“Would you go alone and leave me?”
Yes.The word rings clear and bright in my mind, hovering on my lips. But my mouth won’t move, and I curse my sudden—and uncharacteristic—inability to lie.
Jules’s eyes gleam. “I thought not. Besides, going alone would probably draw almost as much attention as going with you.”
“Why?”
“They go everywhere in twos—you haven’t noticed?”
Frowning, I think back to the Undying we’ve watched all over the ship. “But Slacker …” Even as I raise the objection, I’m realizing what Jules is talking about.
“The support staff, I suppose you might call them, don’t go inpairs. The engineers and what-have-you. But the … the soldiers, I guess, or spies? The ones like Atlanta and Dex, the young-looking ones going down to Earth’s surface? They’re all partnered, and they go everywhere together.”
My heart’s sinking a little, because somewhere in the back of my mind the beginnings of a worst-case-scenario plan had started to form. Hijacking, with Jules and me against one of the Undying,mightwork with the element of surprise. But if the soldier-spies are always in pairs, then we’d have to take two of them out at once, and if they’ve got half the combat training their bearing suggests, our advantage would drop to nil.
Jules pushes the headset back on his forehead and lets out a long, gusty sigh. “I wish Neal were here.”
“Neal?”
“My cousin. My best friend, really. He’s been obsessed with aeronautics since he was a kid.” His eyes lower as he fidgets at a hangnail, his brow lightly furrowed. “He’d figure out how to fly one of their shuttles in a heartbeat. And he’d be doing barrel rolls all the way down.”
I can tell by his tone how much the guy he’s talking about must mean to him. Jules does wonder and absentmindedness a lot better than he does soft, or emotional, but it’s right there in his voice. And in the back of my mind, the reminder that I don’t even know this basic fact about him: who his family is, his best friend. In some ways we’re as close as two people can be. In others, we’re strangers.
I push that thought away. “Too bad he’s not here.”
“You’ll meet him,” Jules says, shooting me a quick grin. “You and he will get along swimmingly. And my father’s going to love you. He’ll talk a lot of mathematics at you, but …” He trails off at the expression on my face. “What?”
His words are ringing in my ears.His father’s going to love me? The street rat his genius son dragged home?Jules has always lived in some sort of fantasy world just slightly left of reality, with his academic idealsand his optimism, but this is a whole new level of delusional. But he looks so genuinely puzzled by my expression that my sarcastic retort dies on my lips.
He really believes there’s some kind of future for the two of us. Assuming the world doesn’t end.
“Jules,” I say softly. “I’m not what you’d call Oxford material. Evie and I aren’t made for the places you come from. And that’s okay. I like us the way we are.”
“I like you the way you are too,” he protests.
He doesn’t get it. He can’t see how impossible it would be for me, trying to fit into his charmed life. He doesn’t understand that against that backdrop, even he’d start to see me differently. More like the way he saw me back on Gaia, when we first met. Scavenger. Thief. Uneducated, unethical, money-grubbing trash. Not that he’d ever say it to my face, but it’d be there. We’d stop being on the same team.
And I don’t want to be there when that happens.
Something about my face, or my silence, makes Jules lean forward and reach for my hand. His is warm, and his fingers feel certain and strong as they wrap around mine. “Mia,” he murmurs, when my gaze starts to slide away from his. “These days there’s not much left I’m sure of. But I promise you, there’s nothing that could—”
He lets go of my hand with a surprised yelp. I’m reeling back too, because a jolt of electricity surged through our joined hands like a static shock, though neither of us moved.
For a moment we just stare at each other, baffled, until Jules twitches again, stifling an oath. Though I didn’t feel the second shock, he clearly did.
Heartbeat quickening a little, I inch closer. “Are you okay?”
“I think it’s the headset doing it. It doesn’t hurt, it was just—” He bites the words off with a faint frown.
“Shocking?” I finish for him, my voice dry. “Gotta say, I’d rather have my phone. Even on its strongest setting the vibrate doesn’t …”But my voice trails off as realization strikes, and a new urgency settles in. “Put the headset on!”
He gives me a startled look, but catches my meaning quickly and settles the earpiece in place, the cracked glass sliding over his right eye. His head lifts immediately, eyes meeting mine. He says nothing, but the distant look that falls across his face tells me I was right: The tingle was a silent alert, just like the vibration on a cell phone.
He listens—or watches, maybe—I don’t know whether it’s the screen or the earpiece that he’s paying attention to. His expression grows increasingly troubled, until he pulls the headset down again with a mute look at me.
“Well?”
“I don’t know, everything’s gone dead. I can’t control it anymore, it’s just … like someone’s switched it off.”
