Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  “You don’t get it.” I stare at him helplessly. “One way or another, I’m going to lose you. When all this is over, I’m going to lose you. And that’s what I think about every time you touch me, every time I want to—to kiss you, every time I look at you. I remember I’m going to lose you.”

  Something clears in Jules’s eyes, their warm brown softening as understanding spreads across his face. “Because everything is different now.”

  Throat too tight for speech, I nod, feeling a tear slide down past my nose.

  Jules steps forward until we’re close, but not touching. He doesn’t try to take my hand, or kiss me, or even wipe away the tear that his eyes track down my cheek. “I’m not going to let that happen.” He’s as serious, as intent, as he’s ever been. More so even than he was on Gaia, fixated on his mission. “And neither are you. You’re not giving either of us enough credit.”

  “But—”

  “Mia, we’ve been to the other side of the universe and back. We traveled to the heart of an ancient alien temple, we survived pitfalls and scavenger attacks and double-crossing secret agents, and we’re about to save the world. Do you honestly think an ocean is going to stop us?”

  My mind scrambles to dismiss what he’s saying, despite how much I long to be convinced. “It’s not the same thing—I was doing it for Evie. And you were doing it for your dad. Everything we’ve managed to do, we were doing it for people we—”

  I stop abruptly, the word sticking in my throat, my whole body freezing.

  Jules waits, but when I don’t go on, he suggests, “For people we love?”

  I’m still frozen, my eyes fixed on his chin rather than his face, too afraid to look up to see his eyes.

  Jules takes a slow breath, close enough that it stirs my hair when he lets it out again. “We haven’t known each other very long. But we know each other well. And yes, it breaks pretty much every rule there is when it comes to what makes sense, what’s logical.” He ducks his head until he can catch my eye, reluctant though I am to let him. “But you’re Amelia Radcliffe. When have you ever given a toss about the rules?”

  His face is so familiar, so earnestly kind, that my fears and my pain slip away, as tangible and fleeting as the tear about to drop off my cheek. Something settles, deep in my mind—a truth I’ve been ignoring, denying, even fighting.

  Whatever it is, Jules sees it in my face. His eyebrows lift. “Do you want me to sleep on the floor?” There’s no guile there, no attempt to guilt me one way or the other. It’s gentle, that offer.

  Swallowing hard, I shake my head.

  His mouth curves a little, and the warmth in his gaze sharpens as it drops a little past my eyes. “Then can I kiss you now?” he asks, watching my lips.

  Rules be damned.

  “Hell yes.”

  MY HAND’S SHAKING AS I RAISE IT TO CURVE MY PALM AROUND THE back of Mia’s neck, brushing my thumb across her cheek to erase the gleaming track the tear left behind. And then one of us makes a sound—me, I think—and I’m leaning into her, every part of me utterly alive.

  A shock and a shiver run through me as our lips meet, and a piece of me is noticing how soft her lips are, while the rest of me spins out slowly. I’ve wanted this so badly, and now, as her hands come to rest on my chest, I’m perfectly aware of the thump of my heart, the press of her fingers through my shirt, the warmth of her skin.

  I haven’t kissed that many girls before, and I’ve never been that sure of myself, but this is effortless. Mia’s hands press harder against my chest, and I take a step back until I’m leaning against the wall. Then her hands slide up to curl around my neck, and mine are at the curve of her hips, and she’s lifting up on her toes to chase a deeper, hungrier kiss.

  She’s perfect, this girl in my arms. This is nothing like the hurried kisses we’ve shared before, in the moments before risking our lives. Now, I lose myself in her, my fingers finding a sliver of skin at the hem of her shirt, sliding in beneath the fabric so my fingertips can trace up her spine.

  I don’t know how much time passes before we stop, both breathing quickly, our eyes meeting. I know I’m wearing a foolish smile, and hers isn’t so very far behind mine, and I want to gaze at her forever.

  “Hi,” I murmur, because I’ve forgotten all the other words except that one.

