by Amie Kaufman
On the upside, the thugs behind me are taking my instructions a little more seriously since one of them—Alex, I think—took off his pack to hunt for a snack while I thought, and let its weight ease onto an unmarked stone.
Sixteen razor-sharp spikes in a four-by-four grid shot up from the stone his pack was resting on, sliding into it like a knife through warm butter. So now Alex’s belongings are nicely aerated, and everyone’s listening more carefully.
I’ve been translating for what feels like hours, while trying to force my tired brain to think its way out of this. But I can barely concentrate on the glyphs, something that’s usually second nature to me, let alone think strategically. When the toe of my boot catches on a loose flagstone, and I nearly fall into the next room before I’ve had the chance to read the instructions, Liz calls for a halt.
We’re in a wide hallway between chambers, and it’s as safe a place as any. I sink down to a crouch, leaning my back against the wall, lifting my bound wrists so I can scratch my jaw. The bindings aren’t helping with my balance, but apparently they’re non-negotiable.
Javier crouches down in front of me to check my circulation and loosen my bonds a little, and hand me a few crackers and a hunk of cheese from my own supplies. I make myself chew and swallow, resting my aching head against the cool stone behind me, and try to make myself think.
It’s going to be the devil’s own work getting out of here, climbing back up cliffs and jumping over crumbled rock. It can be done, but with pursuit on my tail, and without Mia’s climbing expertise? It’s going to take almost as much brainwork to get out of here as it did to get in. I’m counting on Liz thinking the same way, and keeping me alive long enough to navigate them out of this place once they’re looted whatever’s at the center, but I know that as soon as we’re out, my usefulness drops to nothing.
Come to that, I don’t even know what we’ll find at the middle of this temple. The answer to my Nautilus puzzle, certainly. But tech? Valuable loot? I honestly don’t know. She might lose her temper before it’s time to exit, if I’m unlucky.
If I’m going to survive this, I need to think about ways to even the odds. It’s not just my father depending on me, but—if his theories are right—potentially the rest of humanity as well. I can’t afford to stop fighting. I can’t afford to shout my hurt at Amelia for her betrayal, or throw my life away in some stupid lunge for freedom, because if I get shot there’s no one else. I have to think.
And I have to be prepared to act.
A moment later the fourth guy, who they’ve been calling M.C.—in my head it’s because of the bushy black muttonchops visible below the edge of his hat—is hauling me to my feet. Soon we’re underway once more, the stone passage ahead lit by our head torches. I’m out in front, trained lab rat that I am, and Amelia’s walking back with the rest of them, her hands now unbound, though she’s flanked by Javier and Alex. It pleases me that they don’t quite trust her.
And it kills me that they’re right in believing that however badly she’s betrayed me, I don’t think I can bring myself to abandon her to the mercies of this place, knowing what it will mean. Clearly they think she’ll work as collateral to ensure my good behavior. And they’re right.
As we arrive in the next chamber, it’s immediately obvious it’s another grand puzzle rather than a simple set of instructions. Warning glyphs parade across the ceiling, and cover the walls, and the floor is a complex but very deliberate pattern of stone pavers, many of them carved as well. I angle my wrist up to snap a Nautilus carving half-hidden in the shadows, etched over the doorway on the far end of the field of pavers.
Crystalline stone glints back at me as I shine my head torch over the floor, and when I look up, I can see hints of cables up in the dark recesses of the ceiling high above us. Metallic veins dance through the stone of the walls, and everywhere I look, there’s more to take in.
I stop in place, staring, my heart sinking. This looks impossible.
“Well?” Liz says behind me, impatient.
“This will take a while,” I reply, and though she growls under her breath, when she walks up to take a look over my shoulder, evidently the sight before her satisfies her that I’m not stalling for time.
They set up lights so I can see the whole cavern, and sit down for another round of snacks while I work. A tiny part of me—the very small part that’s not preoccupied with either trying not to die, or dreaming up exotic, impossible plans for revenge—wishes I could film every section of this cavern, preserve every glyph and every stone for study. Beyond his warning about the Nautilus, about what the glyph beside it meant—Catastrophe. Apocalypse. The end of all things—my father spent endless hours trying to argue with the International Alliance about the sheer value of exploration, the infinite possibilities afforded by the opportunity to study such an ancient and vast civilization.
It’s a conversation he and I have had many times. The first time I remember it was when I was twelve. It was my school holidays, and he and I had joined an expedition in Spain from the University of Valencia. My father’s friend Miguel headed it up, and to me, he was the king of all he surveyed. We were excavating a series of centuries-old homes near the university itself, recently—and briefly—uncovered due to some building works there. In the gap between demolition and construction, the archaeologists had swarmed in.
Miguel and my father let me assist a couple of the grad students, and when I got back to our hotel that first night, I was brimming with things to tell him. I swiped through picture after picture on my phone, filling him in on every artifact we’d uncovered, parroting what I’d learned about which museums might want them, and what they were worth.
He listened, and he nodded, and when he spoke, he said the last thing I expected to hear. “That’s a long list, Jules. But what did you learn today?”
