A roaring sound began to build as we rounded a curve, and then the forest fell away abruptly, and my jaw dropped.
A great lake filled a crater ahead of us, and a dozen waterfalls emptied into it. Mist rose from the water. A rainbow glittered in the air above the churning water. In the center of the water, a slender tower of green metal reached toward the sky.
“In the center of Perilous is a great lake, perfectly round, and into it, water falls from rocks and statues,” she’d say. “Mist fills the air, and the water makes a great roar that drowns out all other sound.”
“She told me about this,” I whispered. “In the stories.”
A musical sound came from the tower, a humming, ethereal whisper of a song, like wind chimes. I drew in a shuddering breath as that sound triggered my memories. I saw my father’s hands reaching down to hold mine, and heard a voice saying, “Here is the relay tower for communicating with them.”
I didn’t know who them was.
Myo looked at me. “You remember?”
I nodded. The feeling was like getting lost underwater and finding the way up after almost losing all consciousness. Relief and a rush of desperate excitement through my limbs.
A sliver of a bridge spanned the great lake and disappeared into the mist on the other side. I stepped toward it, the energy of the memory spurring me forward. The others followed.
Nol grabbed my wrist before I could cross. “What if we encounter someone?”
“It’s called the lost city,” Garren said. “There’s no one here.”
“But I’ve been here before. My mother has been here before. There are structures...” I pointed at the bridge.
My mother nodded when all eyes turned to her. “The island was occupied when we visited. We were not given much explanation for what we saw, and we saw very little. It was a show of power on Tempest’s part. A treat for those in the inner circle. Nautilus was younger then, and they didn’t know he planned to bring them down with brute force.”
“Do you think the people who were there then are here now?”
She gazed around her. “Everything seems to be in disrepair.”
It was true. The bridge was overgrown with vines and streaked with lichen. Some of the slats were crumbling. The dock we’d crossed to leave the ship had been rotting in places.
“I’ll risk it,” Garren said, lifting the weapon he wore. “The lost city is ours now. Tempest can’t claim it, not with the Dron involved. It doesn’t belong to those leeches.”
We crossed the bridge.
The bridge ended at a path lined with crumbling statues of men and women holding what appeared to be chalices in their hands. Moss covered their faces like masks. Beyond them, a blue dome rose like the curve of a giant, polished jewel. Birds rose from the roof as we approached, a cloud of red and blue. The sun glinted off their feathers as they took to the sky.
Moss covered the walls and furred the edges of an arching door. A clearing surrounded the building, edged with flowering trees. Strange trilling calls from the wildlife echoed around us.
We stopped before the door. I stretched out my hand, my veins thrumming with memories that sifted just below the surface of my mind. I’d been here before. I was certain of it.
Tob stepped to my side and gazed up at the roof of the building. “I feel so strange looking at that,” he said. “It’s... it’s the oddest thing. It’s beautiful.” He pressed a hand to his head, his fingers tracing the line of his scar and twining in his hair as he looked at it, as if he were a child mesmerized by a magic trick.
“It looks like an Itlantean structure,” Myo murmured. “Look at the lines and curves of the design.”
“The lost city doesn’t belong to the Itlanteans,” Garren said gruffly.
I grabbed the handle on the door and pulled, hoping to quell arguments with action. With a groan, it swung open.
The interior smelled like gloom and old books. Musty. Dry.
Sunlight spilled into a hallway of chalk-white stone. Ahead, I could see another pair of doors, these made of clouded glass. They were broken, cracks radiating outward from a place in the middle where something or someone had struck them, causing a spiderweb of damage.
I stepped inside. “It looks abandoned.”
This supported the theory that the island was now abandoned.
Our footsteps crunched as we stepped over a fine sheen of shattered glass in an otherwise empty corridor. I opened the doors carefully and stepped into a room beyond that was filled with white, shapeless forms. Sheets. Covering... what?
Nol stopped beside me and scanned the room. He kept his hand tight on his weapon. “What’s this?” he said. “It could be an ambush.”
Garren didn’t pretend restraint. He lifted his trusket and turned a circle.
My mother strode forward and yanked at one of the sheets. It floated down to the floor, unveiling a tower of metal gears in its wake. A machine of some kind, old and silent.
“Look,” I said, crossing to the wall.
A faded symbol.
Azure’s symbol.
Fear skittered through me. I drew back. Nol was at my side, a solid warmth that calmed me. We exchanged a glance.
“Shall we see what else awaits?” Merelus asked after a brief pause.
The next room was round, with a pit of deep water in the middle and spotlights in the ceiling. Garren found a switch that activated them, and the beams shot down into the water, illuminating a chimney of stone that went down and down into the deep.
After a moment of silence, bubbles stirred the surface, and then a great gray thing surged up from the bottom of the pit, turned a circle in the water, and then dove again, a flash of fins slicing the surface of the water.
Another Azure beast?
In the next room, statues lined the walls, and the ceiling was a map of the sea. Red dots peppered the lines and squiggles that denoted islands, ocean shelves, and trenches.
“Azure’s presence?” Myo guessed, studying the dots with a furrowed brow.
