by Jessica Gunn
“As in, ‘yes, Chelsea, you’re still almost kicking my ass?’” I smirked.
She nodded and rubbed at her abdomen. “We send soldiers out with us all the time. I see no reason why Major Pike would worry about your capabilities.”
“Those same soldiers were the only ones who died in Atlantis,” I said. “And during the SeaSat5 rescue.”
“Having powers doesn’t make you invincible,” Sophia said. “Just harder to take down, and sometimes not even then.” She trailed toward the counter holding our water bottles and threw mine to me.
I caught it and squirted some into my mouth. “So are you going to tell them I’m fine to go on the mission?”
Sophia considered me for a long moment. “Do you think you’re capable?”
“Duh, that’s why I’m here.” It’d been two days since my talk with Pike, and they’d been hellishly long. I just wanted to know if I’d be allowed on this mission or not.
“Then if you can shoot straight, I think you’re physically ready. I will tell both the Major and the General as much,” said Sophia. “I think keeping you cooped up is a terrible idea anyway. It’s how people go mad around here.”
I should have taken her at her word and not investigated any second meanings, but the way she specified “physically ready” gave me pause. “You’re concerned about my bias here, too. Aren’t you?”
“I’m worried about everyone’s biases.” Her eyes took on a hard glint and her lips pressed into a thin line. “I’m usually a good judge of character. I’ve prided myself on that for many years. If what the enemy would have us believe is true about Trevor… I’m worried that none of us are truly ready for what we might encounter.”
“A suddenly super-powered Trevor, with abilities we don’t know the extent of and possibly irreversible brainwashing?” I suggested with as much sarcasm as possible so that I could make it through the sentence without crying.
“Precisely.”
I closed my eyes and took in a steadying breath, paying attention to the way my lungs expanded and how my brain reacted to the fresh oxygen. “I want to hope for the best.”
“We all do.”
“He was there, Sophia,” I said. “At the car accident. I can’t decide if he was in the car with the driver—driving it, maybe—or at the scene. But I saw him. He got to me before Josh and Weyland and he left me there.”
Sophia swallowed hard and stared straight ahead of her. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. We will find out what happened to him.” Maybe deflecting away from life-threatening situations was another talent of Atlantean super soldiers.
“After we retrieve the Lifestone.”
She nodded. “After the Lifestone. If General Allen gets his hands on the stone, we have no way to know what he’ll do with it. I’d rather the White City itself use it for what it’s for than let him use it for who-knows-what.”
“Agreed.”
Sophia took another drink of water, then capped her metal bottle. “I’ll go talk to Major Pike now. Hopefully, we can move tomorrow and return before too long.”
“We don’t even know where we’ll appear,” I told her. “Or know for sure that the Temple at the Falls is where the stone actually is.”
“Then we should get going as soon as possible,” she said, walking toward the door. “Keep training here for a while. Work on your muscle memory in case your other senses fail.”
“Will do.”
Then she was gone and I all I could hope was that Major Pike would listen to her words.
Chapter Fifteen
CHELSEA
The Transfer to the unknown time period was strange, almost like I was an observer to the hazy blue fog of the Waterstar map instead of someone capable of wielding it. Dates and times swarmed past me, our destination appearing on the horizon. Some point in the A.D. period, but any further details remained shrouded in a cobalt nest, unreadable.
Maybe I was even less of an Atlantean super soldier now than I’d thought. If my ability to see the Waterstar map had waned… I didn’t know who I was anymore. Maybe Pike had been right. I’d relied on my abilities for too many years. Maybe I’d never known myself at all.
My heart sank as the Transfer came to an end, ushering out the navy blue haze and replacing it with the scent of ozone, an instant suffocation by humid heat, and pollen. Lots of it.
“Ho-ly crap,” exclaimed Weyland. A chorus of safeties being clicked off sounded. Never a good sign.
“This is ridiculous,” Valerie said.
