by Amie Kaufman
I draw a shaky breath. “Do you trust me?”
Another second slips away as I scan her features, drinking them in. Silently, she rests one of her hands on my bound ones, giving me her answer in the squeeze of her fingers through mine.
I squeeze back, the only warning before I’m gathering myself to move. “Run!” Together we sprint for the archway ahead of us, for safety. In the same instant there’s a thunderous roar above us as the ceiling starts to give way, a rock ricocheting off my shoulder and knocking me off-balance. I stumble forward, nearly losing my footing, and Mia shoves her shoulder into mine without breaking stride to knock me back upright.
In the next instant, the floor’s giving way beneath us. Perfututi, we’re screwed, I didn’t see any glyphs about the floor.
I missed one detail, and that’s what’s going to kill us: it wasn’t just the ceiling that was rigged, but the floors as well. We’re leaping from stone to stone as they drop away beneath us, momentum sending us flying toward safety, but not fast enough, not fast enough. Somehow Mia has her multi-tool in her hand, and we’re just a few steps from safety, and we’re not going to make it.
The final stone drops out from beneath me, and I throw myself toward the archway that’s suddenly a ledge above me as I fall—I’ve miscalculated, this is my fault, this is it—when Mia suddenly punches her hand between my bound wrists, driving the multi-tool into the rock face.
The ropes around my wrists snag on it, and my arms are on fire, my shoulders screaming as I’m jerked up short, the floor gone from beneath me, the ceiling still raining down, hanging from the knife wedged into the rock. Her momentum carries her down, down, and my heart’s stopping, and I can’t do anything—and then she manages to grab at one of my legs, sending a bolt of agony through my shoulders at the extra weight. I can’t stop myself from crying out, but there’s as much relief in it as pain.
She doesn’t even pause to acknowledge the fact that she nearly plunged to her death and scrambles up my body, climbing me like a ladder. As soon as she’s on the ledge she spins around to reach for my arms. She’s too small to pull me up, too light, and my weight drags her toward the edge of the cliff. I kick wildly, my boot finding a tiny ledge, and I jam my foot onto it, scrabbling upward as a chunk of rock from above plummets past my head.
Then somehow I’m over the edge of the cliff, and we’re safe together in the archway, lying in a tangle of limbs as she reaches past me to yank the multi-tool out of the rock. The ceiling is still falling, and soon the room we’ve just come through will be packed solid with fallen rocks.
And somewhere in there, Alex is dead. We’re safe on the other side, separated from Liz, her remaining men, and most of our gear, but we’re alive, and—
And then it really hits. Alex is dead. And I killed him.
In all likelihood I’m the first murderer on Gaia. Take one of them out, I thought to myself—murder one of them, that’s what I meant. I dodged the word. I can’t dodge the deed.
I crawl free of Mia, propping up on my elbows and knees, and my coughing turns to retching, my skin ice-cold, damp with sweat. Wordlessly, Mia eases my arms to one side, so she can get at the ropes binding me. It takes her three tries to cut me free, her hands shaking so badly her fingers won’t work.
“We should keep moving.” Her voice is shaking too, and I don’t think I can look at her or I’ll lose what little remnant of calm I have left. “Liz won’t give up. We need a head start.”
A man is dead. Liz is on our heels, angrier than ever.
And I’m trapped on the wrong side of a rockfall with an uncertain ally.
Did she save me because she still needs me, or… I’m not even sure of the end of that sentence.
As we climb to our feet, the questions racing around my head are pounding as hard as my pulse.
I LEAD THE WAY FOR a while. Not every room in this place is a puzzle requiring Jules’s expertise, and while I can’t read the glyphs, I am starting to know what their patterns indicate. Like Jules said, the glyphs are based on math, and once I started to recognize the equation for their language, their simpler instructions—step here, don’t walk there—aren’t hard to translate. And the spread of ordinary traps like hidden spikes and pitfalls are becoming easy to spot and avoid—it’s almost like the Undying put them there so we can see them, and know we’re still on the right path.