Before anyone else could speculate, a clatter made us whirl in time to see one of the statues wobbling.
Garren stretched out his hand to steady it.
And that was when they jumped us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THERE WERE SIX of them, all smeared with mud and wearing skirts of leaves. They brandished truskets, spears, and other weapons that I couldn’t identify.
“Don’t move, or we’ll shoot,” the tallest one shouted, aiming his weapon at my face. “You’re our prisoners now.” He was male, with stripes of mud painted down his cheeks and across his chest. He bared his teeth at me, and they glowed in the darkness. The others flashed luminescent smiles.
Garren leaped at him, but the speaker pivoted and fired his weapon. Lightning licked from the barrel, shooting across the room and flashing against the Dron’s skin.
Garren hit the floor, clutching his arm, his face clenched in pain as he groaned out a curse.
“Anyone else want to try?” Face-streaks demanded.
We laid down our truskets. We were no match for this. A flush of fear rushed across my skin, leaving me clammy in its wake. Nol gripped my hand, and with our fingers entwined, we followed the others as the strangers herded us through a narrow hall and into a dark, vast room. Half the roof had crumbled away, showing a patch of sky and a canopy of dark green leaves waving in the wind.
“On your knees,” one ordered, waving his stick-weapon at us.
Slowly, we all dropped to the damp ground. I scanned the room. Tendrils of green had already begun to grown among the debris of a laboratory.
The wind blew, carrying with it more remnants of sound. I crouched on the mossy floor, my mind spinning as the memories came tumbling back bit by bit.
I knew these faces, although they were older now, stranger.
“Wait,” I said.
“Quiet,” the tallest one snapped.
“Your name is Breg,” I said.
His head swivel
ed around, and his eyes widened.
The memory was faint but growing stronger. Boys, crowded together in a small white room, listening to music play while men in white coats scribbled something silently. One of the boys lifted his head and met my eyes. I was frightened and I grabbed for my father’s hand.
“We have dozens of experiments happening simultaneously,” one of the men boasted to my father.
“So many,” my father said.
“Don’t worry,” the man replied. “They won’t be missed. They aren’t Itlantean.”
They aren’t Itlantean.
Garren gave a cry from behind me, as if he’d just connected two pieces of information and the results had shocked him. “Breg, the little brother of Marl?”
Our captor stilled. His eyes hardened to slits. “Is this some new test? Why do you speak my brother’s name to me?”
Garren began to weep.
“Why is he doing that?” Breg demanded. The other captors looked uneasy.
“You are Dron,” Garren said. “You are the lost Dron children.”
“What do you know about the Dron?” another said eagerly.
“I am Garren, my father was Briel.”
They exchanged glances. Some of them lowered their weapons.
“You were stolen away from us as children,” Garren continued. “My brother, Rentobi... is he among you?” His voice was hopeful as he scanned their faces.
“Rentobi escaped more than twelve years ago,” Berg said. “He came up with a plan to knock out the handlers, and he slipped away in the confusion. The rest of us didn’t make it out. They caught us before we reached the bridge. I was quite small then, and I don’t remember it well. I’m sorry.”
Garren’s eyes slid shut. He cleared his throat noisily and didn’t speak for a moment.
“Where are your handlers now?” I asked in the silence that followed.
Berg grinned. “They all died years ago from one of their experiments gone wrong. It shut the whole place down, and we have the run of things now. Served ‘em right.” He stared at Garren and shook his head. “Dron. After all this time. Are you all Dron?”
“We’re... a mixture of things,” I said.
“So are we,” Berg said. “A few Itlantean kids were being kept here too, and they get along with us just fine. I remember there was a war before we were taken, but we haven’t given much thought to that. Here, we’re all just people.” He paused. “C’mon, let me show you where we live now.”
~ ~ ~
Most of the buildings were half reclaimed by the creeping jungle. Vines and moss grew over columns and walls, painting everything a misted green color. Broken glass windows let in swaths of bright sunlight, and the light danced on abandoned instruments and equipment as we passed rooms and rooms.
“Do you always dress this way?” Tob asked, gesturing at the skirts of leaves.
Berg laughed. “This is just our costumes to scare away intruders. It’s a trick we learned from our people.”
“I remember,” I muttered.
Garren looked proud.
One of the rooms contained a vast round structure split by a crack in the middle and blackened on all sides.
“What’s that?” Myo asked.
Berg shrugged. “The handlers had all sorts of things they were tinkering with. We weren’t allowed to see, and we rarely left the rooms where they kept us until they all got sick and we broke out. By the time that happened, some of them had taken all the ships and fled, and we were left behind. We burned and broke everything we could until we figured we should leave some things alone so we’d have a place to live.” He stopped before a door. “Here’s where we stay.”
The doors slid open to reveal a courtyard beneath an open sky. A few men and women sat on the ground playing a game with stones. They looked at us and then scrambled to their feet, alarmed.
“Berg!” one shouted. “What are you doing?”
“They’re Dron,” Berg said. “They’re here...” He glanced back at Garren. “Are you here to rescue us?”
