JULES IS STARING AT ME like a guy between the moment when he’s punched and the moment when he falls down, lips slightly parted, breath shallow. Then Javier hisses to get our attention.
“Let’s go,” he whispers. “We don’t have much time—they’re legging it like their tails are on fire—evacuation must be nearly done.”
My blood feels like ice in my veins—I don’t need anyone telling me to run like hell, but my feet won’t move. I know what I’ve just said is insane. The Undying are extinct. We’re alone in the universe, picking at the remains of their civilization like me and the scavvers in the ruins of Chicago. Except…what if, like the people of Chicago, the Undying didn’t die out? What if they just…moved on?
Then the corridor lights flicker, on and off, in a rapid succession of flashes. “That can’t be good,” mutters Javier, easing out to double-check that all the guards are gone. And Jules is following, until our joined hands and my unmoving feet bring him to a halt. I feel, rather than see, his eyes on me—I’m staring up, at the lights.
They’re flashing almost too quickly to track, but there’s a pattern there.
I’m counting under my breath, and when the flashing stops for a beat, I whisper the number aloud. “Twenty-nine.”
He must be used to my seemingly random outbursts by now, because Jules doesn’t give me the whole crazy-scavver-girl sidelong eyeball he used to. He crouches down at my side instead, ignoring Javier’s increasingly urgent summons to follow him. “Twenty-nine what?”
“Flashes. Hang on.” The sequence is starting again, and I’m so tired I don’t think I can count and hear Jules’s voice at the same time. This time there are twenty-eight flashes—and this time Jules is counting them too.
Our eyes meet, and then as one we’re scrambling back to our feet and taking off down the hallway, bursting past Javier. “It’s a countdown,” Jules is shouting. “The flashes—they’re counting down each time.”
Javier scrambles after us. “A countdown—what, like for a shuttle takeoff or something?”
“Exactly like.” Jules’s voice is short, as he saves his breath for running. “I guess not everyone’s evacuated—someone’s initiated a launch sequence.”
Javier slings his gun over his shoulder so he can run faster. “Or they’ve rigged up a remote piloting system.”
Jules stumbles, spitting out an oath so strangled I can’t even identify what language he’s speaking. “I guess she did listen to my warning after all. Just…not enough.”
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. It’s the best of all possible worlds for Charlotte—she sends home her prize through the portal without risking herself or a single one of her men. Assuming the ship flies—assuming it doesn’t blow up on liftoff—and assuming it doesn’t wipe out half of life on Earth.
I don’t want to get blown up leaving Gaia’s atmosphere on an ancient alien spaceship. I also really don’t want to get blown up on an ancient alien spaceship in orbit around the planet my sister and I call home. I guess I just don’t really want to get blown up at all. Mostly I want off this goddamn creepy-ass alien deathtrap. If I’m going up into space again it’ll be as god intended it: in a nice, carbon-fiber and steel shuttle with noise-canceling headphones and, preferably, enough sedatives coursing through my veins to knock out an elephant.
The halls of the ship are empty, with only the well-traveled boot prints of the Alliance forces to tell us anyone was ever here. Though I know we can’t run any faster, my mind’s tracking the countdown anyway, like some perverse reminder that there’s not enough time. For the first time in my life I wish I wasn’t good with numbers. I wish it didn’t come naturally. I wish I didn’t have this realization echoing around inside my skull, reverberating to the rhythm of my pounding feet.
Nineteen.
I try to comfort myself by remembering that it’s not a one-to-one countdown—it takes nineteen seconds to count out nineteen flashes, then another eighteen to count down eighteen, and it’ll keep going, flashing out each number in full right down to zero. We’ve got a few minutes, not just a handful of seconds. But each step seems to take forever.
Jules’s boots squeal against a puddle of melted snow and he goes careening into the wall instead of rounding a corner, his hand tearing from mine—Javier’s there before anyone else, grabbing at his elbow to haul him upright again.
But neither of them starts moving again, and an instant later, I see why.
The airlock’s ahead of us, and it’s still open. A way out.
The ramp has been pulled away already, but if the doors are going to automatically close, they haven’t yet. I’m trying to remember how high up the scaffolding was—I know I thought I could make it, if Mink pushed me off. But the white, featureless snow below us is almost impossible to gauge now.
“We have to get to a shuttle,” Javier shouts, lifting his voice over the roar of the engines. “I’ve got a family on Earth. I’ve got kids. My sister, my nephews. I don’t care if they arrest me, shoot me. Someone’s got to try to send a warning to Earth, that they shouldn’t bring this thing through the portal until they’re sure it’s not dangerous.”
Not a word we’ve said to Mink has made any difference so far—well, except to make her cautious enough to evacuate herself and her troops—but she’s not the only member of the IA with pull. If Javier can get us to a shuttle so we can send a message to whoever her commander is, there’s a chance they could abort the launch, or at least make sure the ship stays far from Earth.
Slowly, Jules nods. His eyes are distant, and I know he’s thinking. I wish I knew what to say—how to tell him in this instant that staying alive, bringing this message back to humanity, is more important than the answers this ship could give us. But I’m not even sure that’s true anymore.
