“You talk a lot, huh?” Shailene smiled.
“You must read a lot, too. Nice to see some articles made their way past Australia,” Fay replied. “Which ones did you read?”
Melody paused. “Magicals Weekly and their top thirty under thirty.”
Shailene looked smug. “That was a good one. Yeah, we were the first to capture Selkies and have them stored in the Bestiary.”
“It definitely wasn’t easy,” Fay added, right on schedule. “They’re slimy little buggers, and anyone who says different is lying. They might turn out all pretty on the shore, but they’re not pretty when they’re trying to escape.”
Fay and Shailene looked over the rest of us, their eyes lingering a bit too long on Luke and me. They turned to each other and whispered, matching smirks turning up the corners of their lips. They seemed to be forming judgments, and I didn’t know if they were the bad kind or the good kind.
Melody’s eyes suddenly widened. “Oh, wow… I wasn’t expecting that.”
“The Selkie wrangling?” Fay and Shailene chorused in creepy unison.
“No… oh dear, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you really shouldn’t waste time on fancying Luke, Shailene. Or setting your sights on Finch, Fay. It wouldn’t be right for you two to go after unavailable guys.” Melody hesitated, apparently oblivious to the personal nature of the details she’d just spilled. “I mean, they’re not physically unavailable, but they are emotionally. Gosh, I hope that makes sense? Finch doesn’t like physical contact, and Luke… he isn’t interested. I’d hate for you to spend energy on them when there are other nice guys out there. I’m sure you have your pick, anyway, looking the way you do.”
Fay and Shailene stared at her in disbelief.
Wow… awkward.
“Melody.” Luke put his hand on her shoulder, and she blushed furiously.
“Did I do it again?” she whispered.
He nodded. “A little bit, yeah.”
It didn’t take a genius to realize she had Empath abilities. Given her role as Miss Chatterbox, I felt glad that my Shapeshifting spared me from being Empathed.
Everyone else’s abilities would be harder to gauge. I wasn’t at the SDC anymore, where you literally pinned the info to your special occasion uniform. These people’s behavior didn’t do much to expose them, either.
Mr. Abara looked to be playing his cards close to his chest. Blanche was eager to get on with learning about mapmaking so she could find El Dorado. Oliver seemed happy to go with the flow. Melody and Luke worked on their secrets together, as a unit. And the Wonder Twins obviously sought something together. I doubted they did anything alone. That left me, with no idea about anything involving the monastery.
“So, after that bombshell, who’s here for what?” I broke the uncomfortable silence. Melody offered me a grateful glance for taking the spotlight off her.
“I’m after Shangri-La,” Oliver replied. “I’m going to find it and learn their ways, to discover the secrets of true happiness and a long life. It’s my dream to live in a real utopia, a genuine paradise on Earth. And once I’ve done that, I’m going to write about it.”
I frowned. “Didn’t someone already do that? I mean, Shangri-La is fictional, right? It’s from Lost Horizon.”
“He’s right, it is,” Melody agreed.
“There’s truth in stories, mate.” Oliver gave a casual shrug. “It’s out there, and I’m going to find it, just like James Hilton found it and wrote about it, calling it fictional. If he said outright it was real, people would go flocking after it, ruining that paradise… obviously.”
Why did people keep saying that—“there’s truth in stories”? As if I didn’t know. The Fountain of Youth had been a myth until yesterday. What they were leaving out was the teeny-tiny small print, that there was also danger in stories.
“You’re going after Shangri-La?” The Creep Twins snorted at him. “Well, you can expect to have a race on your hands, mate, because that’s where we’re headed, too.”
“Couldn’t you all go? I’m sure Shangri-La is pretty roomy,” I said.
Shailene snorted. “As if. We’re not into sharing glory, unless it’s between the two of us.”
“May the best explorer win, then,” Oliver replied, evidently unbothered. He didn’t seem like the sort of guy who got worked up about much.
“That’d be us,” Fay shot back.
Oliver smiled lazily. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What about you?” I nodded to Melody and Luke. “What tickles your geographical fancy?”
