by Amie Kaufman
“Well, at least we’re on the same side.” It’s worth a try. I do my best to look relaxed, though it’s hard with the adrenaline surging through my body.
“We work for the same employer.” Liz is watching me, hawk-eyed. “Doesn’t put us on the same side.”
I have to act fast. I only have one big play here, one piece of information I can use to convince them I’m worth my weight, and the second they find it out on their own, it’s useless to me. This is what scavver life has trained me for—weighing up risks and opportunities in the blink of an eye, and acting on them without hesitation.
“Hey,” I say, raising my voice, putting just a hint of irritation in it, like they’re wasting my time. “Do you know who this guy is? How valuable he is? This is Jules Addison, Elliott Addison’s only kid.” I hear Jules’s sharp, shocked intake of breath behind me, and force myself to ignore him, my voice hard. “He knows more about Gaia than everyone else on this planet put together, and I’ve been keeping him alive so far. So let’s all stop posturing, and just figure out our way forward, yeah?”
Liz fixes me with a long look, and the corner of her mouth lifts like she wants to laugh at a joke only she gets. “Honey, we know who he is.”
That robs me of breath to respond, leaving me scrambling. His identity was the only currency I had, my only bargaining chip.
Liz grins, the twist of her lips making me want to lunge at her. “Mink knows all about him. Why stumble around blindly when you can follow the trained rat right to the center of the maze?” She’s enjoying herself, that much is obvious—one of those people who gets a twisted pleasure out of holding all the cards. But information’s not worth nothing. If I keep her talking, maybe she’ll let something slip I can use.
“But—” I stammer, and though I’m playing it up, I don’t have to look far to find a quaver for my voice. “But I’m one of Mink’s, she would’ve told me…”
“You were supposed to go to the main temple with the other dumbass scavvers.” Liz shifts her weight, impatience starting to overtake her enjoyment. “Insurance. Bottom-feeding carrion crawlers—nothing to lose by putting more feet on the ground, and if one or two of you make it back with something valuable, bonus payday.”
My mind’s reeling. But Liz’s eyes shift toward Jules, and when I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, his expression is stone. He heard me betray his identity—it doesn’t matter that Liz already knew who he was, or that I was trying to save both our lives by making it more profitable to keep us breathing. From his point of view, we fought last night, and I’ve turned against him.
Whatever fragile chance we had of acting like a team is in pieces now. Maybe it was doomed from the beginning. Maybe that moment lying together after that bridge collapsed was the lie.
After all, I’m a scavenger. I’m a raider. I’m a thief, and a vandal, and a criminal. And he’s a privileged, idealistic scholar who’d call the cops on me if he could, in another life, on another world.
We were always going to fracture. I take a breath and harden myself against the regret and loss in my heart. This is what I do. I shut out the hurt and keep going, no matter what happens. Stay alive. Save Evie. Do what you came here to do.
Liz cuts her inspection of Jules short with a snapped order, and two of her men step forward to empty our pockets and pat us down for weapons while the others load up our packs again. I’m hyper-aware of the multi-tool against my lower belly, warming slowly to skin temperature. The guy frisking me is a scruffy-faced twenty-something in dire need of a shower—but then, aren’t we all?—and a change of clothes. He keeps it professional until he gets to my waist. But as he starts to cup his hand around my ass, I flinch away and snap, “Hey, you wanna lose that hand?”
He starts to bristle, but the guy frisking a blank-faced Jules, a middle-aged Latino guy, snaps, “Cut it out, Hansen. She’s just a kid.”
“Whatever.” Hansen’s reply is sullen, and he finishes his search of my pockets as quickly as possible. He gives my boots a cursory check and then stalks off, leaving me shaking and trying not to show my relief that he didn’t take my multi-tool. There’s a blade in there. I’m not defenseless. He leaves the other man to keep an eye on me and Jules while Liz holds an indistinct conversation with the others in her group, some distance away. One’s a short guy with fair hair, the other’s wearing a newsboy cap that shades his face, and has stupid-looking facial hair crawling down his cheeks.
