by S. A. Beck
She went up to him and, not wanting to speak, handed over what she hoped was enough money. The young man said something back. Jaxon shrugged and held up the banknote. He said something else. Jaxon prayed this wasn’t the start of a conversation. The driver took the money, gave her more change than she expected, and began calling out his destination again. Jaxon thanked her luck that he was too busy to speak with her.
Jaxon climbed aboard and found there was nowhere to sit. Every seat was taken up by at least one person, and everyone had a baby or a bag in their lap. The aisles were filled with people sitting on the floor. At the back was a huge pile of sacks. Some people sat on top of them, scrunched between the top of the sacks and the roof. Jaxon spotted a few places left back there, so she picked her way through the people crammed into the aisle, sometimes having to lift herself up on the seats and swing over people too crammed in to move out of the way.
Finally she made her way back to the sacks, which turned out to be filled with cheap sneakers imported from China, found a lumpy spot, and the bus roared off, headed back to the place that had nearly killed her a couple of days before.
This is insane, she told herself, and yet she couldn’t keep away from Timbuktu. Even though every logical part of her mind begged her to get off at the next stop, she stayed in her place. She had messed up everything back in Timbuktu, and she had to set it right. She had spent a lifetime of leaving messes behind. Now it was time to grow up and take responsibility. Plus Hawa’s mention of some foreign Atlanteans arriving in town had piqued her curiosity. Who could they be? She had to find out.
It sure helped that she couldn’t stay in the town she had just left. It wasn’t safe. In fact, no place was safe for her anymore.
And if she was going to be in danger, she might as well be in danger someplace where she could be useful.
Chapter 17
AUGUST 17, 2016, TIMBUKTU
2:30 P.M.
* * *
By the time the bus pulled into the main square of Timbuktu under the shadow of the great adobe mosque with its towering minarets and wooden support beams sticking out of the walls like the quills of a hedgehog, Jaxon swore she would never take public transport in Mali ever again. The bus had taken more than an hour to go twenty-five miles, stopping at every town, village, and roadside market on the way. No one got off, but plenty of people got on. It seemed like everyone was going to Timbuktu. The few remaining spots on the sacks of Chinese sneakers soon filled up. But still the bus filled. A seemingly endless influx of people and luggage got crammed into an ever-smaller space. One man even brought a chicken coop aboard. Jaxon ended up with someone’s toddler on her lap and squished against one of the windows by the press of bodies, the breeze from the open windows blowing sand and chicken feathers into her face.
Even with all the windows open, it soon grew oppressively hot. The toddler squalled with discomfort, and nothing Jaxon or her mother, crushed at her side, could do would calm her down.
And of course everyone almost immediately found out Jaxon was a foreigner. Soon a young man in Western clothing clambered over the mass of bodies, somehow found a place to sit nearby by inserting himself between two people who were able to move just enough for him to get one hip on the pile of shoes, introduced himself as a local university student, and started a long conversation with her. For the entire ride, he peppered her with all sorts of questions about who she was and why she was on a rattling old bus on a Malian highway.
She’d had a million of these conversations since she’d come to Africa. It was simple curiosity on their part, but now it felt like a police cross-examination.
Because, in a way, it was. The police were searching for an American who looked like one of the People of the Sea. If they asked around enough, sooner or later they’d talk to one of the people on this bus and hear all about her.
She couldn’t figure a way out of it, though, and kept up the conversation as the toddler wailed on her lap.
By the time the bus creaked to a halt on a broad square near the center of Timbuktu, Jaxon was almost faint from the heat and had a killer headache.
She didn’t feel so bad that she didn’t keep a sharp eye out as she stepped off the bus. A few cops stood not far off, smoking cigarettes and joking, their rifles slung casually over their shoulders. They didn’t appear to be watching the passengers. Instead, they looked like routine security like most public places had in Mali.
That made her feel better. The cops were on the lookout for a pair of Land Rovers that had peeled out of Timbuktu, not for bus passengers coming into the city.
Wrapping her headscarf close about her face, she walked to the nearest street leading away from the square. She resisted the urge to run. Now that she had made it back, she had to figure out what to do next. Go visit the Atlantean community? That could be risky with all eyes watching them. But she needed to get in touch with her friends and fix this mess somehow.
“Do you need help? Do you know where you are going?”
It was the university student from the bus, walking right next to her.
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” she said, picking up a little speed.
“I can show you many interesting places in our city,” he said, dogging her steps.
“No, thank you.”
“Are you hungry? The marketplace has some wonderful—”
Jaxon straightened her spine and whirled on him. “You are being too forward. Would you like my husband to hear about this?”
The student stopped, eyes wide. He put up his hands as if to ward off a blow.
“So sorry! I didn’t mean it that way. Good day.”
The student hurried off.