Luke hesitated to answer, but Melody came right out with it. “We want to find the Last Unknown—one of the few places on Earth yet to be discovered.”
“The Last Unknown? That’s not very specific. What if your map takes you to a different Unknown?” I asked.
“It won’t.” Melody cast a conspiratorial glance back at Luke.
Figuring I wouldn’t get much else out of her with Luke the guard dog around, I turned to another member of our party. “And you, Mr. Abara?”
“I intend to find the lost Oasis of Little Birds, otherwise known as Zezura,” he replied.
“Never heard of it. What’s there?”
He gave me a warning look. “Something I desire. That’s all you need to know.”
“How about you, Finch?” Melody cut in.
“Me? Oh… I’m… uh, looking for the Fountain of Youth,” I lied. I didn’t want them thinking I was there to steal their ideas. The Fountain seemed like a safe bet, since it was empty and buried under a mine’s worth of rockfall.
I was spared more explanation by the arrival of five more people, coming by sea, sky, and land. One rode up on a four-wheeler, having landed by boat at the other end of the island. He went by the name Bill and came from New Zealand. He instantly recognized the Basani twins. Rodrigo, from Spain, made the same entrance Mr. Abara had, boating to the cliff’s edge and climbing up. Lin, from Puerto Rico, came speeding in on a hang-glider, while Giulia, from Italy, rappelled down from a helicopter. Alessandra, who’d come all the way from Brazil, arrived last.
After brief small talk, it turned out they mostly sought the same things—El Dorado, the Lost City of Z, Arcadia, the Aztec homeland of Aztlán—for the same reasons: treasure, long life, or paradise. All the things mortals longed for. Yet none of those places or motivations set off Erebus alarms in my head.
“Do the doors open when the full moon comes out?” I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. “Do we start the entrance trials inside?”
A ripple of confusion echoed through the gathered group. Huh, maybe they aren’t as clued-up as I thought.
“Oliver, what happened last time?” Mr. Abara fixed his gaze on our resident hipster.
“Oh, when I said I failed the entrance trials, I meant I missed them completely. I got here too late,” he replied. “I don’t know what to do past getting through that shield, mate. I thought that was the hard part.”
“Anyone?” I said hopefully.
Melody shook her head. “The people who told us the location said that not knowing what to do is part of the trial. I didn’t understand it then—I thought it was just a riddle, perhaps—but now I see that they were right. If that’s the case, I suppose our trial has already started.”
“All doors open,” Shailene said.
“Yeah, we just have to break through them,” Fay added.
With that, the Creep Twins strode up to the front doors like a matching set of bookends and started hammering them with Telekinesis. Following their lead, Melody used a gust of Air to sweep herself up to the nearest window. Luke hovered below like an anxious puppy. Meanwhile, Oliver scaled the wall to try to reach the spires at the top.
Bill stepped forward to help, when the gemstones embedded in the spires emitted a piercing screech. Their thrum had been constant up until this point, but this felt different. This sounded like a siren… a warning siren.
Light shot between the ge
ms, red bouncing to red, green to green, and so on. As the shriek built to a deafening howl, a burst of multicolored light flooded the building, knocking back everyone who had tried to force their way through.
Bill sailed backward, toppling over the edge of the cliff. A splash followed. I ran to the lip with Mr. Abara, both of us peering down to make sure Bill was okay. He surfaced and gave a weary wave before turning around and swimming for a dinghy that waited down the shore.
“Is he out of the game?” I glanced at Mr. Abara.
“It seems so,” he replied.
A voice boomed from within the monastery. “Welcome, brave travelers, to the Mapmakers’ Monastery. My name is Etienne Biset, and I will teach those who make it through these trials. To enter, we begin the first trial—you must solve the riddle of how to enter. I hold these trials every full moon, if enough people gather. I don’t have the patience to coddle every newcomer that darkens my door. So, I suggest you get on with it.”
He had a faint French accent. There was something dangerous about it that scared me and intrigued me in equal measure.
