by Jessica Gunn
She yelped and hopped off the stool, clasping her neck. “What the hell, Chelsea?! Get out! Get out before I call the cops!”
She raced to the phone hanging on the wall, but I beat her to it, holding a hand out in front of me.
“Wait a minute. Think. Concentrate on Atlantis. On you and me, our friendship and this dumb rivalry. On how even when we hated each other, we still gravitated to the same space, whether that was classes in college or shows at the Franklin.”
Her eyes narrowed, seething, as her shoulders rose and fell in a quick staccato. I was getting through to her.
“Think about why you came to the Juxe show in Jersey despite knowing one hundred percent I was going to sing that song about you,” I said. “No one else in their right mind would have risked that. But you did.”
“I wanted to call you out,” she said. “Like how I agreed to feed the paparazzi what they wanted that first summer after the station disappeared.”
I shook my head, a slow, understanding smile forming on my lips. “You came to Juxe because I was there and so was Weyland. He’s like us. And you came that night at the Franklin because Sophia was there. We’re super soldiers, Lexi. They created us on Atlantis and after our parents whisked us away to the future, to try keeping us separated and safe so no one could hurt us, we started gravitating toward each other anyway. Weyland found me on SeaSat5. Sophia found me at TAO after SeaSat5 was taken. My other friend Charlie found me through Trevor’s friend Valerie. You and I”—I gestured between us—“we’ve always been together. Always. Ever since, I suspect, your parents brought you directly here. You must have been a lot older than me and the others at the time. Five, maybe six years old.”
“You’re a year older than me,” she gritted out. Her eyes blinked rapidly, tears welling up. One slipped free as she said, “You’re talking crazy.”
“No, I’m not. That seal on your neck—it’s to block your memories and your powers. Our parents must have known each other if they placed us so close together. Think about it, Lexi. Don’t you remember the city at all? The white buildings and water-filled sidewalks. The ponds and birds and crazy-colored fishes and flowers. The smell of the Atlantic wafting across the air.”
She swallowed hard, gulping down a huge breath. “I’ve seen it in my dreams.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay to remember. To know it’s real.” I reached out and Lexi fell into the embrace. For long moments I held her like I had after her first heartbreak. Like we’d always been best friends and always would be. Then, out of nowhere, she snapped out of the hug, her eyes going wild.
“What?” I asked her. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re not my parents,” she said quickly, her gaze darting around the room. “They’re not related to me. Oh, god—Chelsea, they’re not even Atlantean.”
“What?”
I didn’t have time to get an answer. The front door crashed opened and two adults dressed in various shades of brown and green barreled down the hallway. The ceramic tile beneath our feet vibrated and shook.
Her parents were home.
Chapter Thirty-Six
VALERIE
I heard Chelsea scream my name before her phone call even connected. Tossing my phone to the side, I vaulted through the back door of her friend’s house and followed the telltale thuds and smacks of bodies fighting.
“Get back, Lexi!” Chelsea shouted, firing off a wave of water as I rounded the corner and let my own attack loose. My fireball met with a hunk of ceramic tile and smoked out. My stomach clenched. White City soldiers. Here?
“Retreat,” I shouted. An obvious course of action, but Chelsea was almost as stubborn as Trevor. She’d just as quickly stay and fight a pointless battle as she would leave and never try to fight again.
Chelsea shook her head and squeezed her hand. The wave she’d grabbed from the air and thrown at one of the White City soldiers—Lexi’s parents— froze midair. Then Chelsea’s ice lance skewered one of them.
Lexi—the other girl, I guessed—screamed. I supposed Chelsea hadn’t explained as much as I’d thought. I sent another fireball at the soldier and added some extra strength to it at the end. Chelsea rushed him during the distraction, sliding to kick his legs out from under him. She hopped up as he fell and grabbed Lexi by the arm.
