by Amie Kaufman
Until the hot water hits me, at which point I forget everything else and stay there until the water turns cold.
After I’ve dried off and pulled on some of the fresh clothes from the backpacks Neal brought for us, he returns with a large haul from the supermarket. I can’t help but notice how interested the Undying are in every kind of food. I’m thrown back for a moment to their wonder as they felt the breeze, and saw the grass for the first time.
All this must be so new, so overwhelming to them. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the strangeness of being on Gaia, and I’d brought all my own clothes and food—and there wasn’t anyone else there. The culture shock—species shock?—for them must be staggering. I’d admire their ability to remain efficiently on-mission if it weren’t that same ability that’s going to get us killed, unless we’re very lucky.
It’s late afternoon by the time we’ve eaten, and though the sun’s not down yet, the four of us are nodding. Dex and Atlanta curl up together on one bed, and Mia and I take the other. Neal, insisting it’s no discomfort at all, settles himself down in the small armchair, pulling up a book to read on his phone, apparently settling in to read while we sleep.
When I wake, it’s dark. I roll over, disoriented. Beside me, Mia makes a sleepy noise, but she’s already struggling to sit up, in response to whatever woke me.
“What the hell?” That’s Neal, and I know where I am.
I hear him cross the room in three quick strides, and my eyes sting as he flicks on the light. Another two steps, and he’s through the open bathroom door.
When he reemerges, his mouth is tight, face grim. “They’re not here,” he says. “I don’t even remember falling asleep, but I locked the door, and I kept the chair by the window. I don’t know how they didn’t wake me.”
That’s when I look across at the other bed.
The rumpled sheets are flat.
Dex and Atlanta are gone.
“GOOD, I’M GLAD THEY’RE GONE!” MY VOICE IS LOUDER THAN I intended. Despite my exhaustion, I only slept an hour or two last night. Long enough for Dex and Atlanta to slip away, but not long enough to refresh my tired brain. I couldn’t stop my mind turning over, couldn’t stop thinking. Every turn we make, our options just get narrower and narrower—and in the darkness, making it to Prague seemed impossible. I told myself that everything would look simpler in the light of morning, but now, staring at the empty bed the Undying teens had occupied, I just want to give up.
Jules stares at me. “How can you say that?”
“We can move that much faster without them, and also not have to worry about getting shot or, you know, being killed in our sleep with a freaking Swiss Army knife! We have a million other things to worry about—I don’t think losing the homicidal aliens hounding us should be one of them.”
It’s just us in the hotel room—Neal’s gone out to try and find us some breakfast, since the Undying took the remains of the food he bought last night. That leaves me and Jules to figure out what to do about the missing aliens. I admit that knowing they’re out there somewhere instead of where we can keep an eye on them is terrifying—but not nearly as terrifying as having them sleeping a few feet away.
“We need them.” Jules expression is rather stony, and I can hear in his voice how thin his patience has gotten. “Even if my dad can neutralize the portals they’re setting up—maybe they’ve got some fallback if they can’t land more troops through the portals. We have to learn what the rest of their plan is.”
“Screw their plan!” My voice cracks, and I shore it up with an effort. “This is so beyond us it’s not even … A few weeks ago I was standing on an alien planet certain that I was in the middle of the worst, most terrible thing I was ever going to have to go through in my life.”
His brown eyes, narrowed with irritation, soften a fraction. I don’t know what he felt the first few steps he took on Gaia, but I had plenty of opportunity to see how frightened he was in the days that followed. Because I was frightened too, and that shared experience was beyond anything that could’ve brought us together here on Earth.
Maybe that means we never should’ve been together in the first place. And shouldn’t be now. My heart quails from that thought almost as much as the thought of trekking across Europe as a wanted fugitive.
He doesn’t speak, and the silence keeps pulling words from my mouth, my mind too exhausted to stop them.