Jaxon smiled. That was one thing she had learned from Muslim women. Act regal and offended, and the guys usually backed off.
She glanced at the police. No, they hadn’t witnessed that little blow-up.
She continued on her way.
But where should she go? Her Atlantean friends had warned her not to come back.
“Don’t turn around, just keep walking in the direction you’re walking,” a low voice said behind her.
Jaxon whirled around. “Look, I told you—”
She cut off and immediately turned to face forward again, almost stumbling she did it so quickly. The person walking behind her wasn’t the Malian student who had been speaking to her a minute ago. It was one of her own people, a man who looked to be in his thirties, wearing local clothing but speaking fluent English with a British accent.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“A friend. Be careful. They’re looking for you.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“You shouldn’t have come back here,” the man said, keeping his voice barely above a whisper.
“Who are you?” Jaxon asked again.
“We can talk once we get out of sight.”
“Where can we go?”
“Down this road a little more. See that small shrine, the one with the domed roof? There’s an alley to the right just beyond it. Go down that.”
Jaxon’s heart raced. This was one of the foreign Atlanteans her schoolteacher friend had told her about.
“Walk casually,” he said, “as if you aren’t with me. I am going to drop a little way behind before coming to join you.”
Jaxon passed the shrine. It was one of the old tombs to medieval saints that attracted pilgrims from all over North Africa. It looked simple on the outside, just a square building with a low dome. The whole thing was painted green, the color of paradise. There were dozens of such shrines in Timbuktu, each with its own long story of the good deeds of its founder and the miracles that happened to the faithful who gathered there. She spotted the alley, a narrow space between the shrine and a madrasa, or religious school, right next to it. Through a small window high up in the wall, she could hear the rhythmic chanting of a group of young boys as they recited from the Koran.
As she entered the alley, she stumbled over a pile of bricks
and some tools. Picking her way over the rubble, she moved further along. It was cooler here in the shade of the shrine. She noticed that large sections of it had been recently repaired. Half the roof and a big chunk of the wall had been replaced with new material.
“Smashed up by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb,” the stranger said as he joined her in the alley. He looked up at the new repairs and shook his head sadly. “This shrine is for a revered saint who lived nine hundred years ago. He was famous for teaching peace and for giving charity to orphans. A suitable place for us to have our little chat, isn’t it?”
“Was he a Christian? Was that why the terrorists destroyed his shrine?” Jaxon asked.
“A Christian in Timbuktu? No, this has been a Muslim city for more than a thousand years. No, the saint was a Muslim like all the local saints, but the radical Islamists don’t like shrines of any sort, especially if they honor a Muslim who preached peace.”
“I’m a little more worried about my own government than I am about terrorists,” Jaxon said.
The Englishman smiled. “My government isn’t much better. But let’s get down to business. I am Winston Chambers, an Atlantean like you.”
“I can see that. I’m—”
“Jaxon Ares Anderson.”
Jaxon blinked. “How did you know that?”
“We’ve been looking for you for quite some time. You’re a hard girl to keep up with. I hope we’ve been of some small service to you and your friends.”
“The team that saved Dr. Yamazaki from the hospital! That was you?”
“Please keep your voice down. Yes, that was us.”
“One of you cured her stroke.”
Winston bowed his head. “That was Rachel. She was our most talented healer.”
Jaxon remembered Yamazaki had told her the entire team that had saved her had been gunned down by General Meade’s agents. She bit her lip. More people getting hurt because of her.
Winston must have seen her expression, because he looked her in the eye and said in a firm voice, “Don’t feel bad. They knew the risks, and we aren’t doing all this just for you but for our entire people.”
“So what’s going on? And why follow me to Timbuktu?”
Winston paused, as if collecting his thoughts. “Because you’re special. You’re far more than an ordinary Atlantean.”
“Why? Because of my powers? I can make plants grow, but that’s nothing compared to curing a stroke.”
“No, not because of your powers over plants but because of who your parents were.”
The words hit her like a bolt of lightning. Her mind went blank, and she fell back until her back rested against the alley wall. If she had been standing out in the open, she would have fallen over.
“You knew my parents?” Her words came out in a hoarse croak.
“I knew them slightly. They were famous in our community back in London.”
“London? I’m English?”
“No, a naturalized American. You were born in Portland, Oregon.”
“Wait, my parents, are they here?”
“Please keep your voice down,” Winston said, casting a nervous glance at the entrance to the alley. “Now stay calm. You’re not going to like what I have to say.”
Misery settled on Jaxon like a heavy blanket. She knew what was coming next. Of course, after all these years hoping to find her parents, she was going to meet someone who would tell her they were dead.
And the words came, relentless, cruel, and undeniable.