“Sorry about him,” says the Latino guy, who’s about Liz’s age, maybe late thirties or forties. He’s following my gaze as I watch Hansen retreat. “My name’s Javier. Just do what she says and you guys’ll be fine.”
“Thanks.” I offer him a nod even though I feel like throwing his “apology” in his teeth. He’s still helping her waylay us. But it never hurts to try the friendly approach. Maybe it’ll buy me a second or two of hesitation if Liz orders him to shoot me in the head.
Jules says nothing, gazing at some fixed point in the distance, as if he’s withdrawn entirely to his own world. Part of me wishes I could explain that his name was currency, that I was trying to buy a measure of trust so I could get us both out of here—and part of me recoils, still furious, insisting that I don’t owe him a scrap of loyalty.
They finish searching us and then put our packs back on our shoulders. They bind our hands with my climbing rope, tying us together and leaving a length of it hanging out like a leash. Great. We’re pack mules. Hansen’s the one who does the knots, and he yanks mine extra tight with a grunt of satisfaction. Javier might have some sympathy for us, but Hansen’s certainly not a fan of mine anymore.
Liz finishes her confab with her team and strolls back toward us to pick up the “leash” end of the rope. “You’ll go first,” she informs Jules, plunking his helmet down on his head and switching on his head lamp. “Seeing as you’ve been so good at decoding these little traps and pitfalls so far. It’ll be a lot easier following you now, without needing grappling hooks and harnesses. You made a mess of that first room up there.”
“Our breathers?” I ask. I didn’t see where they went—no doubt they meant us not to. I know it’s a futile effort, that they took them on purpose to make sure we couldn’t run, even if we got out of our ropes. “We didn’t get a full night with them.”
Liz wraps the leash end around her hand. “You’ll get them when we make camp. If you do as I’ve said, and lead us through safely. Bury us under half a ton of rock, and your breathers go with us.”
I asked Jules if the Undying were capable of violence and deception, like humans are. I should have stuck to worrying about my own species.
Jules swallows, eyes swinging from Liz to me before turning toward the yawning darkness at the edge of the field of rubble. There’s fear there, in his gaze—but not nearly enough. I didn’t exactly tell Jules everything about my past, about the kinds of people you encounter as a scavenger. I told him there were some decent folks, and there were.
But I didn’t tell him about people like Liz. People who’ll shoot you as soon as talk to you, who’ll leave you trussed up for the desert to suck dry just to make off with a handful of your gear.
To people like her, everything, everyone, has a value. It’s no different from the way I sorted through Jules’s gear at the start of our little partnership—anything that’s not worth carrying goes.
The fact that they haven’t decided to kill me right now doesn’t mean it won’t happen—it just means they haven’t made up their minds, or they want to use me like a canary in an old mine to spring any traps Jules might miss. If it serves her purposes later, I have no doubt Liz is capable of killing me without a second thought.
Jules has a use to them, but right now I’m on borrowed time.
I’ve got to make sure we’re both worth carrying.
The next chamber seems relatively intact, though given how much easier it was to climb down the broken puzzle before we made camp than it was to solve the tuning puzzle and then make it across th
at deathtrap of a bridge, that’s not necessarily a good thing. But after only a cursory examination of the glyphs scattered about the walls, Jules begins leading the expedition on a circuitous path through the room.
It’s some time before I recognize it—it’s not all that different from one of the early puzzle rooms in the Explorer IV temple. I watched the videos of those astronauts dozens of times, studying up in the weeks after Mink recruited me. This one isn’t exactly the same, but it’s a relatively simple grid puzzle—and while I can’t read the glyphs, Jules can.
Each time he steps onto the correct paving stone, a glimmer of light seems to run through it, the silvery filaments coming to life for an instant. It’s unnerving, this stone-that’s-not-stone. It’s just as unnerving to think that fifty thousand years ago, when we’d just begun to replace spears with bows and arrows, before we’d developed anything we’d call a language, the Undying were building this place, broadcasting their final message into space for their successors, creating tech we still can’t comprehend.