  “Hi,” she murmurs back, and then we gaze at each other for just a little longer, as she slowly comes down from her toes to rest on the flats of her feet once more.

  “We should go to bed,” I say quietly, and the instant the words are out, I hear them again, and my eyes widen, and I splutter a noise that doesn’t appear in any language I’ve ever learned. “Deus, I mean we should go to sleep, it’s been a long day, and we have another in the morning, and—”

  Mia saves me from myself by lifting her hand to cover my mouth. “Quit while you’re ahead, Oxford,” she suggests, a smile playing across her lips. “I’m with you. One step at a time is fine by me. Let’s go to sleep.”

  “We should be rested, in case we want to try this again in the morning,” I say, trying for gravity and falling short.

  “Count on it,” she replies, tugging me toward the bed.

  In the end, though, I can’t sleep. Mia lies in my arms, her slow, even breathing marking out the tempo I should be following. We had a couple of false starts in the going-to-sleep business, but eventually we conquered distraction long enough for her to pass out, and I wish I could do the same.

  My heart won’t let me, though. I know it was just a kiss, only a kiss, but it wasn’t just anything. There’s not an ounce of only in a moment like that.

  It was everything.

  She’s my everything, my safe place. Tomorrow, we’ll have to rise and face the world once more, face border crossings and the IA and the knowledge that the Undying are on the verge of invading, and that my father’s behind endless layers of security, and wonder when our luck will run out.

  But tonight, Mia lies here in my arms, and I know we’re making a promise to each other. This moment, as I hold her, I’m echoing back the promise to me that she made on the train.

  Amelia Radcliffe, I’m with you. And I’m not leaving you. Wherever we go, we’ll go together.

  GISELA SENDS US OFF IN THE MORNING WITH A MASSIVE BREAKFAST of eggs and thick slices of spicy sausage, freshly baked rolls with marmalade and honey, and coffee strong enough to strip the enamel from our teeth. Neal eyes us speculatively over his roll, and I know I’m probably blushing, but Jules just grins at him and tucks into his breakfast.

  The day is bright and sunny, and once we’re off the gravel road again, I curl up in my seat behind Neal. Luisa’s driving us, since Gisela has work, so we’re not all crammed in the backseat like before. I’m still basking a little in the warmth of last night, and I lean back in my seat with a sigh.

  Neal’s half turned around in his seat so he and Jules can exchange barbs and teases—they act the way I imagine brothers would act, and I feel a pang as I watch them. The world can’t support siblings anymore, not with the resources Earth has. My parents broke the law by having Evie, but she’s always been everything in the world that’s important to me. I can’t imagine my life without her.

  It’s easy to say the single-child rules are unfair. Easy to know Evie and I are right to stick together. But so much of the world is starving—for food, for medicine, for electricity, for education—that indiscriminately bringing more kids into a world that can’t feed them … that can’t be right either. Jules and Neal are proof that close bonds exist outside of sibling relationships. And true, they are family—but at this point, Jules and I are family too. Even if our world can’t support large biological families anymore, maybe there’s something to be said for found families. Chosen ones.

  I watch out the window, my thoughts meandering lazily, and I’m breathing more easily than I have in a long time. In the distance I can see Dresden, past the highway and across the river. Even this far away, I can see it’s an astonishingly beau
tiful city—I’m ashamed to admit even to myself that I’d never heard of it, and imagined some dinky, forgettable place. But there are graceful domed buildings, and towers that look like something out of an ancient fairy tale, and a stone bridge with archways for river boats to pass beneath. I find myself wishing we really were going there as tourists, so we could just take it all in.

  Except … we aren’t going there, are we?

  I sit up, blinking. The city’s in the distance, vanishing behind us, and we’re on a highway.

  Heading away.

  “Jules.” I grab for his arm, and something about my tone makes him stop mid-sentence and look at me. “The city’s behind us.”

  Jules leans across me, craning his head to look out the window. Ease and humor vanished, he demands, “Where are you driving us?”

  Luisa is silent, her eyes on the road ahead of her.

