by Amie Kaufman
Jules lets his breath out, then slowly drags himself into a more upright position. “Mehercule,” he mutters, one of his incomprehensible curses. “You’re right,” he concedes finally. “Looks like another chamber up ahead—if it’s safe, we can stop there.”
I can see the darker hole he’s indicating through the gloom. The chambers themselves, the ones containing puzzles, all share similar doorway-like entrances with carved rims like a warning, whereas the connecting corridors of tunnels seem more like simple passageways from one room to the next. I drag myself to my feet and offer Jules a hand, but he waves me away and stumbles up on his own. The shape I’m in right now, I wouldn’t have been much help to him anyway, but the gesture just serves to remind me of what’s changed between us. We inch our way toward the next chamber, on alert. Pausing at its entrance, Jules gazes around, searching for the glyphs of warning and explanation that have marked each puzzle room before.
There are none.
The walls and ceiling are completely and utterly bare. The floor’s empty, no paving stones or pressure plates or pits. There are no carvings, no paintings, no glimmers of metal or crystalline rock, no shadowy cables in the ceiling, nothing. Nothing but an empty room. Its only feature is another archway at its far edge, but instead of darkness on the other side of it, it contains a sheet of rock, carved with the most complex glyphs we’ve seen yet. If it’s a door, it’s not one with an obvious keyhole.
This chamber is totally different from any other we’ve seen so far, and though I don’t know what it means, Jules doesn’t need to tell me to be careful—we both move forward slowly, gingerly, waiting for the catch. But we reach the center of the room without incident. And after tapping at the stone around us, then stomping on it, then—finally—jumping up and down on it, Jules drops his pack wearily to the ground. “I guess it’s safe. We can look at those carvings after we’ve slept.”
“You think it means something, that this room is so different from the others?”
“I can’t be sure,” he says. “But we must be very close to the center now. Whatever’s significant about this temple, whatever the Nautilus is warning us against…I think it might be on the other side.”
His gaze snags on the door, and I feel that same pull toward it—all this way, and our prize is finally within our grasp. “All the more reason to sleep,” I make myself say. “If there’s some kind of test coming, let’s give ourselves a fighting chance.”
Jules nods slowly. “Mehercule, I’m exhausted.”
I let my pack slide from my shoulders too, and sink to the stone floor. “What does that mean? You keep saying it. One of your languages?”
He looks mildly embarrassed. “It’s, uh, Latin. ‘By Hercules.’ We’d catch it bad from our teachers if we were caught cursing, so I guess we just…got creative.”
I eye him sidelong, not sure whether to laugh or cry or collapse in exhausted hysterics. “Every time I think you can’t get more…” But I’m not sure what the word is that I’m searching for. More Jules is what I mean. He’s the most Jules-ish person I’ve ever met.
We both fall silent as we settle on the floor. It’s frigid to the touch, but I’m so tired I’m ready to sleep right there, cheek pressed to its chilly rock surface. But though my body’s screaming for sleep, my mind knows at least part of the exhaustion comes from lack of food and lack of oxygen. So I force myself to open my pack and start sorting through it.
“It’s a good thing they were lazy and made us carry our own stuff.” I break the quiet, the meager light from my wrist LED throwing shadows around the gear in my bag and confusing my tired eyes.
“They took the wave-stove,” comes Jules’s reply from the gloom a distance away. “No hot meals for us anymore.”
I physically flinch at that reminder—something hot in my stomach would have been like a ray of light in the endless night of this underground labyrinth. Trying not to sigh too loudly, I dig out my breather. I slip its strap into place and suck in a few lungfuls of richer air.
I know all it’s doing is injecting a little extra oxygen into Gaia’s thin air, but it makes such a difference I imagine myself dizzy with the sudden influx. I can hear Jules sorting through his own pack, see his head lamp moving this way and that in the dark. I pull out my blanket roll and a few protein bars, then crawl toward him. He’s setting up his lantern, pulling his flashlight apart so it casts a yellow glow around the empty room; then he switches off his helmet and tucks it beside his pack.