“Now would be a fantastic time for—”
I handed over the necklace that she and Charlie had used to make a Link Piece that’d return us to the abandoned European mansion we’d made into our base. Chelsea now wore the engagement ring around her finger. She wrapped the chain around her hand and then grasped Lexi’s arm. I put one hand on Chelsea and the other on Lexi.
“Don’t let go,” Chelsea told her.
“O-Okay,” Lexi said, tears in her eyes and confusion written all over her face. Poor girl. What a shitty way to be shown the real world we lived in: your parents dying right in front of you.
Chelsea’s gaze met mine and I nodded, anchored securely to her. Like hell I’d let go and get lost in the time void. Nope. I could live without that happening.
Before the White City soldier recovered, Chelsea transferred us back to the mansion.
After Chelsea had calmed Lexi down and explained everything that was going on, and after Trevor and Lexi very awkwardly reconnected, we left her with the other super soldiers. They’d been in the same position, for the most part. Not many of the men and women Charlie and I had recovered had known what was going on. And only one or two, not including Charlie, had been rescued by me directly from General Allen’s clutches.
The four of us plus Weyland and Sophia, who, despite now being in on our plan and the hideout, still hated what we were doing. I didn’t care. We needed every super soldier we could get, and that included them. And I think they knew that on some level, so they didn’t leave.
Well, they also had no Link Piece to go home with, so that could have been part of it, too. Besides, without knowing how much juice this Link Piece-making machine had, it’d been decided to stop using it for now. The last thing we needed was for it to die while we were all stuck here. If it did, we’d have to take our chances going out and finding a Return Piece the old-fashioned way. Just the thought of combing major cities for one made my skin crawl. We had no time for adventures like that.
There was never enough time, it seemed.
We sat around a small table, a notebook of equations and theories written inside of it by both Trevor and me.
“Do we actually have a plan to stop General Allen now that he’s invincible?” Weyland asked.
“Immortal, not invincible,” I corrected. “Two different things, both of which really mean nothing, if you think about it. Plenty of mythological figures were supposed to be both of those and yet they were defeated.”
Chelsea rubbed her temples viciously, as if doing so would coax an answer out of nowhere. “I can’t think of anything. The problem isn’t that he’s immortal, it’s that he’s feeding off the time energy inside the Lifestone to make himself immortal, right?”
Trevor nodded and pointed to the notebook on the table. “Exactly. We’ve been thinking about this for a few months now and we might have a plan.”
I reached forward and opened to middle of the notebook and splayed the diagrams for them to see. “The easiest option is to dump him in a black hole where time doesn’t exist anymore. But unless anyone’s got a secret spaceship they haven’t been sharing with the class, that idea’s out.”
“At least in the conventional sense,” said Charlie.
Trevor leaned in closer. “Yes. So how about we trap him in the past, in about the only surefire method we can think of?”
“What do you have in mind? If he can see Link Pieces like Atlanteans…” Confusion streaked down Chelsea’s face.
“Stick him with the dinosaurs, basically,” Trevor said. “We bring him—and it will take all of us to keep him restrained—back in time to when there weren’t any people around who could even make Link Pieces. The
n we trap him there, hundreds or thousands of years before civilization. If he manages to stay immortal, he’ll die when the meteor hits. And if that doesn’t get him, the Ice Age will.”
“Dinosaurs,” Weyland said incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, he’s not,” said Sophia as she relaxed in her chair. “How exactly do you plan on bringing him there if your Link Piece devices have minimal charges left?”
Trevor and I shared a look that made Chelsea’s eyes roll. “Oh, here we go,” she said. “Wonder Twins have something slipped up their sleeves again.”
I let it slide. She’d found out only just this morning about what had really happened over the past few months. She deserved to be irritable about it for at least another hour or two.
“Atlas,” I said.
The three of them didn’t say anything to that, and it was probably for the best. Because I next had to explain exactly how we’d use Atlas and how we were going to get the ship in the first place, and I knew, I just knew, Weyland and Sophia would fight it. Maybe even Chelsea, too.
