by Amie Kaufman
“There’ll be action,” he says. “I pledge, there’ll be action for every single pair aboard this ship by the time we’re done, and every single person below.”
“Don’t start on about the protos again,” she groans, halfheartedly tossing a piece of dirty laundry at him.
He pushes up to his feet, and his boots approach her bunk. “Let’s get something to eat,” he suggests.
She grumbles a reply. “We could be eating planetside, if we’d shifted already.” But even though she protests, she’s swinging her legs off the bed, and taking his hand so he can pull her up.
“Regular food will taste like lixo once we’ve eaten planetside,” he replies cheerfully. “So we might as well eat up before we learn what the beno stuff’s like.” He’s already untying the sleeves of his jumpsuit from around his waist as they prepare to leave. “We’ll hit the bridge after, learn what the new data is,” he suggests, as they make their way through the door. “We’ll make clear we’re up for the challenge, okay? Whether we go Prime-One or not—our assignment will be beno.”
She pauses in the doorway, looking into his eyes, searching. “And you do want a beno destin?” she says quietly.
“I pledge,” he says, herding her out into the hall. “We’ll get this done. They’ve had their chance with this planet.”
The door clangs shut behind them.
Mia and I lie in silence for half a minute, processing what we’ve heard and waiting to make sure they’re good and gone. Then she starts to move, so I sit up to give her room.
“Holy shit.” She flicks on the wrist unit, face pale in the light. “Jules, did you—”
“Yeah. Destin—like destination? For a mission of some kind? Lixo is Portuguese, and in Portuguese it’s destino. Not to mention it’s similar in French, Italian, Spanish—”
“Jules!” Mia’s voice is urgent, a quick reminder to bring myself back to the point.
“Right.” When the academic fog lifts, I’m left with the same horror that has Mia trembling, horror that makes my heart begin to pound. “They’re sending Undying troops down to Earth with recon assignments—that’s how they’re learning about us. They’re actually down there, right now, hidden in plain sight.”
“That’s why they’ve made themselves look human.” Mia’s voice is shaking.
“And why they speak English and other Earth languages.” A memory strikes me, leaves me cold. “Centuries ago countries would send specially trained spies to other countries to blend in among the population, and they’d only be allowed to speak the enemy country’s language from the time they were children. That’s why they’re speaking like us now.”
“Do you think they know?” Mia’s voice is shaking. “Down there on Earth—that there are aliens among them, things that look human but aren’t? Do they know we’re being invaded?”
“If they knew,” I reply grimly, “they’d have found a way to attack the ship by now.”
“But the Undying look exactly like us, so no one will try to stop them. They could be setting bombs to go off, or infiltrating various governments, or taking hostages, or … or …”
I know she’s thinking about her sister, Evie. I know, because my first thought was for my father, and for the first time I’m actually relieved he’s in detention at IA Headquarters in Prague. Maybe he’ll be safe there. But there are other people I care about who have no such protection. My friends, the rest of my family.
I reach out and take her hand, and she wastes no time tangling her fingers in mine and squeezing. We touch each other so much now that there aren’t many moments like this, moments of conscious choice. It should feel like nothing, a common thing. But for me at least, the choice makes it electric.
Then her grip falters, and I look up to find her nibbling her lower lip, fear making way for something else. As I watch, her eyes light with that fire I’ve come to admire—and fear—so much. That fire that means she’s about to suggest something insane. “Wait—Jules. If they’re sending Undying forces to blend in among the people down there, that means they’ve got some way of getting from the ship to the surface and back.”
And suddenly I know what she’s realized. “They’ve got shuttles.” I straighten so quickly I bang my head on the wall that slants in toward the ceiling of the Junction. But I don’t care, because for the first time, there’s hope. “If we can figure out where they are …”
“That’s our way off this ship.” Mia grabs for the headset and presses it into my hands.
