by Jenn Stark
“So where are we, Sara?” Nigel asked, peering into the shadows beyond the pool of light. “Do you know for sure?”
“I…have a suspicion. But I’ve only been here once.” I found myself strangely loath to say the name of the ancient city out loud. It was so laden with mythology, mysticism, and flat-out fantasy that it seemed almost a joke, even in my line of work.
Ever attuned to me, Nikki gasped. “Oh my gawd. It’s Atlantis, isn’t it?” she demanded, her eyes going saucer-wide as I turned toward her. “Where you came back from stuck full of weapons like a Sara-upholstered pincushion.”
“What—” Nigel choked as he turned to me, nearly dropping the newly shocked Emilio, as Simon whirled around, his delighted laughter rolling through the space.
“Seriously, Atlantis? This is so cool! But where’s Roland? He was supposed to be, like, right beneath us.” As he spoke, Simon pulled his small waist pack around, rummaging through it and pulling out a small rectangular unit. He moved into the light and stared down at the small device in his hand, then breathed out a hushed breath.
“It just spins,” he said.
I moved over to him and saw he’d pulled out a small analog compass. Not a bad idea, but he was right. The dial on the compass spun in long lazy circles, never finding its North Star.
“Nifty,” I sighed. “What else do you have in that pack? Any matches, lighter, flares?”
As Simon rummaged, Emilio piped up, his voice only sounding slightly strangled. “I have flares, a battery-operated torch, handheld torches that are more like tapers for a limited amount of light—or could be used as fire starters.”
I nodded. “Good. See if you can get the battery-operated flashlight to work.”
Of course it didn’t, but the matches lit, the burst of light undetectable in the stream of sunlight.
Even better, the match remained lit once we took it out of the cone of illumination.
“Okay, it’s good to know that we’ve got some options, but I don’t want to use them unless we need it. Blow it out for now. Simon, same thing goes with anything in your kit. Don’t try to mess with it. Anything that triggers magic could be tracked.”
“Roger that,” Simon said.
I gestured us forward. “Let’s head out. Straight line, keep close beside each other, whoever hits a wall first, be sure to let the rest of us know.”
We moved ahead, hands out, the dim light provided by the hole of sunlight diminishing rapidly until we were cloaked in gloom.
“Nice floor,” Nikki observed as we crept forward. “I would have expected it not to be in such great shape, you know, given the last time Atlantis threw a party.”
“You don’t know,” Simon countered. “They could have an entirely new standard for maintenance down here.”
It all smacked a little of gallows humor, but in another dozen steps, Nigel humphed. “Well. Here we go, then. Wall.”
A second later, we all encountered the same obstruction.
“More inlaid tile,” Nikki observed, her fingers moving over the wall. “No discernible pattern, but somebody spent some time on their interior décor. Seems kind of a shame to leave it in the dark like this.”
“There’s probably a good reason for that, and not one we’re going to like,” Nigel commented drily.
“I’ve got a doorway,” Simon said. “We go in? Or, I guess…out?”
“We go through,” I agreed.
The moment we stepped through the door, however, everything changed. Sconces lit up in a parade line down the long hallway, visibly brightening the corridor, while behind us, the entryway we’d just cleared—disappeared. Nothing but a flat wall of rock remained.
“You know, I generally like to be in charge of my own search and rescue mission,” Nikki complained. “Not herded around like ducks.”
“No kidding,” I muttered. Any further conversation was halted as a low moan rolled down the hallway.
I shot a glance at Nigel. “Did that sound like a Roland Franklin moan to you?”
He shrugged. “It sounds like somebody’s not having a very good day, whoever it is.”
We moved on, picking up the pace, none of us missing the fact that as we passed each of the sconces, they winked out again. “Well, someone’s doing that, even if it isn’t Roland,” Nikki muttered.
“It’s not even that impressive magic when you think about it,” Simon countered. “Illusion magic doesn’t take a lot of energy, especially with a captive audience.”
