by Amie Kaufman
Instead of the tantrum I might have expected, or a demand that I help him, he stays where he is, silent, eyes on the interior of his pack. Then he lifts his head to look over his shoulder, down the canyon, and I get just the tiniest glimpse of his expression—there’s something sharp there, something intense and unexpected.
Something I recognize from the mirror: desperation.
I swallow. “Hey, you’ll be fine. You’ve got money, clearly. When the station comes back overhead tomorrow, send up a signal offering to buy your way back off the planet.”
“No, I—” He stops and looks up, face now devoid of that faint, easy smile. “I can’t leave yet. I’ll figure it out. If the expedition’s gone, I’ll go on my own.” Though his voice is steady, determined, his movements as he starts dumping things back into his pack are quick and jerky.
“Look, Oxford, you really don’t want to be—”
“I’ll be the judge of what I want, thank you.” The reply is quick, snapped, a sign of temper he didn’t betray even at gunpoint.
My own temper flares to match, and I lurch to my feet. “Fine. Do what you want, I guess.” I turn my back and stalk the few steps to retrieve my own gear, slinging it onto my shoulders. But my annoyance tends to burn quickly, and it’s already dimming. When I glance back Jules is still squatting by his enormous pack, pulling up a holographic map of the terrain from a device worn on his wrist.
This guy’s going to get himself killed.
And I wouldn’t wish dying a billion light-years from home on my worst enemy, not even on the assholes who were going to steal my stuff and leave me for dead.
“Hey, Oxford.” I take a deep breath. I’ve already stopped, already lost time—I might as well make this my lunch break. “You hungry?”
Jules blinks and looks up. “What?”
“I’ve got some canned beans left. You hungry or not?”
I’d probably walk away from an offer from a stranger without a second thought. There’d be strings attached, or a trap, or some game to figure out. But instead, he nods. “I am, actually.”
I nod and drop my pack so I can dig through it for the cans at the bottom. They’ve got to get eaten first anyway—they weigh so much more than the dried stuff—but at least it puts off the day when everything I eat is going to resemble rehydrated dog food. I find two and toss one his way, realizing only an instant after I throw it that this guy probably doesn’t have the best reflexes. I jerk my head up to warn him—only to see him neatly catch the can and turn it over, inspecting the label with interest.
I drop down onto a rock, resting my elbows on my knees as I pull my multi-tool from my pocket. I click it a few notches to the right and then thumb the release button, and a hooked blade springs out of it. I jab it into the can, catching at the lid and tearing it free.
“High in protein,” Jules muses, actually looking at the nutrition info printed along the label. “Not a bad idea, if a little bland. Five grams of protein per hundred, and the recommended daily intake is a little under a gram per kilo of body weight, so that’s…” He pauses, frowning in calculation.
“About ten percent of my needs,” I say, without thinking. “Less efficient for you.”
He blinks, no doubt surprised I can count, much less anything beyond that—the look on his face needles me. “Yes,” he agrees after a pause. “Ten percent. And in terms of regulation of blood sugar, and the vitamin complexes you find in them, they…” He trails off, because I’m staring at him.
“Wow,” I reply, sarcasm oozing through my tone as I wipe off my multi-tool, still smarting a little over his surprise I could perform basic calculations. I fold my can’s lid into a little trough to use as a spoon. “Nutrition too? So smart, I may faint.”
Jules glances up with a grin, completely missing the sting in my tone. “I try not to show the smart in public too often. It’s embarrassing when the girls swarm all over me. And demoralizing for the other guys, you know?”
A little laugh escapes me before I can stop it, and I find myself grinning at him for half a breath before I turn my attention to the can of beans, scooping up a mouthful. Damn, Oxford. Be disarming, then.
“Uh—” Jules interjects. “Don’t you want to doctor that up a little first?”
I blink, the can lid loaded with beans halfway to my mouth. “Doctor? I’m not gonna cut myself, if that’s what you mean. Spoons are extra weight, not worth carrying.”
