by Jessica Gunn
Valerie shut and locked the door behind us. We walked down the small hallway into a living room where they sat. A man and a woman. His hair was the same honey blond as mine, and her eyes the same hazel. She had darker skin than me but seemed to be built leaner. I must have gotten my body from her and not my stocky father. Father.
What hit me the most was the buzz. The instantaneous hum throughout my body, the same I felt with Sophia, only instead of constant and in the background, this buzz thrummed through me, pulsing in bright neon letters, saying, “I’m not only a super soldier like you, I am from you.” With a single glance, I knew: these were the people who gave birth to me, and there was a connection between us that ran deeper than blood.
As soon as the man and woman—my parents—saw me, they stood.
Valerie slid past me from the hallway into the living room. “I know this is a moment and all, but we don’t have a lot of time.” She stood between my parents and me, pointing to each of us in turn. “Chelsea, these are your parents, Markus and Alacia. And this is your daughter, Chelsea.”
Markus—my father, whose short hair and wide eyes looked so familiar—was the first to move. He took a step forward, arms outstretched as if he’d waited forever to see me again and couldn’t contain the feeling. I didn’t share it, as callous as that was. This, all of it, was too weird. Biological parents. Adoption. Valerie tying us back together after all she’d done because of my Atlantean heritage in the past.
Even still, I held my ground. I didn’t move forward, but I also didn’t retreat. My mother did the same. The wrinkles around her eyes gave her away, though. It was clear she wanted to act. Instead, she gave me the space her husband hadn’t realized I needed.
Then I looked to my father, and the moment our eyes met, I broke. Tears stung my eyes. These people were unquestionably my parents. Why couldn’t I accept it along with their open arms?
My father must have seen the same thing in my eyes as I did his because, despite my arms remaining at my sides, he crossed the distance between us and hugged me. I hesitated for a few long, awkward moments before returning the embrace.
I didn’t know how we got here. I didn’t know why they’d put me up for adoption—although the easy answer seemed to be to keep me hidden, or at least to try keeping me a secret, because of all the opposition to super soldiers. I didn’t know any of that, and yet hugging my father felt like the most natural thing in the world. Like his arms were meant to hold me, to show me the world as much as to protect me from it. He smelled of sea air. It was like he’d bottled the air of Atlantis—or, what I assumed Atlantis would smell like.
Finally, my father let me go. I looked to my mother. A sad smile was in the process of shattering her calm, collected façade—a mannerism I’d clearly gotten from her. She stepped across the rug-covered living room and held her hand out to mine. I grabbed it and pulled her into an embrace. Even more so than my father’s, her embrace felt like home. Finally, the buzzing stopped.
“Chelsea,” my mother said. She cupped my face and brushed her fingers over my cheeks like an artist examining their work. “You’ve grown into such a beautiful woman.”
Her words didn’t have the desired effect. Instead of being happy she thought as much of me, fear skewered my gut. What if I didn’t match up with what they’d hoped their daughter would turn into? What if they didn’t like what they saw? What if they were only pretending to side with the Lemurians, with Valerie, to draw me out and take me with them back to Atlantis?
“That’s not remotely the case, Chelsea,” my father said as he placed a hand on my shoulder. “I assure you of that.”
“What?” All of this touching suddenly felt too uncomfortable. I shrugged out of the way and cocked my head to the side. “Did you just read my thoughts?”
He frowned. “It is a power I have. I cannot turn it off, as much as I would like.”
I swallowed hard. The only person I’d ever let into my head before was Trevor. And as awkward and annoying as that could be, this felt so much worse. “Can you please try not to? I can’t… that’s a lot.”
He nodded deeply. “I will try. Telepathy was not a skill I ever discovered how to master.”
I looked away. “Fair enough.” I barely had control over my abilities half the time. “Why did you give me up for adoption, then? Why wait all this time to show up?”
His lips formed a thin line and my mother stiffened. “There’s more to what happened than you know.”
“Obviously,” I said. And clearly more than you want to tell me.
Valerie stepped into my peripheral vision. “I’ve gotta go help Trevor on SeaSat5. Keep this short and bring them back with you.”
I nodded to her. “Will do. Thank you, Valerie.”
Then she was gone, teleporting out in a wave of fire. The heat kissed my skin as I watched her leave. My gut twisted but not from the awkwardness of the situation Valerie had left me in. I was worried about her. What’d happened since our chat at the Franklin months ago? And who’d taught her extra Lemurian abilities?
“Please,” my mother said, gesturing to the couch. “Sit with us so we might explain.”
She was slender but built in the ways I was, with toughness and muscle wrapped in outward grace. Bet she wasn’t nearly the klutz I was, though.
“Don’t know about that,” my father commented, chuckling.
My eyes snapped to his. “Hey.”
He sat down beside my mother. “Apologies. Like I said, I cannot always control my ability. Least of all with other super soldiers.”
I followed suit and plopped into the chair opposite them. “Well, that makes two people who can read my thoughts now whenever they want. Sorry if you find anything you don’t like.” I’m not exactly a nice person.
My father frowned. “To be fair, you weren’t created to be a nice person. But I believe you’re an emissary for good.”
