The Accidental Invasion (Atlantis Book #1)

by Gregory Mone

  There was no chance the Erasers could have tracked them, though. They’d already taken too many turns. Lewis was watching for them, too. Or for his father. The sonic rifle had knocked the poor, huge man out, and Kaya had sped away. Lewis had yelled for her to turn back. Hanna, too. But she’d made the right choice. If she had backed up and tried to haul the professor into the cruiser, the Erasers would have captured all of them. Then what?

  She’d recognized the man who’d fired his weapon and the woman who’d called them invaders, too. They’d both been at the theater the night of Elida’s show. That proved they were Erasers—normal police wouldn’t turn up both in Edgeland and Ridge City. So if she had tried to help the professor, they’d all be gone. Now at least they had a chance. Her father could help them. Maybe her grandmother. Or even Rian’s parents.

  The Sun People should’ve thanked her. She’d saved them! Sure, if she had been in Lewis’s place and he’d left her father behind, she’d probably be upset, too. But still.

  They rode in silence for a while before Lewis finally spoke—and not, thankfully, about his dad. “So who are the Erasers, anyway?”

  Happy to talk, she explained what she knew. First of all, she said, they operated in secret, and you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd. They didn’t wear uniforms or have secret handshakes or special tattoos. Lewis asked if they had their own hats—that was a no, too. “They could be anyone, anywhere, at any time,” she added. “I’ve heard stories about them grabbing people off the street and no one ever hearing from them again. Poof. Just like that. Erased.”

  “You’re sure your dad will be able to help us find the professor?” Hanna asked.

  No, she wasn’t sure. But she knew one thing: “He’ll try.” Kaya’s dad knew people. Important people. Forget the Erasers. Her dad would find the professor and make sure he was safe. He’d reunite the three of them. He’d make sure that they were treated like honored guests, not criminals, and the Sun People would finally see the beauty of Atlantis. Or that’s what she told them, anyway. Was she being naive?

  Maybe the Sun People would never be safe in Atlantis.

  In a way, Gogol was to blame. He could’ve taken a few of them in his cruiser. That way, they all would’ve escaped. Naxos was at fault, too. He’d turned them in! If either of those two fools had only understood, if they’d realized just what a colossal and epic and massively important event this was, then all three of the Sun People would be perfectly safe. Her only mistake had been trusting those two frightened, lying cowards.

  Hanna put her hand on Kaya’s clenched fist.

  The tunnel narrowed. The air was warm and wet as they coasted along, riding the water. Hanna started asking questions about the caverns and the tunnels and how they were built. But Kaya didn’t want to talk. All she wanted to do was move. As far away as possible.

  Every time the tunnel curved or split, she half expected the Erasers to be there waiting.

  She hated that she was scared.

  Hanna started working through the junk she’d grabbed from Gogol.

  “What are you doing?” Kaya asked.

  “Tinkering,” Hanna replied. She held up the busted sonic blaster. “If we see those Erasers again, we might as well try to defend ourselves.”

  “I’ve already got one of those,” Kaya noted.

  “Two is better,” Hanna said.

  Lewis leaned forward. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “Remember how I mentioned the water running through the streets at night to clean up the slop?” Kaya said. “All that water flows out through these tunnels. They run beneath all the cities.”

  Silence again. Then Lewis muttered something.

  “What?” Hanna asked.

  “So we’re basically in the sewers,” he said.

  Hanna wiped a few drops of water off her forearm. “Yep,” she said. Then she lowered her voice, imitating the professor: “In Atlantis!”

  A smile cracked Lewis’s stony face. “That was a pretty good impression.”

  Now Hanna held her wrist just below her chin, speaking into an imaginary device. “The light is dim, but it doesn’t seem to bother our guide,” she began, using the same deep voice. “Her unusually large eyes are well adjusted to dim lighting conditions. The world she sees—the world we see—is so shockingly beautiful. The walls are soaking wet. Tiny crystals in the rocks glitter as we pass. The air is as steamy as a rainforest.”

