by Jessica Gunn
“Whoa, girlie, what’s—”
“Black panther, I think,” she said, her eyes focused on the tree line. “More than one. It sounded like at least a half dozen, which doesn’t make sense.”
“They’re not pack animals,” Dr. Hill said.
Chelsea nodded quickly. “Exactly. Something’s wrong and I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen on finding out what that something is or being their dinner.”
Another black panther jumped out of the jungle and prowled along the edge of the camp. Its eyes glowed green—they all did—like some awful, predatory firefly species peeking out of the night. Moonlight slid along their long, muscular bodies as they crept, snarling and hissing. Closing in.
“Why are their eyes green?” Chelsea asked.
No one answered, but an inkling, a tiny prickle of recognition, bounced back and forth in my head. Green eyes. Glowing green eyes. Solitary animals acting together to take down a group of humans. They wouldn’t do that… willingly.
“They’re being controlled,” I said. “Shit. The White City, they know we’re here.”
Chelsea’s gaze swung to me. “Excuse me?”
I shrugged and took aim at one of the giant cats as a half dozen ocelots joined the crowd. Their sandy brown colorings were easier to spot against the night. “I can’t explain it, especially because I don’t think any of our eyes ever glowed green like that, but the White City is controlling them. We know their powers can alter memories and manipulate human minds. Why not animal ones as well?”
“No time for debate,” Pike said at exactly the same time that one of the black panthers charged the camp, jumping through the air directly at him. He let loose half a clip of his rifle and the creature fell to the ground. I readied my weapon in case the rest had the same idea.
“Guys!” Chelsea shrieked. I turned, ready to take down whatever had attacked her but only found her standing there, hands in the air… like she was trying to control something—someone—and had forgotten she didn’t have that power anymore. “Sophia! Don’t kill them. They’re just animals. They don’t have a choice.”
Somewhere deep inside me, the part of me not under attack by a growing conglomerate of jungle cats, appreciated her need to protect animals. But this wasn’t the time.
Two ocelots charged us, followed by another panther, but all three of them stopped in midair. Sophia stood in the middle, hands held at her head. She’d gotten a hold of them.
“Can you keep them still?” Pike asked. “So we can get out of here fast?”
Sophia’s hands shook. Chelsea joined her at her side, frowning. Shaking her head, Sophia said, “It’s taking all I have right now. Whoever’s controlling them is strong.”
But what did that really mean? Chelsea always went on about how we didn’t know enough about the White City and their powers. Or about their people other than General Allen. And here we were in their territory, hunted by animals.
“They have to be nearby,” Sophia said. “Find them. Hurry.”
Major Pike didn’t have to give the order—I was gone just as Sophia finished her sentence. If I were some psychopath controlling animals to do my bidding, where would I hide? I spun as I walked, conducting a continual read of the area.
I’d want to be close enough to keep a solid hold on my foot soldiers, but far away enough not to be seen in the night. I’d probably want to see what was happening, too. I fixed my gaze on the jungle. No, the moon wasn’t bright enough to light up that tree line. You wouldn’t be able to see anything that didn’t have moonlight cast on it, or—
The lake! Moonlight danced along the top of the water, reflected so brightly it’d given us enough light to make camp with. I scanned the waterline, even the other shore, but my field of vision cut short before I found anything.
Think, Turner.
“There!” Chelsea pointed up at the Waterfall. “Watch. Wait for it…” Two green lights blinked. A pause. One green light. Pause. Two, then pause, then one. A signal. An order.
“Major,” I said.
Pike charged to the stack of gear we had and uncovered a longer bag and yanked out a sniper rifle. He tossed it to me. I hunkered down on a rock and assembled the rifle. Steadied myself and my aim. Breathed in. Found my target, an adult male on a railing along the cliff face. Dwellings stood next to it, but he was the only one outside. Thanks to the rifle’s scope, I made out a glowing green necklace—a lit-up emerald or something—hanging around his neck.
“Turner, do you have the shot?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.” I hated this. I hated taking lives. But—
“Do it,” he ordered. “Now.”
My finger slipped onto the trigger and I took the shot. As soon as I did and the soldier died, the animals dropped and retreated without a fight or anything. We watched them go, confusion and panic written on their beastly faces.
I folded up the rifle and shouldered the bag. “What just happened?”
“They ran,” said Dr. Hill. “You took out the person controlling them.”
The ground shook beneath us. “Then what’s up with the earthquake?”
Was this what Chelsea did every time they went on a mission through a Link Piece? No wonder she’d wanted to stay with TruGates so badly. I was not cut out for this fantasy, this action movie. I’d had enough action when I was overseas in the war.
A loud crack reverberated around us as four giant pillars of earth sprang up from the ground. Earthen rib-like structures sprouted from each one as they careened closer to us. Containing us. Pulling us in.
“Move!” I shouted.
Major Pike and I slid past two ribs that were about to connect, but the others didn’t. Something sharp pierced my shoulder. I looked down to find a projectile, small and slim, peeking out from my muscle. Pike had one too.
