I’m panicking, but I know that if I move I’ll only make things worse, so I watch from the outside, keeping an eye on Callie the whole time, making sure I can see her, grab her and run away with her if anything goes wrong. Soon a light—dim yet brilliant, if you can imagine such a thing—starts pulsing beneath the ice. The trembling expanse of ice, around which our Icelings huddle and within which this new Iceling stands, continues to crack open, over and over and over and over, until the field looks like the shell of an egg that’s been rolled and smashed but not quite split. The Icelings’ faces come alive with what I read as a sort of nervous excitement. Some of them break rank and look around at each other. They grin, like Can you believe it? But it could be something else entirely, something as un-intuitive to me as singing karaoke is to Callie.
And then—oh my God—these little . . . things, all of them lichen green, start shooting up from the ice. One by one, row after row of them sprouting up with an energy I’ve never seen in nature before. They’ve fully breached the surface of the ice, and now they’re growing up like stalks, like hundreds of large flowers poking out, and they shiver and shake their way up there, up here, to the surface. Only the more they grow, the more I see that they’re not flowers. Not flowers but . . . pods. Jesus. Pods. And the Icelings all look on with awe, their eyes wide, their jaws slack, straining against each other to run out to the pods. I look at Callie, and then at the pods, and at Callie, and at the pods, and I smell the air. I can’t explain what the smell is other than to say that it’s different from the green one and that I’ve never smelled it before. It’s sort of burnt, and like rain, and electric. There’s something else in there that I’m not quite getting, but I’m almost getting it, and before I can wonder about it, I see Callie’s face, and it’s falling. It’s like her heart is breaking behind her face, and I look around, and so is Tara’s and Greta’s and everyone else’s. I look from them to the pods, and that’s all it takes to see why.
The pods are all withered and dead-looking, like crushed empty cans, like broken boxes, like corpses. I’m not the botanist in the family, and I don’t know how this alien crop is supposed to look, but right now all I can think of is that time Dad bought me a cactus to take care of as a way to help me and Callie bond, and how I was so scared of killing that cactus so I made sure to water it all the time, but then the cactus died anyway because I didn’t know that feeding a plant too often could drown and kill the roots. One of the pods starts to open. I think, Maybe this’ll be fine, maybe it’ll be all right. But it’s not. The pods are shaped like footballs. They each have four seams, and they’re sort of opening from the middle point out, and you can see how they probably should open, how the pod should peel back in quarters, rising toward the sun that’s emerging, shining down right on this trembling expanse, the clouds actually moving aside right now as if to make that happen, the sky all around them gone purple, the clouds this steely gray, and you can see in your mind’s eye how this should play out.
But it doesn’t. The plant shudders, like it’s coughing, and only one quarter of the football seam peels back, and it’s more that it dries up than opens. The whole pod droops, and when it touches the ground, it just turns to dust.
“Lorna,” someone whispers, and the sound of my name spoken by another human being feels so foreign right now that for a second I wonder if I’m dead and this is the place my body has chosen to go.
But then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn to see Emily standing beside me, and all around us is everyone else. The rest of us, of the siblings, have come down from up above while I was too engrossed to notice.
Somebody asks what’s happening in a desperate voice, and someone else asks it again, even more desperately, and I’m screaming it over and over again in my head, but no one can say anything. All we can do is watch.
The soldiers too. All they do is watch. The drones are moving overhead, and down below more soldiers are setting something up in what looks like a van. Someone’s in there, and people are going in and out, like it’s a command post or something.
And then suddenly the air is full with that smell, the one other than the green one. The smell of lightning. So this is what lightning smells like. It had been lingering this whole time, but I’d gotten used to it. But now it’s stronger, and everywhere, the air is choked with it. I remember Dad, after dinner, saying, “That day . . . that day, it . . . just. It just wasn’t what we were expecting to find out there. But mostly what I remember was the sky. My God. It was purple and yellow, and it smelled like lightning, but I couldn’t see any. Do you know what lightning smells like? Don’t. Don’t know that. And the clouds were so low and heavy and with a mind of their own, opening a hole in the sky to let the light in.”
The smell is more than I can bear, I think, and I wonder if human lungs were built to breathe this stuff in, and then a sudden snap of motion ripples all across the field, and I look. The pods—not dead—start to open.