Unearthed

by Amie Kaufman

  “Is it getting worse?” Mia’s voice, several paces behind me, is high with panic.

  I make the mistake of looking over my shoulder at her. And from where I stand I can see almost the whole bridge behind me, buckling so hard now that the sides are almost over Mia’s head, and she’s having to fight to stay upright.

  It’s clear the bridge was designed to move, to open the door. But this…Something’s wrong. Time, or miscalculation, or some error on our part—the buckling bridge is tearing itself apart, the harmonic waves building on one another. And Mia’s only halfway across.

  “Run!” I shout, and she doesn’t hesitate to obey. But then there’s a scream of rock that rises above the eerie song of the Undying stone flute, and a huge chunk of the bridge behind Mia collapses.

  I lift my gaze to hers just in time for our eyes to lock.

  And then the stone gives way beneath her feet.

  She vanishes with a shriek as the bridge falls apart, the first two-thirds of it ripping free of the other side and sliding down, down toward the abyss. The screech of splintering stone and the roar of rock crashing drowns out the rest of her scream and the music, as the bridge tears the platform asunder, silencing the ancient flute forever. I can’t move. I can’t think.

  It’s only then that my ears make out a breathless string of curses, and my mind snaps back into gear. My eyes find something pale in the gloom and I realize it’s a hand, clinging white-knuckled to an outcropping of rock. Mia must’ve thrown herself across empty space to reach it before the rest of the bridge fell.

  I’m diving toward the edge before I can even process that she’s alive, before my brain can point out that throwing myself after her might be a somewhat fatal plan. But when the stone beneath me quivers, making my whole body shrink and lurch, I have to force myself to edge toward her with agonizing care to avoid another collapse of the rock. My heart’s pounding in time with the no-no-no-no drumming through my brain as I make myself test each stone before transferring my weight, checking to see whether any more of the bridge is going to break apart. “Hold on.”

  “You think?” she gasps, her other hand appearing over the lip of the stone as she grunts with effort.

  I reach out to push on, moving too quickly in my impatience, and a chunk of stone gives way. As part of the remaining bridge crumbles into the chasm, my arm slides down the gap in its wake, my fingertips grasping at nothing. I swear for a moment I see circuitry, but I can’t spare it a second glance. Adrenaline surging, breath coming in quick gasps, I scramble back, and force myself to climb over it, checking the rock on the other side.

  It takes me a moment to realize I didn’t hear the falling rubble hit anything below. It’s a long way down.

  One of Mia’s hands disappears, then reappears a moment later holding that multi-tool of hers. She bangs it against the lip of the stone a few times, and it suddenly sprouts tines, digging into the rock to give her a better grip. She grunts again, and for an instant her face appears over the ledge just a meter away, her eyes so wide the whites are showing all around. Then the stone groans a warning, and she thinks better of hauling herself up, freezing in place.

  Finally, finally I’m there, lowering myself onto my front, praying the pathway holds as I reach down to grip her bicep, letting her grip mine in return. “I won’t let you fall,” I murmur, bracing to hold her in place. “Deus, this is my fault, I told you to hang back.”

  “Can we divide up the blame later?” she asks through gritted teeth, clinging to my sleeve, her feet swinging free in the void.

  Just a weight at the gym, I tell myself, closing my eyes for a moment, and checking my grip on her, slowing my breathing. Stay calm, don’t screw this up. Then I exhale hard and push backward, onto my hands and knees, pulling her with me. She slams the tool down on the rock once more, using her grip to pull herself up and over the rim, and as soon as I get her a little farther back, she swings her leg out to the side, hooking her boot over the lip of the stone. She moves like one of the climbers at the gym, lithe and quick—of course, she’d have been practicing on skyscrapers. And probably didn’t have anyone to catch her if she fell.

  I keep hold of her and she keeps hold of me, and together we crawl back along the remaining fragment of the bridge, me backward and her forward, until we can collapse together in the now wide-open doorway between this chamber and the next.

  “The Undying certainly knew how to roll out the welcome mat,” I manage, meeting her gaze. She’s as rattled as me, and I know that endless fall will be flashing behind her eyelids as she tries to sleep tonight—just as it will behind mine. Assuming we survive until bedtime.