I remember the feeling as if it happened just moments ago—the way the ground slipped beneath my feet, and suddenly I was uncertain. I’d done something wrong. But I didn’t know what. I glanced down at my phone, with its catalogue of pictures, silent.
“Each one of these pieces will play an important part in a museum,” he said, his voice gentle. “But together, they tell a story that’s even more important. Look here, at these things you all found in the bedroom. I see five different hair combs. What does that tell us about the person who lived in this room?”
“They were probably rich,” I ventured. “Or they cared a lot about doing their hair.”
“Or both,” he agreed, with a smile. “Let’s look at what else is here, and see what kind of story we can build. You never know what we’ll find out.”
And I couldn’t have imagined how much we would find. We were up until well after midnight constructing stories about the people who might have lived in that house. Learning about them, viewing them through first one lens and then another.
Without that late night, we’d never have discovered that the home we were excavating belonged to a fifteenth-century poet still studied today. Other scholars would never have found new interpretations for his works, knowing where he’d lived. We’d never have seen the beauty of his work refracted back at us, or learned more than we knew before about the world he inhabited. Which taught us in turn about the world we inhabited.
“Humans exceed themselves when they open their minds to discovery,” my father said, that first night. “When we immerse ourselves in the wonders of curiosity, rather than moving straight toward the goal we’ve chosen. Toward the goal we imagine is most important, because it’s the one we can see. When we allow ourselves to explore, we discover destinations that were never on our map.”
My father changed the way I saw the world that night. That night was the reason I understood when he called for the exploration of Gaia to slow down, even before we found the hidden warning, the Nautilus spiral. I still wonder how everything might have unfolded—how our lives might be different—if even a handful of the officials at the IA had ever had an experience like tha
t night in Valencia.
My father and I dreamed for years of exploring a room like the one laid out before me. But now I don’t get the luxury of exploration, because I have to pour all my efforts into survival. Which is exactly what the International Alliance has been doing on Earth, focusing on the immediacy of saving lives, theirs and the rest of humanity. After years of arguing against my father’s critics, now I sound just like them.
So I take what photographs I can manage, and start to read. The problem with reading conceptual glyphs—signs and signals that don’t mean any one particular word, but change in relationship to one another—is that you have to read the whole inscription and hold it in your head in order to translate it. And I have no idea where to start. So I let my eyes run over the glyphs, consider their various meanings, and wait for the pattern to emerge. I really wish I had my father’s gift for mathematics around now—or Amelia’s, come to that.
The puzzle is something to do with time, I realize after a while. The glyphs are talking about the nature of time—I think they’re saying that it’s linear, that one can go forward or back along it, like a road, but that makes no sense. Then again, they’re aliens, and I’m lucky they conceive of time in a manner that makes any sense to me at all. They might be talking about literally moving forward or back in time, but more likely they’re talking about something abstract, like imagining the future, or remembering the past.
I can’t travel back in time, but I want to. I want to go back to the moments I trusted Mia. I want to go back to smiling at her across our campfire. I want to go back to not knowing just how far she’ll go, who she’ll betray, to get her money.
I step out onto the first stone, feeling the attention behind me focus as I start to move. “Don’t follow yet,” I say, holding up my bound hands to signal they should stop. “I might need to back up quickly if I get this wrong.”
The first few puzzles are simple—repeats of those I’ve already seen. Step to the left here. Stand on the dark stone. Tap this one with your foot before transferring your weight to it.
And then I’m staring down at a familiar curve, my eyes widening. I’ve seen this before, too, but it’s not a glyph. This is the graph Mia deciphered, the key to tuning the pipes and the bridge that opened that immovable door. Why is it here again?
There’s no wind here this time, no music, but it is a puzzle that lies in my immediate past. Just as the instructions I’ve seen so far have been repeats.
In a flash, I understand what this room is. A journey through time, from behind us, to in front of us, though how I’m meant to understand puzzles I haven’t come across yet, in the future, I don’t know. But I can start with what I do know. Maybe the rest will become clear. Or I’ll figure out a way to run.
“I need Amelia, and a bottle of water,” I call over my shoulder. I can hear the frost in my voice, and I’d like to drop it a couple of degrees further, use her surname, rather than the intimacy of her first name. But I’m realizing I can’t call for “Ms.” anything, because I don’t have any idea what her last name is. There’s a lot I don’t know about her. Hell, how can I be sure I know anything about her at all?
“What do you want her for?” Liz calls, from the entrance behind me.
“It’s referencing the first puzzle,” I say. “She helped me unlock it. I can’t do it on my own.”
There’s quiet consultation behind me, a murmur of voices I can’t make out, and then footsteps. Amelia carefully makes her way across the stones I’ve locked into place, fetching up beside me. Her hands are still free, and she holds a water bottle in one.
“We have weapons trained on you,” Liz calls out. “Careful, Amelia. Wouldn’t want your sister to come to any grief without you, would we?”
