by Amie Kaufman
I show up on a rusty bicycle, and my cousin’s riding a stolen policeman’s motorbike. That’s us in a nutshell, really.
His blue-and-white steed is parked under a tree, and he’s pacing nervously beside it. He always paces when he’s thinking. He turns, spots us, and stares for a moment. Then he breaks into a jog, closing the gap between us.
I’m forced to drop my bicycle, and it clangs to the ground as my cousin throws his arms around me.
“God, Jules.” He sounds hoarse, but whatever emotion was coming is abruptly stifled as he lets go of me as quickly as he grabbed me. “Dear God, you smell unbelievably bad.”
His familiar face, his familiar voice, both part of my life for as long as I can remember—together they bring me a little undone. The tiredness and the hunger catch up with me, and my laugh sounds shaky to my own ears.
“Neal, this is Mia,” I say, stepping aside to introduce the others. Usually I’d say something more. This is Mia, my friend. This is Mia, my classmate. Something to give him some context. But I hear myself hitch on the end of her name, as if I’m swallowing the rest of that sentence, and I realize in that instant that I have no idea what it would even be.
This is Mia … my girlfriend?
The word is both completely insufficient for what she is to me, and at the same time, completely presumptuous. But still …
She offers her hand to shake, and Neal sketches an elaborate bow over it, lifting her fingers close to his lips, miming the action of kissing them.
“You,” he tells her, “do not smell terrible at all. I’m sure you couldn’t.” He peeks up at her, mischief in his eyes, and though she looks a little like she wants to roll hers, Mia is smiling anyway. Neal has that effect on everyone.
“Atlanta,” I say, gesturing to the next of our party.
She glances sidelong at Mia, and then offers her hand, just as my partner did. And Neal, of course, repeats his routine.
“You also smell better than my cousin,” he tells her, though he doesn’t tease a smile out of her, and something in Neal’s expression flickers warily. He knows something’s not right.
“And Dex,” I say. Dex is already smiling, and for a moment I forget he’s an alien. He’s adapting so quickly. They’re like chameleons.
Neal clearly takes that smile as encouragement, and mock-kisses Dex’s hand too. “And you,” he concludes, “I could positively eat.”
Dex’s smile flickers, and his expression goes a bit blank—but oddly, he doesn’t seem entirely put off by Neal’s ebullient friendliness. Instead, he almost looks … shy.
Human. And like he might be blushing.
“I have a hotel room,” Neal says, stepping back. “I couldn’t book for all of us. The whole continent’s at orange security alert, thanks to you-know-what, up there in the sky.” He jabs a finger up.
“What’s the word on it?” Atlanta asks, looking up, as if the ship might be visible right now.
“It’s all anyone’s talking about,” Neal replies. “Front page on every site. The IA transported it back from Gaia, and everyone’s arguing about who gets the tech that must be aboard.”
Mia and I exchange a glance that silently acknowledges everything that’s wrong about what he just said, but nobody corrects him. Atlanta and Dex just listen, blank-faced.
“You can actually see it from down here, certain times of day,” Neal continues. “Anyway, you can’t book into a hotel without a passport right now, but I managed to get a ground floor room with a window, so we shouldn’t have much trouble unofficially checking you in.”
Dex and Atlanta both look at me again, and I realize a lot of what he’s saying probably doesn’t scan.
No wonder they took a couple of Earthling hostages with them. They were supposed to land much closer to Prague—they need us to get from here to there, despite all their skills.
Though to judge by the speed and ease with which Dex, at least, is adapting, they might not need us for long.
I swallow the icy trickle of fear that thought brings, and try to focus on my cousin as he rummages in his pocket.
“Here,” he says, holding out a little plastic package. “A new SIM card for your watch, Jules. I replaced mine, too, after your last call. They won’t be able to track either of us now.” He casts a longing look over his shoulder at the gendarme’s bike, and lets out a sigh. “I suppose Fleur will have to stay behind. I’ve disabled her tracking chip, but sooner or later someone will find her, and I’d rather be far away when they do.”
