FOR A FEW SECONDS NO one speaks—Javier’s breathing hard, focus switching between us. He’s wearing goggles, making it near impossible to read his expression, but his body is tense and ready. It’s clear he’s a pro. A mercenary, rather than a simple scavver. Or, at the very least, someone who’s been doing this sort of work for a long time.
“You fire that thing in here and you’ll bring the whole cave system down on our heads.” I’m speaking before I know what I’m hoping to get out of him.
“Maybe,” he replies. “But you’ll definitely be dead if I pull the trigger.”
“Why come after us?” Jules is staying still, not risking a movement that could make Javier’s twitchy finger slip. “That’s what you’re after, down there. You don’t need us anymore.”
“You’re our bargaining chips.” Javier’s head turns a little—I’m guessing he’s glancing toward the relatively bright hole in the cave that overlooks the valley. “Liz is going to trade you two as prisoners and hopefully make a deal with the Alliance forces down there. This operation’s out of our league.”
“Liz?” I exchange glances with Jules, whose brows are raised. He lifts his eyes to the hole through which Javier descended, and I’m right behind him. Tunneling his way through the ice, Javier would’ve heard the gunshots, but in all likelihood, he won’t have seen what happened.
For a few wild moments, my mind flips through half a dozen ways to use what we know against him. On this, at least, Jules and I agree: knowledge is power. But I’m so tired, and so shaken, and the last few hours are catching up to me faster than I can think.
Javier’s got his attention back on us, and after a few more seconds of silence, he reaches up with his spare hand and lifts his goggles up onto his head. He squints at us, though the gun doesn’t move. “What?”
Now I can see his eyes, I’m remembering the gentler voice he had, the way he loosened my bindings. My resolve to fight him is failing. I have so much else to fight already. “Liz is dead. The guys down there shot her and M.C.”
Javier’s eyes narrow. “Shot?”
“See for yourself.” Jules gestures to the ledge.
Javier inches toward it, keeping his eyes on us. It’d be easy to lunge forward the moment he shifts his attention to the valley, and shove him out over the drop. But when I glance at Jules, and meet his gaze, I know we’re thinking the same thing. Under Liz’s leadership, her team was ruthless, efficient, and smart. And those soldiers down there shot her after a couple of minutes of conversation, and evidently with no warning.
Liz was a nearly insurmountable threat to us, and they just took her out like it was nothing. On our own, Jules and I don’t stand a chance.
It takes Javier only a few seconds to find the distant pool of crimson surrounding the two bodies in the snow on the surface of the frozen plain. He scans the area, then pulls himself back from the ledge and slumps back against the cave wall. “Well, damn.” His gun clicks as he thumbs the safety back on, and he shoves it back into its holster inside his jacket.
I swallow, my throat dry and lips chapped from the cold air. I sneak another look at Jules, who looks relieved—though thanks to recent events, he seems no more eager to trust Javier’s apparent change of heart than I am.
“Sorry,” I say eventually, though even I can hear the lack of feeling in my voice.
Javier’s eyes flick up, and the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile. “No, you’re not. Tell the truth, I can’t say I am either. Knew it was a mistake as soon as she started giving orders. I’m a merc, I go where the money is. But killing a couple of kids?” He grimaces and shakes his head. “I’ve got kids of my own. Not what I signed on for.”
I’m sensing now’s not the time to protest the word kids. Instead, I let my breath out in a long, shaky sigh. “So you’re gonna let us go?”
Javier shrugs, eyes creeping back toward the valley, though this far back in the cave we can’t see the spot where Liz’s body’s still lying in a pool of her blood. “Go where? That’s black-ops down there. There’s a lot the world doesn’t know about the Alliance, and those teams down there make the old organizations, like the CIA and your MI6, look like kids at playtime. Show ourselves, and we get the same treatment as Liz. Pros like that won’t care how old you are. Keeping the secret’s the mission, and taking prisoners requires resources. They’ve got to feed you and find a place to stash you and waste manpower guarding you. They’d need a helluva reason to keep you around. They’re more likely to shoot you, like they did her.”
“Well, we’re running out of choices.” My voice sounds every bit as exasperated as I feel, though, thankfully, nowhere near as terrified. “Stay here, we miss Mink’s evac and either starve or die of eventual asphyxiation, whichever comes first.”
“Go there, and get shot in the face.” Jules’s voice, despite the grimness of it, still manages to warm a little of the ice in my stomach. At least I’m not alone.