“It’s got a time drive on it,” I explained when no one spoke. “We detonate the time drive and it’ll create a space-time tear and/or a black hole that should hold General Allen in place long enough for us to escape.”
Chelsea scoffed. “Look, I know I’m not some prodigy-level scientist like you two, but I’ve watched enough sci-fi movies to know that when a black hole exists, you do not want to be near it, never mind on the same planet.”
“You mean what nearly happened four months ago,” Weyland said. “The very thing Chelsea and I fought our way through engineering to stop.”
“Well actually, we went down there to destroy the time drive Link Piece system so that the White City couldn’t take it,” Chelsea said. “That’s why they came after Atlas anyway, right?”
“Except General Allen wasn’t aboard that White City ship,” Trevor said. “He got incredibly angry with them for going after Atlas. I think… I don’t think they wanted to take the ship. Or the system.”
“What do you mean?” Sophia asked.
It was a longshot, but it was the only answer that made sense, especially after what Josh had learned about General Allen while we’d been stuck in the White City. “Josh said Charon had told him that the General wasn’t liked amongst his people at all. That he was trying to become their leader through any means possible. The White City didn’t know that he knew about an Atlantean super soldier with full, constant access to the Waterstar map.”
“I think… we think that the attack by the White City at Pearl wasn’t to maim our ability to time-travel,” Trevor said. “At least, not fully. I think they were also trying to preemptively take Atlas out of the equation. Imagine General Allen, immortal thanks to the Lifestone, with Waterstar map access and all the power there on top of a time drive. He could go anywhere, do anything, and then siphon power off the Link Piece system for the rest of time.”
“But we got the time-travel ship idea from Germay’s people,” Chelsea said. “They were a part of the White City.”
“In the super far future, yes,” Trevor said. “To them, in their time, whatever threat General Allen posed either wasn’t this large or was resolved. But without going back there, we can’t know for sure, and even if we did go and find out how it all happened, it’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy that we could screw up. Who knows? By creating Atlas because of our trip to the far future with Germay, we may have already altered the timeline. There’s no way to know.”
“So they weren’t really attacking us,” Weyland said, evidently still trying to wrap his head around a time-travel war no one in this room understood. “It was the icing on the cake.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Fortunately for us, the self-destruct on Atlas failed a bit, so most of the ship wasn’t destroyed. They just finished rebuilding it a few days ago.”
Trevor glanced at me. “Really?”
“Yeah, while you were on your way to retrieve Chelsea.”
“Is that why you waited so long to get me?” Chelsea asked him.
“Yes,” he said, though it wasn’t totally true.
We’d wanted to complete most of this groundwork without anyone else involved, but then we found out that General Allen knew Chelsea and Trevor were still alive, and no one wanted to leave Chelsea unguarded and supposedly helpless. We hadn’t known she’d had her powers the entire time rather than them still being locked away.
“If you think they’re going to let you take Atlas, you’re insane,” Weyland said. “It’s even more guarded than last time. The crew is almost entirely military. You can’t just steal my ship.”
Oh, right. I’d almost forgotten Weyland had been given co-command. Too bad. “The reason we didn’t let TAO or the Navy in on any of this from the very beginning is because this is going to get too messy for normal, non-powered humans. We’ll be lucky if we survive with the small army we have. We cannot afford the red tape, nor the dissenting opinions of TAO, the Navy, and especially Major Pike. We’re only going to have one shot at this.”
“Is that why you made it look like I killed Trevor?” Chelsea asked, understanding gleaming in her eyes. “So they’d think he was dead, that you’d defected, and that I was too much of a traitor to keep around?”
Trevor nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry, Chelsea. I knew you’d understand the message, and I knew that if Pike had seen what was about to happen, that he’d issue the cease fire order. I knew you’d listen to me over him.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “This is a lot.”
