Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  Exclamations break out all around us—word of the flu might have spread, but this quarantine is new since Neal saw the news this morning. The speaker continues as I translate.

  “ ‘Entering or leaving the city is forbidden; however, our train is permitted as long as it does not stop at any station. We will continue through, and apologize for any inconvenience.’ ”

  Judging by the protests around us, some of our carriage mates had intended on disembarking in Lyon. But my attention’s on the view outside the carriage window. We haven’t lost any speed, and at first the city flies past—I make out a hospital, a cemetery, and as we come into the more populated area, one of the university campuses.

  As we approach the Gare de Lyon-Part-Dieu, where the train would usually stop, we slow down, rattling along the tracks only a little above walking pace. Now, I can make out people moving around outside—more than I’d expect, given the quarantine—but they’re too far away for us to get a good look.

  From its place on the table, the device Dex left behind gives the softest of chimes. All our heads turn as one, to see a tiny green dot flicker to life on the screen and then fade again. The chime comes again a few seconds later, and then again, a fraction quicker. I glance up, but Mia and Neal look just as confused as I feel.

  Then the train clunks over several street crossings in a row, dragging our attention back to the window. We rumble alongside a small strip of shops, and I can see the street below the tracks properly. It’s lined with small shopfronts and runs parallel to the rails. I lean closer to Mia to get a good look at the people, and can’t help my sharp intake of breath.

  A group of figures come into view, making their way down one of Lyon’s cobbled streets. They’re moving with a lean, steady determination, but there’s something off about them. The way they lift their heads and look around calls to mind a pack of predators on the hunt, and one slaps at the glass window of a shop, hand swiping across the gilt lettering painted there. MARGUERITE PTISSERIE, it reads. Though there’s no sound through the train window, I can see he’s roaring his frustration at the barrier.

  I couldn’t name any one thing that makes it seem like they’re not thinking, not understanding or communicating as humans do, but I’m sure of it. It’s in the way they tilt their heads, their every move, the fact that no one’s speaking, the blank intensity of their expressions. Something has … reduced them.

  The notification sound on Dex’s device has sped to a constant ticking, like it’s approaching some sort of meltdown.

  “What in the name of …” Neal’s voice trails off, and between me and the window, Mia’s pressed against the glass, staring silently.

  Then she explodes into action, somehow vaulting over me, scrambling past the table, to run toward the back of the carriage. Neal and I waste a heartbeat on exchanging a startled look, and then we’re up from our seats, and running after her. The three of us bolt headlong through two more carriages, Neal and I—much bigger than Mia—bouncing off doors and seats.

  When we catch her, she’s standing at the very back of the train, looking out through the rear window. Despite the distance we’ve run, it’s been less than thirty seconds, and this final part of the train is only just starting to pass the little row of shops.

  “There,” she says breathlessly, jabbing a finger down at the street. “There, look at them.”

  I see what she means immediately, and suck in a quick breath. Beside me, Neal has his phone out, and he’s filming the street below us, and I hold my tongue—I don’t want to believe the evidence of my eyes, and just now I can’t bring myself to speak.

  Quietly, Neal gives our location, the time, and the date, and he tries to hold the screen steady as we rattle along the tracks, only putting the phone away when we pick up speed once more.

  “What did you see?” he asks quietly.

  “It can’t have been,” I whisper.

  “It was,” Mia insists. And I know she’s right.

  “There were two Undying back there,” I say slowly.

  “Isn’t the whole problem that they look like humans?” Neal points out. “How can you be sure?”

  Mia shakes her head. “I’m sure. They have a way of moving—there’s a way they walk, and look, these two weren’t confused like everybody else around them. They were talking to each other, and none of the other victims looked like they were even capable of speech. And if they were healthy, there’s no way they’d just be strolling down the street, it wasn’t safe out there. They looked …” Her lip curls. “They looked pleased.”