“Yeah, but we’re all seeing the same thing,” Nikki said. “That’s gotta count for something.”
Another moan, closer this time, stopped the argument before it could get truly started.
“That is sounding a little bit more like Roland,” Nigel said.
Emilio nodded quickly.
“Very much so. He is an old man. Tough, but old.”
The passageway split to either side ahead of us, the lights extending to the right while darkness reached out to the left.
Nigel hesitated, glancing at me, and I nodded.
“We go in together,” I said, and the five of us turned sharply left, piercing the veil of darkness.
A bright light flashed, momentarily blinding us. When it cleared, we could see our target easily. A bulky white-haired man, lying on a low pallet in the center of the room, guarded by a dozen honest-to-God…wolves.
“The guardians of the goddess,” Emilio gasped, and the only reason he didn’t drop to his knees was because Nigel caught him in time.
“Act like you’ve been here before,” Nigel muttered. “Even if you haven’t.”
Emilio stiffened, his breath coming quickly. “Old magic,” he whispered. “Very old. The guardians of the goddess haven’t ever been seen by human eyes—only in stories and legend.”
“Well, if you’re telling me these guys are gonna turn into big strapping men under the light of the full moon, I am totally dead,” Nikki put in.
As if he’d finally heard us, Roland’s newest groan turned into a rasping cough.
“I knew you bastards couldn’t stay away,” the older man gasped, struggling to sit up. “You’ve gone and hung the Moon, haven’t you?”
23
Before we could take a step forward, the wolves vanished, leaving Roland alone on his low pallet. He grunted as we reached him, but didn’t try to stand, and he kept his eyes on the floor, breathing deep as if to recover his sense of equilibrium. His hair was long, almost to his shoulders, half pulled from a leather tie at the base of his neck. Even in the warm light of the sconces, his skin looked pale, his cheeks sunken. He was a surprisingly big man, solidly built, and he dressed for the jungle—lightweight, bug-resistant layers, which now draped too loosely on his big frame.
“How long have I been down here?” he asked.
Nigel huffed a breath, and I could see the mist of it in the flickering sconce light. It was cold down here, which couldn’t have been comfortable for Roland, even if the wolves didn’t mind so much. “I got your message, if you want to call it that, a couple of days ago, no more. How long does it feel like you’ve been down here?”
Roland snorted. “Most of my natural life. You come in through the pinhole room?”
I fielded that one. “We did. That was a pretty narrow hole in the ceiling—what’s it for? It didn’t do much in the way of illuminating the room.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Roland agreed. “It would be better if we started there, though. Quickest way out once you can see the door.”
“What is this place?” Simon asked.
Roland rolled his shoulders, then managed a shallow cough. But though I expected him to announce “Atlantis,” his response was more pragmatic. “Just the holding cell, mate. Easy access for her little honor guard to keep watch while they waited for somebody more important to show up.” He squinted at Simon and Nikki, then refocused on me. “She cast the net pretty wide, I see. Didn’t expect to reel so many of you in.”
Roland’s words were slurre
d, the cadence rising and falling on the strength of his breath. Simon moved toward him, and so did I.
Meanwhile, Nigel stepped in front of Roland but a few feet away, squatting to peer up into the man’s face. Nigel’s jaw set. “He’s not himself,” he said tightly. “He’s off.”
“Have they given you food? Water?” Simon asked.
“Both, I think,” Roland sighed. “But down here, it’s hard to remember what you need to do and when you need to do it. Everything is off its axis.”
I thought about that and the spinning compass from the other room. “I can help,” I offered, but I waited for him to nod before I placed my hand on his shoulder. I knew in an instant that my hesitation was warranted.
“Um… This is going to hurt a little.”
He grimaced. “I figured that.”
Roland’s circuits hadn’t merely been blasted like Emilio’s had, they’d been completely rewired. He hadn’t been kidding when he said that he didn’t know what was up and what was down or what to do, even when the course was obvious and right in front of him. I signaled the others to step away and leaned into the work, losing myself in the effort to heal.
