I LEAD THE WAY FOR a while. Not every room in this place is a puzzle requiring Jules’s expertise, and while I can’t read the glyphs, I am starting to know what their patterns indicate. Like Jules said, the glyphs are based on math, and once I started to recognize the equation for their language, their simpler instructions—step here, don’t walk there—aren’t hard to translate. And the spread of ordinary traps like hidden spikes and pitfalls are becoming easy to spot and avoid—it’s almost like the Undying put them there so we can see them, and know we’re still on the right path.
Maybe it says something about me that the easier it gets, the more uneasy I feel. Like even an ancient race that died out before humans used tools could somehow be out to get me. “This doesn’t bother you?” I say to Jules, shattering the silence.
“What?” His voice comes from behind me, distracted.
“It’s like they’re playing with us,” I say. “This part is so easy.”
“Maybe,” he replies, sounding tired, an edge to his voice. I don’t know if it’s frustration with my continued suspicion, or if it’s this new barrier that’s formed between us, or both. “But we can’t assume they were anything like us, Amelia. Or that they were putting in these tests simply to torture us. They weren’t human, there’s no reason to think they’d understand the kind of cruelty we’re capable of.”
He only calls me Amelia when he’s being formal, or when he’s annoyed. Otherwise it’s Mia, his accent leaning into the vowels. Cruelty, I think, feeling sick, and I fall silent once again.
I tell myself that I’m leading to test myself, to make sure that I’ve got some chance of getting through this place alive without Jules, if he decides I can’t be trusted after all. But the truth is that I’m walking in front so that I don’t have to look at him. He’s so tired, so ragged, and so changed. That trusting nature of his, the one I scoffed at and predicted would get him killed—it’s gone. When I look at him I can see it in his posture, his body language. That slight scholarly stoop to his shoulders now looks like he’s carrying the weight of the entire cave-in that killed that man.
Of course, with him behind me, it means I can feel his eyes boring into me. Or I imagine I can, anyway. Despite the warmth of his hand as we ran for the edge of the last puzzle, despite his nod when I suggested we keep moving, all I can see in my mind’s eye is that burning look of his last night as I lay down with Liz’s gang and he stayed tied to a rock, barely able to move. When everything we’d built started to crumble, beneath the laughter over my “imaginary” sister.
You don’t owe him, my mind insists, flashing frame after frame from the moment he admitted he’d lied to me so I would help him, so I’d get him to this temple for his altruistic dreams. There’s nothing to explain.
And even if I wanted to explain, we don’t have the time to stop. We’re moving. That’s enough.
My feet feel unsteady, and it’s not just exhaustion making my legs shake. For all my swagger, for all the time I’ve spent scavenging in the ruins with murderers and thieves, I’ve never actually seen someone die. And true, I didn’t see that guy—Alex, Liz called him—die either, or even hear him scream. A part of me insists that maybe he survived, maybe he leapt out of the way back toward the safety of the other side of the puzzle even as Jules and I ran for it. But we were closer to the edge than he was, and thanks to Jules, we were ready—and we only barely made it.
That guy is dead.
I want desperately to stop, turn, grab for Jules’s hand and pull him in against me just to feel his warmth, despite the fact that I hate him for his lie, for dooming me and Evie, for the crimes of his father, for all of it.
But it already feels like centuries ago that he slipped that arm around my waist in our sleep and it was all I could feel for an instant before Liz’s flashlight brought reality crashing in. I know there was a chemistry between us, and I think he knew it too, but we’re too different. And there have been too many lies now.
Though it was for all of a second, I miss the feel of his arm around me. I’d been keeping myself apart from him, this boy who’s so goddamn brilliant and so goddamn naïve all at once, this boy who’s both the best possible candidate to make it to the center of this temple and also the most likely to stride into danger with no idea what he’s doing. I’ve kept that distance there on purpose, because my sister comes first, and when it comes down to it, I’ve known there might come a moment when I’d have to choose between her and Jules.
And it has to be Evie. It always has to be Evie. It’s me and Evie heading for our Amsterdam, and then everyone else, the people who don’t matter.
But that night, his arm around me, my head tucked under his chin…For the first time, and not just since landing on Gaia, I wasn’t alone. Just like Evie wished.
