Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  “You could really get lost here,” she says, leaning forward to get a look past me. “I can barely see half a block.”

  Ah. And there it is. I’m about to fall headfirst into one of Mia’s on-the-spot plans.

  In fairness, they work far more often than I expect them to.

  And our alternative is a cell.

  “You’re right,” I say, nudging Neal with my foot. “Talk about busy.”

  Neal shoots me a quick, confused glance, but when I tap his boot with mine again, he falls in line, joining in without understanding why. “What a place,” he says cheerfully, leaning his head out the back of the truck to look around.

  That mobilizes the soldier. “Sit back,” he snaps, gesturing with his rifle.

  “Easy, mate,” Neal says peaceably, holding up his bound hands to remind our captor that he’s restrained. He’s holding on to his bag, which is how I know that he understands we’re up to something. “I’m just having a look. Pretty sure I’m about to be locked up for the rest of my natural life, so this might be my last chance to see the sights of Prague. What’s that building over there?”

  As he’s talking, monopolizing the guard’s attention, Mia’s twisting around, turning her back on me. For a moment I’m lost, and then she subtly wiggles her hips. I look down, and a surge goes through me as I see the outline of her multi-tool pressed against her pocket.

  Without giving myself time to think, I pull it free and flick out the blade. Quietly, quickly, we take turns removing each other’s bonds while Neal continues irritating the guard. There’s no way to cut the ties around his wrists without being spotted—he’s just going to have to run with them tied.

  The guard has a gun. But it’s a rifle, not a handgun—not as easy to aim and fire in close quarters. He won’t be able to aim it at any of us for a few seconds, and by then, we’ll have to be in the crowd of tourists. We’ll have to be among so many other bodies that it’s impossible to hit us.

  I turn around with what I hope is a sheepish smile, but is probably a terrified rictus, and meet Neal’s eyes. There’s a question in his gaze as I pick up my bag, and ever so slowly, I incline my head.

  Neal doesn’t hesitate.

  He hurls himself at the door just as Mia uses her newly freed hands to unlatch it. He spills out onto the cobblestones, and I scramble after him, catching him by the elbow as he stumbles, his hands still bound. Mia’s nimble, throwing herself out behind me, shoving her way past two men with cameras to clear a path for us.

  “Stop!” It’s a sharp shout behind us, but I don’t look back. We’ve made it half a dozen steps, and the soldier will be out of the car by now.

  Mia grabs a woman by the shoulders, pushing her out of the way, and I duck through after her, Neal by my side.

  My whole spine is tingling, the place between my shoulder blades twitching, expecting a bullet with every instant that passes. We’re nearly at the edge of the square.

  I glance back just once, as we round the corner. Mink and the soldier are after us, Mink’s face intent and driven in a way that’s hauntingly familiar—and then I realize.

  In this moment, she looks exactly like Atlanta. I don’t look back again.

  Mia has the lead, and the three of us race through the crowds of shoppers, twisting and turning, taking corners. We pause for just an instant, so she can cut the ties from Neal’s wrists—he looks like a prisoner on the run with them held out in front of him. We have a head start on our pursuers, and if we can stay out of sight for long enough, they’ll lose track of us.

  Eventually Mia grabs at my hand and gasps Neal’s name, and we slow to a walk, turning the corner again and mingling with the people walking down the street. “Slow,” she pants. “Speed gets you distance, but it leaves a trail to follow.”

  We ease into the crowd, which is large—it might be a weekend, in fact. I have no idea what day it is.

  “Did we lose them?” I ask, breath still coming quickly.

  “I think so,” Mia says, looking back. “Though let’s keep moving.”

  Neal has his phone out, and I rest a hand on his shoulder to stop him crashing into anyone as he swipes quickly at the screen.

  “There’s a youth hostel five minutes from here,” he says. “We could get a room, get off the street.”

  “Get the directions,” Mia says grimly, “then take the chip out of your phone. I know you both replaced them, but I can’t think of another way she could have found us at the border. She must have figured out where Neal bought the new ones, and tracked those.”