He’s deliberately set up the lamp between him and me, and he’s pulled out his little journal and pencil, fumbling with it in his tiredness as he tries to grip it to write. Drawn back to his translations as if he can’t help himself, doggedly continuing to work as if somehow it might save us, prepare us for whatever’s on the other side of the door.
I try not to shiver at the thought of sleeping alone on this cold stone. I toss him one of the protein bars, and it hits the floor and skitters to a halt against its leg. He doesn’t react.
“Eat,” I say, my voice distorted by the breather mask in place around my nose and mask.
“Not hungry,” he replies shortly, dropping his head into his hands.
My mind’s working so sluggishly that it takes me a few moments before I understand why his voice sounds so different from mine. “At least put your breather on,” I suggest. “You’ll be hungrier after your blood’s got more O2 in it.”
He looks up wordlessly, eyes meeting mine for a second before sliding away toward his pack. Then I figure it out.
When I negotiated with Liz, my only demand—apart from not being shot in the face—was that we get our breathers back. I got to see mine put back in my pack. But Jules…I was so busy trying to avoid the accusation in his stare that I never saw what they did with his when they got us up and moving again.
His breather’s gone.
My thoughts spin as the bottom falls out of my stomach. Mink outfitted me with a breather tank delicately balancing carrying weight against time so that it would have just enough oxygen to see me through to the scheduled rendezvous. Which still has to be more than two weeks away, though I’d need to get back to the surface to know exactly what day it is. As long as I’m careful with it, limiting myself to the eight hours a day my body needs, rather than the many more hours my body wants, it’s enough.
Enough for one person.
Sharing my breather cuts that time in half, and I don’t make it to the rendezvous. I don’t make it off Gaia, and I don’t make it back to Evie.
My next breath is shaky and loud, its sound amplified by the mask over my face. Then I’m crawling forward, my shadow in the lantern light swinging around the surface of the rock wall as I cross to Jules’s side. I pull off the mask and hold it out to him, hand shaking.
His eyes flick up, surprised confusion there.
“You breathe,” I whisper, “while I eat. Then we’ll switch.”
His gaze holds mine for a long moment, searching. Our lies are there, like layers of dust and debris left by time and neglect, concealing the truths engraved beneath. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve buried ourselves too deeply, if the honesty of that moment waking with his arm around me is as lost to history as the race who built this place.
Then he sets down his journal and pencil and reaches out with both hands—one comes to rest against my shaking fingers, steadying them, while the other takes the mask. I exhale, and some of the dust choking my heart drifts away on the air sighing past my lips.
Our dinner is necessarily silent—and at this rate, it seems like conserving our air is a good idea. We switch after I finish my dinner, then switch again. Jules’s head is bowed, hands dangling from his drawn-up knees, breath shallow in the confines of the mask.
For the first time since Liz’s gang jumped us, I pull out my phone. It’s an old, battered junk-heap of a thing. Years ago everyone had one of these—they were so universal they were like ID back before everything went digital. Now there’s a dozen differe
nt companies making newer, better versions, with cutting-edge technologies this one lacks. Jules’s wrist device, for one, with its holographic interface and its kinetic energy charger so that its battery never runs down.
But the nice thing about these phones, even though they’re ancient in technological terms, is that they’re so universal you can always find parts for them. They’re sturdy, and they’re cheap, and when you’re a scavenger you don’t sport fancy tech unless you want some rival gang to rip you off in your sleep.
It runs on solar power—solar power that it hasn’t seen in days. When I swipe my thumb over the screen, the little battery icon flashes a red warning before the circle for my thumbprint unlock appears. I probably only have a few more minutes before it dies on me.
Even if the station were directly above us now, we’re so far underground that there’s no chance of a signal. I can’t call anyone or get any data. If I tried to watch Evie’s last video message, the battery would die instantly. I hunch over the screen, though, turning the brightness down to conserve power, and swipe until I get to my photo gallery.