The world spun and darkness danced along the edges of my vision. My knees hit the ground, then my face. It took all of my strength to turn over, my back slamming against the ground as I gasped for breath. The last thing I remembered was Chelsea shouting for Major Pike, and a dozen men in green tunics standing over me, weapons pointed at my head.
Chapter Seventeen
CHELSEA
I banged my fist against the earthen cage. Kicked it. Shoved my shoulder into all available cracks. “Let us out!” I screamed. “Take us to your leader for goodness sake—I don’t care!”
Sophia hushed me with a hiss and then reached an arm out, as if she were calling water to herself. None answered the call. She looked down at her hand and then up at me.
“I got nothing, remember? Are your powers gone?” I asked her. She should at the very least be able to teleport to the other side of the bars. Weyland and Valerie, too. I glanced their way. “What about you two?”
They both attempted calling for their abilities. Somehow, the White City soldiers had turned off their powers, but probably not for long. At least, they’d never been switched off for good before today.
Weyland aimed his weapon at the cage wall and fired. The bullet bounced right off and danced across the bars before sinking in the ground.
“Dude!” I exclaimed.
“Sorry,” he said, looking at everyone in turn. “Anyone hurt?”
“No,” said Dr. Hill. Thank god.
“Everyone, just hold on,” Sophia said, her hands up in front of her. “We’ve got time. We need to take this slow.”
“What?” I asked. “So they can get farther away and do something awful to Pike and Josh? No, thank you.”
She leveled me with a look. “It’s better than us shooting ourselves by accident before we even escape.”
“You do realize Josh is screwed, right?” I asked. “He worked with the White City. If someone recognizes him, or if somehow General Allen’s power left some sort of mark on him that they can pick up on, he’s done for.”
Sometime between the attacks on Pearl and us coming here, I’d started to not quite hate Josh so much. Well, okay. That wasn’t true. I’d never
hated him. But I hated what the TruGates team had done to me and to SeaSat5. Josh had been party to that, a part of the delusional, maniacal agenda General Allen had concocted. And despite what Valerie had confirmed about their brainwashing, I had my doubts. A lot of the time, you had to believe your powers would work for them to work. And hypnosis—you generally had to be somewhat susceptible to the idea for you to be hypnotized.
This nagging feeling that the General’s brainwashing abilities worked the same way wouldn’t leave me. To change someone’s will… that was powerful magic.
If it were true, what did that mean? Had Josh and the others actually wanted to abandon me and then do all those horrible things or had they simply been open to the idea of having a leader and a mission again after being discharged from the military? I didn’t know, and until I did, I couldn’t trust my feelings on the matter. But I still didn’t want Josh to die. Those feelings I’d had for him had been real, even if our relationship might not have been.
“Then let’s get out of here,” Dr. Hill said. He slung off his pack and began digging around inside of it.
“And how do you propose we do that?” I asked him.
He pulled out a trowel and a shovel—his archaeological gear. “The old-fashioned way.”
“We need to follow them while the trail is still fresh,” Weyland said, shouldering his pack. He righted his rifle in front of him. “Or as fresh as it can be after hours.”
My gaze lifted to the sky above. Dark rain clouds hovered overhead, threatening to dump who-knew-how-much rain. “We might have to pick it up.” Doubly if we counted on following those soldiers up to the city. If their tracks washed away… Our only approach, currently, was scaling the cliff itself if we wanted to get there sometime this week. It’d taken us entirely too long to dig out of that earthen cage.
“Then let’s go,” said Sophia. “Weyland, take point.” With Major Pike gone, the chain of command should have put Weyland in charge, but Sophia had been a member of TAO for so much longer that I doubted her civilian status mattered. Weyland didn’t seem to care either way.
Dr. Hill, Valerie, and I coasted in the middle of the two as we followed their tracks. It’d already been a few hours since Major Pike and Josh had been taken. My fear for them grew with every step through the muddy jungle undergrowth. All around us, giant trees closed in and massive, colorful flowers the size of my head sprouted at their bases.
The soldiers’ tracks, mixed with those of people walking reluctantly, alternated between walking along the shore of the lake and weaving into the jungle, as if they were avoiding something. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that something was. Hopefully, it was us they wanted to outwit, but I didn’t suspect they thought we’d get out of that weird cage thing.
Still, we continued onwards throughout the day and late into the afternoon. By the time the sun set behind the waterfall, its cliff basking the bottom in shadow, we were exhausted.
We kept moving anyway.
The tracks disappeared at the edge of the jungle twenty yards from the cliff’s edge. I looked up and down the rock for any clue as to where they might have gone, for even handholds for climbing the stone, but found nothing. Dr. Hill joined me, running his fingertips gingerly over all the rock at our eye level, and soon we’d investigated a good portion of the visible mountainside. Its sheer vertical climb was both unforgiving and intimidating. There was no way they climbed this, not without the help of that ladder system, which started about halfway up, where the dwellings were.
Dwellings. Odds said those people didn’t solely live on the side of a cliff. Either they climbed into the city regularly for food and other supplies, or they came down here. And just because we hadn’t yet found too much evidence for people living in or moving to the base of the waterfall didn’t mean these people never ventured into the jungle. If anything, it proved that things more dangerous than brainwashed jungle cats lived within the foliage.
