Maia has spent her entire life walking these underwater streets despite never having been here. It was always Los Angeles. She has come full circle. She is exactly where she is meant to be.
As Maia comes up for air, a loud horn sounds repeatedly from the ship behind her. She looks towards Lucas, now standing on his raft and shielding his eyes. He quickly sits down and turns his raft around, rowing back towards her. She dives beneath the ocean once more and kicks with all her might, spinning through the waters above the city from her dreams.
She has a distance to go, but she has always been a strong swimmer. The buildings’ antennae beneath the water begin to flash like beacons, steadfastly guiding her through the darkness. Every stroke she takes only strengthens her resolve.
Just keep kicking.
Don’t stop kicking.
Fifty-One
Coming up for air, Maia gasps as the commotion she’s caused assaults her from every angle. Lucas calls out from his raft, rowing towards her as frantically as she is swimming towards him. Behind them, Claire is still yelling. The boat’s horn blasts out another deafening blow.
Maia sinks below the water’s glassy surface and glides down the drowned streets of Los Angeles. It is so peaceful down here. Away from the noise of the boat, she can hear herself think. Streetlamps flicker as she passes and she twirls through the water, propelled by some great unknowable force. She swims back to the surface, swallowing a mammoth gulp of oxygen before flipping her feet into the air and sinking back down.
The outline of Lucas’s raft is so close. His oars lift from the water and he yells out for her.
Maia kicks back to the surface. “Lucas!”
Lucas stands on his raft, shielding the sun from his eyes. He spots her and picks up his oars once again.
Paddling over a streetlamp blanketed in seaweed, an overgrown tendril wraps itself around Maia’s foot. Her startled screams echo off the mossy towers.
“Maia!” Lucas’s panicked voice travels across the water. He dives off his raft.
She flips to her back and kicks the green ribbon from her ankle. “Lucas! I’m okay!” she calls out breathlessly.
“Maia!” Lucas yells as he swims towards her. He is so close. So close.
“Oh Lucas, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t!” she sobs as he approaches.
He grabs her outstretched hand. Pulling her to him, he kisses her as they tread the water. “Are you okay?! What happened back there?”
“I’m coming with you,” she pants.
He looks shocked. He glances back to the ship as he catches his breath. “Come on, let’s get you to the raft,” he says.
Lucas hoists himself on board, then reaches for Maia’s arm. He pulls her up and she falls on top of him. Grabbing his face, she kisses him, her wet arms folding him into her embrace.
“Oh, Maia, I am so sorry. Rowing away from you was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.”
The ship’s horn blows out another menacing blast behind them.
She lifts off him. “You have to start rowing, Lucas. Row away so they know I’m not coming back.”
His face conflicted, he sits up, glancing between the ship and Maia. “You are not going back? No, this is too dangerous. I could never…”
“You didn’t—I did. This was my choice.”
He looks at her, shaking his head. “Maia … are you sure?”
“More than anything.”
He peers behind her to the dark and tangled terrain awaiting them. “What if something were to happen to you, Maia? I could never live with myself.”
“Safety is an illusion, Lucas. Something could happen to me at any time. All that matters in this moment is that we are together. We can do anything together. I know this now.”
Lucas’s head falls into his hands and they sit in silence on their small raft. When he finally looks up at her, he smiles, surprising her. “Okay, my love,” he says. “Okay, yes. We do this together.”
The horn sounds again in three long calls. Maia turns to see the ship sailing away. Relief showers over her.
“Maia … what happened?”
She looks at Lucas. “I jumped,” she responds nervously.
He leans back. Clutching his head with both hands, he gapes at her with equal tones of shock and amusement. “Oh my God. Honestly, Maia, you have got to stop doing that.”
She twists her hair to the side, wringing out the water. “I just suddenly realized, with all the danger and the uncertainty that lie ahead on this journey, that there are two things I know without a shadow of a doubt.”
Lucas stops rowing. “Okay…”
“The Old Arctic Circle is my destiny.”
“Okay.”
“And so are you.”
His eyes glassy, he looks away. “Maia, if anything were to happen to you…”
“Nothing will happen to me,” she says sternly. “We will make it to The Old Arctic Circle. I know it.”
He looks at her for a long while before responding. Leaning across the raft, he tenderly brushes a tear from her chin. “Okay, yes. We do this together,” he says with a smile. “But can you promise me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“From here on out, no more jumping off ships.”
She smiles. “If you jump, I jump.”
His eyes narrow. “Okay,” he says as he begins to row. “But to be fair, I never jumped.”
Maia bites her lip. “Touché.”
Lucas slowly paddles through the drowned city streets. Now outside the cluster of skyscrapers, the smaller buildings remain mostly submerged, opening the expanse of water ahead of them. They pass by what seems to be an unending, crumbling brick warehouse covered in moss and a thick web of vines.
A small shirtless boy with his thumb in his mouth watches them from behind a half-destroyed brick column. Dirt is smeared across his face and his brown eyes are wide and curious.
