WHEN I WAKE UP, I know time has passed, but not enough—my eyelids are still heavy, my gut churning with the nausea that comes from waking too soon when you’re already sleep-deprived. Something’s touching my face, and it’s a moment before I realize it’s my breather, and it’s meant to be there.
A light flashes past my vision, and a rock clicks against another up by my head. Is Jules clearing a path to go take a leak or something? Wait, no—he’s still curled up behind me. We’ve moved closer together in our sleep—because it’s cold, I tell myself, and it’s warmer to stay close—and the curve of my back is fitted in against his front. When I take a deep, shaky breath, I discover that he’s got an arm wrapped around me. It’s like he knew what I was thinking last night about leaving—like even his subconscious wants to keep me here with him.
Time to go, Mia, I tell myself, letting last night’s anger wash over me. I knew he was naïve, idealistic, single-minded—but somehow, somewhere in the brief time since we met, I started trusting him. Stupid, rages that voice in my head.
The light flashes across my eyes again, and suddenly I’m awake, adrenaline surging through me as I sit up. Jules groans a protest, but the same instinct must take him, because a moment later he’s sitting up behind me.
“Did we wake you, lovebirds?” It’s a woman’s voice, American, hard-edged.
“Who are you?” I snap, my heart slamming in my chest, forcing myself to move slowly as I slide my hand under the covers for my multi-tool. I need to hide it somewhere I can get to it—there’s no circumstance in which these people are friendly, and I can’t let myself get taken captive. Jules can’t know what I’m doing, but he keeps his arm around me, providing cover for the movement.
“My name’s Liz, sweetheart,” the woman replies, dropping the flashlight a little, so I can make out the silhouettes of four more people ranged around us. They must have come down the cliffs while we slept. I can hear the sneer in Liz’s voice. “You didn’t think Mink put all her eggs in one basket, did you?”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
“Mink?” I blink blindly in the light on my face, unable to see much past its glare. I need to buy time. Somewhere in my pack is one of the guns we took off the raiders back at the spring, but there’s no chance I’d reach that without them noticing—and they’ll be looking for weapons if we’re searched. But the multi-tool in my hand—if I could hide it somewhere…“I don’t know who you’re—”
“Don’t play dumb,” she interrupts. “We’re way beyond that, kiddos.”
I briefly consider slipping the multi-tool into my boot, but that’s the first place anyone with half a brain checks when they’re frisking you.
So instead I shove the tool down the front of my pants, inside my underwear, sideways so hopefully it’ll feel like part of the waistband. Scavvers aren’t above using a frisk to cop a feel, but they usually go for the boobs or the ass.
“What’s going on?” Jules is going out of his way to sound bewildered, following my lead. When he pulls down his breather to speak, I can feel his breath on my neck. He keeps it down, as though this will somehow help him get a better look at them, understand them. It’s like a befuddled academic peering through his spectacles, the way he does it.
Liz just laughs, a chilly sort of chuckle. Behind her, a shadow moves and I hear the sound of a flare being struck. An orange light blossoms in the dark, then drops to the ground.
My heart sinks. There’s five of them, and while Jules is taller than a few of them, Liz’s men are bulky with muscle where he’s lean—and they’re all bigger than me. I don’t recognize any of them from the group whose guns and skimmer bike we stole, but that brings me little comfort. It means I don’t know what these guys are after, which gives me zero leverage.
My first instinct, that they’re IA crews sent to stop raiders, is clearly wrong—Liz mentioned Mink, and Mink’s gone to a lot of time and effort to make sure her little side operation is off the IA’s radar. She’d have had to bribe a bunch of lower-level IA employees to get herself and her crews on board the orbital station, and the employees couldn’t rat her out without exposing themselves too. If this Liz knows who Mink is, she isn’t IA.
Liz’s team starts tearing through our packs, locating the guns with grunts of acknowledgment and confiscating them. Most of our other gear is left in the bags, though they take careful inventory and snag a few choice items from Jules’s pack, including the valuable wave-stove. My stuff, I guess, is all too battered and cheap to be of interest.
Then she turns to us, snapping her fingers and holding out her hand. We both stare at her blankly, waiting for the instruction to become clear.
“Your breathers, lovebirds,” she says, impatient.