I mean, when all’s said and done, we’ve only known each other a few days, and what we don’t know about each other far outweighs the stories we’ve told so far. But there’s something about him—I can sense the potential of what we could be together, as a team, or more, and I know that for a while, he did too.
I wish I could tell him that. Our trust’s so badly damaged now that he wouldn’t believe me—I don’t know if he believes anything I’ve told him was the truth.
But that night we were a we. And now that I’m a me again, I feel lonelier than ever.
I’m forced to set all these thoughts aside when we come to an archway signaling one of the rooms with the larger, more complex puzzles, and as Jules comes up beside me, we shine our lights in to size up the challenge ahead.
The huge chamber seems empty, but each of the paving stones has something carved on it, and I can guess the nature of the puzzle easily enough: Step on the right stones, you make it through. Step on the wrong ones, you don’t.
Jules must be thinking of Liz behind us, and perhaps of Alex, but he takes his time, studying each of them in turn, frowning. “These aren’t glyphs,” he says eventually, and when I look down, I realize he’s right. I had just assumed, but now I study them, they lack the mathematical precision of the glyphs, the patterns that I’m starting to recognize. This writing is something entirely different.
My heart sinks. We don’t have time for Jules to teach himself a whole new language to get us across the room. I crane my neck up, checking the roof, trying to pull together a backup plan. Perhaps there’s a way we can climb, get around the puzzle somehow. I don’t like our chances. We’re both exhausted, and we’ve hardly got any equipment left.
“There are patterns,” Jules says eventually, very slowly, like he’s trying the idea out. He lifts a hand to point to the rows of characters as they stretch away. “See how they change a little, the letters? And the words, for want of something better to call them?”
“I see,” I agree. “If we can’t read them, does the pattern help? They could say anything.”
“They might not mean anything at all,” he admits. “Human brains look for patterns everywhere, it’s how we’re wired. That doesn’t mean it’s how the Undying see things.”
I make myself stay quiet, trying not to hurry him along as he works through it, mentally giving him about ten seconds more in lecture mode before I cave. “They heard music the same way we do,” I point out. “They made us harmonize, to cross the bridge. So perhaps we should assume it’s a deliberate pattern. I mean, if it’s not, we don’t have any other options, and we’re in a lot of trouble. So we might as well hope it is.”
“Agreed,” he says, still staring down at the floor. “Look here. Do you see how there’s one dot, and beside it, there’s these three…I’m going to call them words, though they’re not any language I’ve ever seen. They might not be a language at all, they might just be for the puzzle.”
“Yes,” I say, forcing myself to be patient. “A dot.”
“And then there’s two dots,” he says, pointing at the next stone along. “And then these three words again.”
“Are we counting dots?” I try, squinting at the stones past the first two. Most of them seem to have one dot, or two, sometimes three, and then the list of words beside them.
“I think…” He falls silent again. As I try not to scream, and dig my nails into my palms, and wait.
Eventually I’m rewarded, when he speaks again. “I’m trying to think what I’d notice about these words, if they were in English, or French, or Chinese, or something I speak,” he murmurs. “How do they change from when they’re beside one dot, to when they’re beside two. Because they’re quite similar otherwise. I think it’s…” Abruptly he trails off, nodding slowly.
“Jules?” I prompt.
“Conjugation,” he says, breathing the word like it’s a prayer. “It’s—it’s like verbs. You know the way a verb changes? I run, she runs? Or in some languages, it changes even more dramatically. Think of French—j’ai, tu as, elle a, nous avons, and so on.”
“If you say so,” I agree, and he snaps out of lecture mode, returning to something more useful.
“The Undying handle verbs the same way we do, in some cases. It changes, depending on whether it’s I, you, we, and so on. I think this is a nonsense language that uses that sort of pattern, and we have to learn it.”
“We’re having a grammar lesson right now?” The urge to laugh bubbles up inside me, and I clamp down on it. I think if I start, I might not stop.
“Yes,” he says, more enthusiastic than I am. “The ones with one dot, they’re I. I run. And the ones with two dots, they’re someone else, second person. You run. Three, third person. She runs. So all we have to do is learn the endings for each, and then step on the stones with the correct ones. When we see three dots, step on a stone with the third person ending.”
