Riptide

by Jessica Gunn

  “Another tunnel,” said Freddy as he reached into his vest, undoing zippers. “I’ve got one more block of C4 left, sir.”

  “Me too,” said Pike, anger gritting his voice. “Through the tunnel. Go!”

  We did, filing in one by one as the other side of the lake began to fill with Atlantean soldiers. Some teleported in and others dumped the water for their fellow man to come through. As soon as we were all inside except for Freddy and Pike, they joined us and laid their last C4 charges along the entrance to this second tunnel.

  “Get as far as you can,” said Pike as he ushered us along. “We’ve only got a few moments.”

  I ran, pushing Trevor along as his breathing grew labored. “Come on. We’ve got to be almost there.”

  He nodded weakly, stumbling a bit in his step. “I know.”

  “Fire in the hole!” Major Pike yelled, followed a moment later by an explosion that wracked the entire tunnel.

  He’d locked us in this stone cage.

  Too bad the Atlanteans could still teleport.

  34

  Trevor

  Down and down we went, seeming to never reach the bottom of this underground passageway. This had to be the way to the Atlas Cache, but why dig a hole this deep? Did the Atlantean High Council have an easier way to get down here?

  Teleportation, probably. Just like our pursuers were going to do any second now.

  I inwardly groaned at my stupidity and kept walking, even as my head grew woozy again. What little light there was from the occasional bugs, torches, and the fire in Valerie’s palm slid in and out of focus, swirling together in a gyre of yellows and oranges and browns. I swayed on my feet and reached out for a wall to steady myself.

  “Whoa,” Chelsea said. “Are you okay?” She pulled me up, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my head. “Damn, you’re burning up. Are you sick?”

  “I got this, girlie,” Valerie said, trotting back to be my aid. My interference.

  “Interference?” Chelsea asked, her eyes bouncing between mine. “What’s going on? What don’t you want me to know about?”

  “He’s fine,” Valerie insisted.

  Chelsea gave me a look that said she didn’t buy it. I wouldn’t have either. Sweat coated my brow and my hands began to shake. God help me.

  “Chelsea!” Sophia shouted down the passageway. “I think we’ve found it. You are not going to believe this.”

  Well, that explained my head. I looked up at Valerie whose rounded, wrinkled eyes and growing frown said I was so beyond screwed.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Chelsea told me, kissing my forehead. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It’s the cache!” Sophia shouted. “Dammit, Chelsea!”

  “We must act now if you’re going to take the Cache,” Chelsea’s father said. He glanced down at me, frowning. “He does not have as much time as we do.”

  Shit. He knows. I lifted up my lips and kissed Chelsea. “Go. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.” I forced a smile to my face regardless of how inappropriate it felt being there.

  “No way in hell,” she said.

  Chelsea’s father crouched down next to me and laid a hand on my chest. He closed his eyes for a moment. A flush of warmth spread over my body, then it was gone. “I’ve healed him as much as I can for the moment, but we must fight. I fear we have no other choice. Go on. Your mother and I will stay here with him.”

  Chelsea gave me one last look, then joined Sophia at the door to what she thought was the Atlas Cache.

  Valerie settled down next to me, holding my hand.

  “I can’t go in there,” I said to her. “I can’t even make it down the damn hallway.”

  Banging and footsteps flowed down the hall. Valerie jumped up and readied fire in her palm. “You might have to. Looks like they’ve caught up to us after all.”

  “Lemurian scum!” someone shouted down the hallway.

  “We’ve got company,” Freddy shouted.

  Major Pike circled back and crouched down in front of me. “Everybody but Sophia, Chelsea, and Josh with me. You three go on ahead.” Sophia nodded and as soon as they were gone down the hallway, he turned to me. “Trevor, what’s going on?”

  I watched Chelsea go, a sickening twist churning my gut. “Fucking map,” I managed to get out.

  Pike gave me a hard look, but I saw past it to the real concern in his eyes. Yeah, I was a large pain in his otherwise spotless, trouble-free ass, but I knew he cared on some level what happened to Chelsea and me. “Stay low, fire fast.” He pressed my pistol into my hands.