My heart sinks even further down into the pit of my stomach. Our lifelines. Without them, we’ll be dead in a few days. One of her gang comes up beside her with a gun hefted meaningfully in one hand, and we both unstrap them, handing them over. It’s the smartest move she could make. We can’t run now, even if we could escape five armed raiders barehanded.
“Get up,” Liz orders, moving the flashlight from my face to gesture with it and rise from her crouch. She’s in her mid-forties, with a hard-lined face that would’ve been quite pretty if it weren’t for the chilly, narrowed eyes and the thin set to her mouth.
“We’re getting.” I give Jules’s arm a squeeze under our shared blankets, then get slowly to my feet. He does the same, a half beat behind me. I was ready to leave when I woke, to climb out of this spiral deathtrap of his and try to salvage my original plan. But just because I can’t bring myself to look at his face—and god, I wish I could—doesn’t mean I want to see his brains splattered all over the cliff behind us. I want to get out of this alive, and I want to get him out alive too, if I can manage it. So I thank whatever deities or spirit ancestors or spaghetti monsters that might be listening that he’s keeping his mouth shut, recognizing that of the two of us, I’ve got the better chance of talking our way out of this. “Let me get this straight—Mink sent you?”
“That’s right, sugar.” Liz rakes her eyes up and down first me, then Jules. Her sharp eyes linger on him, no doubt taking in the same qualities I noticed about him. Although his brand-new clothes aren’t quite so spotless now, his expensive boots no longer so shiny.
“Well, at least we’re on the same side.” It’s worth a try. I do my best to look relaxed, though it’s hard with the adrenaline surging through my body.
“We work for the same employer.” Liz is watching me, hawk-eyed. “Doesn’t put us on the same side.”
I have to act fast. I only have one big play here, one piece of information I can use to convince them I’m worth my weight, and the second they find it out on their own, it’s useless to me. This is what scavver life has trained me for—weighing up risks and opportunities in the blink of an eye, and acting on them without hesitation.
“Hey,” I say, raising my voice, putting just a hint of irritation in it, like they’re wasting my time. “Do you know who this guy is? How valuable he is? This is Jules Addison, Elliott Addison’s only kid.” I hear Jules’s sharp, shocked intake of breath behind me, and force myself to ignore him, my voice hard. “He knows more about Gaia than everyone else on this planet put together, and I’ve been keeping him alive so far. So let’s all stop posturing, and just figure out our way forward, yeah?”
Liz fixes me with a long look, and the corner of her mouth lifts like she wants to laugh at a joke only she gets. “Honey, we know who he is.”
That robs me of breath to respond, leaving me scrambling. His identity was the only currency I had, my only bargaining chip.
Liz grins, the twist of her lips making me want to lunge at her. “Mink knows all about him. Why stumble around blindly when you can follow the trained rat right to the center of the maze?” She’s enjoying herself, that much is obvious—one of those people who gets a twisted pleasure out of holding all the cards. But information’s not worth nothing. If I keep her talking, maybe she’ll let something slip I can use.
“But—” I stammer, and though I’m playing it up, I don’t have to look far to find a quaver for my voice. “But I’m one of Mink’s, she would’ve told me…”
“You were supposed to go to the main temple with the other dumbass scavvers.” Liz shifts her weight, impatience starting to overtake her enjoyment. “Insurance. Bottom-feeding carrion crawlers—nothing to lose by putting more feet on the ground, and if one or two of you make it back with something valuable, bonus payday.”
My mind’s reeling. But Liz’s eyes shift toward Jules, and when I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, his expression is stone. He heard me betray his identity—it doesn’t matter that Liz already knew who he was, or that I was trying to save both our lives by making it more profitable to keep us breathing. From his point of view, we fought last night, and I’ve turned against him.
Whatever fragile chance we had of acting like a team is in pieces now. Maybe it was doomed from the beginning. Maybe that moment lying together after that bridge collapsed was the lie.
After all, I’m a scavenger. I’m a raider. I’m a thief, and a vandal, and a criminal. And he’s a privileged, idealistic scholar who’d call the cops on me if he could, in another life, on another world.
We were always going to fracture. I take a breath and harden myself against the regret and loss in my heart. This is what I do. I shut out the hurt and keep going, no matter what happens. Stay alive. Save Evie. Do what you came here to do.