It was painstaking work, but also strangely restful, because I knew without doubt there was a proper pattern to Roland, to his electrical circuits, the pathways of neural networks that wove through his body, every bit as important as his network of veins, bones, and muscle connectors. Like Emilio, he had a smattering of Connected ability, and I used it for all it was worth. I found myself thinking again of Tesla and his passion for electricity both in life and in death, not to mention his renewed existence as a member of the Arcana Council after he’d spent decades floating through the air, surfing the electrical currents that spun around the world as a disembodied ghost.
Humans were capable of so much more than we believed, even humans like Roland, who’d barely accessed their Connected abilities…
In the detachment of my work, I noticed something else. Unexpected sparks flared along the reconnected circuits that had been magically healed with my aid. Tiny explosions with dancing lights signaled new connections, new pathways for learning, energy, and power. The power, I knew without a doubt, hadn’t been there before to such a pronounced degree, which meant I wasn’t returning Roland back to his original state…I was changing him.
Crap. Was that also a side effect of Armaeus’s tinkering, or was that simply because we were in Atlantis? Or something else entirely?
I didn’t know, and couldn’t stop now, of course. Roland groaned softly as each new connection was made, but I didn’t know how to put a human together in any other way than, well, the right way. I didn’t know how to do it so they were the image of who they were before, only how to make it so they could be who they were meant to be.
That sounded great and all, but a rising tide of dread shifted deep within me. I shouldn’t be doing this…I really shouldn’t. I banked those thoughts as quickly as I could, focusing on the healing at hand. We needed Roland to get us through this mess. The rest we’d have to sort out later.
I don’t know how long it took before I sat back, only that when I shifted my weight, I kept going, eventually falling into the strong arms of Nikki Dawes.
“There you go, dollface, I’ve got you,” she cooed, and she pressed a bottle to my mouth, water I thought at first, then revised my guess. It tasted like juice or nectar, so maybe not water. Probably from Roland’s supply, and I didn’t care. Still, good to know what I was in for.
“Drugged?” I wondered, and Nikki’s chuckle made it clear I’d spoken aloud.
“Probably, but when in Rome…”
“We’ve all drunk it while we were waiting for you,” Nigel said, nodding when I glanced his way. “So far, no observably ill effects. Figured we’d roll the dice.”
“Good,” I said, and it was as much a commentary on their decision as the taste of the strange liquid. I watched Simon and Nigel help Roland to his feet, then shook myself to refocus. “How long was I out?”
Nikki shrugged, helping me to stand. “Hard to gauge. Felt like a long time. We slept in shifts, if that gives you any indication, after the first twenty minutes or so. Figured we needed to stay fresh. The honor guard never did show up again, more’s the pity.”
“Six hours, give or take,” Nigel offered, turning toward me as he braced Roland’s large body. “We did some exploring in pairs. Sconces are lit all the way back to the pinhole room, which is open to us again. It’s dark now outside. We figure if it’s a clear sky there should be moonlight flowing in soon.”
“There will be moonlight,” Roland agreed. “We should get out there.” He waved off Nigel and took a step, then wheeled back to me. “You did something to me, didn’t you? I feel different.”
“You feel alive, and you should be grateful for that,” Nikki pointed out, a little sharply.
Roland shook his head, his hands coming up in quick denial. “No, no. Believe me, I’m grateful. I had a number done on me right smart, no question. That’s not what I’m talking about.” He turned and squinted at Nigel, then at Simon, his eyes widening with the latter.
“You’ve got magic in you,” he said to Simon, then swung toward Nikki. “And you do too.” He turned again toward me, then he flinched, standing back. “Right.”
He swung back to Nigel. “And you’ve got more than you know, boy-o, but it’s buried pretty fucking deep.”
“Okay, Mentalist,” Nigel said, rolling his eyes. “How about you give us some information we can actually use?”