Maybe it says something about me that the easier it gets, the more uneasy I feel. Like even an ancient race that died out before humans used tools could somehow be out to get me. “This doesn’t bother you?” I say to Jules, shattering the silence.
“What?” His voice comes from behind me, distracted.
“It’s like they’re playing with us,” I say. “This part is so easy.”
“Maybe,” he replies, sounding tired, an edge to his voice. I don’t know if it’s frustration with my continued suspicion, or if it’s this new barrier that’s formed between us, or both. “But we can’t assume they were anything like us, Amelia. Or that they were putting in these tests simply to torture us. They weren’t human, there’s no reason to think they’d understand the kind of cruelty we’re capable of.”
He only calls me Amelia when he’s being formal, or when he’s annoyed. Otherwise it’s Mia, his accent leaning into the vowels. Cruelty, I think, feeling sick, and I fall silent once again.
I tell myself that I’m leading to test myself, to make sure that I’ve got some chance of getting through this place alive without Jules, if he decides I can’t be trusted after all. But the truth is that I’m walking in front so that I don’t have to look at him. He’s so tired, so ragged, and so changed. That trusting nature of his, the one I scoffed at and predicted would get him killed—it’s gone. When I look at him I can see it in his posture, his body language. That slight scholarly stoop to his shoulders now looks like he’s carrying the weight of the entire cave-in that killed that man.
Of course, with him behind me, it means I can feel his eyes boring into me. Or I imagine I can, anyway. Despite the warmth of his hand as we ran for the edge of the last puzzle, despite his nod when I suggested we keep moving, all I can see in my mind’s eye is that burning look of his last night as I lay down with Liz’s gang and he stayed tied to a rock, barely able to move. When everything we’d built started to crumble, beneath the laughter over my “imaginary” sister.
You don’t owe him, my mind insists, flashing frame after frame from the moment he admitted he’d lied to me so I would help him, so I’d get him to this temple for his altruistic dreams. There’s nothing to explain.
And even if I wanted to explain, we don’t have the time to stop. We’re moving. That’s enough.
My feet feel unsteady, and it’s not just exhaustion making my legs shake. For all my swagger, for all the time I’ve spent scavenging in the ruins with murderers and thieves, I’ve never actually seen someone die. And true, I didn’t see that guy—Alex, Liz called him—die either, or even hear him scream. A part of me insists that maybe he survived, maybe he leapt out of the way back toward the safety of the other side of the puzzle even as Jules and I ran for it. But we were closer to the edge than he was, and thanks to Jules, we were ready—and we only barely made it.
That guy is dead.
I want desperately to stop, turn, grab for Jules’s hand and pull him in against me just to feel his warmth, despite the fact that I hate him for his lie, for dooming me and Evie, for the crimes of his father, for all of it.
But it already feels like centuries ago that he slipped that arm around my waist in our sleep and it was all I could feel for an instant before Liz’s flashlight brought reality crashing in. I know there was a chemistry between us, and I think he knew it too, but we’re too different. And there have been too many lies now.
Though it was for all of a second, I miss the feel of his arm around me. I’d been keeping myself apart from him, this boy who’s so goddamn brilliant and so goddamn naïve all at once, this boy who’s both the best possible
candidate to make it to the center of this temple and also the most likely to stride into danger with no idea what he’s doing. I’ve kept that distance there on purpose, because my sister comes first, and when it comes down to it, I’ve known there might come a moment when I’d have to choose between her and Jules.
And it has to be Evie. It always has to be Evie. It’s me and Evie heading for our Amsterdam, and then everyone else, the people who don’t matter.
But that night, his arm around me, my head tucked under his chin…For the first time, and not just since landing on Gaia, I wasn’t alone. Just like Evie wished.
I mean, when all’s said and done, we’ve only known each other a few days, and what we don’t know about each other far outweighs the stories we’ve told so far. But there’s something about him—I can sense the potential of what we could be together, as a team, or more, and I know that for a while, he did too.
