by Amie Kaufman
“Lyon,” I murmur, as the woman lets Jules through. They’re looking for people in the early stages of infection.
Another of the IA officials finishes with his traveler, but I’m quick to head for the woman who let Jules through. She was friendly, at least, and that might be helpful. Let Neal—with his valid passport and lack of criminal record—head for the unknown quantity.
“I keep telling him the same thing about eating all that crap in his backpack,” I say conspiratorially to the IA officer when I hand over my bag. My heart is going a thousand beats per second, and my palms are sweaty, but I summon an air of bored patience, the exact sort of stereotypical teenaged apathy that makes most people not bother thinking twice about me.
The guard smiles briefly at me, and looks through the odds and ends in my bag, which aren’t much better than Jules’s. “Kids,” she says dismissively, but with a bit of humor in her gaze. She reaches under her table, pulling out a protein bar and set of headphones, holding both up for me to see. “Can you name these, please?”
“That’s a protein bar, and those are headphones,” I say, making sure I look baffled. “Um, do I need to know about those in the Czech Republic?”
She offers a quick, reassuring smile. “Just a new procedure from International Alliance HQ, nothing to worry about. Enjoy your time in the Czech Republic.”
Relief sweeps across me, making me dizzy as I grope for my bag, mumble a thank-you, and hurry my steps toward where Jules waits with an exaggerated air of nonchalance that would make me laugh, if I weren’t so unraveled myself.
The other officer hands Neal his bag and his papers, and he turns toward us with an inimitable grin, slinging it back over his shoulder.
But he doesn’t get two steps before the officer he’d been speaking to calls, “Hang on a second.”
Neal stops, flashing us a brief look of panic, before turning back to the officer. The man scans his features with a frown. “You look familiar. Step this way, please.”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Of course, Neal isn’t wanted for anything—not as far as we know. But the last name on his passport is Addison, and while that’s not exactly a unique name, it wouldn’t be hard to make a case that he’d know something about one of the fugitives from IA custody.
The officer brings Neal over to the booth, tapping at the window and asking some question of someone inside. Neal flashes us another look, this one far more grave and fearful—and then I realize why. The official’s given a printout by someone inside the little office, and though I can’t see what it is from here, I do see a pair of photos at the top.
It’s a wanted bulletin.
“He looks like me,” Jules whispers. “Maybe our official hadn’t seen the bulletin or something—but Neal’s getting stopped because we look alike.”
I bite at my lip, my thoughts paralyzed. “We’ve got to just go. They’ll see he’s not you, and they’ll let him go, but we can’t be around for them to—”
“Excuse me, would you two please come this way?” One of the regular immigration officials gestures us over. “You’re traveling together, right?”
Two more IA officers have joined the one detaining Neal.
“No,” I lie, “we just met in line. We’ve got to go if we’re going to stick to our hiking schedule. …”
The first officer glances our way, and then his puzzled expression vanishes, replaced with surprise and a hint of grim satisfaction. “That’s them. This one—maybe he’s related, I don’t know, but look, isn’t that them?”
Jules’s hand grabs for mine and squeezes. Somehow, I recognize from his grip what he wants to do—and just now I’ve got no better ideas. If we run, there’s a chance we could make it past the parked cars on the other side of the crossing, and down the embankment on the far side of the highway before anyone could organize a chase.
The officers have guns—but they wouldn’t fire on a couple of teenagers. Especially since it’s not like we’re wanted for murder or armed robbery. But then, I haven’t seen whatever wanted bulletin went out. I don’t know what the IA is saying about us. I don’t know.
And seeing a line of IA uniformed officers, all with rifles slung over their backs, makes my legs feel weak and rubbery.
I squeeze back, holding for a while, and then release. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I say aloud. For Jules, I squeeze his hand once, twice—I ready myself to run, and tighten my hand a third time.
