by C. E. Murphy
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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2
3
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5
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13
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Also By CE Murphy
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ATLANTIS FALLEN
The Heartstrike Chronicles: Book One
CE Murphy
ATLANTIS FALLEN
ISBN-13: 978-1-61317-107-3
Copyright © by 2016 by C.E. Murphy
All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author, [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art & design: Tara O'Shea / fringe-element.net
mostly for Peter, of course
1
Eventually her hair would fill the room.
Hip-length when she was captured, she could only guess at its length now. Folding it from her feet to her head told her it was at least a dozen times her body's height. It made her frantic, being unable to escape the tendrils, no matter where she dove in the room. They followed her, invisible spiders whose subtle brush were the only contact she had with anything living.
She had broken it off at first, tearing great handsful apart and letting them go in the little prison. It hadn't taken long to realize the folly of the tactic: at least while attached to her head, she had some control over the impossibly long strands. Those torn free twisted themselves around her legs and arms constricting her movements.
Those broken lengths were what made her realize that someday the room would fill with her hair. The thought terrified her. Captivity for eternity was bad enough. Captivity wound motionlessly in a secondary prison of her own making was enough to set her screaming.
The sound carried to the walls of her prison, bouncing harmlessly back to her, distorted with water. Only exhaustion made her stop, hours or perhaps days later. Time's passage could not be counted here. Neither light nor tide passed into the deeps, leaving her with no idea how long she had been trapped. Only the first few hours were clear.
She'd wakened with a surge of pain, screaming air into her lungs, thrashing wildly in salt water. In absolute dark she fumbled for the door, finally diving in search of it. The floor lay several feet below her, and her blind searching found no exit. Shoving back to the surface, she realized there was barely two feet between the ceiling and the water level. Pounding wildly on the ceiling, she screamed. Screamed for her gods, for her mother, for her lover, for anyone to save her. Silence answered, and the patient lapping of the water as she caused it to slosh back and forth in the free space in the chamber.
"Please, please, please." It became a rhythmic sob, growing more frantic as the water level rose. Soon the air would be gone and she would drown with the rest of Atlantis.
The water level was rising!
Somewhere, there had to be a fracture, a break in the stone that let the water in. Again, she dove, running her hands over the stone, looking for the flaw. Time and again she floundered to the surface, gasping for air, only to drive herself back under the water, determined to find the passage where the water flowed in.
It proved fruitless. The water rose, slow and terrible and inexorable. The break allowing it to seep in could only be a hairline fracture, too small for panicked fingers to find, too narrow to break further apart for escape. As she shoved her way to the thin layer of air, despairing, she tasted the air going stale. Fighting tears, she lay on her back in the cool water, trying to breathe shallowly. How long she lay there she couldn't say, fading in and out of consciousness as the air thinned further.
Panic regrouped when her nose bumped the ceiling. A scream tore her throat, the faint metallic taste of blood pooling at the back of her mouth. She smashed her hands blindly on the ceiling, wasting the little air that was left. Then, in the barest moment of time, the water closed over her head entirely.
Sinking into the quiet tomb, she held her breath, desperately trying to extend her life just a few more seconds. The physical desire to simply open her mouth, to breathe deeply, was nearly impossible to resist. She fought it, pale stars dancing behind her eyes in the blackness, and then the conscious decision to hold her breath failed before the instinctive reflex to breathe.
A fit of coughing, the attempt to dislodge water from her lungs doubled her over, sobbing in the darkness. Not until it had passed, and she lay floating in the water, curled in a fetal position, did it slowly dawn on her that she did not need to breathe.
It took longer yet before the implications of that set in. That she, like Aroz, was immortal. Timeless.
Like Lorhen.
She would live here until she escaped. If she could not escape, the room would be her prison, but never her grave.
The thought jarred her from her fetal floating. Unfolding, kicking toward a wall, she began working over every centimeter of the room with frantic, blind fingers.
It was no longer shaped like it once had been. The walls were melted smooth, a uniformity to them that the architects could only have dreamed of. There were no cracks, no imperfections that might be exploited.
The door was simply gone. She could not locate where it might once have been, no hollows or changes in texture in the stone to hint at a way out.
Only in two places did the texture change at all. The stone turned to metal slag, short rough spots on the floor. Desperately, she scrabbled at them until her fingers bled, trying to gain some purchase in the two small flaws. That she failed each time she tried did not stop her. What else was there to do?
Nearly five thousand years passed.
2
Dawn wasn't even a promise on the horizon when a staccato knock sounded at the door. Not even the apartment door: the one downstairs that opened into the vintage club—known locally as The Vin—and which sat directly beneath the window beside Emma Hickman's bed. Emma pulled a pillow over her head, willing the knocker—probably a drunk hoping for an after-hours drink—away.
