Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  It was all I could do not to cry out as our ticket off this island burned in the shallows.

  The spotlight swiveled again, this time pinning down our location behind the cannon. We raced back toward the tunnel, into the fort, eliciting a chorus of shouts from our pursuers. I glanced back as four mercenaries in tactical gear leaped onto the dock.

  Leading the charge, his long gunmetal hair bathed in the orange light from our burning boat, was Horace Nox.

  Back inside the fort walls, Atlas held tight to my hand as we fled across the starlit parade grounds. He directed us toward the far corner, where we plunged through an archway and into the dark bowels of the fortress.

  It was nearly impossible to see inside so we clung to the walls, running our fingers over the damp stone to guide us. With each passing cell, I felt hope slip away. Even if we found another exit, we were still stranded on this island. What were we going to do without a boat? Swim a mile to the nearest shore? Risk destroying the new riddle in the process?

  Any specter of hope for our survival vanished when we reached a dead end. We had entered a dank, empty cell, with no furniture to hide behind and only a single window, latticed with metal bars. A wheezy sob escaped my lips as I violently jerked at the grill, trying to rip it free from the stone. The island was a dead zone for cellular service, so we couldn’t call the police, and it was too late to turn back to the other rooms. I could hear the footsteps of Nox and his men descending on us down the hallway.

  Atlas, who had barricaded the door shut using the only chair in the room, spun me around and cupped my face in his hands. “Listen to me—Sabra, listen to me!” he whispered harshly, until I stopped crying. “What if I told you that there is a way to get us off this island alive? What if I told you that in twenty-four hours, you’ll know the location of the final riddle? Would you trust me?”

  I nodded vigorously. I couldn’t form the words to agree with him.

  “Then no matter what happens next, you cannot stop what I’m about to do,” he said. “First, I need the journal page.”

  Atlas produced a lighter from his pocket. His fingers were shaking, so it took a few tries for him to ignite it, but once he did, he snatched the new riddle from me. In the flickering glow, his eyes rapidly scanned the page.

  After he’d read it once, he brought the flame to the corner.

  “What are you—?” I started to cry out.

  He silenced me with a finger to his lips and mouthed the words ‘Have faith.’ The edge of the paper crackled and blackened. The burn was apparently too slow for Atlas—he dropped the riddle to the ground and snapped the lighter’s shell over it. The butane from the fuel chamber drizzled onto the page. Fire spread rapidly over the surface, hungrily following the trail of lighter fluid. I watched helplessly as the flames consumed Cumberland Warwick’s cursive. In less than a minute, the riddle, the only chance I had to end the blight that had stolen my sister’s childhood from her, was gone.

  Atlas wasn’t watching the page burn, nor was he watching the door, where any minute now Nox and his men would burst through. Instead, he closed his eyes. The lumps of his pupils danced behind his eyelids. His lips formed a string of words, to the point that he appeared to be chanting to himself.

  Someone on the other side of the door kicked it hard. On the second kick, the old wood began to buckle. With the third, the chair flew out from under the knob and clattered to the floor, and a fourth sprung the door open altogether.

  The squad of mercenaries fanned out into the room, shining their flashlights on our faces and hollering at us to hold our hands over our heads.

  The last person to enter the room was Horace Nox.

  The drug baron held a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his gaze fell on the riddle’s burning remains. His eyes widened as the fire devoured the last surviving word.

  “No!” he howled, then again, “No, no, no!” He threw himself to his knees and attempted to slap out the remaining fire, but he was too late. The riddle was nothing but embers now.

  Driven mad with rage, he pointed the pistol at my head. I drew in my last breath. “I’m sorry, Echo …” I whispered.

  But right before Nox could pull the trigger, Atlas’s eyes sprung open and he screamed, “I have an eidetic memory!”

  While I had no idea what that meant, his words clearly meant something to Nox. The gangster kept his gun trained on my face, but his finger relaxed on the trigger. “Explain,” he ordered.