There’s the selfie I sent to Evie right before I boarded the ship, and before it, a few promo shots of bits of salvage for auctioning online. I keep scrolling until I find the picture I’m looking for.
It’s the last time Evie and I were together. She’s still got her makeup on from work, the dark, smoky eyes and red lips making her look way older than fourteen. You can see her tracker bracelet at the picture’s edge—the bracelet the club put around her wrist, attached to the bone in her arm by dozens of micro-anchors. The only way to remove it is by paying her impossible debt, or lopping off her arm.
Though it’s hard to look past the makeup and the bracelet, she’s wearing pajamas with pink elephants on them, and I’m in my PJs too, and we’re snuggled close on the crappy couch in her room under the club that holds her contract. Our heads are together and you can see my arm where I’m holding the phone up, and we’re grinning. We’d been laughing about something right before I took the picture, and the smiles are real.
I can’t remember what we were laughing about. My eyes blur as my mind sticks on that, turning over and over and over. Why can’t I remember the joke? Why can’t I remember the last thing my sister and I laughed about together?
My breath catches and I choke, drawing my knees up and cradling the phone so that its dim picture is right in front of my eyes.
“So she’s real.”
I jump at the voice, reaching up to dash my tears away. But Jules’s eyes are already on my face—he’s already seen me crying.
“She’s real.” I look back at the phone, eyes hungry for the sight of her face. Trapped behind a rockfall, with bloodthirsty mercs on the other side, under countless tons of rock and sand on a planet so far from home I can’t imagine the distance, without enough air to catch my ride back even if we could get back that way—I’m just trying to look at Evie, and not at the battery symbol flashing urgently in the corner of the screen.
“You were right,” Jules says, lowering the breather mask from his face. He’s moved over to my side so he can look at the picture of my sister. “She’s beautiful. She looks just like you.”
That makes me laugh, but I’m still crying, and I end up half snorting and lifting my arm so I can wipe my nose on my sleeve before I start dripping snot. “Liar.”
“I’m not lying.” His voice is quiet as he says it, and abruptly I remember why there was distance between us, and the warmth of him seems to pull away even though our bodies are still. “Not this time.”
I keep my eyes on my phone, knowing it could go dark at any moment, but I wish I could look up at Jules, too. “I was never going to join them, Jules. I wasn’t lying to you either, about Evie or about me. That was the lie, back there with them. Not this.”
It feels more important than ever that he knows this, that he hear the truth from me even if he’s already seen it in my face or felt it as I passed him the breather. It feels strangely vital that he understand without having to dig for it, or guess, or decipher my expression. I don’t know what waits for us on the other side of that door, but I need him to see me truly before we go through it.
Jules lifts the mask for another breath, but I can tell it’s as much to buy himself time to answer. But even after he’s done, he’s quiet for a while before letting that air out in a sigh. “I don’t know what’s real anymore. I just know I have to be here. I have to find answers for my dad. For myself.”
“I’m real.” My voice sounds thin and quiet against the stone. “And I’m here.” I lift my head, searching for his face in the dim lantern light. I’m here, I said. What I meant was: I’m with you. The words I’d meant as reassurance sound instead like a promise.
He opens his mouth to reply, but before he can, the light flickers. I know before I look down that it’s not the lantern—it’s my phone.
The screen’s dark. Evie’s face is gone. In a moment of blind panic, I can’t even remember what the picture looked like. And I wasn’t watching when it went away—I wasn’t looking at her, those last precious seconds. And I can never get it back.
I’m crying again, holding the phone in my palm like it had been a living thing, cradling it like it’s the loss of this pile of plastic and circuitry and computer chips that’s broken my heart. Then Jules’s arm is around me, and he’s easing the phone away from my hand with the other, and pulling me in against his chest.