I kept my eyes shut, turning away from the group. If danger lurked nearby, and if Valerie thought it was that absurd, then I didn’t want to know yet. Something ancient tugged at my mind, like the feeling of nostalgia had when we’d first found the outpost, and I wanted to hang on to it a bit longer. To figure it out without seeing, like if I looked, the feeling would be lost forever. But this wasn’t a sense of familiarity or wistfulness.
Wrongness. It seeped into my every vein and synapse. And when all of those readied pistols never fired, I realized it wasn’t just me. They’d all felt it too.
Slowly, I opened my eyes to a world straight out of a children’s fairytale book. My eyes widened, brows scrunched. “What in the hell…?”
A bright orange sky whisked away my attention. The unnatural color burned my eyes, but I couldn’t look away from the strangeness of it. We’d landed on the shore of a huge lake, the water tinted slightly orange by the sky’s color. Or maybe minerals were to blame. It was water, wasn’t it?
Dark sand surrounded the lake, leading off into slightly off-green grass. Trees surrounded the clearing, tall and covered in brown vines. Their leaves were that same off-green color as the grass, maybe darker, and the ones with flowers were brighter than the rest. The flowers, though, competed with the sky for Willy Wonka Wannabe of the Day. Purples and bright blues, almost neon pink and yellow, and colors I didn’t even have a word for because I hadn’t yet seen them. Strange little bird-like creatures, close to a hummingbird in size, fluttered around the buds and flowering plants. Their aromas filled the air, as did the salty taste of the lake. A saltwater lake?
A mighty roar thrummed all around us. My gaze followed the sound to a ginormous waterfall. The pounding water tumbled from at least a quarter mile up the cliff face. And above it sat a city, tall and wonderful and made of stone that reflected the orange daylight. It looked ancient, the buildings appearing to have been made out of clay. But the architecture spoke differently. There was no way the sweeping arches and squat buildings toward the edge of the waterfall could have stood up to their task if made out of clay or terracotta.
Along the waterfall’s various heights were bridges and ropes tied to little, round structures that appeared to have been built into the cliff itself. Ladders connected the levels, though these houses and other constructions didn’t look nearly as sturdy. Why would anyone build a city on such a precipice, never mind above the mouth of a raging waterfall? I squinted my eyes and could just make out wheels beneath the city. Ah. Hydro-electric power. Also, the location provided protection from any number of things: war, predators, water shortage.
“Well, then,” I said. “This is new.”
I turned around to face the group. Josh and Major Pike still had their pistols in hand. Sophia and Weyland had established a perimeter, apparently over their initial shock of the unnatural colors surrounding us, while Dr. Hill had already begun exploring. He’d wandered a yard or two away, examining the lakeside. His gaze traveled up the waterfall to the city at its peak. Valerie had stayed by my side, her gaze transfixed on the strange world around us.
“There’s no way this is Earth,” Pike commented. It sounded like he wanted to add more, but he paused and looked around. “Right? I’m not imagining the Wonderland effect, am I?”
I shook my head. “No, this isn’t Earth. Not as we know it.”
“Where did JoAnne get that Link Piece from?” Valerie asked. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted that witch.”
“And yet…” I looked up to the sky again. “Not our sun.” It was bigger, marginally. Maybe we were on Earth during a time when it had a closer solar orbit? Was that a thing? Space wasn’t exactly my forte.
“We’ll be able to tell in a few hours,” Josh chimed in. “Sun’s pretty low. Hopefully, that means sunset is soon. If the stars are in the right place, we’ll know for sure.”
“Not always in the past,” Dr. Hill said. “But maybe.”
“Let’s make camp,” Pike said. “Secure the area and take a look around. I don’t want to charge headfirst into this. Besides, it looks like JoAnne left out some key details.”
My gaze wandered to the waterfall and the huts lining the cliff. “You mean the fact we have to climb that or find another way around?”
I hadn’t meant it to sound sarcastic, but Pike shot me a look anyway. “Yeah,” he said. “That.”
