The Atlantis Allegiance

by S. A. Beck

  The Atlantis Allegiance

  Book 2 of the Atlantis Saga

  S.A. Beck

  Sign up for S.A. Beck’s Newsletter to get 99¢ new releases

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Atlantis Allegiance: The Atlantis Saga

  Copyright © 2015 by S.A. Beck

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  www.sabeckbooks.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  All Books by S.A. Beck

  Excerpt from The Atlantis Gene

  Chapter 1

  MAY 27, 2016, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  11:15 AM

  Jaxon Ares Andersen lay curled up on her bed at the Forever Welcome Group Home on the outskirts of San Francisco, knowing her life was over. A group of strange military men was hunting her, and the only other person who knew—her boyfriend, Otto—had been sent off to prison for something he hadn’t done.

  Now she was alone.

  Not that that was anything new. She’d always been alone, shuffled from one group home or foster home to another, never settling down, never fitting in, never making friends. Always the odd one out. Always different.

  Over the last few weeks, her life had finally been lit by a ray of hope. She’d started coming out of her shell. She’d even gotten a boyfriend.

  How pathetic. Her first boyfriend at sixteen. Most girls had them at twelve. She didn’t even get to kiss him.

  And now that he was in prison for arson, it didn’t look as though she’d get the chance.

  Jaxon buried her face in her pillow. She had been stupid to think this place would be any different. Every place always ended up being the same. Some looked more promising than others, like the Spencer family that took her in when she was nine. They’d been really friendly, and look how that turned out.

  She winced and pushed that memory aside. No point in thinking about that now. Any place that had given her a bit of hope had always disappointed her more than the obviously crappy places.

  She had more important things to worry about. Who had those men been? Why were they after her? They had attacked her and Otto in the greenhouse. When she and her boyfriend had fought them off and run away, the strangers burned the greenhouse to hide the evidence. The group home staff assumed Otto had gone back to his pyromania. That was what had gotten him institutionalized in the first place, and lighting another fire counted as breaking his parole.

  Those men would come back, Jaxon was sure of it. They must have been after her because of her special powers. Why else would they go after a screwed-up teenager? The real question was—how did they even know about what she could do? No one else, not even her therapist, had any idea.

  They’d timed it perfectly too. While there was a security camera in the greenhouse to make sure no one got up to anything there, no one had been watching it because everyone was gathered on the lawn for visitors’ day.

  So what should she do? Run away? Where? And do what?

  Jaxon sighed. It was hopeless.

  A snide voice cut through her thoughts. “Sooooo… how’s the love life?”

  Lizzie.

  Obnoxious, stuck-up, and the dominant girl at the group home. She always had all sorts of little groupies flocking around her. Weak people who wanted to feel big by hanging out with the class bully. From the faint snickering Jax heard, at least two of them were standing in the hall with Lizzie.

  “Not so proud now, huh?” Lizzie went on. “Looks like lover boy was a real criminal. Too bad he didn’t burn you down with the greenhouse.”

  “Go away,” Jax grumbled. “You’re boring me.”

  “I’m boring? That’s a laugh! You’re the one with no friends and a boyfriend in lockup. Hope you don’t have a little convict baby in nine months.”

  Jax had a fantasy of leaping off the bed, picking it up, and throwing it at Lizzie. She could do it. That was a big part of the problem—that she was some sort of superhuman freak, like something out of a comic book. Lizzie didn’t know about that, of course, or she’d never poke fun at Jaxon. She must sense Jax was different somehow though. People like Lizzie always could.

  “What’s the matter?” Lizzie continued in a singsong voice. “Not going to the gym anymore? Guess it isn’t so much fun when lover boy isn’t around to set your heart on fire.”

  Lizzie laughed at her own joke. Jax, with her face still buried in the pillow, rolled her eyes. Why did stupid people always think they were clever?

  “Fine. Just stay in your room. We don’t want to see your ugly face anyway.”

  Lizzie’s groupies tittered. Jax heard their footsteps recede down the hallway.

  She sighed. If she was going to be lonely all her life, couldn’t people at least leave her alone?

  A couple of minutes later, there was a soft rapping on her doorframe.

  “I said go away,” Jax grumbled.

  There was a laugh, and Ginger Edwards’s voice said, “This is my room too, you know.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Jax said, sitting up and looking at her. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “I sure hope so,” Ginger said with a smile. She walked into the room and sat on the edge of Jax’s bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like pond scum,” Jax said, flopping back down.

  “That’s better than you were feeling a couple of hours ago, and I’m going to make you feel even better. I have good news.”

  Jax gave her an ironic smile. “You’ve discovered my birth parents, the judge let Otto go, and Lizzie fell on her face and had to have her jaw wired shut?”

  “Um, not quite. I heard from my caseworker, and she says that she’s found you a placement in a foster home.”

  “Already?”

