THE TENT WHERE WE’RE BEING held is a thin prefab thing that does little to block out the cold. With my hands bound behind me, I can’t move enough to keep warm. I can’t tell whether my fingertips are numb from cold or because the plastic zip ties they’ve used have cut off my circulation. Hansen and Javier are nowhere to be seen—the last glimpse I got of either of them was of Hansen being dragged off into the dark.
Mia, still unconscious, is slumped on the ground next to me. The best I can do to check on her is to scoot across the tarpaulin floor to be closer to her, to see the steady, minute rise and fall of her chest that tells me she’s alive.
They’ve set up floodlights outside, and without any light in here, it throws every movement of the camp beyond our tent into a nightmarish shadow play against the canvas walls. The only steady shape is the outline of the guard at the tent’s entrance. They haven’t gagged us, but I don’t call out. Mia’s quick thinking clearly spared our lives—the guards took extra care not to harm me—but I don’t want to attract more attention to myself than necessary.
Maybe they’ll forget we’re here.
Unlikely.
Mia…wake up.
She’s the one with the silver tongue. I may be able to puzzle our way out of an eons-old alien temple, but she’s the one who can bluff her way out of captivity. Mia. Mia. Wake up, please wake up.
A second shape joins the guard outside. I catch a brief murmur of conversation, and then the flap’s lifting to admit the new arrival.
The floodlights outside blind me, and I jerk my face away, blinking tears. When I look back, the newcomer’s bent over a crate, back to me, turning on a lantern. With a stomach-lurching jolt I recognize the long black coat I saw earlier—this is the person who shot Liz.
Then the figure turns around, and everything goes still. I know this face.
Her face.
A long, thin face with an aquiline nose, thick brows to accentuate her sharp eyes, lips that speak of competence and certainty without uttering a word. Her hair is brown, not the blond I remember, though the sharp bangs framing her face are still the same. In her military uniform I wouldn’t know her but for the way she looks at me, appraising, gauging, needy…except now I see it isn’t need. It’s a chilling mix of greed and triumph and drive.
“Ch-Charlotte?” I croak, too stunned to do anything other than stare at the Global Energy employee who recruited me. The last time I saw her was over coffee at a tiny café in London. To see her here is like seeing a thoroughbred racehorse in a police station waiting room—so jarring I can’t begin to draw the line of connection between them.
“Mr. Addison.” Her voice would almost be warm, but for the remoteness of her gaze. I remember our conversation so clearly—she was as passionate as me, dedicated to using her corporate reach to back my trip. Prepared to sell the idea to her bosses however she needed to. She was committed, one of us. All that’s gone now. She’s brisk, efficient, and calm. “You are every bit the treasure we thought you’d be.”
I’m staring at her, unable to stop looking between her face and her uniform, trying to connect them in my mind. These soldiers wear no symbol or badges, but then, a black-ops force wouldn’t. And the only group left on Earth with the resources to be here in such numbers and with such precision and skill is the IA.
But Charlotte isn’t in the International Alliance, my mind protests again. She’s as disgusted by their politics as I am. She believes in my father. She’s like me…she wants to save the world.…
The dark brows lift. “Did they give you a concussion? I specifically told them not to harm you.”
I swallow hard. “They didn’t.” A pause, my mouth open, and she waits expectantly. “How…What are you…”
“…doing here?” she finishes, looking almost amused. Almost amused. She doesn’t answer the question, though, waiting for me to figure it out instead.
“You’re not with Global Energy Solutions,” I say slowly, my exhausted, numb mind trying to catch up.
“Global Energy Solutions doesn’t exist.” She moves away from the lantern, letting more of its light illuminate the interior of the tent. “I’ll be honest, Jules, I didn’t think you existed anymore either. We lost our lock on your tracker once you went too deep inside the temple, and there was no report you’d come out again.”
“Tracker?” I repeat, echoing her like an idiot.
“You were supposed to think you were unobserved,” she says with exaggerated patience. “Not be unobserved. There was a tracker on the breather we supplied you with. When we found your breather on the mercs we sent to tail you, and their leader refused to say where you were, I assumed she was covering for having killed you.”
“Liz?” I’m trying desperately to put it all together, blinking up at her. Yes, Liz had my breather. With this tracker on it, apparently. And she wouldn’t have told them where I was. She’d sent Javier to find me, so she could trade me.
“Yes, Liz—keep up, Mr. Addison.” Charlotte rolls her eyes. “I thought you were the brains of the operation.” She nods down at Mia’s unconscious form. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have hit your girlfriend so hard on the head.”
“My—” All my confusion condenses, and when it solidifies in my gut the knot is full of fury and fire. “What the hell is going on? Who are you, and why—” Why everything, my mind wants to demand.
