by Amie Kaufman
I have no idea how much time has passed when I finally look up again. With every new image I feel like I’m sinking deeper into the language of the Undying, understanding the nuances better. But none of it says anything about the Nautilus—and judging by the way it was carved so sneakily in the two places I found it so far, I’m not sure any of the formal carvings will help with it. So far, all I’ve seen is a retelling of the story from the original broadcast.
Mia’s moved a bit away from me, and she’s looking down at her handheld phone. The display’s on its dimmest setting, but I can see the flicker of it against her face—she’s watching a video. The sound’s muted, but she’s gazing at it intently. We’re way too far underground now for there to be a signal, even if the station were directly overhead. I’m guessing it’s the video message I saw her get last night.
Her face in the glow of the screen is tired and miserable and dirty, and her shoulders droop forward. I start to speak and stop myself—but I must make some sound, because her eyes snap up and she’s immediately scowling at me and thumbing the button to turn her phone display off.
“What?” Her voice is a challenge, daring me to comment.
“Nothing.” I let my wrist unit go dark and stick my pen inside my journal to hold the page. “Just thinking about my dad. Doing this kind of work reminds me how much I miss him, I guess.”
Mia’s shoulders lose a bit of their tension, and after a few seconds she crawls closer again so she can reach her pack to slip her phone back into its protected pocket, then resume her spot at my side. “Any luck with the translations?”
“Some.” It’s nearly impossible to keep from reaching for my journal again—but my utter exhaustion helps. I may have pulled a lot of all-nighters in my life, but never after a day spent fighting for my life in an alien temple. “These glyphs are a lot less formal than the ones in the main temple that the Explorer crew photographed. Almost conversational.”
“Well, you can save the rest as a treat for tomorrow.”
I grin, and together we bunk down on the chilly stone floor, clearing spots of debris for our bedrolls. We pull on our breathers, settling them over our noses and mouths to supplement our air with oxygen as we sleep. My body’s ready for the boost, that much I can tell as soon as I inhale.
We’re necessarily close to each other—the larger debris forms a maze-like path that leaves us little room to spread out. But I notice that there’s only a thin line of rocks and pebbles between my sleeping bag and her blanket nest, and I’m racking my brain trying to remember who put their bed down first and who was second. Was it me? Or was she the one to choose this closeness?
My conscience beats at me again, even as I ask that question. You’re lying to her. You’re lying to her.
She flicks off the lamp without much warning, before I can read her face, or what’s visible of it behind the breather. Before she can read mine and see my guilt.
I hear the rustle of fabric as she nestles down, and I follow suit, thoughts spinning. There’s a few breaths of silence, and then her voice comes low and soft, a little muffled by the breather.
“So, the translations—what do they say?”
“It’ll take a while for me to figure it all out.” Again, the urge to turn on my torch and study my notes by its dim light flares, and I have to suppress it. Easier, with Mia just a hand’s width away from me. “And we don’t have the whole of the story yet, but it’s elaborating on what they said in their original broadcast. I think it’s the history of their civilization. How they rose, how they fell. Why they left these places behind for a new race to find.”
“It must be so much bigger than ours,” she murmurs, and for a moment I have to force my mind back, to remember what I just said. “Ours is all the story of one planet. Of one brief attempt to leave it, the Alpha Centauri mission, and otherwise, not even a blip until now.”
“And the history they’re telling in this temple says they’ve seen the whole galaxy. Can you imagine the stories they could tell?”
“Stories,” Mia echoes, voice weighty with meaning. “Uncovering things left behind.”
It’s hard to know exactly what she’s referring to—the Undying, perhaps, or our conversation about scavenging versus archaeology. Or she’s talking about Evie and my father, the family we’ve left behind. My ruined academic career and her dangerous work in Chicago. The sun and the sky and her skyscrapers and my pool—our lives, maybe. Neither of us are writing the stories we thought we would.