“Easy as that,” I murmur. I follow his gaze as he traces out the pattern he’s found, the series of words with endings that change. We find it once, then twice, and once we’re sure enough, we step out onto the paving stones, making our choices for each stone with one dot, or two. Every nerve in my body is jangling, but there’s no grinding, no sudden crack—the floor beneath us holds steady. And one by one we find each new word, work out how it should conjugate, and step across those stones. It’s almost like a mathematical puzzle, once I get the hang of it.
When we reach the other side, I let out a breath, leaning against the arch of the doorway and glancing back. Our footsteps mark a clear path to follow in the dust, if Liz and her crew get past the rockfall, but there’s nothing we can do to hide our trail without potentially setting off whatever fatal traps lie in this room to punish mistakes.
We’re quiet as we keep moving down the endless mazes and corridors. The next few rooms are far simpler—we come to a puzzle with square blocks of stone to be transferred back and forth between different pavers until their combined weights are equal. It’s a little difficult without any way to weigh them, but we heft them in our hands, and it doesn’t take us long. Clearly, math and logic are universal between our two species. Maybe universal among any intelligent species, I don’t know.
We continue on, coming eventually to a branch in the path with two forks with swaths of glyphs carved above them. This time I’m the one who recognizes the puzzle type—it’s a variation on the one where there are two guards standing in front of two tunnels. One always lies, one always tells the truth, but you don’t know which is which. So when they both tell you there’s death down their tunnel, you have to figure out which to believe. Jules mutters softly to himself as he translates the rows of glyphs beneath them. Their meanings change, depending on context, he says—like kanji in Japanese, or a bunch of other Earth languages. He’s trying to translate for puns in an alien language, as best I can tell. I hold my breath, and try not to show my impatience, until finally he nods hesitantly at one tunnel.
We move gingerly, ready to run or dodge if something shifts in the path, but it seems we’ve chosen correctly. The next few corridors are filled only with the typical pitfalls here and there, and my mind starts to wander—until I see Jules, just ahead of me, walking straight onto a pressure plate.
I dart forward, grabbing at his pack and yanking backward with all my strength. I’m so much lighter than him that I only shift him a little, but it’s enough—when the plate triggers, and a shower of head-sized boulders rains down, Jules and I are in a heap just beyond its edge.
Half-dazed, Jules stares dumbly at the pile of rubble for a moment before groaning and rubbing at his head. I risk a glance at him and see again the exhaustion there. We haven’t stopped moving since we ditched Liz and her cronies, and it’s been at least a day.
What little sleep we did get before our capture got cut short when they snatched us, and neither of us slept much the night they had us as their prisoners. Especially not Jules, bound as tightly to that boulder as he was.
“We’ve got to stop,” I gasp.
Jules coughs, the dust from the rockfall settling in around us. “Liz.” He’s still prone, shaking his head.
I know what he’s saying. Liz’s company managed to cross the chasm beneath the music puzzle, despite the bridge being destroyed. They rappelled down into the broken puzzle where we were camping so silently they didn’t wake us. They’ll find a way through that rockfall sooner or later, and we can’t be within grabbing distance when they do.
“We’ll hear them,” I say, sounding more certain than I feel. “They’re going to have to tunnel through all that rock, and that’ll take time, and they’ll make a lot of noise when they break through. That kind of sound echoes, and we’ll hear it.”
“But we’ve already solved the other puzzles, cleared the way and left a trail for them. If they do get through the rockfall, all they’ll have to do is catch up to us.”
I swallow hard. It’s like he’s speaking my own fears aloud. “I know. But Jules, look at you. You were two seconds away from being a pancake. Look at me—I was half-asleep, I could’ve just as easily not even seen that plate. We got lucky. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our luck hasn’t been all that great so far. I don’t want to count on it. We need sleep. We need time with the breathers. Even if you could force yourself to keep moving, if you don’t get some oxygen, you won’t be able to think straight.”
Jules lets his breath out, then slowly drags himself into a more upright position. “Mehercule,” he mutters, one of his incomprehensible curses. “You’re right,” he concedes finally. “Looks like another chamber up ahead—if it’s safe, we can stop there.”