  Panic sears through me, and I’m half a breath away from fumbling at the door handle, despite the idiocy of leaving a moving car speeding down the highway. “Stop the car!” I harden my voice. “Let us out, we’ll hitch from here.”

  Neal levels a hard stare at Luisa. “You said you were driving us to Dresden.”

  I was right. They did recognize us. They had us stay so they could contact the authorities, and now she’s driving us to the police. De Luca or Captain Abrantes is going to be waiting for us, and we’ll be shoved back into a cell, and we’ll never get to Jules’s dad, and the world will end. …

  Luisa draws in a breath. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel, knuckles showing white. “We are now a half hour from the border with Tschechien—with the Czech Republic. You wish I would turn the car around?”

  That stops us all short. I end up staring at Jules, who gazes back at me with equal confusion before looking over at Neal, who just shrugs, looking baffled and petrified all at once.

  Not once did we ever mention we were trying to get to Prague. We’d planned on hitchhiking from Dresden if we couldn’t find bicycles, because it wasn’t that far to the border, and that way Luisa and Gisela would have nothing to tell the authorities about where we went even if the IA managed to connect us to them.

  Abruptly, Neal rummages in his bag, and as he moves aside a hoodie, I hear the sound that made him start hunting—a faint chiming. Luisa glances across at him, but evidently dismisses the sound as a notification from his phone. I watch from my place in the backseat as he pulls out the electronic device Dex left on the pillow back in Montpellier, and checks the screen before wordlessly turning it so we can see. It’s faint, at the edge of the screen, and even as we watch, the little green blip flickers out and the chiming stops.

  There are Undying in Dresden, too. Like there were in Lyon, when the flu broke out.

  I look at Jules, whose hands curls tightly around mine. We can’t go there—we can’t warn them, because no one would believe us. We don’t know how the Undying are connected to the disease spreading across Europe, only that they are connected.

  The only thing we can do is get to Dr. Addison and give him what he needs to shut down the portals and stop the Undying.

  Luisa is still driving in tense silence. Jules squeezes my fingers, as much to comfort himself as to comfort me, and I try to calm the anxiety roiling around in my stomach. Instead I just feel like throwing up.

  The border is crowded. I have no basis for comparison, but judging from the frazzled looks on the faces of travelers and officials alike, I’m guessing the heightened security across Europe is slowing everything down.

  Luisa pulls the car into an empty space some distance from the crossing itself. She leaves the motor running, but puts it into park and then passes a hand over her face.

  “I hope you have … gefälscht? Das Wort ist … fake? I hope you have fake papers. I do not know how you will cross, I do not want to know. But I know your face from the Zeitung. From the newspaper.” She looks up at the rearview mirror, watching Jules.

  Jules’s hand tightens around mine. “Have you told anyone else about us?”

  “My wife, even she does not know.” Luisa retrieves her handbag from under her seat and pulls out a thick envelope, which she then clutches in one hand as she turns in her seat to look at all of us. Her face is still troubled, still suspicious, still rather severe, as she regards us. “I do not know whether I should stop you, but I think you are good Kinder. These times, they are …” She stops to hunt for the word. “Frightening. You go to find your father, ja?”

  I hold my breath, my eyes on Jules. He swallows, quiet for a long time. Then, he says simply, “Yes.”

  Luisa hands the envelope to Neal, who opens it enough to show a stack of euro notes before he closes it and looks up, wide-eyed.

  Suddenly, unable to hold it in anymore, I blurt: “Don’t go back to Dresden.” The innocent chime of the Undying locator is ringing in my ears. “Take Gisela and go somewhere safe—somewhere away from the city.”

  Luisa’s looking at me now in the mirror, and though she hesitates, she nods after a long moment. “I will. Go, I do not want someone to see you in my Auto.”

  Confused, torn between suspicion and gratitude, we all fumble with our seat belts and the door handles. My legs feel wobbly, and the heat of the sun reflecting off the pavement feels like an oven despite the cool morning air. We all stand there beside the car, unmoving, staring at each other—until Luisa rolls down the passenger’s side window.