  Lewis was laughing now, and Kaya, too, but what did Hanna mean by large eyes? Kaya’s eyes were normal. Small, even. The Sun People were the ones with weird eyes. And the air wasn’t hot at all. Wait until she brought them near a vent! Now that was real heat. Get too close, and you’d roast your eyebrows.

  Ahead of them, the underground river split again.

  Kaya swung the cruiser to the right.

  “He’ll be fine, Lewis,” Hanna said, switching back to her normal voice. “He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He will be fine.”

  “I know,” Lewis said. “I know.”

  As the mood in the cruiser changed, Kaya finally felt herself relaxing. What they needed now was music, and thankfully the soundscape in the old junker still worked. She adjusted the dials on the dashboard, skipping a few story stations and old-fashioned songs.

  “This is that radio thing you were talking about earlier?” Hanna asked. She held up the cube she’d grabbed from the junk pile.

  “The soundscape,” Kaya replied. The first recent song she found was a popular tune by the Narwhals, of course. She quickly switched and found one she liked. The beat was just right.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I liked that first one better,” Lewis said.

  Of course he did. Clearly he had no taste.

  The water kept racing and swerving, and Hanna started running her hands over the knobs and dials on the dashboard, asking which ones controlled what features. “Where’s the gravity drive?” she asked. “Maybe I can try to fix it.”

  “You literally just learned that there are gravity drives,” Lewis said. “Now you’re going to try to repair one?”

  Hanna shrugged. “Why not?”

  Kaya admired her confidence. The Sun People watched closely as Kaya pressed her palm to one of the tablets on the dashboard; Hanna leaned over and tilted her head to the side, focusing on the moving screen, the rise and fall of the tiny rods.

  “What are you doing?” Hanna asked.

  Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m reading.” The cruiser’s instruction manual was stored in the tablet, and Kaya was scanning through it to figure out how to access the gravity drive. “You don’t read like this?”

  “We read with our eyes,” Hanna said.

  “We do that, too,” Kaya replied. “But this way is better.”

  At that point, she didn’t need to steer—the cruiser was riding the water. So Kaya climbed into the back and, following the instructions, popped up one of the rear seats to reveal a squat contraption about as long on each side as her forearm. Tubes stretched out to each of the four corners of the cruiser, and there was a single circular panel in the middle. “Your gravity drive, Hanna,” Kaya announced.

  Hanna made Lewis switch places with her, then popped open the panel with one of her new tools. “It’s beautiful,” Hanna whispered.

  That was not the word Kaya would have used. Waterways and pools could be beautiful. The gleaming buildings in Ridge City. But a motor? Beautiful? No. Yet the girl from the surface was entranced as she picked her way through the tightly packed components. She pulled out more tools and began removing piece after piece of the drive, turning each one over in her hands, then popping it back into place. As she worked, Hanna talked more to herself than either of them, turning the pieces over and around in her hands and narrating in weird, broken speech. “Why is this . . . oh . . . and I don’t understand . . . aha, sure . . . never seen anything . . .”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Lewis asked.

  “Nop
e,” Hanna admitted. “But I’m learning.”

  “And she can’t break what’s already broken,” Kaya added.

  Lewis nodded, then sat back in his seat and yawned. He seemed more relaxed now. Was he still mad at her for leaving his father behind? She hoped he understood.

  At least they were safe. No one could have tracked them.

  They’d taken so many turns.

  Too many, even . . .

  She studied the dripping crystalline walls. The dim green and blue lights. The curve of the narrow tunnel. She’d never been in a waterway like this one before.

  Were they lost? A little.

  But she wasn’t going to tell the Sun People.

  The river dropped over a small ledge.

  Water splashed into the cabin.

  In the front seat now, Lewis gripped the handle beside him, but Hanna didn’t even look up. “Here,” she said, holding up a small metal ball. “Take this.”