  “If this is the welcome mat, I’d hate to see their ‘do not disturb,’ ” she manages, with a weak laugh.

  I try to join her, and we realize about the same time that we’re still holding each other, arms and legs tangled together. Our gazes are still locked, and I see her face flush even as she lets out her breath, visibly deciding for the moment not to care that I’m holding her. I don’t think either of us gives a damn about pride just now. And I’m not ashamed to say that the solid warmth of her is keeping me from shaking.

  “Thanks for coming back to get me,” Mia whispers, sober now, as reality catches up.

  “Of course,” I murmur, unable to summon even the ghost of a glib comment, or a joke about how I didn’t have anything better to do.

  Because it was of course.

  I realize now that I didn’t even think before I threw myself after her. Maybe I didn’t know this girl a couple of days ago, but I know her now.

  I know she’s fierce and smart, determined and wryly funny.

  And I know I’m not just drawing out the time I’m lying here tangled up with her because I’m too exhausted to move. This is a terrible time to discover she makes my heart beat faster just as surely as danger does, but there it is.

  And I know that I’ve lied to her, brought her here without any idea whether she’ll find the tech she needs, with her sister’s life on the line. And whether or not I’m trying to save the lives of everyone on my planet, I know that won’t matter when Mia finds out what I’ve done. I can’t even blame her—because as much as I’m doing this for the people my father wanted to protect, I’m doing this for him, too. I’m here for one person, just like she is.

  I don’t know how this ends between us, but I know it doesn’t end well. And I wish it were different.

  “Snack?” I ask, forcing myself into safer territory, making my mind focus on practicalities. I can’t imagine moving enough to wrestle my pack out from behind me, and getting up seems beyond me. For now, at least, I can unhook my breather mask and take a few long lungfuls.

  “Snack,” she agrees, reaching down and slipping a couple of granola bars out of a pocket on her thigh. “If we make it through the next room, I’m expecting some kind of fancy celebration dinner.”

  Deus, the next one. As one, we turn our heads, shining our torches through the archway.

  The next puzzle awaits.

  I’M DOUBLE-CHECKING THE BANDS of my climbing harness and listening with half an ear while Jules talks to himself. Every chance he gets he starts scribbling in his little journal, working through ideas aloud and staring at pictures of glyphs from his wrist unit. He’s translating those damn things as though his life depends on it. I guess maybe it does. Or could. Still, I had to remind him to chew on his granola bar. Then I had to remind him to swallow.

  When the next room proved to be little more than a massive pit, he ordered me to stand to the side on the ledge while he investigated, certain that this was some new kind of puzzle. But there are barely any glyphs to be seen. Just some in an archway, and then on the ledge by our feet, a spiral shape, with a line radiating from it. He said that one wasn’t a glyph, but he did snap a surreptitious picture of it with his wrist unit. Maybe he’s not as sure as he claims to be when it comes to the glyphs.

  The ceiling soars so high above us that it’s mostly lost in the dark,
the beams of our lights only dimly illuminating cables and glimmering stone up there. Just inside the doorway we stand on our ledge, and the rest of the room is one giant hole in the ground. To me, it looks more like a puzzle that fell apart—a trap that time had sprung, maybe, given how long ago this place was built.

  I don’t mind the break, though. It gives me time to mull over the mystery that is Jules.

  Oxford University was where Elliott Addison worked, before the IA threw him in prison for treason after his famous TV appearance. Oxford was where he first decoded the Undying broadcast, when he was only a little older than Jules and I are now. I’m wishing I could get a signal on my phone here, pull up pictures of Addison from back then. Gazing at Jules now, with that eager gleam in his eye as he tries to figure out what our next move should be, it’s hard not to wonder. He said his last name was Thomas. But if I were related to a world-renowned lunatic and traitor, I’d lie about my name, too.

