With not a moment to spare, I gave Atlas a rough push from behind to force him up the final few feet and over the lip of the crater. A magnificent wind rushed around me as the trunk came so close to crushing us that I could almost feel the bark scrape down my backside. The ground quaked as the broken sequoia, reduced to a log of epic proportions, crashed to the earth, snapping an entire row of maples as if they were toothpicks. With any luck, the trunk had flattened Nox’s corpse in the process.
We plowed through the burning maple fields toward the garage. Even with a sprained ankle and drugs pumping through his veins, Atlas soldiered on, one grimace-inducing step after another. The compound’s security detail was too preoccupied with the fire to notice us limping through the chaos.
Our luck only lasted so long. We arrived at the garage right as a mercenary emerged from the door. He froze, noting our non-official attire. His hand strayed instinctively toward his holster.
“Excuse me, sir,” Atlas said, then launched out of my grip with explosive speed. He drilled his meaty knuckles into the guard’s temple in the most devastating punch I’d ever seen. The mercenary’s head clanged against the garage’s aluminum siding on his way to the ground, where he lay still.
Inside the garage, we ducked low and weaved through the armada of syrup delivery trucks. One of them idled, its diesel engine chugging away. The keys dangled from the ignition, abandoned by its driver at the sound of the explosions.
I helped Atlas into the passenger seat and climbed behind the wheel. As I reached for the stick shift, I realized that despite having my driver’s license, I had never driven anything larger than Atlas’s Silverado. Now, I was about to drive a box truck on a mad escape from a burning maple field.
“Just pretend it’s a really big pedicab,” Atlas suggested.
I taxied out of the garage, retracing the route the driver I’d taken hostage had followed. When I reached the main gates, they had been sealed closed. Fortunately, I had planned for this.
“Okay,” Dec said, “so you’ve got your entrance, your distraction, and eventually, your man. But that doesn’t mean shit if you can’t get out.” He stretched out of his wheelchair to poke the front gates on the map. “The moment you start burning the place down, those doors are going to snap shut to keep the feds out and trap you inside. And they’re not some crappy chainlink fence you can drive through either—we’re talking slabs of reinforced steel. You could drive a Mac truck into those at sixty miles per hour and you’d probably bounce right off.”
Dec was, annoyingly, right. And without a ladder to scale the walls that circled the compound and bolt-cutters to hack through the razor wire on top, we might as well dig a hole to China to get out.
A squiggle on the map’s southeastern edge caught my eye. According to our materials, it was a natural spring that Nox used as the primary reservoir for his sprinkler system.
I raised an eyebrow at Dec. “What if I made my own door?”
We sped past the sealed guard gate and down the access road. When the outline of the spring became visible beyond a nearby row of maples, I asked Atlas, “How strong is your arm?”
“I was an all-star pitcher on my baseball team. Of course, that was Little League …”
With one hand still on the wheel, I withdrew a brick of Hydrobane from my bag and handed it to Atlas. “Then pretend it’s the final inning of the Little League World Series.” I pointed to the approaching spring. “Hit the edge of that pond as close to the wall as you can.”
Looking perplexed, Atlas pulled himself out the window and sat on the sill. He waited so long that I thought he might chicken out. If he threw it when we were too close to the spring, we’d be incinerated in the process.
He cocked back his arm, and with a cry of exertion, he finally let it rip. Through the windshield, I watched the brick soar through the air and tumble twice along the gravel road.
Then it plunged into the shallows of the spring.
I reached across the front seat and jerked Atlas back into the truck as the Hydrobane detonated. Half of the natural spring instantly turned into steam. The blast ripped through the wall as though it were made of papier-mâché.
I floored the accelerator so we’d have enough momentum to navigate the obstacle course ahead. The truck splashed down into the crater’s soggy valley, popped up over the opposite lip, and barreled through a mound of rocky debris. As soon as we’d passed through the hole in the wall, I took a hard right to avoid the forest ahead.
