LATIN. IN A TEMPLE ON the other side of the galaxy built by creatures who went extinct long before Rome ever existed.
My mind’s spinning, and I know Jules is as thrown as I am.
“This message is for us,” I say, my voice hoarse. “For humans.”
“Yes,” he whispers.
“I mean, it’s freaking Latin!” I actually squeak the last word. “What the hell, Jules?”
“They used the same words in the broadcast,” he says, dazed, his gaze barely focused. “ ‘Onward, if you dare.’ And now here it is, it’s…The test was always for us. It was us they were testing for worthiness.”
“I don’t like this,” I murmur, staring up at the black monolith like it might move. “I don’t trust it. We’ve been doing our best to explain everything away—fifty thousand years, convergent evolution, but—”
“I’ve been explaining it away,” he corrects me, still soft. “You’ve been asking what other ways they might be similar to us. Whether they could lie. Deceive. We have your answer now.”
“But the answer’s impossible,” I reply. “The answer is that they’ve been seeking humanity, targeting Earth all along. That’s impossible.”
“And yet there it is.” I think something’s broken in his head—intellectual overload, or whatever. He just keeps shaking it slowly, staring at the Latin.
A sound, tiny and far away, yanks me back to myself. Maybe I’m imagining it—Jules certainly doesn’t hear it, too lost in his own mind—but it reminds me nonetheless that whatever we’ve just discovered, we’re still in a race for survival.
I want to give him a shake, to shout that Liz is on our heels, and she won’t bother to solve the door puzzle—she’ll just blast her way through it. But I need him thinking.
“Okay,” I say, trying to make myself calm. “It says ‘onward, if you dare.’ That means there’s got to be a way to actually go onward, right? I mean, I don’t like this, and I have more questions than I can count right now, but we know Liz will definitely shoot us if she catches up with us, so onward’s still looking better than our other options.”
Jules’s mouth opens a few times before he actually manages a response. “Right. Yes. There should be a way.”
“So maybe there’s a puzzle here, too. Something to do with this thing.” I move forward toward the hulking stone structure in the center of the room, forcing myself to look at it and nod toward the letters carved there. “It’ll turn into a ladder, or a trapdoor, or it’ll open some invisible second door in here, or something. Maybe we could try and climb this frame.” But even as I say it, I’m eyeing its smooth slope, without so much as a crack or chip for a toehold.
“Maybe.” Jules is still so shaken he’s barely registering my words. “But I don’t…The Latin just says ‘onward,’ there’s nothing about a puzzle, no glyphs like in the other rooms. If this is the end of the maze, where are our answers? The Nautilus…”
“Okay.” I take a breath, coming up alongside him. Part of me wants to take his hand, drown out my fear with the feel of his fingers twining through mine, but I need him thinking about that statue-thing, not me. “Okay, Jules—forget the Latin. Forget the glyphs, forget the Nautilus, forget the Undying, forget Gaia. Forget everything else in this temple. You’re an archaeologist. Where do we start?”
Jules gives himself a little shake, as if shedding the confusion and fear and wonder. “We…we observe. We look for wear patterns that might tell us if this was used for anything, we look for any fragments around it of other artifacts. Anything that might suggest why this would’ve been important to the civilization that built it.”
He starts poring over every centimeter of the thing, and while I do the same, I have no idea what I’m looking for. It’s obvious as I get closer that the structure does something—sections of the stone are cut through by narrow, almost invisible lines that would allow the different parts to move if operated by some invisible mechanism.
Another distant sound, muffled by the thick stone door, slithers into the quiet and jacks up my heart rate. Jules hears it this time, and his eyes meet mine, widening.
“Ignore it.” I’m talking fast, but trying to sound calm. “We’ve got time. Focus.”
But inside I’m screaming. Figure this thing out or we’re gonna get blown up or shot or tied up and left here to die.
It feels like hours before Jules gives a little exclamation, though I know it’s only moments. I’m quick to join him where he’s crouched at the base of the statue, inspecting something half-concealed in the shadows. It’s another of the scratched carvings he’s been tracking—the curve of the Nautilus shape, a line radiating out from it. Taking a breath to steady his hand, he angles his wrist unit so he can photograph it.
