He flips the glass up and meets my eyes. In a flash of recognition, I know exactly what conclusion he’s reached—because I’ve reached it too.
“They know someone’s been accessing their database,” I whisper, as if I might make the words true if I spoke any louder. “Someone who’s not one of them.”
“It was probably the repeated searches for piloting instructions,” Jules replies, reaching up to pull the headset off. He folds it carefully, tucking it away as calmly as a professor might stow a pair of reading glasses. “It was a risk we had to take, but these Undying have been training their whole lives for this—they don’t need to look for instructions.”
“But they can’t know we’re stowed away.” My voice has a bit of an edge—now Iwantmy words to be true. “They’ll think it’s someone from Earth, right? A remote hack of some kind. We’re still hidden. The Junction’s still safe.”
And in that moment, as if my words were a summoning spell, the corridors of the Junction light up with a glaring red laser grid, sharp lines dissecting every angle. I scramble frantically into Jules,but he’s trying to climb my way—the grid is closing in on us from every direction.
An instant later it traces across each of our bodies in half a dozen places. Red lines radiate from Jules’s shoulders, his lanky, bent legs, his hand. And when he turns wide eyes on me, a red dot appears in the center of his forehead. Like a sniper’s scope out of an action film. My heart seizes.
They know we’re here.
We haven’t slept in forty-nine hours. Every time we think we’ve found a nook or cranny the Undying don’t know about, it’s only a matter of time before we hear the stomp of their boots or the metallic screech of a nearby hatch being torn off. And a matter of minutes, not hours. It’s like they’ve got a way to see through the very walls themselves, some way to come straight for us every time.
I’ve got myself wedged in at the top of a ventilation shaft, my back over a thirty-meter drop, my shoulders against the wall and my boots braced against the corner. Their laser grid doesn’t cover this spot, and for good reason—only a fool would hover at the top of a deadly fall. A fool, or someone desperate enough that the height is less frightening than the alternatives.
Jules is leaning back against my legs, dozing. I don’t think he was aware of leaning against me—he’d have pulled away if he was, trying to take off some of the pressure of staying in this position. He has it harder than I do, anyway. His height makes traversing the wall cavities and crawlspaces agony, and he hasn’t been able to stretch out properly in days.
My eyelids are drooping. With a swift intake of breath, I go from head to toe, tensing each muscle group and relaxing it again, focusing on physical sensations to keep myself awake.
I’ve done this before, in Chicago. Once, I ran into a scavver gang sitting on enough food to feed a platoon, and I set up a diversion a block over to lure some of them away. They were stupidenough that they all took off after the sound of someone shouting for help—an ancient digital recorder I found in a looted pawn shop—and I walked right into their empty camp, helping myself to their rations and some of their more portable loot as well. But I got greedy and stayed too long, and they came back before I could get clear. I spent a day and a half curled up inside an old chest freezer eating cold canned peas until they moved on.
A sound interrupts my thoughts, and I jolt awake without even realizing that memory had started to become dream. My heart pounding, I wait until my mind identifies the sound as a distant fan turning on somewhere. I check the wrist unit. Twenty-two minutes since we stopped.
Jules’s body gives a jerk, sending my heart rate skyward again. I squeeze his shoulder, and his eyes flash at me in the dark. Hurriedly he pulls himself away from my legs, but when he speaks it’s not an apology. “The headset buzzed me,” he whispers hoarsely.
I want to tell him to ignore it. They know we’re here now, so any message they send through the headset is one they don’t mind us intercepting. They could even be sending false messages, bait to lure us out from the walls. But it’s also the only window we have through to the Undying’s network of communication, and if they’ve turned the system back on … we need to know what they’re saying.
I squeeze his shoulder again, and he settles the headset into place.
I’m bracing myself for a long silence while he’s gone, gone even more than he is when he’s asleep—but he pulls the headset off after only a few moments, looking at it with confusion.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“Just one sentence,” he replies. “ ‘Abandon departure schedule, all surface teams to shift immediately.’ And that’s it—it’s still not responding to me at all, and the screen’s still dead.”
I’m so tired my mind is sluggish. “The ones like Atlanta and Dex, the soldiers—they’re all going down to Earth now?”
“Seems that way.”
“They’ve been chasing us for days—why are they just now moving up the schedule?”
Without warning the duct stretching out before us comes to life with bright red lines. I grab for Jules, but he’s seen them too, and with a jerk he pulls his long legs back out of the way, shoving in close against me. There’s only a few centimeters between him and the edge of the laser grid, but it’s enough. We wait, hearts pounding, as silent as if the lasers might somehow hear us if we moved—until the place goes dark again.
I squeeze Jules’s shoulder, and when I creep ahead along the horizontal shaft, he follows me silently, no questions. If he’s the master of the headset, I’m the one keeping us alive and on the move in these tunnels.
The shaft we’re in runs at floor level along one of the upper decks of the ship, and we’ve gotten no more than a few meters before running footsteps make us freeze. Too often, that sound has meant a hasty retreat for us, and another mad scramble for a hiding place. But this time, the boots go racing past, followed and joined by more and more, until there’s a veritable stampede.
Once the crowd has passed, I whisper, “We’ve got to get to one of those shuttles if we’re going to get off this ship.”
“And what, ask if we can hitchhike?” I catch the glitter of his eyes in the gloom, and I want to smile—he sounds like me, burying his exhaustion and fear under sarcasm. But we’re both too tired to smile. “Even if we could get aboard one unseen, we’ve got no hope of learning to pilot an alien landing craft made by a species tens of thousands of years ahead of us.”
“We have to try!” I stop at an intersection, and grab Jules’s ankle to tell him to do the same. There’s just enough room for him to ease to one side and rest for a moment. “Maybe we can find a pair of suits as a disguise, like we talked about.”
Jules’s eyes fall, and I know he’s looking at my legs, outstretched and interlocking with his—and ending a good foot shorter thanhis do. I’d look like a child in one of their suits. It might fool them for a moment or two, but not long enough to locate the shuttle bay from the memory of our map, find a shuttle, and sneak—or talk—our way on board.
I force myself to let go of the tension holding me upright and just lie down where I am, forehead pillowed on my crossed arms.Think, Mia. You’ve done this before. How do you steal something from a group with vastly superior numbers and organization?
