Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  My mind feels sluggish, and with a wrenching effort I force myself to focus. There must be some way we can increase the reach of our message, find new allies—but I can’t see it.

  Dex rises slowly to his feet, scanning our weary faces. “The first thing we saw, when we arrived,” he begins slowly, “was the power of your media.”

  “I doubt we’ve got supporters at any local news stations,” I mutter.

  Dex raises an eyebrow. “I mean the pictures, the videos, everything that floods your networks—sirsly, when one video is seen enough times, it reaches a kind of critical mass and suddenly millions are watching.”

  Mia’s eyes widen. “You’re saying we need a video, something people will watch, and tell their friends to watch—something that gets attention and proves what’s going on somehow.”

  Dex nods. “And I can think of someone the world would watch—they watched his father, after all, a million times over.”

  All eyes swivel toward me, and a bolt of sheer terror stiffens my spine. “No,” I whisper, almost inaudible even to myself.

  “The Addison speech,” Mia murmurs beside me. “Part two.”

  JULES’S EYES FIX ON ME, AND THE HINT OF PAIN AND ACCUSATION in them hits like a blow. “What good would it do for me to be the one on camera?” he blurts. “If anything, the world’s less likely to believe me, given that they don’t believe my father.”

  “But the point Dex is making is that the first problem is getting people to watch the video at all. We need them to tune in. The second part, the believing us part—that comes later.”

  “Mia,” he says simply, his gaze saying the rest. His father’s fall from grace—the mocking, the memes of his impassioned plea, the repetition of the injuries over and over—it was almost too much for Jules to bear the first time. And now we’re asking him to put himself in the middle of it again, with—he believes—little chance of success.

  “I know,” I whisper, twisting my body in to face his, shutting out everything else. “But there’s no other choice, Jules. They could find us locked in here any minute, and we’ll lose our last chance to spread the warning. This time, it will be different.” There’s a ferociousness in my voice that startles me, and I realize that I really believe that I’m saying. “This time, they’ve seen Lyon. This time, there’s an army of supporters out there just waiting to help spread the word, and you’ll be broadcasting from inside the IA, right in front of your father’s work. This time, they’ll listen, like they should have listened to him. Nobody’s going to look at you and doubt you, Jules. They never could.”

  I can see the pulse at his neck, quick and delicate and so, so fast, as he tries to steady himself. And then he closes his eyes, and lets out a breath. “There’s no other choice,” he echoes. And I’m not sure if it’s resignation, or a leap of faith, but I know he’ll do it.

  “Neal, can you get some sort of livestream hosting site up?” I have only the vaguest idea what I’m talking about, but Neal nods like I’m speaking his language. I squeeze Jules’s hands as I continue. “And a countdown. Dex, when are the portals activating?”

  “They can be turned on manually,” Dex replies, “but they’re not scheduled for mass deployment for another fifty-two hours and eight minutes.”

  Neal’s lips twitch. “You’re not big on precision, are you?”

  Dex blinks owlishly. “Seven minutes and forty-eight seconds now.”

  Neal laughs, but his amusement doesn’t last long. “You think anyone apart from Atlanta will turn theirs on early?”

  “I don’t know,” Dex admits. “It’s possible, if they see the broadcast. But there wasn’t a plan for it, and we’re a big network. Even after we started chasing Jules and Mia around our ship, it took us two days to accelerate the launch schedule—we don’t change course quickly. Planetside, we all operate independently, and there’s no system for communicating a change of plan. Nobody anticipated any real proto resistance, to be honest. No offense.”

  Neal snickers, and abruptly I realize that his joking, lighthearted nature doesn’t irritate me the way it once did. Then, it seemed like he didn’t understand the weight of what Jules and I had to accomplish. Or that it was all some big game, a bunch of kids playing at international spydom. But the warmth in his face is real, and now I can’t not see it. His face looks so much like Jules’s when he’s being sincere, and whenever he speaks Jules looks just the tiniest bit lighter. And when Jules is lighter, my own mind feels freer.