I can see the darker hole he’s indicating through the gloom. The chambers themselves, the ones containing puzzles, all share similar doorway-like entrances with carved rims like a warning, whereas the connecting corridors of tunnels seem more like simple passageways from one room to the next. I drag myself to my feet and offer Jules a hand, but he waves me away and stumbles up on his own. The shape I’m in right now, I wouldn’t have been much help to him anyway, but the gesture just serves to remind me of what’s changed between us. We inch our way toward the next chamber, on alert. Pausing at its entrance, Jules gazes around, searching for the glyphs of warning and explanation that have marked each puzzle room before.
There are none.
The walls and ceiling are completely and utterly bare. The floor’s empty, no paving stones or pressure plates or pits. There are no carvings, no paintings, no glimmers of metal or crystalline rock, no shadowy cables in the ceiling, nothing. Nothing but an empty room. Its only feature is another archway at its far edge, but instead of darkness on the other side of it, it contains a sheet of rock, carved with the most complex glyphs we’ve seen yet. If it’s a door, it’s not one with an obvious keyhole.
This chamber is totally different from any other we’ve seen so far, and though I don’t know what it means, Jules doesn’t need to tell me to be careful—we both move forward slowly, gingerly, waiting for the catch. But we reach the center of the room without incident. And after tapping at the stone around us, then stomping on it, then—finally—jumping up and down on it, Jules drops his pack wearily to the ground. “I guess it’s safe. We can look at those carvings after we’ve slept.”
“You think it means something, that this room is so different from the others?”
“I can’t be sure,” he says. “But we must be very close to the center now. Whatever’s significant about this temple, whatever the Nautilus is warning us against…I think it might be on the other side.”
His gaze snags on the door, and I feel that same pull toward it—all this way, and our prize is finally within our grasp. “All the more reason to sleep,” I make myself say. “If there’s some kind of test coming, let’s give ourselves a fighting chance.”
Jules nods slowly. “Mehercule, I’m exhausted.”
I let my pack slide from my shoulders too, and sink to the stone floor. “What does that mean? You keep saying it. One of your languages?”
He looks mildly embarrassed. “It’s, uh, Latin. ‘By Hercules.’ We’d catch it bad from our teachers if we were caught cursing, so I guess we just…got creative.”
I eye him sidelong, not sure whether to laugh or cry or collapse in exhausted hysterics. “Every time I think you can’t get more…” But I’m not sure what the word is that I’m searching for. More Jules is what I mean. He’s the most Jules-ish person I’ve ever met.
We both fall silent as we settle on the floor. It’s frigid to the touch, but I’m so tired I’m ready to sleep right there, cheek pressed to its chilly rock surface. But though my body’s screaming for sleep, my mind knows at least part of the exhaustion comes from lack of food and lack of oxygen. So I force myself to open my pack and start sorting through it.
“It’s a good thing they were lazy and made us carry our own stuff.” I break the quiet, the meager light from my wrist LED throwing shadows around the gear in my bag and confusing my tired eyes.
“They took the wave-stove,” comes Jules’s reply from the gloom a distance away. “No hot meals for us anymore.”
I physically flinch at that reminder—something hot in my stomach would have been like a ray of light in the endless night of this underground labyrinth. Trying not to sigh too loudly, I dig out my breather. I slip its strap into place and suck in a few lungfuls of richer air.
I know all it’s doing is injecting a little extra oxygen into Gaia’s thin air, but it makes such a difference I imagine myself dizzy with the sudden influx. I can hear Jules sorting through his own pack, see his head lamp moving this way and that in the dark. I pull out my blanket roll and a few protein bars, then crawl toward him. He’s setting up his lantern, pulling his flashlight apart so it casts a yellow glow around the empty room; then he switches off his helmet and tucks it beside his pack.
He’s deliberately set up the lamp between him and me, and he’s pulled out his little journal and pencil, fumbling with it in his tiredness as he tries to grip it to write. Drawn back to his translations as if he can’t help himself, doggedly continuing to work as if somehow it might save us, prepare us for whatever’s on the other side of the door.
I try not to shiver at the thought of sleeping alone on this cold stone. I toss him one of the protein bars, and it hits the floor and skitters to a halt against its leg. He doesn’t react.
“Eat,” I say, my voice distorted by the breather mask in place around my nose and mask.
“Not hungry,” he replies shortly, dropping his head into his hands.