Then his finger trails across to hover above a shape next to it that’s similar, but definitely not the same. This shape isn’t scratched into the surface—it stands out in relief, like it’s been embossed on the stone.
“See this?” His voice is quiet, tense with concentration. He’s gesturing, without touching, at the curl of carving and the shadow it casts. “I think it’s an alpha.”
“A what?” This time, I’m not able to keep the impatience from my voice.
“It’s the first letter of the ancient Greek alphabet.” The curl he’s indicating looks kind of like a stick-drawing of a fish, but it could also be a badly-drawn lowercase A. “Didn’t the ancient Greeks speak Latin?”
“Well, no, they spoke Greek, actually. A number of different forms of Latin were the dominant languages during the Roman Empire that followed, although it depends on which area of the empire you’re talking about, because at times it occupied territories that stretched into what’s now—”
“Jules!”
“Right. Right. I think this statue is another puzzle. I think it might just be a simple alphabet puzzle.”
“Starting with this alpha thing?”
He nods, tracing the shape of the letter in the air by the carving.
“Good enough for me.” I reach for it, and I know we’re both holding our breath. It stands out from the stone, so it’s easy enough to grip. Under my fingers, the letter gives a little, the layer of stone it’s carved into seeming to separate from the rest, and I wrench harder. The small tile with the alpha on it twists a quarter turn to the right, then clicks inward.
The frame encircling the polished surface of the monolith shudders, and suddenly the stone sheds a cloud of ancient dust and sand and comes to life. More stone carvings push their way to the surface until Greek letters ring the entire frame.
Before we have time to inspect them, a rumbling and shower of dust from the cavern wall behind us makes us both jump to our feet, ready to run if the ceiling’s coming down—though I know we’re both thinking, Run where?
The source of the sound is another set of characters, emerging from the stone wall, a foot high at least, suddenly there at head height where there was nothing before, just like the letters on the statue. The words aren’t Greek—they’re written in another alphabet I can’t read—but I recognize it.
“What—is that Chinese?” I gasp.
Jules is staring at it in silent, baffled awe.
But before either of us can speculate, we hear a sound that leaves absolutely no doubt that Liz and her people are close: voices.
They’re on the other side of the door.
Jules’s gaze swings to meet mine, and in that moment we have no need of speech.
I’m immediately turning to scan the frame. “What’s the next letter in the Greek alphabet?”
“Beta. It looks like an uppercase B with a longer tail.…”
We search the ring-like frame, moving fast, Jules calling out descriptions and both our eyes searching for the letters that came to the surface when I twisted the alpha stone. He finds most of them, eyes trained to see them, but every so often I’m the one who leaps forward and twists the next piece of the puzzle.
Each time we turn a new letter, more words emerge from the walls around us, sometimes four or five sentences at a time. They appear on every wall of the chamber, until the whole place is covered with words in more languages than I knew existed. At one point a series of lines pop out that look barely more than chicken scratch, but as I stare at them, I remember vaguely a lesson from before I dropped out of school. Cuneiform, it’s called. From some ancient civilization before even the Greeks and Romans.
What the hell is going on?
The fact that Liz and her people aren’t already inside means they haven’t found the little slot that contains my phone, the key to unlocking the door. But I doubt they only brought enough explosives for one cave-in, and if they blast their way in here, we’re dead—if the explosion doesn’t kill us, Liz will. She might keep Jules alive for a little while, but only until he’s outlived his usefulness.
“I’m telling you,” shouts Jules, urgency lifting his voice, “it looks just like a lowercase W.”
“And I’m telling you,” I retort, “that the only W-looking thing was the psi we just pushed. Like a w and a y got busy with each other.”
“Look harder, it’s got to be here. Omega. It’s the last letter.”
I’m searching, eyes watering with the effort and the brightness of the refracted sunlight flooding the room, when my gaze suddenly snaps into focus—not on the frame around the monolith, but on the wall behind it. There’s a phrase there…in English.
The worthy will rise into the stars.…
I don’t stop now to marvel at the fact that I’m reading something from an ancient temple. I can’t worry that it’s cryptic, that I can only think of it literally, that a naïve college student and an uneducated scavver girl are clearly not “worthy” in any possible way.