  “She’s right,” I say. “And they were in a pair, like all the Undying on the ship.”

  Neal murmurs, “The thing Dex left us—it can detect the Undying somehow. That’s why it was beeping.” Neal’s voice is taut with fear. “The question is, did these two just happen to find themselves in the middle of some kind of outbreak, or is there a connection between their presence and what’s happening in Lyon?”

  Mia’s face is white. I’m probably looking pretty ashen myself—Neal certainly looks like he’s about to throw up—but she has that look in her eye that tells me she’s had a realization, one that we’re not going to like.

  “Those people back there are like animals.” Her eyes are on the window, her voice trembling. “Like they’ve … regressed or something, like they’re Neanderthals.”

  My throat tightens. Perhaps it’s the time we’ve spent working together so closely, or perhaps it’s some instinct developed over all the studying I’ve done on this species—but I know what she’s about to say a split second before she says it.

  Her eyes leave the window and meet mine, and for a moment Neal’s not even there. “It’s like they’re proto-humans,” she whispers.

  We stand in silence for a long moment as the beeping from Dex’s device begins to slow, fading back into silence, but Lyon has one final offering—one that causes Neal to lift his phone to film with a shaky hand once more.

  As the three of us gaze down at the final section of track, a pair comes stumbling out the gate in someone’s back fence. It’s an old woman, still in her nightdress, and a young child with a huge mop of brown curls, clad only in a pair of shorts.

  The old woman’s lips part in a silent howl, and the child breaks into a run following us, hands up, fingers curled into claws, as if the train is some kind of threat it has to chase out of its territory.

  Behind the child, the old woman tries to shuffle to a run too, but she falls, landing heavily on the tracks.

  The child doesn’t look back, but keeps chasing us, face twisted in rage and confusion and maybe fear, until it’s lost from sight as we round the curve and pick up speed outside the city once more.

  IT’S HOURS BEFORE ANY SEMBLANCE OF ORDER RETURNS TO THE TRAIN. We’re not the only ones who saw the horrifying chaos in Lyon. Ordinarily you’d get officials walking the aisles, telling everyone to remain calm and stay in their seats, but when we elbowed our way past the panicked passengers back to our car, we passed one of the conductors sitting in an empty seat, head in his hands, while the passenger next to him fired off a stream of endless, unanswerable questions.

  Even the people in charge here are losing it.

  We don’t speak much once we’re back in our seats. The countryside is beautiful, even idyllic—I’ve never seen so much grass, such green, rolling hills. Back home it’s all dust and stunted trees. But I watch the scenery pass with an emptiness in my chest, as if my mind can’t process beauty anymore. Vineyards, rivers, picturesque towns, fields of solar power arrays … I watch it go by like it’s a movie.

  Because we left reality back there in Lyon.

  The train makes a few stops, and some passengers leave—others stay, clearly wanting nothing more than to put as much distance between them and the afflicted town as possible. Another hour passes and a sign whips by, a message written in a number of languages: WILKOMMEN AUF DEUTSCHLAND! BIENVENUE EN ALLEMAGNE! WELCOME TO GERMANY! The conductor in the seat behind us final
ly pulls himself together and staggers on up the aisle and into the next car. Jules slowly and methodically shreds an old napkin into ragged confetti.

  “I think I should post this.” Neal’s voice is quiet, but it’s been so long since anyone spoke that it thunders in my ears so that I barely understand him.

  “What?” I stare at him, numb.

  Neal’s eyes, so like Jules’s, flick between my face and that of his cousin. “The footage. I think I should put it online. The news reports … Guys, everyone else thinks whatever’s happening in Lyon is some sort of flu. That’s not a flu. That’s the goddamn end of the world.”

  Jules stays quiet, so I clear my throat and try to gather my stunned and scattered thoughts together again. “People will panic when they see that.”

  “Good!” Neal’s voice is higher than usual. “They should bloody well panic. Panicking is absolutely, one hundred percent, no question about it, exactly what they should do.”

