by Amie Kaufman
“I think you’re smart,” Jules interrupts me, voice quiet. “And clever, which isn’t the same thing. I think you’re hurting about something and I don’t think you like what you’re here to do, but you’re too proud to admit that, so you’re putting words in my mouth. And I think you’ll find I don’t really care for that.”
The silence that swarms in around us when he stops speaking makes my throat hurt. My head feels fuzzy, a combination of the exhaustion of the day and richer food than I’m used to eating and the lack of proper air. And something about what he’s said makes me want to pull my blanket over my head and cry, just a little, where no one can hear me. But he’s there, and he’d hear.
Jules clears his throat, warning me this time that he’s about to speak. “What I meant to say was that you seem to me like a clever, beautiful girl who could more than support herself in any of a dozen ways on Earth, which either means I’m wrong about you, and I don’t think I am, although come to think of it I didn’t really mean to say beautiful because I’m not really sure how that plays into anything—” He stops, clears his throat a second time to regroup. “Either I’m wrong about you, or else you have some other reason for being here.”
Who the hell calls someone beautiful anymore? My thoughts are reeling. This isn’t some after-school feel-good movie special. But I resist the urge to pull my blanket over my head and ignore him. My face isn’t feeling the cold anymore anyway.
Goodnight, Oxford.
The words form clearly in my mind. But then I see Evie’s face, the stain of rouge on her lips as she blows me a kiss, the hope in her face when she breathes the word Amsterdam. And when my mouth opens, I say something else entirely.
“I’m trying to buy back my little sister.”
THE MORNING DAWNS COLD AND THIN, thin, as Gaia’s dual suns creep over the canyon rim. One half of the sky is still inky black, stars scattered carelessly across it, but the other is slowly shifting from a metallic gray to a soft orange. By noon it’ll be baking hot again, but just now the air is crisp, and I could live inside my little silver cocoon forever with no complaints.
Except, that is, for the temple beside us, beckoning me with a pull so strong I’d almost think it was supernatural, if I hadn’t felt it ever since I first learned about the Undying from my father. My earliest memory is of sitting on his lap while he tried to work, and I alternated between trying to take off his glasses and trying to use my best pencils to color in the glyphs he was working on, the paper charts stretched out across his desk. This has been my journey as long as I’ve been alive. I’m not sure how much I actually slept last night, buzzing with the need to just leap out of my sleeping bag and sprint toward the temple’s entrance.
Beside me, Mia sits up, tearing her breather mask away and squinting at the canyon rim as though it’s to blame for all her woes. “Stupid goddamn alien suns,” she mutters, transferring the blame neatly. “How the hell do I know what time it is when there’s two of them?”
I wriggle around until I can free my hands, hitting the display and bringing my wrist unit to life. I pull my own mask away. “Six,” I croak, my voice still rusty with sleep and the bone-dry air from the breather.
Mia fixes me with a look that adds me to the list of things she’s blaming for her current predicament, but keeping her blanket wrapped around her like a cloak, she slowly clambers to her feet, shifting from one foot to the other to get the blood flowing. “I’ll check the canyon, see if there’s any sign of other camps.”
“I’ll make breakfast.” I force myself to move, wincing as every muscle in my body lines up to file a complaint about yesterday’s trials. And I thought I was fit. “If you see any hostiles incoming, let them know we need about an hour or so before we’re ready to flee for our lives.”
That earns me a sound that’s certainly not a laugh, but might be a distant relative hovering uncertainly at the edge of the family photograph. I set to work with the wave-stove, pulling together the quickest breakfast I can manage. I only really won one argument the whole of yesterday, but as the scent of porridge and cinnamon slowly revives me, I’m bloody glad it was the one about keeping my spices.
While she’s gone, I can’t help thinking again about what she said last night. Her sister. She wouldn’t say anything more after that, pretending to be asleep, though I know she was faking it by the way her breath kept varying. A sister should be illegal, especially in the U.S., where the population control laws are incredibly strict. I’m not quite as naïve as she thinks I am, though. I can guess what happened.
We received the first Undying transmission over fifty years ago, but decoding it, building the portal, testing it with probes, unmanned drones, and finally manned missions took decades. It was only about fifteen years ago, when Mia and I were toddlers, that the first clear images came back of Gaia. It was then that some people started breaking the “one child” laws, thinking we’d settle the planet in a year or two and there’d be space for everyone to raise more than one kid.
Mia and I were still children when geologists and astronomers worked out that one of Gaia’s suns gives off a solar flare every few decades, like a cosmological Old Faithful, and dashed any hope that Gaia could be a permanent second home for us. Only the simple, single-celled bacteria in the oceans survive each flare. The discovery of tangible life on another planet knocked the scientific community flat when the first samples came back, but the rest of the world was more focused on the extinct race of sentient beings trying to communicate with us. For most of us, the bacteria are just a reminder that nothing more complex could ever live on Gaia.