Liz cuts her inspection of Jules short with a snapped order, and two of her men step forward to empty our pockets and pat us down for weapons while the others load up our packs again. I’m hyper-aware of the multi-tool against my lower belly, warming slowly to skin temperature. The guy frisking me is a scruffy-faced twenty-something in dire need of a shower—but then, aren’t we all?—and a change of clothes. He keeps it professional until he gets to my waist. But as he starts to cup his hand around my ass, I flinch away and snap, “Hey, you wanna lose that hand?”
He starts to bristle, but the guy frisking a blank-faced Jules, a middle-aged Latino guy, snaps, “Cut it out, Hansen. She’s just a kid.”
“Whatever.” Hansen’s reply is sullen, and he finishes his search of my pockets as quickly as possible. He gives my boots a cursory check and then stalks off, leaving me shaking and trying not to show my relief that he didn’t take my multi-tool. There’s a blade in there. I’m not defenseless. He leaves the other man to keep an eye on me and Jules while Liz holds an indistinct conversation with the others in her group, some distance away. One’s a short guy with fair hair, the other’s wearing a newsboy cap that shades his face, and has stupid-looking facial hair crawling down his cheeks.
“Sorry about him,” says the Latino guy, who’s about Liz’s age, maybe late thirties or forties. He’s following my gaze as I watch Hansen retreat. “My name’s Javier. Just do what she says and you guys’ll be fine.”
“Thanks.” I offer him a nod even though I feel like throwing his “apology” in his teeth. He’s still helping her waylay us. But it never hurts to try the friendly approach. Maybe it’ll buy me a second or two of hesitation if Liz orders him to shoot me in the head.
Jules says nothing, gazing at some fixed point in the distance, as if he’s withdrawn entirely to his own world. Part of me wishes I could explain that his name was currency, that I was trying to buy a measure of trust so I could get us both out of here—and part of me recoils, still furious, insisting that I don’t owe him a scrap of loyalty.
They finish searching us and then put our packs back on our shoulders. They bind our hands with my climbing rope, tying us together and leaving a length of it hanging out like a leash. Great. We’re pack mules. Hansen’s the one who does the knots, and he yanks mine extra tight with a grunt of satisfaction. Javier might have some sympathy for us, but Hansen’s certainly not a fan of mine anymore.
Liz finishes her confab with her team and strolls back toward us to pick up the “leash” end of the rope. “You’ll go first,” she informs Jules, plunking his helmet down on his head and switching on his head lamp. “Seeing as you’ve been so good at decoding these little traps and pitfalls so far. It’ll be a lot easier following you now, without needing grappling hooks and harnesses. You made a mess of that first room up there.”
“Our breathers?” I ask. I didn’t see where they went—no doubt they meant us not to. I know it’s a futile effort, that they took them on purpose to make sure we couldn’t run, even if we got out of our ropes. “We didn’t get a full night with them.”
Liz wraps the leash end around her hand. “You’ll get them when we make camp. If you do as I’ve said, and lead us through safely. Bury us under half a ton of rock, and your breathers go with us.”
I asked Jules if the Undying were capable of violence and deception, like humans are. I should have stuck to worrying about my own species.
Jules swallows, eyes swinging from Liz to me before turning toward the yawning darkness at the edge of the field of rubble. There’s fear there, in his gaze—but not nearly enough. I didn’t exactly tell Jules everything about my past, about the kinds of people you encounter as a scavenger. I told him there were some decent folks, and there were.
But I didn’t tell him about people like Liz. People who’ll shoot you as soon as talk to you, who’ll leave you trussed up for the desert to suck dry just to make off with a handful of your gear.
To people like her, everything, everyone, has a value. It’s no different from the way I sorted through Jules’s gear at the start of our little partnership—anything that’s not worth carrying goes.
The fact that they haven’t decided to kill me right now doesn’t mean it won’t happen—it just means they haven’t made up their minds, or they want to use me like a canary in an old mine to spring any traps Jules might miss. If it serves her purposes later, I have no doubt Liz is capable of killing me without a second thought.
Jules has a use to them, but right now I’m on borrowed time.
I’ve got to make sure we’re both worth carrying.
The next chamber seems relatively intact, though given how much easier it was to climb down the broken puzzle before we made camp than it was to solve the tuning puzzle and then make it across that deathtrap of a bridge, that’s not necessarily a good thing. But after only a cursory examination of the glyphs scattered about the walls, Jules begins leading the expedition on a circuitous path through the room.