I wish I could tell him that. Our trust’s so badly damaged now that he wouldn’t believe me—I don’t know if he believes anything I’ve told him was the truth.
But that night we were a we. And now that I’m a me again, I feel lonelier than ever.
I’m forced to set all these thoughts aside when we come to an archway signaling one of the rooms with the larger, more complex puzzles, and as Jules comes up beside me, we shine our lights in to size up the challenge ahead.
The huge chamber seems empty, but each of the paving stones has something carved on it, and I can guess the nature of the puzzle easily enough: Step on the right stones, you make it through. Step on the wrong ones, you don’t.
Jules must be thinking of Liz behind us, and perhaps of Alex, but he takes his time, studying each of them in turn, frowning. “These aren’t glyphs,” he says eventually, and when I look down, I realize he’s right. I had just assumed, but now I study them, they lack the mathematical precision of the glyphs, the patterns that I’m starting to recognize. This writing is something entirely different.
My heart sinks. We don’t have time for Jules to teach himself a whole new language to get us across the room. I crane my neck up, checking the roof, trying to pull together a backup plan. Perhaps there’s a way we can climb, get around the puzzle somehow. I don’t like our chances. We’re both exhausted, and we’ve hardly got any equipment left.
“There are patterns,” Jules says eventually, very slowly, like he’s trying the idea out. He lifts a hand to point to the rows of characters as they stretch away. “See how they change a little, the letters? And the words, for want of something better to call them?”
“I see,” I agree. “If we can’t read them, does the pattern help? They could say anything.”
“They might not mean anything at all,” he admits. “Human brains look for patterns everywhere, it’s how we’re wired. That doesn’t mean it’s how the Undying see things.”
I make myself stay quiet, trying not to hurry him along as he works through it, mentally giving him about ten seconds more in lecture mode before I cave. “They heard music the same way we do,” I point out. “They made us harmonize, to cross the bridge. So perhaps we should assume it’s a deliberate pattern. I mean, if it’s not, we don’t have any other options, and we’re in a lot of trouble. So we might as well hope it is.”
“Agreed,” he says, still staring down at the floor. “Look here. Do you see how there’s one dot, and beside it, there’s these three…I’m going to call them words, though they’re not any language I’ve ever seen. They might not be a language at all, they might just be for the puzzle.”
“Yes,” I say, forcing myself to be patient. “A dot.”
“And then there’s two dots,” he says, pointing at the next stone along. “And then these three words again.”
“Are we counting dots?” I try, squinting at the stones past the first two. Most of them seem to have one dot, or two, sometimes three, and then the list of words beside them.
“I think…” He falls silent again. As I try not to scream, and dig my nails into my palms, and wait.
Eventually I’m rewarded, when he speaks again. “I’m trying to think what I’d notice about these words, if they were in English, or French, or Chinese, or something I speak,” he murmurs. “How do they change from when they’re beside one dot, to when they’re beside two. Because they’re quite similar otherwise. I think it’s…” Abruptly he trails off, nodding slowly.
“Jules?” I prompt.
“Conjugation,” he says, breathing the word like it’s a prayer. “It’s—it’s like verbs. You know the way a verb changes? I run, she runs? Or in some languages, it changes even more dramatically. Think of French—j’ai, tu as, elle a, nous avons, and so on.”
“If you say so,” I agree, and he snaps out of lecture mode, returning to something more useful.
“The Undying handle verbs the same way we do, in some cases. It changes, depending on whether it’s I, you, we, and so on. I think this is a nonsense language that uses that sort of pattern, and we have to learn it.”
“We’re having a grammar lesson right now?” The urge to laugh bubbles up inside me, and I clamp down on it. I think if I start, I might not stop.
“Yes,” he says, more enthusiastic than I am. “The ones with one dot, they’re I. I run. And the ones with two dots, they’re someone else, second person. You run. Three, third person. She runs. So all we have to do is learn the endings for each, and then step on the stones with the correct ones. When we see three dots, step on a stone with the third person ending.”
