Riptide Atlas Link Series 3

by Jessica Gunn

  In short, the doctors had earned the right to see the outpost, and since I hadn’t been there in months, I wanted to go with them. My body ached with the need to see it again, like the outpost was inexplicably intertwined with me in a way I didn’t understand. The first time I stepped onto that marble flooring, jaw falling in awe of the collection inside, it’d felt like coming home. The connection, the nostalgia, the gut-wrenching twist the very sight induced, was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before for any one place or person.

  Not my parents. Not Trevor. Not even Boston.

  The trip to the outpost took all of a few seconds thanks to my teleportation abilities. Freddy and Christa accompanied us as an extra precaution, with pistols strapped to their hips. They offered me one, but as we often discovered, I was enough of a weapon on my own. Plus, my powers worked here and did more damage than bullets.

  When we landed, the two doctors teetered on their feet. Christa and Freddy had grown used to my teleportation since I’d rejoined SeaSat5 months ago. The doctors on the other hand…

  I reached and grabbed each of them by the arm. “Easy now. I know it’s a bit disorienting at first. The dizziness will pass.”

  They both nodded while Freddy smirked. He and Christa took off to clear the room. It was pretty obvious by the musty smell, lack of lights beyond the ones our team had set up over two years ago, and the layer of dust covering everything that no one had been here in a long time—ally or not.

  “Just be careful,” Christa finally said. “Keep an eye out for anything out of place.”

  “Like a trap trigger?” I asked. My thoughts jumped back to the time Trevor and I had accidentally set one off by depressing a floor tile. We’d been making out and his hand slipped on a pressure plate that triggered a hidden door. Inside, we’d found a plethora of Link Pieces. I looked off to my right where that door now lay shut and sealed. I didn’t remember what tile had opened it, but I did know we left those Link Pieces where they rested.

  Christa nodded. “Precisely. I heard Trevor and Sophia had some fun with those on a TAO mission.”

  My eyes narrowed. “What? Really?” No one had told me about that.

  “Oh!” Dr. Michaels exclaimed. “This place is exquisite.”

  “That’s the best you can come up with?” Dr. Newton asked. “It’s incredible.”

  Momentarily distracted, but not forgetting Christa’s words, I said, “You should have been here when we first found it. If you think this is crazy, you’d have died if you saw all the artifacts.” Actually, I could retrace my and Trevor’s steps, find that loose pressure plate, and show them. Then they’d know how it’d felt. I scanned the floor about where we had been but couldn’t pick it out.

  The doctors started exploring and I watched them take in the outpost for almost a full minute, wondering if my face had looked the same.

  “You can touch it, you know,” I said. “There might not be many artifacts anymore, but this place isn’t going to bite or anything. Go take a look at the artifacts still here.”

  Both of them nodded and started exploring. Together, of course. They took the stairs to the upper platform, flashlights and tablets in-hand.

  I sighed as my gaze wandered the room. The greatest moments of my life happened inside this underwater building. But the Sargasso Sea cache had also led to the worst. When the hijacking happened years ago, I thought life and everything in it was as bad as it could get. But now that we knew the full scale of the war, now that we knew it wasn’t just Atlantis and Lemuria fighting over Link Pieces, everything had become that much worse.

  What did the White City really want? And what, if any, connection did their endgame have to the Atlantean-Lemurian war?

  I wasn’t sure we’d ever get those answers. General Allen was the only person from the White City I’d ever met, and he wasn’t the warmest individual in the world. I doubted he’d ever give us information, willingly or not.

  “Hey, Chelsea,” Freddy called from the platform. “Take a look at this.”

  I glanced over at him, peering past the light stands our team had left behind. “What is it?” I asked as I climbed up the stairs.

  He bent down, slipped his sleeve down over his hand, and used it to pick up an object without touching it. “I think it’s a locket… or a necklace, anyway. Did someone leave it here?”

  I cringed as he removed it from its resting place, in the event it wasn’t someone’s left behind trinket and instead a hundreds of years old artifact. At least Freddy had the forethought of using impromptu gloves.

