MIA’S A THIRD OF THE way down already, gripping the rope by her hip, her feet planted against the rock, pushing off to bounce slowly down like she’s jumping in low gravity. I’m leaning over the edge of the cliff to watch her, my head torch illuminating her path, motes of dust and debris dancing in the beam of light.
She’s silent all the way down to the ground, letting me stew in my fear—and the fact that she knows who I am—the whole time. This is terrifying on all possible counts.
I took a basic course on climbing before I left, because I didn’t count on having Mia here to help, but the clean, predictable wall of the gym was nothing like the ancient, crumbling rock face below me. I didn’t like the idea of climbing then, and I hate it now.
Once she hits the floor of the cavern, she’s quick to unlace the rope in movements I can’t make out, then uses both hands to roll a boulder into place beside her. When she shouts up, her voice is steady, and I’m trying to pretend to myself that my breath isn’t sticking in my throat and my hands aren’t fumbling as I thread my rope through the anchor point and drop it down to her. The prospect of the climb is crowding out what I should really be focusing on, which is that my cover is blown. But how can I think about that when I’m about to rely on an anchor we just drilled into the rock ourselves?
The rope slithers as it unwinds, whispering like the wind, taking forever to reach the bottom. Though I suppose those few seconds won’t seem very long if I’m the one falling. She secures one end of the rope under the boulder—she’s too light to be my counterweight all on her own—and calls up that I should launch myself off into space. Just like that, no big deal.
You’ve done this in the gym, I remind myself, carefully turning and backing up to the edge of the cliff. If I’m to make my way down like her, feet planted against the rock face, body bent like an L-shape, I’m going to have to lower myself backward over the cliff, against every instinct I have, my gut and my brain screaming at me in chorus to stay safely perched up here, where gravity can’t hurt me.
Deus, I’m going to die.
Prickles run up and down my spine, the back of my neck tingling, trying to warn me danger’s nearby. I have to wait until I’m almost not thinking about it, until the image of my father’s face—and of Mia’s face, when she worked out who I am—is floating in the forefront of my mind, and then I let myself ease back, catching my warring instincts unawares.
It’s not so bad, once I’m underway. I don’t make long leaps like her, but instead simply walk down, carefully placing each foot before I move the next, craning my head back occasionally to eyeball the rope. It seems like the anchor point is holding. After a few moments I even dare to look sideways, along the ragged edge of the cliff. Far into the distance, I think I can see cables sticking out of the rock, thick as my arm, trailing down into the darkness below. Some part of the mechanism behind this broken trap, I suppose, but I can’t make out more than that.
A pebble slides away beneath my foot, and I yank my attention back to the rock face in front of me. But I’m not just moving slowly because I’m inexpert—it’s because I need to know what I’m going to say by the time I reach the bottom.
She’s heard the stories about my father, and she believes them, that much I could see in her face. And I understand. The thing is, he tried every possible channel before he went public.
He was the one who decoded the language of the Undying. He studied every text, every second of the footage from first our probes, and then the Explorer IV crew. He’s devoted his life to this ancient civilization since before I was born.
When we discovered we could use Undying tech as an almost endless energy source, he understood what that meant for Earth. People said he didn’t—they called him a cloistered academic, an elitist, accused him of being so distant from the real world that he couldn’t imagine what the energy to filter water, to light up cities, to protect crops could mean to…well, to people like Amelia.
But those people weren’t there with him as he struggled with his decades-old translations, obsessed over them, let them consume him. They didn’t watch him endlessly coding and decoding the broadcast, and the fragments of text from the Explorer mission, praying out loud by lamplight that he was wrong. They weren’t raised by a man desperate to disprove his own life’s work so that he wouldn’t have to tell the world we hadn’t discovered a way to save ourselves after all.
Nothing stopped him, not even my mother leaving. At the time I hated him for it, for ignoring us in favor of a bunch of stupid maths problems on the walls of his study. My parents were—are—so different from one another. A chemist and a linguist. You’d think his mathematics specialty would help him stay in her world, her scientific sphere of yes and no, right and wrong, thesis and proof.
But mathematics and linguistics always came together for him as a merging of art and science, a world full of shades of gray, where hers was black and white. The two of them were like oil and water, never quite mixing, and when it all became too much for her, the answer was clear. It was like a chemical response.