Javier drops to his knees, grasping at the edge of the drop and then falling. My heart stops for half a second—then starts pumping again, frantically, as I see him land harmlessly in the snow only a few meters down. He’s shouting something, but out here the hum of the ship has risen to a roar. He gestures for us to follow, then takes off along the outer hull, aiming for the shuttles lined up a few kilometers away. But when I start to make for the drop, I realize Jules is just standing there, unmoving, eyes fixed upward on the lights overhead.
Seventeen.
“There’s not enough time,” he says softly, so softly I mostly just read the words on his lips, half deafened by the sound of the ship preparing to take off. For half a moment I think he’s reading my mind.
Then I snap out of it. “Not if you stand there gaping like a dumbass!” I gasp, lungs burning from our headlong flight.
“No—not enough time for Javier to get a message through, even if he gets past the guards, even if he can figure out instantly how to launch one of their shuttles. He won’t be able to get someone in charge to stop this, not before it’s already happening. He won’t even reach the shuttles before this thing takes off.” He takes a quick, bracing breath. “But there’s still a chance I could shut it down from inside.”
“From inside—” I stop short, all my glib replies and oh-so-witty rejoinders fleeing. I’m rooted to the spot, one hand on the wall of the corridor as I stare at him. Suddenly I understand what he’s planning—with the time we have left, it’ll almost certainly be a one-way trip to the control room. Sabotage, not shutdown. If this ship is meant to destroy a planet, better it destroy lifeless Gaia than the only home our species has ever known.
His eyes snap down to meet mine, and after a heartbeat, he manages a little smile. “Sometimes you trust your instincts,” he whispers, then steps in close so he can wrap a hand around my waist and pull me in against him, hard. His mouth finds mine, and this time the kiss is real—the first time, neither of us knew what was happening, not even me, and I was the one who started it. This time…this time there’s a heat there, a longing, desperation in the way his lips explore mine, the press of his hand against my back.
I step back, not because I want to pull away but because my knees feel like they’re about to give out, and I hit the wall of the airlock with a little gasp. The stolen rifle drops from my nerveless hands and clatters to the floor.
Jules presses in close for another breath, but the lights are flashing again—fifteen—and I know we don’t have time to stay in this moment. No matter how utterly, completely, heartbreakingly much I want to. I give a little moan and he pulls away, though his arm is still around me. He lifts his other hand to brush a lock of gross, sweaty blue hair out of my eyes, his fingertips gentle, tracing my cheek. “I’ll see you around, Mia.”
Then he’s turning me toward the edge of the drop-off, ushering me toward freedom. I can see Javier already dwindling into a tiny figure as he heads for the shuttles.
My knees are still being uncooperative, and for a moment I get a flash of horror that Jules actually thinks he’s gonna dump me off this ship and go back to the control room by himself.
I give a wordless noise of protest and kick out, hitting him in the shin and causing him to stagger back with a grunt of pain and surprise.
“Screw that, Oxford,” I gasp, then reach for the panel beside the airlock. The same panels that I observed next to all the doors, the ones I thought might be door controls if this were a science fiction movie. The ones that did nothing…before the ship powered up, that is.
Now, my palm connects with a tingle, like the pad senses the conductivity of my skin—and the airlock doors slam shut with all the force of an avalanche. The bright glare of the snow is gone, leaving us bathed only in the blue glow of the lights of the corridor, pausing between countdown numbers.
“Dammit, Mia!” The words fly from his mouth as he stares at me, horrified. It’s the first time I’ve heard him swear in a language I actually understand, and for a wild moment that fact delights me, makes me want to grin, to laugh, to throw myself at him with insane and, I’ll admit, inappropriate enthusiasm.
“You think you’re gonna leave me behind now?” I’m still panting for breath; panting from the run, from the kiss, from the decision to die with him, if that’s what we’re about to do. “Stupid academics, always thinking everything’s some dumbass fairy-tale legendary epic with the chosen sacrificial hero. You really want to stand here and fight me? You know I’ll win.”
Fourteen.
Jules’s horror is fading to surprise, and as my eyes adjust to the blue-tinted gloom, I realize that he’s always looked at me that way. Always surprised. Always like I’ve caught him off-guard. At first I thought it was because he was an asshole, some elitist jerk who thought no uneducated criminal chick could possibly have anything to contribute to his precious expedition.
Then I thought it was because he was automatically dismissing me as just another scavver, someone trying to play him for his expensive gear, his knowledge of the temples. Then I thought maybe it was because he was surprised at himself, at what he was really capable of when things got real, when the choices we were facing were about murder and death and sacrifice and loyalty to our families, and maybe he saw me as a symbol of how he’d changed.
But now he’s just gazing at me, and as his mouth closes and curves into a smile, brown eyes warming, he murmurs, “I am never going to figure you out, am I?”
Maybe I was just always a puzzle. Exactly the kind of puzzle that calls to a guy like Jules.
“I hope not,” I reply.
He reaches out, and I slip my hand into his, and together we sprint for the control room, and for our last-ditch effort to stop this portable apocalypse from lifting off.