Maia begins to say something and Lucas rushes to cover her mouth. “That boy won’t be alone,” he whispers. “Don’t say a word.”
When Maia glances back, the boy is gone.
The water begins to shallow into streams. Fallen road signs unearthed from soggy street corners slump on top of rusted vehicles. One- and two-story derelict buildings stretch along the bloated streets, with massive holes like puncture wounds collapsing in from their decomposing roofs.
“Okay, I think this is where we walk,” Lucas says quietly. “Take this.” He holds out a sheathed knife. “Now we each have one. Place it somewhere out of sight but easy to grab.”
“Thank you.” She tucks the knife into her back waistband beneath her shirt.
Lucas steps out of the raft and the water rises to his shins. Maia hands him his pack and he throws it on his back before helping her over.
“You nervous?” she asks as she dips her foot into the water.
“A little.” He shrugs. “You?”
“A little.”
They quietly wade through the swampy streets, taking each step as deliberately as possible to avoid attracting any unwanted attention. The city is eerily quiet, the only sound coming from a seagull calling from above.
Ahead of them, the water recedes, revealing dampened soil and a partly hidden trail leading up to a wooded hill.
“Shall we check this out?” Lucas whispers. “I need to get my bearings.”
“Let’s do it.”
They trudge through the marshy bank onto drier land where rotted-out tree trunks litter the trails and old vines cloak the trees like netting.
“Doesn’t look like anyone has been up here in ages,” Lucas says while tearing down a vine.
“Should we still go up?”
“We won’t go too far—I just need to get a visual of the city to make sense of the map Mario gave me.”
Hiking the overgrown trail, Maia’s heart skips a beat. An animal-like instinct takes over and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She slows her stride and scans the trail behind her.
Lucas
stops. “Maia?”
“Yeah … I just … it feels like someone is following us.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing.” There are eyes on her, she can feel them. “I just … have a feeling.”
Lucas backs up, step by step, until he is standing next to her. He slowly pulls out his knife. They stand motionless and search their surroundings.
A few branches break in the distance and Maia releases her knife from its sheath. An eagle flies through the trees, disappearing above the canopy. They both let out their breath, laughing nervously.
“Okay,” Lucas whispers. “We should keep moving.”
He leads the way down the path, crawling over downed trees and pulling vines as they go. Every step they take, that ghostly feeling that they are not alone follows her. Turning a corner, they come across an abandoned shed.
“Stay here, I will go see if there is anything we can use from inside.” Lucas slinks from view to the front of the shed.
All the hairs on Maia’s body rise. She doesn’t know how, but she knows whoever has been following them is still lurking, and she knows he’s a male. Carefully grasping her knife, she holds it before her as she scans the ruined forest, listening for movement.
As her instincts continue to kick in, her sense of hearing and smell intensify. The crystalline energy of the earth appears, flowing through the trees in streams. Her hair draping across her face spirals into a dark red before her eyes.
The intruder creeps up from behind, breathing shallow, nervous breaths. His eyes focus on her and he crouches down. She slowly turns on her heels with her hand outstretched and the foliage bends to her command.
Then she stops, releasing the vegetation. The trees groan as they return to their upright stance.
She steps towards him, still anxiously cowering behind a cluster of bushes. An intense maternal love washes over her and she drops her knife to the dusty ground. She shoves back the prickly twigs.
Cowering before her, his head lowers to the ground and his ears pin back. He whimpers as his piercing yellow eyes take in the sight of her and he sniffs in her direction.
Maia stands frozen before the adolescent tiger. “My God,” she breathes.
A gust of wind swirls through the battered forest and a peculiar grin spreads wide across her face.
Book Two Excerpt
Read on for an excerpt from
The Burn of a Thousand Suns
The Forgotten Ones Book Two
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Available August 2021
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Copyright © 2021 by Jillian Webster
Prologue
A cloud of dust billows from Maia’s feet.
Like everything else around these parts, the gravel has shriveled up. Caved in. Crumbled to dust like hollow bones of the earth.
A mirage of water hovers along the horizon in a tsunami-like, metallic wave. The hot air blowing across them is like the inside of a furnace, the heat so intense it nears suffocating. Every step is a struggle. It’s as if Maia’s legs have been wrapped in lead, weighing each foot down to the ground the moment she lifts it.
A scorpion scurries across the road.
The endless desert highway they now roam has been swallowed in oscillating mounds of sand; the scorched earth cracked open like a gaping spider’s web. Any cement left exposed to the elements has been ruptured by the crooked arms of barren shrubs, desperately clawing from beneath the rubble.
Maia casts a glance at Lucas. A red cloth is wrapped across his nose and mouth like a mask, a thin layer of sand glued to the areas wet with condensation. His tired eyes squint against the early evening sun, hovering like a demonic orb suspended in the brown haze of sky.
Another gust of sand hurls across them.
Maia motions her hand to catch Lucas’s attention. He nods and she tosses him her staff. He hands her a small rag. They’ve been switching the two items every few miles. The staff doubles nicely as a walking stick. And with just a flick of the wrist, the rag can swat away the relentless black flies, frantic for the moisture of their skin and eyes.