  Atlas swallowed hard and stepped in front of me to interrupt Nox’s line of fire. “It’s not a perfect photographic memory,” he went on, “but I can picture the words on the page, and using some mnemonic devices, I’ll be able to tell you exactly what the riddle said—word for word.”

  Nox seized Atlas by his short hair. He pressed the barrel of his pistol to the soft fleshy spot under Atlas’s jaw. “Then get on your knees and write those words in the dirt, and for your troubles, I will mercifully let your maggoty existence extend an extra sixty seconds.”

  “No,” Atlas replied. Nox drilled the gun harder into his neck. Still, Atlas held his ground. “You’ll get the eleventh riddle—and the Serengeti Sapphire—but only on my terms.”

  Nox took a step back and impatiently massaged the bridge of his nose. “Please, please tell me that you’re not about to bore me with some ultimatum to spare your life.”

  “Not my life.” Atlas tilted his head in my direction. “Just hers.”

  Nox sauntered around Atlas and up to me. I tried not to flinch as he ran the pistol’s barrel down the side of my face in a perverse caress. I’d killed the woman who’d murdered my brother, I’d destroyed the man who’d covered it up, yet here was the human stain who was behind all of my family’s recent suffering, close enough that I had to share oxygen molecules with him—and I could do nothing.

  “I’m excellent at reading character,” Nox said. He jerked his thumb back at Atlas. “Your man, there, is a petunia who hasn’t an ounce of violence in him. But you …” He released a shuddering breath, odorous with the cabbage-like smell of death, thanks to the illness rotting his insides. “I can taste the violence in you. Drumm, Pearce, Aries—their deaths were all your doing, weren’t they?”

  “Oops,” I replied.

  “Hey, douchebag,” Atlas snapped. “Do you want your magical plant or not?”

  Nox turned back to Atlas. “Okay, cupcake. What are your terms of surrender?”

  “This is how it’s going to go down,” Atlas said firmly. “You’re going to hold me for one day, some place away from Boston, off the grid, so I know that you’re personally not anywhere near Sabra. Over the course of those twenty-four hours, she is going to get a head start fleeing as far away from the city as she possibly can.” I started to protest, but Atlas spoke louder to cut me off. “After that time has elapsed, she’s going to call me so I know that she’s found haven somewhere beyond your reach. Once I hear her voice, then I will dictate to you the contents of the riddle and even help you solve it. But if I don’t hear from her, then you might as well make your own funeral arrangements, because the contents of the riddle will die with me.”

  Nox mulled over Atlas’s proposition. “So you’ll willingly help me find the Sapphire, even though that means condemning youngest Tides runt to death.”

  Atlas turned his gaze on me. His eyes were so stony that even I was convinced by what he said next. “To be brutally honest, I think you’re all a bunch of pathetic daydreamers who are chasing an antidote that doesn’t exist. So, yes, I will lead you down the rabbit hole, if only to watch you writhe with desperation when you realize you’ve wasted your final days chasing a white whale.”

  It dawned on me exactly what Atlas was orchestrating. After everything he’d gone through with his own sister, after everything we’d gone through over the last few days, he would never betray Echo and lead Nox to our miracle cure. What if I told you that in twenty-four hours, you’ll know the location
of the final riddle? he’d said to me before our capture. Would you trust me?

  Atlas was going to solve the riddle in his own head.

  When I called tomorrow, he would tell me where to find the next journal page and hope that I could race there before Nox did.

  And as soon as he did that, he was a dead man.

  Nox, who’d been studying Atlas for any trace of bullshit, must have realized that he had no other option but to cooperate. Atlas was, after all, the only ‘copy’ of the remaining riddle. If he died, so did the final link to the Sapphire.

  So Nox unclipped a satellite phone from the belt of his black jeans, dialed a number, and held it to his ear. “Hello, dear brother,” he sang. “Get the Greenhouse ready for a visitor.” He smiled at Atlas. “I have a new petunia for your garden.”

  Several minutes later, Atlas and I were ushered aboard Nox’s boat, which had been sadistically named The Last Hope. The two of us were isolated on separate ends of the ship.