  Ginger had told Jax she’d call her caseworker about Jax less than a week ago, just after Otto was taken away for supposedly burning the greenhouse. Jax had been in the system all her life, and it never worked that fast. Ginger’s caseworker must have all kinds of connections to be able to work that fast.

  “Yup. They’re coming tomorrow.”

  Jax sat up again. “No way!”

  “My caseworker says they’re really cool. She couldn’t tell me much, confidentiality and all that, but she did tell me they’re rich.”

  Jax didn’t care about that. This place was no longer safe. She felt a tug of regret to be moving again though. How many times had it been? She’d lost count. The Forever Welcome Group Home had been pretty cool, and she had hoped it would mean something better for her life, but deep down, she had always known it was too good to last.

  “Hey, Jax! Don’t fall over yourself thanking me!” Ginger laughed.

  “Oh, sorry. Thanks. I mean it. Just bummed about having to move again.”

  Ginger gave her a sympathetic look. “You poor kid.”

  That made Jaxon giggle. When Ginger called her or the other resid
ents “kids,” it always made her sound older, like one of the staff members or Jaxon’s therapist, Dr. Hollis.

  “Come on,” Ginger said, “I’ll help you pack so you’ll be ready to go when they come.”

  Jaxon looked from her half of the room, which was neat and tidy, to the disaster area on Ginger’s side.

  “I think I can handle it.” Jaxon said.

  She got up and started sorting her things. Packing had become second nature to her, and she didn’t need to think about what she was doing. Instead, her mind whirled from the impact of knowing she was getting whisked away, probably never to see Ginger or any of the other kids again.

  It was a shame. She had actually begun making friends here, or at least people who would speak to her without laughing at her. She’d miss that.

  This place wasn’t safe anymore though. She had to get out of there. Yet the question remained—if those guys from the greenhouse could track her here, couldn’t they track her to her new foster home?

  Would she ever be safe?

  Chapter 2

  MAY 27, 2016, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  12:15 PM

  Dr. Anthony Hollis couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d received an email from the California Child Protective Services informing him that Jaxon Andersen was being reassigned to a foster home.

  That didn’t make any sense. Jaxon hadn’t been at the group home long enough to significantly advance with her therapy. She was just beginning to come out of her shell socially and hadn’t progressed at all in her one-on-one sessions with him. He got the feeling she was hiding some secret about herself from him. The girl’s intelligence rankings were off the charts, and she had seemed to be engrossed in some strange experiments in the greenhouse, at least until that juvenile delinquent boyfriend of hers burned it down.

  Dr. Hollis bit his nail. He could lose his job over that one.

  Right now though, he was more interested in what was going on with Jaxon. The teenager’s social worker, Helen Jenkins, had moved heaven and earth to get her assigned here, and now she was moving her out.

  A new message popped into his inbox. It was from Jenkins. He opened it, and his eyes went wide as he read her lengthy complaint about Jax being reassigned over her head. Jax’s new social worker was someone Dr. Hollis had never heard of. Jenkins wanted to know who had spoken with Child Protective Services and whose decision it had been to move Jax into a foster home. She even flatly accused Dr. Hollis of trying to get rid of Jaxon because of the greenhouse incident. Jenkins seemed to think that Hollis blamed her for not keeping Jaxon in line.

  He sat back in his seat, stunned. What was going on?

  Dr. Hollis went upstairs to the sleeping quarters. Propriety and state law demanded that he didn’t enter the girls’ wing, so he asked another girl to go fetch Jaxon.

  Jaxon came out after a minute, her face a mask.

  “Hi, Jaxon, how are you doing?”

  The girl shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  Communicative as always, I see. “Let’s go for a walk,” Dr. Hollis said.

  They went downstairs and out into the center’s expansive back garden. Not far off lay the blackened remains of the greenhouse. Dr. Hollis studied Jax’s face as the ruins came into view. She bit her lip and looked at it with obvious worry.

  “I got a strange email from CPS. Apparently you’ve been reassigned to a foster home.”

  “I know,” she said, nodding.

  Dr. Hollis stopped. “You know? But your social worker didn’t even know.”

  “I… called someone at CPS I know and got it squared away.”

  “Jaxon, this sort of request has to go through Mrs. Jenkins.”

  Suddenly Jaxon grew angry. “What difference does it make? There’s nothing for me here. You sent Otto off to jail!”

  “Jaxon—no, don’t turn away—you have to understand something about Otto. He’s very sick. As you know from group therapy, he’s addicted to setting fires. That’s what got him assigned here as a condition of his parole. This sort of sickness is a deep-rooted addiction, just as bad as alcoholism or drug abuse. It’s a shame he slipped on his therapy and broke his parole. I really thought he was making progress. Unfortunately, it’s out of my hands now.”

  Jaxon stood facing him with a defiant stare, her arms crossed. “He didn’t set that fire.”

