by Jessica Gunn
I also wasn’t sure she’d forgive me for all I’d had to do to keep up the act, from ramming her van in the city to leaving her to almost drown, even if I’d known Josh would save her.
Chelsea’s gaze and bright smile met mine, and her golden ocean irises arrested my breath. Shaking her hand, making that skin to skin contact, near busted my soul in two. I’d done so many horrible things. I’d never deserved her. Chelsea’s touch after so many months without made me fall in love with her all over again.
“I’m Ethan,” I managed to get out, reminding myself every single millisecond that I was Ethan and not Trevor. Not that my name alone might be enough to let her see past this Lemurian glamour. I mean, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know how it worked, not really, but I did know that the glamour involved a mixture of actual blood magic and a mental capacity to accept a fluid appearance. As long as she or I didn’t think too deeply about who I really was, this disguise should stay intact. And it should be easy on her front because she so far hadn’t said anything. Part of my heart twisted in on itself, knowing she hadn’t see through the glamour.
“Glad to meet you both.” Chelsea thumbed over her shoulder. “Those are our charges. Zach and his friends have some special mouths on them, but the rest are well-behaved. I totally lucked out. We’re working on sifting through some layers today, might be able to dig that square tomorrow. They’ve got kayaking for rec time later.”
“Sounds like it’s non-stop around here,” I said.
She nodded. “Oh yeah. Frankly, I’m a fan of the fast pace. Keeps your focus on the kids.” She tried hiding it by looking away, but I caught the twist of her lips, the almost-frown and everything that’d caused it.
Things I’d done.
I had to get her alone. I had to make her understand.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get this out of the way,” Cody started. Already?
“Dude,” I said to him.
He lifted his hands. “You knew it was coming.” To Chelsea he said, “I’m a big fan. Have been for a while. Just wanted you to know that.”
Chelsea turned to Cody with the most practiced of smiles—I’d know, she’d used them on me for years—and said, “Thanks. Now that it’s out of the way, please let it stay that way. I know the kids know who I am, but I’d rather not let that interfere with what we’re doing here. Archaeology is what’s important.”
Cody nodded. “Agreed. That’s why I’m here, anyway. I’ll be graduating soon. Masters with a focus in Northeastern Indian cultures.”
“Sweet,” she said, though her attention was on the kids. “We’ll have to chat some time.” Then she sighed and pointed to Zach again. “I swear, this kid’s stuck in middle school.” Louder, she shouted, “Zach—stop. It. Now.”
I chuckled despite myself.
Swinging her gaze back on me, she grinned. “Go ahead. Laugh now. But know that they pied the last set of counselors in the face. And then there was something about bugs in their beds?”
“What?” I asked. Seriously?
“Yeah, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they’re apparently repeat offenders from last year and it’s become a tradition to prank counselors. Most of the time it’s been in good fun. Just warning you.”
Yes. Pranks on teachers and counselors while I was here to keep Chelsea from actually being in danger again. Hopefully none of the kids were White City plants. I didn’t like the idea of fighting and hurting children.
General Allen wouldn’t sink that low, would he?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
VALERIE
“Please just let me heal it.” Charlie’s hand gingerly slid up my arm to my left shoulder. But her fingers barely touched me, no matter how much she wanted to complete the contact. “Come on, Val.”
I shook my head, gritted my teeth, and focused on the work in front of me. The main screen display on White City ships were one hell of a trip. Though their city looked like something out of ancient history from the outside, their amphibious means of transportation were anything but. What I needed wasn’t a fully-functioning arm. I needed Trevor. But Trevor was busy playing ‘figure out how to tell Chelsea she didn’t actually kill him’ and, quite frankly, I’d rather be here doing this. Because depending on how he told her and if I was there to mitigate, she’d go full rage-mode.
Not my idea of fun.
“Valerie.”