Watching my fellow wannabes gearing up, I sensed things were about to take a turn for the hectic. I had two options: join them or end up like Bill. And I wasn’t in the mood for a soaking.
“Let the games begin,” I whispered, letting Chaos flow into my palms.
Four
Finch
“One more thing.” Etienne’s voice echoed back out. “I hate to have to simplify what should be obvious, but I must, or none of you will get in. The doors are locked, as you have realized. But the puzzle to solve is this: these doors can only be opened from the inside.”
Huh? Stepping outside this monastery without your keys would be a complete pain in the ass.
“I thought it’d be something a bit more—” Shailene began.
“—impressive.” Fay finished off the sentence.
“How hard can it be to break into this place?” Oliver asked casually.
If you think it’ll be easy, you’ve never been part of a challenge, pal. I didn’t know much about my fellow players’ experience, but I’d broken into a few high-security buildings in my time. The New York Coven took the top spot in my breaking-and-entering Hall of Fame, and that had been a real pain.
“Who says we have to break in?” Melody approached the front door and knocked. Everyone stared at her. Naturally, nothing happened. I liked her outside-the-box thinking, but that was a little too simple.
“What, you thought you could just knock, and they’d answer?” Shailene barked a cold laugh.
Melody reddened. “It was worth a try.”
With knocking a no-go, the Basani twins hit the windows first, using a joint attack of powerful Telekinesis to try to wrench the glass from the frames. Oliver went back to scaling the wall, likely seeking a weak spot on the roof. Melody bombarded the front door with Air, while Luke sent twisting silver tendrils from his hand and grasped for the hinges of the front door. The filling in my back tooth started to tug weirdly, as if it wanted to pop right out.
Huh… interesting. Judging by the odd sensation, I guessed Luke to be a Magneton—a manipulator of metals. He’d be paying my dental bill if this baby came out.
Blanche, meanwhile, crouched in front of the side door on the monastery’s left wall. A torrent of Water arced through the air and filtered into the lock. Her hands pulled outward, feeding in a strand of bright white Chaos alongside the liquid. I noticed a sheen of frost glitter up the wood of the door and realized she’d turned the water to ice.
It was a decent idea. One I wished I’d thought of, though I lacked the Ice abilities to make it work. Or, rather, the Glacier abilities—a sub-section of Water Elementals who could change the state of water. Ice, steam, the whole shebang.
Rodrigo used Melody’s tactic, though he focused his Air powers on the windows, attempting to shatter the glass. I wanted the number of the glazier for this monastery, because those panes proved to be impenetrable.
Lin had scaled the wall alongside Oliver and now tried to take apart the chimney in order to slide down, like some kind of Puerto Rican Santa Claus. Giulia used Earth abilities to shake the foundations of the place—a riskier move, since it could mean breaking the whole building to pieces. Alessandra, on the other hand, used her Earth powers to dig, evidently taking inspiration from The Great Escape. I wondered if she’d still be tunneling by the time the rest of us got inside.
Only Mr. Abara and I hung back. He delved into his pocket and took out a pouch of cloth to reveal a small pile of charcoal. He tipped some into his hand and put the pouch back into his pocket. I tried not to stare, but it was hard not to. He closed his hands over the charcoal, and a blue glow shone beneath his palms. When he uncovered it, the charcoal was gone. In its place sat a brand new, sparkling diamond with one facet sharpened to a glinting point.
He’s a Geode. Flashbacks to the Jubilee cavern rushed through my mind as I remembered the diamond floor Davin had shattered with his Dark magic. Ponce de Léon had been a Geode too, gifted with the ability to turn rocks and minerals into gemstones.
“Are you just going to watch?” Mr. Abara smirked.
“Huh? No, I’m just… uh… thinking through my approach,” I replied hurriedly.
“Good, because nobody likes a slackah.” He chuckled as he walked toward the monastery and stopped in front of the only ground floor window not under assault. I heard the toe-curling scrape of the diamond as it started to carve the glass.