A second rapid knock sounded, sharper and clearer than drunks usually managed. Emma folded the pillow around her head, promising herself, as she always did when a long night meant using the over-club apartment, that she would never again convince herself that she was too tired to manage the five blocks home to her house. She was on her feet by the third knock, flinging the window open to snarl, "Do you know what time it is?"
A lanky, dark-haired white man with sharp features and a duffel bag slung over his shoulder rocked back on his heels to look up at her. "About three. Good morning, Emma."
"For Christ's sake, Logan." Emma closed the window and sat on the edge of her bed, allowing herself to imagine, for a moment, that she wasn't going to let him in. Then, swearing under her breath, she rose again, pulled on
a robe, and stalked barefoot to the door that stood as the sole occupant of a narrow hall cut between a rattletrap freight elevator and the wall. The door opened outward onto a grate staircase that shone black with new rain and dully reflected the streetlights just up the road. Logan Adams was taking the stairs two at a time, most of the way to the landing already when she pushed the door open. “Go away. I’m mad at you.”
“You wouldn’t have opened the door if you were that angry.” Logan—Lorhen, Emma reminded herself—slid past her, making some small effort to keep his duffel bag from crashing against her as he came in, and knocked a light switch on with his elbow as he made his way down the the hall. Emma leaned her forehead against the door frame, then sighed and pulled the door closed before following Lorhen back into the apartment.
Speakers, lights and other equipment from the club downstairs extended the doorway hall another third of the way into the apartment and left only an aisle to navigate into the lift through. Emma had long since given up imagining the equipment was less than a permanent feature, even if its details changed, and had put a leather couch up against it on its innermost side, making the equipment the de facto apartment wall. A glass-topped coffee table and two armchairs faced the couch; past them on the elevator’s end of the apartment lay a kitchenette with a free-standing counter, and the bedroom—all part of the same open space—sat at the far end of the room. Years ago it had been a perfect space for a single woman just out of the military, right above the business she was building; now it was a useful crash space not only for Emma but for the singers and bands who played The Vin on their tours.
And, apparently, for men of her acquaintance who turned out to be Timeless, the immortal warriors whom Emma had helped to watch and keep records of since leaving the military almost seventeen years earlier. Not just Timeless, either: Logan Adams, whom Emma had known for a decade, who was himself a Keeper, whose job within the Keepers was heading up a tiny band of researchers investigating the oldest and most legendary of the Timeless…was the oldest and most legendary of the Timeless, a six thousand year old man called Lorhen.
Emma was fifty-four years old and, she would have thought, long past holding grudges. Why she would think that when she had Kept records for people ten, twenty, even thirty times her own age who themselves clearly held grudges was a question for another time; the point was that she had learned Lorhen’s true identity by accident, when he’d been shot down in front of her and gotten up again, and then, enragingly, it had transpired that Emma’s own charge, a Timeless named Cathal Devane with whom she had—illicitly—become friends, had already known Lorhen’s secret, and neither of them had told her.
Outrage, it turned out, was remarkably invigorating. Emma had felt more satisfaction just in being pissed off at the two of them than she had in the last several years of being a Keeper.
Lorhen dropped first his duffel, then himself, into the couch, asking, “Did I wake you?” with a certain blithe airiness.
“What do you think?” Emma threw herself into one of the armchairs across from him.
A twitch or two rendered the ancient man comfortable on the couch before he folded his arms behind his head to inspect her as if it wasn’t obvious she’d been awakened. After a good look, he opted to ignore the question. “I had an idea.”
“I’m sure you did. I’m sure it could have waited until morning, too.”
"It could have, but my plane just got in, and the cab ride out here took all my money, so I had nowhere else to stay. You realize it costs almost fifty dollars?"
“I realize it costs half that to get to Cathal’s house, or that you could have stayed at a hotel next to the airport and called him in the morning.”
“I hate airplane noise pollution, and besides, you know perfectly well that Cathal is in Chicago. Besides, I didn’t want to stay with him. He snores.”
“Lorhen.” Emma pressed her fingertips against the inner corners of her eyes before looking up to tick points off on her fingers. “First, he doesn’t snore. Second, even if he did, he doesn’t snore loudly enough to hear him from Chicago. Third, and this is my duty as a Keeper, not prurient curiosity, speaking, he has a three bedroom house. If you’re sleeping close enough that his snoring bothers you, I’ll be delighted to go make note of that in his records.”
“It is prurient curiosity that makes me ask just how it is you know he doesn’t snore.” Lorhen flipped over on the couch, trying, to no avail, to make himself fit better: it was four inches shorter than he was even including the arms. He ended up on his back again, with his feet dangling over one end, with the long black coat he hadn’t shed pooled halfway onto the floor. “Anyway, I don’t have a key to his house so I came here.”