  “When you see your father,” she says, just before she shifts the car back into drive and pulls away, “tell him I believe in Addison.”

  My heart’s still racing as we stand there, watching her car vanish back over the slight rise in the road. I find my gaze pulled toward Jules, whose face is nearly unreadable—but only nearly. I can see his lips a fraction tighter than normal, the slight drawing in of his brows, the tiny flare of his nostrils as he struggles to breathe normally. It was one thing to see anonymous avatars online in support of his father—another to stumble upon one in real life.

  Luisa’s suspicion toward us, at least in comparison with her wife, makes sense now. If she’d recognized Jules as Addison’s son, it would’ve made everything real for her too. Using a hashtag or posting a comment in a forum is easy. Breaking the rules and choosing a side and fighting for what you believe is far harder.

  I reach for Jules’s hand, a tiny part of me worried that he won’t want that support just now, or that it’ll make him crack and cry, or—but his fingers curl around mine without hesitation.

  Neal lets out his breath in an audible whoosh, and scrubs his hands over his close-cropped hair. “I guess we’d better try our luck at the border.”

  The lines of cars at the gatehouses stretch far back beyond the border itself, but the booth for hikers and cyclists has far fewer people waiting. It’s not until we fall into step at the end of the line, though, that we see why there are lines at all.

  A dozen uniformed IA security officers are conducting searches of travelers’ belongings, asking them questions, and conducting random inspections of documentation.

  Neal shifts his weight from one foot to the other, trying not to look nervous. “Should we duck out of line, try to sneak across somewhere else like in France?”

  “I don’t think we can,” I murmur, anxiety sharpening my voice a little. “If we go now, after seeing the security officers, it’ll be a dead giveaway that we’ve got something to hide.”

  Jules’s eyes are scanning the people currently being questioned at the crossing. “They’re looking at everyone—I don’t think they’re looking for us specifically. We’ve still got our fake passports.”

  “And they’re only doing close inspections at random.” My voice sounds far more confident than I feel. “Odds are they won’t look twice at our passports, and we’ve got nothing incriminating in our bags.”

  “Except this.” Jules pulls out Dex’s tracker from his pocket. “But given that they didn’t believe us when we were standing next to an Undying landing craft, I doubt anyone�
��s going to think this is strange.”

  Neal draws in a breath, brows furrowed. “Then we act like everything’s normal, and hope we don’t get stopped.”

  The line drags itself forward, and with each shuffling step my heart rate speeds up, and we come closer to the IA officers ahead. I put myself in between Jules and Neal, so that we’re clearly a group—if one of us gets stopped, we might be able to pull the but I’ve got to stick with my boyfriend trick and follow—because I bluff better than either of them.

  We make sure we’ve all got our passports ready and our bags open, so that we’ll spend as little time in front of the officers as possible. And I murmur to them not to try to avert their faces, to meet the eyes of the inspection crew for a second, smile faintly, and then break eye contact—not enough for them to really remember us, but enough that it doesn’t seem like we’re avoiding them.

  Jules’s backpack is mostly vending machine junk food and dirty laundry, and he gets a little eyebrow lift from the officer inspecting it once we reach the front of the line. He shrugs—I told him to speak as little as possible, just in case the British accent somehow cues them to his identity—and smiles at her, and she hands it back with a roll of her eyes.

  “Wait until you’re in your thirties,” she murmurs wistfully. She speaks English with only the slightest trace of an accent. The IA trains their agents well. “You won’t be able to eat like this, that’s for sure. Now, I’ve just got another couple of questions. First, can you count down from one hundred for me, in increments of seven?”

  Jules blinks at her, but after an encouraging nod from the official, he begins.

  “One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two …”

  “Thank you,” she says, glancing down at her screen and hitting a button.

  Neal leans down so he can speak to me in a whisper. “That’s a question from the Mini-Mental State Exam, I did it in a psychology class at uni. They’re checking for deterioration in cognitive function.”