Undying

by Amie Kaufman

“The Nautilus is real.” Dex is still speaking softly.

  My pulse quickens, a jolt of excitement drowning out the fear for just a moment. I was right. The symbols scratched all over the Gaian temples and embedded in the deepest layers of code in the original Undying broadcast—not only were they a real warning, but I’ve got living proof right here that not all of the Undying want to wrest our planet from us by force.

  Atlanta’s shaking her head. “You’re not one of them. I’ve known you since before I can remember. I’d know. You’re not a traitor.”

  “Lower the gun,” he pleads, soft, gentle, unmoving. “This isn’t who we are. It’s not who we have to be.”

  A shudder goes through her, as though she can’t contain her response. She’s heaving for breath.

  His words are so soft I almost miss them. “I love you, Peaches. I pledge, you’re my best friend. But I’m not going to let you kill them. It’s not too late to stop what we’re doing.”

  “Don’t do this,” she whispers. She lifts the gun, this time to aim it back at her partner again, its barrel wobbling and wavering. Her whole body—which had once seemed so alien in its deliberate movements and strength—is shaking. “Please, Dex. It’s not too late for you either.”

  Dex is shaking too, but he doesn’t move. He stands between her and us, the barrel of the gun pointed at his chest. He says nothing, but I can imagine the pain on his face. Whatever side he’s chosen, he loves his partner, and this is killing him.

  My heart thumps. Once, twice, three times.

  Atlanta’s finger tightens on the trigger a fraction, and she draws a few quick breaths, trying to force herself to act. But as a tear escapes her reddened eyes and tracks its way down her cheek, she cracks, lowering the gun to her side. She takes a single step back through the doorway, then slams her hand over the button just beside the door frame.

  The door slides closed at lightning speed, and a red light springs to life beside it. All four of us lunge forward, tangling together as we scrabble for the controls, but we’re an instant too late.

  The door’s firmly sealed, Atlanta’s gone, and we’re locked inside.

  “QUICK,” JULES SAYS, STEPPING BACK TO MAKE WAY FOR DEX. “The code breaker, open the door!”

  But Dex doesn’t move a muscle, simply staring down at the blinking light. “It only works when a lock’s able to be unlocked,” he says quietly. “This one isn’t designed to unlock from the inside.”

  “So …” Jules’s voice trails away.

  “So we’re stuck here,” I say. “Until someone comes along and finds us.”

  “But we know how to block the portals,” he protests, voice rising. “We know how, we can’t just—”

  “We know how,” Neal says. “But we don’t know how. We don’t have any way to broadcast a jamming frequency worldwide. And there’s no way we can travel around the world to a hundred cities to jam them each one by one, even if we could get out of this cell. And we still don’t have any way to make the IA believe us. What are we going to do, point to Dex when they show up and find us here, him with his completely human DNA, and insist he came from a spaceship?”

  “Because that worked so well last time,” I mutter.

  All the faces around me are grim. “Mia’s right,” Jules says. “There’s nobody out there who’ll believe us. Deus, this is almost worse than it was before. We know how to save our people, and nobody’s going to listen.”

  “Not true.” That’s Dex, from his place by the door. He’s speaking slowly and thoughtfully, as if he’s working through an idea. He’s still staring at the door, as if Atlanta might come back through it. “That’s not true. There are some people who believe you. And they’re all over the world, yeh? I’ve been watching them since we landed.”

  It takes me a long moment to understand what he means, and I see it dawn on the others’ faces.

  He’s right.

  We might be trapped in here, but we have allies out there. They’re the friends and colleagues of Elliott Addison, even his competitors. They’re the people online who refuse to believe what they’re told without being shown the facts behind it. They are Luisa, in Dresden. They are everywhere.

  They believe in Addison.

  But will they be enough?

  All we can do is hope.

  “I’m posting what we know to the forums,” Neal says, pulling out his phone, and backing over to his uncle’s desk to sink down into his chair. “Before someone finds us here and confiscates my phone. The folks on those forums told me they wanted to hear from me, they invited me to come tell them what’s happening. Maybe they’ll pick this up. Maybe they can build jammers, save their own cities. Save as many as they can.”