“To wake me up in the middle of the night. How thoughtful of you, Logan. How did you even know I was here? I’m not usually.”
“I know. I went to your house first.”
Emma dropped her head against the back of the chair. “You’re telling me there was no way I was going to avoid an uninvited house guest.”
"That is, in fact, what I’m telling you.” Even relaxed on the couch, Lorhen had a nervous energy about him that suggested a grad student functioning by the grace of caffeine alone, but his flickering gaze came to rest on Emma briefly, and his voice softened unexpectedly. “I wasn’t actually sure you’d let me in.”
Emma thinned her mouth, unwilling to soften in turn. “Well, I did. What do you want?”
"Mmm. All right, then.” Lorhen ran a hand over his hair, making it spike and then settle over classical features and eyes that shifted from hazel to nearly black. He looked about thirty and bookish, as good a disguise, Emma thought irritably, as a Timeless of six or so thousand years could ask for. “You were about to ask what this great idea of mine was," he said.
“I really wasn’t.”
“Well, you can’t possibly be prepared to wait until morning. I couldn’t stand the idea of you lying there awake with suspense. I’m doing you a favor.”
Emma closed her eyes, muttered, “Next time, don’t open the door, Em,” to herself, then opened her eyes and bared an unpleasant smile at the ancient Timeless. “All right, Lorhen. What’s this great idea of yours.”
“I’m so glad you asked,” he said promptly. “I’ve been thinking about the Keepers.”
Emma turned her wrist up, rubbing her thumb over the tattoo she and Lorhen both shared: a circle encompassing a tilt-waisted hourglass. “What about us.”
“‘Us’,” Lorhen echoed, faintly surprised. “‘Us’, Emma? Where are you drawing the distinction there, between you and me or between you and me, and the rest of them? Because I seem to remember things coming down to a pretty distinct us and them back there, and you definitely weren’t on the side of them.”
“Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Emma glanced away, knuckles folded against her lips.
“Most people don’t when their friends get shot down in front of them. Emma—”
“Lorhen, I am not prepared to talk about this. What about the Keepers?”
Lorhen fell silent a moment. “All right. All right, Emma. Look, the ones who found me out weren’t exactly happy to learn they’d been harboring a Timeless in their ranks all these years.”
“They weren’t?”
“You’re the one who just said you didn’t want to talk about it, Em. Have you changed your mind in the last five seconds?”
“Dammit, Lorhen. No. I haven’t. Fine. We weren’t happy about it. I wasn’t happy about it.”
“But you chose me over them,” Lorhen said, voice gone soft again. “Those two Keepers didn’t turn on each other before I woke up, Em. And I wasn’t the one with the gun, when I did wake up. I’m good, but not good enough to take out five armed people who knew how to kill me, not on my own.”
“But you had a sword!” The accusation burst out, driving Emma to her feet in search of a drink. “You had a sword,” she said again more quietly, once a generous tumbler of whiskey had been poured. “
If you’d just been a new Timeless, Lorhen, but no, you had a goddamn sword.”
There were factions inside the Keepers, had been for decades, probably centuries. Emma knew that, but discovering a group determined to find immortality for themselves had still come as a shock to her. They’d been after an artifact said to prolong life, and Lorhen—Logan, at the time—had gotten in their way. Up until the moment he’d risen from the dead and drawn a blade that he knew how to use, she had believed he was only a Keeper dedicated to their policy of neither interfering with Timeless lives, nor seeking immortality for themselves.
He’d fended the Keepers off, but it had only been later still that Emma had realized he’d never so much as blooded one with his blade. She’d done the dirty work, shooting her fellow Keepers with a sniper’s steadiness. In the aftermath, with the two of them standing in the darkness staring at one another, Logan Adams had said, with unexpected clarity, “I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t mean for you to get dragged in to this. My name is Lorhen, and I think we’d better run.”
They had run, Lorhen back to his research position in the Keepers, and Emma to Cathal, where her hurt and anger at learning Lorhen’s secret had been compounded by her big Irish charge already knowing it. The two men had, in their ways, been among her closest friends, and she’d barely spoken to either of them in the five months since.
“I had a sword,” Lorhen said quietly, “and you didn’t tell anyone. But it gave me an idea, Em. I need to die, really spectacularly.”
Emma paused with her drink halfway to her lips, then turned to stare at Lorhen in genuine surprise. “You what?”
“Can I have some of that? In front of a lot of Keepers would be particularly good. I wake up befuddled. What? Me? An Timeless? After all this time studying them? It can't be!"
"Lorhen, that’s…depraved.”
Lorhen sat up to lean forward. "No, listen, it'll work. It even explains why Devane’s been hanging around me all this time. The Keepers know Timeless can sense the Awakening in potential Timeless, and it fits his pattern of befriending a potential Timeless to train him if he gets in an accident."