Ashfall Legacy by Pittacus Lore

Author:Pittacus Lore [Lore, Pittacus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062845368
Google: MArYzQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0062845365
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Denza (I Half Belong Here)

19

I stood with my hands pressed against the wall that I’d flipped to transparent mode, staring down at the approaching planet. The Eastwood coasted between two low-hanging moons, the satellites glowing orange from the rising sun. The ocean came into view—rippling and wide, dotted everywhere with islands. Those little havens were all connected by a spider’s web of high-speed rail lines. As we got closer, I could see trains zipping between islands, the swaying tops of trees, people paddling boats down the coastline. I felt a drop in my stomach like an elevator going down too fast as the Eastwood slowed its descent. That was real gravity grabbing hold of me for the first time in weeks.

This was Denza. Not one of Aela’s tutorial memories either. The real thing.

My first sunrise on another world.

“Pretty dope,” I said to myself. I was alone on the Eastwood’s viewing deck. I’d gotten out of my cabin early, my trusty Earther backpack slung over my shoulder, hyped to explore a new planet.

I heard a small laugh behind me and turned to find Melian watching me with her hands clasped behind her back. “You’re going to leave nose smudges on the wall, getting that close,” she said.

I didn’t step back, but I did buff the sleeve of my uniform against the wall-screen. “First alien planet,” I said. “I’m kind of geeking out.”

She came to stand next to me. “It’s nice to come home.”

After the incident with the Etherazi, I’d spent a few days recovering in the sick bay and then in my cabin. My advanced half-human metabolism stomped all over a little vacuum-caused frostbite, and I was back on my feet in a few days. The official narrative, which had come down from Captain Reno, was that in an act of foolish bravery I’d distracted the Etherazi long enough for her to scare it away in her Battle-Anchor. The rest of my crewmates weren’t stupid—well, maybe Hiram was—and surely knew there was more to the story, but with all the senior members of the crew behind it, they had no choice but to accept it.

Melian, I thought, accepted it more readily than some of the others. She’d been looking at me with starry eyes for the rest of our trip to Denza. I didn’t mind. It was nice to be the hero for once, instead of the lurking new kid with a dangerous secret. I mean, I still had dangerous secrets, but the heroism was fresh.

“That’s Primclef down there,” Melian said, “the world capital.”

She pointed at the huge island we were gliding toward. Primclef was essentially a giant crater, mountainous on all sides except for what the locals called Keyhole Cove at the north end. Most of the important government buildings were housed directly in hollowed-out portions of the mountain ring; these included the Serpo Institute, the Denzan Senate, and the state-owned mining company that regulated the production of ultonate. These mountainside locales were connected by walkways, systems of elevators,

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