The Color of Distance Read Online Free Page A

would be back to normal. But she could feel her claws pulling against the tips of her fingers. This was an incredibly vivid and realistic nightmare.
    She rested her forehead against the rough bark of the branch. The last thing she remembered was lying on the ground in the middle of an alien rain forest, struggling to breathe through her constricted airways. She had been dying of anaphylactic shock. Before that had been the flyer crash, followed by a forced march through the jungle in a desperate attempt to make it back to the Survey base. Now she was fifty meters up a tree, hanging on for dear life to a slippery, wet branch as big around as her thigh. A steady warm rain was falling. This wasn’t a dream. She was alive, impossible as that seemed. She clutched onto that thread of hope, and felt her terror ease.
    Why had she survived? Humans were profoundly allergic to every living world the Survey had found. This world was no exception. The air was loaded with pollen, molds, spores, and microscopic organisms. They couldn’t infect humans, but their alien proteins caused violent allergic reactions. Test animals from Earth exposed to the atmosphere usually died within hours.
    Tears pricked the inside of her eyelids as she remembered the slow, painful deaths of the others. Catherine, the tall, elegant pilot, had died in the crash. The rest—Hiro, Yanni, and Shana—had died of anaphylactic shock when their filters failed. Oliver had been the last to go. She had been holding him in her lap when the first symptoms struck her. She remembered the agony of her own itching eyes and swelling throat before she blacked out. It was a terrible way to go.
    Juna opened her eyes. Her skin was the grey of wet clay instead of its familiar dark brown. Fleshy red spurs protruded from the insides of her arms just above the wrist. They looked swollen and angry, as though they should hurt, but they didn’t.
    A slight breeze pfeyed over her scalp. It felt oddly cool. Juna pried her claws from the branch and ran a hand over the top of her head, and sighed with regret. Her hair was gone too.
    The branch swayed in a sudden gust of wind. Her stomach tightened, and her claws dug into the branch until her fingers ached. Her skin flared orange again as a fresh burst of fear blossomed in her stomach.
    Juna took a deep breath and let it out. If she lost control, she would never get out of this tree alive. She fought back her panic. As it subsided, her hands faded to pale green. The strange color changes seemed related to shifts in her emotional state.
So much for mah jongg and poker,
Juna thought to herself with a nervous laugh. She shook her head. She had to get down to the ground before she fell apart completely. Focus
on getting down,
she told herself.
Worry about everything else later.
    Juna inched carefully backward over the shredded remains of the leathery sack she had clawed her way out of. How had she wound up inside it? At last her groping feet found the trunk. She turned to face it, fighting a sudden surge of terror as the tree swayed in a fresh breeze.
    Clinging to the huge trunk made her feel a little more secure. Juna paused to consider her next move. It was then that she saw the alien.
    The biologist in her awoke and began observing the alien, her fear forgotten for the moment. It stood on a branch below Juna, watching her calmly. It resembled an enormous tree frog, except for its large fanlike ears and high, domed forehead. The alien was pale green, and completely naked, except for a satchel of woven grass slung over one shoulder. Its eyes were golden, with vertical, catlike pupils. On the inside of its arms, just above the wrist, were bright red spurs resembling the ones on her own arms.
    She looked like the alien, Juna realized. Was it responsible for her transformation? If so, how had it been done? The creature seemed far too primitive to be capable of such a feat.
    A ripple of brilliant blue passed over the alien’s chest. The color moved