WE BOTH FREEZE. WE’RE CLOSE enough that I can feel the muscles in Jules’s body stiffen, can feel the catch of his breath like it’s my own. I can hear one of Liz’s men hurling his guts out somewhere down below, a side effect of going through the portal, and the sound of his retching makes my own stomach roil in sympathy.
Yeah, I feel you, buddy.
Liz, however, seems as immune to the portal’s side effects as Jules, or else she’s just so used to shoving aside physical discomfort that she powers through it. I can hear her giving commands, ordering her men to fan out and search for tracks.
Tracks…
The moments after I wound up in a snowdrift on the other side of the portal are a bit of a blur—Jules talking about climbing is the first thing I can remember with any clarity. But we’re some distance from the portal, and we had to get here somehow.
Tracks.
“Tracks,” I blurt, my mind finally catching up. “We’ve got to move. They’ll see our footprints in the snow and find us in no time.”
Jules is moving quickly, twisting in our tiny ice hole so that he can return my pack to me. “I concealed them as best I could. The last few minutes we were moving over ice, so the tracks will be harder to find, but not impossible. If we climb back down, we’ll certainly hit snow again, and leave more prints. And if we go up, we’ll be out in the open, where anyone can see us if they climb to the top of the crevasse.”
I tighten the straps of my pack around my shoulders once more, poking my head out cautiously from our hiding place to make sure they haven’t found our trail yet. Though the occasional beam from a flashlight ricochets through the ice, the voices don’t seem any closer. I crane my neck, inspecting the crevasse. I don’t have anything like the kind of gear we’d need to climb the ice safely. “Your pick,” I whisper, pulling my head back in so I can make out Jules’s silhouette in the dark. “The one you brought for artifacts and stuff.”
“What?” He’s staring at me like I’ve lost my mind—and maybe I have.
“If we can’t go down and we can’t go up, we’ll go sideways.” I’m grabbing my multi-tool from its pocket, twisting it until I can unfold its mini hatchet blade. “Across the ice.”
Jules is muttering something under his breath, something I recognize now as probably Latin. Latin. We have so, so many questions that need answering right now, and as soon as we’re not running for our lives, I’m going to make him turn that enormous brain of his to figuring them out. Right now, though, survival’s top of the list.
I wriggle my top half out of our hole and jab the blade of the tool into the ice some distance away. I ease a leg out, trying to find purchase with my boots and scrabbling until I get the leverage to kick at the ice and make myself a tiny dent of a toehold. Jules follows, breathing harsh just behind me. We’re not high off the ground at all, but a fall will leave a telltale sign for Liz to follow, and make enough noise for them to hear. And that’s a death sentence as certain as any life-threatening drop would be.
I’ve seen plenty of movies with ice climbing, and it always looked so much easier than scaling skyscrapers—you just make your own holds, wherever you need them, with your ice picks. But as we make our way horizontally across the face of the crevasse walls, I realize those movies were bullshit. For one thing, each of us has only one pick. We have to stick close together so I can use Jules’s holds while freeing my ax, and vice versa. For another, half the time the ice gives way as soon as I put any weight on the handle of my multi-tool, causing a shower of ice to skid to the bottom of the crevasse. Fortunately, bits of ice litter the sides of this canyon from years, or even centuries, of shifting winds. I don’t think the trail we’re leaving is one Liz will easily follow. At any rate, it’s a better bet than trying to hide our footprints.
Our progress across the cliff face is slow, and at times I swear I can hear my breathing echoing back at me off the opposite wall—we’re in a narrow gorge in the ice, snow on the ground below us, sky visible above.
When the crevasse branches, and branches again, we’re forced to stick to the same wall, always heading right through this ice maze. But as Liz’s voice, and the voices of her men, fade into the distance, I’m feeling better and better about our chances of getting out of this.
Well, away from Liz, at any rate. The rest—I can’t think about the rest, about anything beyond surviving the next few hours.
Eventually, my shaking limbs and burning lungs force me to give up. “I think that’s far enough,” I gasp, trying to sound like I’m not as winded as I am. My only consolation is that Jules drops to the snow almost immediately after I speak, slumping over with exhaustion.
