“Will anyone survive?” Neal whispers.
Dex lifts his head again, his gaze distant. “Well, we will, for a while. No running water in here. But unless someone lets us out before the toxin takes over …”
“Then we’ll die of dehydration.” Mia’s voice is tiny. Scared. After all we’ve been through, I can’t blame her—we passed up a dozen deaths preferable to dying of thirst, forgotten in a basement while the world burns.
“Maybe people who live somewhere small will survive for a while,” Dex says. “Somewhere high. Maybe in the mountains, upstreamward, where the water won’t come from somewhereinfected. All the big cities will be gone. Or rather, there’ll be olders in charge, Undying stewards. The portal teams are all our age—we were trained on planets with Earth-equivalent gravity, to prepare us. No air or life on our training planets, not places we could call home, but enough to make sure we’d be able to handle being planetside when the time came. The stewards will find it harder going, down here, but they’ll make the sacrifice and take the hassle, to run the cities.”
Mia’s voice is thin and small as she asks, “But what about all the people who do drink the toxin? They’ll be like animals, dangerous ones, and there’ll be millions of them, everywhere.”
Dex swallows, looking nearly as sick as I feel. “The toxin makes most people infertile,” he says quietly. “Yeh, they’re dangerous. But all we’ll have to do is wait.”
For humanity to die out.
Everyone’s quiet for a long moment, and it’s Neal who breaks the silence. He’s staring at his phone again. “We have another problem,” he says, soft and solemn. “The people on the forum are picking up what we’re saying, but only about half the targeted cities have anyone who’s on the ground, and knows what they’re doing, and says they’re building a jammer.”
“Half?” Mia lifts her head, stricken. “That’s still hundreds of millions—maybe billions, I don’t know—of people who are still going to turn into … turn into those things we saw in Lyon.”
We’re all silent, reeling from this new gut punch. The flicker of hope that even if we didn’t make it, some places might—it was something to hold on to. But though the Undying may not be able to take over the planet in the next few days, they’ll be able to take a lot of it if they can wipe out dozens of cities in one night. Earth will certainly never be the same.
My mind feels sluggish, and with a wrenching effort I force myself to focus. There must be some way we can increase the reach of our message, find new allies—but I can’t see it.
Dex rises slowly to his feet, scanning our weary faces. “The firstthing we saw, when we arrived,” he begins slowly, “was the power of your media.”
“I doubt we’ve got supporters at any local news stations,” I mutter.
Dex raises an eyebrow. “I mean the pictures, the videos, everything that floods your networks—sirsly, when one video is seen enough times, it reaches a kind of critical mass and suddenly millions are watching.”
Mia’s eyes widen. “You’re saying we need a video, something people will watch, and tell their friends to watch—something that gets attention and proves what’s going on somehow.”
Dex nods. “And I can think of someone the world would watch—they watched his father, after all, a million times over.”
All eyes swivel toward me, and a bolt of sheer terror stiffens my spine. “No,” I whisper, almost inaudible even to myself.
“The Addison speech,” Mia murmurs beside me. “Part two.”
JULES’S EYES FIX ON ME, AND THE HINT OF PAIN AND ACCUSATIONin them hits like a blow. “What good would it do for me to be the one on camera?” he blurts. “If anything, the world’slesslikely to believe me, given that they don’t believe my father.”
“But the point Dex is making is that the first problem is getting people to watch the video at all. We need them to tune in. The second part, thebelieving uspart—that comes later.”
“Mia,” he says simply, his gaze saying the rest. His father’s fall from grace—the mocking, the memes of his impassioned plea, the repetition of the injuries over and over—it was almost too much for Jules to bear the first time. And now we’re asking him to put himself in the middle of it again, with—he believes—little chance of success.
“I know,” I whisper, twisting my body in to face his, shutting out everything else. “But there’s no other choice, Jules. They could find us locked in here any minute, and we’ll lose our last chance to spread the warning. This time, it will be different.” There’s aferociousness in my voice that startles me, and I realize that I really believe that I’m saying. “This time, they’ve seen Lyon. This time, there’s an army of supporters out there just waiting to help spread the word, and you’ll be broadcasting from inside the IA, right in front of your father’s work. This time, they’ll listen, like they should have listened to him. Nobody’s going to look at you and doubt you, Jules. They never could.”
I can see the pulse at his neck, quick and delicate and so, so fast, as he tries to steady himself. And then he closes his eyes, and lets out a breath. “There’s no other choice,” he echoes. And I’m not sure if it’s resignation, or a leap of faith, but I know he’ll do it.
“Neal, can you get some sort of livestream hosting site up?” I have only the vaguest idea what I’m talking about, but Neal nods like I’m speaking his language. I squeeze Jules’s hands as I continue. “And a countdown. Dex, when are the portals activating?”
“They can be turned on manually,” Dex replies, “but they’re not scheduled for mass deployment for another fifty-two hours and eight minutes.”
Neal’s lips twitch. “You’re not big on precision, are you?”
Dex blinks owlishly. “Seven minutes and forty-eight seconds now.”
Neal laughs, but his amusement doesn’t last long. “You think anyone apart from Atlanta will turn theirs on early?”
“I don’t know,” Dex admits. “It’s possible, if they see the broadcast. But there wasn’t a plan for it, and we’re a big network. Even after we started chasing Jules and Mia around our ship, it took us two days to accelerate the launch schedule—we don’t change course quickly. Planetside, we all operate independently, and there’s no system for communicating a change of plan. Nobody anticipated any real proto resistance, to be honest. No offense.”
Neal snickers, and abruptly I realize that his joking, lighthearted nature doesn’t irritate me the way it once did. Then, it seemed like he didn’t understand the weight of what Jules and I had to accomplish. Or that it was all some big game, a bunch of kidsplaying at international spydom. But the warmth in his face is real, and now I can’t not see it. His face looks so much like Jules’s when he’s being sincere, and whenever he speaks Jules looks just the tiniest bit lighter. And when Jules is lighter, my own mind feels freer.