When unyielding husband is added to desperate social pressure and worldwide publicity, normality evaporates and stressors multiply. Solution? Remove husband.
So she cut her losses and asked me to come with her. But somebody had to stay, to try to keep him from drowning completely. And I had already started to learn the language he was reading—not just the Undying glyphs, but the language of mystery and secrets.
My father’s office walls were covered with translations from the original broadcast, along with sticky notes and satellite images and pictures from early exploratory missions. I can still picture a particular passage that had spawned dozens of notes: Know unlocking the door may lead to salvation or doom.
Whose salvation? he had written underneath in black marker on the faded chevron wallpaper. Whose doom?
It’s easy for the International Alliance to say they’ll be careful on Gaia. It’s easy for them to dismiss the warnings from the Undying, the stories of their own civilization’s downfall. But the human race has been dismissing the decline of our planet and the destruction of its resources for centuries now. We’ve gotten pretty good at it.
I don’t know what I want to find here. I’ll follow the Nautilus, try to understand why that strange, inelegant warning was crammed into the broadcast. A part of me wants my father to be right. I don’t want him to have thrown our lives away for nothing.
Another part of me, of course, wants him to be wrong. Because if he’s not, that’s the end. Not this generation, probably not the next, but it’ll happen pretty soon. Our world will fall apart. And Mia is one of the billions who need this tech, whose lives will be changed if we can find enough of it, or better yet, find a way to replicate it. If I told her he wants to withhold it for her own good, she’d punch me, and I wouldn’t blame her.
I’ve left it far too late to tell her what I’m really chasing here—to tell her about the mystery of the Nautilus spiral, and the one glyph of warning. But if I’d told her any earlier, she wouldn’t have come, she wouldn’t have helped me.
So? says a tiny voice in my head. That would have been her choice. You made it for her.
Another voice pushes back. And if I did? It was for the good of everyone on Earth, everyone she cares about. She was here to steal—she is here to steal. To desecrate this place before we can learn from it.
I’m still searching for the right words when I realize I’m only a half a meter from the ground, and I can lower my feet until my boots hit the gravelly surface and shift my weight so I’m standing once more. We’re standing amid the ruins, and near the entrance to another chamber.
My hands are still trembling from the descent as I start to unbuckle my harness. And though I still haven’t found the right words, Amelia’s the one to break the silence.
“It explains a lot, actually. If he’s your father.”
Familiar frustration surges up in me, though it’s a little hard to tell it apart from the adrenaline. “Deus, you think he brainwashed me? That’s the usual assumption. My age means that nobody credits me with the ability to form my own opinions. This, despite the fact that I finished my schooling at thirteen, have been auditing university courses ever since, and if you’ll forgive the lack of modesty, can go toe-to-toe with any academic in the field, at any level. I formed my own opinions, including deciding how to weight his expertise, and I believe him.”
“Actually,” she says, and stepping forward to help me with removing the last of the harness—an intimacy I try unsuccessfully to ignore—“I just meant that what you’re doing makes more sense now. Risking your life for a bunch of rocks, that I don’t get. It’s different when you’re doing it for someone you love.”
“Oh,” I say, in one of my more eloquent moments.
“You’re going to keep up your end of our bargain?” she asks quietly.
“Yes.” I mean it. Somehow, I will.
She nods, some of the tension going out of her frame. “For what it’s worth,” she adds, “I’m more or less the same age as you, and I think we can make our own decisions just fine.”
“We may be the only ones who think that braving a series of crumbling deathtraps is proof of good decision-making,” I joke weakly, the strength starting to come back to my limbs, though when she flashes me a grin, I find my knees aren’t quite as recovered as I thought.
I like this girl.
And I’ve lied to her.
“Also,” Mia says, interrupting my scattered thoughts, “it explains why you’re such a freak. I mean, your dad was a freak, he decoded the broadcast when he was…well, our age. Makes sense you’re some crazy genius too.”
That’s always been a sticking point, for me. The people around me who treat me like a genius—which, perversely, generally involves assuming I can’t tie my own shoelaces, so lost am I in brilliant thoughts. And the ones who don’t think I can be, not at my age.
For my part, I’ve always known that I have in me what my father has in him. It’s not arrogance. It’s just truth. I didn’t earn it—I was born with it, gifted it.
The part that’s on me is the challenge—the pressure—to make something of it.