  Freddy held out the necklace to me. A rusted over chain with a diamond-shaped pendant. Sure enough, tiny little hinges hung on one side. Geometric shapes had once adorned the outside without blemish, but now they were barely visible beneath the orange rust.

  Dr. Michaels dug into the pocket of his uniform jumpsuit and tugged out a pair of blue rubber gloves. “Here, take these.”

  “Thank you,” I said, tugging on the gloves, and took the necklace from Freddy’s hands. The pendant was no bigger than my thumb. I carefully brushed some of the rust from the top. Something had been written in a language that resembled Greek but looked different—the language of Atlantis. The same language the journal I’d taken from the outpost had been written in. The one with the story about the parents who whisked their child away from the city, scared of the destruction to come.

  “Can you read that?” Freddy asked, peering over my hand at the necklace.

  “No, unfortunately. Dr. Hill and Sophia can. I’ve never been good with languages.” I’d tried to learn Greek and Atlantean over the years since joining TAO, but I barely remembered the Spanish I’d spent entire grades learning in school. “But I think I can pop this open.”

  The rust hadn’t settled on the hinges. I slid a gloved fingernail beneath the seam and gently pushed the locket open. The tiny hinges squeaked with the effort. Rust bits glided to the ground. Inside, one portion of the locket held a picture and the other an inscription, again in Atlantean. The picture was of a four-person family: a mother, father, and two toddlers, one much bigger than the other. The image had been smudged and wrinkled by wear and water.

  “No way this is Valerie’s,” I said. “Even if she dropped it here two and a half years ago.” She wouldn’t have an Atlantean locket.

  The cool metal thrummed beneath my fingers, energy radiating from it to my fingertips much the way Link Pieces did. I glanced down at the necklace again, examining it and opening my mind to the Waterstar map.

  It didn’t come, and the locket didn’t shimmer blue like a Link Piece.

  “Chelsea?” Christa asked as she joined us all on the platform.

  A heavy sense of dread sliced through my mind, so fierce and without warning that I had to reach out for the nearby banister to hold myself steady. My fingers clenched around the locket as my eyes slammed shut and more awful, heart-wrenching emotions washed over me. The haze of the Waterstar map crested over my mindscape.

  As the blue lines with dates and times slid in and out of sight, I stood amongst them, clutching the locket. Unseen wind rushed past me. I swept my hair out of my face and watched as a city built itself around me. Towering skyscrapers made of white and tan stones and the bluest sapphires embedded in their walls.

  The image shifted, zeroing in on one building in particular like a bird of prey focusing on their next meal. Down, down, down the scene changed until all I saw was the outside of this building. The outpost. I recognized the writing on the tiled roof, the stained-glass windows protected by some sort of high-tech shield Trevor and TAO had never been able to figure out.

  Then I stood inside the building, watching as couples with children ranging from newborns to grade-schoolers scooped up objects—artifacts—from museum shelves and disappeared into a blue haze. The Waterstar map.

  As soon as I realized this, the world slipped as though I’d transferred myself to another place-time. I stood straddled between the present and… the past. Machu Picchu,
in all of its ancient South American splendor at sunrise. The sprawling city on the mountain spread out before me, magnificent in its sheer size and location amongst pillars of stone.

  “Chelsea!”

  Freddy’s voice called me back to reality, snapping me out of the past. Suddenly, I was fully in the present as if nothing had happened. My vision swam. I blinked to clear the disorientation, but it lingered like heavy New England fog in the morning.

  “What the actual hell,” I gritted out. Cool marble had broken a fall I didn’t remember taking. Freddy knelt in front of me, a hand on my shoulder. “What just happened?”

  His gaze slipped from my eyes to the locket still clenched in my palm. “You were holding that, then you froze and spaced out before falling.”

  “I saw the map,” I said, like it explained everything. Only, it didn’t. “I saw the Waterstar map as if I were about to use this as Link Piece.” I lifted the necklace. “It’s not a Link Piece, though. I don’t understand.”