Sophia circled back to me and raised her hand. It shook, her fingers restless. “Are you feeling the same?”
“The wrongness? Yes. What about you, Weyland?”
He nodded and Pike asked, “What’s going on?”
“We’re having a reaction to this place,” Sophia said. “Like Germay’s time many months ago, and like the jungle cache.”
“In the presence of the White City,” I concluded. “Hey, didn’t you guys find the ruins of La Ciudad Blanca at that cache site?”
“Part of it,” Dr. Hill said, nodding. “But nothing that looked like that city up there. Wherever we are, whatever city that is, this has to be before things turned to rubble in the jungle.”
“Unless what you found was an outpost like the Sargasso Sea cache,” I said. “Maybe they moved the main city here, whenever this is.” At least we knew for certain that it was some time A.D. The farther in the world’s timeline we were, the greater the odds of finding a Return Piece.
Shrugging, Dr. Hill said, “Yes. That could be the case.”
Pike swung his backpack off his shoulders and laid it on the ground. “Like I said, let’s make camp and investigate. We’re not rushing into this one, and this area looks untouched enough to be safe.”
Untouched by people, he meant. Who knew what kind of creatures existed here? Atlantis had sea monsters and we’d already seen unfamiliar birds. I dropped my pack as well and dug around inside for my camera. Standard gear. Dr. Hill usually took the lead with the archaeology stuff—him having an actual doctorate and all—and it’d always been my job to document everything. You know, months ago when I’d worked for TAO without all these issues, without SeaSat5 being around.
I snapped pictures of the area around camp, of the lake, and of the waterfall. The camera’s zoom provided a great way to study the huts along the cliff face. People—at least, they looked like people—in white tunics milled about, some carrying supplies and food, some working on the wooden huts. Normal, almost. A day uninterrupted.
Look deeper, said my mind in a perfect imitation of Trevor’s voice. All of a sudden my thoughts jumped to times past where I’d taken photographs of places we’d time-traveled to, the cultures and temples and art. A presence filled the space next to me, feeling like him, but I knew it wasn’t real. Trevor was back home—somewhere. And that was that.
“What do you think?” Dr. Hill asked as he joined me on the lakeshore.
I shook off the feeling of Trevor and pointed up past the huts to the city above. “Definitely Aztec. No idea why there’re people living on the waterfall, but those city structures are absolutely Aztec.”
He lifted his binoculars for another look. “Oh yeah. I can make out some of the symbols and pictographs on the walls. Quetzalcoatl, we meet again.”
The name sent chills up my spine. “Fantastic. Hope we don’t meet any monsters like his namesake. The wannabe kraken was enough, thank you.”
Dr. Hill nodded, a chuckle escaping despite the fact that nothing about this mission was funny. “Your mouth to God’s ears.”
We moved camp a little farther into woods, against a part of another mountain so we had some semblance of security on at least one side. We sat in a circle, Weyland and Pike taking up positions across from each other, and ate MREs. Valerie took a seat beside me, ever my guard.
“What are the odds the temple is up there?” Josh asked, eyeing the waterfall with an unsure expression.
“What, don’t think you can rock climb that?” I asked him. The waterfall was an absolute far cry from the small cliff face the team had made me climb when I’d first joined TruGates, but with the people living on it… their ladders could help. You know, if a frontal attack was a halfway decent idea. Which it wasn’t.
Josh shook his head. “We don’t have the gear even if I could. There might be another way around, a natural one.”
“Or a road,” Dr. Hill chimed in.
“No way,” Pike said. “We need to stay as hidden as possible. In fact, no fire tonight. Let’s hope it won’t get too cold.”
If he really wanted to stay hidden, a cave might have been a better hiding spot. But maybe we could get a move on early in the morning, under the cloak of pre-dawn.
Even if we found another way up the waterfall that didn’t involve going directly up it via either the tiny village or Sophia’s power over water lifting us, there was no way to know how long it’d take. And the longer we stayed here, the greater our risk of getting caught.
