Atlanta’s comrades have stopped shooting, and I hear Mink’s voice shouting at her own forces to hold their fire.
Atlanta’s eyes are red-rimmed, her face puffy with emotion, but I have none to spare for her. She could have stayed with her partner. She could have trusted him. She chose this outcome—who am I to change the fate that comes from that choice?
“He wanted peace,” I choke out, the gun pointed at her face, its grip still warm from her hand. “We would havewelcomedyou if you’d just asked. But I figured out why you hate us so much.”
“Because you’ve treated this planet like lixo,” Atlanta spits. “Because you’re not fit to live here. Because you’re sub-human.”
“No.” I gesture with the gun, and she presses her lips together. “You hate us because we’re a mirror. You see in us the worst of yourselves. Every fear, every failed promise. So you try to make us into monsters, beasts to be slain or corralled. But youareus. You’reus, just on a different road. The whole reason you exist is because we did come together, once, and set out for the stars. That you exist—it’s a miracle, Atlanta. What you accomplished. That you survived. Your existence is proof of what humanity can do. Proof that there’s nothing wecan’tdo.”
There are tears on Atlanta’s face, and her gaze shifts, just a moment, to the side. Toward where Dex stands, frozen, watching.
“You could have come here in peace, and your survival, your technology, your inspiration—your story—would have changed the entire world. You could have proven that we aremorethan—than this.” My voice is raw with crying, and my shattered heart gives way. I don’t have anything left.
“You want to know the funny thing?” I whisper. “If it had been me you shot—if it was Jules standing here now, holding this gun—you wouldn’t be in any danger at all. He would never, not for anything, pull this trigger.”
Atlanta doesn’t speak. She just looks up at me, and in her eyes I see a certainty settling into place. My finger curls around the trigger. Distantly, like a memory from some other life, I remember being in the halls of the Undying portal ship, standing over a guard, saved from having to shoot her by Javier’s intervention. I’d said I would do it, though looking back, I know I couldn’t have.
Now, I know that girl’s gone.
My heart empty, I say, “But I’m not Jules.”
I draw a breath.
“Mia?” The voice is soft, frightened. And so familiar, so unexpectedlyhomethat I freeze, the heart I thought had stopped starting to pound as I turn my head.
Two figures are standing by the ropes dangling from the opening overhead. One a tall man with an oddly familiar stoop to his shoulders and a haggard look on his face. The other, a girl, her face white, her eyes round with horror.
A mirror of myself. Of the old Mia. The one not covered inJules’s blood, the one not ready to blow Atlanta from the face of the earth.
“Evie.” The name slips out like a moan, and as if my voice were some sort of cue, the rest of my body starts to tremble.
“I told you two to stay in the safe house,” snaps Mink, who’s half hidden behind a fallen column, her rifle still trained on the Undying soldiers.
“And we chose to leave,” says the man at Evie’s side. His voice, the British accent, the tilt of his head as he speaks—even if he weren’t one of the most recognizable faces in the world right now, I would know him anywhere. Then his eyes move toward the motionless form of his son behind me.
And then it turns out I’m not empty at all, but so full of grief and fear and pain that the dam can’t hold it back. I’m weeping, staggering back. Dimly I’m aware of Mink’s forces moving quickly, overtaking the Undying troops who dropped their weapons when I took Atlanta’s gun.
Of Dex, bursting from behind his cover to run to Atlanta’s side, his arms around her. Of Neal, who wasn’t in hiding at all, but carefully making his way around the perimeter of the room to reach his cousin’s body.
And of Evie, who comes straight for me, and as my legs buckle she catches me, and we sink to the stone together. She holds me as I cry, murmuring in my ear, so like our mother used to do when I was tiny, when she was a baby, though she doesn’t remember our mother at all.
I don’t even ask how she’s here. Distantly I know it must have been Mink. That she listened, when we tried to tell her in the truck that we needed Addison to finish his work on the portals. That she must have got to him, got him out of his cell, that she must have picked up Evie so the IA couldn’t use her against me. And probably a dozen other things we’ll never know about, maneuvering behind the scenes.
I want to focus on Evie and not Jules dead on the ground. I want to focus on the face I thought I’d never see again when I was on Gaia, when I was on the Undying ship.
Whenwewere …
I gasp for breath, a fresh wave of pain sweeping over me.
“Help me up,” I whisper to Evie. For once she doesn’t argue with me, and lets me lean on her as my shaking legs threaten to give way.
The song of distant sirens, indistinct echoing shouts, steps running—help must have already been on the way. The phone, I realize, is still propped up on the rocks. Still pointed toward us. Recording—and broadcasting—everything. The view counter is frozen on ninety-nine million viewers. The app doesn’t have the capability to display anything higher.
The time that had slowed while I held Jules, while I held the gun, comes rushing back. Mink’s talking with the Undying, and Dex is disabling the portal while Atlanta watches, weeping. And Jules is … he’s lying there on the ground, EMTs gathering around him to transfer his still form to a stretcher.
I stagger forward, my heart suddenly squeezing so hard it hurts. I can’t let them take him away, not without me.
A uniformed officer grabs hold of me just as I reach the stretcher. “Stay back, miss,” he says in thickly accented English.