Charlotte’s lips quirk, and she slips a hand into a narrow slit at the hip of her long black coat. Then there’s a click, and a blade pops out from her hand as she advances toward me. My body jerks automatically, straining against bonds I already know I can’t break even as my eyes hunt for Mia, hoping against hope that her own eyes will open and meet mine, that she’ll have a way out—or that I’ll at least see her look at me one more time.
But Charlotte snorts. “Calm down, you big baby. I didn’t bring you all this way to kill you.”
I’m still tense, my muscles screaming at me to run, when she leans down over my shoulder and grasps the bonds behind my back. She smells of shuttle fuel and resin, acrid and chemical and nothing human at all. After days curled up with Mia, growing used to the scent of her, even sweaty and dirty and “gross,” as she’d say, Charlotte smells sterile.
I must smell like a sewer to her.
Then there’s a pressure on the plastic zip ties that makes them dig all the more sharply into my wrists, making me bite my lip. And then my arms are falling to the sides, the pressure gone, my hands dangling like lead weights.
Charlotte steps back, folding her knife back up and stowing it once more. “We don’t really have time to waste on explanations, Mr. Addison. Nothing has changed, except for the resources at your disposal. We still want what you want: to uncover the technological abilities of the Undying.”
“To use them, you mean.” She’s IA. She’s part of the group that threw my father in jail because he wouldn’t guide them through the temples. She has no idea what we’re dealing with. She doesn’t know about the warnings left in the spirals leading to this place.
I bite my tongue on that particular piece of information. Liz might’ve died because of it, but she had the right idea not telling Charlotte everything she knew. The IA never believed my father and his decades of expertise—there’s not a chance in a thousand Charlotte will pay any attention if I tell her to hold back from exploring the ship. She’ll think it’s a delaying tactic, or else an all-out lie, and she’ll end up watching me all the more closely to make sure I’m not sabotaging their mission. The only weapon I have is knowledge—if there’s a chance I can use what I know to stop them, or to get Mia and me out of this mess, I’ve got to hold on to it.
“You want to exploit the technology, whatever it is,” I say. “Whatever the danger.”
“You want to know, don’t you?” Charlotte raises one eyebrow. “Whether your father was right. Whether your lives can go back to what they were. This is your chance to find out. The answers are in that ship, Mr. Addison, if you can find a way inside.”
“Hang on.” My mind’s catching up, slowly, too slowly, like thinking through treacle. Looking for a way out. I push myself to speak again, stalling for time with indignation. “You lie to me, you track me here, you tie up my friends, and now you want me to help you?”
Charlotte’s lips purse, and she shrugs. “We could always just blast our way in, if you prefer.”
Some part of the scholar is still in my brain, because even though I know the most important thing we can do here is find out what the Undying knew about us—how they knew about us and what we would become, why they deceived us—her words make my heart shrivel. The idea of blowing up part of this astonishing artifact still carries with it a visceral, tangible pain. But fear reasserts itself and I swallow. “You want me to open the ship for you. What then?”
“Not really your concern, is it?”
“I mean—what about me? What about M—my friends? Somehow I doubt you’ll just let us sign a nondisclosure and walk off into the sunset.”
I’m thinking of Mia, mostly, but a part of my brain—not one I’m enormously proud of—is still aware that Hansen’s a pilot. That Javier can fight. That the two of them could be a way out of here, if I keep them alive.
Charlotte smiles. My heart shrinks just a little more. “Believe whatever you like, Mr. Addison. But a choice between certain death now and possible death later isn’t a difficult choice at all. I’m sure we’ll come to an arrangement.”
My lips press together. I feel the rage building in me, some distant relation to the anger I felt when I thought Mia had betrayed me to join Liz’s group; related the way a forest fire is related to a scented candle.
And suddenly my whirling thoughts coalesce, and my father’s voice, his face, is all my mind knows. Every warning of his is ringing in my ears. I can see the refracted rainbows back in the temple, the words in a hundred languages engraved, impossibly, into fifty-thousand-year-old walls.
My every exhausted sense is screaming that this place, this planet, is dangerous. And after everything the IA has done to me, to us, they want me to open up the ship for them. Open the Nautilus, unleash the danger every hidden symbol warned about.
My mouth is opening to tell this woman to go jump off a cliff, that she can kill me if she wants, that the day I open up that ship for her is the day they discover mind control—
—then Mia stirs at my side, with a whispering groan of pain and confusion that pops my fury like a pin held to an overfilled balloon. I lean over, reaching out to lay my hand on her arm and give it a squeeze. And I find that hand isn’t numb after all, that I can feel the warmth of her against my palm, the brush of her rib cage as she takes a deeper breath.