“Only if they see us.” I inch forward toward the ledge, and feel Jules’s hand wrap around the ankle of my boot to keep me from sliding out into empty air. Scanning the ship and the tents being erected around it, my gut tightens. There’s dozens of them, not to mention however many have yet to land—probably hundreds, altogether. But when you run out of options, you have to get creative. And desperate. “It’ll be dark again soon, right? The days here are short, at the pole? We can at least sneak in and steal some supplies, and maybe find out more about what’s going on. There’s no reason they’d have a perimeter set up in a place like this yet, because who were they expecting to come calling, but we don’t know what Liz told them about others being here. We should act fast, before they change their routine, and make it harder for us. If they’ve got shuttles running up to a station and back maybe we can stow away.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” Javier points out.
“Hey,” I snap back, wriggling away from the ledge until I’m at Jules’s side again. “We’ve made it this far on maybes, a lot farther than you guys would’ve gotten without us.”
“True.” Javier exhales loudly, letting his head thunk back against the ice. After a few seconds, he announces, “We’ll back you up.”
That brings me up short.
“We?” Jules echoes him.
“Me and Hansen. He’s back at base camp. We’ve lost over half the team now. Hansen’s a pilot, if we can get to a shuttle…I’d just like to get off this planet with my skin in one piece and see my family again, and your plan sounds as good as any.”
Jules looks at me, but I’m so stunned that I just shrug, too tired to think through the ramifications of joining forces with the remnants of the gang that was, less than a day ago, trying to kill us.
“Fine,” Jules says eventually. “But Mia and I, we’re giving the orders.”
Javier shrugs. “Won’t be the first time someone half my age is in charge.”
“And we get weapons.”
“Done.”
Jules’s eyes narrow. “And no more tying us up.”
Javier’s half quirk of a smile comes back. “That’s fair.”
I drag myself up onto my knees, readying myself to move out and follow Javier back to his camp. “One more thing,” I add, feeling around for my multi-tool, and the blade that pops out of its haft. “Your guy Hansen tries to cop another feel and he’s gonna lose that hand.”
By the time we reach the camp, the suns are back down below the mountains again, and night’s falling fast. It’s an uneasy truce at best. Hansen’s initial confusion at seeing us unbound only deepens as Javier explains the situation. But after a few outbursts—how do I know you didn’t just switch sides, and Liz’ll come through any minute and shoot all of us?—it seems to sink in, and Hansen subsides with his back against the wall of the crevasse we’re nestled inside.
Jules and I retreat to the opposite side, though the spot’s narrow enough that we’re only a few meters from where Hansen sits. We pass my breather back and forth in silence for a time, until a squeak of boot on snow summons my attention. It’s Javier, crossing toward us in the dark and stooping to hand us something. Aside from a dim LED lantern, we’re not risking any light, so it’s not until I reach up to take it that I realize what it is: another breather.
I nudge Jules, whose head jerks up with a start before he reaches up to take the breather. “This isn’t mine.”
“Yours is in Liz’s pack, out there on the ice.” Javier’s voice is quiet. “This one was Alex’s.”
If Alex’s absence from the little group wasn’t proof enough, the truth is in Javier’s voice. Alex, the guy who was halfway across the puzzle floor after us back in the temple when the roof caved in. The guy we killed.
Jules is staring at the breather in his hand like its tank is filled with poison gas. I don’t blame him. Every breath out of that mask is one Alex’s never taking again.
“Switch with me,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll take that one.”
But Jules is shaking his head. “The mask’s for a man. It’ll fit my face better than yours.” He only hesitates a moment longer before fitting it to his face and leaning back against the wall behind us.
I look across at the two new members of our little group. Javier’s busying himself checking our remaining gear, inventorying what stayed here when Liz went out to talk to the forces excavating the ruined ship. Hansen’s got his shoulders pressed back against the crevasse wall, like he’s bracing himself. He’s got an automatic rifle clutched to his chest like it’s the only thing standing between him and certain death. Back in the temple, when it was a gang nearly half a dozen strong tying me up, he was an asshole with wandering hands and an attitude. Now he’s just a guy a few years older than me, stranded like we are on a planet so far from home our galaxy isn’t even a smear in the countless spread of stars overhead.
My breathing sounds shaky to my own ears, echoing against the plastic of my mask until eventually I pull it away. Though my brain knows the air from the tanks is better for me, the masks get hot and moist and just now I want the frigid chill of the frozen air against my face.
“We need a plan.” My voice sounds a lot stronger than I feel.
Hansen’s gaze flicks up, eyes wide enough that I can see the whites of them rolling in my direction. “A plan? A plan? We’re gonna die, how’s that for a plan? Shit. I almost went with them. I almost went with them.”
I’m assuming he means Liz and M.C., whose bodies are probably frozen solid by now, out on that windswept plain. I take a breath, resisting the urge to join Hansen in what is, admittedly, a justified descent into panic. Take his badass, hardcore boss away and he’s more scared than we are.
I realize I’m shivering, and not from the cold. Okay, maybe not more scared than we are.