It’s some time before I recognize it—it’s not all that different from one of the early puzzle rooms in the Explorer IV temple. I watched the videos of those astronauts dozens of times, studying up in the weeks after Mink recruited me. This one isn’t exactly the same, but it’s a relatively simple grid puzzle—and while I can’t read the glyphs, Jules can.
Each time he steps onto the correct paving stone, a glimmer of light seems to run through it, the silvery filaments coming to life for an instant. It’s unnerving, this stone-that’s-not-stone. It’s just as unnerving to think that fifty thousand years ago, when we’d just begun to replace spears with bows and arrows, before we’d developed anything we’d call a language, the Undying were building this place, broadcasting their final message into space for their successors, creating tech we still can’t comprehend.
We continue on, waiting as Jules figures out where we can safely step, minutes stretching into hours. I can tell by the way he lifts his bound wrists that he’s still taking pictures of the glyphs, as if translating the sagas of the Undying matters at all now. He’s got no clue how bad this is, how screwed we are. How unlikely it is that he’ll ever have the chance to go home and share these pictures. There’s nothing to do but stay close, though, and make sure the ropes binding us together don’t tug either of us off our course, onto unsafe ground.
Following closely on his heels gives me time to think. They know who Jules is, somehow—Mink knew he was coming to Gaia, knew he’d be their ticket through this deathtrap of a temple. And that he’d be worth following. That brings the tiniest flicker of hope. Mink’s not the type to care about academic research unless there’s a payout. Maybe, just maybe, there’s still a chance I’ll be able to earn enough to help Evie.
With Liz holding the rope attaching me to Jules, there’s no chance for him and me to have a private conversation, which is probably just as well. Any given moment I don’t know whether I want to save him or punt him down one of these bottomless chasms for lying to me the way he did.
I tear my thoughts away from Jules with an effort, and concentrate on walking. But then, as I listen to the occasional rock shifting behind us or pebble skittering across the floor, I realize something.
I heard them. I saw them. What I thought was just the broken maze shifting after we passed, what I dismissed as glare from an alien sun on the canyon rim—those were the telltale signs we were being followed.
I could scream my frustration. I’m better than this. I should’ve been on the alert for…but we were so sure there was no reason for anyone to come this way in our wake. Jules thought he was following some second, secret spiral code in the original transmission—something nobody else would know about—and I thought he was leading me to a payout nobody else had discovered. We couldn’t have guessed Mink would have a team on his heels. We couldn’t have guessed she even knew he was here.
My eyes burn—exhaustion, I tell myself—and I squeeze them shut. No telling what kind of water rations they’ll give to their prisoners. Can’t afford to lose any in the form of tears.
Down here, with no windows to the surface, it’s impossible to tell the passage of time without a clock, and I can’t get at my phone with my hands bound. But some time later—it feels like hours—after the grid chamber and corridor open into a debris-filled antechamber, Liz calls a halt.
She gives a jerk on the rope holding us without a warning, wrenching my shoulders, and a quick cry of pain escapes me before I can clamp my lips together. Jules, attached to me, stops too, stumbling to his knees and almost dragging me with him.
“You,” she orders, jerking her chin at Jules. “This another broken puzzle?”
Jules turns his head enough to look at her out of the corner of his eye. “Looks like it.” I can see the muscles clenching in his jaw.
“Safe to make camp here?”
“I’d imagine so.”
Liz’s eyes narrow. “Look, cutie, anything happens to my team because you ‘miss’ something, on purpose or not, and I’m gonna make sure it happens to you, too. Now, once more, with feeling: is this a safe place to make camp?”
Jules grits his teeth, then scans the room for a few long, tense seconds. “To the best of my estimation, yes.”
“Fine.” She strides forward and ushers us off to the side, forcing Jules to scramble from his knees. She orders us to sit, then anchors her end of the rope around a massive boulder. Then she and her men—there’s Javier and Hansen, and I haven’t caught the names of the other two yet—spread out, gingerly inspecting the room and testing the floor, not wholly trusting Jules’s assurances. I can’t blame them—I wouldn’t trust him, in their shoes.