We lie down that way, pressed together, legs entwined in the warmth of his sleeping bag, the breather mask between us. We pass the mask back and forth in the dark, finding each other’s hands and fingers and faces by touch. And when I sleep, he wakes me after a time to press the mask against my face, and after an hour or two I do the same for him. Binding ourselves together, as we prepare to face whatever waits on the other side of that final door.
All night we learn each other’s hands and lips as we share this single tie to life, the warmth of his skin still on the plastic mask each time he fits it to the curve of my own face. Each touch is more intimate than any kiss, our minds half-waking, half-dreaming, our two bodies sharing one breath.
I’m torn from sleep by the ground quaking beneath me. I gasp, eyes flying open to meet Jules’s, his fingers still splayed gently on the mask over my face. Sleepy, confused, I would think I was dreaming but for the alarm written so clearly on Jules’s face it’s like I’m looking in a mirror.
Then the air’s split by sound—a massive boom followed by the roar of falling rock, and the ricocheting, multifaceted echo of the initial crack of stone.
We both bolt upright, tangled together but moving as one. My voice is hoarse from the dry air in the breather, and hoarse with exhaustion, and hoarse with sleep. “That was an explosion,” I gasp. “That wasn’t a natural rockfall.”
“I know,” Jules replies, disentangling himself from me so he can grab his pack and shove his gear back into it. “That was a demolition charge.”
I’m struggling up as well, the breather in one hand, my dead phone in the other, staggering in the sudden cold outside his sleeping bag.
If they’ve blasted through the rockfall, it means one thing: we’re out of time.
“OKAY,” I MUTTER, TRYING TO, force myself to calm down. "Okay, the door.” Why didn’t I look at it last night? But I know the answer to that—because I was so tired and so short of oxygen I couldn’t think straight. But now, we’ve only got the time it’ll take Liz, Javier, and the others to navigate the traps we passed on our way here, and given the trail we left them, that won’t be long at all.
Mia lifts her flashlight to shine it on the door for me, stepping back so the beam takes in the whole of it, silent as she waits for me to translate the glyphs—the ones carved on the door are the only features in this otherwise empty chamber. I can feel her presence at my back, but now her silence is supportive. Something’s changed between us, in the night. We both still have questions—we both still see the chasm between us. But
somehow, we’re a we again.
The glyphs seem to swim together, new combinations I’ve never seen tangled in with the old. Translating them isn’t like reading any language I know—it’s about absorbing all their possible meanings and then allowing them to sit together in your mind, until suddenly, like one of those optical illusion puzzles, you can see what they say.
“It’s talking about energy,” I mutter, frowning. “About…not the sun. Mia, I don’t know.”
She stays silent, and for that I’m grateful—this isn’t the moment to point out to me that I don’t know could be a death sentence.
“Here,” I say softly, lifting my free hand to trace a line that curves down to the lower right-hand side of the huge double doors. “There’s something I’m supposed to focus on here, as if I—”
There’s a small square carved into the wall where the curve of the glyphs ends, and I press my fingers against it. With a soft click, the section I’m touching slides out, a rectangle not even as big as my hand, and it’s hollow. Something glints inside—crystalline, something resembling the Undying artifacts we’ve studied—and my heart sinks. No, no, no.
“What is it?” Mia asks, stepping forward to look down at it, then glancing back over her shoulder, as if Liz is only steps away, rather than several rooms.
“A piece of tech goes here, I think,” I say, barely able to speak the words. “A piece of Undying tech. Which we don’t have. We must have missed something, perhaps there was some key we were supposed to pick up, and we didn’t see it, or it was in one of the collapsed rooms.” I’m stumbling over the words. “I don’t know.”
“What?” Her voice is sharp. “No, it can’t! Jules, we haven’t come across bridges made of songs and past spikes shooting up from the floor and through rocks falling from the ceiling to hit this door and not have a stupid key. We don’t need a key, we’ll break in, we’ll pick the lock. There has to be something!”
Pick the lock… I’m staring at the circuitry in the slot.