My father’s always told me that my integrity matters more than any other part of me, and he’s shown his over and over, in the face of unbearable pressure, to protect even those who don’t want his protection.
“Well,” I say. “You think I’m a genius—you’ve never met him. Now I’m the only one my father has left in his corner, freak or not. And that’s why I’m here.”
“That, and you get all hot and bothered about walking where no human foot has trod before,” she teases.
You get me hot and bothered, Mia.
“Um,” I say, shoving that thought aside. “Well, true. Have you heard of Walt Whitman? He was one of your American poets. He said, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ” I shrug. “I can be here for more than one reason. I am here for more than one reason.”
“Can I ask you a question?” she says quietly.
“I’ve heard the worst of it from every possible angle,” I say, though my mind is already bracing itself against whatever blow is coming. “Ask, I won’t mind.”
“Helping your father, finding something to prove the tech is dangerous, finding something that will get him out of jail, that I get. But learning about the Undying…why does it matter?” She pauses, to see if I’m offended, and I nod that she should go on. “I understand archaeology. I understand looking at our past to figure ourselves out, that makes sense to me. But these…beings…were completely different from us, not connected at all. They’ve left tech we can use, sure, and it’s worth learning about that and how to use it. But why does it matter who they were and why they died? Aren’t there better things we could spend our effort on?”
I consider the question, as a trickle of rock falls gently down the cliff face above me. “Well, who says learning those things isn’t the same as ensuring our own survival and well-being?” I say eventually. “For a start, we don’t know how different they really were. You said yourself, this place reminds you of Angkor Wat, of the Pyramids. They set us puzzles with musical harmonies that sound good to our ears, they built doorways the right size for us to go through.”
“Say you’re right,” she counters. “My question still stands. I understand wanting to learn about the tech, prove your father right or wrong. But their stories? What good does that do?”
“The Undying went extinct,” I say. “And while the broadcast didn’t get specific, it does say that they did it to themselves. How many times have we, as a species, tried to annihilate one another? How long will the IA’s authority hold, as things get worse and worse on Earth? The Undying had the tech we think we need so badly, and they still destroyed themselves. I think we ought to know why and how.”
She’s quiet for a time. “You think the puzzles, the set-up of this place means they might think like us,” she says eventually. “So we might fall into the same mistakes they made. We know humans are capable of violence, deception. You think the Undying were the same?”
I wish I could answer that honestly. I know there was a warning hidden deep in their broadcast, and someone, or something, had to put it there. “I…I don’t know,” I say. “They mentioned war, in the broadcast. But they’re the only other intelligent species we’ve ever discovered. Given the distances between Earth and even the next closest star to our sun, they’re probably the only intelligent species we’ll ever encounter, even long extinct. We should know who they were. They’re gone now, but somebody should know their story.”
“Is it worth dying for?” she asks.
“Maybe.” The word is out before I’ve had the chance to consider my answer—though really, I decided that long ago, as I took the first steps on my path to Gaia. “Though I’m not volunteering to be another Explorer IV team, if I can help it.” Everybody remembers the fates of the astronauts who died discovering that the temples on Gaia were full of traps and pitfalls. It was messy. And publicly broadcast, thanks to a live relay feeding through the portal to Earth.
We both stand in silence when I’ve finished my impromptu lecture, and she’s gazing at me in a way I can’t make sense of, though I want to. Like she’s adding together all the things she knows about me, and perhaps the answer she’s getting doesn’t completely displease her. Eventually, she nods. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Jules.”
The sincerity in her voice shakes me, and all I can do is nod in return.
The next moment she’s clearing her throat and turning businesslike. “Let’s make camp here. It’s been a…a busy day.” Her voice is wry, and I don’t blame her. Tuning ancient temples, falling off bridges, drilling holes, and rappelling down cliffs…Busy is an understatement. “We’ll just do something stupid, if we try for the next puzzle tonight.” She pauses, then quirks a smile. “Well, stupider than coming here in the first place.”
I can’t disagree, and together we get to work setting up camp, in what feels like companionable silence. Even with this trap triggered already, we don’t trust it not to yield up some final, nasty surprise. So she clears a space in the rocks at the base of the cliff just large enough for the two of us to lie down to sleep, and I sit at one end of it preparing dinner. We’re amid the debris from whatever trap was here, and once again I’m reminded this couldn’t just be any cave back on Earth. Metallic lines streak the nearest boulder, no thicker than the hairs on my head. They intersect and weave together in endlessly intricate patterns—this rock is unlike anything we have at home.
