by Amie Kaufman
We’re stuck waiting for Dex.
The sirens are wailing louder, a second joining the first in a dissonant counterpoint.
Perfututi, we have to get out of here.
Then there’s a sudden scramble behind us, and Dex is throwing himself into the backseat of the jeep, his arms full of something I can’t make out in the dark. Three quick strides, and Atlanta’s in beside him.
Mia hits the accelerator, and the car shoots forward. She yanks the wheel to the left, and we arc around to head straight for the chain-link fence. “Get down,” she barks, so loud her voice cracks.
I double over and twist sideways to get my body below the level of the windshield, and Mia folds herself down beside me, her foot still jammed on the pedal.
The seconds tick by, stretching forever, and I begin to think we must somehow have turned, somehow veered away. Then there’s an almighty crash, a high-pitched noise. And there’s a hurricane all around us, something whirling over my head, a shudder passing through the car that rattles every bone in my body.
And we’re through the fence, tearing out across the open grassland, the car bumping over tussocks, fishtailing wildly as Mia wrestles the wheel for control, without giving up an ounce of speed.
“Veer left,” Dex yells from the back seat. “Left, mountainwards.”
“There’s no way through them,” I shout back. “There’s no pass, we’ll be trapped against the cliffs.”
“Shift left,” he yells again.
Mia looks across at me in the dark. In this moment, I can’t afford to believe any of the signs I’ve been interpreting to mean that Dex might be, even in some small way, on our side. In this moment, I’m just trying not to die.
And I believe he is too.
“Left,” I say, and she swings the wheel.
There’s no way to see what’s ahead of us by the faint starlight, but I know there are mountains, cliffs, looming somewhere before us now. We daren’t turn on the headlights, even if we knew where to find the switch.
“Well?” Mia demands, without turning her head, the wind grabbing at her words. “What now, what’s left?”
“Fifteen seconds,” Dex says.
“Fifteen seconds until what?”
“Ten seconds.” His voice is grim.
I don’t bother asking, because there’s nothing I can do in the next ten seconds, whatever’s coming. Instead, I just count silently down in my head, as Mia finally takes her foot off the accelerator, and finds the brake, slowing us to a halt. I can see the shadowed cliffs in front of us now.
Mia turns her head to look back at the two of them, and past them, to the compound.
I twist as well, searching for any sign of pursuit. There are lights running all over the place, uneven, as though people are carrying them. They’re mobilizing.
“What—” says Mia.
“Now,” says Dex, at the same moment.
And a bright orange ball of flame blossoms up from the facility behind us. An explosion, huge. The boom reaches us a moment later, a physical force.
“What the hell?” I shout.
“The shuttle,” Atlanta says calmly. “It’s not designed to be detonated near vehicles like that. Fuel.”
Of course. As the IA were taking us out of the shuttle, I watched Dex weigh up whether or not he could hit that ignition switch just outside the door. He must have run back to do it just now.
“There could have been people near that thing,” I hear myself say.
“Yeh.” Dex’s voice is calm. “I hope not.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Atlanta says, dismissive. “Keep them busy, they won’t have time to hassle us.”
“Not for long,” I point out.
“Slow them down,” Dex says.
“So now,” Mia says slowly, “we need to give them a reason to think they can stop chasing.”
Atlanta nods, finally looking like she approves of some aspect of Mia. “The vehicle,” she says. “Out, now.”
Mia and I exchange a glance. I don’t know what Atlanta’s planning now, but as one, we dive out of the vehicle. Atlanta’s hauling a rock toward the driver’s side, and Dex is fiddling with a small handheld device he must’ve retrieved from the shuttle. He’s also got something metallic slung over his shoulder, but just now, I’m too busy imagining how loud the gunshots will be as the IA forces catch up to us.
Atlanta shouts something I can’t make out, and then Dex is slapping the device onto the hood of the jeep and she’s dropping the rock onto the accelerator pedal. Mia and I scramble away as the jeep peels off, tires spinning, toward the cliffs out there in the dark.