I just look up.
“Jules—what does an uppercase omega look like?”
“All the rest have been lowercase—”
“I know, but it’s the last one, and those words…it says rise…What’s that at the top?” I’m pointing—rise into the stars—to a semicircular carving at the very center of the top of the frame.
“Mehercule,” Jules mumbles.
“Give me a boost,” I demand, hurrying to his side. He kneels and cups his hands obligingly, and then he’s heaving me upward, grunting with the effort. I can just barely touch the top of the frame, but it’s enough—my fingers graze the omega’s edge, and the letter twists and sinks into the frame.
The ground beneath us quakes, and as Jules cries out and I go tumbling down, I’m thinking, Oh god, they’ve blown a hole in the wall.…This is it…
But when I land on top of Jules, who half grunts, half gasps at the impact, I’m scrambling up to discover that the door is still intact. The rumbling is coming from the structure. I’ve been so focused on Jules, so desperate to keep him working, translating, thinking—that I haven’t had time to process my own fear. So the sudden wave of hope that washes over me is so visceral I’d fall to my knees if I weren’t already in a heap on the ground with Jules.
The structure is a puzzle, and it is doing something. Opening a door, creating a staircase…I don’t care what it is, as long as it gets us out of this dead-end deathtrap.
We stumble to our feet in time to see a mind-bending ripple flow through the solid rock of the monolith. I jerk back, Jules staggering with me—his fingers are tangled through mine, I realize, but I have no idea who grabbed for whose hand.
Another ripple flows through the polished center of the statue, and abruptly it doesn’t look like stone anymore. Its surface looks like an oil slick, semi-reflective and fluid.
I take it back. I want a goddamn staircase.
“What the hell is that?” I draw in close to Jules’s side, his warmth a comfort in the chill air that’s humming now with a strange sort of energy, like we’re standing beneath a set of power lines or on an open field in a thunderstorm.
“I don’t—” But Jules stops abruptly, his eyes widening. “Wait…I have seen this before. Don’t you recognize this? It looks like the surface of the portal, the one that brought our shuttles here to Gaia.”
“I spent that trip sealed up in a packing crate, remember?” I reply. For all my dreams of exploring space, all I got was the inside of a box—and the utter, gut-wrenching, mind-searing pain of going through the portal.
The memory of it makes me want to shrink back from the oily-looking thing in front of me. I can’t do it again. I can’t. Not unless it’s to go home—to go back to Evie.
“We can’t just leap in blindly,” Jules is saying, gazing at the portal in wonder. “We don’t know why they built this place, we don’t know why they were testing us, not anymore. We still don’t know what danger the Nautilus was warning against. This is the room, Mia, this is it. Why I came here. They led us here, and we have to find the answer. This portal could be the very threat we’re meant to avoid—the spiral’s carved right there in this thing’s base. We need more time.”
“We don’t have time,” I remind him, hating that I have to be the one to say it. “We’re out of options.”
“Mia, we can’t go through this thing not knowing where it goes. It could take us to some other planet, one where we’d need more than breathers to survive. It could send us straight into a black hole. It could send us into the middle of outer space to die, for all we know.”
At least I’d get to see what space looked like before my eyeballs exploded in the vacuum.
“Look at these walls.” I give his hand a tug to turn him, so the light on his helmet scans across the multiple languages and characters that emerged while we were unlocking the portal. “These are human languages. I have no idea what that means, but I also don’t know why the Undying would have a path leading straight to this portal, and a message telling us to keep going, in a language we understand—in literally dozens of languages humans might understand—if this portal were going to kill us.”
“You’re assuming their motives—”
“We have no choice!” I interrupt him. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that we are gonna die when Liz and her people come through that door. I’d rather take my chances with the portal.”
But he’s shaking his head, setting his jaw and gazing around at the walls. “The answers are here, Mia.” He’s taking pictures again—pictures, for the love of…—of the walls and their multi-language messages, his eyes burning with that fervor that lights them every time he gets buried in the secrets of the Undying. “These walls…this is why I came to Gaia, what I risked my life to find. Translating these messages could be the key to proving my father was right not to trust blindly the technology the Undying left us. These temples were built long before these languages ever existed. You can’t tell me to leave this behind.”