“I mean,” Jules says carefully, “don’t you want to heat it up, add some flavor? Give me five minutes and I can make it taste a little more like…I mean, do you really like it like that?” He reaches into his bag and pulls out one of the little cloth sacks he’d set aside earlier.
“I don’t like it,” I reply. “It’s just food. You get hungry, you eat.” What, does this guy think we’re in some four-star restaurant in fancy-pants London? But curiosity’s getting the better of me, and I kind of want to know what’s in that sack that he thinks will turn cold canned beans into haute cuisine. I lean forward, holding out the can. “Have at it, Doctor.”
“Thank you,” he says gravely, like I’d just given him a compliment. Then he gets to work pulling out a few sachets of spices, a spoon, a box that looks like…oh, holy hell, he’s got a wave-stove. Those things cost upward of a thousand bucks, and he’s setting it up like it’s nothing. I have only vague memories of how they work—something about electromagnets and kinetic energy—but no one I know actually has one in the field. I’d take the grand in cash over hot food, and so would every scavver I know.
He works for a time in silence, adding a pinch of spices and salt here and there, stirring at the can and placing it inside the box to heat. After a few minutes he glances up, expression curious. He has that intense, furrowed-brow gaze, the kind you see on billboards where they’re trying to make you think buying cologne will make you so sexy that your shirt will fly off. I’m so distracted that I nearly miss his question: “When you called me Oxford before—can you really pick that just from my accent, or was it a crack about education?”
“Huh?” I blink, momentarily confused until my brain catches up with my ears. “Wait, you mean you’re actually from Oxford?” I peer closer, while somewhere at the back of my mind I’m trying to reconfigure what I thought I knew about this guy. “Aren’t you kind of young to be in college?”
“I won’t be starting until next year,” he replies, stirring the beans as they heat. He doesn’t look eighteen—he’s tall, yes, but a lanky kind of tall, the kind guys get when they’ve only just hit a growth spurt and don’t quite know what to do with their arms and legs yet. “And I’m starting early. I grew up there, though. It’s complicated.”
I bite my lip—the curiosity surges, making me want to ask more, to figure out this strange boy while I can. It’s obvious he’s not a raider like everyone else who’s lied, cheated, or sneaked their way onto Gaia. I don’t know what scam he fell for, but he mentioned being some sort of language expert for an expedition—not a raiding party. He’s got that look, that I’m-gonna-save-the-world look, like his nobility weighs more than his ridiculous pack.
The second it occurs to him that I’m a raider just like the guys we ran from…well, that’ll certainly be the end of this spontaneous little partnership. His kind don’t exactly approve of mine. Even in Chicago we’d get academics screaming bloody murder about us tainting evidence and contaminating environmental whatevers. On pristine Gaia, untouched since the Undying were here, moving a rock is probably on a level with murdering a whole family to people like him.
Much less raiding temples for tech to sell on the black market.
“Here,” he says briskly, interrupting my thoughts as he finishes up and nudges the can my way. “Use your sleeve, the tin’s hot.”
I’ve never seen a wave-stove at work, and the can doesn’t look any different. I glance aside at him, but he’s already at work on his own can. I reach out to grasp tentatively at the edges—and then yelp, drawing my fingers back as pain d
arts through them. “Ow, shit!” The words echo back at me from the canyon walls, and I level a dark glance in Jules’s direction.
He says nothing, keeping his eyes on his own dinner, but I’m pretty sure I can see the corners of his mouth drawing back as he fights a smile.
I yank my jacket sleeve down over my hand and retrieve my can of beans. “Don’t suppose you’re carrying multiple spoons in that traveling cantina of yours?”
He offers up the spoon he’d been using to stir, pulling out a butter knife—he packed a freaking butter knife—to finish his own cooking. “Laugh at me if you want,” he says, shrugging, “but tell me that’s not an improvement over cold tinned beans.”
