by Jessica Gunn
“There wasn’t a second spy.” My protest came through gritted teeth. Oh my GOD, please make the world stop spinning. Vomit slicked my mouth, but I swallowed it backed down. I didn’t want to know what he’d do if I puked on him if this was how he reacted to simple statements of fact. Where did this assault come from, anyway?
“You and I both know that’s a lie.”
But it wasn’t. Dave was the only mole. He sabotaged SeaSat5. Unless he meant Valerie, who’d disappeared before TAO got there to retake the station.
A black pit formed in my stomach, pulling me deeper into sickness. If Valerie counted as a spy, so did Trevor. So which two did the General know about?
General Allen fished a vial out of his pocket. “This is the cure. Time will lessen the poison’s effects and return your powers, but this is instantaneous. Tell me who the second mole aboard SeaSat5 was, and I’ll let you go.”
My jaw clenched. I wouldn’t speak a single word, wouldn’t dare sell Trevor or Valerie out. Even though we weren’t dating, Trevor was still my friend. And Valerie… Well, she’d done the right thing in the end, I supposed. Didn’t matter either way.
General Allen raised an eyebrow. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
My mouth was cotton and nasty with the taste of bile. “What makes you… think… that?”
He chuckled and let go of my shoulder, pushing off of me so hard the chair spun again. “Your refusal to speak, for starters. Also the fact you appeared there and were hired within weeks of the hijacking. Did you know you’re the only new crewmember they hired after setting sail?”
“Yes,” I admitted. I had known that. That particular fact was one of the biggest that’d made Trevor question my appearance on SeaSat5. Still, it wasn’t a lie and it was easily verifiable, so there wasn’t a point in hiding the truth.
“Did you ever question that?” he asked. “Because I did. But I know things you don’t, soldier.”
His use of the word “soldier” sent pinpricks over every part of me. “How do you…”
He leaned forward and slammed his hands over mine on the chair’s armrests. “Because I know how many of you came over from Atlantis. I know who your parents are. I know.”
My head spun wildly. My parents? What’d they have to do with this? “Touch them or my sister and I’ll kill you in the slowest way I can find,” I growled.
General Allen barked a severe laugh. “Your ignorance is the best entertainment.”
Ignorance? “I’m serious.”
“As am I, Ms. Danning. Now I’ll ask again, why did you sell the SeaSatellite5 crew out to the Lemurians?”
Now I was made to pay for Valerie’s mistakes at the cost of threats to my family?
Don’t do it. Don’t admit anything. When the world stopped spinning, I could think. And if I could think, I could process why and how General Allen knew what he knew, and if I wanted to let Valerie’s secrets spill. If I wanted to risk Trevor’s life to save the lives of others.
“I didn’t,” I said.
“What was so worth it?” he yelled in my face.
Don’t stay a damned word. But his question snapped Michael’s face into my mind. What was worth it? Evidently not Michael’s life. Not the entire crews’ lives. Just as I refused to speak of Atlantis to Thompson, I did so now. General Allen may know about the Lemurians, but he’d never get to know why they were after SeaSatellite5. If he knew I was an Atlantean super soldier though, he must also know about the outpost, right?
Tears streamed down my face. Nothing made sense. TruGates didn’t make sense. Trevor. Protecting Trevor was the only thing I’d ever understood.
“Please,” I said. I needed reprieve. Time and space to think.
“Just tell me and you can have the cure and go free.”
My head slid from side to side. No chance in hell.
Someone knocked on the door. “General, Eric Talmont is here to see you.”
Eric! He could save me. He could stop this madness.
General Allen leaned in closer. “Speak of this to anyone, and not only will their lives be on the line, so will yours. And your sister’s. This isn’t over. I will know what happened on SeaSatellite5.” He backed away. “Compose yourself as best you can and leave. The drug will wear off in time.”
