by Amie Kaufman
Neal hisses through his teeth. “Yeah, that’s pretty grim, mate.”
“Sirsly grim.”
When Dex falls silent, I realize that my heart’s pounding—in spite of everything, despite the fear and hatred I have for this race of invaders, I desperately want him to continue the story. Because suddenly, it’s stopped being the story of the Undying—a remote, alien race—and become our story. The story of people just like us, trying to survive. “What did you do when you realized you’d probably never get home?” My voice is hushed.
He glances at me. “We became the Undying,” he replies simply. “We abandoned the idea of returning to Earth—remember these were all still the original colonists, and they’d been beno with never seeing Earth again anyways. We decided to find a new home. We started searching for star systems instead of entry points to the Storm, for habitable planets instead of astronomical reference points.”
“How long did it take you to find someplace?” Jules is as riveted as I am—his arm has gone lax around me, so fixated is he on Dex’s story.
“Well, at first we concentrated on things like asteroids and moons and planetoids with dense mineral deposits, so we could get the materials to build more ships, faster ships. We poured every last resource we had, after what we needed to survive, into scientific research. Every new child born was raised to question, to explore, to try and compren things outside the boundaries of what we believed was possible. Our ancestors knew we could survive—but that we wouldn’t, unless we pushed at the limits of human resilience and creativity.”
A little finger of dread creeps down my spine, and I echo Jules. “How long were you lost in space before you found a place to live?”
Dex’s expression is calm, but there’s an endless depth to his gaze and I already know what he’s going to say. “We didn’t.”
Neal’s breath catches. “What do you mean you didn’t?”
“The universe is a big place,” Dex replies mildly. “Planets and stars and nebulas and everything you can see from planetside—all of that makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s out there, and the spaces in between are almost endless. There are definitely habitable planets out there—thousands of them, probably millions. But the scale of just one galaxy, let alone the universe … Our brains sirsly can’t compren how far apart everything is. Even with countless places to enter the Storm, your odds of emerging anywhere near a star system with habitable planets are vanishingly, impossibly low. And we never have.”
“So …” Jules speaks slowly, quietly. “In all that time, everywhere you went using all the Storm anomalies, across the universe and back … ?”
Dex nods. “In three hundred years of searching, we never found a planet that could support life.” His lashes drop, and he gazes at the floor. “Earth is all we have. It’s all any of us have.”
My throat is tight, and I’m grateful for Jules at my side, because without him I’d feel so tiny, so insignificant and alone, that I’d curl up and cry. As if he can sense my thoughts, Jules arm tightens around me again.
“We did compren one thing, though.” Dex’s eyes are still on the floor, though the faded blue-gray carpet—with its myriad, unidentifiable stains—can’t be holding his attention. “All that time trying to use the Storm anomalies to travel, we comprenned how to harness them for our own use. How to create them.”
Neal leans toward him, a sudden spark igniting his excitement. “The portals.”
“The portals,” Dex confirms. “It wasn’t like we could just tell a portal ‘Take us Earthward!’ or anything, it had to be a link between two known places. Two artificial portals are linked to each other through the aether—the space between space, the space inside the Storm. It meant, though, that we could spread out—we could shift from ship to ship, the whole fleet staying together even when we were light-years apart. We could specialize. Mining ships, plantation ships, ships dedicated as schools and universities, hospital ships … We built a civilization. Wherever we were, whenever, we could visit another ship from our own time instantly.”
“It sounds like your people basically figured out how to live without a planet at all.” Neal’s voice is gently impressed. “So why did you all still want to come back to Earth?”
Dex glances at Neal sidelong. “Not all of us did.”
Jules leans forward. “What do you mean?”
Dex sighs. “If it were me? I’d be happy to live on the ship where I was born, among the stars, never shifting planetwards except to explore. And I’m not the only one. But most of us … humans aren’t built that way. People want a home, a place that’s theirs, and you have to understand … we all grew up thinking that had been taken from us forever, unless we could go home. Our real home.”
“And Gaia?” Jules reveals very little in his voice. He’s so different from the boy he was. He’s cautious now. He’s driven in a way he wasn’t before, even when flying halfway across the universe to search an alien planet for his father’s freedom.
Dex lifts his head, meeting Jules’s gaze unflinchingly. “A little less than a hundred years before I was born, a woman named Verna Glasgow, an artist by trade, had an idea. The only thing stopping us from using the portals to shift homeward was that there was no matching portal on Earth. But if there was a way to make mankind bring a portal Earthward …”
My mind reels, trying to grasp all the pieces and assemble them, but every time I make one connection, three others seem to vanish like smoke. “So … but … why all the riddles? Why not just explain all this in the broadcast?”
“Because there was another problem, yeh? We were a race of thousands by then. We were centuries beyond protos—Earth humans—in technology. If we just went home, there’d be no place for us. Not among a people who abandoned us when our ancestors’ ship first broke down.”
“But they didn’t abandon you,” Jules says, though the protest is gentle. “That was always the understanding—we put all our eggs in one basket. We bet everything on the Centauri ship. There was no second ship to send.”