  I shiver and wrap both arms about myself. The air is warm, but the goose bumps all over my skin won’t go away. “Maybe.”

  Neal’s staring down at his phone, and though I can’t see its screen, I know he’s watching the footage he took. “Do we say what we know about those two Undying in the background?”

  I chew at my lip. “I don’t know. Maybe that’ll make people think it’s all some kind of hoax.” Like De Luca did.

  “Post it.” Jules’s voice is hollow and soft, but contradicts me without hesitation. “Post all of it, everything about the two Undying. People might not believe that, but the part about Lyon is undeniably true. Maybe a few people will believe the rest of it.”

  Neal’s gaze lingers on his cousin’s face for a while, then flicks over to meet my eyes. He only looks at me for a second, though, before bending his head over his phone to do as Jules said.

  The silence stretches, until Jules’s voice comes softly: “Mia, what you said this morning …”

  I steel myself, eyes on Neal’s bent head—if anything, he’s concentrating even harder on the screen of his phone. Opening my mouth, certain I won’t be able to make it through the sentence without cracking, I say, “What I said about your dad, I didn’t mean—”

  “Not that.” Jules’s face tightens a little, but he presses on. “You said if the Undying wanted Earth, it’d be a problem for tanks and missiles and armies.”

  “Yes, and I still think—” I get no further, because his point strikes home with all the chilling force of a winter wind across the desert.

  What if the Undying weren’t in Lyon by accident? What if they never planned on needing tanks at all?

  “There are no bombs in Lyon,” Jules says, almost inaudible.

  “What if …” My throat tries to close around the words, and I’m forced to stop, then try again. “What if Lyon was just the beginning?”

  The boys sit opposite each other across the table, heads bent over the Undying tracker that Jules thinks Dex left for us to find. With the realization that the horror we witnessed in Lyon might be part of the Undying’s plan to destroy us, Jules is all the more desperate to decipher the tracking device, and he watches with single-minded intensity as Neal tries to figure it out and expand its radius.

  I’m sitting next to Jules, but I might as well be on the other side of the ocean for all the attention he pays to me. And I can’t blame him—even without what we’ve seen in Lyon, what I said to him about everything he’s doing making things worse for his father …

  I long for something familiar, lost in this blurry green sea of the German countryside. The urge to pull out my phone and call Evie, to see her face and hear her voice, is so strong I can almost feel the shape of the phone in my pocket, like a phantom limb. Looking at the screen the boys are examining only makes it worse, like I’m an addict watching someone light up a cigarette a few feet away.

  Abruptly I get to my feet, making the boys look up at me with twin expressions of expectant surprise. They’re so similar in this moment that whatever I’d been about to say vanishes, and I’m left looking between them, bemused.

  “Are you okay?” Neal asks, brows lifting.

  “I … I’m going to see if they’ve got water or something to drink.”

  Neal slides out of his seat. “I’ll go, I need to stretch my legs anyway. Sit, you guys need the rest.” I don’t miss the little look Neal shoots Jules as he departs. Some things are universal, I suppose, including that talk to her, dumbass look.

  Neal tucks his hands into his pockets and wanders on up the aisle toward the front of the dining car and the snack counter while I reluctantly slide into his seat, across from Jules.

  He’s got his eyes on the screen again, though the ease with which he’d been chatting with his cousin has vanished.

  I watch the blurry landscape whizzing by outside the window until I can’t stand the silence anymore. Letting my breath out, head dropping, I whisper, “I’m sorry I said that about your dad.”

  Jules is still for a moment before he sets the tracker aside, screen down. He looks up, and his gaze is as troubled as it’s ever been. “You’re right, though.”

  I blink at him. “I’m what?”

