by Amie Kaufman
But now he’s just gazing at me, and as his mouth closes and curves into a smile, brown eyes warming, he murmurs, “I am never going to figure you out, am I?”
Maybe I was just always a puzzle. Exactly the kind of puzzle that calls to a guy like Jules.
“I hope not,” I reply.
He reaches out, and I slip my hand into his, and together we sprint for the control room, and for our last-ditch effort to stop this portable apocalypse from lifting off.
SEVEN.
We barrel through the door to the control room, ricocheting off each other and sending Mia’s smaller frame into the wall. She waves a hand to urge me on as she gasps for breath, and I stumble forward to stare at the huge control panel. The metallic stone is lit up from within now, circuitry gleaming. The pause before the lights flash for the next sequence in the countdown is interminable, stretching for eternity, but it’s still not long enough.
Charlotte had me at gunpoint last time I was here, but that wasn’t the real threat—the real threat was hanging over Mia’s head, though she didn’t know it. I worked out how to power up the ship, and the launch sequence was only a few steps from that. I said nothing, hoping they wouldn’t make those next few connections themselves. But Charlotte told me they had people who could read the glyphs, and clearly that was true. They managed to initiate the launch, compete with autopilot. My problem is that I didn’t have enough time to learn how to turn this thing off.
And if Mia’s guess about the Undying is right, perhaps there isn’t a way to shut down the launch.
As I stare, more panels light up, signaling their readiness.
Okay, maybe I can work backward—it’s showing me which areas are involved in the launch, maybe I can shut them down.
I run my fingers over the panels and along the grooves carved there as the lights dim for another flash, feeling the current tingle through my fingertips. Mia’s standing beside me, her hand resting on my back, waiting to be told what to do, not wasting an instant on asking questions.
Six.
“Down there,” I snap out, stumbling over the words, pointing to the other end of the small room. The lights dim again. “The section lighting up blue, second from the top—yes, that one. Hit that on my word.” We both ready our hands above what I hope are the instruments for measuring altitude and trajectory. Maybe. They’re something to do with moving quickly, and I think they specify movement in a particular direction. Maybe if they don’t work, the ship will pause until it can fix them.
Five.
“Now!”
Our hands slam down in unison.
Four.
The start-up continues without a pause.
I don’t know what I’m missing, and it could be anything. I could be a fraction off in my guess, or a world away—or I could be absolutely right, and whatever Charlotte and her team did to control the ship remotely has rendered it impossible to shut down the sequence. And I have about ten seconds to work out what to do.
We try another combination, and another, moving together in perfect synchronization, Mia hitting the panels almost as I speak their names, but we might as well be fleas on a dog for all the difference we make—less than fleas, we don’t even cause an itch.
Three.
“Come on,” Mia shouts, smacking both hands down on the control panel in unison, frustration taking her over.
Two.
If this were a story, the ship would magically shut down in this moment, her hands having incredibly found the perfect combination. Instead, as she turns huge eyes to meet mine, the lights give us our final flash.
One.
We both stagger back against the walls as the huge ship pulls itself free of the ice, our ears ringing with the roar of its ascent. I push off my side of the room to stumble over to her, planting my hands on either side of her head to stop myself from crushing her against the wall when the floor tilts. She reaches up to grab my collar, hauling my head down so she can shout in my ear.
“What now? Fry its circuits or something, short out its engine?” I lift my head to look down at her. It’s not a bad idea—if we can cause an error, maybe…but if we destroy the ship’s ability to pilot itself, there’s no chance she’ll land safely.
“Maybe,” I shout back. “We could crash it, or get it to self-destruct on this side of the portal, instead of above Earth.”
“How long do we have?” she shouts in my ear, up on her toes.
I have no idea how fast we’re climbing, though my body’s protesting the G-forces like we’re in an old-school rocketship. I shake my head. I don’t know how long we’ve got. Seconds? Minutes?
Not long enough to say the things to her that I want to say.
The wall’s shaking against my hand, the ground bucking beneath my feet, and it’s as if every thought in my brain has been shaken loose, landing together in one enormous pile, too tangled to ever be picked apart again.
I want to tell her what it means to me that she’s here.
I want to tell her how much I wish she weren’t.
I want to tell her how glad I am I met her.
I want to apologize that I ever did.
“Mia,” I try. “It’s been—I mean, I’m—”
I stare down at her, helpless, and she slings her arms up around my neck, pulling me into a fierce hug. “I know,” she says in my ear. “I know, Jules. Me too.”
And so I draw back, and I nod, because we don’t have time. “Whatever system they rigged up to get it to fly unpiloted, I don’t think we can undo it. But I think I can at least feed it some additional commands. Perhaps enough to confuse it. If we can fool it into trying to accelerate and reverse at once, maybe we can cause a fatal power surge.”
We push apart, grabbing at anything we can to keep our balance as we turn back to the console. “The ship’s so unstable, a power surge would…” Even shouting, I can hear the knowledge—and the determination—in Mia’s voice.
“Destroy it,” I agree. “Before it makes it through the portal. Before it reaches Earth.”