A victory cry burst out of me when we reached the main road and the truck’s wheels rumbled onto asphalt. “Now are you ready to admit that I’ve got street smarts?” I asked.
Atlas didn’t respond. He had slouched down in his seat and was gaping around the truck’s cab in unrestrained terror. From the sheen of sweat that had repopulated his brow, I knew that the mixture of drugs still loitering in his bloodstream had made an uninvited resurgence.
I snapped my fingers to get his attention. “Stay with me, Atlas. It’s just an aftershock from those drugs. Keep looking at my face and everything will be okay.”
Instead, his gaze had focused out the windshield on the road ahead, zeroing in on some imaginary horror. “Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God, oh God, oh God …”
It was imperative that I get him to a hospital—he needed detox and an IV of fluids, fast. If the dehydration didn’t kill him, the shock of these living nightmares might. “Tell me what you’re seeing,” I instructed him. “Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m at the campfire for her birthday.” His voice quivered. “She takes a sip of the Blyss, and I scream out for her to stop, but she can’t hear me. Her eyes roll back and she starts to seize, so her friends all scatter, leaving her to die alone. I can do nothing, I can do absolutely …” He petered off as his breathing escalated into full-blown hyperventilation.
I typed “hospital” into the truck’s GPS, and chose the nearest one, in Saint Johnsbury. “It’s only a nightmare, it’s not real.” But of course, Selene’s death had been real, whether he’d been there or not, so I tried a different approach: distraction. “Tell me something I don’t know about you. I’ve saved your life twice now, so I think I deserve to finally know your first name.”
Atlas had covered his eyes with his hands, but he’d apparently heard me. “Gordon,” he said. “Gordon Atlas. I was real chubby as a kid, so they used to call me El Gordo. It was traumatic.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Well you turned out okay in the looks department. Tell me something else. How about the riddle? You said it was at some old college in Maine?”
The color was starting to return to his face, though his eyes remained glazed over. “Elderfield Hollow, on a small island not far off the coast. The college closed its doors fifty years ago—small schools throughout New England have come and gone like that for years.” He swallowed hard. “The line hallowed halls told me it must be about a university, and there was something about a snaw, a popular ship among pirates. As far as I know, Elderfield Hollow is the only island with both a college and a history of piracy.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure Nox’s security force hadn’t followed us. With their master dead and the drug fields reduced to ash, we were the least of their concerns now. “Was the riddle more specific about where to look, or are we going to have to dig up an entire island?”
Atlas forced himself to take deep breaths. “That part was unclear. The riddle mentioned the Garden of Hesperides. It’s a Greek myth, an orchard that Hera owned on the edge of the world, with golden apple trees that could grant immortality.”
My heart swelled with hope. “Plants with the power to give life? Sounds familiar.” I fumbled around in the center console until I found a canteen of water. There wasn’t much left, but it was better than nothing. “Drink this.”
Atlas greedily poured the contents of the bottle over his chapped lips and down his throat, drinking so fast that he choked. When he was done sputtering, he continued. �
�According to myth, the divine hero Hercules was tasked with twelve labors—twelve feats of heroism—to earn the forgiveness of the gods. The eleventh labor required him to steal an apple from the orchard, which was guarded by a giant serpent.” He shook his head. “That’s honestly all I remember, but once I sit down with some research books, I swear—”
“You’re going to sit down with a doctor first,” I told him. “Then we will find this mythical garden of yours.”
Thirty minutes later, I pulled up outside the hospital in Saint Johnsbury. The syrup truck earned more than a few bewildered looks as I helped Atlas down to the curb and through the emergency room’s sliding doors.
The attendant took one look at the boy draped over my shoulders and paged for help. Two nurses assisted him into a wheelchair. “Not one of these again,” he mumbled.
“Someone drugged his beer at a party,” I lied. “I told him not to leave it unattended.” This was the most plausible story I could come up with. The last thing we needed right now was an inquisition by the state police, the FBI, and the DEA.