  I don’t think we’d have gotten this far without Neal. And not just because of the passports he brought us.

  “All right.” I clear my throat, just enough to get their attention back on me. “Then we need to do this now, before someone finds us and takes the phone, and hope it spreads.”

  Jules finally speaks again, still holding my hand, his voice almost steady. “It’s good timing. It’s noon here, so it’d be eleven a.m. in England,” he says. “Six a.m. on the east coast of the US. A lot of people will be awake to see it.”

  My brows lift, focus derailed the tiniest bit. “You just know that off the top of your head?”

  Jules lifts his eyebrows right back at me, and now his gaze is steady. “I looked it up. I had a compelling reason to learn what the time difference would be between, say, Oxford and a suitably anonymous town on the east coast of America.”

  He doesn’t add when this is all over. But it’s there in his eyes, in the determined set of his jaw. I haven’t forgotten the promise I made him—that we’re in this together, from now on, no matter what—and for the first time, I wonder if it could really turn out that way.

  So I don’t try to hide the smile those words spark, and I don’t suppress the flutter of excitement that he’d been looking up our time differences, and I don’t turn away to hide my blush.

  “We’ll have everyone on the #IBelieveInAddison forums to help spread the word,” Neal says, head down, already fiddling with his phone. “And my followers.”

  “You have followers?” I ask.

  “Many. He posts pictures of the Oxford water polo team,” Jules says beside me, dry. “Our uniform doesn’t involve shirts.”

  I blink slowly, and just give my brain a minute. It’s been through a lot lately, and that’s quite an image.

  Neal is logging in to his accounts and setting up a stream, while explaining to Jules the information he’ll need to give about building a frequency jammer—once he’s convinced everyone he’s for real.

  Jules is nodding, brain working overtime as he memorizes it, expression dubious. “I’m going to convincingly tell them we can stop the portals opening and save the world with a secondhand microwave and some duct tape?” he asks. “Why don’t I just throw in some chewing gum and a shoelace?”

  “If you like,” Neal replies. “As long as you look a lot less disbelieving when you say it.”

  “And,” Dex says, from where he’s studying Dr. Addison’s equations, “you gotta do it quickly, before someone realizes we’re here and imprisons us. Jules, if you can convince enough people, it will work. My people gotta have the portals to shift the virus planetside, distribute it to the cities. There’s not enough of us trained in Earth gravity to invade head-on, and all our shuttles are already down on the surface, most of them self-destructed by now.”

  “And what’re the odds they’ll just drop a rain of bombs on our heads or something out of petty vengeance?”

  Dex’s eyebrows rise. “And destroy the only habitable planet we’ve ever known?” He shakes his head. “Without the portals, I don’t think they’ll have any choice but to leave, or negotiate some kind of peace.”

  Peace.

  A week ago I would have scoffed, pointing out the sheer inhumanity of the invaders at our doorstep, and claiming there was no possible way this would end peacefully. But Dex—and the rest of his unseen Nautilus operatives—have reminded me that even enemies can be complex. Even enemies can become allies.

  Jules starts muttering his script to himself
, head down, as Neal positions the camera. I spin away to pace, and stop short when I abruptly realize there’s someone staring back at me through the observation window in our locked cell door.

  His perfect black hair is still perfectly in place, and his perfectly shaped eyebrows are lifted just a little, but there’s something a little wild about Director De Luca’s eyes.

  “Guys,” I say, and the warning in my tone grabs everyone’s attention, so that a second later, the only sound in the cell is the soft hum of the door as De Luca opens it.

  “No,” he says, turning his head to speak to someone outside, and I catch a glimpse of an armed soldier. “Stay outside. Close the door behind me.”

  “Director, I—”

  De Luca silences the protest with one raised hand. “You don’t have security clearance for this conversation,” he says, and steps into the room.

  A moment later, the door hums closed behind him. And then it’s the five of us.

  The silence stretches as we all face the man in the doorway, trying to get his measure. His eyes sweep across us, coming to rest upon Dex.