  She’s right, and I pull off my watch, and eject the chip, dropping it onto the cobblestones and grinding it to pieces with my heel. My image library is saved to the device itself—everything we found on Gaia, and everything after.

  I look over to make sure Neal’s doing the same, but instead he’s staring down at his phone, brow furrowed. “Come on,” I murmur, jogging his elbow with mine. I doubt anyone could move fast enough to have a trace on our phones already, but the last thing I want to do is underestimate Mink.

  “Hang on,” Neal replies. Something in his voice raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Mia hears it too—she turns back toward us, shooting me a questioning glance.

  “Is that the video you posted?” I lean in over Neal’s shoulder.

  “It’s got over six million views,” Neal replies, voice hushed. “And look at the comments, there are people who believe us. The #IBelieveInAddison people are going nuts. They’ve latched on to my username, and at least some of them have figured out I am an Addison. They’re asking me to come to the forums, to tell them more, to share what we know.”

  My eye catches on something, and I grab Neal’s sleeve. “Hang on, go back—what’s that sidebar link?”

  It’s in the “You May Also Like” clickbait parade, but when Neal scrolls back up and taps the link, my stomach tightens.

  “Apparently your friend Director De Luca had to give a press conference after the Lyon video went viral,” Neal reports. “They’re saying it’s not a flu at all anymore, but they think it’s something in the water there. Damn, but that feels good—we made him have to face what was going on and tell at least part of the truth.”

  I want to join in Neal’s raptures about the satisfaction of forcing power to tell the truth, but I can’t. I can’t even pause to dwell on the fact that the “flu” isn’t a rampaging contagion that’ll kill us all. Because my eyes are on the picture from the press conference that first grabbed my attention. I reach over Neal’s shoulder to take the phone from him, ignoring his protests.

  I pinch-zoom in on the picture of De Luca standing behind a podium with the IA seal on it, and my heart sinks. I glance at Mia, debating for a moment whether I should even show her what I’ve seen—but when she sees my face, her own drains of color and she reaches out in wordless demand for me to pass the phone to her.

  I hand it over and then rub my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids, trying to dismiss the image from my mind. Among the various officials and nameless civilians gathered behind De Luca in the picture was a young woman. A girl, really. Dressed professionally, but the sleek lines of her jacket didn’t hide the fact that she’s younger than the rest by at least a decade.

  And though I’ve never met her—I knew her instantly.

  She has Mia’s eyes, her chin, even the way her hair parts—she doesn’t have nearly as many freckles, and her face is a little rounder, but the resemblance is unmistakable.

  Evie.

  I squeeze Mia’s shoulders, but they stay rigid under my hands—and I don’t blame her.

  De Luca’s sending us a warning, loud and clear. He’s got someone we care about—someone Mia already volunteered to give her life for, when she went to Gaia. And if we do anything that displeases him, if we threaten to drop a match on his powder keg, well. Then he’s got Evie, and we don’t.

  I can’t help but think something must have changed, something to make him think we’re connected with what’s happen
ing. After all our warnings about the end of the world, perhaps he’s starting to look around and wonder.

  “Pull up the directions,” Mia says finally, handing the phone back to Neal. “And ditch the SIM card.”

  Her voice is thick and heavy, and I want to wrap my arms around her there in the street. The last time she saw her sister’s face, it was on the dying screen of her phone, half a universe away on the surface of an alien planet, when she decided to share the last of our oxygen with me rather than make it to her rendezvous point and her way home. It was when she chose me over her sister.

  It wouldn’t matter if I told her that that wasn’t the choice she made—that she chose hope, chose some other answer that we hadn’t found yet. That it was faith, not betrayal. But right now, I know the only thing she’s thinking about is the girl in that picture, standing a few feet away from the man trying to hunt us down.

  Half an hour later we’re installed in a small room with white-painted walls and tatty curtains, containing two sets of bunk beds, with thin blankets folded across the foot of each thin mattress. We’ve paid for all four beds, closed the door firmly behind us, and we’re sifting through my vending machine stash in search of the most edible options.

