PANIC SWEEPS THROUGH ME AS Mia leaps into the oily black surface of the portal, disappearing with a ripple, leaving me staring after her with my mouth open.
My body’s still electrified, my heart hammering, and I can still feel her lips against mine. We were only together a few seconds, and already there’s an aching absence where she was.
This room holds everything I’ve been searching for.
Everything my father feared.
Everything our world needs to see.
The Nautilus. A warning. Languages that weren’t born for tens of thousands of years after this place was abandoned. If I run, I’m throwing away everything it took to get here.
But Mia went through the portal.
There’s only one choice to make, and so I make it. I stumble half a dozen steps, then break into a run. I make for the black shimmer where Mia vanished, and pray I’ll find oxygen on the other side. A voice shouts from the wreckage of the chamber door, but Liz is too late—the blackness swallows me up, and I’m alone, and silence is all that’s left.
Pain shoots down my arms and legs, pounds at my temples, rips at my insides. My stomach lurches with nausea as I lose all sense of which way is up. Waves of green and gold ripple across my vision even as I squeeze my eyes closed, even as I reach for something, anything, to grab on to—but nothing’s there.
Just as I’m about to scream, I hit something hard. The impact drives the breath from my lungs and sends me rolling, an intense cold slicing at my skin wherever it’s exposed. I come to rest facedown, and as I pry my eyes open, I’m still not sure I can feel my arms and legs. All I can see is a blur of white. The sand beneath me is white.
No, my brain supplies, the sharp pins and needles of cold stabbing into my forehead. The snow is white. You’re facedown in snow.
I can’t summon anything more coherent than that—I can’t remember where I am, or where I’m supposed to be, but everything hurts, and I’m positive that for some reason, I’m supposed to move.
There’s a huge black monolith standing in the icy landscape just behind me, jagged stone polished smooth, and I squint at it, waiting. Then the information arrives with a sudden surge of adrenaline: it’s the portal.
Mia.
I twist my head around to look for her in the dim light, shove over onto my other side, and there she lies a few arm’s lengths away, huddled in a small pile on the ground, completely unmoving. I scramble up onto all fours to crawl across to her, the snow stinging my hands and soaking through the knees of my trousers, my pack trying to tip me over sideways like a too-heavy shell on an oversized tortoise. “Mia,” I gasp, grabbing for her shoulder with one hand. “Are you okay?”
She moans; it’s a long, low sound, her throat raw, as if she’s been screaming. On the ship here, half the crew were incapacitated on the way through the portal, and evidently Amelia’s on the side of the sufferers. I found the sensation thoroughly unpleasant, but then, as now, I recovered quickly. And right now, I have to think for both of us.
I twist around to look back at the portal once more, coming up onto my knees as I realize my hands are starting to turn numb, pressed against the snow. The monolith behind us looks solid, a black mass in the near darkness. No going back. But there’s no guarantee that just because it looks like stone on this side, it isn’t still a portal on the other side. It’s hard to imagine any mercenary who’d choose “unknown alien portal” over “retrace steps and go home,” but theirs is a world I clearly don’t understand.
Theirs is a world that just sent us through a portal because the fear of the humans behind us was greater than the fear of the unknown ahead of us. Or perhaps that’s not their world. It’s our world.
At any rate, I’ve left behind the thing I came to see, but I have to believe that where there’s life, there’s hope. So my priorities are to find a place to hide, in case Liz and her cronies do show up, and then to figure out where the hell we are, and what to do next.
I turn my glance on the landscape around us. We’re in a kind of frozen gully, lying in thick snow, walls of ice rising on either side of us. Even in the faint light, I can see the places I’ve kicked up the snow. Anywhere we move, we’re going to leave footprints behind us, a trail straight to our hiding place.
I stagger to my feet, not bothering to brush off the ice clinging to my clothes, and twist to look in each direction along the gully. Behind the black stone of the portal, the ground rises a little, turning to frozen brown earth, or stone the snow dissipating. That way, then. We’ll have to hope there’s a hiding place somewhere up in that direction.
“Mia,” I say, crouching down to speak in her ear, resting one hand on her back. “We have to get out of sight. Liz could follow us through.”