But staring at the ruins of a broken trap won’t help me now, and I return my attention to our meal. Once I’ve eaten, I can keep translating the glyphs we’ve seen in the first few chambers.
I’ve had my water bottle strapped to the outside of my pack all day, and the idea behind the outrageously expensive fitting on it is that it should condense water from the air, and continually refill itself by way of a slow drip. When I lift it to inspect it by the light of my head torch, it’s only half-full—the air in here is too dry for it to be totally effective.
I show it to Amelia, and she looks up from where she’s gathering a small layer of rocks to stop us rolling into danger in our sleep, and grimaces. We had to use that water or we wouldn’t have gotten this far, but I’d always figured our breathers would be our limiting resource—not water.
I abandon my plan to soak dried noodles and make us something hot to eat, and instead unpack flatbread, covering it with slices of thick yellow cheese, the crumbs of it sharp as I lick them off my fingers. I cut fat slices of salami to layer on top of it, the rich, salty smell setting my mouth watering.
Amelia sets aside our breathers for when we need them at bedtime, and edges along to sit cross-legged beside me, her fingers touching mine as she accepts her slices of flatbread. “Salt and fat and protein,” she says, around a huge mouthful. “Talk about the holy trinity.”
For a time, there’s nothing but the sound of blissful chewing, as we sit together with our backs against the cliff, lit by the light of just one torch to conserve power. We end up licking the grease of the salami off our fingers and picking crumbs of cheese off our clothes, sharing the use of my handkerchief to clean ourselves up.
Her shoulder’s a hair’s breadth from mine, and I’m hyper-aware of her presence. There’s something about being in a place like this—not just another planet, but deep inside a temple, where nobody else could reach us, together in the dark. Something that inspires a closeness, a confidence…an intimacy. A place like this encourages truths, and confessions.
My own confession’s on the tip of my tongue, but as I draw in breath to speak, she breaks the silence instead.
“I learned about your father at school,” she says. “Before I dropped out.”
“You mentioned that.” My curiosity’s killing me, though I don’t want to offend her. But it should be impossible to do what she did. “How did you drop out of school? They didn’t send truancy officers to find you?”
She snorts. “You’ve never heard of attendance drones, I assume. Kids’ll rent out their time, answer questions for you every now and then, along with the twelve other accounts they’re running. You don’t get good grades, not without paying extra, but you pass.”
“I’ve never heard of attendance drones,” I admit, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t surprise her even one iota. “How does one work around the retinal scan? I did most of my classes in person, Oxford tradition and all that, but I took two remotely, and a constant retinal presence was required.”
“The retinal scanners just need an eye,” she replies. “Not specifically my eye, and turns out, not even a human eye.” I’m trying very hard not to think about what that means, when she continues. “What do you mean, your classes were in person?”
This is going to be the water polo pool all over again, and I’m an idiot for bringing it up. “I mean the teacher and the students are all physically in the same room,” I say. “Not virtual.”
She nearly drops her last piece of flatbread, scrambling to catch it, her hand brushing against my leg. “What, like the guy on the screen is a real person for you? You can talk to him?”
“And he can talk to you,” I reply. “Or shout at you for daydreaming. Then tell your father all about it at tea.” Which, now I think about it, doesn’t really stack up against her own list of misfortunes. I try to change direction before I can shove my foot any further into my mouth. “You said maths was the school subject you missed the most,” I venture. And of course, now it just sounds like I’m trying to work out how little education she has, which isn’t what I mean at all—her ingenuity fascinates me. I admire it.
“It makes sense to me,” she replies. “It’s beautiful. When you really get math right, it’s perfectly streamlined. Everything has a job, everything has a purpose, and all the elements work together in harmony. You know exactly where you are, with math, and what’s required to make it right. It’s not much use in my current line of work, though.” Her voice has dropped low, and as we sit shoulder to shoulder, she’s turned her head, and I’ve turned mine, so we’re whispering to each other in the near dark.
The small light illuminates one half of her face—the freckles, the tug of her lips to a wistful smile, the graceful swoop of her lashes. The other half is cast entirely in darkness, unknowable.