Garren lowered his head. “We thought you were all murdered. If we’d known, we would never have stopped trying to find you. We are here to find this lost city to create an alliance between us and the Itlanteans. But I promise you, we will take you home.”
A young woman with thick, curly black hair in a bundle around her face stepped forward and peered at us. She squinted at Tob.
“You look familiar,” she said, and then she squealed and darted forward to embrace him. “Tob!”
We all gaped. Tob stiffened in shock and confusion as she hugged him. The girl drew back and turned to Berg.
“You didn’t say that Rentobi was back.”
“I...” Berg looked at Tob. “Rentobi? It is you. I didn’t recognize you.”
Tob turned toward Garren, who stood thunderstruck, his face white. Tob rubbed his scar. “I... I’ve never remembered much about my life before I got my head injury,” he said slowly.
Garren stood without moving or blinking. No one spoke. The silence felt sacred, dense, paralyzing.
Tob shuffled his feet. “I’m sorry I’m just an Itlantean—”
“My brother,” Garren said, every syllable fervent as he stepped forward and grabbed Tob by the arms. “You are my brother. Whatever else you are, you will always be that.”
~ ~ ~
The weight of long-awaited discovery and the dizzy taste of unexpected joy infused the rest of our exploration of Perilous. Half the abandoned city lay below the sea, the other half sprawled across the island, with access through the body of water in the middle. The lost children of the Dron showed us the ruined laboratories of Azure, along with storage rooms filled with papers and vials.
“They experimented on all sorts of things, not just memories,” Berg explained. “They made a serum that would paralyze its victim, and they tested the antidote on me.” He proudly rolled up his sleeve to show a line of puncture mark scars. “Fortunately, they found one that worked.”
“Do you know where they might keep this serum?” I asked. Could this help Merelus?
Berg promised he would show me. He also showed us the rooms where they had been kept as children, and the memories kept flowing back for me—of a strange man in a long white tunic testing me, of my father striding in furious, shouting. Of the woman who would one day steal me away and tell me she was my mother. She found me while I was playing in a courtyard filled with green, and she whispered secrets into my ears, promising to keep me safe, telling me to remember the things I would see as I left Perilous so that I could come back some day, so that the other children could be rescued. She hummed a song, and I felt strange, just as I had when the man in the white tunic had given me a vial to drink.
Berg even showed us the place where the specially bred sea creatures came to feed. “Years of habit,” he explained. “Nobody leaves food anymore, not usually, although sometimes one of us will become nostalgic and throw something in the water. The Azure handlers kept many of them. They trained them to attack ships when the signal was given.”
“We know,” I said, rubbing my hand where I’d been burned. “We’ve been the recipients.”
The Azure symbol was displayed all over the island.
I drew my mother aside. “Why did you and my father—and I—visit this island? It was Azure controlled.”
“Tempest funded Azure,” she explained. “Azure was their favorite project, their dirty secret. Azure’s experiments were the seeds for half of Tempest’s plots to control the rest of Itlantis.”
An alarm sounded, blaring through the halls of the building we stood inside. Berg twisted around to look at us, a snarl on his lips and mistrust springing into his eyes as he grabbed for his weapon again.
“Who followed you?”
I looked at Myo for help. “We came alone. I promise.”
“We’ve shown you everything—”
“It’s Nautilus,” Nol said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Nautilus?” Ber
g demanded. “Who’s that?”
We were all silent a moment, the alarms still going off. My heart banged against my ribs.
“How could he have found us? We left him on Volcanus. We’ve been to Primus,” I protested.
“Who is Nautilus?” Berg shouted.
We were grim. I was the one who replied.
“He’s our enemy. He wants to destroy the Dron, and the surfacers, and Itlantis... He has to be stopped.”
“Come,” Berg said. “Back to the viewing station. We can see the approach of whoever this is from there.”
~ ~ ~
The approach of the hammership was visible through the glass. Nautilus’s flagship.
Nol was right.
He had found us.
“How?” I whispered. My feet were rooted to the floor as I watched the ship growing closer through the haze of blue.
Myo scanned our faces. “Did any of you receive anything from Volcanus that might contain a tracking device? A belt, shoes, jewelry—”
The ring.
I looked down at my hand, where the engagement gift still glittered, stuck on my finger, the skin swollen around the too-tight band. I held it up wordlessly, and he sighed.
“What are we going to do?”
“Perilous will protect us,” said Berg. He smiled. “Watch.”
A strange, musical wail came from the sea, like the cry of whales, and then then I was lost in another memory, a memory of my father standing with his hand wrapped around mine, staring at the sea through the glass with me at his side. The memory faded and I saw a swarm of fins and tails and glowing streaks of light as a horde of sea creatures rose from the rocks and dove at the hammership.
“What...?” Garren growled out. “What are they doing?”
Berg gripped his spear with both hands as he strained to see. “They attack any ship that comes to close. They always have. It’s why we’ve never been discovered before now. According to what the handlers said, only a ship who followed the exact coordinates would make it to the island unscathed.”
The sea creatures set upon the ship, still making their strange cries, and I was falling into another memory of a white-faced man in a long tunic explaining to me that I was the last hope of the children on Perilous.
In Dawn and Darkness Page 19