  “The IA is going to be in chaos trying to solve what’s happening in Lyon, which to them is a medical problem, an issue for disease control rather than planetary defense. If we go in there talking about alien invasions, they’re going to think we’re crazy, and when they find out who I am, it’s just going to make them even more sure that my dad’s crazy. You’re right.”

  His voice is soft, but there’s such a heavy sadness in it that my heart lurches in sympathy, my eyes prickling. I’ve never heard him sound so utterly defeated.

  “Jules—”

  “What are we even doing?” Jules grips the edge of the table between us, his knuckles whitening. “I had this vision of getting through to the IA, of telling my dad about the portals, and that he’d handle everything and in the process all our crimes—going to Gaia, stowing away on the ship, escaping IA custody, stealing that car, forging these papers—I imagined everything would just be forgiven, because what’s happening with the Undying is so much bigger than us.”

  I watch him mutely, because though I long to talk him out of this—though hearing him speak this way frightens me more than I’d have imagined—he’s not wrong.

  “Because it is so much bigger than us.” Jules lets go of the table and lowers his head into his hands instead. “Maybe it’s the end of the world. Maybe it’s not. But either way, we’re criminals. I’m a criminal. And I can’t go home again, can I?”

  My throat is thick and my eyes are burning. I ought to criticize him for not having thought about that before now, before even going to Gaia in the first place. But he’s never broken the law before, not like this. He hasn’t led the life I have, where home is always being slightly on the wrong side of the rules. And all I can think about is how lost he must feel.

  “I’m here.” My voice is quiet, as if I’m afraid of anyone else overhearing the promise I’m about to make. “I’m with you. And I’m not leaving you. Wherever we go, we’ll go together.”

  Jules lifts his head to meet my eyes, his own reddened and weary. For a long time we sit that way, in silence—then his lips tremble briefly before he opens his mouth to speak, one of his hands moving toward mine.

  But before his fingertips do more than graze my palm, Neal is back, and ungently nudging me sideways so he can join us. Irritation flares through me at the interruption, but one look at Neal’s face flushes all the annoyance out of my system.

  “What is it?”

  Neal lowers his voice, making an effort to sound normal, though it’s thick with tension. “They’re coming through the cars testing people for that flu.”

  Jules frowns. “But no one would show symptoms that fast even if it somehow did get on the train.”

  “I think they’re worried people might have brought it on board somewhere else in France, and I’m guessing Germany doesn’t want that
happening. They say it’s just a precaution.” But his face is grim, eyes a bit wild.

  I lean sideways and see the ticket checker again come through the doorway from the car in front of us, with a few others behind him. “So? We’re not sick.”

  “No, but we do have fake passports. And those IA officers with them probably won’t be fooled as easily as the transit officials. Especially if they’ve been circulating your descriptions.”

  My heart seizes, and I look again to see that the people filing into the car behind the ticket checker are wearing the uniform of the International Alliance. “Oh shit.”

  Jules stuffs the screen into his pocket, his movements jerky with sudden alarm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “And go where?” Neal’s eyes are wild with fear.

  “Off the train.” My voice sounds steady and certain—probably a good thing, though I wish I felt the same. “We’re over the border and into Germany, I saw the sign go by half an hour ago.”

  Both boys turn to look at me, though only Neal splutters a reply. “You want to jump off a moving train?”

  I eye the window. “It’s not moving that fast.” My voice is running out of steady and certain at an alarming rate.

  Jules cuts his cousin short. “We’ve got to hurry.”

  As casually as we can, the three of us abandon our dining car seats and head through the door toward the next car. No one stops us, though that doesn’t mean that the officials didn’t see us leave—it just means they assume they’ll catch up to us in the next car, because where else would we go?

  And when I hit the button that sends the exit door whooshing open, I realize why. Standing in the space between cars, we’re jostled all the more as each car sways and bustles independently, and the ground whizzing by is moving so quickly the gravel is just a smooth, gray blur.

  It’s not going to feel like a smooth gray blur when we go skidding across it.