We maneuver the table over, and two girls hold it in place while I climb and Liz and Megan push me higher. My wrist screams a protest, but I keep climbing, wiggling my way to the top of the breached hull. The scrape is big enough for me to squeeze through, and by the time I make it up to fresh air, my wrist is screaming in pain and it’s getting colder by the minute. I’ve wrapped my sleep shorts around my neck as a scarf and hood, the extra fabric bunched around my exposed throat. My face sticks out of a thigh hole. I’m sure it’s not a sexy look, and the shorts are filthy, but I’m glad for them. The wind is bitter, and I haven’t even stuck my head up through the hole yet.
I put my hands on the icy metal, hissing when my fingers stick to it. I pull them away carefully, wincing at the needle-like feelings pricking at my skin. It’s not only cold out there, it’s damn cold. I use my good arm—now sleeved in the thick, jacket-like uniform of the alien —to propel myself up a bit higher. As I hoist my torso through the crack in the hull, I have a momentary vision of sticking my head out and having an alien chomp it.
Not helpful, Georgie, I tell myself. I shove the image out of my mind as I push through the gap and stare around me.
The good news is that the wind isn’t as bad up here as I thought. Instead, the snow falls in quiet, thick flakes, the two suns shining high overhead.
Two suns.
Two freaking suns.
I squint up at them, making sure I haven’t hit my head in the crash and am now seeing double. Sure enough, two of them. They look almost like a figure eight, with one tinier, much duller sun practically overlapping a larger one. Off in the distance, there is an enormous white moon.
“Not Earth,” I call below. Fuck. I fight back the insane urge to weep in disappointment. I’d so wanted to climb out and see a building in the distance that would tell me oh, it’s just Canada or Finland.
Two suns have pretty much destroyed that hope.
“What do you see?” someone calls up to me.
I stare around the crashed ship at the endless drifts of snow. I look up. In the far distance, there are other mountains—or at least I’m pretty sure they’re mountains—that look like big icy purple crystals the size of skyscrapers. They’re different from this mountain. This one is nothing but barren rock. There are no trees. Nothing but snow and jagged granite. Our tiny ship looks like it bounced off of one of the nearby jaggy cliffs; that was probably how it had torn open.
I look for living creatures or water. Something. Anything. There’s nothing but white.
“What’s it look like?” Someone else calls up.
I lick my lips, hating that they already feel numb with cold. I’m a Southern girl. We do not do well with cold. “You ever see Star Wars? The original ones?”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Yep. It looks like we landed on fucking Hoth. Except I see two itty bitty suns and a huge-ass moon.”
“Not Hoth,” Liz yells. “It was the sixth planet from its sun, and I don’t recall it having a moon.”
“Okay, nerd,” I call back to her. “We’ll call this place Not-Hoth then. You guys cover this hole with the plastic while I’m gone. It’ll help keep things warm.”
“Stay safe,” Liz tells me.
“Your lips to God’s ears,” I yell. Then I haul my ass out of the protection of the ship.
? ? ?
Walking out into that snowy landscape with nothing but borrowed alien clothing and a gun I don’t know how to fire? Pretty much takes every ounce of courage I have in my body. I tremble as I trudge through the snow. I don’t know squat about winter conditions. I’m from Florida, for chrissakes. Palmetto bugs, I can handle. Gators, I can handle. My pinching boots sinking up to my knees in the snow with every step? I cannot handle that.
But there are half a dozen girls waiting for me back at the spaceship, depending on me to find something. Anything. And we don’t have much in the way of options. I can always turn around. I don’t think anyone would blame me for being afraid.
And then I’ll just sit in the cracked hull and slowly starve to death with the others. Or we’ll get picked up by the aliens again.
Or I can risk freezing and try to do something out here.
So I walk on.
I’ll say one thing for the ball-headed alien I killed: His clothes are decently warm. Despite the fact that every step is a struggle and I sink into the powder with each one, my feet are doing all right.
My face feels like a block of ice, though. My hands, too. The sleeves are too tight for me to pull them down over my hands, so I walk with one hand tucked inside my shirt and the other under an armpit. When it gets too cold, I switch them out. My bad wrist hurts like hell, and my ribs still burn. Actually they burn worse, now, because I have to take deep breaths, and that makes a stabbing pain shoot through my chest each time.