Together we all watch in silence as it speeds into the night, completely vanishing from view, though the sound of the engine travels back to us, still audible over the faint sirens coming from behind.
And then it strikes the base of the cliff with a massive gust of smoke and fire, the boom shattering the night. Mia gives an inarticulate cry, instinctively shrinking against me as I fling my arms around her, as much for my comfort as hers. I look at Dex, whose eyes are calm and cold, and suddenly I’m not so sure he’s an ally after all. That device he put on the car—he planned that explosion, I’m sure of it. He and Atlanta acted as one unit, so in sync they barely needed words.
“Thisways,” says Atlanta, pointing along the valley.
They’re just far enough away that if we ran for it now, we might be able to elude them in the dark. Even with their training and their strength—we’d stand a chance. I take a step backward, feeling Mia tense with understanding and readiness in my arms.
Then Dex reaches for something behind his back. At some point—when he went to destroy the shuttle, I’m guessing—he exchanged the rifle for a more manageable handgun. Now, he pulls it from his waistband and fixes its barrel on us. His hand doesn’t waver.
“Thisways,” Atlanta repeats, her voice expectant.
At my side, Mia gulps a shaky breath. I squeeze her shoulders before releasing her, and slowly—our movements careful, our hands raised—we do as our new captors command.
THE FRENCH BORDER CROSSING STATION IS LITTLE MORE THAN A PAIR of officials in a gatehouse with a few floodlights, but it’s as impassable as a prison gate. None of us have passports with us, and even if we did, it’s been hours since we busted out of IA custody. Our names—and probably our faces too—are bound to be on some kind of watch list.
Not to mention the fact that we’re driving a stolen car.
Technically it’s the second car we’ve stolen in a few hours, the first one now smoldering at the base of a cliff. This one we found at a gas station—gasolinera, apparently—after the first car we broke into turned out to be too modern to hotwire, with a fancy computer regulating its ignition. It took several tense moments of explanation, Dex’s stolen gun still trained on us, to convince our captors that we needed to find a crappier car. Now we’re in an old, broken-down junker of a station wagon—which is fine by me, because we don’t want to attract attention anyway.
I’m hoping the IA is too busy sorting through the wreckage at the bottom of that cliff to send someone after us, but it won’t take long for them to realize there aren’t any bodies there. And not long after that to think of looking for other recent car thefts. It was a risk, crashing our original transport, but it was worth it. Drive away at top speed in a car, someone’s going to chase you. Send that car up in a ball of flames, and you buy yourself some time to get away on foot, in the dark, before they realize you’re not smoldering somewhere in the wreckage.
Turns out driving isn’t all that complicated—but driving knowing that the guy sitting behind you has a gun pointed at the back of your seat?
Much harder.
A handful of other cars are stopped on this side of the border. A couple are outfitted with roof racks with kayaks, bicycles, and other unidentifiable outdoor gear, and I’d lay good odds that the drivers are sleeping inside until morning. The IA guys talked about a heightened state of security, so there
might be people here who didn’t realize they’d need to have papers to get through a usually lax border crossing.
It’s not like there’s a fence along the whole border—we could make the crossing on foot by heading out into the farmland nearby, but that would mean leaving behind our only means of transport, and we’d be in the middle of nowhere without a ride.
Evie and I used to have this plan to go to Europe one day once she was free from her contract, and we’d spent hours researching how we’d make it work. We planned to rent a cheap car in Barcelona and then drive until we hit Amsterdam, sleeping in the back whenever we couldn’t afford a hostel.
My heart twinges painfully at the sight of others doing what we’d planned. I suppose we never will now. Either I’ll be in jail or the world will end, and either way, not a lot of room for road trips there. Evie hasn’t heard from me in weeks now—as far as she knows, I’m still on Gaia. As far as she knows, I never even made it to Gaia. She could think I’m dead.