  I nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Can you?” Valerie asked, now standing above me.

  I forced myself to kneel through the haze of dizziness and blinding pain. “Gonna have to try, aren’t I? Don’t stand in front of me.”

  “Shoot straight and you won’t hit any of us,” Major Pike said. He clapped me on the back. “They found it.”

  He didn’t get time to explain more as the wave of Atlantean soldiers swarmed down on us. Their laser guns fired and fired, but missed as Valerie plucked them out of the air with spurts of fire. Abby continually shot blazes down the hall, though I doubted it scared them. Bullets against lasers. So primitive in comparison. How did we expect this to end well at all?

  Soldiers fell on both sides even as Chelsea’s parents joined the fray. Her father ceased trying to heal me—as I could only assume that’s what he’d done before—which didn’t bode well. Aside from this not being a good time to heal me, he wouldn’t have stopped if I could be saved.

  I froze, not firing long enough to risk a glance at the hallway Chelsea had gone down minutes ago. My head swam just from looking at it. The Atlas Cache and its enormous store of Link Pieces was in there.

  Was that the last time I’d ever see Chelsea?

  A stray laser that Valerie had missed flew at my head. I dodged and it struck the dirt a few inches away. Rocks and dirt chunks flew at my face, stinging and cutting. I yelped when one got too close to my eye, jerking my head back. The movement sent my head into a painful whirlwind.

  “Fall back,” Major Pike ordered.

  The enemy kept advancing, with more and more soldiers replacing every single one we took down. One of our guys standing directly behind me screamed out. His shout was cut short, his body falling with a thud to the ground.

  I turned to see if he was still alive and… no. You couldn’t live without a face.

  “Now!” Pike shouted. “Get out. Retreat to the Cache room.”

  Another one of our soldiers fell to the ground. Freddy leaned down as best he could, touched a hand to his neck, and shook his head. “Dammit.”

  Too many were dead already. Falling back into the Atlas Cache room seemed too much like retreating into a dead end for me.

  “We can’t,” I said.

  Pike spun on me. “We don’t have a choice. Valerie can’t teleport us all out of here, can she? Markus? Alacia?”

  Chelsea’s parents didn’t answer as they were focused on holding back a wave of ice-water making its way down the tunnel. If they stopped, we’d drown. I had no doubt about that.

  “Valerie’s a bit busy,” she said for herself, still deflecting laser shots. And Abby wasn’t trained enough to take us all with her. “Shit!” Valerie cried out as one made it through her attempts, slicing across her arm and driving into a wall behind her. She grunted as the tissue and skin seared. “Son of a bitch.”

  I tried my best to find my canteen and open it up, pouring it on her arm. But as I stood to do so the world viciously swam as though I’d been sucked into a riptide, unable to steady myself, and I fell forward. I managed to catch myself, but it was with wrists that bowed outward, my knees knocking the hard ground, and something snapped.

  “Trevor?” Pike asked as I hurled up what little food I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

  “He shouldn’t have come,” Valerie answered. I vaguely saw her pouring the water on herself, ducking from m
ore shots. A volley of lasers flew by us, the sparks of which singed my clothes and struck my skin. It stung like sparklers did on the fourth of July. Our soldiers weren’t falling back like they were ordered, probably because Pike hadn’t moved with them. Still, the Atlanteans advanced. “He should have been sent to Pearl with the others.”

  I couldn’t think. Could barely breathe past the pain splitting my head wide open like an axe on wood logs. Cracking and snapping sounded, as if the Waterstar map were trying to force its way out of my mind. This episode was way worse than even the first time, in the jungle. The pain scorched a trail down my spine, lighting up every nerve and splicing it into so many pieces that I knew there was no hope of me ever coming out of this. Not this time. The Link Pieces on board SeaSat5. Atlantis. The freaking Atlas Cache sitting a hundred feet away.

  Everything hurt. Each limb and synapse. Every breath that slipped past my lips.

