And this time the signature is not my father’s. It’s from Admiral Commander Juniper Faye.
I turn away from Jill and Samara, hands back on my head. Base camp must have uploaded my files the last time the skimmer came through. I was already set to transmit. Which means they’ve seen all the visuals, probably up to Samara setting my ankle and right after, and now, I bet, they’ve just uploaded the rest. The thought of Commander Faye hearing my opinions on protocol and watching me maintain contact with a local directly against orders is enough to make my stomach turn. But maybe I won’t be held responsible for not following orders when I was about to get the opposite ones anyway.
Okay, there’s not much chance of that. It might be almost as bad as Dad seeing me blow a chunk out of one of the most important archaeological sites since Tokyo.
“The dark days can be dangerous on your own,” says Samara.
I wipe away the first message, spell one word, “Understood,” and send. Then I turn around. Those eyes are on me.
“Come with me,” she says, “to my city. Until it’s light again. I can help you remember.”
Come with her. That’s exactly what I want. What I’ve just been ordered to do. But why now? The mask is back, hard and impenetrable.
“No, thanks,” Jill says, her hand on my arm.
I really do need to find a way of telling Jill to shut up without yelling, Shut up.
I take my pack from Jill and sling it over my shoulder, keep my gaze on Samara when I say, “How far is it to New Canaan?”
Jillian goes still, frozen, like she opened the door of the Centauri III and got left floating around in space. And then the lenses flash red. The perimeter alarm. I look up and turn around.
“What is it?” Jill asks.
“Someone’s close,” I say. I scan for heat and I find it, hold up two fingers. “Walking along the edge.”
Jill stares at the wall, tense, while Samara holds that book to her chest, backed up against one of the half columns, ready to run. Like me. I scan again, and one of the heat sources is a meter in the air and rising. Climbing up the mound. What has this girl done?
“They’re coming up,” I whisper.
Jillian spins, like she’s giving it one last try to find a door we missed, and I grab my pack and move to get Samara, and Samara is … gone. Eyes closed, face open, lost somewhere in her head. Great. Just great. I shake her once, like I did in the ruined house. She frowns, but doesn’t come back. Jill tugs at my arm.
“Leave her!” She’s barely containing her voice.
“Orders, Jill.” She backs off, startled, glances up at where the sky should be. I scan again. Our climber is taking their time, more cautious than I was, but still halfway, and I’m more than a little worried the ceiling might come down on us. I grip Samara by the shoulders and shake her again. Hard.
Her eyes pop open. She has the tiniest sprinkle of freckles across her nose. “We should go underground,” she says.
“Oh no, we shouldn’t!” Jill hisses. “We go out the door!”
Then Samara reaches behind her, pulls a latch, and the column swings open. Like a door. Leading down to a damp and hollow dark. Okay, so the glasses missed that one.
“Beckett, no,” Jillian breathes. “We can’t trust her. She could be leading us straight to them!”
These words are not exactly phrased to promote healthy relationships across cultures. I keep looking at Samara. “Do you know the way?”
“Yes. I have remembered.”
“And how did you even know that door was there?” whispers Jill.
The amber eyes swing to her. “Because I smelled it.”
Fine. I don’t know what that means, but fine. Jill is spitting mad, we have about ten seconds before someone’s head comes through that hole, and now that the door is open, the glasses show a long, straight river passage, with at least one branch. “In!” I say beneath my breath. “Go!” Samara slips through the door with her pack and I practically shove Jill.
I shut the door with a soft snick. There’s no lock, and I consider fusing the latch with the laser, but I think messing up one more thing in Canaan might actually kill me. If the glasses didn’t find that door, it’s not likely they will.
Unless they’re trying. Or they already know.
I hurry after Jill and Samara, down black, winding stairs that are worn and slick, sometimes choked with fallen stone. There’s water running down there, and I think I understand what Samara meant by smelling it. Some kind of spice or perfume is in the air, a scent like water, soil, and something else I don’t have a name for. The sound of gushing gets louder, weirdly colored light flickering against the last two or three winding steps, and when I scramble over the final set of fallen rocks, I don’t see what I thought I would at all.
We’re in a cave, a river rushing fast to our right, and every nook, every angle of the ceiling and walls is completely covered with some kind of flower. Green and purple and the occasional red, each one of them lifting a set of long feelers, waving them in the air as if they were underwater. And the flowers are glowing. Bright, luminescent, the feelers making the light seem to move and dance. It’s kind of beautiful, and peculiar. Like celebration decorations gone crazy wrong.
I use the glasses to check the room above us, but I can’t see through this rock. At all. Only the empty spaces, like the passage and the opening up the stairway. I reset the perimeter alarm anyway. Samara is already moving down the passage, looking back to see where we are, but Jillian is still standing at the bottom of the steps. And I know that expression. Even in the flickering light of alien glow flowers.
“Jill,” I say. “Come talk to me.”
She doesn’t at first. And then a green flower reaches out a feeler, just brushing her cheek. She jumps like the thing bit her, closes her eyes, and I can almost see her longing for the sanitizer. But she does take a few steps toward me, arms crossed, putting some distance between us and Samara. I bring her up to speed in a whisper, short and quick, watch her face go from mad to a different kind of mad.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it … ” She glances at Samara, who’s tying that book back over her shoulder, the flowers brushing at her arms. “Why would Commander Faye send us? It doesn’t make any sense.”
I shrug. “Until they get the scans figured out I guess the ship is blind, and we’re the ones who made contact. So we’re elected.”