To my left, there are trees right up against the hull and stacked together, their feather-like leaves already drooping compared to the surrounding undamaged ones. I wince at the sight, not only because I never liked the idea of that sort of destruction, but also thinking of just how rough our landing was and how lucky I am to not only be alive, but to be moving around.
I decide to take the route that slopes down and away from where the rest of the ship was and also leads toward the undamaged forest.
I can always climb back up. Possibly use one of the trees if I need to.
With that decided, I angle my feet down, then carefully roll over onto my stomach.
After about fifteen minutes of slowly and carefully choosing my next hand and footholds, slowed down considerably bycontinually needing to move my hair out of my way, I come to a sharp ledge. I can't see over it, and judging by the view behind me I'm still at least fifteen feet from the ground.
I take several very long minutes to convince myself to continue over the ledge.
I move down until my waist dangles over, then panic when my feet can't find any purchase. This makes me tense up my arms, which are screaming at me by the time I kick farther in and find my first toehold.
The angle is extreme and I don't know if I have the upper body strength to descend it safely, but I know by the way my arms and hands feel, I need to get down as fast as I can.
I keep moving down, and once I'm able to see around the ledge, I can tell that I have about fifteen feet of a sharply underhung climb left. I only get about two more feet down before one of my feet slips and it makes my body swing out and away.
I try to swing my legs back toward the wall, but lose my grip with my left hand, then instantly lose grip with my right.
I have the presence of mind to roll when I hit the ground, which saves me from breaking my legs, but also causes me to slam into a tree.
My back takes most of the hit and I struggle to pull air back into my lungs.
I lay there for a few minutes, waiting for my muscles to stop telling me just how much they hate me. I'm pleasantly surprisedonce that wears off that I only added a few muscle strains to my injury list.
It's still very painful to lift myself up from the ground and I stifle a groan of protest.
I doubt my landing was quiet, but there's no sense in announcing my presence to predators. I look around. With no sense of how to navigate forests or find water, I can't make an informed decision on which way to go now that I'm on the ground.
I'm trying, and failing, to ignore just how similar, but alien, my surroundings are, with the bark of the tree in odd shapes, what looks like grass and moss in colors that just aren't quite the right shades of greens and blues. Purple bushes.
And a purple sky, which I thought was just the fading light last night, but seems to be the normal hue. It's disorienting and overwhelming.
At least the dirt and rocks that the ship section displaced look pretty much how I expect them to look.
With no way to know, I guess the best course of action is to just walk into the forest right next to me, and so I do it without letting myself think any more about it.
I'm so engrossed in the process of making myself take one more step after the other I don't think of how I'll return to where I was. The realization hits soon after, and my heart skips a beat.
That small moment of panic leads to a stutter-step over a root with my left foot, which ends up cascading into three more trips that make me tumble into a bush.
The hundreds of pinprick feelings across my body let me know it's the equivalent of a sticker bush and it takes several minutes and lots of muttered curse words to extract myself from my attacker.
"Well, I guess I was technically the attacker," I admit, by way of apologizing to the prickly plant.
If I was in different circumstances, I would better appreciate the comedic value of such an ungraceful tumble, but right now it just feels like I can't catch a break.
I look around me, quickly noting that I can no longer see the ship.
"Shit, Ree. Don't be so dense," I chastise myself quietly.
I'm smarter than this and I really don't want to die on some alien planet because of something as foolish as not marking which way I came.
Just looking at the surrounding trees it's clear that I won't ever be able to walk in a straight line.
I don't even know which direction I came from thanks to tripping.
My heart pounds when I think of not knowing where the ship is. It's likely not something I should be near anyway, but thethought of leaving Silver without knowing how to find her again just feels incredibly wrong.