  “Chel…sea,” I got out. At least, I thought I managed to say it. Maybe it was in my head? My tongue felt too big for my mouth that was filled with cotton balls. Light disappeared to one tiny pinprick on the horizon of my vision.

  “Trevor!” Valerie shouted. Someone shook me. It hurt. Why did it have to hurt so bad?

  Dying. I was dying. I was sure of it.

  Pain tore through my shoulder and chest, a blazing fire that lit up the blackness. I saw Valerie’s horrified face. She stood over me, screaming something my ears couldn’t hear, something wet running down her face.

  Tears?

  Valerie was crying? Valerie never did that. What made her that sad, that upset?

  Dying. Oh right.

  Chelsea’s parents appeared above me, looking down. They frowned too.

  I thought I’d been shot.

  I didn’t know for sure.

  35

  Chelsea

  Leaving Trevor lying practically dead on the ground was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I’d looked into his mind, scoured it completely, and all I’d found were layers upon layers of mental walls I’d never noticed before. He’d erected those to keep me out, to keep me from knowing.

  I raced toward the Atlas Cache and found Sophia literally wading through it. A blue sea stretching yards and yards into the distance lay before us, seemingly blocked in. Some of the azure fog drifted outside the bounds. Inside stood podiums and stands, some with artifacts on them and some with artworks. An uneasy ancient feeling settled on me, reaching into my soul. Lights swam about with dates and times, lines reaching from one thing to another.

  The Waterstar map. Holy shit. The rumors had been true!

  “I see you’ve come to rejoin the fight, dear children of Atlantis,” a gruff, sarcastic voice said from inside the blue fog.

  “Who’s there?” I asked, stepping into the blue to find out for myself.

  Josh yanked me away from the physical Waterstar map. It was how I’d always seen it in my head. I wasn’t looking at a Link Piece, wasn’t investigating it. I was wading through the map in real time.

  “Don’t go in there,” Josh said.

  I ripped my arm from his grip as I’d already done too many times today. “Lay off me.”

  “Look, I know you don’t trust me anymore, Chelsea, but dammit,” he said, angry and scared and everything I was but had swallowed down. Which one of us was the better soldier now? “You don’t know what’s in there, who’s in there, or what could happen. We need backup.”

  “Major Pike sent us because this is something only we can do,” I shot back at him. “We’re Atlantean. This is Atlantis. Back off.”

  I stepped into the haze, leaving Josh behind in hopes of finding Sophia. I did. She stood in front of a stone. No, a sword in a stone.

  Objects in time, usually man-made, and sometimes full-on structures, Dr. Hill had once said, two years ago during my debriefing with him aboard SeaSatellite5.

  I’d responded, So, like Stonehenge to Excalibur, not knowing if I’d wanted to actually know the answer. Now I did.

  “You’re freaking kidding me,” I let out.

  Sophia shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think I am. Someone’s watching us.”

  “Atlas?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  “Hey, Prince!” I shouted. “Olly olly oxen free!”

  “Chelsea,” Sophia hissed.

  “What? I want to know where he—”

  Something slammed into my body—no, not something. Air. Straight air. I flew backward until my back hit a wall three yards away. All the air in my body whooshed out of my lungs. Pain splintered across my back and shoulders.

  I slid down the wall. What the hell.

  Sophia cried out and I heard another body hit something hard.

  I forced myself to stand and willed my body to not be flung again, honing my telekinesis to fortify this desire.

  My body shook with the force of Prince Atlas trying to make me soar again, but it didn’t work. I would not be moved again. Never.

  His dark, deep laughed filled the wild blue fog around us. “So you’re more than Atlantean,” he said. “You’re something more. Something my father created.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  It was so weird to put a voice, a face, to this previously vague enemy of Atlantis. But as I rounded a pillar and saw him standing there with Sophia in the air next to him, as if strangling her with telekinesis, I finally did. He was tall and muscular, with long blond hair and a full, scraggly beard. He looked like shit, honestly.

  “Oh, I feel like it too. Trust me, soldier,” he said.