“C-c-c-can’t,” she manages, curling into a smaller ball, graduating from shivering in the cold to outright shaking. She doesn’t protest as I carefully pull her pack free of her shoulders.
“I’ll help you stand,” I murmur, drawing out her hands—they’re ice-cold, even to my half-numb touch—and wrapping them in mine. “Not far, then we’ll hide and wrap up warm. Come on, you can do it.”
It’s a tribute to her determination—it’s a tribute to everything I’ve come to admire about her—that she tries to get to her feet. I can see how much every movement costs her. I hook my hands in under her arms and mostly lift her, holding her steady until she can uncurl her legs underneath herself, and stand in the snow, leaning in against me. I wrap my arms around her, tucking her in under my chin, simply holding her for a moment, letting her gather herself.
“Th-thanks,” she manages after half a minute, her voice husky and whisper-thin. “For following me.”
She would’ve gone through this on the way from Earth to Gaia, and she still leapt through the portal, knowing what it would do to her. And not knowing, not for certain, that I would be behind her and here to help her on the other side. Although she did a pretty good job of making sure I’d follow.
“Well,” I say, holding her steady with one hand while I dig in the pocket on her thigh with the other, pulling out the last of her granola bars. A smile wants to creep into my voice despite the adrenaline still flooding my system, simply because she’s near. And I let it, just a little. “I had to follow you. I wasn’t sure the kissing was over, and I didn’t want to risk missing any of it.”
Her breath is a white cloud on the air as she exhales slowly, but she doesn’t reply. Neither of us speaks. And as the white mist of her breath dissipates, so too does the warmth inside me.
I can’t believe that kiss was just a ploy—I know that dizzying rush was as strong for her as it was for me, I know it. But that doesn’t mean she wants to do it again. She’s so single-minded in her pursuit not just of survival, but a way to save her sister, that for all I know, the very intimacy of the moment might be what’s frightened her away from it. She can’t afford to let me be a distraction. Maybe I can’t let her be a distraction.
I use my teeth to tear open the wrapper on the granola bar I’m still holding and peel back the packaging with one hand, holding it to her lips. She takes a bite, though chewing’s clearly an effort. I take a couple bites too, then shove the rest of it into my pocket. I want to wolf it down, but some part of my brain knows to stop myself. We’ve got to ration our supplies all the more strictly now that we have no idea where we are, or how to get back to Mia’s rendezvous point with Mink. All I know is that we can’t stay here forever. We’ve got to keep moving—I can’t think past that, the impossibility of our situation too overwhelming to contemplate.
“Ready to try moving?” I ask.
She nods, but as I lean down to retrieve her pack, so I can sling mine over my left shoulder and hers over my right, she sways in place. We need a hiding place nearby—our first few, faltering steps confirm that.
“Jules,” she whispers, hoarse, but audible. “Why is it dark?”
For a moment the question doesn’t make sense, and then I realize she’s right. We lost track of all time inside the temple, but right before we leapt through the portal, the place was lit with a thousand rainbows. With sunlight, refracted through the crystal up at the ceiling. But now we’re either right before dusk, or just after dawn, judging by the light. “I don’t know,” I admit. “We must still be on Gaia—the air feels the same and we’re not asphyxiating, but this snow…I don’t know.”
We keep to a slow but steady pace, and when we reach the frozen ground on the far side of the portal stone, I glance back, reaching up to turn on my head torch. Now that we’re on ice instead of snow, as best I can tell we’re not leaving footprints, or at least, not footprints that will be visible until daylight.
We make our way about ten minutes along the crevasse we’re in, icy cliffs rising on either side above us several times our own height. If we weren’t in such rough shape we could climb up and out of the crevasse entirely, though what we’d find above us I don’t know. But I don’t think I could climb that high right now, and I’m certain Mia can’t.
I’m straining my ears for the sounds of pursuit, and using my torch to methodically sweep the cliffs for any sign of a crack, a cave, or anywhere we can hide. Mia’s steps are starting to drag, and I’m taking more of her weight, when I finally spot it. There’s an opening in the icy cliff just above my head height, which means it must be about two meters above the ground. It’s barely more than shoulder width in size, but if we can slither in feet-first—and if it’s stable, and deep enough—it’ll be a workable hiding place until we can regain some strength.