I looked over my shoulder at Charlie and cupped her face with one hand. “I love you, and I love that you’ve been looking after me, but the pain reminds me why we’re doing this and how far we’ve already gone.”
“The plan failed,” she pointed out. “It’ll take two seconds. Come on.”
I scowled. “The plan didn’t fail, it just… hiccupped.”
“If by hiccup you mean the kind of hiccup that leads a volcano to erupt, taking the village below with it, then yeah, I suppose it did hiccup.” She turned her head and kissed my cheek before pulling away from me. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep and do it. No biggie.”
That’d be a great plan if, you know, I actually slept anymore.
Thing was, Trevor really did shoot me. I was ninety percent sure it was an accident, but since my own memories had only recently been brought back, I wasn’t certain. Even less so about how much of his antics were actually Trevor and how much might have been him being brainwashed. When we’d created this plan, Trevor had agreed to go all-in so long as it wouldn’t result in our deaths. And yet, Chelsea had almost died three times.
Even when we’d moved the world to save her, fate had wanted her dead. And now… now she’d become a sitting duck in a flock of potential collateral damage with a disguised Trevor as her only savior.
Me? I was too busy trying to reconfigure this damn White City ship to something we could use to enact the new part of the plan. Since we couldn’t stop General Allen and the White City before General Allen went and used the Lifestone to make himself immortal, we now had to figure out a way to surprise attack him and kill him. But how do you kill an immortal creature?
We still hadn’t figured that part out yet.
Charlie lifted an eyebrow, waiting for my response. “Fine,” I told her. “If you can manage it without waking me up.”
She grinned, chin lifted in satisfaction, and plopped into the seat beside me. I reached my hand out for hers and our fingers intertwined. I wished we hadn’t met like we had—me storming one of General Allen’s facilities to save Atlantean super soldiers and finding her hurt and malnourished—but I was so, so glad I’d found her. Charlie had changed me. She’d saved me.
I squeezed her hand three times, then let go. Back to work, like always. Out of the thirty-something second generation Atlantean super soldiers, we’d found or otherwise accounted for twelve of them, including Sophia, Weyland, Charlie, and Chelsea. We had just one more on our list whom we knew was alive but couldn’t figure out how to track them, or their biological parents, down. Many of them, like Chelsea, had been implanted into families, the new parents’ memories changed. But that didn’t appear to be the case for this last individual.
The other twenty-three second generation soldiers had been killed or captured by General Allen. He’d gotten to almost two-thirds of that generation. Two-thirds. Charlie and I, for all our efforts, had been too slow to save them all.
“Have you found them?” Charlie asked.
The ship we stole had come with pretty advanced bio-tracking hardware. With a few engineering changes and panel swap-outs, I’d configured it to sort of track Atlantean super soldiers, at least down to a specific region. With Charlie’s blood, we’d found two of them in the past two weeks and stowed them away in relative safety. This last person, though, they were giving us the hardest of times.
I shook my head. “Not yet. Narrowed it down to the greater Boston, Massachusetts area though, ironically enough.”
“Given the way we’ve tended to cluster around each other without realizing it, it’s probably someone Chelsea knows,” Charlie s
aid. There’d been two more soldiers captured near Charlie, but only she’d survived the ordeal. Then I’d found Charlie and rescued her. “Or if she doesn’t know them, she’s at least probably seen them a lot. Maybe a fellow student when she was at university?”
“I’m half-wondering if her parents lied to us and Sarah is actually her biological sister,” I postulated aloud. “It’s about the only thing that makes sense.”
“We can check,” Charlie said. “Do you want me to call Chelsea’s parents, too?”
“And ask about how we think they’re lying?” I asked her. “No, we can investigate that on our own.”
After the clusterfuck at TAO when Chelsea had shot Trevor, neither of Chelsea’s parents had been keen on joining up with our fight, even after we’d told them what was really happening. Without Chelsea there, and despite the fact that I’d saved their lives, old habits died hard. They’d lived in a time where our civilizations had been at war. Losses had been felt on both sides.
