The point was, all of this was supposed to occur in a pristine, sterile environment.
The harsh mattress beneath her groaned. The quilt covering it was gritty under her fingers, caked with sand. Without the fan, the heat was unbearable, and she was dripping in sweat and cryo’protectant.
But no longer naked, so there was that.
Her clothes: unfamiliar and uncomfortably hot—loose pants, cuffed at the ankle, and a rough tunic with a cowl-neck rucked around her shoulders. Everything was a little too tight, like the clothes her mom would buy to inspire her to lose weight. Her forearms were covered with a constricting, stretchy material, and her wrists itched where sweat pooled under the sleeves. The fabric was handmade; she could tell by the rough weave. These were no LAC-sanctioned medical robes, that was for sure.
On instinct, she mentally reached for her neural’implant, hoping she could use it to switch on an enviro’con, but found nothing. That was to be expected, since ’implants were known to glitch after stasis. She wouldn’t be able to access any technology around her for an indeterminant amount of time. Andra hated that word—indeterminant. She liked for things to be determined.
She brushed her short, dark hair out of her face. Her fingers caught in the tangles just as the door swung open, and another gust of wind blew in, along with a man, who stood silhouetted in the doorway. A cryo’technician. Finally.
Andra tried to blink away the fuzziness. Right before the cryo’tech had put her to sleep, he’d told her to state her name, age, hometown, and CID as soon as she woke up. Andromeda Yue Watts. Seventeen. Riverside, Ohio. 32-638-27. That’s what she was supposed to say, but all that came out was, “Huh?”
Because he didn’t look like a ’tech at all.
He was young—probably only a bit older than Andra, maybe nineteen, twenty—but he looked . . . rough, haggard, raw. Blond. Crinkled eyes. His angular jaw was brushed with scruff, and his sand-colored tunic was deliberately disheveled. He leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed, eyebrows lifted in a question.
And he was wearing leather armor.
Definitely not a cryo’tech.
“Show the toe, Goddess,” he said, and though Andra understood each word individually, she had no idea what they meant put together in that order.
He pushed against the wall and sauntered over to the metal chair, twirling it around to sit backward. He winked, and Andra realized belatedly that she was gaping at him. Not because he was handsome—though, he was—but because there was a boy in leather armor saying random words to her in a cave, and this was so not how she imagined waking up on a new planet.
“Evens, then?” he asked. “You slept forever. See?” He pointed to his chin. “I grew a beard while I waited. Makes me look charred, marah?” He tilted his head in a few different angles, so she could get the full effect. When she didn’t respond, he patted the bed. “Show the toe. We need to peace. Sun’s sinking quickish.” His voice was richly reedy, and he spoke in an accent Andra had never heard before. It was hard to pick apart the string of phonemes into words. Even once she did, they didn’t sound quite right. Mushy and rushed.
“I . . .” She trailed off, taking in her surroundings again. Dirt, dirt, a bed, an empty cup, more dirt. No clues as to where she was. Holymyth, obviously. That was the plan: to wake up when they got to the new planet. She could feel the distance. Like when she’d fallen asleep on the vac’train to visit her grandmother in the Maylarche and when she woke up, something in her body registered how far she was from home. That feeling—shaking, gnawing, unsettling—was a thousand, a million times more potent now.
She’d fallen asleep in one place and woken up across the universe.
No big deal. That was supposed to happen—waking up a gazillion miles away. But the rest of it—the dirty hut and the cryo’tech who wasn’t a cryo’tech . . .
“Where am I?” she asked, her voice raw. “What’s going on?” Rasping vowels, sticky consonants.
“You’re at luck I speak High Goddess.” He thrummed his fingers against the back of the chair. They were coated in sand. “No one else in this wastehole would reck your speech.” He held out his hand. “I’m Zhade.” The way he said it was halfway between shade and jade. “Been looking for you for nearish four years. There’s a kiddun’s game called Rabbit Rabbit—where one kiddun hides and the others have to find them, and you would be massive at that game.”
Andra stared at his hand. It was wrapped with dirty bandages. He turned it over and looked at his palm.
“This is something you do, marah? The hand-shaking thing? Fraughted ridiculous custom.”
Andra swallowed, her brain struggling to keep up, as though it were slogging through knee-deep mud. “Four years? What do you mean you’ve been looking for me?” The room grew dark, a cloud passing over the sun. The air didn’t cool. “My family. I have to find my family. Is this Holymyth? Did something happen while we were in stasis? Where’s the cryo’tech?” Again, she reached for her ’implant, hoping to ping her family, but found nothing.
“That . . .” The soldier frowned. “. . . is a lot of words I don’t reck. I’ll get Wead to fetch you something to eat, but then we need to go road-wise.”
Andra swung over the side of the bed. Her legs ached, but not as badly as her throat. She wobbled as she got to her feet, but didn’t fall. Minimal muscular atrophy, her mother would have said—was probably saying right now as she woke someone else up from stasis.
Maybe Mom was waking up Acadia or Oz or Dad. Maybe she was looking for Andra right now. Or maybe . . .
She hobbled to the door, her muscles stretching in ways they hadn’t for a hundred years, even though in her mind, she’d used them just a few hours ago.
“Heya!” Zhade called. “Where are you peacing to?”
She pried open the door, expecting—
well, she didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.
She stood at the top of a hill, in a village of rock huts. Not huts made of rocks, but huts carved into rocks. Enormous boulders, stories-high, with hollowed-out windows and doors and rooms. Dozens of structures sprouted from the ground. And beyond, as far as the eye could see: desert.
They were supposed to land somewhere subtropical. Somewhere lush, with moderate temperatures and low humidity, and enough trees to hide the horizon. Not a barren desert filled with boulders. The whole landscape was wrong.
But not as wrong as the people. Hundreds of them, all dressed like Andra—covered head-to-toe, despite the heat. As soon as they saw her, the crowd instantly quieted, and then, as one, they fell to their knees, murmuring a single word. Over and over. One Andra knew, but couldn’t begin to understand. She looked back, and Zhade was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, a crooked smile on his lips. He raised an eyebrow and said the word the people were chanting, once and vivid and burning, and somehow, she knew he was talking about her.