And if she doesn’t—then it’s because the IA have taken her, detained her, and now they’ll never let her go so long as Jules and I are on the run.
I swallow the stabbing in my heart at that thought, and focus.
I pull the car off the road to join the others. The crunch of the gravel under the tires is the only sound that’s interrupted the silence for at least an hour. In the rearview mirror I can see Atlanta, whose eyes are scanning the darkness as if she can see through it. Her expression suggests she’s not pleased with what she sees.
I cut the engine, and we all sit in silence for a few seconds, listening to the metal ping erratically as it cools.
Behind me, Dex lets out his breath in a long, steady exhale. “You two are sirsly resourceful.” He sounds impressed.
Atlanta, when she speaks, does not. “You,” she says, nudging at Jules’s seat with her knee, “how far are we from Prague?”
“My name is Jules,” says Jules. His voice is quiet and even, but I can hear the anger and fear simmering underneath the calm. “And I don’t know.”
I watch in the rearview mirror as Atlanta’s eyes narrow. “Guess,” she suggests in a low voice.
“Why are you trying to get to Prague?” I interrupt. If Prague has something to do with their assignment here on Earth, it’s a good bet their “destin” has something to do with sabotaging the International Alliance, which has its headquarters there.
Atlanta’s eyes flick toward me, then up to meet my gaze in the mirror. “You fooling? You think we’re gonna tell you all our plans now, like we’re friends? You’re prisoners—shut up and drive.”
Dex clears his throat. “Slow it, Peaches,” he says softly.
Atlanta whirls on him. “Stop calling me that.” In this moment she looks as sulky as any human teenager, and the effect is chilling. “Not in front of the protos.”
I unbuckle my seat belt and turn to lean against the door so I can see both of the aliens in the backseat. The strangeness of it all is starting to get to me—I can feel a giddy sort of semi-hysterical amusement bubbling up, and I press my head back against the cool window until it passes.
“We’re out now,” Dex is saying. “Let’s shift by ourselves. No one will believe them if they try to warn anyone—they didn’t believe them when we were sitting right there in that cell.”
“We can’t drive the car,” Atlanta retorts. “We wouldn’t have known where to look for the car in the first place. And what do we say to the men in the little house there? I know your Earth geography is sirsly shaky, but we can’t walk to Prague and get there before—” She glances at me. “In time.”
“I can’t drive there either,” I say, raising my voice. I can see where Atlanta’s heading, and I do not like it. “Those men in the little house? That’s the border crossing. None of us have papers, and we’re probably wanted criminals at this point anyway, and we’re in a car somebody’s bound to report as stolen at any moment, if they haven’t already.”
Atlanta considers this, then glances at Dex, who just shrugs as if to concede defeat. “They’re resourceful, like you said,” she says finally, raising a defiant eyebrow at Dex. “They’ll find a way.”
She’s turning something over and over in her hands, and as something metallic catches the light, I realize she’s got a Swiss Army knife. She must have found it in the seat-back pocket, or else in the first car that turned out to be too fancy to hotwire. It’s not exactly a deadly weapon, not like Dex’s gun, but as she examines attachment after attachment with interest, suddenly that miniature corkscrew seems a lot scarier than it ever has before.
Dex draws breath to reply, but before he can speak, Jules’s voice breaks in.
“We need rest first,” he says firmly. “We can’t drive through the border right now, we don’t have the right documents. If we leave the car here and try it on foot, we can’t rely on just managing to steal a third car in one night. If we stay here, we can blend in with the others who are spending the night here while they figure out what to do. We might as well stop for a while too, until we have a plan.”
I’m about to protest, to remind him that every minute we waste brings the International Alliance that much closer to tracking us down, but he catches my eye and I fall silent. I know that look—I’ve given him that look. That shut up, I’ve got this look.
So I shut up.
Atlanta glares at him, and then at me, and then at Dex. She glares a lot, I’ve found. Finally, she speaks. “Beno. I’m gonna put the knife away, for now. But both of you, think on this: You run, we’ll find you. We’re stronger, we’re faster. And if I gotta waste time tracking you, I will kill you when I find you.”