“Hold your questions,” a crisp, authoritative voice calls. A woman in an IA Intelligence uniform strides past us. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Intelligence has no authority at border crossings,” protests the officer detaining Neal. “This is a directive from international security to detain and question those two.”
The woman retrieves Neal from the officer holding his arm. “Call De Luca’s office yourself if you want an explanation. But I outrank you, Officer, and I had breakfast with De Luca this morning, and I don’t owe you anything.”
Neal, baffled, stumbles along as the woman steers him toward us. I don’t blame him for his confusion—I’m confused myself, and Jules’s hand in mine has gone lax with shock.
The woman ushering Neal toward us, and gesturing for us to come with her, is Mink.
“LET’S GO,” MINK SAYS TIGHTLY, AND MIA AND I EXCHANGE A glance that contains a whole conversation.
What’s she doing here?
I don’t know.
Can we trust her?
When have we ever been able to trust her?
Do we have a choice?
I don’t know.
As if sensing our doubts, Mink speaks in a low voice. “I said, let’s go. Unless you want a bullet in the back, you’ll shut up and come with me without making a fuss.”
My breath catches in my throat, my whole body responding to the threat.
I don’t doubt she’s capable of shooting us. We’ve seen her do it before, and she’s got a gun holstered at her waist.
Before I have a chance to reply, or even to think, the IA officials have caught up with us once more, all protesting volubly.
With an exasperated look at the crew of genuinely innocent civilians waiting for their own border-crossing inspection—all of whom are straining their ears to figure out what’s going on with this sudden burst of activity—she opens the door to the guardhouse and marches inside, all of us following her like a confused, terrified, and in some cases outraged, parade.
Mink points at what looks like the guards’ break room. “You three, in there.” The adults need to talk is the unspoken corollary to that.
We do as we’re told, and I leave the door carefully ajar so we can overhear the territorial dispute happening outside. I hover by the crack for a few moments, straining my ears.
A man’s voice is speaking, loud and strident. “With respect, ma’am, nobody is taking anybody anywhere until I’ve scanned your ID.”
Mia’s already on the far side of the room, and my eyes widen as I realize she’s stuffing the jacket of an IA uniform inside her backpack.
“What are you doing?” I hiss, despite the fact that the answer is bloody obvious.
“What I can,” she replies, shoving the fabric down and cinching the bag closed. “I don’t know what’s coming next, but let’s be ready as we can be.”
“There’s an ID in this locker,” Neal says, pulling out a card on a lanyard, and tossing it across the room to Mia, then closing the door of the locker beside him.
With a nod, she shoves it in her bag.
Deus, they’re two of a kind.
My attention’s yanked back to the door when a series of piercing beeps emanates from some kind of machine. I hear the man’s voice again.
“This identification has been suspended.”
Mink’s voice is rich with scorn. “Bullshit, it was working just fine when Director De Luca sent me to pick them up.”
De Luca. Have they made their peace, or is she just throwing his nam
e around for authority?
“Nevertheless,” the man insists. “We can’t just hand them over to you.”
“You were going to send them to Prague anyway, weren’t you?” she asks, frosty now. “That’s exactly where I’m going.”
“And yet I still cannot simply give you the prisoners.”
I ease away from the door to speak to Mia and Neal in a low voice. “They’re fighting over who takes us to IA Headquarters in Prague,” I report. “It’s about an hour’s drive. We might have a chance to get away during the trip, or when we arrive.”
“If we don’t, then we’re locked up for good,” Mia says, grim. “With Dex and Atlanta already arrived, or on their way.”
Neal digs around in his bag until he can pull out the Undying device. It’s silent now, and he fiddles with it while Mia finishes stuffing her bag full of whatever she can find that might be useful.
Then Neal lets out a startled oath. From where I stand, all I can see is the back of the device, emblazoned with the arcing meteorite that is the Undying’s symbol for themselves.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“It zooms out.” Neal crosses toward us so that we can all bend our heads over the little screen. “If you touch here like this, and then tilt the whole thing up and down …” He demonstrates, and the display’s grid lines and terrain map jump and wobble dizzyingly. A little blip flashes by—the Undying in Dresden that we drove past.