  The captain slowed the vessel off the coast of Hull, at which point I was manhandled by two mercenaries, who held me by my arms as Nox approached. He reached out and traced a finger down the silver chain around my neck, until his fingertip came to rest on Paul Revere’s silver bell. He tightened a fist around the trinket, and with a rough yank, he ripped the necklace off me. Tiny silver links scattered over the deck as the chain snapped, and I could feel blood bead on the nape of my neck.

  “Before I toss you back out to sea,” Nox said, “I can’t help but ask: What is it with your family and stealing from me? What sort of strange compulsion makes all of you so unable to keep your hands off my shit?” He searched my eyes for an answer. “After three Tides in nine years, I have to believe that you suffer from some genetically predisposed death wish.”

  “Three Tides?” I repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Nox’s eyes lit up. “Wait—you really don’t know, do you?” He laughed from his belly. “Oh, this is fresh. Whose warehouse do you think your old man was trying to roll over when the pigs busted him? Who do you think he was trying to rip off?”

  I shook my head. “That’s … not possible. The man who owned the warehouse testified against my dad.” It had been almost a decade since the trial, and I’d been a kid then, sure, but I would have remembered if Horace Nox had been involved.

  “You think I’m cotton-headed enough to put my own name on the deed to a warehouse full of drugs? That guy who testified against your father was only my marionette.” Nox pantomimed a puppet with his hand. “Of course, Buck was too dumb to realize he’d been duped. And he had no idea he was setting the Tides bloodline on a collision course for extinction.”

  I was still struggling to process this twist when Nox jabbed a finger down at the water. “Let’s reunite the Tides with the surf, shall we boys?”

  The two mercenaries hefted me over their heads with strong arms and tossed me overboard. I landed in a yellow lifeboat that they’d lowered into the water. One of them dropped a single paddle on top of me.

  Once I had peeled myself off the raft’s plastic lining, Nox threw something else before I drifted away. It was a five-dollar bill wrapped around a rock. “Buy Echo a cheeseburger,” he shouted. “I hear she’s got a voracious appetite these days.”

  I roared and threw the stone right back at him, aiming for his face. It pathetically missed and struck the side of the ship. The rock gouged a hole in the word Hope before the harbor waters swallowed it up.

  I didn’t cry until my raft washed ashore on the banks of Hull. I collapsed in the sand. I had come so far—so far—only to have the penultimate riddle stripped from me, along with the one person who had been my bedrock during these backbreaking last few days. We’d repeatedly overcome insurmountable odds to complete the trials of the Sapphire quest, and it had all been for nothing. Atlas would likely die in Nox’s confines, my own days were numbered, and Echo would never get her miracle cure.

  As I wept on the beach, the cold surf lapping at my legs, I pictured the last moment I’d seen Atlas aboard the ship—potentially the last time I would ever see him alive. He hadn’t said anything to me. He’d simply rolled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and pressed two fingers to the tattoo of his sister’s name.

  That simple gesture gave me the strength to pick myself up off the beach. Despite the severe setbacks I’d been dealt, all of that dissolved, leaving behind only the simplicity of what I wanted, and what I would have to do to get it.

  I wanted Echo to live. I needed the riddle to save her. Which meant that I had twenty-four hours to do whatever it took to find and free Atlas.

  I pulled out my phone, which thankfully had service now that I was back on the mainland. I didn’t even bother with a greeting when Rufus picked up. “I need two addresses this time,” I said. The first, I explained, was the location of Nox’s “greenhouse,” where I assumed he grew Blyss’s main ingredient. And as for the second …

  “Who the hell is Declan Kelly?” Rufus asked.

  I speared the paddle from the life raft into the sand. “He’s my godfather.”

  The last time I’d seen Declan Kelly was almost ten years ago, shortly before he took the stand to testify against my dad. But even in my memories of my godfather from before that unforgivable betrayal, the man was a real piece of shit.

