Shades of Earth Read Online Free PDF

of Sol-Earth that the super-tall bushes are called trees and that the wood from them is the same kind of wood that made the table I used when working on assignments from Eldest. I know the dirt, although blackened from our descent, will not be the smooth, clay-like, evenly processed soil that filled the Feeder Level.
    But I’m not looking at any of that.
    I’m looking out, past the burnt ground and the broken trees, their limbs twisting and turning like tangled yarn, past the horizon and to the sky.
    And no matter how much my eyes strain, there isn’t a wall. Not a single frexing wall.
    Something dark flashes in the blue sky, something unnatural, and my grip around the gun Amy gave me tightens.
    I give my order to the computer:
open doors
.
    It works. A cracking sound echoes throughout the bridge. I grab the control panel to steady myself—but my disorientation isn’t from the shuttle moving. It’s from the window breaking open. Just as I once saw the ceiling of the Keeper Level split in half, the honeycombed glass of the window lifts on one end, rising like a hinged lid.
    The individual glass pieces were held together by metal solder, but now I realize that the metal is actually a part of an intricate mechanical feature. The hexagonal segments of glass move and shift, forming a ramp down the right side of the ship. The angle is steep, but the glass is long enough to stretch out past the burnt ground to the yellowish earth beyond.
    I step past the control panel, brushing my hand along the exposed edge of the shuttle. The metal between the glass serves as a grip—I can easily walk down the sharp ramp formed by the window pieces and set foot on the new world.
    A warm breeze blows past, filling my nose with the scent of ash and dirt, lifting the edge of my hair. The air is thick and humid, but the wind is as soft as Amy’s shy kisses; and although it barely touches my skin, it spurs me just as deeply. I race down the ramp, skidding to a halt only when my feet touch the ground of the new world. The sandy soil shifts underfoot, making me feel as if I could plant myself into the earth as surely as one of the twisty trees.
    My vision drifts up. How could I have ever thought the blue-and-white painted steel plates of the roof of the Feeder Level emulated the sky? They don’t. They don’t look anything like the gradient blues and grays above me, the wispy strands of clouds that move before my eyes. I’d never understood how Amy could miss Sol-Earth so much, how
Godspeed
was never enough for her. What’s the difference between air from a spaceship and air from a planet?
    Everything.
    The two suns overhead beam down, so bright that staring at them makes me blink black dots. Two suns. Centauri-Earth is in a binary star system, unlike Sol-Earth, which had only one sun. The big sun is slightly higher in the sky than the littler one. The smaller sun has an orange-red color, a color that reminds me of Amy’s hair, actually, and the bigger one is bright white, reminding me of her skin.
    A high-pitched ringing pierces my ears, and I whip my head around to the forest. Something dark moves in the shadows, but as I try to squint through the tree branches, I hear another sound.
    A horrific, bestial cry ringing across the sky.
    I spin around, looking up at the direction of the sound.
    And I see the monster Orion warned us of.
    The bird-
thing
lands only a few meters in front of me, but it’s so heavy that I can feel the
thump
of its body reverberating on the sandy ground. The creature towers over me, its long, pointed head tilted to the sky before peering down and opening its hard beak, exposing saw-like teeth. Green leathery skin that’s so dark it’s nearly black gives way to scaly claws and membrane-like wings. It’s a horrible monster that seems cobbled together from creatures on Sol-Earth—a dinosaur head atop a lizard’s body with raptor claws and bat-like wings.
    My