  Christa and the doctors stood to the side, watching the exchange. Not one of them offered an explanation. Though I supposed they wouldn’t have one. No one here besides me even knew what a Link Piece really looked like, much less anything about powers.

  Was it a premonition? A vision? I’d had that weird dream once, about a family running from Atlantis just like the stories in that journal I’d found here years ago.

  Were visions part of the super soldier deal, too?

  “Let’s get you back to the station,” Freddy said. He hooked an arm under mine and pulled me up. “If you can manage it.”

  I cataloged my body. My head was a bit woozy, but otherwise I felt fine. “I can do it.” I held out my hand. “Taxi up.”

  The doctors didn’t look convinced. Dr. Newton’s eyes softened with concern. “Are you sure? Will you at least go to the Infirmary?”

  I nodded. “Probably the best idea.” Dr. Gordon should know about this. Maybe she even had answers from all her research. “Come on.”

  They each took hold of my hand and each other’s, and I teleported us all back to SeaSatellite5.

  8

  Trevor

  I was late again. This time, to see Abby. Work always seemed to pile up at the worst of times, and with tasks regarding the panic room mounting every day, I’d had a hard time juggling it all. But we were almost done with the panic room. Finally.

  The Lift’s door dinged and slid open. I stepped out of the cramped elevator with bated breath and into the hallway leading to the medical deck on SeaSat5. Leaving Abby with Dr. Gordon and Sophia had been the hardest thing I’d done in a long time. But there wasn’t much I could do for her, not without powers and an ability to understand. I’d once helped Chelsea learn hers, but that was so long ago and under different circumstances. Not to mention, Abby and Chelsea were two vastly different people whose powers originated from two diverse sources.

  “Move!” someone shouted down the hall perpendicular to the one I was walking down. The order was barked, tension screaming in their tone. “Out of the way!”

  I jumped, startled by the sudden intrusion of noise. My feet carried me toward the panicked voice, whether I could help them or not. I reached the entrance to the Infirmary at the same time Freddy did, Chelsea at his side. He had her arm thrown over his shoulder and, judging by the limpness in Chelsea’s walk, was holding most of her weight, too.

  I rushed to them, my heart in my throat, and slammed the button to open the door to the Infirmary as we approached it. “What happened?”

  “I’m fine,” Chelsea snapped groggily. Embarrassment echoed in her thoughts. This is so stupid. “I just…” She trailed off, eyes scrunching tight as her face paled and she rested more of her weight on Freddy’s side.

  Freddy looked down at her. “We’re almost there. Hang on.” His eyes met mine, worried and wide. “Get Dr. Gordon.”

  I rushed inside the Infirmary, boots clanging against the floor with every step. The smell of antiseptic assaulted my senses, raising my anxiety that much further. My sudden appearance startled some of the nurses and aid staff working inside. They looked up from their stations as I passed, alarm flashing across their faces as Freddy and Chelsea entered behind me.

  Dr. Gordon’s office was around the corner, and I didn’t bother knocking when I arrived there.

  I ducked my head in and said, “Freddy needs you. Hurry. It’s Chelsea.”

  What’d happened to her? The same question reflected off Dr. Gordon’s face. She followed me out into the lobby where a nurse had managed to get Chelsea into a wheelchair.

  “Exam one,” Dr. Gordon ordered.

  We shuffled into the nearest exam room, the hospital smell following us, amplified by the fluorescents above, and helped Chelsea onto a hospital bed. Dr. Gordon proceeded to run through normal tests before producing a light that she shown into Chelsea’s eyes.

  “I’m fine,” Chelsea said, squinting away from the assault.

  Dr. Gordon’s mouth creased, like she didn’t believe Chelsea’s assertion. I didn’t either. “Fine” had been Chelsea’s typical response for years now, regardless of her actual state of health.

  Dr. Gordon shut off the light and slipped it back into her pocket. She snapped her fingers at the closest nurse, who brought over an IV and stuck Chelsea with it before she could refuse. “Are you sure? Your responses speak differently.”