And with us on board.
The earthquake beneath our feet abruptly stops, the roaring dying back to a loud but even hum, the floor suddenly still, and we’re left standing there—Mia gripping the doorframe, me braced against the console, blinking.
We’re past the point of no return, our commitment already made, and neither of us hesitates. There’s no time to think anymore, no time to imagine what will happen if we succeed—whether it will be quick.
We stagger upright, turning toward the console—and the world goes black.
Green and gold bursts across my darkened vision, and pain explodes down my arms and legs, pounding at my temples, trying to turn me inside out. I’m dimly aware of my body hitting the floor, and then I’m spinning, my gut churning like I’m cresting the top of a roller coaster, and falling down, down, down. I want to run, but I can’t remember how to move.
I’m not sure if I’m dead or not, but it strikes me a moment later that the fact that I’m thinking about it means I’m probably not.
Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.
I am…alive, hopefully.
There’s a groan somewhere nearby, and then some cursing that includes a couple of words I’ve never heard before, though I’m too dizzy to take notes. Then reality snaps into focus, as the voice snags in my brain: that’s Mia’s voice.
And I’ve felt this way before. This is how I felt after passing through the last portal.
Oh, deus, the portal.
“Mia,” I groan, rolling over onto my front. “Mia, we have to—it went through.”
She’s lying on her back, eyes closed, and when I speak she manages to roll onto her side to face me, curling into a fetal position. The noise she makes isn’t a word, but I know she’s trying. I force myself up to my elbows, and try to sit, the world swimming.
“We have to what?” she mumbles, and that’s when it hits me. We have to nothing. If we destroy the ship n
ow, so close to Earth, we’re doing the Undying’s work for them. Maybe I can find a way to prevent it, to turn it around, to take it back. Even as I climb unsteadily to my feet, moving on automatic, I know I haven’t a hope.
I couldn’t even abort the launch sequence. Turning off the autopilot and managing to steer this thing back through the portal would take years of study.
There’s nothing else to do, though, so I grab the control panel for balance and stare down at the lights racing across it, blinking to clear my vision.
“Everything hurts,” Mia mutters on the floor, still in a ball. “I was supposed to be dead by now. This hurts a lot more than dead. At least it didn’t blow up.…If it was a bomb, if they meant us to take it back to destroy Earth, it’d be blowing up now, right?”
The crystalline circuits on the panels before me are blinking on and off, the sections used for launch dimming, and new areas slowly coming to life as power’s diverted to other systems. I trace the glyphs with my fingers, trying to make myself understand what they might mean. And then I see one I know. The same swooping line I followed, thinking I was leading us to the engines. The swooping line that led to the long hallway full of portals. Why is power diverting there?
Hope surges through me, followed a moment later by horror.
“Mia,” I say slowly, and I know she hears it in my voice, because she rolls to all fours, and with a gasp, pushes herself to her feet to join me, wrapping an arm around my waist for balance—the portal’s taken her as badly as it did last time. “I don’t think it’s going to self-destruct—I don’t think it was ever meant to be a bomb at all. I think it’s a Trojan Horse.”
“A what?” she whispers, staring down blearily at the panels before us.
“It’s…” I grasp for the quickest explanation. “All right, it’s this ancient story from Greece, it was called The Odyssey, and these—”
She cuts me off, shoving an elbow into my ribs and gasping, “I know what the damn Trojan Horse was! What the hell are you talking about?”
“The—the Trojan Horse,” I repeat, like an idiot. “The Trojans brought it inside their walls, and all the Greeks hiding inside poured out to slaughter them. The power’s diverting to where the portals are. I think it’s bringing them all online.”
“But they’re one-way portals,” she replies, staring at me in confusion. “They look just like the one we came through from the temple. They don’t lead anywhere, they lead…” The words die in her throat.
I say it anyway. “They lead here. From wherever the Undying are now, if they are still alive like you said, to this ship. Currently in orbit around—”
“Around Earth,” whispers Mia.
“If they’re trying to take Earth, they’re not using the ship as a bomb. They’re using it as a gateway to come here themselves.”
“No,” she murmurs, pushing away from me, and I follow her as she stumbles through the doorway, picking up speed as we run toward the portals.
I’ve never wanted so badly to be wrong.
I’ve never been so sure I’m not.
I CONCENTRATE ON TRYING NOT to puke, because it’s hard to run while you’re heaving your guts out. But focusing on the side effects of the portal that brought this ship back to Earth also means I don’t have to think about what’s happening.
Yeah, right. If there’s anything I can do while trying not to die, it’s think about how utterly goddamn screwed we are.
All this time. Every puzzle, every step through their carefully laid-out temples. The temples themselves, designed to be tantalizing clues—tantalizing traps. The ship, with its doors, and its hallways, and its controls simple enough that a teenager—albeit an academic genius—figured out how to fly it in a matter of hours. At least—enough to fly it straight back to Earth.
Exactly where the Undying intended it to go.