  He breaks the silence with one question, voice low. “Is there a cure?”

  I’m glancing at Dex before I have time to register the implications of that question. The Undying boy draws a quaking breath and shakes his head. “For Lyon? No.”

  De Luca’s face tightens, and this time I can see the fear in his eyes as he gazes at Dex. “Your people,” he says, and then pauses for a few long heartbeats, struggling with the question he’s about to ask. “Are they human?”

  My heart seizes, and I glance at Jules. His eyes are waiting for mine, kindling with a tiny flash of hope.

  De Luca knows.

  Dex looks rather fearful himself. It’s one thing to be found out by a handful of teenagers, and quite another to be the sole captive of the man responsible for the security of the whole continent. “Yes, sir,” he replies. “We’re the descendants of the Centauri settlers, lost in space and time.”

  De Luca’s shoulders sag a little and he steps back until he’s got the support of the cell wall at his back.

  “You believe us now,” Jules says quietly. There’s anger in his voice, and I can’t blame him. If De Luca had believed us earlier, we wouldn’t be in this position. The world would’ve had time to prepare for the invasion. Maybe they could have even stopped Lyon. But when I look at Jules, his body is rigid with control.

  He’s angry, but he’s not going to blow this last chance to win ourselves an ally.

  De Luca’s face is troubled, his habitual mask of superiority and disinterest cracking and mixing with fear and confusion. “I don’t know what I believe,” he says slowly. “But I know our researchers have shown that the disease in Lyon has come from an artificially engineered toxin, and that it’s far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen before. I know that the shuttle we were assembling to send a team of astronauts up to the ship in orbit was sabotaged, using technology our engineers haven’t manage to decode yet. And I know—” His eyes flicker across toward Jules and me. “I know you believe it.”

  It’s not an apology. I don’t think we’ll ever get an apology from a man like De Luca. But he’s changed his mind. And that’s all we need.

  “You have to let us out,” I say, trying to keep my voice even and suppress the urgency in my heart.

  Both De Luca’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you insane? I have to question you. All of you. If any of what you’ve been saying is true—and,” he admits with reluctance, “clearly some of it is—then the fate of the world rests on what you know.”

  Helplessness wants to take over again, but I ball my fists at my sides, summoning strength to speak up to this man with the power to keep us locked up indefinitely. “Maybe if you’d questioned us a few days ago,” I reply. “But we don’t have time for that now.”

  Jules nods, adding, “One of the operatives—the girl you had in custody with us in Catalonia—she’s headed for the portal here in Prague as we speak. You’ve got to let us stop her.”

  De Luca eyes each of us, clearly taken aback. But either his comeuppance has shattered his composure more than I thought, or he’s more frightened than I thought, because for the first time since we encountered him, he looks uncertain. “You’re asking me to leave the fate of this city, and quite possibly the world, in the hands of a group of teenagers.”

  “Believe me,” Jules says wryly, “we tried to hand off responsibility to the grown-ups half a dozen times. Now, we’ve got no other option.”

  “I’ll gather some troops to send with you,” De Luca says finally. “Give me a few hours to put the orders through.”

  “We don’t have a couple of hours.” Dex straightens, a hint of impatience in his stance. “And troops will just make her fight. I’ve got to try to talk her down, or a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

  De Luca shifts his weight from foot to foot, the reality of the situation contradicting every procedure and rule he knows. “I can’t just let you all go. I can’t just wait to see what happens.”

  “You have to.” Jules’s voice is quiet. He’s been quiet since he agreed to do the Addison speech reprise. If De Luca lets us out, we might be able to stop Atlanta and then broadcast the video afterward—the rest of the world has a couple of days, but Prague has hours at best. Jules isn’t off the hook yet. He’ll still have to stand exactly where his father did.