But her next words tell me exactly what part of home is on her mind: “Jules,” she says, quiet. “We’re a few rooms in now, and there’s been nothing I could take back with me to sell. You’re sure there’ll be something?”
My silence lasts a beat too long. I know that even as it’s happening, as I’m groping for words that won’t be a lie. “I promised I’d help you,” I say eventually, a lifetime too late.
The lamp flicks back on, and she’s propping up on her elbow, expression wary as she looks at me. “Jules?” It’s a warning. A question.
“This is absolutely the most important place on Gaia we could possibly be.” The words come tumbling out of my mouth, defensive.
“Because of the second layer of code,” she says, her voice flat, and for a moment my heart jumps. Then I remember the lie I told her—that the second layer mapped out the locations of the best tech.
“Yes,” I say slowly, heavily. Because I can’t lie, not again. Not to Mia, and not when she’s asking me directly. I should—this is that important—but I can’t. “Because of the second layer. But the second layer doesn’t lead us to hidden tech. At least, I don’t think it does.”
I look over, finally, my eyes finding her face. And suddenly, like water pouring from a broken dam, I’m telling her what I do know—I explain the equation in that second layer of coding that forms the start of a perfect Fibonacci spiral when you graph it. Forms a shape found over and over in nature, including in the nautilus shell I’ve named the spiral after. I tell her about the glyph, with its fluid meaning, difficult to translate.
Catastrophe. Apocalypse. The end of all things.
“And from the air, this temple looks identical to the perfect spiral, just like the graph,” I say. “I don’t know if someone was warning us that this temple is full of danger, or that this temple will tell us how to identify the danger, but I’m the only one who knows, and nobody’s listening to me now that my father’s…” I fall silent, searching for a word. Incarcerated? In detention?
When I worked out what I was seeing on the satellite images, my brain suddenly sparking as I matched the spiral shape to the roof of this temple, I knew what I had to do. I tried to tell my father, in our last vid-call. Remember my very first dig? I’d said, holding up the arrowhead my five-year-old fingers had pried out of the dirt. His face softened, and then I held up a nautilus shell, the rusty red-and-cream stripes lining its curves. He went very still, then—he knew the shell didn’t come from any dig I’d ever been on. He knew what that shape meant. I think I’m going to go back, I told him, willing him to hold his poker face. See what else I can find. I love you, Dad.
And before he could protest, I shut down the call. He knew where I was going. He knew why. And the IA operatives monitoring our weekly call thought I was off to entertain myself on some university excursion.
I drag myself back to the present. “I had to come here, Mia. This shape, this spiral, it means something. And this is the place that will tell me what.”
She stares at me in the dim light, still propped on her elbow, and she blinks once, swallows slowly. When she speaks, her voice is careful and composed in a way I’ve never heard it before. “The spiral means danger,” she says. “But you don’t know if this place is full of danger, or just teaches us about danger.”
“No,” I admit. “But we’re in the right place, I know that. Right before we walked out onto the bridge, I saw the Nautilus scratched into the rock, like a sign. I saw it at the top of the cliff, a
s well. This is where we’re meant to be, to find out more about it.”
“You don’t know if this place is deadly.” Though her pose is one of relaxation, even in the dark I can tell her body is tense. “And you brought me in here, without even—you just brought me here, without ever asking if I was willing to take that risk. And then you saw a symbol that probably means freaking apocalypse, and you just strolled on by without sharing that information?”
I gaze at her in silence. There’s no defense I can offer. She’s right.
“Do you have any idea if there’s anything valuable in here at all for me? For Evie?” she asks, controlled once more.
My heart wants to shrink away. “I don’t know,” I whisper. There could be, my mind says. I hope there is. I want there to be. But none of those words make it past the lump in my throat.