Our bindings offer no other way to rest, so I slump back against Jules, letting exhaustion claim me for a few breaths. Even if we could get free, where would we run? Straight into more traps, and with them on our heels, we wouldn’t have time to reason out the solutions. And we’d only last a day or two without our breathers.
“Are you okay?” Jules’s voice is quiet, and the question sounds like it pains him to ask.
The freaked, exhausted, one-step-away-from-hysterics part of my mind wants to laugh. Such a gentleman, even when tied to a dirty, sweaty, traitorous girl in the bottom of a deadly temple, surrounded by mercs ready to shoot us in the face. “Fine. You?”
“Fine.” He pauses a beat. “Really bloody annoyed.”
This time I do grin, fueled by a flicker of relief, or hope, that he understands why I betrayed his identity. “Glad to hear it.” I lean my head back, greatly daring, to rest it against his shoulder in some silent display of solidarity—and he jerks it away. The flicker of warmth in my chest vanishes.
Around us, the members of Liz’s team are making a rudimentary camp, setting their bags down and clearing spaces for their sleeping bags. I watch them a moment, until I’m sure nobody can overhear my murmur. “Jules, the only reason I gave them your name—”
“Don’t.” He grinds the word out between his teeth, eyes closed. “I don’t want to hear your excuse.”
I find myself gritting my own teeth. “You don’t get to be pissed at me.” My voice is chilly. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t lied to me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have brought you along if I’d known you’d spill my identity at the first sign of trouble.”
“Let’s just survive this.” I keep my voice cold. “Then we can go our separate ways.”
I can feel him, tense, against my back. The forced intimacy of being tied together makes his every shift and reaction feel almost like my own. I reach for resolve, trying to harden my thoughts. I don’t owe Jules anything. I cling to that thought and keep my body as stiff as I can where we’re touching.
“Fine,” he says eventually.
“I’m pretty sure they’ve been following us since the canyon.” I take a breath, watching to make sure none of Liz’s gang drift close enough to hear. “Someone’ll be guarding us soon, we don’t have much time. Any idea who these people are?”
“None. Never seen them, don’t know the name Liz.”
“The group you were supposed to meet when you landed? When you thought you were meeting a research expedition?”
I feel Jules shake his head, his ear brushing my hair. “Not what was described to me, anyway.”
“Mink’s a notorious puppet master.” I’m thinking aloud, head spinning with hunger and exhaustion. “Maybe somehow she found out you were on board the ship and…and put together a team to follow you, knowing wherever you went, it would be somewhere worthwhile.”
“Maybe.” Jules’s voice is soft, but weary rather than gentle. “The company that hired me, the woman who approached me, Charlotte, took a lot of precautions. I vetted them for weeks, traced everyone involved back for years online, but if Mink’s that well-connected…maybe she had someone on the inside at Global Energy, someone who tipped her off.”
I close my eyes, wishing I could shut out the sounds of Liz’s gang settling in. I’d thought the silence of only the two of us, alone in an ancient alien temple, was unsettling—now I long for it.
If Mink got a tip-off from a spy—or however she found out—then she could’ve known from the start that the main temple might not be the prime target for looting. Jules never would’ve helped a gang of raiders, mercs as ruthless and efficient as Liz’s gang, if they’d taken him prisoner from the start.
Mink’s smart enough to have done her research, and she’d know he’d be too principled for that. They’d let him go on Global Energy’s dime, wipe out the party that was meant to meet and support him, let him lead them to the right spot, and wait until there was no turning back before springing their trap.
It’s a brilliant plan, and my gut twists at the tiny flicker of admiration I feel for that. But it’s the cruelty of it that really makes my stomach churn. Liz would’ve had orders not to interfere, not to show a sign of her presence, until he was far enough inside the temple that he couldn’t run. Then truss him up, use him like a bloodhound, make him watch while they stripped this place of every scrap of evidence that could help his father. And the whole plan is unfolding smooth as butter.
Except for one thing: me.
I was supposed to head for the main temple. A backup policy, I guess, in case her hunch was wrong or Jules had given up or died. I was never supposed to meet him, and was certainly never supposed to join him. Jules was supposed to be alone.
Which means I’m dead weight to Liz.
Fear, hot and tangible, runs up my spine so viscerally I’m half certain Jules can feel it where we’re pressed together.
I’m not worth carrying.
“Jules,” I breathe, careful not to whisper—in caves like this, a breathy whisper carries a lot farther than a soft voice. “We’ve got to get free.”