  “Jaxon, I know you two were close—”

  “We were attacked, I told you!”

  Dr. Hollis inclined his head. “Jaxon, you know that there was a video camera in there.” He nodded toward the ruins. “We record all our CCTV just in case there’s an incident. I looked at the tape, and it stops a couple of minutes before the start of the fire. The fire crew discovered that the cable running to the camera had been cut, and they found a pair of garden shears lying nearby. Otto didn’t want to get caught.”

  Jaxon looked confused. “No, you don’t understand. They must have done it so you wouldn’t see them!”

  Dr. Hollis studied her. She seemed to be in earnest. Did she actually believe what she was saying? She hadn’t shown any signs of being delusional, but that could be a difficult pathology to detect if the delusions weren’t too outlandish.

  “Can I go now? I have some packing to do,” Jaxon said, looking sulky.

  Dr. Hollis sighed. It appeared this was out of his hands too. He’d have to make inquiries with CPS. He didn’t want this sort of thing to happen again. How could he help a young person’s mental health if they could disappear at any moment?

  The next day, Jaxon’s new foster parents showed up, along with Jaxon’s new social worker, Olivia Mahone. Dr. Hollis had looked her up and found out she had just moved to California from New Mexico. Jaxon was her first case in the state. Even stranger, the foster parents had never been foster parents before.

  As he ushered them into his office, he studied them. Mahone was a mousy, middle-aged woman who seemed to know her business. The foster parents, Stephen and Isadore Grant, were quite a couple. Stephen Grant looked in his mid-fifties, yet fit and handsome with a bearing that spoke of a military background. He had brown hair just beginning to go grey at the temples. Although he dressed casually, the quality of his clothes and the gold Rolex on his wrist spoke of considerable wealth.

  Isadore Grant was simply stunning. Perhaps ten years younger than her husband, she looked as if she had been a model in her youth, and perhaps still was. She had Grecian features, crystal blue eyes, and luxuriant brown hair that tumbled over her narrow shoulders. Like her husband, she appeared fit and had a strange seriousness, as if she had been in the military too, although she didn’t fit the type. Dr. Hollis flushed as she looked around his cluttered and disorganized office with obvious distaste.

  “Please, everyone have a seat,” he said, before realizing that all the seats except his own were piled high with books and papers. Flustered, he cleared off three chairs, sending a cascade of papers from one of them. Individual sheets wafted in the breeze coming in through the open window.

  Isadore Grant whipped out a hand and snatched one from the air before it flew out the door. The movement was so fast and precise, it reminded Dr. Hollis of a cobra striking.

  Once he had cleared the chairs, everyone sat, and he fetched the sections of Jaxon’s file the foster parents were allowed to see. That did not include reports of his one-on-one sessions or reports from her earlier therapists. Those were confidential.

  “Here you go, Mr. and Mrs. Grant,” he said, handing them over.

  The couple leaned over the first page of the file with obvious interest.

  “Jaxon Ares Andersen. Odd middle name,” Dr. Hollis said.

  “The ancient Greek god of war,” Stephen Grant said.

  “Is that what it means? Well, she is a fighter,” Dr. Hollis said and chuckled.

  Isadore Grant pointed with a slim forefinger and tapped Jaxon’s photo with a well-manicured nail painted deep red. “Quite a distinct appearance too. Not a beauty, but certainly someone who stands out of the
crowd.”

  Dr. Hollis looked at the photo. Jaxon had brown skin, yet her features seemed more Caucasian with perhaps a bit of Asian heritage. Her jet-black hair was naturally straight, as far as he knew, and her most distinctive feature was her startlingly blue eyes with a slight Asian epicanthic fold, the irises encircled with a faint brown ring.

  “There is no record of her birth parents. She’s obviously mixed race though. Is that a problem?” Dr. Hollis asked.

  Stephen and Isadore looked shocked at the question.

  “Why would it be?” Isadore asked.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be,” Dr. Hollis said. “Unfortunately, it’s an issue with some foster parents. Personally, I don’t think anyone who has a racial preference is fit to be a foster parent, but the state isn’t interested in my opinion.”

  “A child is a child,” Stephen Grant said. “We’d accept her in our home even if she wasn’t human.”

  Dr. Hollis chuckled then stopped as he noticed Isadore give her husband a sharp look.

  “Well…” Dr. Hollis coughed. “Once you’ve read through all this, we’ll have some forms to fill out, and then you can meet your new ward.”

  He studied the paperwork as the Grants filled out each page. He noted that Isadore Grant worked in insurance and Stephen Grant was a leading botanist at UCLA. That was a good fit for Jaxon. She had an obvious talent for growing plants. He couldn’t get over that footage of Jaxon touching plants and them growing an inch or more in less than a minute. Dr. Hollis still hadn’t figured out how she did that. Perhaps her foster father would have better luck.

  “I see you’re a botanist,” Dr. Hollis said.