Undying

by Amie Kaufman

  He sighs. “Mia,” he whispers. And then his eyes roll away from me, and his head drops back.

  I can’t let go of him. My arms are frozen around him, his heavier weight pinning me down with him. I’ll just stay here with him until it’s over.

  When all this is over.

  Those words echo in my mind, again and again and again. When all this is over … We’ll be together. We’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to love each other. We’ll have a chance to see what we’re like when we’re not fighting for our lives. We’ll start over. We’ll be together.

  When all this is over.

  My hands sticky with Jules’s blood, my every muscle screaming protest, I lift my head.

  The two sides are facing off against each other, the Undying in cover around the portal, and Mink’s people shielding themselves around the mouth of the tunnel. There’s no sign of Neal—I hope he’s behind cover somewhere, out of harm’s way—and Dex is still talking, trying to appeal to Atlanta.

  Atlanta, who’s only a few yards away from me, still near the portal, her shoulder against the stone, gun trained in the direction of her opposition.

  Gently, I ease Jules down onto the stone, smoothing the edge of his shirt back into place, drying the last few tears still left on his face. He looks like he’s asleep. He looks peaceful.

  Then I get to my feet and walk toward the girl who murdered Jules.

  I’m in her blind spot, flanking the Undying. The others will see me, and Atlanta might even hear me, but not before it’s too late. She’s dismissed me—she destroyed me, after all.

  And I may be destroyed. But I can still take her with me.

  I break into a run at the last moment, so that when I reach her I collide with her and knock her to the ground. Her grunt of surprise and pain nearly drowns out the clatter of the handgun skittering on the stone. Her hand stretches out, but I have a rock in my hand, and I smash it at her face, and then dive for the gun myself.

  By the time I’m on my feet again, Atlanta’s on her knees, blood pouring from a new gash across her cheek—but she freezes when I swing the weapon around to point at her.

  This time, I stand far enough back that she can’t do what she did at IA Headquarters. This time, I make sure the safety’s off. This time, my hand is steady.

  “See how easily it’s turned yourways?” I say softly.

  Atlanta’s comrades have stopped shooting, and I hear Mink’s voice shouting at her own forces to hold their fire.

  Atlanta’s eyes are red-rimmed, her face puffy with emotion, but I have none to spare for her. She could have stayed with her partner. She could have trusted him. She chose this outcome—who am I to change the fate that comes from that choice?

  “He wanted peace,” I choke out, the gun pointed at her face, its grip still warm from her hand. “We would have welcomed you if you’d just asked. But I figured out why you hate us so much.”

  “Because you’ve treated this planet like lixo,” Atlanta spits. “Because you’re not fit to live here. Because you’re sub-human.”

  “No.” I gesture with the gun, and she presses her lips together. “You hate us because we’re a mirror. You see in us the worst of yourselves. Every fear, every failed promise. So you try to make us into monsters, beasts to be slain or corralled. But you are us. You’re us, just on a different road. The whole reason you exist is because we did come together, once, and set out for the stars. That you exist—it’s a miracle, Atlanta. What you accomplished. That you survived. Your existence is proof of what humanity can do. Proof that there’s nothing we can’t do.”

  There are tears on Atlanta’s face, and her gaze shifts, just a moment, to the side. Toward where Dex stands, frozen, watching.

  “You could have come here in peace, and your survival, your technology, your inspiration—your story—would have changed the entire world. You could have proven that we are more than—than this.” My voice is raw with crying, and my shattered heart gives way. I don’t have anything left.

  “You want to know the funny thing?” I whisper. “If it had been me you shot—if it was Jules standing here now, holding this gun—you wouldn’t be in any danger at all. He would never, not for anything, pull this trigger.”

  Atlanta doesn’t speak. She just looks up at me, and in her eyes I see a certainty settling into place. My finger curls around the trigger. Distantly, like a memory from some other life, I remember being in the halls of the Undying portal ship, standing over a guard, saved from having to shoot her by Javier’s intervention. I’d said I would do it, though looking back, I know I couldn’t have.