  We fall silent as he works furiously, occasionally glancing back at the codes his uncle left scrawled above the door. Jules is watching the door, and I’m watching Dex, who’s still hardly moved.

  We might have sixty seconds until someone shows up to discover us. Or, if they all think Dr. Addison is somewhere else, if the IA moved him to a new location, then it could be a very long time before anyone looks in here.

  However long we have, I don’t want to waste it. I want answers. I have hundreds of questions burning through my mind—questions with impossible answers—and Dex is the only one who can unravel everything that’s happened to us. Jules begins to pace as Neal types, and I find myself walking laps of the little prison-cell-turned-office in the opposite direction, passing him twice every circuit. Like caged animals, my brain supplies.

  After a few minutes Neal lowers his phone, cradling it in one hand. “I’ve done my best,” he says. “I’ve given them the specs. Now we have to hope they understand us. That they’re the sort of people prepared to pull apart their microwaves and start modifying them, given sufficient proof of what’s going on.”

  “That’s what all this has been about,” Jules says softly. “Truth.”

  I want to soak up the sound of his voice, drink in every second I can stare at him, because when they come and find us here, I probably won’t see him again for … well. I probably won’t see him again. Or Evie.

  But despite this, I find my gaze twitching across to Dex, taking in his lean height, the dark hair, the skin a shade somewhere between mine and Jules’s, and the droop of his shoulders where he stands. I’m in a room with a member of a race that’s trying to wipe out humanity.

  It was a lot easier to just hate him when I thought he was an alien. Now, knowing he’s as human as I am … somehow, it makes everything worse. Complex and nuanced, Jules would say. Messy, say my own thoughts.

  “Thank you for helping us.” Neal, surprising me with his gravity, is watching Dex with his eyes full of sympathy. “I could see she meant a lot to you.”

  “She’s my other half.” Dex clenches his jaw, and a tear streaks down one cheek as he turns his face away. “We grew up together. We’ve been partners since before we could read and write.”

  “What kind of partners?” Neal rummages through his pockets until he produces a mangled, crushed plastic packet of tissues. He rises to his feet and walks over to Dex, offering them to him. Trying to understand this boy who’s suddenly in our midst.

  Dex looks between him and the tissues, a trickle of confusion momentarily eclipsing his misery.

  “For when your nose starts running,” Neal provides helpfully. “Or your eyes.”

  Dex, brow furrowed, takes the packet and extracts one of the tissues, then carefully wipes at his face. He looks up to meet Neal’s eyes briefly, and though he doesn’t smile, there’s a shift around his eyes. “Thanks. We’re … I don’t know how to describe it. We’re supposed to be together. We always are.” And, judging by his tone, it hurts right now that they’re not.

  “What is with the partners thing anyway?” I ask, making Dex twitch and look my way. “On the ship, in Lyon, you and Atlanta … why do you all go around in twos?”

  Dex lifts a shoulder. “All of us on the retrieval team have partners. A partner keeps
you focused, has your back, isn’t afraid to challenge you, comprens your thinking and your capabilities better than you compren yourself. And if you ever start to doubt your convictions …” Dex’s eyes go distant again. “Then a partner keeps you on track.”

  “Retrieval team?” Jules echoes. “Retrieval of what?”

  Dex’s eyes flicker toward Jules and stay there. “Of our home.”

  Gently, carefully, each word like a cautious step through a minefield, Jules speaks into the quiet. “Your people are from the Centauri mission.”

  Though there’s no lift at the end of his sentence, the words are a question anyway. Dex watches him, hints of anguish showing about his eyes and lips, and then drops his head.

  When Jules looks my way, I can only lift my shoulders helplessly. If Dex doesn’t want to answer our questions, we can’t force him. We’re not killers or torturers, and anyway, he helped us. But this could be our last chance to understand everything that’s happened.

  The silence stretches until Neal turns to retrieve his uncle’s chair, wheeling it across the room and offering it to Dex, then sinking down to sit on the floor. “Are you regretting what you did? Stopping her from killing us?”