I gently lower Mia down to sit on the frozen ground with the packs, leaning against the ice, and look up at the cliff face. It’s not a long way, but the fall could still do considerable damage. Assuming it doesn’t just collapse when I try to climb it.
Mia lifts her head to look up at me, her face white in the darkness. She’s pressing her fingertips to the ice, and I realize that if she’s grown up scavenging in deserts like the one that decimated Chicago, she’s probably never seen ice before in person, or snow, and certainly not in quantities like this. I’ve only been in a landscape like this once, on a geological expedition with my father in the Antarctic. For Mia, who nearly had a stroke when she tried to imagine me in a swimming pool, this much fresh water, frozen though it is, must be almost incomprehensible.
I reach up to test the ice, and it’s not as slippery as I feared, though the cold is biting. I yank my sleeves down to cover part of my palms, set my foot on an outcropping only a couple of fingers wide, and reach up, every muscle in my body protesting as I tentatively hoist myself off the ground. The cliff holds.
I don’t have to work my way up far off the ground to get a look inside the crack—I can’t even really call it a cave—but by then I’m sure the cliff face is solid, and relief washes over me like warmth when I get a look inside our prospective shelter. It goes back far enough for us to fit inside, and given I’m not moving Mia any farther in a hurry, it’ll do.
I climb back down and pick up the packs, slinging them over my head and into the shelter, and then help her to her feet. “More climbing,” I tease, drawing a faint smile from her. “You love climbing.”
“You hate it,” she murmurs.
“I do,” I agree. “Here lies Jules Addison. He died in the name of archaeology, when he tried to climb an ice cliff and landed on his head.”
“I’ll make sure that’s what the plaque says,” she replies, her voice a little stronger, and when I lean down to lace my hands together to boost her, she’s strong enough to lift her foot and set her boot on them, reaching up to take hold of the two highest outcroppings on the cliff she can reach.
“In Latin, please,” I say, bracing, then lifting her up, so she can grab at the edge of our little nook, slithering in headfirst with a kick of her feet, then twisting inside there to stick her head out a moment later.
“You’ll have to write it down, if you want it in Latin,” she says, as I glance down at the ground, use my boot to scuff out a hint of a footprint, and start to climb after her. “And based on our day so far, seems like more Undying would’ve understood it than humans.”
It’s a tight fit, climbing in beside her—I can squeeze in headfirst well enough, but there’s a lot of shuffling to turn myself around. I can only just rise up onto my hands and knees without smacking into the ceiling of our hiding place.
Eventually we’re wedged in next to each other, with me on one side of her and the packs on the other, my blanket wrapped around the pair of us. We finish off the granola bar in silence, and she doesn’t protest when I hand her the breather.
Its presence reminds me—and her, I have no doubt—of our limited resources, and as my limbs start to defrost a little, I turn my mind to the next question in my triage list.
Mia alive, check.
Place to hide, check.
Figuring out where the hell we are, and what the bloody hell is going on…no idea.
As if she’s reading my mind, Amelia switches off the breather after a couple of minutes, pulling it down from her mouth so she can speak. “So,” she says quietly, breath steaming in the frigid air. “We have limited oxygen, limited food, and no loot to buy our way off the planet. We’re still on Gaia, but this snow means we’re a long, long way from where we started, which means we have no way to contact Mink on the station anyway.” Her voice is low, almost monotone, her gaze fixed on the cliff face opposite the mouth of our little cave.
“That’s about it,” I agree, settling on my side to face her. “But we’re not dead yet.”
She wriggles around, settling down to face me, nose to nose. “If you say something like ‘where there’s life, there’s hope,’ I’m gonna punch you,” she warns me.
“Fair enough,” I concede, my mouth wanting to quirk a little when I cast my mind back to my earlier thoughts as I tried to get her moving. Good thing I kept them to myself then, or she might’ve stayed facedown in the snow out of spite.