  I pointed to Sophia. “You’ve got my friend there by the throat. I don’t trust people who hurt my friends.”

  “What have you come here for?” he spat. His fist closed tighter on Sophia’s neck. Her eyes went wide, her movements growing sluggish. She was running out of air.

  He knew. He had to know. How often did people come down here?

  “Chels-ea,” Sophia grunted out. The color of her face began shifting to blue. Or the haze around her made it look that way. Why didn’t she teleport out? Unless he was simply holding on to her and her powers too tightly. Was that possible?

  Prince Atlas dropped her to the ground. “I’m already bored. Please go back to attacking now.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, slamming my open palm into the air around me, pushing against Prince Atlas with my power. He sailed backward into a pillar. I took the opening and rushed to Sophia’s side. The skin around her neck was an angry red and already bruising, but she stood.

  “We can’t beat him,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “No way.”

  Atlas’s voice boomed when he next spoke. “You foolish soldiers. All of you made for war and not sense. This cache is the only reason Atlantis still exists.”

  What did that even mean? My parents had said the Atlas Cache was destroying not only the city, but the world itself, too. Space-time being ripped apart. Ripples in the fabric of time. Stuff I didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”

  Atlas gestured wide to the room at large. “You don’t feel it?” His eyes narrowed. “No. Manufactured life might not.”

  Sophia scoffed and wiped blood from her lip. “We weren’t manufactured.” The bite in her voice cut even me. I couldn’t agree more.

  Besides, I could feel it now that he’d said something. A buzzing thrummed beneath my fingertips, under my skin. Like an electric wave coursing through me, gently. A caress of power. But the longer I focused on it, the more I let it in, the more the energy throbbed at my pulse points. “What is this?” I asked, looking down at my hands.

  “What?” Josh asked. “What’s going on?”

  Atlas’s eyebrows rose. “Or maybe you soldiers can feel it.”

  Sophia turned to me with her hands lifted, palm up. “I don’t like this.”

  Energy. Power. Was this… No. No way. How was that possible?

  “Oh yes,” Atlas said, taking a step closer to us.

  Josh lifted his weapon. “Back of
f!”

  Atlas waved his hand, sending Josh flying into another pillar. I didn’t rush to his aid. Couldn’t. Atlas’s power seeped into my body, holding the water inside of me captive to his own uses. I searched within myself and tried to sever the bond, but even when I found it, he held on to my water too tightly. Sophia must have been under his control too, or I doubt she would have let this conversation continue.

  Every second that passed was filled with gunshots and shouts from outside. What was going on out there? Was Trevor okay?

  “You’re feeling the power of a space-time rift,” Atlas all but purred into the air between us as he continued to hold both Sophia and me hostage to his ability. “The raw energy. The city’s council might have designed this cache to hold every Link Piece in existence, but I volunteered to harness the very power at its core. The power of time, of life, itself.”

  Almost. He didn’t have enough Link Pieces? And we’d brought SeaSat5, a massive Link Piece, right damn here. We’d made it so easy for him.

  “What’s the point of that?” I asked. “Power hungry?” At least that, I supposed, would make sense. Some people just wanted power.

  Prince Atlas’s eyes met mine and he shrugged. Shrugged. “Because with enough energy I can go back to the start of this war and end Lemuria before they even get the idea to fight us over time-travel.” He turned his head and spat on the floor. “Those fools might be natural masters of time, they might even worship the gods who walked time as though walking on the ground, but they are ignorant. Backward. They don’t see the power one can harness from time, the possibilities. And just because we can, because my father, the King of Atlantis, wants to, they wish us destroyed? No. We’ll see who the real time master is.”

  All of this because of some I want it, no I want it, too pissing war? “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Ask him,” said Atlas as he unfurled an abnormally long finger in Josh’s direction. “Lemuria isn’t the only one who wants us to stop traveling, to stop collecting.” Atlas dropped his hold on me long enough for me to seek out Josh. The corner of his eyes wrinkled, a frown forming on his lips. He didn’t know what Atlas meant, did he?