  Dex’s tight lips relax a fraction, and then he ducks his head. “I should’ve tried harder to shift her. I should’ve explained somehow—I should’ve …” He makes a strange, swooping gesture that, while utterly foreign to me, conveys an all-encompassing helplessness that makes my own heart ping with unexpected sympathy.

  “Of course you regret hurting your partner.” Neal’s voice is gentle. “But do you regret the choice you made?”

  Dex just sinks down slowly into the chair. “I chose what I chose.” He’s quiet and still for a few seconds longer, and then he draws his shoulders back and takes a long, bracing breath. The tissue’s still clutched in his hand as it curls into a fist. “And yeh. My ancestors were the crew and colonists on the Centauri mission.”

  “But how?” The words spill out of me before I can stop them. “Your tech is so much more advanced than ours, and the ship only left Earth like sixty years ago, and the temple on Gaia’s a zillion years old, not to mention a zillion light-years away, and …”

  I’m braced for my torrent of questions to send Dex back into lockdown, but he’s just watching me, an odd almost-warmth in his eyes, like some part of him is amused. “Looking at it yourways, the ship did leave only sixty years ago. But ourways, it’s been over three centuries.”

  Jules pushes off from where he’s been leaning against his father’s desk, sending a stack of papers fluttering violently to the floor. “Time travel?” he blurts, his skin going several shades darker, his own hands clenched into fists. “All this time we’ve been trying to figure out this absurd riddle with no answer, and all this time it was something that’s—that’s—impossible! Time travel isn’t possible. It isn’t.”

  Every face in the room turns toward him, shocked by his uncharacteristic outburst. Standing there with fists clenched, lungs heaving, face flooded with ire and eyes blazing, he looks like he’s ready to fight someone.

  If ever there was something Jules would be ready to knock someone down over, it’d be an academic discussion about abstract concepts of quantum astro-whatever …

  Despite myself, I burst into helpless laughter.

  This time all eyes in the room go to me, including Jules, his fists relaxing in surprise. I lift my head to explain what was so funny, that he’s objecting to the concept of time travel while sitting in a detention cell in Prague with an ancient time-traveling space-human turncoat-alien whose people want to steal our planet. I want to tell Jules I’m fine, but I can’t stop laughing, my whole body seizing and quaking, spots forming before my eyes as my lungs struggle to get enough air. I reach for the wall behind me and slide down onto the ground, shaking.

  As soon as I realize I can’t stop, my brain short-circuits. It’s not funny anymore, but I’m still laughing, like the wires have gotten crossed and I want to cry or scream or explode into bits all over the inside of the room, but all I know how to do is keep laughing.

  Jules is on the floor next to me in seconds, wrapping his arms around me as I gasp, tears running from my eyes. He draws me in against him, one hand cradling the back of my head. For some reason it’s the feel of his fingers running through my newly cut hair that reminds me that my body’s a thing I can control, and with his arm around me, I take a long, shuddering breath.

  When I can look around again, the other boys are staring at me. I cough, twinges of embarrassment rising up now that the panic-laughter, whatever it was, is fading. I cough, and try to draw a breath, and it snorks through my clogged nose and makes me realize I must have snot just absolutely everywhere.

  The light shifts, and when I look up, Dex is there crouched in front of me, the squashy packet of tissues held out flat on both palms, like an offering of tribute. His expression is grave, and he makes such a human tableau despite not knowing how to hand someone a tissue.

  Another tiny little laugh escapes, like an aftershock reminding me that the tectonic plates of my abused psyche aren’t done shifting around yet. My fingers are shaking as they reach for the tissue packet. Weakly, I smile at Dex. “Thanks.”

  He smiles back, and because I’m looking at him, I can see the moment when the strangeness, the familiarity, of that human connection hits him. The Undying must have expected us to be as unfeeling and alien as we thought they were. A shadow crosses his features, and he returns to the chair Neal offered him.

  “We’re not time travelers,” he says softly as he sits. He looks across at us, and when I nod—I’m okay, go ahead—he takes another of those smooth, bracing breaths. “Though yeh, we have shifted in time. Eight years into the journey to the Alpha Centauri system, something went wrong with the ship. A design flaw during construction. We sent a distress call Earthward, but after waiting weeks for it to reach them, the only reply was that they couldn’t help us. We were abandoned.”