She pushes up to sit in a sharp, sudden movement, lifting her hands to weave them through her hair, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip. “You don’t know,” she repeats, cold as ice. And then in a blink, the ice is gone, seared away with the heat of her fury. “You don’t know? My sister’s life depends on me, my only family, my little sister—everything I care about in the world, and you just decided to merrily lead me in here to play some stupid detective game, because you’re Jules Addison, and you know better than everyone else. You knew I had one goal here, just one thing I came to do. I needed tech and you…you lied to me. This isn’t a game, this isn’t—even if you don’t care at all about helping my sister, without something valuable, I won’t be able to buy my way off the planet. I’ll die here, Jules.”
“I’ll help you,” I try, when she pauses for a breath that sounds more like a sob. “I gave you my word. I meant it.”
“With what money?” Her voice breaks, and the crack of it makes me want to melt back into the rocks and debris. “Where’s this magical money coming from? Are you that rich, Jules?”
And I’m not, of course. I might live in the plush surrounds of Oxford, but my father’s on a professor’s salary. I don’t have the kind of money Mia will need to buy her sister’s freedom. “We’ll find something,” I mumble, unconvincing even to my own ears. “There’s no way of knowing what we’ll find at the end of this trail.”
Mia’s eyes burn in the torchlight. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself this whole time? Making yourself feel better?”
I don’t answer—I can’t. Because she’s right, and we both know it, and even though I know I’m doing the right thing, even though I know I have to get to the center of this temple to discover what’s so dangerous about the Undying tech…looking at her face, all the things I know don’t seem so certain anymore.
She’s right. And my silence acknowledges it.
She stares at me a beat longer, then two, her angry gaze measuring me, and finding me wanting in every possible way. Then she’s looking over toward her gear, her climbing harness, before glancing up—my heart shrinks—at the cliff. I can see in the furious set of her jaw that she wants nothing more than to get away, leave me and try to salvage her original plan. But if she’s even half as exhausted as I am, she’ll never make it. So instead, she reaches for the lamp and plunges us both into the dark once more.
I want to convince her that I will find a way to help her.
I want to try and explain one more time that we could be in the middle of making the most important discovery on Gaia—that we could be saving our whole world.
I want to…
“Mia—”
“Don’t.”
The word is a bullet, and it silences me.
WHEN I WAKE UP, I know time has passed, but not enough—my eyelids are still heavy, my gut churning with the nausea that comes from waking too soon when you’re already sleep-deprived. Something’s touching my face, and it’s a moment before I realize it’s my breather, and it’s meant to be there.
A light flashes past my vision, and a rock clicks against another up by my head. Is Jules clearing a path to go take a leak or something? Wait, no—he’s still curled up behind me. We’ve moved closer together in our sleep—because it’s cold, I tell myself, and it’s warmer to stay close—and the curve of my back is fitted in against his front. When I take a deep, shaky breath, I discover that he’s got an arm wrapped around me. It’s like he knew what I was thinking last night about leaving—like even his subconscious wants to keep me here with him.
Time to go, Mia, I tell myself, letting last night’s anger wash over me. I knew he was naïve, idealistic, single-minded—but somehow, somewhere in the brief time since we met, I started trusting him. Stupid, rages that voice in my head.
The light flashes across my eyes again, and suddenly I’m awake, adrenaline surging through me as I sit up. Jules groans a protest, but the same instinct must take him, because a moment later he’s sitting up behind me.
“Did we wake you, lovebirds?” It’s a woman’s voice, American, hard-edged.
“Who are you?” I snap, my heart slamming in my chest, forcing myself to move slowly as I slide my hand under the covers for my multi-tool. I need to hide it somewhere I can get to it—there’s no circumstance in which these people are friendly, and I can’t let myself get taken captive. Jules can’t know what I’m doing, but he keeps his arm around me, providing cover for the movement.