Without those solar flares, though, we wouldn’t have been able to date the Undying ruins. The cut stones of their structures have been absorbing radiation with every solar eruption since they were built—for less time than the surrounding ground and cliffs—which allowed my father and his colleagues to calculate the age of the temples to a staggering fifty thousand years.
But whether or not Gaia was ever going to be the answer to Earth’s overpopulation problems, Mia’s parents still broke the law.
Her sister’s existence is illegal—which explains why Mia might have to think outside the box when it comes to helping her out of whatever circumstances she’s in. It also complicates my role in all of this. Whatever aversion I feel to bringing a scavver inside the temple with me, I can’t deny the urgency of her mission. I might not come from the same kind of underworld as Mia—I might never have set foot in it—but I know enough to understand it’s not hyperbole when she says “buy back.” It’s not just about money for her, any more than it is for me. And I’m still lying to her.
We’re both quiet as we down breakfast and pack up our things. Mia’s more or less stopped scowling, tamed by the porridge, though her pink-and-blue hair’s still sticking up every which way, her eyes sleepy. Clearly not a morning person. I reluctantly learned to be, after years of early rising for polo practice at the pool, but now doesn’t seem the time to rub that in.
“I suppose we should get an early start on today’s law-breaking,” I venture, groping for a logical next step. Despite my eagerness to enter the temple, however, it’s proving more difficult than I would’ve thought to turn my mind to the magnificent stone façade above us. It wants to stay focused on the sleep-rumpled girl beside me instead. After years of being told I’m growing up too fast, that I should relax and act more like the teenager I am, this is not the time for my hormones to kick in and decide to do exactly that.
Except, apparently, logic doesn’t get a vote.
We both stare up at the temple we’re about to brave. Columns line the steps, inviting, leading up to a shadowy maw of an entrance. At first glance, a passerby—if there were passersby on Gaia—might think it a relic from our own past, at home next to the stone city of Petra or ancient Egypt’s grand Abu Simbel. But the Undying temple seems to grow out of the cliff as though it were organic, part of Gaia, in a way no human civilization could have attempted. The stones are so prec
isely cut it’s impossible to see the seams between them, except in a few places where sand and wind have nibbled a corner away over the eons. And though the façade before us is of the same red-brown rock of the canyon below and the cliffs above, a glimmer in the dark doorway reminds me we could find anything once we step inside this temple.
Temple isn’t really the right word—my father and his colleagues used to wince whenever they heard it, preferring structure or complex, anything that didn’t hold a spiritual connotation—because there’s no evidence of religion in the Undying’s broadcast or glyphed messages on Gaia. There’s no evidence any of the structures were built to honor a deity or house their dead. But standing here, my breath steaming in what’s left of the desert night and dawn edging the cliffs with gold, the word structure leaves me hollow.
And I understand why the first astronauts on Gaia’s surface, scientists themselves, whispered the word temple.
Banks and supermarkets are structures. Structures are built and used and torn down and rebuilt and recycled and end up just so much cardboard and plastic wrap. This place…this place is heavy with importance. It calls, the way a church’s bells call a congregation to mass or the cry of the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer. It waits with gravity and consequence, with the ancient serenity of a massive oak. I don’t have to scan the radiation levels in its stones to know how long it’s been waiting for us, because it’s how long I’ve been waiting too: always.
The moment takes me so abruptly that my knees want to buckle, leaving me floundering, floating, as unable to move as if I were in zero-G. I tear my eyes away to see Mia, her eyes wide and breath quickening as she gazes at the temple. I watch her face, see how the fear in her eyes gains not a scrap of ground against the absolute determination in the set of her mouth. And suddenly my feet are on the ground again.
“We have to be careful.” My voice is dry and dusty, like the sand underfoot, as I order my feet to start moving. “Once we’re inside we can’t get separated, can’t run ahead, can’t so much as step through a doorway without thinking it through.”
I’m rewarded with a roll of her eyes as we make our way toward the steps. “You mean I shouldn’t sprint headlong into an alien tomb full of booby-traps and pitfalls? I saw what happened to the Explorer IV team. I’m not volunteering for the same fate.”
I wince. Everybody saw what happened to the Explorer IV team, the very first astronauts to land here on Gaia. In their desperation for some positive PR, the International Alliance agreed to broadcast the exploration live via satellite relay, like the moon landings were, once upon a time. Which means everybody heard the screams when half the team was pulverized a few rooms in.
After that, it became clear that without somebody to serve as a guide, someone able to translate the temple’s warnings and instructions, any exploration past the temples’ antechambers would be next to impossible. And though other people can read the glyphs, there’s reading them, and then there’s understanding them. There’s a nuance to translating the Undying language that few people have ever mastered.
Mia shifts her weight, the laces of her boots creaking in protest. “Look, Oxford,” she says, voice softening. “This ain’t my first rodeo. I can take care of myself.”
“And I’ve trained for a moment like this for years,” I say, though privately I’m suddenly thinking that summer spent sifting early hominid bone fragments in South Africa didn’t exactly prepare me for this. “But neither of us has done anything like this before. You’re going to have to trust me when it comes to interpreting their writings, passing on their warnings. We need to watch out for each other.” Trust me, I keep saying, my own voice echoing around my mind like a mocking chorus. The words taste like sand.