“I hate it sometimes,” she continues. “Picking through the remains of people’s lives, like vultures, taking anything that can be sold or stripped down for parts or recycled. But early on I started a collection, you know? Things that didn’t have any value, wouldn’t help Evie, but still held something. Like little snapshots. Stories about the people who used to be there. Most of the personal stuff is gone, but you can put a lot of it together from the pieces you do find. I love that part.”
My own lips curve to match her smile, though mine’s more warm than wistful. “That’s archaeology, you know,” I say, just as quietly. “Putting together stories from what’s left behind. That’s what I do.”
And it turns out she does understand it after all, and as our eyes meet, we both share that knowledge for a few seconds: that in each other we can see the same love of uncovering a hidden story. I wish we shared more than that—I wish I truly knew her mind. We’re from two different worlds in every possible sense. I ought to hate her just for being here. I ought to resent everything she’s done, and everything she’ll do, if we escape this place. But just like the left-behind histories we uncover—hers in ruined buildings, mine in vanished civilizations—our own story is more complicated than one simple truth.
Here’s a very simple truth, though: I could tip forward just a fraction, and if she did too, our lips would meet. Her gaze flickers down to my mouth and lights a spark inside me—a moment’s hope that she’s thinking the same thing as me.
She clears her throat and turns away, head dipping so she can open her pack and rummage through it, like she’s taking inventory. “It must be killing you not being able to take your time and study everything we’re finding here.”
You’re killing me.
But I let my breath out in a rush and tip my head back against the wall. “Pretty much,” I agree. “But we’re here for something more important.” Above us yawns the black emptiness of the pit walls we scaled earlier, the darkness heavy with all the knowledge, all the stories, haste has forced me to leave behind. I’m struck with a sudden sense of vertigo, as if our little pool of lantern light is clinging to the rock and I’d fall up into the dark if it weren’t for Mia tethering me to the ground.
“What about those pictures?”
Her voice makes me jump. “What pictures?”
She frowns at me, then jerks her chin toward my arm. “The ones you took when we came in, of the walls and stuff. The ones you were going over when we stopped after the bridge.”
“Mehercule, I for—” I stop, blinking. I do. I have brand-new pictures, new glyphs to study. Forgotten because of this baffling, pink-and-blue-haired criminal at my side. I jerk my eyes downward and bring my wrist display to life with a shaking twist of my hand. Some of the pictures are blurry from my rush to record the glyphs in that first room, but others are clearer, and as the Mia-fog recedes from my brain, they start to click into focus. I grope around with my other hand until I find my journal in my pack and pull it onto my lap, eyes still on the pictures.
Mia snorts beside me. “Aaaaand he’s gone.”
I could tell her she’s as fascinating a puzzle as the coded messages the Undying left behind. That if she wanted it, she could have my full attention. But she broke that moment earlier, she looked away first—and I know when not to push my luck. It wouldn’t be honest, anyway. I’ve lied to her, and she believes I’m something I’m not. So I try to put her—and the sound of her humming, the flicker of shadows as she fiddles with one of the carabiners, the scent of her in the still air—out of my mind and focus on my translation.
I have no idea how much time has passed when I finally look up again. With every new image I feel like I’m sinking deeper into the language of the Undying, understanding the nuances better. But none of it says anything about the Nautilus—and judging by the way it was carved so sneakily in the two places I found it so far, I’m not sure any of the formal carvings will help with it. So far, all I’ve seen is a retelling of the story from the original broadcast.
Mia’s moved a bit away from me, and she’s looking down at her handheld phone. The display’s on its dimmest setting, but I can see the flicker of it against her face—she’s watching a video. The sound’s muted, but she’s gazing at it intently. We’re way too far underground now for there to be a signal, even if the station were directly overhead. I’m guessing it’s the video message I saw her get last night.
Her face in the glow of the screen is tired and miserable and dirty, and her shoulders droop forward. I start to speak and stop myself—but I must make some sound, because her eyes snap up and she’s immediately scowling at me and thumbing the button to turn her phone display off.
“What?” Her voice is a challenge, daring me to comment.
“Nothing.” I let my wrist unit go dark and stick my pen inside my journal to hold the page. “Just thinking about my dad. Doing this kind of work reminds me how much I miss him, I guess.”