Come on, Finch. Get your ass in gear! I wished I knew what this Etienne guy looked like. Perhaps the door accepted verified members of the monastery. I could’ve fooled the system by Shifting into the Frenchie. Instead, I’d have to rely on a bit of brute force.
Before I could try anything, though, the gemstones atop the monastery screeched again. Light bounced between them, the soft, constant thrum growing until it reached fever pitch. Just as it turned to an unbearable howl, a flood of light spilled across the entirety of the building, sending everyone flying backward. Oliver and Lin hurtled through the air, falling from the roof. The former landed with a thud on the very edge of the cliff, while Lin sailed right over it. The customary splash followed. He was out of the running.
“Lin Garcia and Alessandra Santos are both disqualified.” Etienne’s voice echoed out of nowhere. How he knew our names, I had no clue. Maybe the protective shield scanned us in some way as we entered. Worrying, 1984-level stuff, and that made Etienne the Big Brother, watching our every move.
I hadn’t even noticed the Brazilian woman disappear over the cliff, but since she was nowhere to be seen, I had to believe Etienne. This task looked easy, but it really wasn’t, with those gemstones firing out an expulsion shield every minute or so.
Maybe if we break the gemstones, we’ll be able to get in.
Looking pissed off, the Basani twins used Telekinesis to pull themselves up to the roof. Giulia followed them, no doubt wanting a slice of the Basani glory. As a trio, they hammered the gemstones with powerful waves of Telekinesis, Fire, and Earth, following my train of thought. I waited for the gems to break, but they seemed to be made of the same tough stuff as the windows. With every hit, they shimmered brighter, until that thrumming sound rose to a scream again.
The force of protective energy flung the three of them clean off the monastery as another blast surged over the building. The Basani twins lashed out with lassos of Telekinesis, using the strands to grip spires, stopping their descent toward the churning ocean. Giulia didn’t have that power. The rest of us watched, no time to react, as she tumbled over the cliff and hit the water with a loud splash.
“Giulia D’Amanzo is disqualified,” Etienne announced.
“We have to try to break through, in between those sirens,” I said to the sisters. “When it’s just a vibration, we’re on green. When you hear it shriek, we’re on red.”
The Basani twins shot me a dirty look. “Stating the obvious there—” Shailene began.
&nbs
p; “—genius,” Fay added.
How did they do that? Seriously, it was like they had the same brain. The rumors about identical twins sharing powers appeared to be true. They both had a mix of Telekinesis and Fire, and they knew how to use them. I started to feel a bit sorry for the Purge beasts they’d come up against. Poor suckers wouldn’t have stood a chance.
More determined than ever, everyone returned to their stations. Blanche kept trying to ice the side door into submission, Oliver took over the role of Santa Claus, Mr. Abara had gone back to his diamond scraping, the Basani twins took the track of gemstone annihilation, and Luke and Melody tried to force the main door with Magneton powers and blasts of Air.
The old adage had it right: the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Being the spectator had some benefit. Namely, it was obvious to me that none of the current approaches would work.
“We need to focus on one spot, all together!” I shouted above the incoming screech.
“Nice try. You just want us to do the hard work for you!” Oliver yelled back.
Mr. Abara offered a shrug as he carried on with his cutting, and it didn’t look like the others had heard me.
“I’m serious! We need to—” I didn’t get to finish, as the security protocols swept over the monastery and tossed everyone backward. Mr. Abara bore the brunt of it as an explosion surged out of the marks he’d made and hit him square in the chest. He careened past me, his body curved where the impact had struck him. A few more seconds and he’d be in the water, too.
I don’t know if it was compassion or instinct, but my palms lifted on autopilot and tendrils of Telekinesis shot out, wrapping around Mr. Abara’s torso. The wrench of his trajectory almost took me with him, but I managed to dig my heels into the soft earth and brace myself enough to keep my footing. As he dragged me closer to the edge, I fell back onto my butt and hauled on the tendrils with all my strength. Mr. Abara paused in midair, a look of surprise on his face. I yanked harder, bringing him back toward me, where he landed in a heap at my side.
Harley Merlin 11: Finch Merlin and the Lost Map Page 3
