THE DARKNESS IS CLOSE AND STILL, AND ABSOLUTE.MIA IS NEARBY—I can feel her body heat, a gentle warmth along one side. In the quiet, our ragged breaths are as harsh as a siren’s wail.
And then Mia shatters the thick, eerie silence: “Screw it, I can’t do this in the dark—Jules, turn your watch on, will you?”
Despite the fear coursing through me, I find myself smothering a smile as I fumble at my wrist for the LED. A week hiding aboard an occupied alien spaceship, and she’s the one thing I can count on to feel familiar. Safe. Like home.
Most of our devices are dead, with no access to the sun to recharge, but my wrist unit charges kinetically—something I’m increasingly grateful for each day. The idea of existing this way in utter darkness is too terrifying to contemplate long.
The pale blue light spills out from the watch screen. Mia appears out of the darkness like a ghost, her face framed by her choppy black and pink and blue hair, skin white beneath her freckles. She’s got her multi-tool out, and with a wan little smile at me, she goesback to work, trying to pry the bolts off an access cover to the narrow passageway we’re in. The glint of the crystalline stone lining the shaft plays tricks on my vision, masquerading as glittering eyes in the gloom.
The hinge on the cover gives a tiny creak of protest as she finally succeeds. Easing the cover aside and letting it dangle from one hinge, Mia reveals the opportunity we’ve been searching for: a chance to get ahead of the Undying aliens that came pouring through the portals on this ship a week ago.
The passageway we’re using is actually a cavitybetweenthe walls of the ship. We found these hidden spaces by crawling up into the ventilation system to hide in those first frenzied minutes after the ship took off, and the Undying emerged from the portals along the long hallway we’d discovered. We wriggled through the vents on knees and elbows—we still do, occasionally—until we found the hatches leading down inside the walls.
Thick metal doors are recessed along the hallways at regular intervals, ready to snap shut and seal off any one section in case of a hull breach. The vents have impressive shutter systems, no doubt designed to lock down automatically at the first sign of a change in air pressure. As Mia said when she discovered the first set of auto-doors, the Undying areseriouslyspacefaring. They make the ships we used to reach Gaia look like a kid’s toy rocket set.
The Undying wasted no time in grid-searching the ship, hundreds of sets of boots stomping down the hallways, voices echoing over each other so that the individual words were impossible to make out. They know humans launched the ship—all their traps were designed to make sure we did, after all.
What they didn’t know was that there were two of us still on board.
They would have found Hansen’s body in one of the corridors, where we had no choice but to leave him after one of theInternational Alliance soldiers shot him. Even as they were dragging him away to dispose of him, Mia still had his blood under her fingernails, from where she tried to stanch his wounds.
I wonder what they made of him. Of us, that we killed one another in the middle of an extraordinary discovery like this.
So Mia and I hid first in the vents, and then in the walls when we found them, and now, after a week on the run, we know our territory. We even have a home base of sorts. We call it the Junction—a slightly wider spot where six different walls meet in a star-shaped intersection, and there’s room to sit, wedged in side by side. We have neighbors on just one side there—a pair of Undying who call each other Atlanta and Dex—and if we hold perfectly still and they stand in the right place, we can listen in on their conversations, and catch a glimpse of them through the vent. And when they’re out of their room, on shift, we can talk quietly ourselves without risk of being overheard.
But we’ve been too busy just surviving todoanything—to hunt for answers, to take action. We haven’t been able to figure out how—or why—they’ve managed to look so much like us, only that they’renotus, and the resemblance only goes skin-deep. We haven’t even been able to figure out what they want with Earth, except that they intend to take it from us.
Whatever that means, neither of us particularly likes the sound of it.
All we need is a single chance to contact Earth. We may not know why they’re here, but if we can warn humanity that the massive ship in orbitisn’tempty, as they believe, there’s a chance the cavalry will arrive before the Undying discover we’re here.
Of course, as Mia pointed out, the IA’s equally as likely to simply blow the ship out of the sky. But I prefer to hope for the best. To trust that they wouldn’t destroy their last chance to discover technology that could save Earth from its rapid decline and dwindling resources.
The access panel Mia’s been working on opens up into thecorner of a small chamber habitually occupied by a single Undying worker, whose movements we started tracking two days ago. As best we can tell, this Undying drone seems to think it necessary to take at least two breaks an hour. There’s a slacker in every bunch, and we’re counting on ours today. We’ve heard enough one-sided conversations through the wall that we know he’s outfitted with one of the clever little headsets most of the Undying on the ship wear, composed of a small metal piece that folds over one ear and a slim strip of glass that folds out over one eye.
If these headsets are like phones for the Undying, then maybe—justmaybe—we can find a way to use one to call home.
Without wasting a moment of this latest break, we climb down into the small room where our target works, crossing our fingers this is one of his longer absences. I catch Mia as she lets herself drop after me, feet-first. She rests in my arms for a moment, almost nose-to-nose with me, and our eyes meet. My heart speeds, even as I try to remind myself this is hardly the time.
She’s kissed me twice since we met.
Once was to get me to follow her through the portal inside the temple. The second time was right before we thought we were going to die.
Since then, we’ve never been apart for more than half an hour. We’ve curled up together to sleep, we’ve wedged ourselves in together to eavesdrop in the narrow passageways, but neither of us has made a move toward another kiss. Me, because I’m too damned awkward to know if it would be welcome outside an emergency—nothing like a survival scenario with someone who’s had to politely turn you down—and her, because … well, if I knew, this would be easier. Maybe it only occurs to her when we’re in a life-and-death situation.
Then again, one could make a convincing argument that death’s pretty close, and every moment we’re aboard this ship is an emergency.
I wonder if I could convince her of that.
I set her down, and she doesn’t linger, crossing over to the door to stand by it and keep watch, ready to give me as much warning as she can. I turn for the workstation, which thankfully didn’t retract into the wall when its operator left—but then my gaze is caught by the window.
For the first time since I left it, I can see Earth.
I can make out the mostly golden-brown shapes of North and South America, wreathed in white wisps of cloud. Somewhere down there is Mia’s little sister, Evie, lost in the huge sprawl of the two continents. Some green still clings to the bulge of the south, but the coastal deserts in the north are slowly creeping in toward each other.
It’s a paler brown than the rusty red of Gaia. In the short time I was there, I grew quickly accustomed to the barren beauty of the alien planet. I thought I’d die there, at the hands of scavvers, or crushed in a temple trap when my wits let me down, or simply when my breather ran out. Or, over those last few days, at the hands of the IA—of Charlotte, or Mink, or whatever our double-crossing puppet master’s really called.
And after that, I thought I’d die sabotaging this ship, or when that failed, when it came through the portal and self-destructed in an attack on Earth. Now we’re stranded. Compared to being stuck on Gaia, we’re so close to home it’s like we’re standing on the front porch. But without a way to get to the surface, we might as well still be on the other side of the galaxy. And expecting, every day, to be caught and most likely killed.