I snorted. Emissary for good, my ass. The way he’d said “created” tripped me up. “What do you mean?”
“You know that Atlantean super soldiers were genetically engineered, yes?” he asked me.
I looked from him to my mother. “Yeah. The Atlanteans made us to end the war, only the war ended and our ancestors escaped the city before they ever had the chance to fight.”
My parents exchanged a dark, serious look that had me wondering what the hell I’d done to get grounded this time.
“What’s wrong?” I asked when they didn’t speak. “What part of the picture have I gotten wrong?”
“Honestly?” my mother asked. “Most of it.”
Well, okay then. I rolled my eyes. “Figures.”
My parents shared a knowing look, both smiling. What? Did one of them roll their eyes as much as me? Probably. A trait I’d passed on to Sarah.
Sarah. She wasn’t my sister. Not by blood. Did that matter? I thought back on our lives together—the family trips, the shared clothes, the band. No. It didn’t matter that we didn’t share the same blood. She was my sister and that was that.
“Well, to begin, we are super soldiers,” my mother said, sliding a lock of hair behind her ear. She wore silver earrings in a design I’d never seen before. It was geometric, with straight, sharp lines but in a shape that didn’t fall into a square or rectangle category. It had too many sides, too many lines crossing dimensions into 3D.
Trevor would love it. It’d confuse his mind enough that he’d stop whatever he was doing and figure it out.
My father cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” I said. “You two are like me?”
“We’re the first generation, yes,” my mother said. And that was all she said.
“First generation?” I asked.
They didn’t respond, wanting me to figure something out for myself.
My brain sifted through the dots of all the information I had about Atlantis and super soldiers and the war, and came up short of connecting any relevant ones. According to everything I’d been told by Sophia and Dr. Go
rdon, Sophia and I were the descendants of super soldiers who fled Atlantis with other refugees. Our specific genetic markers, the engineered bits of us, were passed down through our family lines to us. Because the genetic markers were so uncommon, sometimes they were recessive and didn’t show up in every generation.
This left Dr. Gordon as a descendant of a plain old Atlantean refugee—she had a single innate power and Sophia and I could feel her presence. But she wasn’t like us. And all the other plain old Atlanteans in existence that weren’t super soldiers all had one innate power each, a power that differed from person to person.
That was what I knew. That was what I’d always assumed to be true, even when Valerie had said she’d found my parents. I thought that maybe they’d given me up for adoption because I was a super soldier and they were trying to hide me. But now these people in front of me said they were the first generation—as in, the genetic engineering had happened some forty or so years ago. Not thousands.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. How could we have gotten the truth so wrong? “I’m confused.”
“No, you’re not,” my father said. He tapped the side of his head. “You’re getting closer.”
“I really wish you’d stop that,” I said dryly. “I get that you can’t shut the power off, but it’s rather annoying to have you responding aloud to my thoughts.”
He smiled small. “I’ll refrain from doing so.”
“Thank you,” I said. My thoughts trailed backward. How could I be close if that wasn’t the truth?
First generation.
Wait a second… “Are you trying to tell me you’re not only Atlantean, you’re actually from the city itself?” I asked him, then looked to my mother. “You were there when it was destroyed?”
They both gave small nods to the affirmative.
“How?” I asked slowly, trying to wrap my mind around it. “I don’t understand.” Time travel I understood. I’d done it enough times by now. But this?
“After those of us in the first generation began dying in the war,” my father started, “the people in charge of the Promethean Project wanted us to procreate with each other, so they could have our offspring in addition to the other children they were taking from the more powerful Atlantean families. Those other children were injected with the same medicines they gave your mother and I—and all of us in the first generation—to give us the enhancements. That happened when we were newborns. But you were born of super soldiers, as were many others. There were forty-eight in your generation in total.”
“There are forty-eight others like me out there?” I knew about Sophia and Weyland, and I also knew more existed thanks to Valerie’s initiative to round them up and save them from General Allen and from being recruited by Atlantis. But forty-eight?
“Not everyone made it out of the Destruction,” my mother said. “As it was, you were a toddler when we escaped.”
My mind jumped from fact to fact, my thoughts whirring with this new information. Not only was there more than one set of us super soldiers, my parents were telling me they were in Atlantis the night of the Destruction.
The world suddenly slipped into a singular, obvious, laser-sharp focus. My vision narrowed to a pinprick.
I’d seen that night. I’d seen them and that toddler. I’d seen them running. All in that dream, the one I’d had on SeaSatellite5 after I’d plugged the leak at the outpost. I scrubbed my face, unbelieving and unable to wrap my mind around this. “I’m from Atlantis. Like, I was actually born in the city.”
My father nodded, a comforting look taking over his features. He reached a hand out to me. I didn’t lean into it. “Yes,” he said. “You were barely over a year old when we had to leave. They knew you had the genetic markers. You weren’t made a super soldier. You, like the others in your generation, were born one. That made you dangerous because they didn’t know what your full capabilities would be.”
“And clearly that was a legitimate worry,” my mother said. Her eyes were tight, wrinkled. Concerned. “You are powerful, Chelsea.”