  Dec was an unofficial uncle to Jack and me when we were growing up, since my father was an only child and Mom’s siblings lived back on Cyprus. Even now, I couldn’t hear Dec’s name without catching a whiff of his offensive breath, which smelled like a beer-soaked ashtray. As far as I knew, he only owned sleeveless t-shirts, none of them large enough to restrain the kidney-bean bulge of his stomach. His visits to the Tides household usually spiraled out of control shortly after he and my father retreated to our dilapidated porch with a deck of cards and a case of Harp.

  Despite his short fuse and his countless deficits as a family man, my father mostly treated my mother with respect. But he slipped down to a spiteful place whenever Dec was around. He would make petty verbal jabs at Mom, picking at the scabs of old disagreements. All the while, I could hear my godfather sniggering through the porch’s screen door, egging him on.

  So while I didn’t hate Dec for landing my father in Cedar Junction—Buck Tides had dug his own grave—I did hate Dec because he was an asshole.

  That’s why, in my time of crisis, I couldn’t believe that I was driving two hours west to my godfather’s trailer in the middle of the Mohawk Trail Forest. Dec was a gun collector, and I wasn’t about to crash Nox’s drug fields unarmed. Not that I actually knew how to fire a weapon, but I’d feel a hell of a lot safer with one to at least theatrically wave around.

  Route 2 narrowed from three lanes to two lanes, then to one, until it ceased to be a highway altogether. The backroads took me through a covered bridge, the kind you only see in movies, and into a dense wood of towering oaks. When I finally parked Atlas’s truck next to a mailbox plastered with a collage of Hooters stickers, it didn’t take a GPS to confirm that I’d arrived at Dec’s place.

  The long dirt driveway spat me out in front of a trailer so dented and weathered that it looked like a giant had discarded an enormous beer can in the woods. It had been built on the banks of a brook that snaked through the trees, and reclined at an angle where the mossy earth was slowly repossessing it. Truth be told, I had some good rustic memories of summer days here—sipping root beer, trying to catch bullfrogs in the stream—but I didn’t remember it ever being in such a sorry state.

  I had no intention of meeting face-to-face with Dec. Hopefully, he was somewhere off-property sniping squirrels out of the trees, a favorite pastime of his. I peered through the dingy windows, looking for any signs of movement, but found none. His Harley was absent from the gravel drive.

  To my relief, the old shipping container was still there. The long steel crate was the one place Jack and I had been banned from playing near. Considering the amount of rusty tools and scrap metal littering
the riverside that we had been allowed to scamper around, it was obvious that there was something pretty damn dangerous inside the box.

  The container’s door was sealed shut with a flimsy lock. I scavenged around the yard until I found a lug wrench. Several hard swings later and the mangled lock dropped to the ground.

  The inside of the shipping container was like a carnival of vices and contraband. I tripped over a crate of whiskey bottles as I entered. Buzzing UV lamps lined the walls, shining fake sunlight on a garden of plants that I felt reasonably certain weren’t ferns. And in the back …

  “Bingo.”

  Dec kept all of his firearms on display in a glass cabinet: handguns, semiautomatics, a recurve bow with a bouquet of arrows. I decided to go small—homicidal drug lord or not, I had no intention of prancing around Nox’s compound with an assault rifle. I had just settled on a revolver when someone behind me said in a butter-thick Boston accent, “Lay it down on the floor and turn around, real slow.”

  I did as I was told, exaggerating my movements. When I turned to face Dec, I was shocked to see a man who only loosely resembled the godfather from my childhood memories.

  For starters, he was in a wheelchair now.

  He had a sawed-off shotgun resting on the tartan quilt covering his lap. His finger hovered over the trigger.

  “Hello, Uncle,” I said.

  His thin lips fell open as my face clicked in his memory with the eight-year-old girl he used to know. He let the shotgun clatter to the floor beside his wheelchair. “Jesus, Mary, and Bono,” he whispered and groped for the crucifix tucked into the collar of his army surplus T.

  “Isn’t there a commandment against using U2’s name in vain?” I asked.

  As the shock of seeing me for the first time in a decade wore off, Dec folded his arms over his chest. “I might as well have shot you, because if your mother finds out you paid Uncle Dec a visit, she’ll flay the both of us alive. So what the hell are you doing here?”