Still, they’d said they’d be around for the final fight if we lived long enough to have it.
Charlie shifted in her seat. “Trevor should be with her now.”
“Yeah, looking like some ex-rocker who just cleaned up his act.” A more appropriate disguise for Chelsea than anyone else. I’d given her a lot of shit back in the day, and even right up until all this crap had started happening. But the truth was, I admired her. She’d given up a lot over the years because of this war, and now this too. For what we’d made her do. And there she went, fighting the good fight in raising kids, teaching them. She’d always be a much better person than me.
Charlie chuckled. “At least he’ll draw her attention.”
“As long as he doesn’t draw the attention of anyone else.”
I reached across the dashboard in front of me and started up the ship. “Time to get moving.”
Turned out White City ships were all installed with the same Link Piece-making technology as their handy handheld devices. We’d used the technology to pick a hideout no one was likely to find us in, and that was where we’d stored the super soldiers for now.
But this ship, we needed it to complete the mission. A whole other monster we had to deal with at some point. But not before we recovered Chelsea.
“With this tug, we should be there by tomorrow,” Charlie said as she lovingly stroked the ship’s hull.
“Lucky you found this thing at all.” Even if it’d taken massive damage on exit when Charlie had moved it and her through time. If it didn’t have a cloak, the Navy would have found and confiscated this ship by now for sure. But thankfully, no one had discovered us yet, no matter how close to Pearl we’d gotten.
Since General Allen had made himself immortal three months ago, our immediate world had become a very different place. With TAO more or less destroyed, Link Piece operations had moved to Pearl, but that was no good either because the White City had already attacked there once. The Navy had since moved Atlas to an ‘undisclosed’ location, but since it’d taken me all of ten minutes of hacking to figure out where that ‘undisclosed’ location was (Iceland, for the record), I didn’t doubt that General Allen wasn’t that far behind.
I’d stayed with TAO and the Navy for as long as I could, until I’d gathered all the information I needed to make the rest of the plan work, and until their questioning had grown intolerable. Since I’d grown up with Trevor—and without Chelsea there to act as a buffer—Major Pike had insisted I’d known something I hadn’t told them. And while that had technically been true, I hadn’t known that at the time.
As predicted, I’d left TAO and the Navy behind after just one month of grieving. Within hours of leaving Pearl, Charlie had found me, teleported me to this ship, and set the record straight. She’d returned my original memories of Chelsea’s full plan to me—the plan Chelsea currently didn’t remember. Charlie had helped me to understand exactly how much had gone wrong and when, and how I’d managed to carry out the plan despite not always having the memories to back it up.
But along with having the White City and General Allen on our tail, we’ve therefore also had to deal with TAO and the Navy. Every now and then we’d intercept a memo with my name and ‘wanted’ on it, as if I were some super dangerous criminal who had to be taken down. It wasn’t the first time the Navy had thought of me as such at least.
We were simply running out of time and freedom from red tape to enact our plan.
I flicked a bunch of levers and buttons on the main dashboard and engaged the handheld helm controls so they’d keep me focused. Just another fourteen hours. Then we’d recover the last super soldier and meet up with Trevor. It wouldn’t be hard. It wouldn’t be filled with obstacles.
I forced a deep breath into my lungs and ordered myself to calm down so that the only thing that hurt or felt uncomfortable was my shoulder. And when I’d done that, a painful throb burst through the area of the wound. I’d gotten stitches and surgery, but the shoulder had never healed right. And I hadn’t exactly stayed around long enough to see it actually fixed. I moaned through the pain.
“Okay, Charlie. You win.” I turned to her, fighting to keep my expression even. “You can heal it.”
She smiled, but it was small, and lifted a hand to my shoulder. Within seconds it felt a hundred times better than before.
“Thank you,” I told her.