When. Not if.
My legs are shaking when I step out of the car, and I lean heavily against the door while Jules circles round to my side. I don’t doubt Atlanta’s telling the truth.
The two Undying move away a few steps, ostensibly to examine the tree we’re parked by, but they’re conversing in low voices. I can’t help but notice, though, that even while he’s talking to Atlanta, Dex is running his fingers down the bark slowly, wonderingly, studying the tree like … well, I guess it is the first one he’s ever had a chance to look at up close.
I keep my body relaxed, leaning against the car, and my voice low. “If we get back in the car and lock the doors, I think I could get it started before they think to break a window. We can’t outrun them on foot, but we could drive away.”
Jules turns to lean against the car next to me. “We have to go with them,” he says softly.
I stiffen in spite of myself and turn to stare at him. “Are you crazy? Has your brain finally just collapsed under its own weight?”
His gaze is serious. “What alternative do you propose? The world is ending, Mia, and we’re the only ones who know about it. We have to find out more. We’re learning more and more about these Undying every second we’re with them, and at some point, one of them will slip.”
“How do you know?” I wish I could stop my voice shaking.
“Because someone always does,” Jules counters. “No one is that good.”
“They’re not someones.” Even though Atlanta’s turned away, I can still feel the cold, unwavering intensity of her stare. The way she never seems to blink. The predatory fluidity of her movements. “We have no idea what they can do.”
Jules keeps his voice low, but his eyebrows lift to emphasize his words. “That’s exactly my point. We have no idea. But Mia, they’ve already slipped. Remember when Atlanta said they only need a few people on the surface?”
I certainly remember the coldness of her voice as she said it. “So?”
“Well, you can’t take over a whole planet with just a few shuttles. Just like you can’t take over a whole planet with just one ship. But it’s not just one ship, is it?”
My mouth opens, and I blink at him, my surprise briefly eclipsed by the reminder of just how quickly Jules thinks, how beautifully his mind works. “It’s a Trojan Horse. A ship full of
portals.”
“And if they can somehow do that here, build portals on the surface …”
“… then they won’t need more than a few,” I breathe, finishing the thought for him. “Holy shit, Jules. You’re right.”
Jules leans closer to me. “We’ve already tried letting the IA sort it out. Maybe they still will—I hope they do. Maybe someone will actually look at those DNA samples back there, and the word will get out, but we haven’t gotten very far on maybes and hopes. On the ship, they were talking about this ‘Prime-One destin’ like it was one of the most important parts of the invasion—and we’re going to figure it out. We have to. And maybe if we can figure out how they’re building the portals, or where, we’ll stop what’s happening. But we have to stay with them to do that.”
My eyes sting, and I know I’m tired if the mere thought of attempting Jules’s plan makes me want to cry. “They’re crazy,” I whisper. “She is, anyway. Did you see her with that knife? She’s going to snap and straight-up murder us, Jules.”
“She won’t.” Jules sounds confident. “Dex won’t let her.”
I groan. “Even if you’re right and Dex is somehow on our side, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she doesn’t exactly seem to listen to him.”
“She does, though.” Jules sounds surprised, and when I glance his way he’s looking at me with his eyebrows up. “She might be giving us all these orders, but haven’t you noticed that whenever Dex does speak up, she changes her mind? They’re like twins. She might seem like the more dominant one, but she listens to him, even though she doesn’t act like it.”
I have to admit that he has a point, though he’s got a lot more faith in Dex than I have. “When did you turn into the expert on alien behavior?”
“I think some things must be universal.” Jules’s lips twitch. “Besides, I have a little experience being given orders by a … very decisive partner.”
He’s amused, his eyes gleaming at me, but the words still hurt, a little twinge of self-consciousness plucking at my heart. “Then you propose we don’t try to get away? We just take them to Prague?”