  “Okay,” says Neal. “So after that stuff at the border crossing, they’ll have added me to the bulletin about you. If I try to see Uncle Elliott, I’ll just be arrested.”

  “Right,” I agree, glad Neal was willing to break the silence. “And there’s no reason to think they’ll listen to us two any more than De Luca did. We might get lucky, but …”

  Mia, whose face is still pinched with frustration and worry for her sister, huffs a soft breath of sour laughter. I can’t blame her—it feels like our last shreds of luck ran out long ago.

  “We still need to get to Uncle Elliott,” Neal says. “We’ve got the locations of the Undying on this tracker Dex left—and we know the portals are key to their plan. We’ve got to get that info to him so he can shut them all down.”

  The silence from Mia is deafening—this is where she’d be in her element, coming up with harebrained schemes and rushing off half-cocked to scare the life out of me with some daring feat or another. But she’s just sitting there, head bowed, elbows on her knees.

  We’ve all been thinking of the people we care about. Neal’s parents—my uncle and aunt—are back in England. Our friends are at Oxford. I think my mother’s in Switzerland, and though we haven’t spoken much since she left dad and me, I still love her. She’s my mum, and I can’t even wholly blame her for leaving my dad. His theories made him sound mad—the whole world thought so.

  We can’t contact any of them, for fear the IA is listening and will trace the call—and perhaps for fear they wouldn’t believe our warnings if we tried—but I know we’ve all been thinking of the warning Mia gave to Luisa, and wishing we could do the same for those we love.

  But for all those thoughts that have sat with us during long car journeys, and during the night, neither Neal nor I have had a moment like Mia just did. To see Evie there, standing behind De Luca, when she’s devoted her entire life to keeping her sister safe, when she’s risked her life to keep her sister safe … I can’t imagine.

  “So let’s think about what we have on our side,” Neal says, following my gaze to Mia’s slouched form.

  “An IA jacket, and an ID we can maybe modify,” I say.

  “Languages,” Neal says. “You could pass as being from a lot of different places.”

  “Mia’s brain,” I add, and that’s enough to make her lift her head and shoot me a surprised look. “What?” I say. “You’re the quickest person I’ve ever met in a tight spot. You always think of something.”

  “We have the people online,” she says slowly. “The #IBelieveIn Addison people. I don’t know what use they can be yet, but Luisa showed us they’re real, and at least some of them will help us.”

  “We should decide if we want to participate in that conversation,” Neal says. “You have a lot of pictures you could add.”

  “Maybe,” I say, but I can feel myself sitting a little straighter just at the thought of that community out there, refusing to accept what they’re told, asking questions and demanding proof.

  Mia lets out her breath slowly. “We’re still going to have to try to get in to see Dr. Addison. We stick to the original plan—it’s just harder, now we can’t use Neal.” Her voice is quiet, her brow furrowed with concentration. “Whole sections of the castle are museum now, right? Open to tourists?”

  You wanted a harebrained scheme that would get us all killed, Jules.

  I stifle that thought. “They’d catch us before we got halfway to him.”

  “Maybe.” Mia’s still thinking. “Probably. But what else have we got left to try? At least if we’re arrested and questioned, we can warn them that Atlanta and Dex are here—if we can’t convince them that they’re aliens, maybe we can convince them that they’re bioterrorists or something. That they’re connected to the Lyon disease. If nothing else, maybe we can stop them taking over IA Headquarters. Or whatever they’re doing here.”

  My heartbeat’s starting to quicken, the thought of trying to infiltrate the IA—once the world’s most sophisticated government headquarters—nearly as frightening as being caught by Mink on the streets of Prague. But Mia’s sitting up, talking, being herself again for the first time since seeing Evie on Neal’s phone, and I can’t help but be carried along with her. “We do have the ID badge and the IA uniform jacket,” I say.