The rest of us keep our bicycles, and nobody speaks as we wheel them silently out of the park. His hotel is only a few blocks away, and Neal strolls through the front door while we head down the alleyway beside it. A couple of minutes later he’s popping open his window with a loud creak of rusty hinges, and helping pull the four of us through.
It’s a modest room in a family-run pensione, with two small double beds topped by gaudy, flowery bedspreads, and an emphatic sign littered with incorrectly used quotation marks warning against “smoking” tobacco or “electronic” cigarettes—the sort of sign you know there’s a story behind, if it’s that large. There’s a trio of backpacks on the bed.
Mehercule, please let there be fresh clothes in there.
Mia speaks. “Atlanta, Dex, you can shower first.”
The two have barely spoken a word since we met Neal, but their unspoken question is obvious now—they look around, their gazes lighting first on the door that leads out of the room, and then the door that leads to the little bathroom.
Do spacefaring aliens even know what a shower is?
“Neal, could you show them how the shower works?” I ask.
He shoots me a querying glance that only lasts a beat, then nods smoothly. “Of course,” he says, leading the way through into the bathroom. Dex follows without hesitation, but Atlanta halts long enough to eye the two of us speculatively, and then crosses the room to shut the window and latch it. It’s an old building, and the window shrieks in its frame—she doesn’t have to say a word for us to understand her meaning.
If we try to slip out while they’re in the next room, she’ll hear. And we’ll wish we’d stayed put.
As she turns to join her partner, I crack open one of the complimentary bottles of water on the nightstand and hand it to Mia, then pick up the other for myself. In the bathroom, I can hear Neal passing out towels, showing them how to control the water flow and temperature, and jokingly asking if anyone wants help washing their backs. When he reemerges, Atlanta firmly closes the door behind him.
He looks back over his shoulder, then pulls a face. “Aw, they’re staying in together? Boy, did I misread that one.”
“No,” says Mia. “You didn’t. They just have different ideas about modesty. And probably, they want to talk where we can’t hear.”
“That seems more likely,” Neal agrees solemnly. “I’m pretty sure he swings my way, and few can resist my charms.”
Oh, Neal. You’ve got no idea. I doubt he even swings toward our species.
“We need to hurry,” Mia says quietly, sinking down to sit on the edge of the bed.
I settle behind her, ignoring—mostly—the way my thighs scream a protest at all their recent cycling as I lower myself down.
Neal takes a spot on the other bed, opposite us.
“Neal,” I start, “I’m going to tell you about the last few weeks, and I don’t have time to convince you I’m not crazy. I need you to just believe me.”
The laughter falls away from his eyes, and he nods, instantly serious. “I’ll believe anything,” he says. “I know where you’ve been.”
That pulls me up short. “You do?”
He nods. “A few weeks ago, I got a request through the IA for a vid conference with your father. He’d been using all his allotted time for you, so I was surprised. When we got on, he started talking about how he needed a hand with some of his equations.”
I nod. That was as good a cover as any for speaking to Neal. My fat
her’s mathematics are second to none, but that doesn’t mean he’s a specialist in every area. As an engineer, Neal goes places my father doesn’t, sometimes. And though he’s only just graduated from university, first, he’s family, and therefore to be trusted, and second, he’s an Addison, and therefore brilliant.
“It took a while before I understood what he was getting at, with all his hints and veiled references,” Neal admits. “It’s a pretty insane realization to come to—that you, of all people, had somehow gotten yourself to Gaia.”
I nod. “That’s where I’ve been, and Mia too.”
