“I …” He clears his throat softly, tries again. “I don’t know. I was sure she’d try and start the portal, complete the mission in case we sent anyone after her. I don’t know why she’d set it up and leave it. But maybe it was too much.”
I can hear the strain in his voice, and I know the others can too. Whatever his moral convictions, this is the person he loves most in the world he’s talking about. And he’s broken her.
Question is, does that make her more or less dangerous now?
“Well,” I whisper, “just because she’s not here doesn’t mean she’s not coming. We should try the broadcast from here. There couldn’t be a better backdrop than the portal. That thing would convince me, that’s for sure.”
“You’re right,” Jules murmurs. “Let’s go.”
I glance at the others, who look as daunted as I feel. And then, without a word, we begin the long climb down to reach the reservoir, and at its end, the Undying portal.
DESPITE THE COOL AIR DOWN HERE, MY PALMS ARE SWEATING ASDEXsets up the camera—just one of our new burner phones, mounted on a chunk of rock, with Neal’s backpack underneath it to give it a little grip. Mia stands beside him, studying the image of me over his shoulder, gesturing for me to shuffle a little to one side so I’m framed properly.
Neal’s sending out the news on all his social networks and urging the forum members to help spread the word—Jules Addison answers his father’s critics with the truth about the ship in orbit, live at the top of the hour, you don’t want to miss this, pass it on.
Neal finishes his work, flipping his phone around and propping it next to mine, but facing me, so I can see the streaming feed and make sure I stay in shot.
I want to keep the portal in it, as well. It’s mounted against the high wall behind me, just above the surface of the water. I can see the long, rope-like strings of circuitry Dex rescued from thelanding shuttle before he blew it up, fixed into the stone itself. And spreading out from the curve of the rope, glimmering in the beam of our flashlights, is the kind of crystalline rock we saw all over the temple on Gaia. It’s as if the Undying tech is leaching out of the framework Dex and Atlanta brought here, and making itself part of the stone of the waterways.
The others are talking quietly, but their words are mostly a buzz in the background.
I’m scared. I’m scared, and I’m so tired. I want to find somewhere dark and safe, and hide there until this is all over. It feels impossible, standing up to speak the truth when I know how many people are out there, just waiting to take apart my every word. To do to me what they did to my father.
And if they do—if I fail—whole cities will fall.
“Jules, we’re ready,” Neal says quietly. “And … wow, do we have a lot of viewers. Maybe De Luca came good and told people to watch.”
They’re coming to see a car crash, my terrified heart insists.They want something new to auto-tune. To mock. It’s going to be just like last time. You’re going to be a joke, and they won’t hear what you need them to hear, and—
“Hey, Oxford.” It’s Mia’s voice, calm, breaking into the trickle of rising panic.
And when I look across at her, she’s smiling. A small, private smile, just for me, playing across her lips like we know something the world doesn’t.
And I know that whatever happens, it’s not going to be like last time. Because she promised we’d stick together.
“I’m ready,” I say quietly.
Neal leans down to swipe at the screen and start the broadcast, and nods at me to begin.
I take a deep breath, and look down the lens of the camera.
“My name is Jules Addison,” I say. “And I don’t have long, but I want to tell you a story. To find the start of it, we have to go back sixty years. The Earth’s climate was failing. The deserts weregrowing, the weather becoming more and more unpredictable and violent. The future looked grim, but humankind managed to set aside its differences, and through the formation of the International Alliance we came together to reach further than we ever had before. We founded the Centauri mission. We dreamed of a new world, and a new future.
“But we all know how that part of the story ends—or at least, we think we do. Their ship failed. They called for help, and we had no second ship with which to answer. And then they vanished, falling silent forever, and we lost more than a colony ship. We lost more than the hundreds of people on it. We lost hope. We lost our future. But though we’ve always ended the story there, it turns out there were many more chapters to come.”
My eyes on the camera, I speak about the way the Centauri settlers fought for survival, tossed about through space and time, searching for another planet like Earth. I speak about their failure to find one, no matter how far they traveled, how hard they looked.
“When I first heard that,” I say, ignoring the viewer count on the phone that’s facing me, though I can tell it’s ticking up and up and up, “I felt small. I felt infinitely small. Our planet is an insignificant speck, when set against the scale of our galaxy. But the fact that we are tiny, and alone, and yet we survive—that does not make us insignificant. It makes usmagnificent.
“That wasn’t the story the Centauri told, though. They only remembered, as centuries passed for them—centuries spent far in our future, far into our past—that they called for help, and we did not come. They remembered that we had a precious planet, and we seemed determined to destroy it. When they hunted for us with their transmission, it never occurred to them that we might offer help. Not a wasteful, heartless people like us. So they called themselves the Undying, and they baited their hook by telling us about our own misdeeds.
“‘Ours is a story of greed and destruction,’they said. Those are the words of the Undying transmission my father translated.‘Of a peoplenot ready for the treasure they guarded. Our end came not from the stars but from within. … We were not, and never had been, worthy of what had been given to us.’”
I let the words echo a moment, let them soak in, before I continue. “They have returned to us now, and they are our enemies. And a part of me isn’t even sure we have the right to protest that. They want to take our planet from us—they started in Lyon, with the outbreak you’ve all seen by now thanks to that video that leaked out.
“These portals”—I point up over my shoulder now, and one of my companions shines a light onto the glimmering arch—“are like the portal we used to travel to Gaia. Soon, they will open to let through teams of Undying in every major city on the planet, here to spread the toxin that caused the disaster in Lyon. This is their plan, because they never thought it would be worth asking us for help. They didn’t believe we’d answer.
“We have to stop them, but we don’t have to do it with missiles—in fact, we can’t. We need your help, no matter where you are in the world. We’re putting links up on the screen as I speak. We need you to build these transmitters, to jam the signals they need to operate the portals. We need you to get to work, and to broadcast on this frequency as soon as you can.”