“Easy as that,” I murmur. I follow his gaze as he traces out the pattern he’s found, the series of words with endings that change. We find it once, then twice, and once we’re sure enough, we step out onto the paving stones, making our choices for each stone with one dot, or two. Every nerve in my body is jangling, but there’s no grinding, no sudden crack—the floor beneath us holds steady. And one by one we find each new word, work out how it should conjugate, and step across those stones. It’s almost like a mathematical puzzle, once I get the hang of it.
When we reach the other side, I let out a breath, leaning against the arch of the doorway and glancing back. Our footsteps mark a clear path to follow in the dust, if Liz and her crew get past the rockfall, but there’s nothing we can do to hide our trail without potentially setting off whatever fatal traps lie in this room to punish mistakes.
We’re quiet as we keep moving down the endless mazes and corridors. The next few rooms are far simpler—we come to a puzzle with square blocks of stone to be transferred back and forth between different pavers until their combined weights are equal. It’s a little difficult without any way to weigh them, but we heft them in our hands, and it doesn’t take us long. Clearly, math and logic are universal between our two species. Maybe universal among any intelligent species, I don’t know.
We continue on, coming eventually to a branch in the path with two forks with swaths of glyphs carved above them. This time I’m the one who recognizes the puzzle type—it’s a variation on the one where there are two guards standing in front of two tunnels. One always lies, one always tells the truth, but you don’t know which is which. So when they both tell you there’s death down their tunnel, you have to figure out which to believe. Jules mutters softly to himself as he translates the rows of glyphs beneath them. Their meanings change, depending on context, he says—like kanji in Japanese, or a bunch of other Earth languages. He’s trying to translate for puns in an alien language, as best I can tell. I hold my breath, and try not to show my impatience, until finally he nods hesitantly at one tunnel.
We move gingerly, ready to run or dodge if something shifts in the path, but it seems we’ve chosen correctly. The next few corridors are filled only with the typical pitfalls here and there, and my mind starts to wander—until I see Jules, just ahead of me, walking straight onto a pressure plate.
I dart forward, grabbing at his pack and yanking backward with all my strength. I’m so much lighter than him that I only shift him a l
ittle, but it’s enough—when the plate triggers, and a shower of head-sized boulders rains down, Jules and I are in a heap just beyond its edge.
Half-dazed, Jules stares dumbly at the pile of rubble for a moment before groaning and rubbing at his head. I risk a glance at him and see again the exhaustion there. We haven’t stopped moving since we ditched Liz and her cronies, and it’s been at least a day.
What little sleep we did get before our capture got cut short when they snatched us, and neither of us slept much the night they had us as their prisoners. Especially not Jules, bound as tightly to that boulder as he was.
“We’ve got to stop,” I gasp.
Jules coughs, the dust from the rockfall settling in around us. “Liz.” He’s still prone, shaking his head.
I know what he’s saying. Liz’s company managed to cross the chasm beneath the music puzzle, despite the bridge being destroyed. They rappelled down into the broken puzzle where we were camping so silently they didn’t wake us. They’ll find a way through that rockfall sooner or later, and we can’t be within grabbing distance when they do.
“We’ll hear them,” I say, sounding more certain than I feel. “They’re going to have to tunnel through all that rock, and that’ll take time, and they’ll make a lot of noise when they break through. That kind of sound echoes, and we’ll hear it.”
“But we’ve already solved the other puzzles, cleared the way and left a trail for them. If they do get through the rockfall, all they’ll have to do is catch up to us.”
I swallow hard. It’s like he’s speaking my own fears aloud. “I know. But Jules, look at you. You were two seconds away from being a pancake. Look at me—I was half-asleep, I could’ve just as easily not even seen that plate. We got lucky. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our luck hasn’t been all that great so far. I don’t want to count on it. We need sleep. We need time with the breathers. Even if you could force yourself to keep moving, if you don’t get some oxygen, you won’t be able to think straight.”