“Jules,” she mumbles, before her eyes even open, recognizing my touch. “The hell…think I’m gonna hurl.”
She’s got a concussion, of that I’m certain. I’m no doctor, but she was out for the better part of an hour, and the way she’s trying to sit up and can’t make her limbs work is all too familiar. People scoff at water polo, but they’ve never seen a guy take a blow to the temple and finish the point streaming blood, then desperately make for the edge of the pool so he can puke on the concrete.
“Here, let me,” I whisper, forgetting Charlotte but remembering my hands are free. I slide my arm under Mia’s shoulders and help her sit up. They zip-tied her too, and her fingers look unnaturally pink and puffy. She leans against me for support.
“Jules, what’s going…” But her dazed, unfocused eyes have wandered away from my face. “Wait,” she says, struggling to form the words. “Am I halluci—halloge—hillocillat…Shit, am I seeing things?”
I follow her gaze, which is fixed on Charlotte. The woman’s standing right there, arms folded loosely, watching us with what looks like amusement. Like someone’s aunt, watching the antics of her little niece and nephew with bemused patience. If that aunt had a knife, was dressed in black-ops military garb, and had a fleet of dozens of shuttles at her command.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, keeping my voice low but not really caring if Charlotte hears. “I’m going to handle this.”
“But…” Mia’s still staring, and after a few seconds of struggle, she blurts, “Mink?”
Now I know she’s concussed. And hillocillating. “Mia,” I say gently, trying to encourage her to look back at me. “This is Charlotte. She’s the one who recruited me, the one whose company backed my trip here.”
Except, of course, they didn’t. Because Global Energy Solutions doesn’t exist. But I can’t explain that to myself yet, much less the concussed, half-conscious girl leaning against my shoulder.
“No,” Mia says, blinking hard. “No, that’s Mink. My backer. She hired me. Hired Liz and them. How is she…Are we still at the south pole?”
But I’m staring at Charlotte again. She doesn’t look confused. She doesn’t look surprised. She doesn’t look like anything—except, perhaps, that patient aunt, waiting while her charges work torturously through a primary lesson, like one of those cardboard books that teach small children how to read. See Jane, my mind supplies, absurd and out of control.
“Mink…Mink is Charlotte?” My mind’s spinning so much I wonder if somehow Mia’s concussion could be contagious.
See Jane play.
“We were hired by the same person?” Mia’s leaning harder against me, and somehow I know she wants to take my hand but can’t. I wrap an arm around her instead.
Charlotte—or whoever she is—sighs. “When we were recruiting Mr. Addison here, he kept on asking whether it was really possible to make it to Gaia in secret with the IA monitoring travel through the portal.”
Mia leans in against me. “So you gave him proof,” she says quietly.
See Jane jump.
“We recruited a few scavengers to head for the planet,” Charlotte says. “Pointed out that it was his own father’s breakdown on live television that leaked all the info a scavenger would need, and that the record was already being contaminated. We took care to pick out those who had nobody of consequence to report them missing, back home.”
Mia goes stiff beside me, and all the breath leaves my body, as if I’ve been punched in the gut. Nobody was ever coming to pick Mia up. And Mia didn’t win her chance to come here because of her skill, as she thought.
Charlotte—Mink—chose Mia because she was disposable. Expendable.
The woman’s eyebrows lift. “Think about it this way, Amelia. Everybody else we recruited is out there right now, waiting for a pick-up that will never come. In your case, perhaps Mr. Addison will negotiate your way off the planet before all this is done. And you’ll be able to go back to…Evelyn, right? The precious sister.”
In this moment I don’t have to look at Mia’s face to know what she’s thinking—it’s what I’m thinking. We haven’t crossed a universe, traversed an alien planet, crawled through an ancient temple, and thrown ourselves into an unknown portal that could have obliterated us just to let someone like this pull us apart.
Charlotte unfolds her arms and steps toward the tent flap, making no move to untie Mia and instead gesturing at me. “Come with me, Mr. Addison.” Her voice is polite and remote and, right now, more terrifying than a dozen armed and faceless soldiers. “It’s time to go to work.”
See Jane run.
“I need her,” I blurt, not moving from Mia’s side. “She knows the glyphs as well as I do now. She knows their maths. I—I need her.” A deep breath. “And I need proof of life for the others, if you want me to do anything for you.” My pilot and my soldier. My escape.
Charlotte—Mink—Aunt Jane Doe—narrows her eyes a fraction and looks from my face to Mia’s, lingering, considering. She heard which one of the three I named first. She heard the desperation in my voice.
Her lips move, just the tiniest bit. It looks like she’s smiling. “Very well.”
Run, Jane. Run.