Dex’s gaze swings over toward my face, then Neal’s, where it lingers for a moment before flicking back to Jules. His lashes lower for a long moment, and then he says softly, “Because you sound like your father. I really gotta shift. Good luck.”
Then he’s moving away, back into the crowd. But I’m still staring at the uniform case, my mind still seizing like it did before, like I’ve seen something wrong and I just don’t know what it is yet.
“Jules,” I murmur, a rising confusion and certainty prompting me.
“Just … just give me a second.” Jules’s voice is taut with feeling.
The Centauri uniforms are a deep blue, emblazoned on the right breast pocket with the flag of the International Alliance and the logo for the Centauri mission, a landing craft streaking across the trinary star system that was their destination.
“Jules—” I try again. I can feel Neal straightening next to me, sensing the urgency in my tone.
“They watched videos of my father being mocked,” Jules mutters to himself, clearly oblivious to me and to his cousin, “andthat’swhen they knew they could beat us and take Earth?”
My eyes stick on the Centauri logo. On the cutout of the uniform’s leg, and the layers inside the suit. “Jules!” I shout, not caring that a few people nearby turn to stare at us and then move away, slowly.
Jules blinks and looks up. “What?” His voice is sharp with irritation.
“Look.” My finger’s quivering as it points toward the case.
We all grew up knowing the Centauri mission logo. But it’s history, a thing long gone, so far in the past that it’s become background noise. All it is to us is a symbol of failure. But now it snaps into focus as if it’s brand-new. It’s the first time either of us would’ve had reason to look at the logo since we’ve been to Gaia.
Jules is silent, his eyes wide, his lips parted. Beside us, slowly, Neal pulls out the tracking device Dex left behind for us, and turns it over to look at the back. Etched into the casing is the Undying symbol, the one we saw in the temple on Gaia. A meteorite, streaking across the sky, we always thought.
Or a colony ship, streaking through a star system.
“How is this possible?” Neal whispers.
“It isn’t.” Jules’s words are dismissive, but he can’t stop staring at the uniform. “It isn’t possible, okay? The temple on Gaia is fifty thousand years old. The Centauri mission left Earth only sixty years ago.”
“And even if the ship itself wasn’t destroyed like the IA thought, they only had resources for …” Neal’s frowning, and abandons his mental calculations. “There’s no way they could still be alive today even if they weren’t immediately destroyed when the IA lost contact with them.”
“But they’re human.” I’m remembering Atlanta, how she stood there scanning the names on the wall of Centauri mission casualties. “They’re human, and look—the leg of the suit. The insulating gel—it’s blue, isn’t it? The Undying guy on the ship who was injured was wearing a suit. I mean, different from this one, obviously, but … what if it’s the same technology?”
“So it looked like blue blood when the uniform got cut.” Jules’s voice is stunned and slow.
“Maybe they faked the temple somehow.” Neal is watching Jules with something almost like apprehension, like he’s waiting for an explosion to occur. “Maybe it’s not as old as we thought.”
“Geologists and archaeologists dated the temple carvings with amargin of error less than 0.08 percent.” Jules’s voice is faint, falling back on his scholarly roots like I’d crawl beneath a familiar, warm blanket. “They couldn’t have faked it.”
I reach for Jules’s arm, which moves without resistance, and retrieve the device Dex gave us. Jules doesn’t even seem to notice.
“Guys, they’re going to kill Jules’s dad. We have to get moving,now.”
The device Dex handed me activates at the touch of a button, a display screen showing a ten-digit number that flips backward through each digit until it shows zeroes across the board. I’m trying to ignore the sheer panic flooding my system at the mere thought of what lies ahead.
Jules’s lips press together, hard enough to thin them into a line, and then release. “Mia’s right,” he says softly. “We’re out of time—let’s go.”
“Maybe they’re time travelers.” Neal speaks in a low voice, but not a whisper. Jules is used to following my instructions when it comes to acting like you belong, but Neal’s a novice, and it’s taken him twenty minutes to stop acting like a conspirator in a spy thriller. “Like maybe they’re coming back from the future to get revenge on us for sending their ancestors to Centauri in the first place.”
“Time travel’s not possible,” Jules mutters. “It breaks all the laws of physics, it’s just a fantasy.” But just now, in the face of all we’ve seen, that denial is sounding a little thin. And from the look in his eye, he knows it.
“Even if it were possible, why wouldn’t they just travel back to a point before the mission left, and warn someone not to send them?” I reach up to smooth back a lock of hair. I’m still not used to its color, and I keep seeing my bangs out of the corner of my eye. But what with the surprisingly decent haircut, and our pilfered IA jacket, I look like a professional—albeit rather short—IA security officer.
The boys, whose clothes aren’t quite as informal as mine, canpass for wearing business casual, and Jules has the stolen IA badge clipped to his pocket. Together we look like coworkers strolling through the underground corridors.
I hope.
Still, my skin prickles at every sound, every shift of the still, heavy air around us. I haven’t forgotten that Atlanta and Dex are here too. Dex just told us he won’t be able to stop Atlanta killing Dr. Addison if they get there first. If we meet, I don’t know if he could stop her from trying to kill us too.