This is what the secret warning was trying to point us to. The Nautilus spiral in the code, the glyph that warned us about the apocalypse, the unspoken catastrophe that Jules’s dad feared. We’ve helped deliver the end of the world.
The prize was never a lump of Undying tech that would save my sister or exonerate Jules’s dad. The prize was always Earth. We were just wrong about who the raiders were.
The blood pumping through my veins, with its healthy dose of adrenaline and utter panic, is proving to be a potent antidote to the portal hangover. If only Jules had known that all he had to do to get me moving after we came through the portal back at the temple was scare the shit out of me.
I want to laugh, a hysterical reaction, but I just gasp for air. All I can hear is the harshness of our breathing over the hum of the engines, purring gently now that we’re in orbit.
We pass the intersection where Javier knocked out that Alliance soldier, but he’s gone. Either he came to, or one of his comrades got him out.
Jules and I are alone.
I wish I hadn’t left the other rifle at the airlock. Of course, at the time, the ship was empty, evacuated for launch. We had no reason to think we’d need weapons. And, given how I froze during the escape plan with Javier and Hansen, no reason to think I’d be able to use one in a pinch.
I may not be able to shoot a person, but damned if I wouldn’t shoot whatever freakish alien bastard comes squirming through those portals.
We round the corner that opens onto the portal corridor, and Jules has to reach out and haul back on my arm to counteract the momentum that tries to send me plunging onward. I blink sweat and tears from my eyes, dropping into a crouch so I can peer around the corner. The rows of portals are still solid, dark.
“Nothing’s happening.” I’m panting from the run, from fear, from relief. “You were wrong.”
“They only go liquid when something’s coming through,” Jules replies, breathing as hard as I am, but struggling to get it under control. “Remember the temple portal? Looked like stone on the exit side after we came through, but Liz and her gang still came through after us later. Just because it looks solid now doesn’t mean it won’t change in a few seconds.”
I actually don’t remember what the other side of the temple portal looked like at all, being too busy having a seizure on the ice, but in this moment I’m willing to take his word for it. “Then what do we do? We can’t just sit here and wait, what if—”
“The lights.” Jules points, hand outstretched over my shoulder. He’s crouching just behind me, voice in my ear. Any other moment and the sound of it would give me shivers, make me want to lean back a fraction and feel the warmth of his chest on my back. Just now, though, his tone only makes me feel colder. “The lights over the portals. They’re on, and they weren’t before. They’re active.”
He’s right. But before I can reply, the portal at the far end of the corridor ripples with a sound like a distant earthquake, like a shockwave in reverse. It’s so low I feel it in my gut, through the soles of my boots, in the marrow of my bones.
And something steps through.
Jules’s hand on my shoulder tightens, but I don’t need the warning. We both pull back out of sight, taking turns to peek around the corner for a heartbeat here, a breath there.
It’s wearing a suit of some kind, though nothing like what our astronauts wear. Bipedal, like we thought. Tall, taller than Jules. I can’t see if it has arms or a face or anything else. Then, between one glance and the next, a second figure appears, the sound of the portal rebounding against my eardrums and settling into the pit of my stomach.
They’re making noises, harsh, distorted sounds that mean nothing, but do suggest they can hear each other—and us.
I take a careful breath, exhaling the words as softly as I can: “There are only two of them.”
“And only two of us,” Jules replies. His hand on my shoulder is shaking, his whole body is shaking—or mine is, and the tremor I’m feeling is my own terror.
Two unarmed kids, neither of us exactly trained in combat, against two alien members of a species capable of creating the largest-scale
hoax in the known galaxy, capable of insane cunning and patience just to find the right kind of life-form, the right kind of planet to take over. We don’t stand a chance. But without us, neither does Earth.
Because Earth doesn’t know what’s up here. If Javier does manage to steal an IA shuttle, it’ll take him time to get it away from the magnetic signal-scrambling effect at Gaia’s pole; it’ll take him time to transmit the message, time for the IA honchos to get it, discuss it, make a decision. And even if he manages all of that, he’s still only warning them that the ship could explode. Now that we’re in orbit, and the ship hasn’t turned into a bomb, his warning will be meaningless except to make the IA all the more cautious about sending an exploratory team up here. They’ll take their time, making sure to get it right. They could spend months developing exactly the right bomb squad team to explore what they think is an empty ship.
By which time the Undying could have a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand troops ready to swarm through, carrying god knows what kind of tech-powered weapons to obliterate us all.
I can feel tears running down my cheeks, as though my body’s already decided that it’s hopeless, that we’ll die, that everyone we love on Earth will die. That I’ll never see Evie again. That I’ll never have the rush of standing atop Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers again. That I’ll never eat lime chicken and porcini wild rice again.
To hell with what my body thinks.
“We’re not letting them take Earth,” I hiss.
“Wait.” Jules’s grip on my arm is still tight, as though he expects me to go barreling into the corridor without a plan. And just now I’m not sure he’s wrong. “Look.”
The two figures seem to be conferring, then one turns and slots something into a groove beside the portal they arrived through. The surface shimmers and turns oily, and then one of the figures casually tosses something through.