She doesn’t reply at first, reaching the bottom of the steps and pausing to glance across at me. Whatever she sees there makes her smile—though her lips don’t curve, her eyes shift, warm, crinkle at the edges. “You go on,” she says softly, watching my face. “I don’t mind being second in history.”
I know I’m smiling back at her like an idiot, but I can’t bring myself to care. She gets it.
At the big complex, the Explorer IV team didn’t trigger any traps until several rooms into the temple. Still, my body’s taut with caution, every nerve on high alert as we climb the stone steps, the soft sound of our footfalls the only break in the dawn’s silence. We have to clamber up them—they’re just a little higher than is comfortable, even for someone as tall as me. Not quite built on our scale, but almost. The world has spent years speculating on what the Undying might have looked like, from the sensationalized frenzy of movies and books about the Undying to the scientific community’s painstakingly crafted theories, but even the more plausible theories are still little more than guesses. We know they must have been only a little larger than us, judging by the scale of the structures they built, but beyond that…there were no images of themselves among the glyphs photographed by the Explorer team. Unless the images are hidden at the unexplored hearts of the temples, the Undying left behind no traces of what they looked like.
I reach up to switch on my head torch as we reach the threshold, even the tips of my fingers seeming to shiver in anticipation. The first humans ever to step into this place. “Just one step into the anteroom,” I murmur, and beside me she nods. “Then we stop and look for instructions.”
And then, with a step like any other—except that it’s perhaps the most important step of my life—I ease in through the doorway, and onto the first flagstone.
I wait a moment, and when nothing happens, I shift to the side so Mia can join me, and together we lift our heads to scan the walls around us. We’re in a soaring chamber, several meters across in each direction. A huge spiral made up of long strings of Undying glyphs is carved into the wall. My eyes jump to them immediately, and my heart just about thumps right out of my chest—this is the Nautilus spiral, the hidden shape in the code that brought me here. I’m in the right place to unravel the mystery.
There’s an energy about the carvings, despite their static nature, and as motes of dust dance in the torch beam, the designs almost seem to move. It’s hauntingly familiar and utterly foreign all at once. It raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Holy hell,” Mia breathes beside me. She doesn’t have a torch on her helmet like mine, but she switches on a light affixed to her wrist, a crude fiber-optic set-up that lets her illuminate whatever she’s pointing at. “The images Explorer IV sent back didn’t look like this.”
“The site they explored isn’t the important one,” I murmur. “I’ve never seen a pattern like this either. The transmission Dr. Addison decoded doesn’t allow for aesthetics, and the Explorer IV team was more interested in getting out alive than taking proper visual records. These glyphs are almost artistic, although that could simply be projection, since we’re hardwired to see symmetry and pattern and—”
“Oxford.” When I glance at her, she’s got one eyebrow lifted, that bemused expression on her face, arms folded.
“Right.” She has no reason to take an interest in the sweeping spiral shape, of course. And I need to see more than this—I need to see as much as possible, if I’m to understand what the warning pertains to. We need to keep moving. “I’ll just take some pictures—there’s text all over the place in here, not just these large ones over the entrance. Maybe when we take a break I can decode some of it.” Though I want to sit down on the floor and pull out my journal right here, I force myself to sweep my wrist unit in an arc around us, recording the images. “Let’s see…The language of the original broadcast was mathematical in nature, and this written language is too. Each glyph’s lines are determined by numeric values that correspond to words and concepts from the broadcast, but once you learn the glyphs you can read it almost like any other language.”
“Almost?” Amelia’s voice is tense.
“Well, some of them are more like letters, like an alphabet, and others are complete words, even complet
e ideas. And their abstract concepts aren’t always the easiest to understand. This group here, these convey a sense of…” I’m forced to pause and hunt for the right words. “There will be consequences, for treading here. Moving up toward the top of the arch, we have the symbol the Undying used for themselves, the one that looks like a meteor arcing through the sky. They’re saying this is their place, their territory.”
“Huh,” she mutters. “You really can read it. Does it say where the tech will be?”
I choose to ignore her surprise, as well as her question—an uncomfortable reminder that she’s not just here for the joy of discovery—and press on. “This next section down the other side of the arch is for learning or education, meaning we will need to apply knowledge to make our way through the temple. And this section here is denoting this temple’s importance above the others in this area—told you our friends are looking in the wrong place—and that what we’re looking for will be at the very center of the temple. Or possibly the bottom, they don’t seem to think quite like we do when it comes to three-dimensional spatial relationships.”
“At the very center,” she echoes, though that deadpan response is lightened by her clear relief that I was right to lead her here instead of the bigger temple. “Of course. Past all the traps.”
“Indeed.”
“And you’re absolutely certain there’ll be tech here I can grab? I can’t pay my debts with interesting facts and cultural insights, Oxford.”