“But I did it anyway, going to Gaia. Because it’d be worth it, because I’d be saving my sister, and we’d be together. But they’ve got Evie, Jules, or they’re threatening to take her, or she’s missing, or—or something. We’re rapidly on our way to being labeled international terrorists. And we can’t even rent a hotel room for fear we’ll be arrested. It feels like years, Jules—it feels like years since I’ve had even a moment of feeling safe, like disaster wasn’t right around the corner. And it was one thing when we were in an ancient temple on another world, and even in the walls of an alien spaceship—but we’re home. We’re here, against all odds. We got home despite knowing we were going to die. And I just—I can’t keep doing this, and neither can you. So screw the Undying plan, Jules. I’m done. I’m going to find Evie, and make sure she’s safe—it’s all I can do.”
I don’t even have the energy to care that there are tears spilling down my cheeks. He’s seen me raw before, and I don’t have anything left to prove to him anyway.
Let him see me cry. I’m done.
His arm moves, like the tears trigger some automatic response—but he doesn’t reach for me. His voice is hoarse when he speaks, his own eyes red-rimmed. “What about Earth?”
“What about it?” The words are callous, but in my current state I can’t help the wobble in my voice. “I don’t mean—it’s just, what can we possibly do? This is a problem for world leaders, and armies, and … and tanks, and missiles, and bombs the size of houses, Jules. What are we meant to do to help in all of that? Two kids in the middle of a world war to end all wars?”
Jules passes a hand over his eyes, clearing his throat. “But we have to—”
“Have to what?” I interrupt him, wishing an instant later that I hadn’t. “Bust into the IA with a list of insane criminal charges behind us both, claiming with no proof that aliens are invading the planet, and we need to see their most notorious prisoner at once?” My heart shrivels, but the words are already there, and I listen to them come out with something almost like horror. “All you’re doing now is making things worse for your dad.”
In the silence that follows, I can hear the distant sounds of traffic a few blocks away. The thumping bass line from someone’s car radio rises and falls. A bird gives a raucous cry as it swoops past the window.
Jules’s lips were still parted to speak when I interrupted him—now he closes his mouth, gazing at me from across the double beds. It’s not the anger that strikes me, though he is mad, fists clenched at his sides and lips tight. What strikes me, what guts me, is the pain there—full of betrayal, disappointment, shock.
Like I’m not who he thought I was.
A tap at the door, followed by the rattle of a keycard, makes me swipe my sleeve across my face and look away. The door opens to admit Neal, like a near-copy of Jules himself, his arms full of cellophane-wrapped vending machine food.
“Bad news, team, we need to …” He trails off, glancing between us. Then he clears his throat, moving to dump his armload of junk food on the bed. “Look, normally I’d say I forgot the Doritos and give you guys a sec, but we don’t have time.”
Jules frowns. “Why? What’s going on?”
Neal shrugs as he rummages through the pile of salt and sugar until he comes up with some Kinder chocolate. Not real chocolate, of course—that’s been an embargoed luxury for at least a decade. And the chocolate “flavored” substitute is nothing like the real thing. “Some flu or something in Lyon, they’re recommending tourists stay away. The news was on the TV in the snack room. Roads and trains are gonna be jammed in just a
few hours with people overreacting and changing their travel plans, and we’ve got to get across the border before then.”
Jules glances at me. I meet his eye with an effort, fighting the urge to look away in guilt and shame. Because he’s got no right to make me feel this way—to think a few teenagers could somehow do more than an entire international coalition of experts is beyond arrogance, it’s downright reckless and irresponsible and dangerous, and not just for us.
We tried. And now we’ve got to do what we both set out to do: save our families.
“Either way,” I say wearily, “we have to get out of France. We don’t have time to argue right now.”
“Did you bring papers?” Jules turns to Neal, barely acknowledging me.
“Yeah, though I don’t have a picture for Mia.” Neal goes over to rummage through his backpack and pull out two passports, one of which he hands to his cousin.
Jules flips it open and exhales a somewhat mirthless laugh. “Tyler Hogwood?”