“It’s treason,” said Sophia. “Court-martial offenses for the both of us, assuming we survive long enough to return to TAO and be court-martialed.”
“It’ll be the end of our careers,” Weyland agreed. “Even if it saves the world, neither of us will see the outside of a cell ever again. Neither will any of you. Not for stealing a classified Navy vessel.”
“Two,” Trevor said. The room silenced and they looked at him with momentarily blank stares. “We’ll be stealing two Navy vessels.”
“Oh, fuck me,” Chelsea exclaimed. “That’s part of the reason you needed so many super soldiers, isn’t it? Because you needed enough people to attack as well as float the SeaSat5 and Atlas?”
I nodded. “We need a way to get home. With the time drive in Atlas destroyed, we’re counting on your ability to turn SeaSat5 into a Link Piece to return us.”
Chelsea’s jaw dropped. “I did it once. As a baby. And as we all well know, once you use a Link Piece, you can’t use it again.”
“You might if it’s indirectly,” I said. “Utilizing a White City Link Piece maker, your connection to SeaSat5 might be enough to, in conjunction with another Piece, get us home if we’re in relatively the same spot. And if you’ll recall, Pangea—”
“Do not give the anthropologist a history lesson,” she snapped.
Trevor made a show of flipping to the next notebook page and clearing his throat. It shut the both of us up. He said, “We’ll only get one shot to commandeer both Atlas and SeaSat5, take them to the far past with General Allen aboard one of them—or baited to follow us—and detonate Atlas’s Link Piece drive.”
“And then?” Chelsea asked.
“And then we come home and hope for a chance to explain ourselves before they imprison us,” I said.
Weyland covered his face in his hands. “This is insane.”
“I’m still leaning toward the word ‘treason,’” Sophia said.
I looked to Chelsea, who actually seemed to be entertaining this idea. “What do you think?”
She hesitated, not speaking for a ten-count. Then she glanced up at Trevor and said, “I think the thought of General Allen as an immortal ruling over his people, keeping only those who follow him alive, is wrong. I think the ability of free time-travel he’ll gain because of the Waterstar map or Atlas or whatever means we haven’t yet figured out—I think that’s wrong, too. What happened on Atlantis wit
h Atlas and the cache… that’s what he’ll become. Except instead of doing it in the far future where Atlantis was moved to, General Allen’s going to do it here. Now. And that’s not the kind of thing I can let slide. This world isn’t our ancestors’ anymore, any of ours. I don’t know if it’s right that we’re making this decision for everybody else at TAO and the Navy, but if we can keep one more maniac from threatening Earth, then I say, let’s do it.” Her gaze moved to me. “Besides, this is all too sci-fi for me, anyway.”
I wanted to smirk, to smile at the reference to the time I’d shown her around SeaSat5 when she’d first boarded, to when she hadn’t even known about the cloak that made SeaSat5 invisible. She’d been so confused, a little scared, and so brand new to the war and everything that came with it, I’d found it hard to look at her and see the threat Thompson was scared of. That all of Lemuria had feared.
I reached for Charlie’s hand and she took mine in both of hers. Atlantean super soldiers weren’t so terrifying anymore.
The amount of change in all of us scared me more. But even more horrifying than the change or the fact that I’d all but delivered my best friend to the enemy months ago was the fact that our enemy could rip Earth apart at its very core at any time. All he needed was one more piece of the puzzle.
And a giant puzzle was all it ever was.
“All in favor of ending this time-travel war and taking that bastard with us?” I asked, placing a hand in the middle of the table.
Chelsea was the first to join, resting her fingers on top of mine. “More than you could ever know. SeaSat5 brought us all together. It only seems right to end it this way.”
Charlie was next. “I’m with you at every step.”
Trevor hesitated only a moment before putting his hand in. “For Abby, yes. Besides, we’ve come too far now not to end it.”