“Right, right. The pinhole room. Let’s go, then. That’s where everything starts.”
Nigel stepped away as Roland moved forward, the Aussie’s gaze scanning the chamber. He easily found the doorway where we’d entered, but seemed momentarily confused despite that.
“Wait. That’s not right,” Roland muttered. “There were other openings in the wall before, weren’t there?” He kept up his mumbled commentary as he walked forward.
Beside me, Nigel chuckled. “I’d forgotten about that. Roland has a habit of never shutting up, but he isn’t talking to anyone else, just himself. I’d never worked with him long enough to realize he was working out the path as he went. He’s good at it too—or at least he was.”
“Maybe he’s always had a little bit more than intuition?” Nikki put in.
I shot her a wry glance. When I’d tumbled into her arms, her own ability had clicked into action, that of being able to read the recent memories of anyone she touched. Mine had been suffused with concern over the man I’d put back together in a slightly better incarnation than the one that he’d been before. It still didn’t sit right with me, and I found myself hoping she was right, and that some of that native magic had already been inside Roland, waiting to be released. That I hadn’t created some kind of Frankenstein’s monster out of whole cloth. A monster whose abilities I didn’t even know.
“Maybe,” Nigel said, though whether he was being honest or picking up on Nikki’s intention, I didn’t know. “Somebody chose him to start this process, though, and the more I think about it, the more I suspect the net being cast wide wasn’t the original plan.”
“I caught that too,” Simon said as we followed a few paces behind Roland, letting him mutter his way forward. “It seems like there was some other plan to get this Moon character out of whatever it is she’s hiding, and it didn’t work. So we are officially Plan B.”
“And we still don’t know who put the plan in motion,” Nikki put in. “The Moon, or somebody else.”
“It wasn’t the Moon. You can put that notion to bed right now,” Roland said, talking over his shoulder at us. “Now shut your pieholes and take a look at this. It’s pretty damned impressive, and I’ve seen some things.”
He stepped into a chamber I knew was the pinhole chamber by the pattern of tile on the floor, but unlike the shrouded space we’d left hours before, this room was fully illuminated. I stared, my skin going cold.
Oh, yeah. I remembe
red this.
Enormous images stretched up the wall toward the pinhole at the top, from which flooded moonlight that struck the tiled floor and was refracted to all sides in a way the sunshine absolutely had not been able to mimic. The images stretched from floor to ceiling of the domed room, glorious depictions in the Greco-Roman style of gods and goddesses, Herculean men, and Amazonian women, living, fighting, and loving in resplendent style. I’d seen these images before, a long time ago and—I’d thought—far, far away. I knew what they were. But I still had a hard time reconciling what I saw.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Roland said. “But keep looking higher.”
Obligingly, I craned my neck back, my gaze searching the ceiling. Above the gods and goddesses, the sun, moon, and star circled close together. Given the proximity of the heavenly beings to each other, the illustration was stylized well beyond any attempt at accuracy. It was beautiful all the same, and I stared at the artwork with some surprise.
Why had I not noticed it before? The answer was simple enough. When I’d last been to Atlantis, I’d been under siege, gathering weapons to save the vulnerable and the weak, as well as my own sorry ass. I hadn’t stayed long, and I didn’t much feel like staying now.
“Here we go,” Roland said, and the moon shifted another degree, the fall of light striking the floor in such a way that rivers of illumination appeared all through the domed chamber. I blinked. This was not the same place I’d been before, I decided. That place had been a ruin, while this remained beautiful and filled with light.
“What is all this?” Nikki asked, her voice uncharacteristically faint with wonder. “It…it’s so beautiful.”
Nigel’s voice sounded over her. “What the hell?” he barked, clearly surprised, “Sara. This looks like you.”
I turned to see the image etched into the wall that he was staring at. The resemblance was uncanny and, once again, not unknown to me.
“Vigilance,” I said. “Not me. It’s one of the incarnations my mom took, once upon a time.”