  “They didn’t have another ship,” Neal murmurs. “They couldn’t have helped. The colonists knew that.”

  “Maybe.” Dex’s expression is grave—he obviously has no desire to debate whose fault the failure of the mission was. “But while we were trying to patch the ship, an unidentified anomaly appeared, and caught up the ship, drawing it into uncharted space. We call it the Storm—and that’s the easiest way to compren it. Imagine you’re in a boat on the ocean—” He pauses and looks around. “Does Earth still have boats, do you compren what that is?”

  I blink, momentarily meeting Neal’s eyes before looking back. “Um, yes, we know what boats are.”

  Dex’s mouth twists, a hint of wry humor there. “It’s not a lixo question. For us, everything about Earth is ancient history. I mean, do you people know off the top of your head whether the ancient Egyptians knew about … antibiotics?”

  “Um,” I say again, “actually, yeah, pretty much everyone in the world knows ancient Egyptians were way before antibiotics. That’s not the best example you could have picked.”

  Jules’s arm around me squeezes, and he whispers in my ear, “The ancient Egyptians actually did know about antibiotics. They, um, used a kind of medicinal beer.” The words are apologetic. The gleam in his eye when I turn to glower at him isn’t.

  From the look on Dex’s face, his sharp ears picked up on Jules’s whisper. But when he grins at me, for the first time I feel warmer for seeing him smile, rather than disturbed by how an alien could seem so human. “So yeh. Boats. Imagine a boat on the ocean, and a storm shows up and gives you hassle. Once you’re at the mercy of the weather, you don’t know where you’ll have shifted once the storm passes. You could be kilometers off course.”

  “Or centuries,” Jules murmurs.

  “Or millennia.” Dex’s grin has vanished again. “Though we didn’t compren at first that we’d been shifted in time as well as space, because nothing around them was familiar. Without any reference points you could be dropped anyways
, anywhen, in the universe and have no idea.”

  “So it took you fifty thousand years back, the temple’s age on Gaia?” I ask.

  “Not that first time, that came much later. After the Storm, the Centauri crew were stranded with no help, and only enough supplies to reach their original destination—so only a few years’ worth of food. This is actually my favorite historical era,” he adds shyly, as if confessing a guilty pleasure, though the pride in his expression says otherwise. “The resilience of our ancestors, their ingenuity, the dozens of ways they worked out to extend, preserve, and sirsly, even grow their own food in those early decades is staggering. There’s a whole trilogy of movies about it.”

  “You have movies?” Neal’s eyebrows shoot up.

  Dex blinks at him. “Are you fooling? Of course we have movies. It’s not like we can build massive interstellar spaceships but somehow not compren a video camera. Our movies are like your … what’d they call it? Virtual reality? They’re kind of interactive, yeh? You can watch, or you can pick a role in the story and be in the movie, and the characters are all programmed to react spontaneously according to their personalities.”

  Neal’s cheeks flush a little, but he chuckles anyway, looking only mildly embarrassed. “I’d like to see those movies about the crew right after the Storm.”

  “They’re beno.” Dex studies Neal out of the corner of his eye, measuring, thoughtful.

  Jules clears his throat. “So the Centauri crew figured out how to extend their rations … ?”

  Dex blinks, looking back toward us. “Yeh. And they discovered that the Storm was not a unique phenomenon, that there were these anomalies all over the place. That probably, they created the one that pulled them in when they were trying to get their broken ship to shift, trying all kinds of lixo ideas. They shifted through every one they could find, hoping to get lucky and get sent someways Earthward, someways with star patterns they could recognize. But that was when their astronavigators comprenned why all their calculations were giving them so much hassle—that the Storm they were traveling through was shifting them in time as well as space, yeh? The probability of finding a hole in space that just happens to bring you anywhere Earthward is so tiny that it was actually pretty foolish of them to even try. But when you add in time as a variable … to get close to Earth and come out at a time when they could actually get help, a time when humans were spacefaring?”