I close my eyes, trying to take a deep breath. If this room were filled with valuable artifacts, I’d be grabbing every single one I could fit into my pack, for Evie. These messages are his version of that—I can’t deny him the chance to do what he came here to do just because I’ve failed. And beyond that, he’s right—there are questions here we have to find answers to.
I glance at the door, which still stands between us and Liz, and let my breath out slowly. “Maybe there’s a place to hide that we missed,” I say softly. “I’ll look around now that we’ve unlocked the—”
But I don’t get to finish. I’m interrupted by an ear-splitting crack and a roar, and the ground shakes again—this time enough to knock me down, though Jules keeps his feet. When I lift my head, part of the door is gone, enough that I can see flashlights in the darkness beyond. The rest of it is covered with a web of cracks, and before I can even catch my breath, the clang of pickaxes penetrates the ringing in my ears. Half the mirrors have been misaligned by the blast, and the remaining shafts of light aren’t aimed at the refractory crystal—the rainbows are gone.
Jules’s head lamp swings toward the door, the air now so dusty from the explosion that his helmet’s beam looks almost solid as it quakes and wavers.
I can hear Liz shouting orders on the other side of the door, though my ears are still ringing so badly from the explosion that I can’t make out what she’s saying. I lurch unsteadily to my feet, still dazed from the shockwave.
“We have to go!” I shout at Jules, stumbling toward him until I can steady myself by grasping at his arms. “Now!”
He’s staring at me, forgetting for the moment that his light is blinding in my eyes—but I don’t need to see him to know he’s torn, body rigid with the warring needs to flee and stay to study this room of secrets.
“I can’t,” he says back, barely audible to my explosion-dazzled ears. “Mia—we can’t just dive through a thing like this without knowing where it leads. Especially not after seeing all this.” He gestures around at the walls. “You’ll talk to Liz again—we can convince them to wait, to keep us alive long enough to—”
“To what? Find another miraculous way to escape four trained, armed mercenaries with no qualms about shooting us? Jules, don’t make me go through the portal alone.”
But still he hesitates. A shot rings out, fired through the widening hole in the door and pinging off the stone some distance behind us. I gasp and reach up, switching off the lamp on his helmet so at least they won’t be able to see where we are so easily.
I tighten my grip on Jules’s arms, trying to pull him toward the portal—but even if he wasn’t a foot taller than me, he’s strong, and I can barely budge him. “There’s a time for study and planning and waiting and going over every detail, like you do, and there’s a time for answers, but sometimes you have to go by your gut, your—”
I’m interrupted by a shower of rocks and a shout, as one of Liz’s men knocks another section of the door down. The hole’s going to be wide enough to squeeze through in another few seconds.
Now that his bright helmet’s off and out of my eyes, I can see some of Jules’s face in the half light left by the mirrors high overhead. His dilemma is so clearly written there that my heart aches for him. And in that moment I know what to do.
“Sometimes you have to go on instinct,” I whisper. Then I lean into him and stretch up onto my toes, sliding one hand up his arm to curl around the back of his neck and pull him down into a kiss. For an instant, there is no portal. There’s no Liz, no armed crew ready to kill us, no loved ones waiting for us on Earth. He’s motionless for a heartbeat. Then he slides his arm around the small of my back and pulls me in against him, our bodies colliding and robbing me of breath.
His other hand cups my cheek, as gentle as his embrace is fierce, and my skin burns where his fingers rest. I meant to shock him, distract him, interrupt his frozen indecision—and instead I’m the one who’s melting, my body fitted against him, my lips parting with his, a heat washing over me so intense I have to break away or else catch fire.…
I stumble back, dizzy. I’m staring up at him, and his eyes are burning, and my voice is somewhere far away, making me hunt for it amid the wreckage of my thoughts. “Instinct,” I whisper.
Then, before I can talk myself out of it, before I can think again about the agony of my trip through the portal from Earth to Gaia, before Jules can grab for me and stop me, I turn and break into a run.
Please, Jules. It’s all I can think as I make for the dark, roiling surface of the portal. Don’t make me go through alone.