I’m dying to say something in retort, a few possibilities flickering through my mind, but my nose catches a whiff of the steam rising off my meal, and all my snappy comebacks vanish. I blow at a mouthful until I’m sure my tongue won’t suffer the same fate as my fingertips, then try a bite—and it’s all I can do not to groan. It’s delicious. More than delicious, it actually tastes like something you’d get at a fancy four-star London restaurant. Or what I’d imagine you’d get there, anyway.
“Ffff,” I manage, and then forget all about the boy across from me as I focus on devouring my lunch.
He’s quiet as we finish our meals—I’m trying to lick the inside of the can and making a mess of it—giving me time to study him surreptitiously under cover of scanning our surroundings through my goggles. So he’s not completely useless. He can run, and he kept up with me—mostly—despite that giant pack. But half the gear in his pack is piled up next to it, and most of what I can identify is pointless in a place like this. The guy’s got a pillow, and a little solar-powered fan, and a whole set of dinnerware. He’s so far out of his element that it’s like he’s…well, it’s like he’s an alien here.
The terrain on this continent isn’t all that different from the deserts in the southwest of the U.S., the ones creeping in across the continent toward the east coast bit by bit ever since the start of the climate decline. You can’t tell when you breathe that the air here’s not quite right—you only start getting tired and shaky if you go too long without your breather. If you don’t notice that the only features are windswept rock formations, if you ignore the complete absence of any life, and if you don’t look at the two distinct suns beside each other in the sky, you could almost forget you weren’t on Earth.
Almost.
Most of my energy is going toward pretending that’s the case, because every time I let myself think about the enormity of what I’m doing my thoughts start to spiral into a panic. I’m one of only a few dozen people who’ve ever set foot on this world—who’ve ever stood on another planet without a spacesuit, without breathing tubes, with nothing but the suns on my face and a breeze stirring my sweaty hair. I can’t pull out my phone and text my sister. I can’t ask it for tomorrow’s weather. I can’t check my feeds to see if anyone’s bid on my latest salvage finds. There’s no spot left on Earth where anyone is ever isolated from anyone else, but I’m alone here. The first people to explore Gaia on foot were trained IA astronauts, prepped over a lifetime of scientific study and practical training. And they died in the temples. I’m just a high-school dropout from the Midwest with half a dozen minimum-wage jobs under my belt and a juvie rap sheet too dull for the cops to bother with me.
And he’s even more out of place here than I am.
“Jules,” I say quietly as he finishes his lunch. “Listen. Are you sure you won’t just head back up to the station? No offense, but you stick out here like a…” My thoughts screech to a halt. There’s no good sentence that starts out with “no offense.” I sigh. “Well, you stick out. You’ll be a target.”
He’s silent for a while, looking first at me and then away, putting his can on the ground and pulling out a fresh white cloth with which to clean off his fingers and lips. Then, softly, he answers: “I’m aware of how much I stick out.” His eyes flick back toward my face. “But I wouldn’t be here unless I had to be. I won’t just turn and go back.”
I want so badly to ask why, but then he’ll ask me in return why I’m here, and if I know one thing about Jules Thomas already, it’s that he wouldn’t like my answer to that question. I can only assume the truth hasn’t occurred to him yet because we’ve been on the run for most of our short acquaintance. I draw a breath. “Then will you at least let me give you some advice?”
He nods, folding the napkin and tucking it back into his pack. “I’d welcome it, please.”
“How far from your rendezvous point did you get dropped?”
“It was…” He pauses, doing a quick mental calculation. “A little under ten kilometers. About three hours of walking.”
“See, that’s—three hours to cover ten Ks, that’s too slow. That’s why you were late, why your people left without you. I could cover that ground in half that time if I had to. I’m not trying to brag, I’m just—” I wave a hand at his pack, and the pile of stuff beside it. “You’re trying to move with an entire outfitter’s store on your back. You’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff.”
“Well, the expedition I was joining was going to have grav-lifters,” he answers, sounding only a little wounded. “What am I meant to do, just leave it all behind? I’m going to need these tools when I reach the temple.”