We continue on, waiting as Jules figures out where we can safely step, minutes stretching into hours. I can tell by the way he lifts his bound wrists that he’s still taking pictures of the glyphs, as if translating the sagas of the Undying matters at all now. He’s got no clue how bad this is, how screwed we are. How unlikely it is that he’ll ever have the chance to go home and share these pictures. There’s nothing to do but stay close, though, and make sure the ropes binding us together don’t tug either of us off our course, onto unsafe ground.
Following closely on his heels gives me time to think. They know who Jules is, somehow—Mink knew he was coming to Gaia, knew he’d be their ticket through this deathtrap of a temple. And that he’d be worth following. That brings the tiniest flicker of hope. Mink’s not the type to care about academic research unless there’s a payout. Maybe, just maybe, there’s still a chance I’ll be able to earn enough to help Evie.
With Liz holding the rope attaching me to Jules, there’s no chance for him and me to have a private conversation, which is probably just as well. Any given moment I don’t know whether I want to save him or punt him down one of these bottomless chasms for lying to me the way he did.
I tear my thoughts away from Jules with an effort, and concentrate on walking. But then, as I listen to the occasional rock shifting behind us or pebble skittering across the floor, I realize something.
I heard them. I saw them. What I thought was just the broken maze shifting after we passed, what I dismissed as glare from an alien sun on the canyon rim—those were the telltale signs we were being followed.
I could scream my frustration. I’m better than this. I should’ve been on the alert for…but we were so sure there was no reason for anyone to come this way in our wake. Jules thought he was following some second, secret spiral code in the original transmission—something nobody else would know about—and I thought he was leading me to a payout nobody else had discovered. We couldn’t have guessed Mink would have a team on his heels. We couldn’t have guessed she even knew he was here.
My eyes burn—exhaustion, I tell myself—and I squeeze them shut. No telling what kind of water rations they’ll give to their prisoners. Can’t afford to lose any in the form of tears.
Down here, with no windows to the surface, it’s impossible to tell the passage of time without a clock, and I can’t get at my phone with my hands bound. But some time later—it feels like hours—after the grid chamber and corridor open into a debris-filled antechamber, Liz calls a halt.
She gives a jerk on the rope holding us without a warning, wrenching my shoulders, and a quick cry of pain escapes me before I can clamp my lips together. Jules, attached to me, stops too, stumbling to his knees and almost dragging me with him.
“You,” she orders, jerking her chin at Jules. “This another broken puzzle?”
Jules turns his head enough to look at her out of the corner of his eye. “Looks like it.” I can see the muscles clenching in his jaw.
“Safe to make camp here?”
“I’d imagine so.”
Liz’s eyes narrow. “Look, cutie, anything happens to my team because you ‘miss’ something, on purpose or not, and I’m gonna make sure it happens to you, too. Now, once more, with feeling: is this a safe place to make camp?”
Jules grits his teeth, then scans the room for a few long, tense seconds. “To the best of my estimation, yes.”
“Fine.” She strides forward and ushers us off to the side, forcing Jules to scramble from his knees. She orders us to sit, then anchors her end of the rope around a massive boulder. Then she and her men—there’s Javier and Hansen, and I haven’t caught the names of the other two yet—spread out, gingerly inspecting the room and testing the floor, not wholly trusting Jules’s assurances. I can’t blame them—I wouldn’t trust him, in their shoes.
Our bindings offer no other way to rest, so I slump back against Jules, letting exhaustion claim me for a few breaths. Even if we could get free, where would we run? Straight into more traps, and with them on our heels, we wouldn’t have time to reason out the solutions. And we’d only last a day or two without our breathers.
“Are you okay?” Jules’s voice is quiet, and the question sounds like it pains him to ask.
The freaked, exhausted, one-step-away-from-hysterics part of my mind wants to laugh. Such a gentleman, even when tied to a dirty, sweaty, traitorous girl in the bottom of a deadly temple, surrounded by mercs ready to shoot us in the face. “Fine. You?”