Evening came quick here, disrupting any theories we had that we might still be on Earth. That or it was possible we’d misgauged our arrival time.
Still, the stars came out slowly, as if each one took its sweet time blinking into existence. With every newly visible star came another familiar constellation. Orion overhead, Cassiopeia, and the dippers appeared over the treetops. Given their position to what we all saw in the night sky all the time, we couldn’t argue it. We were still on Earth, but an Earth with colors that didn’t match what we knew despite the foliage itself being one hundred percent familiar.
A low rumble started throughout the air, filling it as the noise spread from over the waterfall to our camp.
I sat up straighter. “Please tell me I’m not the only one hearing that hum-rumble thing.” It almost felt like how bass notes do, when you can’t hear them, but you can feel them in your chest. “What is that?”
“We all hear it,” said Josh, his eyes on the city above the waterfall. “It’s coming from up there.”
“It almost sounds like singing, chanting,” Dr. Hill said. “Like they’re all singing one low note.”
A bright light appeared in the sky—no, a ball with a trail. A comet. It streaked across the deep blue, almost black night sky with grace. Fighting gravity, the fireball soared. The closer it got to arching over the waterfall city, the louder the people’s singing grew.
“They were expecting it,” I said. “It’s a ritual or something.” It wasn’t unheard of, especially since most ancient cultures like this didn’t know what they were looking at. Most thought it was an act of the gods, not a hunk of ice and space rock that orbited around the solar system.
The comet had a blueish-purple tinge to its tail as it soared through the sky. It took my breath away, the beauty of it. A lone object journeying through space, sometimes in companion to something greater than itself—but just for the briefest of moments before taking off back into space. Traveling through a vast darkness with only stars as a guide; it sounded vaguely familiar.
“Halley’s Comet,” Dr. Hill said, his voice tinged with awe. “I’ll be damned.”
“You sure?” Major Pike asked him.
Dr. Hill nodded profusely. “Oh, yes.”
Okay, so we were definitely still on Earth. That was too many coincidences for that not to be true. So what gave?
Pocket universe.
The thought floated across
my consciousness. I clung to it and dug deeper, back to when JoAnne had been telling us about this mission. About why the White City wanted the Lifestone so badly.
They’re from a pocket universe. They got here by accident and weren’t able to get home.
“Oh,” I said, barely louder than a whisper. I wasn’t sure I completely understood the idea of a pocket universe, but I’d seen enough sci-fi movies to know what ‘alternate reality’ meant. And if it was even marginally the same, then that was where we were: still on Earth, just not our Earth. “Mystery solved.”
Except for the part about how a Link Piece had brought us here, and why the White City hadn’t been able to do just that. Unless it was like how I’d never been able to see SeaSat5 or Atlantis on the Waterstar Map because I’d made the Link Pieces that went there.
Josh glanced my way. “What do you mean?”
I explained my observations and they agreed. Resigned to figuring out the truth, we bunkered down for the night.
I awoke sometime later to the call of nature. Pike caught my eye as he sat on the edge of camp, and I motioned to the woods in a vague depiction of my needs. I wandered a few yards into the jungle to do my business to the sounds of various insects and—
Something growled, low and deep, before I could even tug down my pants. I paused and listened, studying the darkness for movement. Maybe I’d imagined it?
Then, as I moved to continue on with my business, something leaped out of the dark, teeth barred below glowing green eyes. A mighty roar tore from its throat.
Chapter Sixteen
JOSH
A scream wrenched me out of sleep. My fingers grabbed for the gun lying at my side before I opened my eyes. I sat up and took stock of our camp. Everyone was there, batting away grogginess to also see what was going on, except…
Chelsea.
“Valerie!” she shouted.
I was up and moving in the direction of her scream before the Major opened his mouth to utter the order. Sophia joined us as we moved toward the jungle, guns raised.