As Neal starts to get the hang of navigating the thing, another little blip shows up near the first. For a moment I think it must be Lyon, except that when he zooms out further, I can see the sharp shift in terrain that marks the Alps. This dot is much closer—in Nuremburg, perhaps, or Stuttgart.
Another dot joins the first two. And another, and another. Munich. Berlin. Paris. London.
The terrain lines vanish into the sea as Neal’s shaking hands tilt the screen all the way back.
New York City. Bogotá. Nairobi. Sydney. Hong Kong. Mumbai. And at least a hundred other dots in between, until the entire world is freckled with green.
I can hear Mia’s breathing next to me, quickening, her voice coming out ragged and frightened. “They’re already everywhere.”
I take the device from Neal’s unresisting hands and tilt it back in. My heart sinks, even though I already knew what I was going to see. “They’re in Prague.”
“Do you think it’s Dex and Atlanta?” Mia’s face is white.
“I don’t know. Probably.” My head’s spinning. They’ll be able to spread the Lyon disease everywhere, and the Undying will have the ability to transport troops instantly between cities—they could destroy St. Petersburg one day and invade Los Angeles the next. They’d have a way to bring instant reinforcements, no matter what damage our armies could do—assuming the world’s governments could even muster an army quickly enough to counter the Undying’s movements.
“We’ve got to try and convince someone you guys are telling the truth.” Neal’s voice is soft. “They’re taking us right to where Uncle Elliott is being held, and if he’s figured out how to shut down the portals, maybe we’ll all still have a chance. But only if we can get in to see him.”
My reply is cut off when the door swings open to reveal Mink, and a sweaty man standing behind her. Neal casually takes the device back and tucks it into his pocket, like it’s just his phone and not a forecast of the end of humanity.
Mink glances at him and then actually snaps her fingers at us. “Let’s go.”
“We are transporting you to Prague,” the man says. “The agent here will travel with us.”
So the answer to the question of which one of them is our captor has been answered: both of them, but perhaps him slightly more than her.
There’s nothing to do but acquiesce, especially since they’re taking us where we want to go—so long as we can convince someone of the truth before we’re dumped in a cell and forgotten. We let them bind our wrists with bright blue zip ties, and with our bags clutched in our bound hands, we file out of the room under armed guard.
The vehicle that’s waiting is a small truck with a covered back, two benches facing each other in its rear. The driver climbs into the cabin, and the three of us climb into the back, along with Mink and an IA soldier.
All five of us sit in silence as the dark green countryside slips by, and we hum along with the flow of traffic. I know we should try and convince Mink we’re right about the Undying, but I can’t even think where to begin. What argument can we make that we haven’t already tried?
Is she our ally, because she helped Mia and me out of detention the first time? Though now I can’t help but wonder if we were never meant to escape at all the first time, but just escape De Luca, and run straight into her arms instead.
Back when I thought she was Charlotte Stapleton, when I thought she was recruiting me for a private expedition to Gaia, this woman and I spent hours in London cafés, talking about the importance of exploration. Of discovery. Of what can be achieved when we think beyond the immediate, and seek out ways to exceed ourselves. I saw in her a kindred spirit then, a mind as devoted to understanding our universe as my own.
But as Mink, as the head of the covert IA operation that tracked me to the heart of the Undying temple … she manipulated me from moment one, perfectly willing to let me die in the process of trying to unravel the Undying’s mysteries and extract the ancient ship from the Gaian ice cap. Mia and I watched as she shot an expendable operative in the head.
I worked until my eyes nearly gave out to get the ancient ship operational while she held a gun to Mia’s temple. She stood unmoved as we pleaded with her to listen to us, to believe us when we told her that the ship was dangerous and that the future of our entire planet could very well hang in the balance if she went ahead with her plan to send the ship through the portal back to Earth.