I hesitate, fingers curling around the band of the headset. “But, Mia, they’ll spot us if we try to steal a ship—and we don’t even know how to fly it. Neither of us are pilots, and even if we were, these are alien ships, and—”
Mia makes a wordless sound of frustration. “We’ll figure it out as we go, Jules, we always have! We’ll tackle the next problem once we’ve solved the first one.”
I gaze at her, at that terrifying light in her eyes, and know that if I take this first step, she’ll start running with me until I can’t stop either of us as we rush headlong off a cliff.
“Put on the headset, Oxford.”
Her hand on my arm is warm, and familiar, and grounding.
I put on the headset.
JULES MUTTERS SOMETHING UNDER HIS BREATH, A LEVEL OF IRRITATION there that even our increasingly frequent brushes with death don’t inspire. His body next to mine is rigid with effort as he tries to navigate the Undying’s headset system. It’s been hours, but my gentle suggestions that he take a break have gone unnoticed. I did insist at one point on taking over, but no sooner did I put the thing on than the whole display flashed with blinding, searing lines of scattered text, bringing with them an equally searing headache.
“It’s like an advanced prosthetic leg or something, controlled by nerve impulses, but for the whole brain.” Jules’s explanation was almost apologetic as he took the headset back from me. “It just takes practice.”
I’ve got no problem admitting that Jules is smarter than I am, at least when it comes to the kind of precision thinking these contraptions require. Still, my voice was a little sullen as I muttered, “I don’t suppose the idea of a keyboard ever occurred to these aliens.”
A shift in the muscles rigid against my side draws my eye back to him, and I notice there’s sweat gathering at his temple and along his collarbone. I know we need this information, and I know he’s got to keep working, but before I can stop myself, I reach out to wrap my fingers around his wrist.
“Easy, Oxford,” I murmur, when he jumps at my touch.
Jules flips the glass over his eye up so that he can blink and refocus on me in the blue glow of his watch. “How long was I in there?”
“Long enough,” I tell him. “Take a break, eat something. Tell me what you’ve found.”
Jules reaches automatically for one of the sponge-like food cubes, easing his arm away from me again so he can point the display of the watch toward the map we’ve scratched into the wall of the Junction, copied from the images Jules is getting from the headset. “I was right about this being the shuttle bay,” he announces, gesturing at a large open area at the opposite end of the ship.
I raise an eyebrow. “Why don’t you sound more pleased?”
“Because I still haven’t found a single thing about how to actually fly one of the shuttles.” Jules squishes the rest of his food cube between thumb and forefinger with a little grimace, as though it’s taste he’s objecting to rather than lack of success in his research.
Staring at the map, such as it is, I wish we could actually get a look at the shuttle bay in person. But there’s Undying personnel everywhere, and no ventilation bulkheads to hide in around the shuttle bay—which makes sense. You wouldn’t want your ventilation system connected to a room that opens out into space.
“Maybe we don’t have to fly it,” I say finally. “Maybe we can sneak on board one of them. Stow away, like we are now.”
“Maybe.” Jules’s voice is dubious, and for
once I don’t disagree. It’s one thing to hide on a ship the size of a small skyscraper. It’s another to hide on a shuttle the size of someone’s bedroom. “Maybe we can use their own tactics against them. Blend in with them like they’re blending in on Earth. If we could get our hands on a couple of those suits …”
He trails off, carefully not looking at me, and I know why. I rise up onto my knees with a grimace. “We haven’t seen a single one of them under six feet tall. Even if we could steal matching outfits, I’d look like a kid wearing one of her mom’s pantsuits.”
Jules stifles a laugh, the sound cutting through the bands of tension around my heart like a knife through butter. “You paint quite the mental picture.”
I grin a weary grin at him, but it fades before I can get the next words out. “But you could go.”
Jules’s smile vanishes too. It takes every ounce of my willpower not to show how terrifying that idea is to me, because I know he’d refuse if he saw me frightened. If I can’t get out of here alive, knowing Jules had gotten away would be the next best thing. But then I’d be here alone.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jules says finally, whisper rising hoarsely.