“Your parents fled England twenty years ago when a gang of organized criminals wanted to recruit Atlanteans into their service. They had found out about us somehow, and while they weren’t nearly as organized or sophisticated as General Meade’s group, they were violent in the extreme. They threatened to kill your parents if they didn’t comply. Your parents couldn’t go to the police, because they knew they were being watched and this gang had connections with the police as well, so they fled to America. For a time they were safe, but the London gang had connections in America, and they tracked them down. By then you had been born. You were still an infant, and they knew the safest thing to do was to give you up for adoption.”
“And my parents?”
Winston’s face turned grim. “The criminals got them. I am terribly sorry.”
“And my extended family?” Jaxon asked, feeling ill and leaning on the wall for support.
“We don’t know about them.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t know your parents’ real names.”
“What? How come?”
Winston glanced at the opening of the alleyway again and lowered his voice as he continued. “Because they were the Keepers of the Texts. Like the griots here, they kept information about our heritage. And not just texts from the Middle Ages but actual original knowledge of our lost continent. The Keepers of the Texts is an office handed down from parents to children. Besides the individual power each Atlantean enjoys, they have an additional power, one vital to continuing our culture.”
“What’s that?”
“They can sense the old places, the places where our ancestors left knowledge. They are in tune with the powers that the old continent of Atlantis used to become the greatest civilization this world has ever seen.”
Jaxon remembered that strange sensation she had had when they were dying of thirst in the desert, that certainty that they should make for a distant cluster of rocks when it lay in a different direction than the highway and their only reasonable chance of being saved. She had trusted her instincts, and she had found the wonderful healing water that had saved her and Vivian, and later Grunt.
But not Brett. She hadn’t had enough to save Brett.
She pressed her hands against her eyes. This was all too much. Winston went on.
“Because of that, your parents, like the Keepers before them, had to take care not to let outsiders find out their secrets. They lived a roaming life and used a series of false names. Not even their closest friends knew their real names. I never learned their real identities.”
“So wait, you’re telling me I don’t even get to know my parents’ names? How about my name?” Jaxon shook her head in disbelief. This was worse than not knowing anything about her past at all.
“When they gave you up, they wrote a single name on your blanket. The American Child Protective Services incorporated that into your legal name.”
“Ares,” Jaxon whispered. “It was Ares, wasn’t it?”
Winston nodded.
She had always thought her middle name was strange. It was the name of the Greek god of war, a name she had never heard anyone else using, and a name that wasn’t even a girl’s name.
But it was a strong name, the name of a fighter. The name of a leader.
Jaxon felt a warmth spread through her chest. Her parents had loved her. Her parents had thought she had potential to do great things. None of the temporary foster parents she’d dealt with over the years had ever given her those two things.
She had something from them. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
And that was a whole lot more than what she’d had before.
A shout in Arabic made her whirl around.
A policeman stood at the entrance to the alleyway, an AK-47 assault rifle in his hands. He stared at them and barked out a phrase that sounded like a question.
Jaxon tensed. This policeman had been ordered to keep an eye on the People of the Sea, and he’d found two of them hiding in an alleyway right next to a school. This did not look good.
The policeman shouted something again.
Winston put a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.”
The policeman looked at him quizzically.
“It’s all right,” Winston said in a soothing voice and beckoned him to join them.
The policeman relaxed, his shoulders slumping and his hand falling away from the trigger of his weapon.
“It’s all right. Everything is fine,” Winston w
hispered, and the man shuffled into the alley. He looked half asleep.
Once he got up to them, Winston gently put a hand on his shoulder and put the palm of his other hand in front of the policeman’s face.
“Shhh.”
The man’s eyes closed, briefly reopened with sudden awareness, and then shut again. His features relaxed, and he slid down into a seated position, his back against the wall.
In another moment, he began to snore.
“Nice ability,” Jaxon said.
“It comes in handy. I loathe violence. Let’s make a move. It isn’t safe here.”
He led her to the other end of the alley, where it opened up into a street that had few pedestrians.
“We need you,” Winston said.
“For what?”
“For your ability. That’s why we’ve been searching for you all these years.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“The Atlantis Guard. We protect our people’s interests. This isn’t the first time we’ve been persecuted, although this is by far the most dangerous challenge we’ve faced in generations.”
“General Meade has created some sort of artificial Atlanteans,” Jaxon said as the terrible image seared through her mind of Brett pushing against the storm of bullets.
“Oh dear, it’s worse than we thought. But you can help. We have a team here, and we need you to find some of the old texts for us, some of the old places where our secret knowledge remains hidden. It’s the only way to fight them.”
They hurried along the nearly abandoned street, Winston in the lead.
“What kind of knowledge?”
“Secrets of healing, and of war. Sadly, we will need both if we have an army of our equals to contend with.”
Jaxon had already found one of those secrets, but she didn’t say that to Winston. This was all too new, she had too much to absorb, and she had been betrayed too many times by people claiming to want to help her for her to trust some random person on the street, even if he was one of her people.