“We’re not dead yet.” Jules lowers Alex’s mask from his face. “We need to know more about the layout down there if we’re going to get our hands on more supplies, and ultimately, a shuttle.”
“Gonna die,” groans Hansen.
“Shut up, kid.” The gruffness of Javier’s voice is undercut by the fact that he drops down next to Hansen and hands him a flask too small for carrying water. Then, to Jules: “You’ve got an idea?”
“Well,” says Jules, thoughtful. “I assume their first step will be to try and get inside the ship. I don’t know how they’ll do it—I haven’t seen it close up—but I have a better chance than most of figuring it out.” He pauses, and we exchange a glance in the dim light. We’re both thinking of the clues we’ve already seen—of the human languages carved into a fifty-thousand-year-old temple. I’m wondering if Javier and Hansen even saw it all, or if the mirrors were knocked so askew by their explosion that they weren’t lighting up the walls anymore. Neither of us mentions it. Nor do we mention the trail of Nautilus symbols that warned us about the ship. About a danger we still don’t truly understand.
“Right,” Javier prompts, gentle, and Jules continues.
“I’m assuming you have the best chance of guessing how an armed camp of this sort would be set up. Of reading the landscape of it, so to speak.”
Javier nods slowly. “So you think we team up and scout.”
“I don’t love it,” Jules admits. “But I don’t have a lot of better ideas.”
I don’t love the plan either—a lot has to go our way for it to work—but I’m one of the best get-out-of-this-with-my-skin-intact scavvers I know and I can’t think of a better one.
Javier doesn’t seem much more enthused than I feel, but eventually he grunts and nods. “We’ll want to observe them for a few hours before we get close enough to scout properly. Time to see what their security measures are now, avoid being spotted by the guys with guns, that sort of thing.”
“Tomorrow,” I say firmly. “Thanks to you lot, we haven’t slept—not really slept—in days. I don’t particularly feel like walking into a fully armed patrol because I’m half-asleep on my feet.”
At that, Javier actually laughs—and though it’s brief, it’s a quiet, gentle laugh rather than the harsh bark you might expect from the big, burly-looking guy. “You’ve got a point. Hansen, go easy on that stuff.” He tugs his flask back from Hansen, who still looks too shaken to process much of anything.
“Better put out the light, though,” I note, nodding toward the little LED lantern. “Don’t really want anyone over there spotting an odd glow on the horizon or anything.”
We settle down on our opposite sides of the crevasse, Jules and I sharing the inflatable warmth of his high-tech sleeping bag, and using my blanket roll for a pillow. He wraps his arms around me, for warmth as much as anything—that is, until I feel him sigh, and pull aside Alex’s breather, and duck his head until his lips are against my hair.
“We’re still alive,” he whispers.
I swallow, feeling my fingers curl around the fabric of his shirt as though I might be able to somehow draw him closer that way. “Even if we do make it off this planet, there’s no way I’m doing it with enough loot to help my sister. And whatever’s going on here, it’s something far, far worse than anything your father could’ve predicted. You don’t set up elaborate, multi-stage lies for altruistic reasons—somehow I doubt the Undying hid their foreknowledge of humanity and its languages because they wanted to throw us a surprise party. Whatever’s happening here is a con. And I can’t think of any way it ends well.”
Jules’s jaw tightens. “I can’t either.”
“There’s nothing more in the transmission? Nothing in the translations from the temple?”
He frowns. “No, but…” He stops as his eyes widen. He wriggles his arms free so we can both look at the wrist unit, bringing up the display and the hundreds of photos he took inside the temple. He flicks through them with quick movements of his fingers, pulling out the ones he wants, and I watch in silence.
He has about ten of them when he’s done, and he’s gazing so intently at them that I don’t dare interrupt. They’re just the pictures he took of the Nautilus symbols from the temple, scratched into the stone in so many of the chambers we passed through.
He turns the images semi-transparent. And then, with a series of slow swipes, he begins to layer them, one on top of the other. All the Nautilus swirls fit neatly on top of each other, as if they were just one shell. But all the lines are in different places. And when all the pictures are layered together, those lines join up.
They form the body of the spaceship, rising up from the Nautilus at the base.
“It was always there,” I whisper, staring. “If we knew how to look at it.”
“The spiral was hidden in the broadcast,” he whispers in reply. “And the spiral carvings in the temple were all hastily made and unobtrusive. We’ve been thinking of the Undying as a single cultural entity with a single goal, but look at human history—look at you and me, even. We barely agree on anything half the time. We might not know what the ship is for, but clearly it’s important—and at least one member of the Undying race tried to warn us that it’s dangerous.”
I want to cry, to rail at the impossibility of the puzzle the Undying have left for us. The tangle of timing and probability is worse than any temple maze or pitfall. And even Jules—brilliant, clever, Undying specialist Jules—can’t offer any explanation that makes sense.