“If you could get away, you’d be able to warn someone at the IA about the Undying. They could hurry preparations on the shuttle and be here in no time. Or don’t you think I could survive that long on my own?”
He doesn’t rise to the bait. “We go together. We both go, or we both stay.”
“Jules, don’t be—”
“Would you go alone and leave me?”
Yes. The word rings clear and bright in my mind, hovering on my lips. But my mouth won’t move, and I curse my sudden—and uncharacteristic—inability to lie.
Jules’s eyes gleam. “I thought not. Besides, going alone would probably draw almost as much attention as going with you.”
“Why?”
“They go everywhere in twos—you haven’t noticed?”
Frowning, I think back to the Undying we’ve watched all over the ship. “But Slacker …” Even as I raise the objection, I’m realizing what Jules is talking about.
“The support staff, I suppose you might call them, don’t go in pairs. The engineers and what-have-you. But the … the soldiers, I guess, or spies? The ones like Atlanta and Dex, the young-looking ones going down to Earth’s surface? They’re all partnered, and they go everywhere together.”
My heart’s sinking a little, because somewhere in the back of my mind the beginnings of a worst-case-scenario plan had started to form. Hijacking, with Jules and me against one of the Undying, might work with the element of surprise. But if the soldier-spies are always in pairs, then we’d have to take two of them out at once, and if they’ve got half the combat training their bearing suggests, our advantage would drop to nil.
Jules pushes the headset back on his forehead and lets out a long, gusty sigh. “I wish Neal were here.”
“Neal?”
“My cousin. My best friend, really. He’s been obsessed with aeronautics since he was a kid.” His eyes lower as he fidgets at a hangnail, his brow lightly furrowed. “He’d figure out how to fly one of their shuttles in a heartbeat. And he’d be doing barrel rolls all the way down.”
I can tell by his tone how much the guy he’s talking about must mean to him. Jules does wonder and absentmindedness a lot better than he does soft, or emotional, but it’s right there in his voice. And in the back of my mind, the reminder that I don’t even know this basic fact about him: who his family is, his best friend. In some ways we’re as close as two people can be. In others, we’re strangers.
I push that thought away. “Too bad he’s not here.”
“You’ll meet him,” Jules says, shooting me a quick grin. “You and he will get along swimmingly. And my father’s going to love you. He’ll talk a lot of mathematics at you, but …” He trails off at the expression on my face. “What?”
His words are ringing in my ears. His father’s going to love me? The street rat his genius son dragged home? Jules has always lived in some sort of fantasy world just slightly left of reality, with his academic ideals and his optimism, but this is a whole new level of delusional. But he looks so genuinely puzzled by my expression that my sarcastic retort dies on my lips.
He really believes there’s some kind of future for the two of us. Assuming the world doesn’t end.
“Jules,” I say softly. “I’m not what you’d call Oxford material. Evie and I aren’t made for the places you come from. And that’s okay. I like us the way we are.”
“I like you the way you are too,” he protests.
He doesn’t get it. He can’t see how impossible it would be for me, trying to fit into his charmed life. He doesn’t understand that against that backdrop, even he’d start to see me differently. More like the way he saw me back on Gaia, when we first met. Scavenger. Thief. Uneducated, unethical, money-grubbing trash. Not that he’d ever say it to my face, but it’d be there. We’d stop being on the same team.
And I don’t want to be there when that happens.
Something about my face, or my silence, makes Jules lean forward and reach for my hand. His is warm, and his fingers feel certain and strong as they wrap around mine. “Mia,” he murmurs, when my gaze starts to slide away from his. “These days there’s not much left I’m sure of. But I promise you, there’s nothing that could—”
He lets go of my hand with a surprised yelp. I’m reeling back too, because a jolt of electricity surged through our joined hands like a static shock, though neither of us moved.
For a moment we just stare at each other, baffled, until Jules twitches again, stifling an oath. Though I didn’t feel the second shock, he clearly did.