Mia’s shoulders lose a bit of their tension, and after a few seconds she crawls closer again so she can reach her pack to slip her phone back into its protected pocket, then resume her spot at my side. “Any luck with the translations?”
“Some.” It’s nearly impossible to keep from reaching for my journal again—but my utter exhaustion helps. I may have pulled a lot of all-nighters in my life, but never after a day spent fighting for my life in an alien temple. “These glyphs are a lot less formal than the ones in the main temple that the Explorer crew photographed. Almost conversational.”
“Well, you can save the rest as a treat for tomorrow.”
I grin, and together we bunk down on the chilly stone floor, clearing spots of debris for our bedrolls. We pull on our breathers, settling them over our noses and mouths to supplement our air with oxygen as we sleep. My body’s ready for the boost, that much I can tell as soon as I inhale.
We’re necessarily close to each other—the larger debris forms a maze-like path that leaves us little room to spread out. But I notice that there’s only a thin line of rocks and pebbles between my sleeping bag and her blanket nest, and I’m racking my brain trying to remember who put their bed down first and who was second. Was it me? Or was she the one to choose this closeness?
My conscience beats at me again, even as I ask that question. You’re lying to her. You’re lying to her.
She flicks off the lamp without much warning, before I can read her face, or what’s visible of it behind the breather. Before she can read mine and see my guilt.
I hear the rustle of fabric as she nestles down, and I follow suit, thoughts spinning. There’s a few breaths of silence, and then her voice comes low and soft, a little muffled by the breather.
“So, the translations—what do they say?”
“It’ll take a while for me to figure it all out.” Again, the urge to turn on my torch and study my notes by its dim light flares, and I have to suppress it. Easier, with Mia just a hand’s width away from me. “And we don’t have the whole of the story yet, but it’s elaborating on what they said in their original broadcast. I think it’s the history of their civilization. How they rose, how they fell. Why they left these places behind for a new race to find.”
“It must be so much bigger than ours,” she murmurs, and for a moment I have to force my mind back, to remember what I just said. “Ours is all the story of one planet. Of one brief attempt to leave it, the Alpha Centauri mission, and otherwise, not even a blip until now.”
“And the history they’re telling in this temple says they’ve seen the whole galaxy. Can you imagine the stories they could tell?”
“Stories,” Mia echoes, voice weighty with meaning. “Uncovering things left behind.”
It’s hard to know exactly what she’s referring to—the Undying, perhaps, or our conversation about scavenging versus archaeology. Or she’s talking about Evie and my father, the family we’ve left behind. My ruined academic career and her dangerous work in Chicago. The sun and the sky and her skyscrapers and my pool—our lives, maybe. Neither of us are writing the stories we thought we would.
But her next words tell me exactly what part of home is on her mind: “Jules,” she says, quiet. “We’re a few rooms in now, and there’s been nothing I could take back with me to sell. You’re sure there’ll be something?”
My silence lasts a beat too long. I know that even as it’s happening, as I’m groping for words that won’t be a lie. “I promised I’d help you,” I say eventually, a lifetime too late.
The lamp flicks back on, and she’s propping up on her elbow, expression wary as she looks at me. “Jules?” It’s a warning. A question.
“This is absolutely the most important place on Gaia we could possibly be.” The words come tumbling out of my mouth, defensive.
“Because of the second layer of code,” she says, her voice flat, and for a moment my heart jumps. Then I remember the lie I told her—that the second layer mapped out the locations of the best tech.
“Yes,” I say slowly, heavily. Because I can’t lie, not again. Not to Mia, and not when she’s asking me directly. I should—this is that important—but I can’t. “Because of the second layer. But the second layer doesn’t lead us to hidden tech. At least, I don’t think it does.”
I look over, finally, my eyes finding her face. And suddenly, like water pouring from a broken dam, I’m telling her what I do know—I explain the equation in that second layer of coding that forms the start of a perfect Fibonacci spiral when you graph it. Forms a shape found over and over in nature, including in the nautilus shell I’ve named the spiral after. I tell her about the glyph, with its fluid meaning, difficult to translate.
Catastrophe. Apocalypse. The end of all things.
“And from the air, this temple looks identical to the perfect spiral, just like the graph,” I say. “I don’t know if someone was warning us that this temple is full of danger, or that this temple will tell us how to identify the danger, but I’m the only one who knows, and nobody’s listening to me now that my father’s…” I fall silent, searching for a word. Incarcerated? In detention?