What I want to do is bridge the gap between us, to brush my lips against hers, feel her warmth and share mine with her. But I don’t know if I can, if I should. She said nothing when I brought it up before, leaving room to joke in case she really was only trying to get me through the portal. So instead, I curl an arm around her, and bring her in closer, share my warmth that way. We’re speaking again, she’s teasing me again, and that much I’ll take. Physically, we’re close as I could wish—well, almost—but it’s cold comfort without knowing whether she truly wanted that kiss or not.
“Are we gonna talk about what happened back there?” Mia murmurs.
For a wild moment I wonder if she can read my thoughts, if her mind keeps circling back to that kiss too. Then I look down and see her staring ahead, eyes distant and fearful, and I realize she’s talking about the portal room. Like any sane person would be.
Get it together, Jules.
When I don’t answer, Mia straightens, pulling away from me just a little. “Those were Earth languages written on the walls, Jules. I mean, I don’t speak Russian or Chinese, but I know what they look like. Not to mention the French and whatever else that uses normal letters.”
“I know.” The words slip out, soft and helpless, before I can stop them. I’m lost.
“There was English, too,” she goes on. “I saw only a flash of it, but something about rising into the heavens? Wasn’t that in the original broadcast?”
“Yes, at the end of their message to us. We thought it meant to build and use the portal.”
“But…we’ve done that. We’re here, aren’t we? Why are they still giving us those same instructions? Rise up?”
“I…I can’t explain it, Mia.” My voice sounds small and grim, and as much as I’d like to find something reassuring to tell her, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t even have a hypothesis, however far-fetched. For the first time in my life, I’m adrift in a sea of not knowing, and it’s a terrifying, sinking feeling.
“You’re the expert,” she protests, her exhaustion making her sound accusatory. “Could they have heard radio broadcasts from Earth and learned about our languages that way?”
“We’re not even in the Milky Way galaxy anymore—it’d take millions of years for radio waves to travel here from Earth.”
“Well…it’s only been fifty thousand years since the temples were built, and we still heard the Undying broadcast that led us to Gaia. Maybe they can use the portals to send and receive transmissions, too.”
I lift my free arm so I can rub at my aching head. “Even if they had some reason to come find us, use their portals and listen to our radio signals…Mia, their civilization crumbled before mankind even had radios. Before we could do more than make stone tools. The temple that brought us here, whose walls tell the story of their race’s destruction…it’s over fifty thousand years old.”
“Then how are there human languages on those walls back there?” Her voice is high with confusion and weariness, and I can feel her looking at me, waiting for me to supply the answer she feels certain is coming. “All your Nautilus symbols, they led us to a room full of carvings in our languages, which could only be for humans, but how is it possible if they did it before these languages even existed?”
“I don’t know!” The words burst out, sounding angry and small.
I expect her to lash back, to pull away from me entirely, to accuse me of not fully understanding the level of screwed we are because of my upbringing. Instead she’s silent for a few breaths until I hear her inhale. “Well,” she says finally, “we should keep moving.”
“What?” I look across at her, and she’s got that game-face on again, the bring-it, I-can-take-whatever-you-throw face. “Moving where?”
Mia shrugs, spreads her hands. “Anywhere. Look, you said that temple was important. That it held the key to the hidden warning inside the broadcast, to proving your dad right or wrong. That the important thing in it was all the way at the center, at the bottom. That was the portal. They wanted us to end up here—there has to be a reason. We won’t find it sitting in here.”
The logic is like a life raft appearing in my sea of uncertainty just as I’m getting too tired to tread water. “Maybe there’s another temple here,” I say slowly. “Maybe that room wasn’t the final piece of the Nautilus puzzle. Maybe it was just a stepping-stone. The satellite imaging at the poles is sketchy at best, because of Gaia’s magnetic fields, so they could’ve missed something. Perhaps we can make for higher ground, get a better vantage point.”
Mia nods, eager to seize on any possibility. “Well, then, let’s do it.”
I take a long, slow breath and find myself nodding. But before I can open my mouth to respond, a sound breaks the quiet. It’s quiet, distant, muffled—but unmistakable.
Voices.
Liz and her men have come through the portal.