One Hundred Shadows Over the Earth

The pod shakes as if something massive were trying to tear its insides out, and Valeria Pérez clenches her teeth until her jaw aches. The harness straps dig into her shoulders with every jolt, and the air inside the cabin already smells of burnt metal and fear.

Red emergency lights flash over more than a hundred distorted faces, illuminating at intervals wide-open eyes and mouths screaming unheard over the roar of reentry. A metallic voice repeats a warning no one is listening to anymore: stabilizer failure, stabilizer failure. Valeria knows that warning tone. She heard it in the station's simulations back when she still believed it was just an exercise and not a death sentence.

She reaches for the harness latch and pulls. It doesn't yield. The pod lurches violently to the left and something comes loose from the ceiling—a paneling sheet that spins down between the seats—and a boy two rows ahead begins to scream that they're going to die, that everyone is going to die, in a voice so high-pitched it barely sounds human.

"Shut up and hold on!" Valeria shouts at him, though she doubts he hears her.

She manages to release the latch just as another jolt throws her against the back of the seat in front of her. It doesn't matter. She crawls down the narrow aisle, grabbing onto whatever she can, looking for someone to help before it's too late, even if she isn't quite sure what she can do against the laws of physics.

Two rows over, Mateo Rodríguez has already unbuckled his own harness and covered the red-haired girl next to him with his body. Elena Fernández breathes in short, ragged gasps, her eyes closed and her hands clutching a bag full of vials pressed to her chest as if it were the only real thing in that hell of vibrations.

"Look at me," Mateo tells her, holding her face with one hand while protecting her from the blows against the metal with his other arm. "Breathe slowly. One, two. Again."

"I can't, I can't breathe, the air isn't coming in," she gasps, her words rushing out almost incoherently.

"It's coming in. I promise you. Count with me."

The entire pod groans as if it's about to split in two. Through one of the side hatches, amid the orange glow of friction flames, Valeria catches sight of something dense and green approaching at an impossible speed. Trees. Thousands of trees.

"Impact!" someone screams, and the word has barely left their mouth before the world turns into pure noise.

The first blow sends her flying forward into an empty seat, and the second, more brutal one, makes something in her side crack in a way she doesn't like at all. The pod forces its way through the vegetation, tearing off the tops of ancient trees and snapping trunks that haven't seen the metal of a human machine for centuries, and the din is so immense that Valeria hears nothing more than a sharp ringing in her ears.

When the module finally comes to a halt, wedged awkwardly between two split trunks, the silence that follows feels almost worse than the noise.

It lasts barely a second.

Smoke begins to fill the cabin, thick and black, billowing from control panels sputtering with the last electrical discharges. One of the main screens bursts into a shower of sparks, and someone screams in pain near the front.

Carmen Gómez has already unbuckled her belt before the pod fully settles. She has seen enough accidents in the station's maintenance ducts to know that fire doesn't wait for anyone to recover from the shock. She locates the emergency fire extinguisher mounted under her seat, rips it free with a yank, and stumbles down the smoke-filled aisle, dodging bodies that are still screaming or have stopped screaming altogether.

"Move, damn it!" she shouts, pushing past a boy who has frozen, staring at the flames licking a panel near the floor.

The secondary fuel tank is directly under that panel. Carmen knows this because she memorized the pod's schematics during the descent, back when there was still time to memorize things. She discharges the extinguisher onto the flames with precise movements, without wasting a single second wondering if the fire will spread before she can prevent it. The white stream covers the fire and smothers it, and for a moment the only sound is the hiss of foam against hot metal.

"Good," she mutters under her breath, more to herself than to anyone else. "Good, damn it, good."

On the other side of the cabin, Paula Alonso is already on her knees in front of the comms console, pulling away loose wires with hands that won't stop shaking. She doesn't like what she sees at all. The reentry destroyed the main antenna, fried the circuits of the long-range transmitter, and all that remains of the systems supposed to keep them connected with the station is a tangle of fused boards and lights flickering aimlessly before going completely dark.

"No, no, no," she repeats, gritting her teeth. "This can't be happening."

She strikes a side panel hoping for a response that doesn't come. The machine's silence is more terrifying than any alarm. Without communications, no one on the station will know if they survived the landing. No one will know if the planet can sustain life or if they are just a hundred more corpses waiting for someone up there to execute the rest of the prisoners to save oxygen.

Valeria slowly pushes herself up, one hand pressed against her ribs, and looks around. The interior of the pod is a chaos of smoke, muffled cries, and bodies crawling toward the exit hatch searching for air that isn't toxic. None of this resembles the place where they were supposed to land. She knows it from the angle of the light streaming through the cracks in the hull, from the density of the vegetation surrounding the wreckage of the pod. They drifted off course. Far off course.

When they finally manage to force the main hatch open and stumble outside, the silence hits them in a different way. There are no alarms, no beeps, no metallic voices announcing system failures. Just a vast, green forest stretching out in all directions, impossibly dense, with trees none of them have ever seen before and a grey sky hanging low between the canopies.

No one says a word for a long moment. The survivors stand before the smoking remains of the pod, a hundred-odd bodies shivering from the cold, from fear, and from the shock of still being alive when none of them were sure it would happen.

Valeria looks at the surrounding forest, so silent it feels unnatural, and she knows, with a certainty that chills her blood more than any alarm, that this has only just begun.