The attending nurse looked skeptical, but in the end, she admitted him and firmly instructed me to stay put in the waiting room. Under the pretense of leaning in to plant a goodbye kiss on Atlas’s forehead, I slipped my extra cell phone into his pocket.
As they rolled him away, Atlas hoarsely called out, “Promise me you won’t go looking for the magical garden without me!” If they hadn’t thought he was totally tripping before, they would now.
“I won’t!” I yelled after him.
It was the second lie I’d told since we arrived at the hospital.
I walked back through the sliding doors and out to the truck. Atlas would be safe in hospital care for now. I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting any longer when the Serengeti Sapphire was nearly within my grasp. And if the police came by the hospital and found a stolen delivery truck with a link to an incinerated drug compound up north, I’d end up locked up before I had a chance to complete the quest.
So I sent a telepathic apology to Atlas, plugged the coordinates to Elderfield Hollow into the truck’s GPS, and began the four-hour drive to the Maine coast. With Horace Nox dead, there would be nothing to stop me from finding the Sapphire, nothing to hold me back from reuniting with Echo. By sunrise, I would have my life back.
Meanwhile, back at Glacier Notch Farms
Survival was all about timing. In most circumstances, the difference between life and certain death came down to a single choice you made in a tenth of a second, a weakness that you exploited, an opportunity that you seized.
Horace Nox knew all about timing. It was how he’d survived an ambush that had killed half his battalion twenty years ago. It was how he had risen to the throne atop his Boston empire.
So as he plummeted eight stories from the greenhouse, he rotated his body and let himself fall. Right as he plunged into the burning canopy of a maple tree, he reached out for one of its fiery limbs and seized it with his non-broken hand.
Nox had made a career of agony, but even this hurt. Under his incredible downward velocity and the weight of his body, his fingers snapped as he’d grabbed the burning branch. His shoulder ripped free of its socket. However, he slowed himself enough that when his body hit the ground below, it wasn’t a meteoric impact.
Nox lay in the soil, stunned and taking inventory of his numerous injuries. Several broken ribs. Right shoulder dislocated. Minor burns covering his face and arms. Most of his fingers mangled. All the while, the canopy overhead seemed to burn in slow motion, dumping embers around him like a genocide of fireflies.
A heavy crack snapped Nox out of his stupor, and through the canopy he saw something else: the massive sequoia falling down to squash him. Adrenaline kicked in and he scampered through the trees. He could feel his twisted, bruised, and broken body resist his every movement. In the end, he escaped by a margin of a few feet. Any slower and the monstrous redwood would have crushed him at the ankles.
“Wilbur …” he whispered, gazing at the fallen tree. His brother was undoubtedly dead somewhere under the log.
But above all, Horace Nox loved himself, so there was something far more important to do than mourning his brother: finding the Tides bitch and her boyfriend. While the girl could die a torturous death for all he cared, the boy was his last tether to the slave journal. If he died, so did the location of the Serengeti Sapphire.
After he’d rammed his arm into a nearby tree, popping his shoulder back into the socket, Nox limped through the burning field toward the crumpled knot of steel and shattered glass that used to be the greenhouse. He would tear the I-beams apart with his bare, broken hands if that’s what it took to find the boy. And then he would squeeze him like a wet rag until the truth came out.
Nox wasted no time in assembling a team of his best mercenaries to comb through the wreckage for survivors. They had only begun to sift through the greenhouse debris when a third and final explosion rocked the compound.
Ten minutes later, he stood in front of the gaping, jagged hole in his perimeter wall. The underground spring was slowly replenishing the evaporated reservoir, filling in the tire tracks that the two little bastards had left during their escape.
The chief of his security force jogged up to his side. “Your suspicions were correct—they took one of the delivery trucks. How do you want us to proceed, sir?”