  Suddenly, an idea hits me with all the force of a freight train. “You know what you can do?” I interject, talking over the start of De Luca’s reply to Jules. “Put out a statement of support. Tell the world that the IA has changed its stance on the warnings of Dr. Addison. Tell them to listen to his supporters online, and to pay attention to what we’re asking of them, and—and most of all? Tell them to bloody well listen to his son when he goes live after we’ve stopped Atlanta.”

  De Luca takes a step back, boot heel thudding against the wall at his back. His gaze flickers between me and Jules, every nuance of his body language screaming discomfort. His jaw tightens, and for a moment I think I’ve blown it—that he’ll lock us up after all, just out of petty vengeance and embarrassment.

  But then he lifts a hand and raps on the door at his side. A few moments later, the soldier outside opens it. De Luca steps through and then holds the door out with one arm, eyeing the four of us. “I will.”

  I exhale, some of my tension draining away, and sneak a glance back at Jules. He’s watching me, stunned, and when we all move toward the cell door, he steps close to me and whispers, “Thank you.”

  De Luca clears his throat, a gesture of hesitation that he’s clearly unused to. “I’ll send backup as soon as I can. Where do you think this Atlanta will be?”

  “In the old waterways below the city,” Dex replies, with utter certainty.

  “I’m in the uncomfortable position of realizing nobody’s going to believe me any more than I believed you. I’m not sure how quickly I’d be able to get an official force together. But if I can’t help you, I think I know someone who can.”

  The underground of Prague is … not what I expected. I’m not sure what I was picturing—something like a sewer system in an American city, or tiny dirty tunnels—but instead it’s like there’s an entire second city below the streets of Prague.

  Getting in was easy enough. Getting here was hard. I would have thought running from the police would be far less terrifying than hiding away on an alien spaceship. Instead, every second of our trip through the city was torture. Once we were out on the street again, every siren, every shout, every car that turned unexpectedly or pedestrian who happened to walk our way made me certain we were about to be attacked, either by the Undying or by IA forces who didn’t know De Luca had changed his mind.

  A shriek as we passed a street vendor drew out a tiny, answering yelp from my throat as I whirled around—but the sound came from a child being handed an ice cream cone. With the torrent of pulse-pounding anxiety flooding my system I couldn�
��t tell the difference between delight and terror.

  Once we reached our destination, though, it turned out there were Prague underground tours offered all around the city, and tagging along the end of one—and slipping away at the first opportunity—was child’s play.

  Now, as we emerge from a brick-lined tunnel into a vast underground courtyard with vaulted ceilings and intricate stonework, I can’t help but stop short, my mouth open as I stare.

  “Beautiful,” Jules whispers, his eyes shining. “This looks like—what, thirteenth century?”

  “Hmm, I’d say so, look at the stonework. Definitely from the twelve hundreds.” I answer like I know what the frak he’s talking about, and for once it makes him laugh—after a moment of hesitation where he forgot he was the only archaeologist among us.

  “What is this place?” Neal asks. Our voices echo, but in a muffled way, since the spaces aren’t that tall.

  Jules is all too happy to reply, shining his flashlight—handily provided by the tour company—around the place. “Back then, the city was built lower than it is today. They raised the street levels so they wouldn’t flood, so the new buildings just got built right on top of the old ones. Some of the underground city is basements and storage rooms, but a lot of it is like this—abandoned.”

  “A whole city below a city,” I whisper, fascinated in spite of myself, in spite of what we’re here to do.

  “We should keep shifting.” Dex is uneasy. “Up here there’s a shaft to the cistern—we’ll have to climb downwards.”

  The corridors and tunnels twist and turn, some small enough to require us to crawl on hands and knees, others looking exactly like alleyways, complete with rough-hewn doors on either side like decrepit old houses.

  One of the tiny corridors—more like a big pipe, I realize—emerges into a much larger area, and the moment my head emerges from the tunnel I feel how different the air is. This is where Atlanta cut her way through to the old waterways, and though it’s hard to see the detail in the torchlight, it’s almost as though she melted her way through the rock. I guess, after all their years of exploration, it’s not so far-fetched that the Undying would have the technology for that.