Maia’s face is also wrapped with a bandana, now matted and drenched across the bridge of her nose. Her auburn hair has been tied into a thick bun on top of her head, which not only keeps her cooler but also protects her scalp from the harsh rays of the sun.
A black shadow flickers across them as another circling vulture curls on a wing. The birds have been tracking them for miles, ready to swoop the moment one of them crumbles to the ground.
Maia reaches for her steel canister, secured with rope against the side of her pack. She brings the hot metal to her lips, delicately sipping the warm water and swirling it around the taut skin of her mouth. Her teeth crunch on a piece of sand before swallowing it down.
The vulture circles around again.
This California desert road has felt endless, but the wide-open expanse—albeit harsh—has been a blessing. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to constantly be on guard, and out here, they’ve got none to spare.
But the harsh terrain also filters out the crazies, so they don’t have to worry as much about malicious bandits taking something they hold dear. There are no half-breeds—bounders—hiding behind seemingly innocent, rotted-out vehicles abandoned on the side of the road.
Like that one car back in LA, with the juvenile cottonwood exploding from the hood.
With every skeleton of a vehicle they approach, they each take a side, splitting around it with a wide and cautious stance. So far, there has only been one body found out here and he was far from alive. The only threats on this road seem to be the scorpions and the rattlesnakes—and even they want nothing to do with the lethargic, shuffling humans.
A rusted sign on the side of the road lies crooked and covered in layers of sand. Lucas swats the dust from the faded green metal.
Seattle 994 Miles.
Nine hundred and ninety-four miles. Maia’s heart sinks. Having grown up with kilometers, she’s not as familiar with the unit of distance, but she knows the number isn’t good. They’ve been in America for over two months … and they’ve only traveled less than a hundred miles.
Of course, most of that time was spent hiding within the treacherous streets of Los Angeles, preparing for their four-thousand-mile journey up the new North American West Coast. Every day they would scavenge the crumbling, deserted homes and eerie, waterlogged streets in search of the right supplies. They planned for every possible danger, packed for every harsh and foreboding terrain. They knew they were using precious time staying in LA, but every minute was desperately needed.
Even still, after all that, she feels like nothing could have prepared her for any of this. Sitting around a fire in a deserted home talking about what to expect doesn’t shield one from the numbing pain of swollen feet, open blisters and a merciless desert sun. Or the bee stings, the slithering things, and the icy-cold evenings.
But, one foot in front of the other—they’ve discussed this. They’ve made a pact. There is no room for negative thinking, which, especially when out in the elements, can prove equally as fatal.
Just keep moving.
Lucas turns from the sign and his face drops.
Maia’s seen this face before, back when they were stuck on a collapsing raft of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a storm was heading their way. Her heart plummets to her gut as Lucas slowly pulls the bandana from his gaping mouth, his eyes wide in horror as he scans the horizon behind her. He mouths something. She cannot hear him but she knows exactly what he’s saying. She reluctantly follows his gaze and her rag drops to the dust.
“Meu Deus,” she repeats as Lucas steps next to her.
They stand frozen before the swiftly approaching, mammoth wall of sand.
Lucas turns towards Maia and yells through the barrage of dust suddenly pelting the side of their sun-scorched cheeks, but she can no longer hear him.
Every possible danger.
&n
bsp; Every imaginable terrain.
The billowing cloud mushrooms from the horizon, quickly choking out the last remnants of the sun. They should be running for their lives, but Maia is paralyzed by her thoughts.
What she wouldn’t give to be back in the hellish streets of LA.
Chapter 1
The once stagnant layers of grime now swirl along the surface of the murky waters. Maia nudges a floating teddy bear with the tip of her finger. Drowned facedown, his fur is matted with thick layers of dust. Lucas is ahead of her, slowly wading through the flooded mall’s thigh-high waters.
They crane their necks as they scour the massive lobby for a map. Heavy layers of black mold sprawl across the cathedral ceiling windows, interrupted only by the occasional beam of light streaming through its broken glass. Rows of suspicious murmuring pigeons perched along the ceiling’s high ledges glare down upon them through the crisscrossing of vines. Lucas and Maia carefully maneuver around another rusted grocery cart tipped on its side.
“Careful around these escalators.” Lucas’s whispers echo across the lobby. “Lots of broken glass around the railings.”
“Escalators?” Maia whispers back.
“Yes, the stairs here.” He points towards the steps leading down from the floor above. “They are called ‘escalators.’ They used to move so people didn’t have to walk down them.”
Maia studies the corrugated metal steps. “Move … and go where?”
Lucas smiles, shaking his head. “I’ll explain later. We need to keep moving.”
They quietly shuffle past a row of submerged benches engulfed in clumps of weeds. Maia’s foot slips beneath the black water. She sinks to her chin and her hands slide along the gritty tiles below.
“You okay?” Lucas wades back towards her.
She gains her footing and lifts herself out of the muck. Dripping wet, she nervously scans her palms.
The Weight of a Thousand Oceans Page 28