When I worked out what I was seeing on the satellite images, my brain suddenly sparking as I matched the spiral shape to the roof of this temple, I knew what I had to do. I tried to tell my father, in our last vid-call. Remember my very first dig? I’d said, holding up the arrowhead my five-year-old fingers had pried out of the dirt. His face softened, and then I held up a nautilus shell, the rusty red-and-cream stripes lining its curves. He went very still, then—he knew the shell didn’t come from any dig I’d ever been on. He knew what that shape meant. I think I’m going to go back, I told him, willing him to hold his poker face. See what else I can find. I love you, Dad.
And before he could protest, I shut down the call. He knew where I was going. He knew why. And the IA operatives monitoring our weekly call thought I was off to entertain myself on some university excursion.
I drag myself back to the present. “I had to come here, Mia. This shape, this spiral, it means something. And this is the place that will tell me what.”
She stares at me in the dim light, still propped on her elbow, and she blinks once, swallows slowly. When she speaks, her voice is careful and composed in a way I’ve never heard it before. “The spiral means danger,” she says. “But you don’t know if this place is full of danger, or just teaches us about danger.”
“No,” I admit. “But we’re in the right place, I know that. Right before we walked out onto the bridge, I saw the Nautilus scratched into the rock, like a sign. I saw it at the top of the cliff, as well. This is where we’re meant to be, to find out more about it.”
“You don’t know if this place is deadly.” Though her pose is one of relaxation, even in the dark I can tell her body is tense. “And you brought me in here, without even—you just brought me here, without ever asking if I was willing to take that risk. And then you saw a symbol that probably means freaking apocalypse, and you just strolled on by without sharing that information?”
I gaze at her in silence. There’s no defense I can offer. She’s right.
“Do you have any idea if there’s anything valuable in here at all for me? For Evie?” she asks, controlled once more.
My heart wants to shrink away. “I don’t know,” I whisper. There could be, my mind says. I hope there is. I want there to be. But none of those words make it past the lump in my throat.
She pushes up to sit in a sharp, sudden movement, lifting her hands to weave them through her hair, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip. “You don’t know,” she repeats, cold as ice. And then in a blink, the ice is gone, seared away with the heat of her fury. “You don’t know? My sister’s life depends on me, my only family, my little sister—everything I care about in the world, and you just decided to merrily lead me in here to play some stupid detective game, because you’re Jules Addison, and you know better than everyone else. You knew I had one goal here, just one thing I came to do. I needed tech and you…you lied to me. This isn’t a game, this isn’t—even if you don’t care at all about helping my sister, without something valuable, I won’t be able to buy my way off the planet. I’ll die here, Jules.”
“I’ll help you,” I try, when she pauses for a breath that sounds more like a sob. “I gave you my word. I meant it.”
“With what money?” Her voice breaks, and the crack of it makes me want to melt back into the rocks and debris. “Where’s this magical money coming from? Are you that rich, Jules?”
And I’m not, of course. I might live in the plush surrounds of Oxford, but my father’s on a professor’s salary. I don’t have the kind of money Mia will need to buy her sister’s freedom. “We’ll find something,” I mumble, unconvincing even to my own ears. “There’s no way of knowing what we’ll find at the end of this trail.”
Mia’s eyes burn in the torchlight. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself this whole time? Making yourself feel better?”
I don’t answer—I can’t. Because she’s right, and we both know it, and even though I know I’m doing the right thing, even though I know I have to get to the center of this temple to discover what’s so dangerous about the Undying tech…looking at her face, all the things I know don’t seem so certain anymore.
She’s right. And my silence acknowledges it.
She stares at me a beat longer, then two, her angry gaze measuring me, and finding me wanting in every possible way. Then she’s looking over toward her gear, her climbing harness, before glancing up—my heart shrinks—at the cliff. I can see in the furious set of her jaw that she wants nothing more than to get away, leave me and try to salvage her original plan. But if she’s even half as exhausted as I am, she’ll never make it. So instead, she reaches for the lamp and plunges us both into the dark once more.
I want to convince her that I will find a way to help her.
I want to try and explain one more time that we could be in the middle of making the most important discovery on Gaia—that we could be saving our whole world.
I want to…
“Mia—”
“Don’t.”
The word is a bullet, and it silences me.