“No, really?” His sarcasm would normally make me grin, but I’m too scared.
“No, I mean I have to—”
But one of the men is coming toward us, and I break off. It’s Javier, the one who stopped Hansen from groping me, the one who showed the tiniest flicker of sympathy for our lot.
“We’re stopping here for the night,” he announces. Though there’s no telling what time it actually is, it doesn’t really matter down here in the perpetual darkness. “Gotta get you two settled.”
By settled he means secured.
He crouches beside us and grimaces when he sees the knots Hansen tied earlier. I can’t feel my fingers anymore, and it’s some time before I register the pressure of Javier’s hands as he starts loosening the ropes. “I can give you guys a minute or two to get your circulation going again.”
“I need my journal from my pack,” Jules says, so icily polite that it’s a wonder Javier doesn’t freeze solid on the spot. “I need to keep working on my translations, if you want to make any progress tomorrow.”
Javier considers the question, but apparently he’s willing to risk a weapon as fearsome as a pencil in Jules’s hands, because he hands it over, then turns his attention to my bindings.
The blood comes shooting back into my fingertips, burning and tingling enough to make me bite my lip. But I force myself to massage my hands despite the pain, as Jules does the same. We’re both able to turn a little, and now I can see his face. What I see there makes my heart constrict.
He’s angry. I’ve never seen him like this, and though I’ve only known him a few days, I know him enough to see that this kind of fury is alien to him, too. He’s seen, maybe for the first time, just how mercenary and calculating people can be. For someone like Jules—smart, dedicated, passionate—to realize that nothing he can say will make these people understand him, make them look at the bigger picture he cares about so much, has to be beyond devastating.
I, at least, grew up in a world of smaller, more self-interested views. For him, this kind of betrayal is new.
I’m getting us the hell out of this mess. Me and Jules.
“I’ve gotta pee,” I blurt, plan forming as I go. “Before you tie us up again.”
The rest of the camp overhears, and one of the other men, whose name I don’t know yet—the short, fair-haired guy—sniggers. He tosses an empty plastic bottle our way so that it skitters to a halt against my thigh.
I look down at it, then up again with exaggerated horror. “Are you serious? Girls can’t pee in bottles, you dumbass. Look—your boss can take me. I can go in the hallway we just came from. That’s safe, right?”
That’s for Jules, and he looks at me for a long moment before nodding. I wish I could explain the plan to him, tell him to trust me, but all I can do is gaze at him for half a breath before Liz gets to her feet with a shrug.
“Girl’s got a point, Alex. I can always shoot her if she tries anything.”
I try not to let that hit me, but it does, and my extremities tingle with the desire to run and hide, as I’d do if I were confronted with heavily armed scavver gangs back in Chicago. There, I’d have half a dozen bolt-holes within running distance of wherever I was operating. Here, there’s just fatal traps ahead of me and a sheer cliff behind me.
Liz takes me back the way we came, into the corridor, until we’re out of sight of the rest of the group. My spine tingles, knowing she’s on my heels—though I didn’t see a gun on her, I know she’ll have one. And it’d be just as easy for her to use this opportunity to get rid of the dead weight as to let me do my business.
So I talk fast.
“Look,” I blurt, coming to a halt. I turn, lifting my hands to show my sudden movement isn’t an attempt to overpower her. Still, by the time I can see her, she’s got a weapon trained on my face. I swallow. “I didn’t really need the bathroom, I just wanted a chance to talk to you away from him.” I tilt my head back toward the group, where I can dimly hear Jules asking the rest of the gang about something to eat.
Liz raises an eyebrow, but the gun doesn’t waver. “Then talk. You’ve got ten seconds to get interesting.”
“You know who he is? So do I. He was dumb enough to tell me straight out when we ran into each other.” The lies come easily, quickly. This is what I’m good at. “I’m pretty sure I know why you’re here—and it’s why I’m here too. You’re right that I was supposed to head for the main temple, but when I met Jules, I realized he was heading somewhere else, and he’d know where the good stuff is. So I went with him.”
“I’m getting bored.” Liz is little more than a silhouette in the dark, but I can hear impatience in her voice.