My mind’s working so sluggishly that it takes me a few moments before I understand why his voice sounds so different from mine. “At least put your breather on,” I suggest. “You’ll be hungrier after your blood’s got more O2 in it.”
He looks up wordlessly, eyes meeting mine for a second before sliding away toward his pack. Then I figure it out.
When I negotiated with Liz, my only demand—apart from not being shot in the face—was that we get our breathers back. I got to see mine put back in my pack. But Jules…I was so busy trying to avoid the accusation in his stare that I never saw what they did with his when they got us up and moving again.
His breather’s gone.
My thoughts spin as the bottom falls out of my stomach. Mink outfitted me with a breather tank delicately balancing carrying weight against time so that it would have just enough oxygen to see me through to the scheduled rendezvous. Which still has to be more than two weeks away, though I’d need to get back to the surface to know exactly what day it is. As long as I’m careful with it, limiting myself to the eight hours a day my body needs, rather than the many more hours my body wants, it’s enough.
Enough for one person.
Sharing my breather cuts that time in half, and I don’t make it to the rendezvous. I don’t make it off Gaia, and I don’t make it back to Evie.
My next breath is shaky and loud, its sound amplified by the mask over my face. Then I’m crawling forward, my shadow in the lantern light swinging around the surface of the rock wall as I cross to Jules’s side. I pull off the mask and hold it out to him, hand shaking.
His eyes flick up, surprised confusion there.
“You breathe,” I whisper, “while I eat. Then we’ll switch.”
His gaze holds mine for a long moment, searching. Our lies are there, like layers of dust and debris left by time and neglect, concealing the truths engraved beneath. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve buried ourselves too deeply, if the honesty of that moment waking with his arm around me is as lost to history as the race who built this place.
Then he sets down his journal and pencil and reaches out with both hands—one comes to rest against my shaking fingers, steadying them, while the other takes the mask. I exhale, and some of the dust choking my heart drifts away on the air sighing past my lips.
Our dinner is necessarily silent—and at this rate, it seems like conserving our air is a good idea. We switch after I finish my dinner, then switch again. Jules’s head is bowed, hands dangling from his drawn-up knees, breath shallow in the confines of the mask.
For the first time since Liz’s gang jumped us, I pull out my phone. It’s an old, battered junk-heap of a thing. Years ago everyone had one of these—they were so universal they were like ID back before everything went digital. Now there’s a dozen different companies making newer, better versions, with cutting-edge technologies this one lacks. Jules’s wrist device, for one, with its holographic interface and its kinetic energy charger so that its battery never runs down.
But the nice thing about these phones, even though they’re ancient in technological terms, is that they’re so universal you can always find parts for them. They’re sturdy, and they’re cheap, and when you’re a scavenger you don’t sport fancy tech unless you want some rival gang to rip you off in your sleep.
It runs on solar power—solar power that it hasn’t seen in days. When I swipe my thumb over the screen, the little battery icon flashes a red warning before the circle for my thumbprint unlock appears. I probably only have a few more minutes before it dies on me.
Even if the station were directly above us now, we’re so far underground that there’s no chance of a signal. I can’t call anyone or get any data. If I tried to watch Evie’s last video message, the battery would die instantly. I hunch over the screen, though, turning the brightness down to conserve power, and swipe until I get to my photo gallery.
There’s the selfie I sent to Evie right before I boarded the ship, and before it, a few promo shots of bits of salvage for auctioning online. I keep scrolling until I find the picture I’m looking for.
It’s the last time Evie and I were together. She’s still got her makeup on from work, the dark, smoky eyes and red lips making her look way older than fourteen. You can see her tracker bracelet at the picture’s edge—the bracelet the club put around her wrist, attached to the bone in her arm by dozens of micro-anchors. The only way to remove it is by paying her impossible debt, or lopping off her arm.
Though it’s hard to look past the makeup and the bracelet, she’s wearing pajamas with pink elephants on them, and I’m in my PJs too, and we’re snuggled close on the crappy couch in her room under the club that holds her contract. Our heads are together and you can see my arm where I’m holding the phone up, and we’re grinning. We’d been laughing about something right before I took the picture, and the smiles are real.
I can’t remember what we were laughing about. My eyes blur as my mind sticks on that, turning over and over and over. Why can’t I remember the joke? Why can’t I remember the last thing my sister and I laughed about together?