I drop down beside him. By my estimation there’s at least half a kilometer between our last tracks and these, and the crevasse branched twice. Liz only has four men now, after losing Alex to Jules’s rockfall. It’s gonna take her some time to find us. We take a few minutes to pause, share the breather between us, and stretch. The horizon is definitely getting lighter, though the blanket of stars overhead is still brilliant against the deep violet sky. I gaze upward, trying not to think about how alien it all looks, how there’s not a single constellation from the Chicago skyline up there.
I feel like I should say something to Jules—not about the impossible languages we’ve just seen or how we’re going to get off this planet, but about what happened before we jumped through the portal. I kissed him. He kissed the hell out of me right back. But I don’t know what I could say.
In the end, I give myself a shake and tuck my multi-tool into its pocket. “Let’s move.”
Jules and I keep close to the wall, picking our way among the ice shards fallen from the lip of the crevasse. Our tracks are still visible, but at least they’re not as obvious. Once found, our trail will be easy for Liz to follow. But we’ve put enough distance between us and them that our tracks should take hours to find.
We abandon stealth in favor of speed, trying to widen our lead over Liz’s gang. While I’m geared for cold weather, I’m geared for desert cold—sub-zero, yes, but not this far sub-zero. My feet are numb before too long, and my face quickly chapped by the freezing wind.
The crevasse narrows, then narrows again, forcing us to sidle through single file, until I hear Jules hiss a warning behind me. I stop, but the ice is so narrow I can’t turn my head. That’s when I realize it’s gotten so narrow that he can’t follow. My hips barely fit, and his broader shoulders just won’t squeeze through anymore.
I wriggle backward until I can tip my head back and turn it over my shoulder. “Dammit,” I groan, conceding that we’ve reached a dead end. “How far back was the last branch?”
“Couple of Ks” is Jules’s brief reply, his own head tipped back so it can rest against the ice, sending his breath steaming above us as he pants.
“Shit.” I let my head fall back, too. We stay that way for a while, watching our exhalations rise and vanish into the sky, which is distinctly lighter now. “Well. I guess we go up now.”
“We do need to get to higher ground,” Jules points out. “See if we can spot another temple. For all we know we’re wandering in circles.”
The fact that we’re nearly wedged in makes the upward climb far easier than the sideways scramble of a few hours before. I don’t even bother with my multi-tool, just wedging my boots sideways against the opposing walls of the crevasse and wriggling upward. The top is the hardest part, and I’m so eager to pull myself over that I slip and manage to kick Jules in the face before his bulk stops my slide.
His grunt of pain and effort makes me flinch and grab for the edge of the crevasse. I haul myself up, praying I didn’t break his nose. That’s the last thing I need to add to my list of sins. Once I’m up, I flatten myself on my belly and dig the toes of my boots into a crack in the ice, and offer Jules an extra hand as he scrambles up after me. Then we’re both rolling over onto our backs, ignoring for the moment the cold of the ice beneath us, breathing hard and staring up at the silvery blue of the early morning sky.
When I finally find the strength to sit up—and look around—my breath sticks in my throat as a strangled gasp.
The suns hang just over the horizon, which is marked by distant mountains that look as though I could reach out and touch them, the air is so crystal clear. Gaia’s two suns are overlapped in the sky, red and orange where they sit low above the mountain peaks, and their light paints the edges of the ice a fiery crimson-gold.
Before us spreads an expanse of flat ice, marked with crevasses like the one we just climbed out of, each one gilded in fire that drops quickly into a deep aqua in their depths.
I reach for Jules’s hand without thinking, to pull him upright. And though he takes my hand, he rises to his feet on his own power, keeping my fingers wrapped in his.
We say nothing. My mind is dazzled by the sudden beauty of this place, and there are no words to fill the silence. It’s a silence that doesn’t need filling anyway, a silence so full of awe that to speak would only lessen our wonder.
The crevasse field spreads behind us into what seems like infinity, but ahead of us there’s a line in the white expanse that suggests a change in terrain. We set out for it without needing to discuss it.