  “And we have an advantage they’re not prepared for,” Mia adds. When I raise an eyebrow in query, she flickers a tiny smile at us. “We’re just a handful of kids. What trouble could we possibly be?”

  Neal’s been quiet a while, his head bent over his phone. Without the SIM card, he’s limited to using the hostel Wi-Fi, so it’s been taking him a while to look up whatever he’s searching for. But just then, he lets out a muffled exclamation.

  He looks up, wild-eyed, to find Mia and me looking at him, and even as I watch, his face goes a bit ashen.

  “What is it?” My stomach’s sinking—I don’t think I’ve ever seen Neal look so scared.

  “Veronica replied,” he whispers. “My geneticist friend at Oxford. She answered us about the samples we sent.”

  My heart leaps. With hard proof that Atlanta and Dex are some unknown alien species, we won’t have to sneak into the IA. We could walk straight in, announcing our identities, and hand them proof that the invasion of Earth is happening right now.

  I cross to my cousin’s side and take the phone from his unresisting hand. I’m reading the email, my eyes taking in phrases like highly unusual microarray and long strings of homozygosity without digesting them. Because at the bottom of each result is a standard label in bold.

  “Human DNA Microarray,” I whisper.

  Mia lurches to her feet. “Human? But they bleed blue!”

  Neal’s pallor makes sense now. He’d expected to open an email full of exclamations of wonder and amazement, disbelief from the first geneticist to analyze the DNA of an alien race.

  Instead he found a mildly intrigued old friend talking about various random genetic markers—but human genetic markers.

  “They’re humans.” My voice sounds like poured concrete, thick and slow. “Whatever we saw, whatever we thought we saw … it’s not just a mask on the surface. They’re humans.”

  “IT DOESN’T REALLY LOOK LIKE A CASTLE,” I MUTTER, NOT bothering to hide the disappointment in my voice. Prague “Castle,” home of the International Alliance, is more like a collection of vaguely old stone buildings than the soaring structure I’d imagined. The first floor of the main building is a museum, with a little bit of history of the castle and the city, and a lot of the history of the IA.

  Jules eyes me sidelong, a smile hovering about his lips. “Were you imagining something out of a fairy tale?”

  “Shut up. If you can’t trust Hollywood, who can you trust?” Getting into this p
art of the castle was easy—cursory bag checks at the entrance, not even any ID required. The rent-a-guards at the door barely gave our faces a second glance.

  Life is just continuing here as normal, and despite our attempts at jokes, it feels like the three of us are just swimming through it. The Undying are here in Prague. The Undying are … My mind still shies away from the word, too bewildered to know how to respond. Human?

  Last night, while Neal went out to source us food and buy a couple of burner phones with almost the last of our cash, Jules helped me change my hair. Pink and blue streaks are not exactly low profile, after all. We’ve been through so much—so close to certain death for so long—that dyeing and cutting off my hair ought to have barely registered. And yet as Jules snipped away, I found to my horror that there were tears falling among the locks of damp hair littering the porcelain of the bathtub.

  Somehow, it was like seeing the last little piece of myself, of who I was before all of this, cut away.

  Jules tossed the scissors aside once he’d finished the task and leaned forward to wrap his arms around me from behind, pulling me in against his chest and pressing his lips to my temple. He didn’t speak, but then, neither did I. He just held me until Neal came back, and we could come out of the bathroom dry-eyed.

  Now, I’m sporting a short red bob and fringe that makes me look startlingly different, and I have to admit I don’t entirely hate the effect.

  There’s nothing we can do about Jules and Neal and their distinctive height, but there’s so many people that no one looks at them twice. Tourists are everywhere. Crowds aren’t usually my thing, but today they’re a comfort—in the press of bodies, there’s no possible way for us to stand out.

  After reading Veronica’s email, we’re back to trying to find a way to reach Dr. Addison. We have no idea what to make of her results, no idea how to begin to grapple with what they might mean, but it doesn’t change our mission. The Undying are still here. They’re still building portals. And Jules’s dad is the only one who’ll know how to shut them down.