“Anytime. I’m always here—”
The ship’s imminent collision alarm went off, white lights flashing, seconds before something rear-ended our ship. We lost level and dropped deeper into the ocean as Charlie and I tumbled from our chairs on the Bridge. I helped her up and back into our seats.
“Receiving communications,” she said, finger hovering over the button that’d return the call.
“Don’t bother,” I told her, reaching for the thrusters. “We know who’s calling.” I tapped on the back camera display and confirmed my suspicions. The White City had found us, or at least the sect run by General Allen had. “Going to try to lose them.”
I hit the thrusters and our ship zoomed away from the scene, pulling G’s as we went. I tried my best to keep my eyes open as we lifted—cloaked—out of the water and into the air. But the other ship tailed us, not even remotely far enough behind. We weren’t going to lose them.
“Their weapons are powering!” Charlie shouted. “They’re going to take us out.”
“No way,” I said, my fingers wrapped tightly around the helm controls. “Not if I can help it.”
“Val, we need to go!”
I shook my head, flying us in a zigzag pattern across the Pacific. “I’m not abandoning this ship when we need it the most.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “Weapons firing!”
I kept hold of the thruster, my other hand on helm control, not budging.
“Valerie,” she said. “Please. Abandon ship.”
“I can get us out of this.” Just wait for it—wait for it.
The laser blasters on either side of their ship lit up and glowed dark green. The lasers grew until they were almost as thick across as the blasters themselves, then they shot off. The back end of our ship tore off and we began spinning like a top in the air, two hundred feet above the surface of the Pacific.
I grinned as we spun out of control, losing cabin pressure and maybe our lives, too. If we couldn’t have the ship, then they couldn’t either. Or the intel we’d gathered on it.
At the very last second, Charlie clapped a hand onto my shoulder and my world swam into blackness.
I came to a little while later. “Where are we?” I asked, hoping against all hope that Charlie had decided to teleport my stubborn ass out of our ship. Sitting up, I tried to orientate myself. Grass, lots of it. And a forest.
“Salem, New Hampshire,” she said. “We’re not far from the archaeology camp.” Charlie reached a hand out and pulled me up by my good arm.
“Thank you,” I said.
She shrugged it off. “I know sometimes you’re too headst
rong to quit. We can find another ship.”
“You barely got this one back to the present in one piece,” I said dryly.
Grinning, she replied, “Practice makes perfect.”
I looked around again at our surroundings, observing. Voices echoed in from somewhere in the distance and the sun was high overhead. “People? Did you bring us close to a town?”
“America’s Stonehenge, actually.” She pointed behind me and I spun, finding some stone structures half-buried in the ground behind me. “It opened a few hours ago, if memory serves, but there’s usually not many people around. I figured it was fine.”
My mind twisted around the facts. I didn’t know anything about America’s Stonehenge, except that it very definitely did not look like the Stonehenge I knew. The Stonehenge I’d witnessed Josh and the others do horrific things at.
Chills broke out along my arms. “Let’s get out of here.”
We made our way through some woods until we were in what appeared to be the main area of America’s Stonehenge. After a short retreat through the buildings, we were on the road and hopefully walking toward civilization—or enough civilization for a hotel room and a phone. We’d lost everything on that ship, and while I could easily pop over to SeaSat5 and take what we needed, they thought I’d deserted for good.
They weren’t entirely wrong. The way they’d treated Chelsea after our plan went south, even if they didn’t know about said plan, had been wrong. No, Chelsea hadn’t followed a direct order—but she wasn’t military. And yeah, maybe she shouldn’t have shot Trevor dead. Well, dead from their point of view. Maybe that was where the disconnect had come from. I’d known the whole time he was still alive, they and Chelsea hadn’t.
Eventually, we found a hotel and convinced the clerk behind the counter that we had indeed already paid for a room—thank you, magic—and we were given a room. I collapsed on the bed, Charlie next to me.