“When you reach it?” I shake my head, willing him to understand. “You aren’t going to reach it if you keep moving this slowly. And when you do, every raiding party on the planet will have beaten you there. It’s a big temple, Jules, but it’s not that big. It’ll be stripped by the time you get within spitting distance.”
“In my defense, I was anticipating grav-lifters, and I was not anticipating such a brutal race between capitalism and academia.” Jules’s face tightens—yeah, he really doesn’t like raiders. “At least I’ll be harder to spot on my own. And you never know, I might cross paths with another academically focused expedition, and they’ll allow me to join up with them. It’ll be a breach of contract with my employer, but surely they’d understand, given the circumstances.…”
I stare at him, heartbeat quickening. “Another—Jules, there are no expeditions looking to make new friends or discover the joys of learning. Don’t you get that yet? I don’t know who scammed you, or what fantasy-land you’re living in, but it’s all raiders down here. Scavengers. You don’t stuff yourself in a packing crate and get smuggled halfway across the universe to…People don’t become criminals for academic whatever, they do it for cash.”
“I became a criminal for ‘academic whatever,’ ” Jules says softly, his expression utterly calm, like he’s used to listening to abuse without letting it get to him. “And you’re wrong. I have reason to believe there are other academics here. Hybrid expeditions, combining research with gathering a few select artifacts, to justify the expense. Even those artifacts should stay where they are, really, but if we’re careful, it’s workable. I heard a couple of the guys from Yale were—”
“Don’t be so naïve.” A huge part of me hates being so cold, but he’s not getting it. And if he doesn’t figure it out, he’s going to wind up dead. Even if it means he turns that disgust for scavengers on me, he should know what he’s up against. “Maybe there are some scholars down here, but they’re just here to guide the raiding parties. Your expedition was probably just a front for a raider operation, too, and duped you into working with them by promising you…whatever they promised you.”
“You don’t know everybody’s a raider,” he insists. “Maybe some are like me, academics hoping to stop the philistines from contaminating all the…” He trails off, the chill leaving his expression to make way for dawning realization, his gaze meeting mine.
Bingo. I’ve been waiting for him to realize I’m one of them, those philistines, no better than the duo whose shoes we stole.
I want to speak, but the tiny spark of guilt deep in my mind flares up into an anger I don’t want to let out. I’m not going to let som
e pampered schoolboy make me feel guilty for doing whatever I can to come out of this alive. For doing whatever I have to do to take care of me and mine.
“You’re here to steal from the temples?” Jules’s voice is quiet, with a note of betrayal in it like we’d been partners, not just two strangers meeting by chance on the other side of the universe. “Do you have any idea—do you know the damage that does?” The ferocity of his voice makes me want to step back, but I hold my ground. “We have one chance, one tiny window, in which to learn about the race that built these structures, before they’re destroyed. Before all they were is gone.”
“Yes.” I clench my jaw for a moment. I don’t have to explain myself to him. I don’t think he’d understand if I did. “Yes, I’m here to steal from the temples. Specifically, the big one where they found that first solar cell, the one that got the scientists all hot and bothered, the one that’s single-handedly powering what’s left of the west coast. Think whatever you like about me, but you’re a smart guy, and you’ve got to see that, right now, I’m doing better than you are. Will you let me help you or not?”
He’s still staring at me like I’ve killed his pet dog, that smile gone, his mouth pressed into a thin line.
“Look,” I say, rising to my feet. “I’m offering to help. You can refuse on principle and get killed or left to die when you miss your pick-up—trust me, your expedition isn’t going to circle back around to pick you up before they split—or you can let me help you. Then we can go our separate ways, and maybe someday you testify against me in IA court and clear your conscience.”
He’s silent and still, clearly fighting some war against himself, a muscle standing out in his jaw as he gazes at the nearby cliff face. He could be made of the same stone, totally unmoving, wrestling with whatever’s slowing down his reply.
“All right,” he says finally, as if every word is costing him. “Maybe we can help each other. You get me where I want to go, and I’ll tell you what artifacts are going to be worth most to the collectors.”