“I still have half a mind to ride the waterfall up,” Weyland said, then he frowned and looked at Sophia. “You know, if I could do that. Can you hold all four of us?”
She nodded. “But it’s not a good idea. We’d lose the element of surprise.”
“What element?” I asked. “They already know we’re here or they wouldn’t have sent soldiers and jungle cats after us. And if they didn’t know until that very moment and just happened to come upon us, they captured Pike and Josh. They have to know now.” No one spoke for long moments, and the silence eroded all of my patience. “Look. The problem with riding the waterfall up isn’t that they’ll see us, it’s that those people up there will see us using Atlantean powers.”
“So we wait until nightfall,” Sophia said. “Weyland, do you think you can control the mist coming off the waterfall over there and have it follow us up? No one will notice in the dark and we can hide inside of it. We move up the waterfall to the first set of ladders and climb up.”
“And hope for the best,” I muttered as I clenched my fists at my sides. I shoved them into the pockets of my uniform. I just wanted to help.
Sophia’s gaze met mine. “It’ll work. Then, once we’re at the top, we’ll take the next step. It looks like there’s some sort of tree line up there as well. We’ll hide there and scope out the place.”
“You do realize,” Weyland said, “that if this goes south, we’ll have to leave without them, right? Not that I want to. I don’t. But—”
“We will not be doing that,” I said.
Dr. Hill waved his hand our way. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We don’t even have a Return Piece yet. We’re not going anywhere.”
I sighed and looked away. I wasn’t leaving anyone behind. Ever. I’d so often been the one tossed to the side, confused and worried, that the thought of perpetuating that practice made my stomach roil. “Waterfall first.”
And, after nightfall came and darkness swept the sky, we did just that. After gathering at the bottom of the waterfall, Weyland moved the mist to cover us in a bubble.
“Remember to make it look natural,” Sophia said. “Less like an obvious Trojan horse and more like a mist cloud that happens to be rising. It looks like everyone’s asleep up there, but I don’t trust it.”
If they were awake, I hoped they at least wouldn’t be outside or near a window. Once we got to the ladders, anyone who heard us would likely think we lived there, unless they got a good look at our outfits.
Weyland summoned a mist cloud and Sophia created a water surface the size of an elevator platform. We climbed onto it on unsure feet. I missed this power. I missed it in ways I never imagined I could. And when my body instinctually reached out for contact with the water, to be able to feel at home inside our connection, I cringed.
That connection didn’t exist anymore.
I swallowed down the hollow pit forming in the back of my throat. Pike and Josh didn’t have time for my self-pity.
Up we traveled, hidden and unnoticed by anyone or anything. Sophia moved us at a steady speed and Weyland kept up, continually raising the mist cloud until we came to a stone platform. We stepped off Sophia’s water elevator and into the cliff-village. The dwellings had been created out of a combination of natural stone and what appeared to be clay. The ladders, platform, and railings were all wood. Each house appeared to extend into the mountainside itself, with only a small portion of the walls being visible outside of the stone. If these people were from the city above, this had to be the poverty-ridden outskirts. How far around did this mountain side extend? Did the dwellings circle the whole thing?
Something wet fell onto my nose. Then another drop. I looked up and couldn’t see the moon. All those rainclouds present earlier had finally closed in. My gaze wandered up the vertical ascent. “Uh, guys,” I said.
“I know,” replied Weyland. “If we’re going to climb these things, we need to do it now before this gets bad.”
And so we climbed. Ladder after ladder to platform after platform. Up, move sideways, repeat
over and over again, for at least six stories. The higher we climbed, the more it rained. By the time the last two ladders were in sight, I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me. And every time I looked up to watch Dr. Hill’s ascent above me, water and wind beat my face.
“Keep going!” Sophia shouted over the storm. “Quickly!”
Before thunderstorms decide to start. There was definitely a sense of electricity in the air. The hairs on my arms had risen a few feet down. I did not want to be on one of these ladders when lightning struck. Assuming I held on to them at all.
I stepped up to the next ladder rung and my boot slipped. Water had made the wood slick, and where the ladders were nothing more than footholds carved into the muddy mountainside, it was almost impossible to gain purchase. I stuck my foot back and went to take another step at the same time lightning zipped across the sky.
Son of a bi—
Thunder tore the horizon, shaking the mountain and startling me so bad, I slipped again on the muddy ladder and started to fall. I grabbed on to the handholds the best I could, but only Valerie’s hand underneath me kept me steady enough to ground myself.
“Th-Thanks,” I breathed. “That was a close one.”
“Keep moving,” she ordered. That was it. No time spent on me thanking her for saving my life. Again.
Dr. Hill crested the top of the ladder system, and I followed not long after. We made a run for the tree line to the left, where the leaves were thick enough to keep the ground—and us—relatively dry. That was when my body starting shaking, teeth clattering. In the shade and at night, while soaked through from rain, it had become impossibly cold.
“W-We need a fire,” I said, but the rest of them looked fine, if waterlogged.
