Unearthed by Amie Kaufman

Author:Amie Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

I LEAD THE WAY FOR a while. Not every room in this place is a puzzle requiring Jules’s expertise, and while I can’t read the glyphs, I am starting to know what their patterns indicate. Like Jules said, the glyphs are based on math, and once I started to recognize the equation for their language, their simpler instructions—step here, don’t walk there—aren’t hard to translate. And the spread of ordinary traps like hidden spikes and pitfalls are becoming easy to spot and avoid—it’s almost like the Undying put them there so we can see them, and know we’re still on the right path.

Maybe it says something about me that the easier it gets, the more uneasy I feel. Like even an ancient race that died out before humans used tools could somehow be out to get me. “This doesn’t bother you?” I say to Jules, shattering the silence.

“What?” His voice comes from behind me, distracted.

“It’s like they’re playing with us,” I say. “This part is so easy.”

“Maybe,” he replies, sounding tired, an edge to his voice. I don’t know if it’s frustration with my continued suspicion, or if it’s this new barrier that’s formed between us, or both. “But we can’t assume they were anything like us, Amelia. Or that they were putting in these tests simply to torture us. They weren’t human, there’s no reason to think they’d understand the kind of cruelty we’re capable of.”

He only calls me Amelia when he’s being formal, or when he’s annoyed. Otherwise it’s Mia, his accent leaning into the vowels. Cruelty, I think, feeling sick, and I fall silent once again.

I tell myself that I’m leading to test myself, to make sure that I’ve got some chance of getting through this place alive without Jules, if he decides I can’t be trusted after all. But the truth is that I’m walking in front so that I don’t have to look at him. He’s so tired, so ragged, and so changed. That trusting nature of his, the one I scoffed at and predicted would get him killed—it’s gone. When I look at him I can see it in his posture, his body language. That slight scholarly stoop to his shoulders now looks like he’s carrying the weight of the entire cave-in that killed that man.

Of course, with him behind me, it means I can feel his eyes boring into me. Or I imagine I can, anyway. Despite the warmth of his hand as we ran for the edge of the last puzzle, despite his nod when I suggested we keep moving, all I can see in my mind’s eye is that burning look of his last night as I lay down with Liz’s gang and he stayed tied to a rock, barely able to move. When everything we’d built started to crumble, beneath the laughter over my “imaginary” sister.

You don’t owe him, my mind insists, flashing frame after frame from the moment he admitted he’d lied to me so I would help him, so I’d get him to this temple for his altruistic dreams.

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