Instead, I draw a shaky breath. “The question is, which faction—the engineers of the broadcast or the ones who warned us away in secret—was telling the truth?”
He swallows and shakes his head in reply, then with a quick flick of his fingers, dismisses the images. He looks so determined, his jaw squared, his gaze fixed on the horizon. And with that quick bob of his throat, he looks nervous—more than nervous, afraid.
I turn my head so that just my eyes are peeking out the top of the sleeping bag. Looking up, I can see a sliver of sky beyond the walls of the crevasse stretching up above us. “You know what I miss?” I whisper.
He clears his throat with an effort. “Pizza?”
I laugh, more than his attempt at humor really deserves, relieved he’s trying at all. My breath against his neck makes him shiver. And knowing I did that to him makes my skin prickle in response. I turn a little in his arms so I can look up more easily at this alien sky. “I miss the moon.”
Jules’s head shifts where it rests against mine, and I know he’s looking up now, too. Both of us, scanning the heavens for anything familiar, knowing that there’ll be nothing there to bring us any comfort.
Our whole lives, the International Alliance has been a group of bickering, petty politicians more concerned with buying votes than helping mankind—but there was a time, long ago, when they were Earth’s best hope. When all the nations of the world turned their eyes toward the stars and worked together to reach out toward Alpha Centauri. Toward the future.
It’s when we stop looking up that we fall apart.
I turn in Jules’s arms and he gathers me in, so that we can wrap the sleeping bag up around our faces while keeping our eyes on the alien constellations. Strange, how familiar and how comforting he feels, this boy I still barely know. As familiar as my own stars.
For all I know, tomorrow we’ll get caught sneaking in by one of those patrols, and our bodies will be left to freeze in the snow like Liz. For tonight, I’ll close my eyes and pretend I’m lying here, looking up at the moon, with Jules.
A tiny noise wakes me. My mind cycles through a dozen possibilities, getting closer to the truth with each lap of my thoughts. Then the noise comes again and I recognize it as the blip of a walkie-talkie, the quickly stifled burst of quiet static. I don’t remember anyone in Liz’s group using walkies.
Then I hear the sound of feet on snow. And the squeak of this boot is different from the squeak of Javier’s earlier, and I can see Hansen in the starlight, passed out where he was sitting when I fell asleep.
The gun I insisted Javier give me is in the sleeping bag with us. I’m not good with guns—I wasn’t exactly a seeker of confrontation, back on Earth. I reach for it anyway, grabbing for Jules’s arm as I do so, gripping it in such a way that I hope he’ll wake quickly, and silently.
I’m listening for more footsteps, trying to figure out where their source is, but all I hear now is quiet. Then the starlight glints off something metallic, and I’m moving before I can talk myself out of it. I draw the gun, yanking it free of the folds of our sleeping bag, and swing it toward the glint.
Instantly a light beams directly into my face. “Drop your weapon!” demands a voice, harsh and slightly muffled by a breather mask buckled in place.
“You drop yours!” I shout back, hoping my hands aren’t shaking visibly.
The light shifts to fix on Jules, and for a moment, blinking with afterimages, I can make out three, four…maybe as many as six figures, black clad like the patrol that killed Liz, spread throughout our camp. No badges that I can see, but that only supports Javier’s theory that these are special forces, some kind of secret elite military. Each soldier holds a laser-sighted rifle—I can see the little red dots swing here and there until we’re all in their sights. I’m the only one with a weapon drawn.
The guy with his gun on me gives a little laugh, breathy behind the mask. “Next time, take the safety off, kid.”
I glance at the gun, but I know before I even see it that he’s right. My thoughts are spinning. Static crackles again, and this time the guy nearest us replies. “Four hostiles. Armed, not dangerous. Orders?”
I can’t hear what order he’s given, only the crackle of a voice in his ear. But the guy shifts his weight, then sighs. “Sorry, kid.”
For a heartbeat all I can think of is the flash of a gun going off, the sound it’ll make, whether I’ll even hear it before I’m dead. Then I’m throwing my gun into the snow and lifting my hands. “He’s Jules Addison!” I gasp, voice hoarse with fear.
The guy pauses. He probably expected at least a little begging for our lives, but probably not that. “What?”
“Jules Addison.” I can feel Jules at my side, tense—but silent. I used his name to keep us alive once before, and I nearly lost Jules because of it. This time, he waits. This time, he’s trusting me. “This is Elliott Addison’s son. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about the Undying. Tell me he won’t be useful to you guys down there. Alive.”
The guy’s light swings over toward Jules’s face once more, letting me see for a few precious seconds. “Huh,” is all the guy says, inspecting Jules as he blinks in the brilliant light attached to the guy’s helmet. Then the light’s swinging back toward me, and the last thing I see is the big black shadow of the butt of his gun slamming down toward my face.