It took every ounce of normal, human strength within me to get up out of that chair, to walk toward the door as I fixed my expression into something halfway normal. To march out of that office like my world hadn’t been completely upturned.
General Allen had made two mistakes today. He’d threatened my friends and family, and he’d taken my powers away. That never ended well for my enemies. And as soon as I figured out how to take him down, I would. But the ache in my shoulder from General Allen’s grip told me that this fight would be harder than I thought.
I made it past Eric and down the hallway before moving too much caused everything around me to sway like a bad day on SeaSat5. A common room was at the end of the hall. I stumbled down the hallway toward it, thankfully not running into so much as a single janitor.
Inside the common room, I shut the door, then fell on the leather couch with a thud.
even dwarfs pounded away at some imaginary mining operation in my head. I rubbed my face with my right hand. The other was unresponsive. After several long moments spent sloshing through the all-encompassing heavy fog in my head, I realized my hand wasn’t unresponsive. No, it was trapped beneath the lithe form of someone with bright blonde hair and definitely no clothes on underneath this blanket cocooning us both.
I shifted away and pulled my arm out from beneath her. My boxers—and the rest of my clothes, for that matter— couldn’t be seen from the couch. I climbed my way out without waking her up. My boxers had been tossed without care onto a ceramic cat statue. I relieved the cat of its inappropriate headgear and pulled them on before daring to look at the girl’s face.
I didn’t know her, and that stung every way I looked at it.
What did I do last night?
I collected the rest of my clothing and climbed upstairs on wobbly legs. Freaking plague. Stupid alcohol. Bad decisions all around. Apparently in the process of trying to enjoy the party, I’d ended up in a basement with a girl I’d never met. Evidently Chelsea’s lifestyle has rubbed off on me more than I thought.
Entering the world of the living didn’t help things. As soon as I opened the basement door, sunlight slammed into my eyes, blinding me in searing pain. Why did I ever think drinking that much after contracting the bubonic plague was a great idea? Answer: I was an idiot.
“Oh. My. God.”
I spun to see who was so offended, but more sunlight blinded me.
“What the hell did you do?” the person continued. The voice was familiar enough to give them away despite the blinding sun. Sarah. “I saw Lexi go down there with someone, but when Danny told me it was you, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think you’d be this stupid.”
She charged me, and an open palm stung my face before I could register what was about to happen. The slap sent stars across my vision. I reached out to the wall behind me to stabilize myself.
“Are you completely stupid?” she accused.
“What! What did I do?” I asked. It must have been bad if it sent Sarah into a Chelsea-like angry streak.
“I brought you here to have a good time,” she said. “It was the least I could do after what Chelsea did to you. But dammit Trevor, I didn’t expect you to completely burn that bridge with her.” She shoved me against the wall. “You are the most moronic person I’ve ever met, and I grew up with Chelsea.”
As if on cue, the basement door opened and the blonde girl emerged fully dressed and with a grin as evil as they come.
Sarah’s face contorted into pure rage. “You better get the hell out of here before anyone else wakes up.”
The blonde girl, who looked more familiar than ever wearing that sinister grin, shrugged nonchalantly. “I was on my way out, anyway.”
“Keep walking, slut
,” Sarah spat.
The blonde girl left.
The blonde girl. The same blonde girl I saw during the “Grand Summer Shit-Show.” The same night the blonde girl tried to get Chelsea to throw a punch for the tabloids.
Lexi.
The front door slammed shut as the relationship hell-gods decided my fate.
I slammed my head against the wall. “Fucking. Stupid.”
“Oh yeah,” Sarah said. “Have fun explaining that one to Chelsea, you asshat. Leave before Logan shows up to clean up this mess. Happy hangover.”
That was all the motivation I needed.
I paced the alleyway between the Franklin and the pizza shop next door. This alley held too many memories. Here, I’d met Chelsea, had scared Dave off of her. And together we’d lost SeaSat5 in this very spot. Meeting Valerie in this space felt weird, wrong. And she was late on top of it. I was due back to TAO soon, but they thought I was flying back from Tennessee, not hoping to catch a ride from Sophia in Boston.