My hands shook. I clasped them together to try hiding my anxiety. I wasn’t who I thought I was. Not only wasn’t I a Danning, I hadn’t even been born in this century.
Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I was, had been flipped on its head. Completely and irrevocably.
The thoughts took over my mind, heated my neck and lit a fire in my veins. Again I’d been lied to. Again I’d been played, in some measure, by the people closest to me. If my parents had known, why had they kept it hidden this whole time?
It took all of my willpower, but I swallowed down every thought and emotion, converting my heart into a blank slate only big enough to handle small pieces of information.
“Well, that explains a lot,” I admitted, to give them something rather than remain silent and have to watch their faces grow from concern to fear. “But I’m not as powerful as you think.”
“SeaSat5 is exactly the reason we know you are powerful, dear,” my mother said, leveling me with a look.
A small splash of fear trickled up my throat. I allowed myself that much. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“SeaSat5 is a Link Piece,” my father said.
“I know,” I said. “I was the one who figured it out.”
“No, honey,” he said. “You’re the one who made it in the first place.”
My stomach dropped. If I hadn’t been sitting, I surely would have collapsed. The dam I’d built to stop the emotions and whirring thoughts from taking over me in one giant gyre, it failed. Everything came flooding forward in a single moment of clarity.
The outpost. The war. The buzzing I felt when I was on SeaSat5. Me teleporting to Trevor after meeting him only once for all of five minutes. Valerie and Dave, Thompson and TruGates. All of them had wanted SeaSat5. Valerie had helped us protect it. Even General Allen wanted the damn thing.
My jaw slid open. He knew. He knew. He’d willingly slaughtered countless numbers of Lemurians and Atlantean super soldiers, but not me. He’d toyed with me, tortured me, but had never once sought out to kill me. Or Weyland. He’d exiled Weyland before it became a problem.
“Son of a bitch,” I exclaimed. I cupped my hands over my ears, holding my head. If I heard any more revelations, I wasn’t sure what I’d do or if I could handle it. I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t.
But there was one thing I wanted to know. One thing that had bugged me ever since Dr. Hill had deemed it Atlantean.
“The journal we found at the outpost,” I said to my parents. “My colleague said it was written in Atlantean and Greek, that it was a diary. Was it yours? It talked about couples escaping Atlantis with children.”
My parents exchanged a grim, sad look. My father answered, “No. But if you showed it to us we could tell you who it belonged to.”
I stood. “It’s on SeaSat5 with the other artifacts from the outpost find. I could bring you there right now.”
Both my mother and father leapt to their feet.
“That’s a good idea. Your Lemurian friend was right,” she said, a nasty tone in her words on the last line. She must not like Valerie even though I’d gotten the distinct impression Valerie had saved them. Interesting. “We aren’t safe here. We aren’t safe anywhere anymore. Between the Atlanteans who want their soldiers back for war and this new organization of White City soldiers, we’re all in danger.”
“SeaSatellite5, despite being a massive target, is the safest place to be right now,” I said. “There’re a few of us there, and some of our allies.”
My mother bowed her head a little in acknowledgement. “Then let’s go, if it’s okay with you?”
I swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure if it was okay that they were suddenly in my life, that I had to accept them and everything else so quickly, but I knew better; I didn’t have a choice. “It’s going to have to be, huh?”
“Indeed,” my mother said.
My father peeked around my mother’s head. �
��One thing.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Was it still there?” he asked. “The Link Piece we used to send you here?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Were you in an outpost in the Sargasso Sea when you left?”
We’d long assumed it to be an outpost, a weapon’s storage facility or Link Piece holding area, and not the city of Atlantis. Maybe we’d gotten it wrong?
“Outpost…” my father echoed softly, a hint of edge in his voice. He was lying about something. I set it aside for now. “I suppose so, yes, if that’s what you call it. The Link Piece was Egyptian, all black, smooth stone, and”—he held up his hands to about a foot wide in front of him—“about this big. It’s from Tell El-Amarna.”
I bit my lip. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I’d obsessed over it for days. So had Dr. Hill. The art piece that’d given the identity of the outpost find away. The black chunk of rock with relief writing on it that’d convinced me the outpost was Atlantean.
“Amarna,” I said, thinking of the artwork. It sat in my office on SeaSat5, on a shelf behind my desk, for all to see. The way it’d been so vividly displayed on the outpost. The way it wouldn’t have been back in Egypt in its time. “Yes. I know which Link Piece you’re talking about. We never figured out where it came from. Every time I look at it, even with the Waterstar map in mind, all I get is a blue blur.”
My father nodded. “That’s because you can’t see where you’ve been before, where you’ve time traveled, not the direct line. You only see the pieces and paths around it.”
My heart dropped heavy and quick, as if I were on a massive roller coaster. Whenever I tried to look at SeaSat5, I saw that same exact blur. Why had I never guessed the truth?
“We should go,” my mother said. “Before we’re caught here.”
I nodded quickly, trying to push everything back down again. Facing the captain with all this news would require a clear head. Dr. Gordon would have questions, too, as would Sophia and Trevor and all of TAO.
If I was going to get through this day, this horrific week, I had to bottle all of this up and throw it out the window.