My breath catches and I choke, drawing my knees up and cradling the phone so that its dim picture is right in front of my eyes.
“So she’s real.”
I jump at the voice, reaching up to dash my tears away. But Jules’s eyes are already on my face—he’s already seen me crying.
“She’s real.” I look back at the phone, eyes hungry for the sight of her face. Trapped behind a rockfall, with bloodthirsty mercs on the other side, under countless tons of rock and sand on a planet so far from home I can’t imagine the distance, without enough air to catch my ride back even if we could get back that way—I’m just trying to look at Evie, and not at the battery symbol flashing urgently in the corner of the screen.
“You were right,” Jules says, lowering the breather mask from his face. He’s moved over to my side so he can look at the picture of my sister. “She’s beautiful. She looks just like you.”
That makes me laugh, but I’m still crying, and I end up half snorting and lifting my arm so I can wipe my nose on my sleeve before I start dripping snot. “Liar.”
“I’m not lying.” His voice is quiet as he says it, and abruptly I remember why there was distance between us, and the warmth of him seems to pull away even though our bodies are still. “Not this time.”
I keep my eyes on my phone, knowing it could go dark at any moment, but I wish I could look up at Jules, too. “I was never going to join them, Jules. I wasn’t lying to you either, about Evie or about me. That was the lie, back there with them. Not this.”
It feels more important than ever that he knows this, that he hear the truth from me even if he’s already seen it in my face or felt it as I passed him the breather. It feels strangely vital that he understand without having to dig for it, or guess, or decipher my expression. I don’t know what waits for us on the other side of that door, but I need him to see me truly before we go through it.
Jules lifts the mask for another breath, but I can tell it’s as much to buy himself time to answer. But even after he’s done, he’s quiet for a while before letting that air out in a sigh. “I don’t know what’s real anymore. I just know I have to be here. I have to find answers for my dad. For myself.”
“I’m real.” My voice sounds thin and quiet against the stone. “And I’m here.” I lift my head, searching for his face in the dim lantern light. I’m here, I said. What I meant was: I’m with you. The words I’d meant as reassurance sound instead like a promise.
He opens his mouth to reply, but before he can, the light flickers. I know before I look down that it’s not the lantern—it’s my phone.
The screen’s dark. Evie’s face is gone. In a moment of blind panic, I can’t even remember what the picture looked like. And I wasn’t watching when it went away—I wasn’t looking at her, those last precious seconds. And I can never get it back.
I’m crying again, holding the phone in my palm like it had been a living thing, cradling it like it’s the loss of this pile of plastic and circuitry and computer chips that’s broken my heart. Then Jules’s arm is around me, and he’s easing the phone away from my hand with the other, and pulling me in against his chest.
We lie down that way, pressed together, legs entwined in the warmth of his sleeping bag, the breather mask between us. We pass the mask back and forth in the dark, finding each other’s hands and fingers and faces by touch. And when I sleep, he wakes me after a time to press the mask against my face, and after an hour or two I do the same for him. Binding ourselves together, as we prepare to face whatever waits on the other side of that final door.
All night we learn each other’s hands and lips as we share this single tie to life, the warmth of his skin still on the plastic mask each time he fits it to the curve of my own face. Each touch is more intimate than any kiss, our minds half-waking, half-dreaming, our two bodies sharing one breath.
I’m torn from sleep by the ground quaking beneath me. I gasp, eyes flying open to meet Jules’s, his fingers still splayed gently on the mask over my face. Sleepy, confused, I would think I was dreaming but for the alarm written so clearly on Jules’s face it’s like I’m looking in a mirror.
Then the air’s split by sound—a massive boom followed by the roar of falling rock, and the ricocheting, multifaceted echo of the initial crack of stone.
We both bolt upright, tangled together but moving as one. My voice is hoarse from the dry air in the breather, and hoarse with exhaustion, and hoarse with sleep. “That was an explosion,” I gasp. “That wasn’t a natural rockfall.”
“I know,” Jules replies, disentangling himself from me so he can grab his pack and shove his gear back into it. “That was a demolition charge.”
I’m struggling up as well, the breather in one hand, my dead phone in the other, staggering in the sudden cold outside his sleeping bag.
If they’ve blasted through the rockfall, it means one thing: we’re out of time.