  Kaya reached back and grabbed it; the sphere was warm in her hand and strangely heavy. “What is this?” she asked.

  “I thought you could tell me,” Hanna replied.

  Nope. They didn’t exactly learn about the inner workings of gravity drives in school.

  “Is it the battery?” Lewis guessed.

  “I don’t even know if this thing runs on batteries,” Hanna replied. Still hunched over, she held out her hand and waved her fingers. “What I do know is that there are four of those little spheres. The other three fit snugly into place, and that one was a little loose.” Her fingers kept moving. Oh. Right. She wanted the sphere. Kaya started to pass it back to her. “So I used those tools Gogol gave me to tighten a few other pieces, and—”

  The tunnel dropped sharply, throwing them back against their seats.

  They splashed into a huge body of water. An enormous lake.

  Hanna stared at Kaya. “Tell me you didn’t lose it,” she said.

  The heavy sphere, thankfully, was still in her hand.

  As the cruiser settled into the water, Kaya passed it carefully to Hanna. Lewis cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Echo!” The word bounced back to them off the distant walls. “Wow,” he said, scrunching up his nose. “This place smells like a toilet. How big is it? And where are we, anyway?”

  “Well,” Kaya began, fumbling for an explanation, “I know we’re going in the right direction, because there are no other pools this large between Edgeland and the border.”

  The boy studied her. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t know where we are, do you?”

  Did they think she ran away from secret organizations often? She stood up in her seat and watched how the water moved. In the distance, streams poured out of tunnels high in the walls. There were dozens of waterfalls, all at different heights. The lake itself was moving oddly, too, not just churning from the spilling water. And he was right. It really did stink.

  “We’re going in a circle,” Lewis said. “It’s almost like we’re circling a giant drain.”

  Kaya’s stomach suddenly felt sick. She gripped the top of the door and stared out.

  No, no, no.

  This was a filtering pool.

  These pools were the reason every kid in Atlantis was warned to stay out of the tunnels in the first place. How had she not thought about this? All the street water rushed into these pools. Then it was sucked down through filters built into the bottom of the lake, where sharp, churning blades crushed any rocks and waste into sludge.

  If they didn’t find a way out, they’d be sludge, too.

  That would be the end of the Sun People.

  The end of Kaya.

  “What’s wrong?” Lewis asked.

  There was no use in lying. She explained everything in a rush. Or mostly everything. They didn’t need to know about the spinning blades at the bottom. The thought of drowning was probably frightening enough.

  “Try the gravity drive,” Hanna said.

  “It’s broken.”

  She huffed. “No, not anymore. I fixed it.”

  Seriously? Kaya swept her hands across the dashboard, found the controls, and dialed up the drive with a long, shrill whistle. But the cruiser didn’t float; she could’ve sworn it sank lower in the water. The girl from the surface wasn’t so much disappointed as shocked. She wasn’t used to failure, Kaya guessed. And she didn’t like it, either.

  Hanna mumbled something about giving her a second.

  The cruiser was nearing the center of the massive drain.

  “What happens when we get sucked down?” Lewis asked.

  Kaya didn’t answer.

  A small square piece of metal bounced off the inside of the windshield as Hanna tossed it over her shoulder. The girl stared into the drive with her hand on her chin. Then she shrugged and kicked one of the tubes. “Try it now.”

  Fine. One more time. What else was Kaya supposed to do?

  She whistled again, wondering how far they’d get if they tried to swim against the powerful current, or if there was some kind of emergency beacon she could switch on, when . . .

  The cruiser freed itself from gravity’s grip, rising from the swirling, deadly drain, drifting higher and higher above the water.

  Kaya stared at the girl from the surface. Lewis did, too.

  “What?” Hanna said with a shrug. “I told you I can fix anything.”