  Now, I know that girl’s gone.

  My heart empty, I say, “But I’m not Jules.”

  I draw a breath.

  “Mia?” The voice is soft, frightened. And so familiar, so unexpectedly home that I freeze, the heart I thought had stopped starting to pound as I turn my head.

  Two figures are standing by the ropes dangling from the opening overhead. One a tall man with an oddly familiar stoop to his shoulders and a haggard look on his face. The other, a girl, her face white, her eyes round with horror.

  A mirror of myself. Of the old Mia. The one not covered in Jules’s blood, the one not ready to blow Atlanta from the face of the earth.

  “Evie.” The name slips out like a moan, and as if my voice were some sort of cue, the rest of my body starts to tremble.

  “I told you two to stay in the safe house,” snaps Mink, who’s half hidden behind a fallen column, her rifle still trained on the Undying soldiers.

  “And we chose to leave,” says the man at Evie’s side. His voice, the British accent, the tilt of his head as he speaks—even if he weren’t one of the most recognizable faces in the world right now, I would know him anywhere. Then his eyes move toward the motionless form of his son behind me.

  And then it turns out I’m not empty at all, but so full of grief and fear and pain that the dam can’t hold it back. I’m weeping, staggering back. Dimly I’m aware of Mink’s forces moving quickly, overtaking the Undying troops who dropped their weapons when I took Atlanta’s gun.

  Of Dex, bursting from behind his cover to run to Atlanta’s side, his arms around her. Of Neal, who wasn’t in hiding at all, but carefully making his way around the perimeter of the room to reach his cousin’s body.

  And of Evie, who comes straight for me, and as my legs buckle she catches me, and we sink to the stone together. She holds me as I cry, murmuring in my ear, so like our mother used to do when I was tiny, when she was a baby, though she doesn’t remember our mother at all.

  I don’t even ask how she’s here. Distantly I know it must have been Mink. That she listened, when we tried to tell her in the truck that we needed Addison to finish his work on the portals. That she must have got to him, got him out of his cell, that she must have picked up Evie so the IA couldn’t use her against me. And probably a dozen other things we’ll never know about, maneuvering behind the scenes.

  I want to focus on Evie and not Jules dead on the ground. I want to focus on the face I thought I’d never see again when I was on Gaia, when I was on the Undying ship.

  When we were …

  I gasp for breath, a fresh wave of pain sweeping over me.

  “Help me up,” I whisper to Evie. For once she doesn’t argue with me, and lets me lean on her as my shaking legs threaten to give way.

  The song of distant sirens, indistinct echoing shouts, steps running—help must have already been on the way. The phone, I realize, is still propped up on the rocks. Still pointed toward us. Recording—and broadcasting—everything. The view counter is frozen on ninety-nine million viewers. The app doesn’t have the capability to display anything higher.

  The time that had slowed while I held Jules, while I held the gun, comes rushing back. Mink’s talking with the Undying, and Dex is disabling the portal while Atlanta watches, weeping. And Jules is … he’s lying there on the ground, EMTs gathering around him to transfer his still form to a stretcher
.

  I stagger forward, my heart suddenly squeezing so hard it hurts. I can’t let them take him away, not without me.

  A uniformed officer grabs hold of me just as I reach the stretcher. “Stay back, miss,” he says in thickly accented English.

  Dr. Addison turns a red-rimmed gaze on me. “Let her through,” he says in a voice that’s somehow gentle and authoritative all at once.

  The officer frowns, but lets go of my arm. When I reach Jules’s dad, he looks down to see the confusion on my face. I find myself stammering, babbling. “Jules wasn’t able to talk to you since—how do you know who I am?”

  Dr. Addison shakes his head. “I saw what you did for him. How you looked at him.” He pauses, and then adds, “And I’ve seen the wanted posters with you together.”

  His eyes are so much like his son’s.

  “I’m Mia,” I whisper. “And I’m in love with your son.”

  I can’t say was. I was in love. I can’t do it.

  A hand creeps into mine, and I curl my fingers through Evie’s.