  Still blinking from the pen light, Chelsea said, “A Link Piece did something weird, that’s all.”

  I glanced over at Freddy. What exactly constituted “weird” for Chelsea these days? We’d time-traveled. We’d fought people with powers. We were still telepathically connected. How much weirder could it get?

  Freddy shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s a Link Piece or not.” He dug into his uniform pocket and held up a necklace. “We found this over at the outpost. She picked it up and had some sort of dizzy spell.” He glanced at Chelsea. “Also, you said it wasn’t a Link Piece.”

  “Then why did I see the Waterstar map when I touched it? That’s not possible. It doesn’t work like that.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened, but teleporting back here exacerbated it.”

  “I’ll say,” Dr. Gordon said. “Are you still dizzy? Your blood pressure is way off.”

  Chelsea nodded and leaned back into the bed. “A little. Can I lay here until the world stops spinning?”

  Dr. Gordon frowned, like she expected something more to be wrong but couldn’t figure it out. “I’m going to keep you overnight. Run some tests. I highly doubt this was a vertigo spell given what you’ve told me.”

  “I had a vision too,” Chelsea mumbled past the forearm she’d draped across her eyes. She had one leg hanging off the bed, the tips of her toes barely touching the floor as an anchor.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Same as that dream I had years ago,” Chelsea said. “When I’d passed out after discovering my ability to control water. I saw the outpost, but it was inside the city of Atlantis. The vision kept focusing in on couples running with children. Their children, I assume.” She shook her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” Dr. Gordon said. “For all we know, visions might be another power of yours.”

  “Doubtful,” Chelsea said. “What good are visions in combat? We assume the super soldier powers are there to make us elite weapons, right? What’s the point of these visions if all they do is distract and make the person dizzy? No. I think this was something else. But I don’t know what. Besides, it wasn’t the weirdest part of the whole thing.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  Chelsea dropped her arm and looked at each of us in turn. “I thought I traveled back in time, as if the necklace was a Link Piece. It was like I was straddling the past and present at the same time. I saw the Waterstar map and my destination of Machu Picchu. But I wasn’t in either time-place. I wasn’t able to leave that limbo until Freddy shouted my name.”

  Because that m
ade sense. You couldn’t be in both the past and the present as well as that limbo place the Waterstar map lived in, caught somewhere between the two. At least, that’s what Chelsea and Sophia had said many times before now.

  “She was pretty out of it,” Freddy added. “I’m surprised you were able to teleport us back at all.”

  “Well, you won’t be doing any more of that anytime soon,” said Dr. Gordon as she grabbed a clipboard and began scratching down notes. “You’re going to stay here overnight for observation and then we’ll talk in the morning. Try not to use your abilities, including time-travel.”

  Chelsea nodded. “Duly noted. You couldn’t pay me to move right now.”

  Dr. Gordon smiled and left, but not before saying, “I need to go check on our other patient, but I’ll bring you back something for the dizziness and nausea.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Chelsea said.

  My heart pounded, thoughts caught between both Abby and Chelsea. I cared about them both and now here they both were, inside the Infirmary with their powers acting up. “I can stay with you if you want company.”

  Chelsea shook her head, replacing her forearm over her eyes. “No. You need to see Abby. She needs you right now.”

  So do you, I thought. Hopefully only to myself. It wasn’t true; Chelsea didn’t need me. Anyone was capable of keeping her company while Dr. Gordon ran tests. And it didn’t look like Freddy was going to leave anytime soon. He pulled over a chair next to Chelsea’s hospital bed.

  I glanced between them and then at the wall separating us from Abby’s room.

  “Go,” Chelsea said again. “I’ll be here all night.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Feel better, and try not to use your powers until we know for sure what happened, okay?”

  “Yup,” she said.

  I exhaled a deep breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, then trailed off into the hallway. I couldn’t knock the feeling I’d be leaving her alone while she was super sick. But the truth was, Chelsea wasn’t alone. She had Freddy and Dr. Gordon, when she was done with Abby.