  Kaya wasn’t sure how they celebrated in their world. But she stood for a second and let out a wild, deep scream of delight and relief. Smiling, Hanna followed with some kind of whooping chant, and Lewis . . . well, she wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. He stood on the rear seat, pressed his fists to his ribs, underneath his armpits, and started jutting his chin out in jerky, stabbing motions as he leaned forward and turned in place. All she could do was laugh.

  Then it was time to focus. Who knew how long the drive would last? Kaya scanned the walls as the cruiser rose higher. There were at least fifty tunnels spouting water into the pool, but she soon spotted the right one. A single dry opening. If she could get them over there, they could push the gravity drive as far as it would carry them, then walk if necessary. She wouldn’t have to worry about the water whisking them back. Yes, she thought, that could actually work.

  She pointed. “Sit down and hold on.”

  The boy gripped the rail of one door. Hanna held on to the back of Kaya’s seat.

  Kaya dialed up the lights. The huge wet wall of the cavern was instantly draped in blue. The Sun People watched silently. The stuff spouting out of the tunnels smelled rancid, fetid, foul enough to make her vomit. Yet the crash and roar of all that water spilling down into the lake below was beautiful. Almost soothing. She switched on the thruster, and they were thrown back in their seats as the junker blasted forward, scraped through the opening of the tunnel, then coasted slowly ahead.

  For a moment, no one spoke.

  No one even reacted.

  Then Lewis looked at her. “Did you just have your eyes closed?” he asked.

  “I’ve never even driven one of these before,” Kaya confessed.

  The Sun People were silent. Had she shared too much?

  Finally Hanna laughed. “I’m starting to like you, Kaya.”

  12

  Home

  After the girl from Atlantis steered them through the opening high above the pool, they drifted through a dark, curving tunnel for hours and hours. This one didn’t branch or split; there was only one route. Kaya had studied the manual and learned that the vessel had an autopilot function, so she switched it on, leaned back, and closed her eyes. At some point, Lewis stretched out across the back seat and dropped into a deep and dreamless sleep. When he woke, Hanna was out cold, and Kaya was only just rousing herself, rubbing her eyes. Lewis was dripping with sweat. His hair was so wet it felt like he’d just gone swimming, and his clothes were soaked. Kaya looked perfectly comfortable, though. Her clothes, made of some kind of instantly drying material, weren’t even damp.

  The light brightened around them as th
ey drifted out of the tunnel and into an enormous open cavern divided into huge pools of water. Hanna yawned and stretched, then climbed into the back seat, pulled out the busted sonic blaster, and got back to work trying to fix it. Lewis stared at her. “What?” she asked.

  “You never stop, huh?”

  She held up her hands and wiggled the fingers. “They need to stay busy.”

  “How long did I sleep?” Lewis asked.

  “We all slept through the night,” Kaya replied.

  Hanna stopped what she was doing and stared at the cavern’s ceiling. “How can you even tell whether it’s night or day?” she asked.

  Kaya tapped her earpiece. “This tracks the time.”

  The water was calm and still in some sections, rippled in others. There were a few people in the distance—some in small boats, others walking along the stone paths between the pools. Drops fell from the ceiling and plunked into the water below. Lewis tilted his head back, trying to catch one in his mouth. Not his best idea. When he finally snagged one, it tasted like rock.

  He noticed Kaya’s expression change as she stared at a bright light in the distance.

  “You’re smiling,” he said. “Any chance that means you know where we are?”

  “We’re at the edge of my city. I’ve been here before on school field trips.”

  “You have field trips? They have field trips! In Atlantis!” He elbowed Hanna, who accidentally squeezed the trigger on the blaster. His foot exploded with the strangest sensation—a kind of burning, intense vibration. “Owwww!”

  “Whoa,” Hanna said. “I guess I fixed it. Cool.”

  “Cool? That hurt!”

  Carefully, she placed the blaster on the seat beside her. “Right. Sorry. Are you okay?”