“Fine.” He pauses a beat. “Really bloody annoyed.”
This time I do grin, fueled by a flicker of relief, or hope, that he understands why I betrayed his identity. “Glad to hear it.” I lean my head back, greatly daring, to rest it against his shoulder in some silent display of solidarity—and he jerks it away. The flicker of warmth in my chest vanishes.
Around us, the members of Liz’s team are making a rudimentary camp, setting their bags down and clearing spaces for their sleeping bags. I watch them a moment, until I’m sure nobody can overhear my murmur. “Jules, the only reason I gave them your name—”
“Don’t.” He grinds the word out between his teeth, eyes closed. “I don’t want to hear your excuse.”
I find myself gritting my own teeth. “You don’t get to be pissed at me.” My voice is chilly. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t lied to me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have brought you along if I’d known you’d spill my identity at the first sign of trouble.”
“Let’s just survive this.” I keep my voice cold. “Then we can go our separate ways.”
I can feel him, tense, against my back. The forced intimacy of being tied together makes his every shift and reaction feel almost like my own. I reach for resolve, trying to harden my thoughts. I don’t owe Jules anything. I cling to that thought and keep my body as stiff as I can where we’re touching.
“Fine,” he says eventually.
“I’m pretty sure they’ve been following us since the canyon.” I take a breath, watching to make sure none of Liz’s gang drift close enough to hear. “Someone’ll be guarding us soon, we don’t have much time. Any idea who these people are?”
“None. Never seen them, don’t know the name Liz.”
“The group you were supposed to meet when you landed? When you thought you were meeting a research expedition?”
I feel Jules shake his head, his ear brushing my hair. “Not what was described to me, anyway.”
“Mink’s a notorious puppet master.” I’m thinking aloud, head spinning with hunger and exhaustion. “Maybe somehow she found out you were on board the ship and…and put together a team to follow you, knowing wherever you went, it would be somewhere worthwhile.”
“Maybe.” Jules’s voice is soft, but weary rather than gentle. “The company that hired me, the woman who approached me, Charlotte, took a lot of precautions. I vetted them for weeks, traced everyone involved back for years online, but if Mink’s that
well-connected…maybe she had someone on the inside at Global Energy, someone who tipped her off.”
I close my eyes, wishing I could shut out the sounds of Liz’s gang settling in. I’d thought the silence of only the two of us, alone in an ancient alien temple, was unsettling—now I long for it.
If Mink got a tip-off from a spy—or however she found out—then she could’ve known from the start that the main temple might not be the prime target for looting. Jules never would’ve helped a gang of raiders, mercs as ruthless and efficient as Liz’s gang, if they’d taken him prisoner from the start.
Mink’s smart enough to have done her research, and she’d know he’d be too principled for that. They’d let him go on Global Energy’s dime, wipe out the party that was meant to meet and support him, let him lead them to the right spot, and wait until there was no turning back before springing their trap.
It’s a brilliant plan, and my gut twists at the tiny flicker of admiration I feel for that. But it’s the cruelty of it that really makes my stomach churn. Liz would’ve had orders not to interfere, not to show a sign of her presence, until he was far enough inside the temple that he couldn’t run. Then truss him up, use him like a bloodhound, make him watch while they stripped this place of every scrap of evidence that could help his father. And the whole plan is unfolding smooth as butter.
Except for one thing: me.
I was supposed to head for the main temple. A backup policy, I guess, in case her hunch was wrong or Jules had given up or died. I was never supposed to meet him, and was certainly never supposed to join him. Jules was supposed to be alone.
Which means I’m dead weight to Liz.
Fear, hot and tangible, runs up my spine so viscerally I’m half certain Jules can feel it where we’re pressed together.
I’m not worth carrying.
“Jules,” I breathe, careful not to whisper—in caves like this, a breathy whisper carries a lot farther than a soft voice. “We’ve got to get free.”