The Glow of Fallen Stars (Ventura Book 2)

Chapter One

The water moves around my hips as I walk, surging up against me, pulling at me. It isn't clear or blue like I expected but instead has a skin that is pale and pinkish and scaly, that parts when I touch it with my fingers then stays there as I lift them to my face and study the way it dissolves.

'The ash from the burned-up entry shield,' says Dom, watching me, then looking up at the deep red ball of the sun. 'Come on, let's go.'

Ezra is ahead of us, the closest to shore, stooped half over and blowing water out of his nose, shaking his head, yelling about something. Mariana is between us and him, walking with her arms crossed over her front, getting slower. I would be getting slower too if Dom wasn't pulling me; it's as if I'm melting, as if the water is claiming me.

Ezra turns back to us, making a face. ' . . . fricking gravity . . . ' is the only part of what he says that I catch over the loud hiss that fires out of the shuttle behind us as it cools in the water, shooting a screaming plume of steam into the sky.

It's only as the water gets shallower that I start to really feel it, to feel the way I am almost slowing to a stop.

'We're nearly there,' says Dom, squeezing my hand. 'Fifty metres more, tops.'

I can't do much more than look at him with my mouth hanging open. There is all this bruising under his eyes and around his mouth and, as I watch, a large drop of dark blood snakes out of one nostril.

'Are you OK?' I manage to say, but it cracks in my throat.

'I'm fine,' he says. 'Let's figure it all out on land.'

We reach Mariana just as she loses her footing and sits in the water. I push my arm in under hers, pull her up and grip her close to my side while we walk.

'This is just . . . ' she says, close to my ear, but she doesn't finish.

Ahead of us is a long pale beach, backed by trees and plants that stand together so thick and tangled it may as well be a brick wall. It's hard to tell if the sand is pink and the leaves are dark purple and blue and red the way they seem to be, or whether it's just the fact that Huxley is casting everything in its blood-red glow. Looking in one direction down the beach I can see where the island ends in a point of low, pale rocks; looking in the other it is punctuated by a mountain, so black and so steep that it is more like the massive blade of a knife, towering up into the sky as if it might be about to fall at any moment. There are more giant black rocks, a forest of knives, stretching out to sea, as if at some point they rained down from space, like we just did. This must be the place for it.

Explorer 37 groans suddenly like a dying beast in a monster movie, and I turn in time to see it twist in the water, raising a shattered wing to the sky, releasing an orange jet of liquid in a geyser.

'It's sinking,' I tell Dom. 'We can't let it sink.'

'It won't sink,' he says, but before I can ask him how he knows, he is bent double, coughing a string of blood.

I squeeze his hand and use every bit of effort I have to walk, even though Mariana's weight on my shoulder feels as if it's hammering me deep into the sand and Dom is losing ground, wrenching at my hand with every step. It's only by focusing on Ezra, who is staggering into the shallows, stopping to haul off his undershirt before getting bowled on to his hands and knees by a wave, that I manage to keep going.

When a wave gets us, Mariana and I manage to stand strong against it, but I feel it take Dom, take his feet, so that he is being sucked away from me. I turn and grab his hand with both of mine, hauling him through the surf as the wave retreats and he is able to get back on his feet. In the gap it leaves we run; we run until we are knee-deep, ankle-deep, falling on to the wet sand, panting there.