  “Time to move,” says one of the EMTs. “Sir, you can come with us. Everyone else has to stay back.”

  Dr. Addison speaks before I get a chance. “They’re coming too,” he informs them, his low, gentle voice soft and aching with sadness. “They’re family.”

  IT’S RAINING AS THE CAR PULLS UP TO DR. ADDISON’S COTTAGE, droplets running down the windows and dressing the world beyond in gray. The driver offers to escort me to the door with an umbrella, but I wave it away. The water is bracing, and strangely alien at the same time. If I didn’t know I was in another world from the neatly manicured lawn, the healthy, soaring oak trees lining the streets, or the hired car that arrived at my hotel to bring me here today, the rain would do the trick.

  Evie’s back at the hotel. She offered to come with me, to hold my hand if I needed it or just offer moral support, but I wanted to come alone.

  He always told me I’d fit right in here. That his dad would love me. That it wouldn’t matter that I was a thief and a liar and a criminal. But now, trudging up the front walk by myself, I’m not so sure. Maybe it was just that I’d fit with him, wherever he went, as long as we went together.

  I swallow hard, coming to a stop before the door, abruptly wishing I had taken up the offer of the umbrella. My hair’s plastered to my forehead, and my careful attempts at makeup are no doubt dripping down my face. But I raise a hand to knock anyway.

  The door opens before I can.

  Dr. Addison is there on the other side, and for a moment I’m so struck by the similarities between him and his son that my heart seizes painfully, and I’m robbed of speech.

  “Mia,” he says softly, his eyes warm. If he notices my apprehension, he gives no sign—he just steps out onto the rainy walk and wraps me in a hug.

  I’m Mia. The first words I ever spoke to this man, in that dark, bloodstained cavern in the underground of Prague, were all he needed to hear. And I’m in love with your son.

  He was the one who arranged for Evie and me to come back with him to Oxford. He got us our hotel room, hired the driver, made sure we had everything we could want, like fresh clothes and room service.

  But for all I would’ve once thought I’d died and gone to heaven in such luxury, without Jules it all feels … hollow.

  Dr. Addison ushers me inside, showing me where I can take off my wet shoes, and offering me a warm sweater when he notices me shivering a little in the damp. The hoodie he returns with is filled with a familiar scent, if a little faded. It’s one of Jules’s, no doubt.

  My throat closes as I clutch it close to me.

  We talk a little—he asks about the hotel, and after my sister, and shares the news that not only has the IA dissolved Evie’s contract, they actually raided the club that had her, liberating half a dozen other underage girls.

  His is an old cottage-style house, and though it’s not spacious, there are little touches here and there that give it a strange sort of grandeur. Portraits hang at random intervals all over the walls—some are paintings, faded with age, and others are photographs, more recent. The staircase is old and winding, with an ancient carved wooden banister thicker than my waist.

  Dr. Addison sees me looking at it, and offers a tiny smile. “He broke his collarbone sliding down that banister when he was seven,” he tells me, eyes crinkling with the memory.

  When I first met Jules, I never would’ve thought him capable of sliding down a banister. Now, I can picture it with perfect clarity.

  His father’s watching me, and when I look up, he tilts his head to the side with obvious understanding. “Here’s me talking your ear off, when that’s not why you came. I hope you’ll come often, Mia—you’ll always be welcome here, no matter what. But for now—would you like to see him?”

  Wordlessly, I nod, my heart stuttering. Reliving the moment on the way up to the streets of Prague, when one of the EMTs suddenly lifted her head, eyes wide.

  I can still hear her voice: “He’s got a pulse!”

  Dr. Addison leads me through the house, explaining that Jules’s bedroom was upstairs, but that it seemed impractical to get him up there, so they made a place for him in the parlor. Whatever a parlor is.

  We arrive at a room with long, curtained windows lining one wall, a piano in one corner, and a bed at the far end. Once my eyes see that, they fix there. Dimly, I hear Dr. Addison say, “I’ll give you some time,” as he closes the door gently behind me.