“I’m a scavver, just like you.” I talk faster. “You think I give a crap about this guy’s academic whatever? But thing is, he’s not going to help you. You’ve seen him—sheltered, pampered Oxford life. His head’s full of loyalty and heroism and honor and all that bullshit, and he’s dumb enough to die rather than help scavvers get to the artifacts he’s trying to save.”
“People like to say things like that, but they tend to change their minds when they’re looking down the barrel of a gun.”
“Not this guy. I’ve gotten to know him. He’s the real deal. He’s as crazy as his dad, and Elliott Addison let them dismantle his life’s work and stick him in jail rather than help the IA get here.” I take a deep breath, head spinning with the gamble I’m about to take. “You think I’m worthless to you. Just one of Mink’s backup plans. That dumbass in there is the real prize, and you’re right. But I’m the key to unlocking it.”
Liz shifts her weight from one leg to the other. “The hell you talking about?”
“He’s not gonna help you—but I already got him to help me. Fed him a sob story about a fake illegal sister, a debt that needs paying.” My heart tightens, part of me wanting to burst into tears just saying these words. Evie’s not some sob story. She’s all I have. But I harden my voice. “And you said it yourself when you found us. Lovebirds. He’s smitten, never met a girl like me before. He’s already thinking of a way to escape, I guarantee it. He might be naïve, but you’re trying to hold on to a genius, and it’s not gonna work. He’ll get loose. But if I’m with you—if I join your team—he’ll stay. I can convince him it’s in his best interests to work with you and take you to the loot.”
“And what’s in it for you?”
“Well, not getting shot in the face, for one.”
Liz’s mouth twists to something like a smile, and she lowers her gun. “And?”
“Our breathers.” I hear Liz draw breath to argue and I talk over her, quickly. “You’ve still got him tied up, and it’s not like I can go anywhere—I don’t know how to solve these stupid puzzles any more than you do. But having our breathers would go a long way toward convincing him to go along with you.”
Liz arches an eyebrow and cocks the gun, its click echoing around the stone walls like an explosion. “Killing his little friend would go a long way toward convincing him we’re serious.”
It takes every ounce of strength I have not to shatter, to let fear take over and turn me into a blubbering mass of terror. But my mouth knows what to say, even if my brain is begging me to curl into a fetal position and cry. “Kill me and you destroy the only leverage you’ve got over him. First thing he said, when we stopped? That he’ll go headlong into the next bottomless pit before he leads you to the loot.”
Liz’s eyes narrow. “I find that hard to believe.”
I shrug, hoping it looks nonchalant. “Believe what you want. But if he’s the reason Mink sent you here, I find it hard to believe that she’d pay to get you back off Gaia if she knew you’d let him take a swan-dive off a cliff.”
Liz chews on the inside of her cheek for a few seconds, then tucks her gun away. She’s got a holster somewhere under her jacket, but in the gloom I can’t see exactly where. “Fine,” she says, and a tension snaps around my lungs like a rubber band. “But you’ll stay a prisoner for appearances—better than him thinking you double-crossed him.”
Damn, I was hoping she wouldn’t think of that. I need to be free, even trusted, if I’m going to get us through this. This is what Jules brought me here for, even if he didn’t know it at the time—this is my world, half a universe away from home. “If I’m a prisoner, he’ll be thinking of ways for us to escape. And eventually he’ll come up with something good enough that I can’t say no without it being obvious I don’t want him to escape. No, I’ve got to make him think helping the group is what’ll see him though this, and to do that I’ve got to be one of you. He’ll be pissed, sure. But I know when I’ve got a guy on the hook.” I summon a grin from lord knows where. “He likes me more than he’ll be pissed at me, and I can convince him that I’m just pretending to side with you. Make him think I’m really still on his side.”
Liz is quiet a long time, considering. “All right. But the guys are all going to have their eye on you, and they’re all trained to shoot first so that there aren’t any questions later. Understand?”
I feel like dropping to the ground—the tightrope I’m laying down for myself is exhausting just to contemplate. “Got it.”
“And I’ll be watching you, too.”
Somehow, that’s worse than the rest of her group combined.
We head back down the corridor toward the gang’s camp, my stomach roiling. I can’t help but think how much easier it’d be if I wasn’t lying—if I did switch sides. I’d stand a better chance of keeping Jules alive, not to mention myself. And if I’m a member of their little crew, and Mink really did send them…maybe I’d share in their payday. Jules would probably get his answers, too, even if he’d be a prisoner while getting them.