While there’s no snow to slow our steps, we quickly discover the reason for that—unshielded by the crevasse walls, the wind is fierce up here, too fierce for any snow to collect on the icy plain. We have to hunker our shoulders and lean into it to make any progress, though the winds rise and fall and give us occasional reprieves in which we can move considerably faster.
The change in terrain proves to be a drop-off, but we’re still too far to see into the valley beyond. We’re moving for an hour at least when Jules pauses, his icy fingers tightening in mine to give me some warning before I’m forced to jerk to a stop too.
“The suns aren’t rising any higher,” he notes, brow furrowed as he inspects the horizon. “They’ve moved, but only along the mountain ridge.”
Tired, my mind refuses to interpret what he’s saying. “So?”
“So, that’s strong evidence we’re near one of the poles. The southern one, I’m betting, based on where the suns are. That’s why it went from light to dark when we went through the portal. It wasn’t time travel or anything like that—we just teleported to a part of the planet where the suns hadn’t risen yet.”
“The south pole?” I echo. Numbly, I’m trying to remember my studies of the planet. I knew the terrain by the drop-off point like the back of my hand, but damned if I remember where that actually was on the planet’s surface. “That’s…”
“At least fifteen thousand kilometers from where we were.”
It ought to be a blow. It ought to drive me to my knees, confirming how far we are from the rendezvous point. It ought to make me want to lie down on the ice and wait to freeze to death.
But I think some part of me already knew. Even back in the prism chamber, as we activated the portal, I knew. The old plan—get in, grab the loot, get back to Earth—was long gone by then, lying in ruins at the bottom of one of those pitfalls in that temple.
It started falling apart way before this—before Liz found us, before we even stepped inside. It started falling apart the moment I teamed up with Jules and headed for the hidden temple. It disintegrated when we found all the languages of Earth at the center of the temple, an impossible sight. “Is this part of the planet even covered by the satellites?” I ask, dully sure of the answer.
Jules shakes his head slowly. “Gaia’s magnetic field is so strong at the poles that they don’t have any surveillance here at all.”
I absorb that new blow with barely a waver. There’s no way to call Mink even if she would still pick us up. And even if we could call her, she wouldn’t have any maps or images of this terrain. We might as well actually be on a different planet.
Jules gives my hand a squeeze, then lifts it to his lips. He wraps my fingers in both of his, pressing them to his mouth where his skin is warmer, and his breath warmer still, exhaling life back into my numb body.
Then the air’s rent by a crack, and we both start, half dropping toward the ice. It sounded like a gunshot, but after a moment its echoes are overtaken by the crackling roar of ice. Somewhere behind us something just broke a big chunk of ice from the crevasse. And while it’s impossible to tell how far away it was, the sound’s echoing all around us now, and buried inside the noise of falling ice is the warmer patter of surprised voices.
Jules and I meet each other’s eyes for half a heartbeat, then break into a run. It’s only a few moments later that a shout rings through the air. Liz’s men have not only picked up our trail, but have done as we did and climbed the crevasse for a better vantage point. We turn as one, looking behind us—they’re about a kilometer back, just specks against the ice. But if we can see them, they can see us.
My footing gives way without warning—I was looking behind us, and not where I was running. Jules is falling even before I am, the ice shattering beneath our feet and dropping us with a bone-bruising thud onto a sheet of ice below.
Our momentum carries us into a slide and we go shooting into darkness, kept together only by our linked hands, even as the force of the fall threatens to separate us. We’ve fallen into some sort of meltwater cave system within the ice sheet, and with every passing moment we’re gathering speed as we slide downhill.
We crash into a series of delicate ice stalactites that serve only to daze us, not slow us down. Flashes of light streak by as we pass shafts leading upward into the dusky daylight, but we’re moving too fast to see anything else. Jules tightens his grip on my hand and pulls and our bodies come together.