“That’s not how our story goes,” Dex replies. “Our history says we called, and nobody came. And now, after all this time, we’d be shifting to a dying planet with no power to stop what was happening. We couldn’t just shift home. We had to take our world back, as the rightful stewards of this paradise you don’t even realize you have.”
Neal says softly, “You had to save the world.”
Dex clears his throat. His fingers are twined tightly together in his lap. “At that point my people existed in a time about fifty thousand years before this present. That’s where they’d shifted through their most recent portals. The temples, the broadcast, the portal ship … it took decades to put together. By that time Verna Glasgow was in her late fifties. And as she watched her idea grow, and mutate, and grow again, and seed itself, and change into something she didn’t compren anymore, she realized she’d been wrong. That we’d survived for hundreds of years alone in space—that we didn’t just survive, we thrived. That we didn’t need to take Earth, we didn’t need to destroy our Earth counterparts so that we might live.”
Jules’s body has gone rigid next to me, but it isn’t until he speaks that I understand why. “She saw what she’d created, and changed her mind. She tried to warn them.”
“And she was dismissed as a sentimental fool talking a pile of lixo, causing hassle.” Dex knows why Jules’s voice has changed. The Undying know everything about Elliott Addison, after all. “An artist, after all, not a leader. They let her contribute to the murals and decoration of the temples, but when she refused and made a public appeal to all the ships in the fleet, she was shouted down. All she could do was pass along her misgivings to her children. Teach them that there was room in this universe for all of us. That what we were planning was murder and deception. That even if we saved the world, we’d be dooming ourselves.”
Artists and scientists, I think to myself. No one wants to believe either.
Jules is squeezing m
y hand, hard. I ease free, and curl my fingers through his instead. The gesture seems to restore him somewhat, and he takes an audible breath as Dex continues.
“Her children found others who were uncertain. Who didn’t accept this universally proclaimed truth that we were the superior, evolved version of humanity. Who didn’t want to destroy billions of lives for the sake of thousands. And some who simply didn’t want to give up life in the stars for life on the dirt.” His eyes lift. “It became a secret society, yeh? An underground resistance. Waiting until the day the Undying would return to take Earth, so that maybe they could stop what was happening from within. Just in case the warnings left by Verna Glasgow when she was decorating the temple weren’t enough.”
A strangled sound comes from Jules at my side, and when I look over at him, his eyes are wide with understanding and accusation both. Stricken, he sits unmoving as Dex gets slowly to his feet and unbuttons his shirt, peeling it down to reveal his bare shoulder.
Swirling around the joint, its arms outstretched to curl around the edge of his shoulder blade, alive with translucent gold and purple and deepest indigo, is the spiral galaxy.
“We call ourselves the Nautilus.”
I’M CLINGING TO MIA NOW, AS THOUGH SHE’S THE ONLY THING THAT might stop me from floating away. As if her weight beside me on the floor will somehow prevent me from breaking free of the Earth’s gravity and spinning away into space.
And why shouldn’t I fly free of the Earth’s grasp? Every other rule has been broken. Why not this one too?
“This is so elaborate.” My voice is husky, strained, the pressure my mind is under reflected in my body. “It’s just so elaborate. Your language didn’t evolve into something unrecognizable in three hundred years. That doesn’t happen.”
“No,” says Dex, his dark eyes on my face as he watches me work toward the conclusion.
“You created the glyphs to convince us you weren’t human,” I say quietly.
“Yeh.”
“And you built a temple you never used.”
“Yeh.”
“And you sent a signal, pretending to be a dead alien species, all so you could lure us to Gaia, through the temple, and to your ship?”
“Yeh.”
My voice is cracking, now. “Because we’re so awful, so untrustworthy, that going to all that trouble, undertaking these herculean tasks, seemed a better bet to you than simply contacting us and asking for our help in building a portal to help you come home?”
His whisper is deathly soft. “Yeh. You gotta compren, after centuries of being taught about the greed and wastefulness and selfishness of the humans who abandoned us, who trashed a planet that was unique in all the universe, not one of us would have ever thought a plea for help would’ve been answered this time.”
“You banked on our greed,” Mia says. “You banked on the fact that if you told us there was treasure on the line, we’d go through anything to find it.”
“Well,” says Neal, as Dex buttons his shirt and sits, “in their defense, they were right.”
Perhaps Neal wants to divert us away from this talk of blame, because he leans against a desk, facing Dex.
“Tell me more about the portals,” he says. “I’ve been working on them with Uncle Elliott—with Dr. Addison—these last few weeks. We’ve only ever seen manufactured portals, but the way you talk about the naturally occurring portals, they sound to me like they work differently. They sound wild, unpredictable.”
“They are different,” Dex agrees. “That difference is why we needed you. The naturally occurring portals, like the one the first Centauri ship was lost through, they lead through the aether to a set time and place, and you can’t change it. No matter when you enter the portal on one side, on the other, you’ll emerge on a specific day, at a specific time.”