“Hey, don’t complain, I had like a day. Mia—can I get your picture real quick?” Neal waves his phone, and, numb, I nod. I’ll look exhausted and tear-stained and like I wish I were dead, but that’s what most people look like when they’re traveling, so it’s probably for the best.
Neal snaps my picture, starting to make a lighthearted comment about my suitability as a supermodel—albeit a rather short one—and stopping when he fails to get a smile out of either of us. “Tough room,” he mutters, plugging a little portable printer into the power port of his phone. It only takes him a few moments to run the edge of a box-cutter along the lamination of the passport page, slip my photo in over the existing one, and then seal it back down with a touch of glue.
Neal inspects it critically and then shrugs, handing it over to me. “Wouldn’t hold up under a real inspection, but we’ll just have to hope it’s good enough. Maybe the mass exodus of tourists will be cover enough.”
“How do we get to Germany?” My voice is quiet, and I don’t look at Jules.
“I’ve got train tickets to Frankfurt for us.” Neal pulls a printed confirmation page out of his bag. “We just pick them up at the station. It’s only a few minutes from here. The line goes through Lyon, but I called and the guy said the train’s still running.”
“Let’s go, then.” Jules scoops up a few things from the vending machine pile without looking, and turns for the window we crawled in through.
I’m about to follow suit when Neal calls, “Hey, wait, don’t forget your … phone?”
Jules just has his wrist unit, and my phone is still lodged in a stone doorway back on Gaia. But Neal’s reaching for something half hidden under the pillows on one of the beds.
It does look like a phone, though it’s smaller than most of the smartphones people buy these days. One side of it is a dim screen that brightens as Neal lifts the device; the other side is emblazoned with some sort of symbol, a gentle arc from one corner down toward the other.
“That’s not ours.” Jules’s voice has lost some of its stiffness, his curiosity winning out over everything else, as always. “Let me see?”
Neal hands it over, and the three of us hunch over the thing. The display is minimal, black and white. Curved lines crisscross in a grid-like configuration, intersecting randomly with other, more abstract lines.
“One of them must have left it behind.” I poke at the display, but it doesn’t respond—either it’s not a touch screen like our devices, or it’s locked somehow. “Are any of these symbols you know?”
Jules shakes his head absently. “This symbol on the back—it looks like the symbol we saw in the first room of the temple on Gaia, the symbol for the Undying. But none of this is writing. It looks more like …” He trails off, eyes a bit distant.
“Like a map.” Neal points at the screen. “No roads or countries or anything, but this here, this looks a little like one of the elevation maps we use when we’re programming drones.”
“Maybe it’s to track them. If we can figure out how it works, maybe we could keep tabs on them.” Jules is staring at the little screen in his palm, and when he speaks again there’s a spark of life in his voice for the first time since we were shouting at each other. Or since I was shouting at him, anyway. “Dex. Dex left it here for us to find before they snuck away.”
“The disturbingly hot one?” Neal’s flippancy is more than irritating—but then, he wasn’t on Gaia. He didn’t see the corridors of the ship filled with Undying teens like Dex and Atlanta. He didn’t hear the way they spoke about us “protos.” And he’s our only ally right now.
I let my breath out in a groan. “Look, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t change …” I trail off, because we’re talking in circles, and if I tell him again that there’s nothing we can do, he’ll tell me again that we can’t just give up, and we’re both right and we’re both wrong, and I can’t have this fight again.
“It doesn’t change the fact that we have to get out of France.” Jules’s voice is not exactly conciliatory, but it’s not as brittle as it was. “We’ll have a few hours on the train to decide what to do next. And we can figure out what this is then.” He hefts the little device, and then slips it into his pocket.
Grateful for the reprieve, for his willingness to press pause on our disagreement, I offer him a weary smile. He doesn’t smile back, though he does meet my eyes for a moment before turning to gather up the rest of our meager supplies. I wish I could take back what I said about his father—but I also can’t dismiss the nagging feeling that what I said was true. There’s nothing two kids can do to stop a war, if that’s what the Undying are doing.