  “Maybe some trick of the light,” Jules is murmuring to himself, moving his head this way and that, so that the beam of light from his helmet flashes around the empty cavern, half blinding me. “A bridge, something that looks invisible unless you get just the right light—I don’t see the exit, though, so unless that’s camouflaged too…”

  I give myself a shake, letting him talk as I dig in one of my cargo pockets until I come up with a handful of mini chem-lights. I snap half a dozen and give them a good shake until my handful starts to glow an increasingly bright green. Then, with all my strength, I hurl them down and across the chasm.

  “Wait—what are you doing?” Jules half-reaches for me, almost like he thinks I’m about to hurl myself in after them.

  “You think two-dimensionally,” I retort, watching as the sticks fall—one bounces off the far wall, ricocheting back toward the center of the chasm. Eventually they hit the bottom, revealing a surface strewn with broken rock, some pieces big as boulders. The rock seems to glint at me in the light. “You said when we came in that the Undying don’t necessarily think of space and distances and stuff like we do. Whatever maze or test was in here, it’s long gone now. But the next chamber might not be across some invisible bridge, it might be…oh, for the love of—turn that flashlight off, will you?”

  I’m blinded by his light, but I can hear his intake of breath and can imagine the annoyance on his features. He complies, though, and after a few seconds, I can see the dim glow at the bottom of the pit again. It’s maybe five or six stories down—farther than I’d originally thought.

  “There—see?” I lean closer to Jules so I can point, letting him sight along my outstretched hand. There’s a section of the ragged circular wall down at the base of the pit that’s darker than the rest. An opening. Jules ducks down to see what I see, his cheek a hair’s breadth from mine, and I can feel the warmth of his skin.

  “Mehercule, this path led downward,” Jules breathes. He may be predisposed to think two-dimensionally, but he certainly catches on quick. “But how—” I switch on the tiny LED flashlight on my wrist, and he breaks off, looking at me. His eyes rake across the climbing harness I’d been fiddling with while he talks. “You know, you could have just said something when you got there first.”

  “And ruin your fun?” I flash him a grin. “Think all the traps or whatever are broken here, too?”

  “Well, I don’t see any of their writing,” Jules replies, easing his pack off and dumping it on the ledge so he can rummage through it for his own climbing gear. “If there were instructions, or warnings, they’re down there with the rest of the path.” He inclines his head down toward the bottom of the drop-off, where huge chunks of debris rest in shattered pieces. As if to underline the risk, there’s the sound of a couple of pieces of rubble falling from the collapsed bridge we left behind, the rattle of rock breaking away from rock.

  I pull out my multi-tool, ignoring the flash of remembered panic from when I last used it—getting purchase on the rock, dangling over an abyss, trying to hang on until Jules could get to me. I twist it until I hit the drill-bit setting, then thumb the button. Drilling a climbing anchor is hard work at the best of times, and my hands are already exhausted from my mad scramble earlier. But I pull my hammer from my belt and start anyway, tapping the rock floor to make sure it’s sound. The structure and the tech of the Undying are built from a kind of metallic stone, but this temple is built into the cliff, and the place I’m drilling is just good old-fashioned rock. Gritting my teeth, I grip and twist downward with the multi-tool while tapping at it with the hammer.

  Jules is watching intently as he pulls on his climbing harness, brows drawn in, and I want to make some biting remark at him—Gee, don’t offer to help or anything—but I remember the way he flung himself down on the crumbling bridge to grab for my arm. And I keep my mouth shut.

  It’s not until he’s got himself strapped in that he ambles over. He switches on his helmet light so he can watch what I’m doing. “Can I have a go?” He crouches, like it’s some fascinating new skill, and not something making my whole body ache and sweat drip—oh-so-sexily, I’m sure—down my face.

  “It has to be done right to be safe,” I reply breathlessly, though I stop as I speak, and the second my grip relaxes, cramps go shooting up the hand holding the drill. Yeah, maybe take him up on that when you’re done criticizing him for not helping.

  “I’m a quick study,” Jules promises.

  I look up and eye his equipment. It takes half a second to tell it’s brand-new—the creases from the manufacturer’s packaging are still visible against his thighs, and the straps are a shiny new red. “This isn’t something you pick up cramming late at night in the library, Oxford.”