“But that’s not how our portal works,” Mia says, beside me. “The portal between Earth and Gaia, it always leads to the same place, but it doesn’t lead to the same time. Otherwise, every expedition, from the first one through to ours, would all have shown up on the same day. But we didn’t. We arrived just a moment after we left. The same distance apart.”
“That’s right,” Dex agrees. “That’s the difference between a naturally occurring portal, and one that’s constructed. And it’s why we needed your help. When you received our transmission, you built a portal between Earth and Gaia. A manufactured portal. We knew it had to be after our ancestors left, or they never would have left, and none of us would exist, yeh?”
“The grandfather rule,” I breathe. The paradox that explains why time travel could never work, even if it didn’t violate the laws of physics.
Mia leans in against me. “That’s the one about how, if you go back to before you were born, you might accidentally stop yourself being born?” she asks.
“Right. The Undying needed a portal back to Earth after the Centauri expedition left, to make sure they didn’t accidentally prevent their ancestors from leaving, and prevent themselves from being born.”
“Yes,” Dex replies. “So even if we could have found it again, we couldn’t have just gone back through that very first Storm portal to reach Earth. We’d have arrived in the same instant our ancestors left, and we might have prevented them leaving at all. What we could do, though, was send a signal out into the aether.”
“Oh, I see,” Neal breathes, as soft as a prayer. “You send a signal into the aether, and it emerges from every portal it can find, doesn’t it? Including that first Storm portal. That’s how you knew your signal would reach Earth at the right time to set us to work building the portal you needed. Your ancestors would just miss it.”
“Yeh.” Dex nods. “But we weren’t sure where in time we were—we hoped we were in the past, but it could have been thousands of years until you showed up on Gaia. But as soon as you took the ship through the portal to Earth, you activated all the internal portals on the ship, and we knew it was time to send our teams through.”
He’s sounding a little better, and he’s speaking mostly to Neal—I think Neal’s steady gaze genuinely helps, even if he’s no Atlanta. Neal’s presence helps most people, I’ve noticed.
“Right,” Mia says, and her tone of voice tells me she’s working toward a conclusion she doesn’t like one bit. “So you get the signal, you know the ship’s reached Earth, and you start sending through your teams. And they head down to Earth, posing as bits of space junk, but really …”
Dex nods, as if she’s finished her sentence, dropping his head. “But really, they’re building portals planetside, preparing for the arrival of the reclamation teams,” he says quietly.
“After most of Earth’s humans have lost their minds,” I murmur, trying to ignore the sick feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. “Since the test in Lyon was a resounding success.”
Dex leans forward, burying his face in his hands. “It’s not going to matter much longer,” he says, muffled. “They’re all scheduled to activate a couple days from now, but there’s no way Atlanta won’t speed up her plans. It’ll be hours, not days—and Prague will be just like that town, only millions more will be affected.”
I’m struggling for breath, and beside me, Mia makes a sound like someone’s struck her.
Hours.
We had even less time than we’d imagined.
“Will anyone survive?” Neal whispers.
Dex lifts his head again, his gaze distant. “Well, we will, for a while. No running water in here. But unless someone lets us out before the toxin takes over …”
“Then we’ll die of dehydration.” Mia’s voice is tiny. Scared. After all we’ve been through, I can’t blame her—we passed up a dozen deaths preferable to dying of thirst, forgotten in a basement while the world burns.
“Maybe people who live somewhere small will survive for a while,” Dex says. “Somewhere high. Maybe in the mountains, upstreamward, where the water won’t come from somewhere infected. All the big cities will be gone. Or rather, there�
��ll be olders in charge, Undying stewards. The portal teams are all our age—we were trained on planets with Earth-equivalent gravity, to prepare us. No air or life on our training planets, not places we could call home, but enough to make sure we’d be able to handle being planetside when the time came. The stewards will find it harder going, down here, but they’ll make the sacrifice and take the hassle, to run the cities.”
Mia’s voice is thin and small as she asks, “But what about all the people who do drink the toxin? They’ll be like animals, dangerous ones, and there’ll be millions of them, everywhere.”
Dex swallows, looking nearly as sick as I feel. “The toxin makes most people infertile,” he says quietly. “Yeh, they’re dangerous. But all we’ll have to do is wait.”
For humanity to die out.
Everyone’s quiet for a long moment, and it’s Neal who breaks the silence. He’s staring at his phone again. “We have another problem,” he says, soft and solemn. “The people on the forum are picking up what we’re saying, but only about half the targeted cities have anyone who’s on the ground, and knows what they’re doing, and says they’re building a jammer.”
“Half?” Mia lifts her head, stricken. “That’s still hundreds of millions—maybe billions, I don’t know—of people who are still going to turn into … turn into those things we saw in Lyon.”
We’re all silent, reeling from this new gut punch. The flicker of hope that even if we didn’t make it, some places might—it was something to hold on to. But though the Undying may not be able to take over the planet in the next few days, they’ll be able to take a lot of it if they can wipe out dozens of cities in one night. Earth will certainly never be the same.