The sun beat down between the two buildings. I shielded my eyes from its bright rays. They seared my eyeballs, making my head pound. I’d never drink again. To make it worse, my vision did that blue tint thing again, where everything became encased in sapphire hues and lines.
Finally, Valerie strolled around the corner, halting thoughts of a map I shouldn’t be able to access. I pushed off the brick wall and met Valerie. “What’d you find?”
She looked over her shoulder and pushed me back down to the end of the alley. “Not even the least bit curious why I’m late? Geez.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Not sure,” she said. “Might be being followed. I risked a lot to get this information for you. But I had to know, too.”
My heart sank. “What’s going on? Who’s following you?”
She flashed me a wink. “Now’s not the time to go all big brother on me, Trev.”
Oh, this was bad. She didn’t use childhood nicknames lightly. “Valerie.”
She shook her head. “La Ciudad Blanca. I don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle, but the ones I do have I can’t share. Not yet.”
I glared at her, not because she was holding back, but because she probably also wouldn’t share the reason why. “Why not?”
She put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows—she wasn’t going to budge. “Who they are, how they’re involved with Atlantis and Lemuria… it won’t mean anything if you don’t get SeaSat5 back.”
“Then what’s La Ciudad Blanca?”
Valerie pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and opened it up. It was a screenshot from one of our vest cams during the jungle trip.
“How did you get that?” I asked.
“I taught you how to hack, remember?” She held it up. “What you found, it’s the remnants of La Ciudad Blanca. The White City. But it’s contextually wrong. You said you were somewhere in Brazil, right?”
I nodded. The name of the city didn’t ring a bell, but the way her speech quickened told me I could ask questions later. “According to Dr. Hill. He thought we were in Brazil.”
“Well, he’s either an idiot or something’s wrong. If the city’s ruins have been moved, there must have been a reason. Whole cities don’t just move,” Valerie said.
Except Atlantis. “So what’s the point?”
“I’m not sure the two events—the city moving and you being infected by a Link Piece from the future—are related. I think it was an unfortunate coincidence. It’s interesting because La Ciudad Blanca is tied to the area that once worshiped Quetzalcoatl.”
Again, ancient history wasn’t my thing. “Queza-what now?”
She didn’t bother to stop and correct me. “Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent god, sometimes associated with craftsmanship and art.”
“Link Pieces.” For whatever reasons, Link Pieces were always manmade, always technically a piece of art or a book—things that could be considered crafted. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Valerie.”
“I’m not sure, either. I’m just telling you what I’ve learned.” Her fingers gripped my arm. “Trevor, you guys are in deep and you don’t even know it. And Chelsea chasing down Lemurians isn’t helping. I don’t think they’re at fault here despite everything we’ve been led to believe.”
“How could they not be?”
Thompson had hijacked the station in their name. They’d needed the Link Pieces we’d found at the outpost to form a path to Atlantis, to destroy it. The Lemurians had taken SeaSatellite5 because of the cache, and they’d wanted to take Chelsea, too, to use the Waterstar map in her head. It was straightforward.
Valerie shook her head. “I think we’ve been looking at this wrong the whole time.” She leveled her eyes with mine. “You need to get Chelsea back to TAO. It’s not safe and I can’t tell you why.”
I swallowed hard, fists clenching. “I can’t get Chelsea to do anything.”
“You need to, Trevor. Before it’s too late.”
A helicopter flew overhead. Pretty normal for the city, but it was enough to send Valerie into the shadows.
“I need to go,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. Tell Dr. Hill what I said about La Ciudad Blanca. See you soon.”
She disappeared in a torrent of red and orange flames before I could say anything to make her stay.
Dr. Hill leaned back into his chair and rubbed his eyes in harsh circles. “Valerie.”
He wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t blame him. Valerie had tortured him during the hijacking, so any childhood connection I had to her was canceled out in his eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, moving forward from that. “Apparently the fact we found the ruins of the White City is a big deal.”
“Care to elaborate?” Pike asked from the doorway of Dr. Hill’s office.
“La Ciudad Blanca is like the poorer version of El Dorado,” Dr. Hill supplied. “It’s supposedly a city hidden somewhere in eastern Honduras, lost to myth and non-existent archaeological evidence. If this is true, it would explain why I couldn’t make sense of the site. Although the fact this is another mythological place has me concerned.”
It also appeared to have him depressed. Dr. Hill’s normally bubbly self remained hidden under some invisible weight of pessimistic nature. Something must have happened while I was away.
“What’s got you so down?” I asked.
His eyes lifted to mine. “I could ask you the same thing. According to Sophia, you dragged your feet the whole way here.”
“I made some shitty choices,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
With a shrug, he said, “Fair enough. We uncovered some worrisome information while you were gone.”
Somehow I managed to suppress a groan. I didn’t think I could handle more “worrisome information.” Valerie’s warning echoed in my head: You need to get Chelsea back to TAO. It’s not safe. “Do I want to know?”
“Aside from what we’ve already conjectured regarding the statue Link Piece we found in the jungle—in that it was manufactured, brought from the future, and left there for someone to pick up—we’ve recovered some of the footage from our vest cams from the Altern Device mission.”
“And how do those two things go together?” Obviously that’s why he’d preempted his statement with talking about the statue.
“The Altern Device connected Chelsea and yourself,” he said, “to solve a puzzle. It had to be you two because of the connection you have.”
“Had,” I corrected involuntarily. “I already know all of this. Tell me what you’re really getting at.”
Dr. Hill leaned forward and placed his forearms on his desk. “We were made aware of some technological jumps the Lemurians are making regarding Link Piece travel.”
My stomach clenched. Was this was Valerie was so worried about? “And?”
“It appears as though our initial unease regarding the Altern Device was well-placed. According to our contact, Germay’s people had discovered a way to
manufacture Link Pieces like the one we saw on our last mission. The Altern Device fuses connections made in humans into objects.”
My mind spun, a deluge of thoughts flying in and out of my consciousness. I sat down in the spare chair opposite Dr. Hill and placed my hands on the desk while I processed this.
The statue Piece was manufactured, that much we’d guessed. But that Germay’s people had been doing it all along? If that was our future, it was possible that a good portion of the pieces we came across were also manufactured, possibly planted to mess with our progress in finding SeaSat5. Or exploring the Links and expanding our understanding of the Waterstar map in general.
But what was Germay after in making Chelsea and I use the Altern Device? They already had the Waterstar map. Chelsea and I weren’t important enough. It wasn’t our connection that mattered.
It was when we were from. What we’d both discovered.
The Sargasso Sea cache. The Atlantean outpost we’d found two years ago.
My eyes darted to Dr. Hill’s. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He didn’t say anything, just watched me piece things together.
“Why?” I shouted.
“Trevor—”
This must be what Valerie knew, or at least part of it. With a secret this big she had to let us work it out on our own. But even she couldn’t have foreseen the absurdity being displayed by people I thought were on my side.
“No,” I said. “You can go to hell. You think I sold us out, huh? That I went and told my family exactly where we were going on our next mission, so they could go steal and use Germay’s damn machine to make a Link Piece that’d bring them to SeaSat5? So they could leave another Link Piece that’d get someone sick, then—oops, I infected myself?”
Bile sloshed in my throat. I focused all my willpower on keeping it from coming up, which in turn released my hold on my words. “Why in God’s name would I do that? Why would I infect myself with the bubonic plague just to appear innocent?”
My vision blurred and formed to the azure storm, dates and times whizzing by. My head felt like it were a balloon about to break free from its string leash.