I turn to follow Neal out the window, trying to harden my heart the way I did on Gaia. Evie comes first. At the very least, De Luca and the IA know about her, and at worst, they have her. I can’t forget that for an instant. She always has to come first.
WE FIND A PLACE TO SIT ON THE TRAIN, CLUSTERED IN A SET OF four seats around a small table. As Neal digs through his backpack and hands out little cakes from a packet that says Madeleines on it, I can’t help turning over in my hand the device that I’m sure Dex left behind. It’s small, about the size of my palm, with the display on one side and a hard shell of some unknown alloy on the other. My fingertips trace the symbol for the Undying embossed there: a circle with a long tail arcing behind it.
Neal interrupts my thoughts. “You really think he left it for us to track him on purpose? It couldn’t be something he and Atlanta use to keep track of each other, and it was an accident?”
Mia makes a noise indicating just how likely she thinks that is, but I don’t look up at her. I can’t just now. The things she said are ricocheting around my mind like bullets hunting for a target. I need a chance to think. I need a moment alone. But I’m not going to get one—at least I hope not, because right now Neal and Mia are all I have.
“There’s more to Dex than we know,” I say. “Whatever their plan is, he has doubts. Perhaps he had them to begin with, or perhaps we’re just not what he expected.”
“My good looks probably did come as a surprise,” Neal says modestly, around a mouthful of food. “People rarely expect me to be this clever and this handsome.”
“He’s voiced doubts before,” I insist. “And there have been other moments.”
“The tattoo?” Mia asks, disbelieving. “It was a galaxy tattoo. Most galaxies are spiral shaped.”
I shake my head. “He was trying to draw attention to it. And we know someone within the Undying tried to use the Nautilus to warn us not to go near the ship in the first place.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been Dex,” she retorts. “He’s our age. Or he looks like it. Either way, he wasn’t carving reliefs in a temple fifty thousand years ago. Nothing lives that long.”
“It could be some kind of symbol of resistance,” I suggest. But even I know it’s a stretch. We don’t have any real evidence for that.
“The moment in the shuttle, though,” she s
ays. “That, I have trouble explaining. I could have sworn he made us.”
“He did,” I agree. “Some parts, I’m not sure about. I’m still wondering if he helped me out, when I was bluffing us onto the shuttle. He asked if we trained with the Cortes squadron, and I didn’t know if he was trying to catch me out, or he thought that might explain why he and Atlanta wouldn’t recognize me. But he might have been trying to show me the way out with a leading question. There’s an explanation for that, but there’s no explanation for him seeing us and keeping it a secret from Atlanta, unless his loyalties are divided.”
“What I can’t understand,” Neal says, “is what those two are. How can they possibly look so like us and not be us? I mean, mathematically, the odds on that … Are we talking surgical alteration? It wouldn’t be a bad move, if you wanted to blend with a society you were infiltrating. They couldn’t have known they’d have their cheeks swabbed, though, so those DNA tests … that should’ve sent alarm bells off all over the place. Nothing that bleeds blue is going to look like us on a genetic level.”
“That’s what we have to learn,” I say, still not looking at Mia. “If we know that, we can find a way to make the IA listen. And let us in to see my dad about shutting down the portals.”
“Well,” Neal says, “if anyone can help us, it’s Veronica. She knows her stuff. And whatever the answer, none of it can stop us trying to reveal them to the IA.” His determination is there in his voice, but of course he knows nothing of my fight with Mia this morning.
Neither of us replies.
It’s an hour later when, despite our limited supply of cash, I’m starting to seriously wonder if the train has a dining car that might offer something superior to vending machine food. But the overhead speaker crackles to life.
“Chers voyageurs, votre attention s’il vous plaît …” it says.
I lean in to translate for the others in a whisper. “ ‘In a few moments, the train will pass through the town of Lyon. As you may be aware, the French government has declared Lyon an emergency area, and imposed a quarantine on the city.’ ”