  Heart pounding, I let my feet take me closer. His eyes are closed, his face still and calm. I reach out, fingertips brushing the linens on the bed, courage failing me for a long moment.

  “If you are trying to watch me sleep,” comes a familiar voice in the quiet, “then we’re going to have to have a long talk about what constitutes appropriate behavior.”

  In spite of myself, I laugh, the tension and fear falling away like the rain falling outside. “Your dad made me promise I’d do as little to disturb you as possible,” I protest. “Like seeing me might make you relapse or something.”

  Jules opens his eyes, finding my face as his lips curve in a hint of a smile. “He’s being rather overprotective.” Carefully, he plants his hands on the bed’s surface and pulls himself upright a few more degrees, propped against his pillows. As I start to protest, he throws me a sharp look. “Not you too.”

  I eye him sidelong. “Both of us had to watch you lie there bleeding in that cavern.” I meant the words to be light, joking, in keeping with the tone he chose. But my voice wobbles, and betrays me. “You don’t get to complain if we’re overprotective.”

  Jules lifts one hand in an eloquent gesture of helplessness, and props himself up a little more. The bandages hide some of his chest and one shoulder, but he’s not wearing a shirt, and the rest of him is bare. He notices the little grin on my face before I do, and has both eyebrows lifted by the time my eyes go back to his face.

  “Appropriate behavior,” he reminds me primly.

  “Mm-hmm,” I reply absently, still grinning.

  “Come here,” he suggests, with the air of someone who knows he’s pushing his luck.

  I glance at the door, which is still closed.

  Jules lets out a sigh. “The cat’s out of the bag, Mia,” he points out. “I think my dad knows about us.”

  “Yeah, well,” I retort, defensive, “I was given strict instructions not to upset you when I came. I’m pretty sure that extends to other forms of excitement.”

  Jules makes a sulky face, and settles for claiming my hand instead. I let him take it, ignoring the faint stab of regret that he doesn’t keep trying to get me to kiss him.

  “So that’s why my dad won’t tell me anything about what’s been going on.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Really? You’d think he’d know you well enough to know that not knowing would make you far crazier than anything the truth could do.”

  “Never underestimate the power of denial for an Addison,” Jules replies airily. />
  I squeeze his hand. “I’ll sneak you a few articles if you promise not to tell him I gave them to you.”

  Jules laughs. “Deal. How’s Evie?”

  “In absolute heaven.” I grin at him. “Our hotel room’s got streaming movies and chicken wings—I don’t think she’s ever going to leave. De Luca pulled some strings and got the club shut down—she’s free.”

  I’ve never said those words aloud. Now, I find my throat closing, eyes burning. Jules is watching my face, and leans his head back against the headboard with a warm smile.

  “You kept your promise to her,” he says softly.

  I clear my throat, focusing on the thread pattern of his comforter rather than his face. “What else … well, you know your dad’s on the reintegration committees, finding placement for the Undying who want to return to Earth. There’s way fewer of them than you’d think, though. Dex definitely wasn’t the only one who, deep down, felt that his home was a spaceship.”

  “I haven’t seen Neal—I got the impression from Dad that he and Dex …”

  I’m grinning again. “And then some. I guess the Addisons can be pretty charming when they want to be.” I wink at him, just to see him smile. “Though to be honest, I think part of why they’ve gotten so close so fast is because Dex misses having a partner. Neal’s never going to be what Atlanta was, and he isn’t trying to be. But having someone with him, I think, makes Dex feel a little less lonely.”

  “So there’s still no sign of her?” Jules’s voice is quiet.

  “None. Technically, the IA people know where she is, they know where all the Undying agents are. All the ones who turned themselves in, I mean. But her reintegration destination is secret, like all of them. Dex hasn’t heard from her.”

  Jules inspects my hand in his, idly stroking his thumb across my finger. “I don’t blame her, you know,” he says with a sigh. “She was doing what she was trained to do. She was a foot soldier.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Because I don’t blame her either. And I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life that Evie’s voice reminded me who I was, stopped me following Atlanta down that path.