Heartbeat quickening a little, I inch closer. “Are you okay?”
“I think it’s the headset doing it. It doesn’t hurt, it was just—” He bites the words off with a faint frown.
“Shocking?” I finish for him, my voice dry. “Gotta say, I’d rather have my phone. Even on its strongest setting the vibrate doesn’t …” But my voice trails off as realization strikes, and a new urgency settles in. “Put the headset on!”
He gives me a startled look, but catches my meaning quickly and settles the earpiece in place, the cracked glass sliding over his right eye. His head lifts immediately, eyes meeting mine. He says nothing, but the distant look that falls across his face tells me I was right: The tingle was a silent alert, just like the vibration on a cell phone.
He listens—or watches, maybe—I don’t know whether it’s the screen or the earpiece that he’s paying attention to. His expression grows increasingly troubled, until he pulls the headset down again with a mute look at me.
“Well?”
“I don’t know, everything’s gone dead. I can’t control it anymore, it’s just … like someone’s switched it off.”
He flips the glass up and meets my eyes. In a flash of recognition, I know exactly what conclusion he’s reached—because I’ve reached it too.
“They know someone’s been accessing their database,” I whisper, as if I might make the words true if I spoke any louder. “Someone who’s not one of them.”
“It was probably the repeated searches for piloting instructions,” Jules replies, reaching up to pull the headset off. He folds it carefully, tucking it away as calmly as a professor might stow a pair of reading glasses. “It was a risk we had to take, but these Undying have been training their whole lives for this—they don’t need to look for instructions.”
“But they can’t know we’re stowed away.” My voice has a bit of an edge—now I want my words to be true. “They’ll think it’s someone from Earth, right? A remote hack of some kind. We’re still hidden. The Junction’s still safe.”
And in that moment, as if my words were a summoning spell, the corridors of the Junction light up with a glaring red laser grid, sharp lines dissecting every angle. I scramble frantically into Jules, but he’s trying to climb my way—the grid is closing in
on us from every direction.
An instant later it traces across each of our bodies in half a dozen places. Red lines radiate from Jules’s shoulders, his lanky, bent legs, his hand. And when he turns wide eyes on me, a red dot appears in the center of his forehead. Like a sniper’s scope out of an action film. My heart seizes.
They know we’re here.
We haven’t slept in forty-nine hours. Every time we think we’ve found a nook or cranny the Undying don’t know about, it’s only a matter of time before we hear the stomp of their boots or the metallic screech of a nearby hatch being torn off. And a matter of minutes, not hours. It’s like they’ve got a way to see through the very walls themselves, some way to come straight for us every time.
I’ve got myself wedged in at the top of a ventilation shaft, my back over a thirty-meter drop, my shoulders against the wall and my boots braced against the corner. Their laser grid doesn’t cover this spot, and for good reason—only a fool would hover at the top of a deadly fall. A fool, or someone desperate enough that the height is less frightening than the alternatives.
Jules is leaning back against my legs, dozing. I don’t think he was aware of leaning against me—he’d have pulled away if he was, trying to take off some of the pressure of staying in this position. He has it harder than I do, anyway. His height makes traversing the wall cavities and crawlspaces agony, and he hasn’t been able to stretch out properly in days.
My eyelids are drooping. With a swift intake of breath, I go from head to toe, tensing each muscle group and relaxing it again, focusing on physical sensations to keep myself awake.
I’ve done this before, in Chicago. Once, I ran into a scavver gang sitting on enough food to feed a platoon, and I set up a diversion a block over to lure some of them away. They were stupid enough that they all took off after the sound of someone shouting for help—an ancient digital recorder I found in a looted pawn shop—and I walked right into their empty camp, helping myself to their rations and some of their more portable loot as well. But I got greedy and stayed too long, and they came back before I could get clear. I spent a day and a half curled up inside an old chest freezer eating cold canned peas until they moved on.