He lied to me. The words repeat in my mind, resounding with every echoing step as we walk. I don’t owe him anything, especially not loyalty.
When we reach the camp, emerging into the light from their various battery-powered lamps, they all look up.
“Good news,” Liz announces, shoving me forward a few steps. “Came to an understanding with this one—she’s with us.”
Protests rise around the circle, and Javier stares at me intently, but I’m trying so hard not to look at Jules that their voices fade into a blur. After I blurted out his name, he’ll have no problem believing I’ve switched sides. Good, I think vehemently, clinging to that sense of betrayal, the knowledge that he brought me here with a lie. Let him twist. But the thought brings little comfort.
“We’ll keep an eye on her,” Liz continues, “but she’s one of Mink’s scavvers, like us, and smart. Smart enough to have got this far. Another set of eyes and ears in this place can only help.”
In the end they still tie me up. Liz is too cautious to just welcome me into the fold with a word and a handshake. But they only bind my hands, and they bind them loosely in front of me, almost comfortably. Just enough of an inconvenience that I’ll make noise if I try to slip away in the night. But it’s enough that I can hold the breather Liz drops into my lap, enough that I can fit its mask to my face and take a deep breath. Looking over at the camp, I spot Jules’s breather—they haven’t given it back to him yet.
And that’s what brings me up short, my anger and hurt draining away. Because once we get to the center of the temple, once Jules has served his purpose and brought Liz and the others to whatever loot or revelation lies at its heart, they won’t need him anymore. He’ll be one more loose end, a witness to testify against Liz, against her gang, against Mink herself. They won’t just let him go.
They’ll kill him.
I force myself to look at Jules, willing him with everything I have to understand, to trust me, to let me do what I do best. To understand I’ve already won us one small advantage, and it’s the best kind of advantage: one the other side doesn’t know you have. But he gazes at me for a long moment, ice-cold, then closes his eyes. Though I wait and wait, he doesn’t open them again—I can’t imagine he’s asleep, but he refuses to look at me.
I stare hard at the ground as talk eventually drifts away from this change of events. I sit there in silence as the mercs start to relax, to talk about past adventures, to laugh over in-jokes. To enjoy themselves a little, now that they’re on top.
Liz’s voice rises, catching my attention—they’re all laughing over something, loud and coarse. “Sure, Hansen.” She’s snickering, pausing to take a swig from her water bottle. “Your girlfriend back home,” and the way she leans on the word makes it clear said girlfriend is fake, Hansen’s wishful thinking at best, “can hang out with our new friend’s little sister. Imaginary friends always get on like a house on fire.”
There’s more laughter, as the bottom drops out of my stomach.
I turn my head, knowing what I’m going to see. Jules’s eyes are open, and he’s staring straight at me. She just took my lie—my denial of Evie’s existence—and she spoke it out loud. She laughed at it.
And Jules heard her turn Evie into an imaginary girl.
One by one the lanterns start going out, as the tired mercs turn in for the night. It’s not until there’s only one left that I gather up the courage to glance across at Jules, to see where they’ve settled him.
Despite everything, despite the fury still lingering in my core for his lies, I don’t want to pile on the betrayal—he’s just seen how ruthless people can be, and it makes me shrivel inside to be a part of it. My mind is so desperate for him to see, to understand what I’m doing—or at least to trust I’m not turning on him like it seems—that I can imagine his wink, his flicker of a smile, his quick nod of acceptance. They’re so vivid I almost think I’m seeing them for real.
But then my eyes focus, and I see him bound to a boulder twice his size, with scarcely enough give in the rope to let him lie on his side on the bare rock. Someone’s draped a blanket over him, but it’s already falling off.
His journal and pencil lie on the ground next to him now, and though they’ve finally strapped his breather over his nose and mouth, I can still see his eyes, red-rimmed and hard and boring back into mine. And it turns out the anger I saw earlier, the fury and hurt at being followed by Mink’s crew and led into this trap, was nothing.
Because the way he’s looking at me now…
I tear my gaze away and curl up under my blanket, all too aware that Jules has barely anything to warm him in the underground chill of this ancient place. Cold, shivering, I close my eyes and try to sleep. But all I see is Jules’s face, half-hidden behind his breather, and the disgust in his eyes.