WE RACE ALONG THE HALLWAY, pausing at the top of the stairs as Mia creeps down, the smallest of us, the best scout. She’s turned off the light at her wrist, and she’s silent and invisible in the near darkness, startling me when she suddenly rematerializes by my side. “Clear,” she says, and Javier slips forward to take point once more, his torch turned down as dim as it’ll go.
We’re following the tracks left by the retreating IA personnel, aiming for the main exit. There’s a chance, in the confusion and haste to evacuate, that they might not notice three people in the crowds slipping away.
I’m following on Javier’s heels, my hand wrapped around Amelia’s once more, on automatic pilot. When she stops suddenly, Mia yanks my hand to make sure I do too. I look up to see Javier gesturing urgently backward with his hand, and Mia and I reverse several steps. She pulls me into a room on one side of the hallway, Javier hurries in after us, ducking into the shadows beside the door, gun at the ready.
“Another squad coming,” he whispers, easing out to take a careful look. He’s gritting his teeth when he withdraws. “Wait here, I’ll track them and make sure they’re gone.”
He’s visible in the faint light of the hallway, but the room itself is dark. Mia’s hand tightens around mine, and I follow as she leads me over toward the far wall, into the shadow. I can only see the barest outline of her—the gleam of her eyes, the line of her nose and mouth. I half see, half sense the movement when she lifts her free hand to trail it down the wall beside us, fingertips moving slowly.
“What is it?” I whisper. I know she’s thinking, but we don’t have time to waste.
She shakes her head, the movement slow. “Jules,” she murmurs, so soft she’s nearly inaudible. “Whatever’s about to happen once the ship warms up, it’ll be what all the spirals were warning us about, won’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. Three words I’ve spoken more in the past week than in the rest of my life put together. “But I’m afraid of that.”
“And we still don’t know,” she whispers. “Who tried to warn us. Why.”
“No,” I agree, soft. “But you were right when you said that there’s no way they hid everything they knew about our languages just to give us a nice surprise.”
“What if…” Her voice trails off, and she shakes her head as if denying her own words before speaking them.
“Go on,” I murmur. Mia might not have the education on the Undying I do, but she’s seen more of them in the last few days than any scholar alive except for me.
“What if we’re doing exactly what they wanted us to do, when they built this place? We’re already sure we were passing tests back in the temple, tests to lead us here. Us in particular—humans—because they left us instructions in our own languages. They led us to a ship made to feel familiar to us, with rooms and halls and doors. And now we’re starting up the ship so we can take it home to dismantle or study or put to work. Jules, any race that’s even remotely like us would recognize Earth as a freaking jackpot of a planet, despite all humanity’s done to it. It’s still got oxygen, oceans, resources, life…what if all the temples, all the puzzles, they were putting us through our paces to check we were us? That we were humans? To make us lead them to Earth?”
I try to swallow, I can’t. My hand’s clammy where she’s holding it, my mind racing ahead, now I can see where she’s leading me. But she speaks the words anyway.
“We proved we hear music like humans, we do math like humans, we speak languages belonging to humans. We’ve been like rats in a maze, only instead of a reward at the end there’s just a trap. Now we’re going to take this ship straight to Earth for them, and just like you said, all it has to do is blow up to wipe us out, and leave our planet totally defenseless. You were talking about what would happen if it blew up by accident, because it’s old…but it could do that damage on purpose too.”
“But they’re dead,” I protest, voice hoarse. “Extinct, long ago.”
“Are they?” she counters. “Somebody had to leave us messages in Latin, and English, and French, and Chinese, and who knows what else. You’ve been telling me that the radiation dating doesn’t lie—and that those languages didn’t exist fifty thousand years ago—so we’re already dealing with an unsolvable paradox. What’s one more impossible thing?”
“I can’t just throw all logic and reason out the airlock because I don’t understand yet. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not possible.”
“What about the footprints?” she whispers. “No footprints leading to that hallway, but footprints right there in it, beside the portals.”
“We don’t know they were footprints,” I try, but it’s not much of a protest.
“Markings, then,” she replies. “None of this adds up. Unless you’re heading to one conclusion.”
“Which is?”
She shakes her head again, but speaks on anyway. “What if they named themselves the Undying for a reason? What if they didn’t mean their legacy would live forever, that their broadcast meant their story would never die? What if they meant they would never die? What if they’re not extinct?”
“If they’re…” My mouth goes dry. It took an outsider to see it. I’ve always been told they were gone. I’ve always known it. Because everyone knew it.
“If they’re alive,” she finishes for me, wide-eyed, “what if we’re leading them straight to Earth?”