But she did it anyway. I couldn’t get her to listen to me then.
“Mink, we have to talk.” It’s an instant before I realize the voice raised over the sound of the motor is mine.
Her gaze swings around, glacial. “We really don’t,” she says simply.
“Well, then I’ll talk, you listen,” I say, lifting my zip-tied hands in supplication. “You’re not incompetent—you know the two we had with us in Catalonia weren’t scavvers you hired. You know they came from somewhere else.”
Mia leans in to rest her shoulder against mine in support, and raises her voice too. “You have to believe us. What we saw in Lyon? Just the beginning.”
Mink’s gaze is flat, and completely unmoved. She studies first me and then Mia, ignoring Neal—the boy she spent hours with, pretending to hire him to convince me her company was real—and ignoring the soldier who sits clutching his rifle beside her.
“Think of the consequences,” I urge. “If we’re right and nobody listens, we could be wiped out. If we’re wrong, what do you lose by looking into it?”
“Mr. Addison.” My hopes shrivel and die under the weight of that tone. “Let me be clear. My IA status has been suspended. Director De Luca is under the impression I was involved in your escape in Catalonia a few days ago. My only way back into the fold is with the two of you in my custody.”
“Does that include me?” Neal asks, all charm, with no hint of the anger he must feel for this woman. He wasn’t on the poster. Perhaps he can still get to my father somehow. “You can just forget about me if you like. I mean, usually I’m the popular cousin, but—”
“Enough,” she snaps.
“Can you at least take a message to my dad?” I’m pleading now, my voice cracking. Even if nobody listens to us, perhaps when they finally realize we were right, he can do something. “Tell him to finish his work on closing down the portals. Tell him that’s what he’ll need to do.”
“Mr. Addison,” she snaps. The soldier at her side shifts his grip on the gun, responding to her tone. But Mink glances at the guard, as if she’s about ready to take the soldier’s gun and sort me out herself. “
Be silent.”
And so we all are. I’m exhausted, and my eyes are hot and aching, and beside me Mia’s slumped, her head in her tightly bound hands.
Slowly, eventually, the trees sliding by outside the truck give way to the outer suburbs of the city, and then to the city itself. Prague is a mish-mash of historical buildings with cobblestone streets, and sleek, modern construction.
Almost at walking pace, the truck begins to climb a hill. Neal’s the closest to the back, and he’s looking out, watching the streets go by. I can see the tension in his body—we’ve played sports together for years, and I know when he’s considering a move. But he can’t, not with the armed soldier right there, and Mink’s gun at her hip.
We edge past a pair of black wrought iron gates, the curls of metal ornamented with gilded highlights, and pull in to the side of the road, the engine shifting tone as the driver sets it to idle. Beyond the gates is a large courtyard, teeming with guards in IA uniform, and a long, snaking line of what I realize are tourists waiting for admission. On the far side of the courtyard is an ornate, U-shaped building several stories high, bordering the courtyard on three sides.
It’s Prague Castle—International Alliance Headquarters—a sprawling complex made up of old and new, public and deeply classified. The place from which the IA sets the course of humanity—or used to, when they had the full support of the entire world behind them.
The driver climbs out, and Mink leaves her place opposite me to jump down from the back of the truck. She turns to meet our eyes one by one, her hand resting on the pistol at her hip.
“Stay here,” she says, fixing me with a long stare, before she moves on to Mia. “Are we clear? Stay here.”
And with that, she moves around to join the driver, and presumably argue with the gate guards about her ID, or let them know who she’s bringing in.
Mia, however, is staring straight past me, out at the crowds. “Wow, there’s a lot of tourists here,” she says suddenly.
I blink, but follow her gaze, looking out to the milling throng making their way along the streets. “Yes,” I agree, bewildered, but waiting to see where she’s taking it.