  But I’m exhausted. And he just raises one of those expressive brows at me, and I shift over so he can take my place. His fingers brush mine as he grasps the tool, and I flex my hand.

  “You’ve got to keep a steady downward, twisting pressure on the drill bit while you hit it with the hammer.” I drop to my knees beside him so I can keep a close eye on proceedings. “And don’t hit it hard, just tapping. Too hard and you’ll crumble the stone.”

  Jules starts tapping at the base of the multi-tool, strokes almost exactly imitating mine. I watch his hands as he works to make sure he’s doing it right. While I can’t tell exactly how much pressure he’s putting on the drill bit, I’m not hearing any of the telltale cracks that would suggest he’s breaking the edges of the hole we’re making.

  “Like this?” he asks.

  The question catches me off-guard—I’m still staring at his hands, which bear no calluses like mine, but nonetheless grip the tool with strength. “What? Oh. Yeah, you’re doing fine.” I pause, trying to think of a way to ask this without sounding like some boy-crazy idiot—because it’s not about the way the tendons stand out on his forearms when he’s got his sleeves rolled up.

  It’s curiosity, that’s all.

  Mostly curiosity, anyway.

  I let my gaze slide away, studying the rock wall below us, lit dimly by the far-off glow sticks. “So…get a good workout carrying all those books around, huh?”

  Jules pauses, and I can feel his eyes on me for a moment. “Can I say yes? You’ll hate me if I tell you the truth.”

  “C’mon,” I retort. “You’re a college boy camping with a full set of cutlery and a freaking wave-stove worth more than everything I own put together. Can’t get much worse than that.”

  “Hey, good table manners are the last bastion of—” He cuts himself off with a grunt, renewing his efforts with the drill. “I play water polo.” He says it like it ought to have meaning, weight, like the words are somehow going to ignite some furious response.

  “What the hell is water polo?”

  He stops, looking up at me with lifted brows. “Oh. Um. Well, it’s a sport. You play in a swimming pool, and there’s two teams swimming about and generally mauling each other and trying to get the ball into the goals at either end.”

  I swallow, just the thought
of that much water instantly turning my throat dry. Now I know why he expected me to flip out. I’ve seen swimming pools before—dozens of ’em. But none with anything in them besides garbage and old deflated pool toys. Swimming pools are a luxury of the past, when fresh water was everywhere. A luxury of the past—or of the unbelievably rich. Even in LA, with the fresh water they get from the solar cell there, they don’t waste a drop—certainly not for swimming pools.

  “Holy shit, Oxford. And like…you practice in this pool? Whenever you want, you get to just splash around and—god, I don’t even know how to swim. That’s drinking water that dozens of people, maybe hundreds, could…”

  Silence falls, even the tapping of the hammer ceases. It feels like midnight, in this underground gloom broken only by the lights we brought with us, and the stillness between us is as intimate as if we really were huddled together in the middle of the night.

  “We’re not even from the same world, are we?” I whisper.

  He seems to get that I’m not really expecting him to answer, and he resumes drilling after a few more moments of that strange, tense quiet.

  “Tell me about your world, then,” he says finally.

  “My world?”

  “About your life, how you came to be here.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” I’m flipping through the string of events that led me here, trying to think of any that don’t make me look like…well, like what I am, in front of a guy like this. Guess the best way is to just tell it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “Dropped out of school a few years back so I could work odd jobs to try to pay down Evie’s debt. Got nowhere with it. Started scavenging sort of by accident—I got fired from this diner because I wouldn’t…” I pause, remembering the diner owner’s greasy apron and the smell of onion rings with a swell of nausea. “Anyway, got fired, had no place to stay, and hitched out to Chicago because I’d heard of some tent cities out there, and it was still close enough that I could get back home when I needed. Once I saw the kind of cash the scavver gangs took in, reclaiming and recycling all the junk people left behind, well…I realized I could do that too. Some of the scavvers are good sorts—taught me a bit about it, you know. What’s worth taking, what’s worth stripping for parts, what’s not worth a second glance. Others not so much with the helpful, had to sneak after them, learn their techniques on the fly.”