Neal glances back and forth between us, and shakes his head. “From anyone else,” he says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”
“We can hardly believe it,” Mia replies, and when I glance down at her, her eyes meet mine, and we’re sharing a look full of everything we’ve survived. Nobody else on this planet or any other will ever understand what these past few weeks have been like. Nobody, except Mia. “But if you can hardly believe that,” she continues, with one of her grins, “then you’re going to love what’s coming next.”
Together, we run him through the briefest possible version of our adventures. The temple, the puzzles, the scratched Nautilus warnings. The ship—its discovery and its launch. The fact that Charlotte Stapleton, the woman who granted Neal his internship, was really an undercover IA operative conning me onto the surface of Gaia. Neal barely seems to react to that news—probably because we don’t give him a chance. Because that brings us to the arrival of the Undying.
To the fact that we’ve finally found alien life, and, unbelievably, two of them are in our hotel bathroom right now. Looking almost as human as the three of us.
Neal is utterly silent through the rest of our story: the shuttle landing, our escape from IA detention, the midnight bike ride across the French countryside.
“And then we reached you,” I finish quietly.
His face looks ashen, his hands folded tightly together in his lap. For a wild moment I think he’s about to be sick, for I’ve never seen him look so gutted. We’ve met with setbacks before, but Neal’s always figured out a way through. I remember arriving for polo practice after my father’s arrest to hear Neal arguing with the team captain to keep me on despite the scandal surrounding my family. He never even needed to consult me, he just did it. And it worked.
Neal always has a plan.
Now, Neal’s eyes flick toward the bathroom door, the sound of running water drowning out everything else. And when he looks back, I can see him like a mirror, reflecting my own fear back to me.
And then my cousin, the guy who always has a plan, turns to look at me. “What do we do?”
The words are a blow all by themselves. I hadn’t dared think it, but part of me believed that once Neal caught up to us, once we told him all that had happened, he’d grin one of those devastating grins and tell us the solution we’d missed, in all our exhaustion and urgency.
Mia saves me by answering. “They think we’re their hostages,” she says softly, tilting her head toward the bathroom door. “We’re playing along partly because we’re pretty sure they could kill us without breaking a sweat if we ran. But mostly because we think there’s a chance of learning more about their plan if we stick close.”
We think, my mind echoes, the words warming that core of me that Neal’s fear left shivering. A few hours ago I was trying to convince Mia I was right. Now, it seems, she believes in the plan. Or in me. I don’t much care which. I want to take her hand, but suddenly, in front of Neal, I find myself strangely shy.
“We already know that the plan has something to do with building more portals. Or we think it does.” I suck in a deep breath and clear my throat. “That’s how they’ll get the rest of their army down here, we think, after this first wave sets up the portals on the surface.”
Neal’s face suddenly mobilizes, and though the shift in expression is minute, his eyes sharpen, and he straightens. “Portals? Like the one that sends ships to Gaia?” When I nod, he leans forward, brows lifting. “Jules—that’s what I’ve been working on with your father.”
I blink at him. “With Dad?”
Neal nods, energized once more—even if his eyes are still a bit wild, and he looks like he wishes there was a continent between him and the bathroom containing the Undying aliens. “He’s been trying to decode them while he’s been in detention, figure out how they work. He must have suspected that if he was right—if the Undying tech was dangerous—that someday we might need a kill switch. A way to shut them all down.”
My heart seizes, and I feel a hand grab mine and squeeze tight. Mia, it seems, is not afflicted by shyness. “And?”
Neal glances at the bathroom and back. “And we were making progress. I don’t have much of the data—mostly, your dad would send me specs and I’d walk him through them. He’s better at maths than I’ll ever be, but he’s not an engineer. And everything we did had to be coded, pretty cloak-and-dagger stuff—he had limited calls out, you know, and they listened to everything we said.”
Mia’s breath hitches. “So you don’t know how to shut them down?”
Neal shakes his head. “But he might.”
Pent-up frustration and eagerness make me lurch to my feet. “So we call him, we tell him I’m back, we …” I trail off, looking at Neal’s face. “What?”
