SEVEN.
We barrel through the door to the control room, ricocheting off each other and sending Mia’s smaller frame into the wall. She waves a hand to urge me on as she gasps for breath, and I stumble forward to stare at the huge control panel. The metallic stone is lit up from within now, circuitry gleaming. The pause before the lights flash for the next sequence in the countdown is interminable, stretching for eternity, but it’s still not long enough.
Charlotte had me at gunpoint last time I was here, but that wasn’t the real threat—the real threat was hanging over Mia’s head, though she didn’t know it. I worked out how to power up the ship, and the launch sequence was only a few steps from that. I said nothing, hoping they wouldn’t make those next few connections themselves. But Charlotte told me they had people who could read the glyphs, and clearly that was true. They managed to initiate the launch, compete with autopilot. My problem is that I didn’t have enough time to learn how to turn this thing off.
And if Mia’s guess about the Undying is right, perhaps there isn’t a way to shut down the launch.
As I stare, more panels light up, signaling their readiness.
Okay, maybe I can work backward—it’s showing me which areas are involved in the launch, maybe I can shut them down.
I run my fingers over the panels and along the grooves carved there as the lights dim for another flash, feeling the current tingle through my fingertips. Mia’s standing beside me, her hand resting on my back, waiting to be told what to do, not wasting an instant on asking questions.
Six.
“Down there,” I snap out, stumbling over the words, pointing to the other end of the small room. The lights dim again. “The section lighting up blue, second from the top—yes, that one. Hit that on my word.” We both ready our hands above what I hope are the instruments for measuring altitude and trajectory. Maybe. They’re something to do with moving quickly, and I think they specify movement in a particular direction. Maybe if they don’t work, the ship will pause until it can fix them.
Five.
“Now!”
Our hands slam down in unison.
Four.
The start-up continues without a pause.
I don’t know what I’m missing, and it could be anything. I could be a fraction off in my guess, or a world away—or I could be absolutely right, and whatever Charlotte and her team did to control the ship remotely has rendered it impossible to shut down the sequence. And I have about ten seconds to work out what to do.
We try another combination, and another, moving together in perfect synchronization, Mia hitting the panels almost as I speak their names, but we might as well be fleas on a dog for all the difference we make—less than fleas, we don’t even cause an itch.
Three.
“Come on,” Mia shouts, smacking both hands down on the control panel in unison, frustration taking her over.
Two.
If this were a story, the ship would magically shut down in this moment, her hands having incredibly found the perfect combination. Instead, as she turns huge eyes to meet mine, the lights give us our final flash.
One.
We both stagger back against the walls as the huge ship pulls itself free of the ice, our ears ringing with the roar of its ascent. I push off my side of the room to stumble over to her, planting my hands on either side of her head to stop myself from crushing her against the wall when the floor tilts. She reaches up to grab my collar, hauling my head down so she can shout in my ear.
“What now? Fry its circuits or something, short out its engine?” I lift my head to look down at her. It’s not a bad idea—if we can cause an error, maybe…but if we destroy the ship’s ability to pilot itself, there’s no chance she’ll land safely.
“Maybe,” I shout back. “We could crash it, or get it to self-destruct on this side of the portal, instead of above Earth.”
“How long do we have?” she shouts in my ear, up on her toes.
I have no idea how fast we’re climbing, though my body’s protesting the G-forces like we’re in an old-school rocketship. I shake my head. I don’t know how long we’ve got. Seconds? Minutes?
Not long enough to say the things to her that I want to say.
The wall’s shaking against my hand, the ground bucking beneath my feet, and it’s as if every thought in my brain has been shaken loose, landing together in one enormous pile, too tangled to ever be picked apart again.
I want to tell her what it means to me that she’s here.
I want to tell her how much I wish she weren’t.
I want to tell her how glad I am I met her.
I want to apologize that I ever did.
“Mia,” I try. “It’s been—I mean, I’m—”
I stare down at her, helpless, and she slings her arms up around my neck, pulling me into a fierce hug. “I know,” she says in my ear. “I know, Jules. Me too.”
And so I draw back, and I nod, because we don’t have time. “Whatever system they rigged up to get it to fly unpiloted, I don’t think we can undo it. But I think I can at least feed it some additional commands. Perhaps enough to confuse it. If we can fool it into trying to accelerate and reverse at once, maybe we can cause a fatal power surge.”
