by Jessica Gunn
“Like a stegosaurus.” I giggled. It wasn’t funny. What was happening to me?
The giant Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton stared back at me. It shimmered and swayed, a time-travel tool waiting to be used.
“Sophia!” Trevor shouted.
She probably already knew but couldn’t respond. The scuffle she was intertwined with became a full-on assault as two more Lemurians dodged Pike’s fire to join the fight. My eyes tracked their movements. They were protecting something, something small and shiny. It hung from one of the Lemurians’ hands. A silver necklace.
I pushed myself up off the floor, shook off Trevor’s protective hand, and jumped into the fray. The super soldier inside me surfaced, doing what she could to clear my head enough to take down one of the Lemurians. But another got an arm around me and threw me back toward the door I’d entered from. At the last moment, I teleported in front of Trevor to avoid landing on my face on the floor. The backlash of the movement tumbled me to the ground.
More guns fired—the security guards. I drew my own weapon. With outsiders, using powers was dangerous, especially in a more contemporary setting like this. My hands shook and it took more mental focus than it should have to steady them. This wasn’t the drug or the alcohol talking. What shook my hands were the memories of the hijacking. Of me killing Thompson. Me killing another human being.
I fired. I fired a lot, same as that day. Not with wild abandon, but with a specific target—or three—in mind. Two Lemurians dropped and the world spun as I shot. Pain ripped through my arm and I twisted with the force of the bullet. My last bullet went rogue and slammed into an unknown victim. They grunted and cursed. The security guards that had entered the room also fell, victims to the Lemurians.
“Enough!” Pike yelled. “Taxi up, already!”
Sophia roundhouse kicked the last Lemurian attacking her and snatched the necklace from his hands.
“We can’t,” Trevor said from beside me. I glanced at him and saw Dr. Johansson bent over. “He’s been shot.” Blood pooled on his shirt in the area of his abdomen. I knew that type of bullet wound all too well.
“We need to go,” Pike ordered. “The security detail’s reinforcements will be here soon.”
Dr. Hill and Major Pike stepped up to the T. rex skeleton. Sophia lifted me off the ground and pushed me in the direction of the fossil creature before helping Trevor move Dr. Johansson. We reached beneath the rope tying off the exhibit and made a chain from the bones to each other. I noticed Major Pike’s shoulder was bleeding, too. He skewered me with a frosty glare when he noticed me looking.
I gulped. Did my wild shot hit him or Dr. Johansson? That I’d had a wild shot at all, that it hit anyone… All because of one foolishly accepted drink.
“I’m holding a T. rex’s leg right now,” Trevor whispered in utter awe. He was the only halfway happy person in the room.
We transferred back to TAO. To our time. They rushed Dr. Johansson to the Infirmary for surgery.
My stomach sank in time with my heart. I’d fucked up. Badly.
Chapter Eight
I poked my stitches. The bullet wound to my arm was deep, though the stitches would be useless by morning. I closed my eyes and lay down my head. The pillow was stiff and the bed hard—exactly what I deserved for not coming here sooner.
The doctors ran a full physical. Whatever Anthony had drugged me with paired badly with Vicodin. And despite my body being able to process alcohol, the drug still mingled with it enough to have a reaction. Add in the stress of the Waterstar map—as I’d suspected— and lack of sleep the night before… I’d been right all along. It was like I’d done a cocktail of hardcore drugs and threw it back with alcohol. The map had been the proverbial straw.
If I’d gone to the Infirmary this morning like Trevor had suggested, they’d have held me overnight and the mission would have been postponed, regardless of the Admiral’s wishes for Dr. Johansson. If I’d listened to Trevor for once, things would have been okay. The Lemurians would have never gone there to challenge us for the necklace Link Piece, and Dr. Johansson wouldn’t have been shot by a museum security guard. I wouldn’t have fired a wild shot that sliced through Major Pike’s arm.
I swallowed hard. I was still waiting for Pike to berate, punish, and probably disown me. He already didn’t like Trevor and me, hadn’t since the first day we showed up here. Any trust we’d built up was destroyed in the moment he realized something was wrong with me. Something that inhibited my reaction time, my skills, and my ability to protect Dr. Johansson on a mission meant to make him stop talking bad about the military, not give him a reason to continue doing so.
The door opened and Major Pike waltzed in the room without knocking. He set a chair beside my bed, then he stared at me. His arm rested in a black sling across his chest and his eyes were hard, wrinkled around the edges from age and stress.
“Major—”
He held up a hand to silence me. “If you were military, you’d be done. Career over, dishonorably discharged. You do not go on a mission while in any state of impairment. You do not risk the lives of those you work with, especially on a mission that could have been postponed. Furthermore, you should have told the General or me the very first second you got that a reporter questioned you last night, and possibly drugged you to do it.”
“I didn’t tell Anthony anything,” I slipped in. “He got nothing.”
“But you knew him.”
“I went to high school with him.”
“You can’t trust anyone,” he said. “No one outside this base, the Admiral’s command, or your family. Maybe not even them.”
My fingers curled into fists. “You leave my family out of this,” I snapped.
“Then get your act together!” he shouted, his words dripping with venom. His change in volume and tone scared the shit out of me. It was akin to hearing your parents yell at you for the very first time, knowing they were actually disappointed and angry with you. Possibly as if the “unconditional love” part of the bargain was gone for good.
I swallowed hard.
“You and Trevor think you have a right to be here because of the outpost, because of your ties to SeaSatellite5 and his ties to Lemuria, when in fact those are the very reasons I should have you removed from TAO. And while I can’t help what the media does to get your attention, you need to stop courting them and giving them chances.”
He meant the incident with Lexi. And Anthony.
