Jules flips it open and exhales a somewhat mirthless laugh. “Tyler Hogwood?”
“Hey, don’t complain, I had like a day. Mia—can I get your picture real quick?” Neal waves his phone, and, numb, I nod. I’ll look exhausted and tear-stained and like I wish I were dead, but that’s what most people look like when they’re traveling, so it’s probably for the best.
Neal snaps my picture, starting to make a lighthearted comment about my suitability as a supermodel—albeit a rather short one—and stopping when he fails to get a smile out of either of us. “Tough room,” he mutters, plugging a little portable printer into the power port of his phone. It only takes him a few moments to run the edge of a box-cutter along the lamination of the passport page, slip my photo in over the existing one, and then seal it back down with a touch of glue.
Neal inspects it critically and then shrugs, handing it over to me. “Wouldn’t hold up under a real inspection, but we’ll just have to hope it’s good enough. Maybe the mass exodus of tourists will be cover enough.”
“How do we get to Germany?” My voice is quiet, and I don’t look at Jules.
“I’ve got train tickets to Frankfurt for us.” Neal pulls a printed confirmation page out of his bag. “We just pick them up at the station. It’s only a few minutes from here. The line goes through Lyon, but I called and the guy said the train’s still running.”
“Let’s go, then.” Jules scoops up a few things from the vending machine pile without looking, and turns for the window we crawled in through.
I’m about to follow suit when Neal calls, “Hey, wait, don’t forget your … phone?”
Jules just has his wrist unit, and my phone is still lodged in astone doorway back on Gaia. But Neal’s reaching for something half hidden under the pillows on one of the beds.
It does look like a phone, though it’s smaller than most of the smartphones people buy these days. One side of it is a dim screen that brightens as Neal lifts the device; the other side is emblazoned with some sort of symbol, a gentle arc from one corner down toward the other.
“That’s not ours.” Jules’s voice has lost some of its stiffness, his curiosity winning out over everything else, as always. “Let me see?”
Neal hands it over, and the three of us hunch over the thing. The display is minimal, black and white. Curved lines crisscross in a grid-like configuration, intersecting randomly with other, more abstract lines.
“One of them must have left it behind.” I poke at the display, but it doesn’t respond—either it’s not a touch screen like our devices, or it’s locked somehow. “Are any of these symbols you know?”
Jules shakes his head absently. “This symbol on the back—it looks like the symbol we saw in the first room of the temple on Gaia, the symbol for the Undying. But none of this is writing. It looks more like …” He trails off, eyes a bit distant.
“Like a map.” Neal points at the screen. “No roads or countries or anything, but this here, this looks a little like one of the elevation maps we use when we’re programming drones.”
“Maybe it’s to track them. If we can figure out how it works, maybe we could keep tabs on them.” Jules is staring at the little screen in his palm, and when he speaks again there’s a spark of life in his voice for the first time since we were shouting at each other. Or since I was shouting at him, anyway. “Dex. Dex left it here for us to find before they snuck away.”
“The disturbingly hot one?” Neal’s flippancy is more than irritating—but then, he wasn’t on Gaia. He didn’t see the corridors of the ship filled with Undying teens like Dex and Atlanta. He didn’t hear the way they spoke about us “protos.” And he’s our only ally right now.
I let my breath out in a groan. “Look, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t change …” I trail off, because we’re talking in circles, and if I tell him again that there’s nothing we can do, he’ll tell me again that we can’t just give up, and we’re both right and we’re both wrong, and I can’t have this fight again.
“It doesn’t change the fact that we have to get out of France.” Jules’s voice is not exactly conciliatory, but it’s not as brittle as it was. “We’ll have a few hours on the train to decide what to do next. And we can figure out what this is then.” He hefts the little device, and then slips it into his pocket.
Grateful for the reprieve, for his willingness to press pause on our disagreement, I offer him a weary smile. He doesn’t smile back, though he does meet my eyes for a moment before turning to gather up the rest of our meager supplies. I wish I could take back what I said about his father—but I also can’t dismiss the nagging feeling that what I said wastrue. There’s nothing two kids can do to stop a war, if that’s what the Undying are doing.
I turn to follow Neal out the window, trying to harden my heart the way I did on Gaia. Evie comes first. At the very least, De Luca and the IA know about her, and at worst, they have her. I can’t forget that for an instant. Shealwayshas to come first.
WE FIND A PLACE TO SIT ON THE TRAIN, CLUSTERED IN A SET OFfour seats around a small table. As Neal digs through his backpack and hands out little cakes from a packet that saysMadeleineson it, I can’t help turning over in my hand the device that I’m sure Dex left behind. It’s small, about the size of my palm, with the display on one side and a hard shell of some unknown alloy on the other. My fingertips trace the symbol for the Undying embossed there: a circle with a long tail arcing behind it.
Neal interrupts my thoughts. “You really think he left it for us to track him on purpose? It couldn’t be something he and Atlanta use to keep track of each other, and it was an accident?”
Mia makes a noise indicating just how likely she thinks that is, but I don’t look up at her. I can’t just now. The things she said are ricocheting around my mind like bullets hunting for a target. I need a chance tothink. I need a moment alone. But I’m not going to get one—at least I hope not, because right now Neal and Mia are all I have.
“There’s more to Dex than we know,” I say. “Whatever their plan is, he has doubts. Perhaps he had them to begin with, or perhaps we’re just not what he expected.”
“My good looks probably did come as a surprise,” Neal says modestly, around a mouthful of food. “People rarely expect me to be this cleverandthis handsome.”
“He’s voiced doubts before,” I insist. “And there have been other moments.”
“The tattoo?” Mia asks, disbelieving. “It was a galaxy tattoo. Most galaxiesarespiral shaped.”
I shake my head. “He was trying to draw attention to it. And we know someone within the Undying tried to use the Nautilus to warn us not to go near the ship in the first place.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been Dex,” she retorts. “He’s our age. Or he looks like it. Either way, he wasn’t carving reliefs in a temple fifty thousand years ago. Nothing lives that long.”