We push apart, grabbing at anything we can to keep our balance as we turn back to the console. “The ship’s so unstable, a power surge would…” Even shouting, I can hear the knowledge—and the determination—in Mia’s voice.
“Destroy it,” I agree. “Before it makes it through the portal. Before it reaches Earth.”
And with us on board.
The earthquake beneath our feet abruptly stops, the roaring dying back to a loud but even hum, the floor suddenly still, and we’re left standing there—Mia gripping the doorframe, me braced against the console, blinking.
We’re past the point of no return, our commitment already made, and neither of us hesitates. There’s no time to think anymore, no time to imagine what will happen if we succeed—whether it will be quick.
We stagger upright, turning toward the console—and the world goes black.
Green and gold bursts across my darkened vision, and pain explodes down my arms and legs, pounding at my temples, trying to turn me inside out. I’m dimly aware of my body hitting the floor, and then I’m spinning, my gut churning like I’m cresting the top of a roller coaster, and falling down, down, down. I want to run, but I can’t remember how to move.
I’m not sure if I’m dead or not, but it strikes me a moment later that the fact that I’m thinking about it means I’m probably not.
Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.
I am…alive, hopefully.
There’s a groan somewhere nearby, and then some cursing that includes a couple of words I’ve never heard before, though I’m too dizzy to take notes. Then reality snaps into focus, as the voice snags in my brain: that’s Mia’s voice.
And I’ve felt this way before. This is how I felt after passing through the last portal.
Oh, deus, the portal.
“Mia,” I groan, rolling over onto my front. “Mia, we have to—it went through.”
She’s lying on her back, eyes closed, and when I speak she manages to roll onto her side to face me, curling into a fetal position. The noise she makes isn’t a word, but I know she’s trying. I force myself up to my elbows, and try to sit, the world swimming.
“We have to what?” she mumbles, and that’s when it hits me. We have to nothing. If we destroy the ship now, so close to Earth, we’re doing the Undying’s work for them. Maybe I can find a way to prevent it, to turn it around, to take it back. Even as I climb unsteadily to my feet, moving on automatic, I know I haven’t a hope.
I couldn’t even abort the launch sequence. Turning off the autopilot and managing to steer this thing back through the portal would take years of study.
There’s nothing else to do, though, so I grab the control panel for balance and stare down at the lights racing across it, blinking to clear my vision.
“Everything hurts,” Mia mutters on the floor, still in a ball. “I was supposed to be dead by now. This hurts a lot more than dead. At least it didn’t blow up.…If it was a bomb, if they meant us to take it back to destroy Earth, it’d be blowing up now, right?”
The crystalline circuits on the panels before me are blinking on and off, the sections used for launch dimming, and new areas slowly coming to life as power’s diverted to other systems. I trace the glyphs with my fingers, trying to make myself understand what they might mean. And then I see one I know. The same swooping line I followed, thinking I was leading us to the engines. The swooping line that led to the long hallway full of portals. Why is power diverting there?
Hope surges through me, followed a moment later by horror.
“Mia,” I say slowly, and I know she hears it in my voice, because she rolls to all fours, and with a gasp, pushes herself to her feet to join me, wrapping an arm around my waist for balance—the portal’s taken her as badly as it did last time. “I don’t think it’s going to self-destruct—I don’t think it was ever meant to be a bomb at all. I think it’s a Trojan Horse.”
“A what?” she whispers, staring down blearily at the panels before us.
“It’s…” I grasp for the quickest explanation. “All right, it’s this ancient story from Greece, it was called The Odyssey, and these—”
She cuts me off, shoving an elbow into my ribs and gasping, “I know what the damn Trojan Horse was! What the hell are you talking about?”
“The—the Trojan Horse,” I repeat, like an idiot. “The Trojans brought it inside their walls, and all the Greeks hiding inside poured out to slaughter them. The power’s diverting to where the portals are. I think it’s bringing them all online.”
“But they’re one-way portals,” she replies, staring at me in confusion. “They look just like the one we came through from the temple. They don’t lead anywhere, they lead…” The words die in her throat.
I say it anyway. “They lead here. From wherever the Undying are now, if they are still alive like you said, to this ship. Currently in orbit around—”
“Around Earth,” whispers Mia.
“If they’re trying to take Earth, they’re not using the ship as a bomb. They’re using it as a gateway to come here themselves.”
“No,” she murmurs, pushing away from me, and I follow her as she stumbles through the doorway, picking up speed as we run toward the portals.
I’ve never wanted so badly to be wrong.
I’ve never been so sure I’m not.