We smash through another sheet of ice and slam into a wall before careening sideways and down another chute. I blink ice and tears from my eyes and see the darkness starting to give way, not in a bright flash like we’re approaching a vertical shaft to the light above, but gradually, like we’re rapidly approaching the end of…
“Hold on!” I scream, reaching for my multi-tool. Jules wraps an arm around me, yanking me in against him, and as the hatchet blade comes shooting out of the tool, his other hand wraps around both mine and the haft of the ax. Together we swing downward and the blade strikes ice, not catching but screeching through it like nails across drywall, and with about as much effect.
Then daylight dashes over us—after the utter blackness in the caves, even the dusk of the polar spring is dazzling. The ax’s haft vibrates once against my palm, my only warning before it catches in the ice and jerks to a halt. My arm would’ve been yanked from its socket but for Jules’s added grip—even so, the pain of it wrenches tears from my eyes and a moan from my throat. Jules’s own grunt of pain tells me he’s barely holding on.
And that’s when I realize why: we’re dangling over thin air.
The caves open up into the valley wall beyond the ice sheet, and we’re hanging from the handle of my multi-tool over a drop so high my eyes can’t even track the chunks of ice dislodged by our slide as they fall to the valley floor far below.
I moan again, though this time it’s half a scream, and it’s enough to make Jules glance down and echo it. Together we scramble, adrenaline giving us the strength to haul ourselves back over the lip of the tunnel and retreat, boots scrabbling against the ice and debris, until we can lie still, shaking and coughing.
The multi-tool is wedged into the ice so far I can’t get it out, and Jules has to help me pry my own fingers from its handle. I gently wriggle it to and fro, and he uses the edge of his pick to chip away at the ice around it.
I huddle in against him as much for comfort as for safety, and he’s not pulling away, his own body shaking as hard as mine is—we’re both fumbling every movement, taking longer over this than we have to, but this is a small, concrete action we can cling to, and so we do. The multi-tool is valuable, and whatever happens, we’re going to need it. Eventually it comes free of the ice, and bit by bit we unwind enough to creep back toward the lip of the cave, to look at the valley spread out before us.
The ground far below would have looked like a huge, unbroken expanse, like a frozen inland sea, but for a slab of rock jutting out of it at an angle. My dazzled eyes see it as a pillar from Stonehenge, something finite and understandable.
But as I make out the fine spiderweb of cracks in the ice radiating out from the thing, as my mind reasserts just how far up off the valley floor we are, how far away we must be, the true scale of the stone starts sliding dizzily into place. It’s massive—far larger than any of the temples, even the decoy complex I’d originally intended to loot. It’s not the right shape for one of the temples, either. Now that I’m looking at it, the sleek lines of the thing curve where it’s buried in the ice, spiraling around on itself like the stone is a half-concealed serpent, coiling to strike.
“That’s not a rock.” Jules’s voice is hushed. The shape of that curved base is familiar, and I can feel both our minds trying to figure out why. “It’s…”
He reaches for the multi-tool, easing it out of my unresisting fingers. His breath is catching, as though he wants to speak, but he can’t. He fumbles with the tool’s grip, and out springs the blade. He can’t find the words, but slowly he drags the blade across the ice between us, etching out what he wants to show me.
The Nautilus symbol. Curved, spiraling, twisting in on itself.
I stare at it, then my gaze trails down to the thing in the ice once more. That curve at its base…He’s right. It’s an exact reflection of the Fibonacci spiral he found scrawled all over the temple. On a scale like we’ve never seen it before.
Then my mind tips the object on its side, and everything else about its shape becomes clear. The elongated section snaps into perspective. It’s the body of a bird, a fish, a fighter jet. Designed to move through the air, the water, the substance of reality, with scarcely a ripple.
Designed.
“Rise into the stars,” Jules whispers at my side, for once our two minds following the exact same trajectory.
This is what the Undying broadcast and the temples meant us to find—and it’s also what they tried to warn us about, whoever slipped the equation for the Nautilus—for the shape of this thing—into their broadcast, and etched spirals into the temple walls.
Catastrophe. Apocalypse. The end of all things.
This is the treasure they guarded, the prize at the end of the maze, the discovery that will change the future of Earth forever. Because it’s not a temple, or a monument, or a rock formation at all.
It’s a spaceship.