Neal’s grim expression makes my heart sink even before he says, quietly, “He never made our last call. We were supposed to talk two days ago, and there was nothing. And when I called the IA switchboard and tried to get to someone in the detention facility, I was locked out.”
I sag back down onto the end of the bed, half leaning against Mia, who leans back.
“So we keep following them.” My voice sounds exhausted even to my own ears. “Try to convince someone what’s happening. Try not to get arrested.”
Neal draws a quavering breath. “You said they’re headed for Prague, right?” When I nod, he continues, “Well, that’s where your dad is. They might’ve cut off his phone privileges for some reason, but maybe there’s a chance we could get in to see him. Find out in person if he’s unraveled the portal riddle.”
“They’d never let us see him.” Mia’s voice is cautious, but there’s an energy in it she’s lacked for days. And despite the hollowness in my own chest, I feel a flicker of warmth trying to respond. “We’re fugitives—they’d ID us on the way in.”
“I’m not a fugitive,” Neal points out. “And when Jules vanished—buggered off to Gaia—I got visitation rights. They’ll have to at least tell us why he’s not making phone calls anymore.”
The flicker of warmth comes again, stronger this time. “And Prague is where the Undying want us to go anyway—if we can get to my dad and he can figure out how to turn off the portals …”
Mia finishes for me when I trail off. “Then the only Undying forces here will be the ones who came in that first wave. Hundreds, rather than thousands, or however many are ready to come pouring through to take over our planet.”
For a moment, the three of us just look at each other, all wondering the same thing: Is it even possible for a couple of fugitives and an engineering student to make their way across Europe without being caught?
But it’s a plan. It’s more than we had an hour ago.
Abruptly, the water shuts off, and I remember the aliens in the bathroom.
Mehercule, there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say to myself.
With a start, I recall the pictures I took on my phone of the results of the cheek swab. If the IA hasn’t thought to look at them, I can at least try to gather some proof of my own. “Neal,” I whisper, leaning close so that my voice won’t carry, “do you know anyone back home studying genetics? Anyone you trust, who could look at some data for us?”
Neal reaches into his back pocket to pull out his phone. “Transfer it to me,” he says. “I’ve got a contact back at Oxford. A postdoctoral student.”
I cock a brow.
As I finish transferring the pics, the bathroom door opens, steam billowing out.
Without missing a beat, Neal rises smoothly to his feet. “I’m going out to get food,” he tells a slightly damp and newly clean Dex and Atlanta. “This hotel isn’t large enough to provide room service.”
Though it isn’t clear either of them understand what room service is, they understand out and food. Atlanta nods, and Dex offers a soft, “Beno, thank you.”
He’s cut his hair with the nail scissors from the bathroom, or Atlanta has cut it for him. Now it curls close against his head, like mine and Neal’s, his braid gone. So far he’s only seen Neal and me, who keep our hair short because we spend so much time in the pool, and the IA, who all sport military haircuts. So he’s gone short, to blend in with what he’s observed.
Neal takes his leave, and then it’s the four of us again, just like old times.
“What did you tell him?” Atlanta asks, studying my face.
I feel like she could quite possibly count my pulse rate from watching a vein in my temple, and expertly calculate whether I’m telling the truth. “I told him that I need him to trust me,” I say.
After a long moment, she nods.
Mia and I take it in turns to shower. I let her go first, and when she comes out wrapped in a towel and an air of utter bliss, for a long moment I can only stare at her. Her cheeks are rosy from the heat, and her lips are curved in the most satisfied smile I’ve ever seen. Water droplets flick down her thighs as she makes room for me to move past her into the bathroom. Her wet hair falls over her shoulders and water trails down the slope of her chest toward the towel knotted just over her—I jerk my eyes away, and for a few moments I’m focusing so hard on not thinking about Mia about to get dressed in the next room that I barely take any notice of getting into the shower myself.