I can only assume Liz is one of those people who think that I’m a genius in one area of my life, and an idiot in every other. That now, I’m not going to hear the way she leans on the word sister, like she’s putting it in quotation marks. My anger is like a visceral thing, heavy in my chest, closing my throat. The sister I silently promised myself I’d find a way to help. The sister Amelia offered me, as a look at the deepest part of herself. The sister that sealed her lie. The sister that doesn’t exist.
“Got it,” Amelia calls back, her voice tight, without looking up. Instead, she looks straight ahead, so that I can hear her, but Liz can’t see her mouth move. “Jules,” she murmurs. “I’m doing this to keep us safe.”
I snort, though I keep my voice down, indignation surging up. “Us? I’m already safe, they need me. And I was still ready to try and keep you safe, but you’ve thrown me to the wolves twice now, and you’re standing free with them while I’m at gunpoint. I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not too sympathetic to your needs right now.”
Her jaw squares, but her voice stays low. “You have every right to think that. But I promise, I won’t abandon you. I know what it’s like to be the only person who can help someone you love.”
“Do you?” My tone is pointed, and makes her already-large eyes widen even more. Don’t, I think, anger tensing my muscles. Don’t pretend to be shocked or hurt. Don’t look at me like we’re friends.
Before Amelia can muster a response, Liz’s voice cuts across the space between us once more. “Enough chitchat, kids. Let’s get moving, if you already know how to complete this section.”
The frustration that’s been simmering inside me breaks like a wave, tumbling me over and submerging me. “Listen,” I snap. “If you want this done, either do it yourself, or bloody well wait until I’m ready. If you want to bring the ceiling down on us all, which is what one wrong step will do, then just get on with it.”
There’s no response from behind us, but I have no doubt I’ve just earned myself some manner of punishment—a meal lost, a kick to the ribs. It’s worth it. No doubt they’re looking up at the shadowy cables and glints of metal above us, impossible to make out in the darkness, and drawing the conclusion that that’s a lot of ceiling to land on top of anyone. Perhaps they’ll give me a little room to concentrate now.
I point out the curve to Amelia, who understands straightaway—the next five stones have holes in them, and she’s careful to fill each one with the same fraction of water she used in that first puzzle. The next few pavers click into place, and together we step forward onto them. Behind us, a couple of the thugs raise a cheer for the progress, then fall abruptly silent as Liz snaps something.
Mia tilts her gaze up and sideways at me, her mouth curving to a smile, and for a moment I wonder if one really can go forward and back in time, just as this room seems to suggest. Because just for an instant, I’m traveling back to that moment I wished for, when we trusted one another, when we worked together without doubt.
And then that moment’s gone, and I’m translating the next paver, stepping forward onto it. Amelia stays beside me, and nobody calls her back yet, though I know the guns are still trained on us. I take a long swig from the water bottle, because I’m thirsty, and not feeling particularly motivated to conserve the supplies of my allies, earning a growled warning from Liz.
We make it another six pavers—a good two-thirds of the way across the hall—before we arrive at the next major puzzle. And immediately, I know we’re in trouble. “Mehercule,” I mutter, lifting my bound hands to run them through my hair.
“Jules?” Mia whispers, before Liz cottons onto the fact that I’ve stopped for too long.
“I think this is from the puzzle that had already collapsed, the cliff we climbed down,” I murmur.
It only takes a second for the implication of that to register on her face, as her mouth falls open. We never solved this puzzle, which means we have no idea how to solve it now. And if we try, there’s a decent chance we’re going to bring this whole thing down on our heads.
“So if we mess this up…” she whispers.
I nod fractionally, rolling my eyes up to the ceiling above us. Most of it’s hidden in the darkness, but there can be no doubt that the de
signers of this room paid some very serious attention to that ceiling. Cables glint, seeming to move and sway for a moment in the shaking light of my head torch. Mia swallows hard.
“Problem, sweetheart?” Liz shouts across the space between us.
By silent agreement, we ignore her. “Keep thinking,” Mia whispers. “Look at the whole picture, maybe there’s something.”
“Alex, get out there,” Liz snaps, when neither of us reply. “Bring the girl back.”
The next few seconds slow to a snail’s pace, as my mind flips through a thousand thoughts, one after another.
The short blond thug, Alex, is stepping out onto the path I’ve locked into place behind us.
We’ve only got a few moments before he’ll drag Mia back to the others, and leave me out here alone. For those few moments, until he reaches us, he’s walking across a literal deathtrap. He’s vulnerable.
Vulnerable.
It’s a simple word, and it avoids the unthinkable reality of what that could mean: this is my chance to improve the odds against me.
This is my chance to take one of them out.
Another second ticks past.
This isn’t just about my survival. This is about my father. About the danger of the Undying tech, and the chance to prove it. The future of my planet, our planet.
“Mia,” I whisper, head down, looking sideways at her.
She turns her head properly now, hesitating, looking back up at me. She’s tired and dirty and her eyes are scared, and she looks lonely, and it makes my throat tighten. I wish I knew if she were playing me, sticking with whichever side she thinks will get her further.
I know I want to believe.
I know she stopped and helped me before she knew I could offer her anything.
I know I’m furious she sold me out to these criminals.
But whatever she’s done, she doesn’t deserve to die. I won’t be a part of that.