Nox pulled out his mobile phone. The screen was shattered, a spider web of misfiring pixels, but the processor inside had survived the fall. And as he pulled up the GPS locators that allowed him to see where all of his trucks were at any given time, he saw one blip heading east.
“Sir?” the mercenary repeated. “Do you want us to pursue the stolen truck?” He couldn’t take his eyes off Nox’s gnarled fingers, which were struggling to operate his phone. “Do you … require medical attention?”
Nox took a vial of Blyss from his pocket and chugged it in one gulp. Over the next few minutes, it would slowly deaden him to the pain racking his body.
“Turn the fertilizer back on,” Nox ordered the security chief. “In all quadrants. I want this field and all the product incinerated before the authorities get here. I’ll handle our missing inventory.” He pointed to the pistol strapped to the guard’s hip. “Oh, and give me your sidearm.”
The security chief handed over his weapon and Nox gingerly closed his fractured hand around its grip. The great thing about guns was that it didn’t matter if you had nine broken fingers.
You only needed one to pull a trigger.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. CUMBERLAND WARWICK
Columbia, South Carolina | February 17, 1865
In the moments following the slave quarters’ implosion, I stood paralyzed with a despair incomparable even to the bloodiest nights of my military career. Staring at the mountain of fiery rubble that had collapsed on Malaika and his son, my beating heart petrified into cold, inanimate stone.
But when all seemed lost, over the fire’s steady crackle, I heard a sound that filled me with optimism: a single cough. Then another. Forgetting my fear of fire, I set the Serengeti Sapphire aside and plunged into the wreckage. The smoldering wood and tin burned away the flesh on my fingers. Even now, it is with great pain that I hold the pen to write this letter. But hope trumps any agony, so I dug until my flesh puckered.
When the digging was done, I unearthed a bittersweet miracle.
Malaika had, to my great sorrow, perished in the collapse. His head hung askew where the largest rafter had broken his neck. I had little time to mourn because another weak cough escaped from below him. When I mustered the strength to roll my companion’s tremendous form aside, I discovered the source of the signs of life: young Jaro. As his last dying act, his father had used his own mighty back, strong from a lifetime of tea leaf harvests, to shelter Jaro from the falling debris.
I scooped up the semiconscious boy in my arms and carried him away from the fiery ruins, so he would not wake to the sight of his father. Beneath t
he shelter of a weeping willow, I lay him among the roots. His face was streaked with soot and sweat. Smoke inhalation had aggravated his illness, rendering every breath ragged and uncertain. Any doubts that the boy sprawled before me was Malaika’s son were whisked away when his gold-flecked eyes blinked open.
Upon seeing me, Jaro shrank back. I cannot fault him—he had probably seen no kindness from our people since the day of his kidnapping. I chose my next words carefully. “Jaro, I was sent by your father. Sent to bring you this.” Spectacle speaks more convincingly than words, so I unsheathed the mystical Sapphire from its burlap sack.
As the orchid’s azure glow lit Jaro’s face, his eyes transformed from fear to wonder. “Yakuti …” he whispered. His father, before cruel providence tore his son away, must have shared with him the legend of the flower, because Jaro excitedly plucked one of its radiant petals. Hope swelled in me as he pressed the blue curiosity to his tongue.
I was watching him chew when someone struck me savagely over the head. Consciousness forsook me. Hours later, my skull still throbs as fierce as my scorched fingers. When I regained my faculties, I was alone beneath the willow. The boy and the flower were gone. Through my bleary eyes, beyond the fiery mirage of the mansion, I observed a wagon speeding away down the long drive, away from Magnolia Black. I swear, from within the shadowed canopy of the carriage, I saw two eyes, filled with stardust and a thirst for life, gazing right back.
I fear I shall never know Jaro’s fate, whether he escaped north, whether illness took him, or whether the Sapphire turned out to be the miracle Malaika zealously believed it to be.
To my dying day, however, I will think of that boy, and I will wonder.
In a kingdom of waves, these hallowed halls
Nightingale, Sing Page 25