“You don’t know—”
“No,” he said. “I do know. I’ve been involved with military scandal. With missions gone wrong. The best course of action—the only course of action—is to black out the media. They don’t know what happened. Nine times out of ten your commanding officer doesn’t know what actually happened. So you keep it to yourself and you do whatever necessary to keep the mission going, to keep the media out of your business. To keep the people still with you alive and safe.”
He forced a long, deep breath through his lungs, the inhale so loud that it echoed in the room. “If you were military, this—you working for TAO—would be over. But you’re a civilian, one we need. Your Atlantean super soldier status and the fact you can read the Atlantean language and time-travel—that’s about all that you’ve got going for right now as far as I’m concerned. To General Holt it might be different, but you and I, we’re back to ground zero.”
I didn’t know what to say. Nothing he said was wrong. I shouldn’t have talked to Anthony, or anyone who wasn’t family or Logan or Trevor. I shouldn’t have fought with Lexi backstage. I shouldn’t have skipped out on the Infirmary trip this morning. I didn’t deserve this second chance. And now I felt the same exact way I did a year ago when I’d woken up in Freddy’s bed.
“I’ll do better.” Feeble, weak words— they were all I could offer.
His eyes pinned me to the bed, but rather than being hard and unforgiving, they were desperate. “For SeaSatellite5’s sake, I hope that’s true.”
There was
a knock on the door. Trevor poked his head in.
Major Pike stood. “We’ll talk more later.”
I nodded, fully expecting lectures for the next six months.
After Pike left, Trevor set a plate on the table beside my bed. Cookies graced them.
I smiled up at him. “Thanks.”
He didn’t smile back. My stomach somersaulted in a bad way. “I know hospital food sucks and this was all I could grab.”
Great. Him, too.
“Dr. Johansson is okay,” Trevor continued. “He’s recovering and said he’ll be making a statement in support of the U.S. Navy, thereby breaking his contract with the Discovery Channel and whoever else convinced him to say that stuff about us, as soon as he’s recovered. He doesn’t know about what happened with you.”
“At least he changed his mind,” I said. It was the absolute only good thing that came out of this completely botched mission.
He nodded. “Yeah. Also, Sophia thinks that Link Piece we took from them, the silver necklace, might connect up to something important, so there’s that, too.”
“Trevor…”
Trevor took a step back and shook his head. “You screwed up. I know it, and so do you. I’m glad you’re okay, and that Dr. Johansson and Major Pike are, too, but you should have gone to the Infirmary when I said to. Taking Dr. Johansson anywhere could have waited for that stuff to wear off.”
I looked down at my hands. Everything seemed so far away. And in that moment, I realized Trevor was one of those things. “I’m sorry.”
“I am, too,” he said quietly. A pause echoed off the walls, so loud my ears rang. “I should go. Dr. Johansson needs help preparing a statement that won’t get him locked in jail for breaking the non-disclosure agreement.”
Trevor was gone almost as fast as he’d come to visit me, and I was left all alone.
Chapter Nine
I walked the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, glancing down at my phone as I waited for Dr. Johansson’s statement. It’d been a week and a half since the mission, and while everyone was talking to me again, things were still rough and awkward.
I’d slipped out of my lab unnoticed and came to New York to inspect the damage we’d done on history. After that day in 1956, the museum upped their security big-time. The incident had been labeled an accident and more security guards found themselves with steady employment. Other than that, the only thing affected was our Return Piece itself.
The Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton stared back at me with menacing eye-sockets. That anything this monstrous and deadly had once existed gave me chills. He—or she, I wasn’t sure—no longer buzzed with a blue, shimmery aura. After a Link Piece was used once, that was it. Now it looked like the same dead, fossilized dinosaur that everyone else saw.
No one bothered me as I walked the halls, and I hoped that was because no one recognized me. I sat on a bench at exactly 2 p.m., and flipped my phone sideways for better viewing of the live press conference. Looking at Dr. Johansson now, you’d never know he’d been shot a week and a half ago.
He took the podium with ease and addressed the onlookers. “Thank you all for coming today. Almost two weeks ago, I made unfounded statements about this nation’s great Navy. I’d like to formally apologize for those and clear the air.”
And break your contract to do so. By doing this, Dr. Johansson would be discrediting himself despite fighting the good fight. TAO was set to hire him next month in return. Having another highly qualified archaeologist wasn’t something TAO could pass up.
“The U.S. Navy did not participate in international thieving activities. The emails given to me were faked. The pictures were clearly doctored to show things that cannot possibly be true. And, as many of you have pointed out, anyone with common sense can see that. I was one of those people, but was forced to speak otherwise, and for that I am humbly sorry. While the loss of SeaSatellite5 is deeply felt by all of us. The Navy and other armed forces are going above and beyond to find the station. All we can do is help them along, and slandering the Navy isn’t the way to do it.”
He paused, as I’m sure his PR person suggested he’d do. Then he finished with, “So, let’s stop making their job difficult. Let’s find SeaSatellite5 together.”
Thank you for reading!
I hope you enjoyed DRIFTWOOD. Book two of the Atlas Link Series, LANDLOCKED, is available now!
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Also By Jessica Gunn
Atlas Link Series:
Gyre
Landlocked
Driftwood
Riptide (August 2017)
Countercurrent (October 2017)
Hunter Circles Series
The Hunter – Free Prequel
The Hunted (June 2017)
About the Author
Jessica Gunn is a New Adult author and avid science-fiction and fantasy fan. Her favorite stories are those that transport the reader to other, more exciting worlds. When not working or writing, she can be found binge-watching Firefly and Stargate, or feeding her fascination of the ancient world’s many mysteries. Jessica also holds a degree in Anthropology.
To catch up with Jessica, follow her on Twitter (@JessGunnAuthor).
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