“My name’s Liz, sweetheart,” the woman replies, dropping the flashlight a little, so I can make out the silhouettes of four more people ranged around us. They must have come down the cliffs while we slept. I can hear the sneer in Liz’s voice. “You didn’t think Mink put all her eggs in one basket, did you?”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
“Mink?” I blink blindly in the light on my face, unable to see much past its glare. I need to buy time. Somewhere in my pack is one of the guns we took off the raiders back at the spring, but there’s no chance I’d reach that without them noticing—and they’ll be looking for weapons if we’re searched. But the multi-tool in my hand—if I could hide it somewhere…“I don’t know who you’re—”
“Don’t play dumb,” she interrupts. “We’re way beyond that, kiddos.”
I briefly consider slipping the multi-tool into my boot, but that’s the first place anyone with half a brain checks when they’re frisking you.
So instead I shove the tool down the front of my pants, inside my underwear, sideways so hopefully it’ll feel like part of the waistband. Scavvers aren’t above using a frisk to cop a feel, but they usually go for the boobs or the ass.
“What’s going on?” Jules is going out of his way to sound bewildered, following my lead. When he pulls down his breather to speak, I can feel his breath on my neck. He keeps it down, as though this will somehow help him get a better look at them, understand them. It’s like a befuddled academic peering through his spectacles, the way he does it.
Liz just laughs, a chilly sort of chuckle. Behind her, a shadow moves and I hear the sound of a flare being struck. An orange light blossoms in the dark, then drops to the ground.
My heart sinks. There’s five of them, and while Jules is taller than a few of them, Liz’s men are bulky with muscle where he’s lean—and they’re all bigger than me. I don’t recognize any of them from the group whose guns and skimmer bike we stole, but that brings me little comfort. It means I don’t know what these guys are after, which gives me zero leverage.
My first instinct, that they’re IA crews sent to stop raiders, is clearly wrong—Liz mentioned Mink, and Mink’s gone to a lot of time and effort to make sure her little side operation is off the IA’s radar. She’d have had to bribe a bunch of lower-level IA employees to get herself and her crews on board the orbital station, and the employees couldn’t rat her out without exposing themselves too. If this Liz knows who Mink is, she isn’t IA.
Liz’s team starts tearing through our packs, locating the guns with grunts of acknowledgment and confiscating them. Most of our other gear is left in the bags, though they take careful inventory and snag a few choice items
from Jules’s pack, including the valuable wave-stove. My stuff, I guess, is all too battered and cheap to be of interest.
Then she turns to us, snapping her fingers and holding out her hand. We both stare at her blankly, waiting for the instruction to become clear.
“Your breathers, lovebirds,” she says, impatient.
My heart sinks even further down into the pit of my stomach. Our lifelines. Without them, we’ll be dead in a few days. One of her gang comes up beside her with a gun hefted meaningfully in one hand, and we both unstrap them, handing them over. It’s the smartest move she could make. We can’t run now, even if we could escape five armed raiders barehanded.
“Get up,” Liz orders, moving the flashlight from my face to gesture with it and rise from her crouch. She’s in her mid-forties, with a hard-lined face that would’ve been quite pretty if it weren’t for the chilly, narrowed eyes and the thin set to her mouth.
“We’re getting.” I give Jules’s arm a squeeze under our shared blankets, then get slowly to my feet. He does the same, a half beat behind me. I was ready to leave when I woke, to climb out of this spiral deathtrap of his and try to salvage my original plan. But just because I can’t bring myself to look at his face—and god, I wish I could—doesn’t mean I want to see his brains splattered all over the cliff behind us. I want to get out of this alive, and I want to get him out alive too, if I can manage it. So I thank whatever deities or spirit ancestors or spaghetti monsters that might be listening that he’s keeping his mouth shut, recognizing that of the two of us, I’ve got the better chance of talking our way out of this. “Let me get this straight—Mink sent you?”
“That’s right, sugar.” Liz rakes her eyes up and down first me, then Jules. Her sharp eyes linger on him, no doubt taking in the same qualities I noticed about him. Although his brand-new clothes aren’t quite so spotless now, his expensive boots no longer so shiny.