Legends of Fire: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 4)

by A. L. Knorr

The sound of a glass being set down on the counter in the kitchen made Tomio raise his head and swear under his breath.

  “What?” I got out of bed and stretched my arms over my head.

  He cocked a thumb toward the door. “Did she really agree to go back underground, or did I dream that?”

  “It wasn’t a dream. Brave woman.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, if this works and we get Gage back in one piece with his fire intact, we’ll owe her a debt we can never repay.”

  “Well, we did spring her from prison.”

  “True.”

  “And if you were in her shoes would you not do the same?” I asked.

  “I’ve never spent three years underground. I don’t know how I’d feel.”

  “Me either,” I agreed.

  “Yeah, you do. You wouldn’t think twice about it.” Tomio’s utter confidence in this statement made me feel even more conflicted.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do and the risk is minimal. And...” he paused, hesitant.

  “And what?”

  “You’re... Saxony.”

  I blinked at him in astonishment. It was the first time Tomio had said such a thing in such a way. He sounded so admiring. As my coach, he’d never been gushy. I was about to ask him what he meant by that when he changed the subject.

  “Anyway, let’s not think too hard about the fact that we’re putting her back in.”

  I shuddered and felt the cool rat’s paws of anxiety run up my spine. What if something happened to Janet? What if Nero knew somehow, that she was part of a trap we’d laid for him? If he hurt her—

  I mentally stomped on that line of thinking. I had enough to worry about.

  As if Tomio was thinking something similar, he mumbled, “Man, I hope we know what we’re doing.”

  There came a soft tap on the door. Janet stood on the other side looking apprehensive. “Your laptop woke up. I think someone wants to talk to you?”

  The laptop’s screen was a gray veil covering the map, showing at least double the number of specks of light. A text message from ‘Kate Shepherd’ blinked in the corner. The yellow text proclaimed: URGENT: Updated directive. Click to open.

  When I clicked on it, a video screen opened showing Ms. Shepherd in the background talking to someone. She wore a headset and must have been notified we were online because she looked over at us, excused herself from her conversation and slid into the seat in front of her camera.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  We said we had as we arranged ourselves so that she could see all of us at the same time. Tomio pressed against my left side, and Janet on my right.

  She got straight to the point. “We now have photographic and video evidence that Nero has landed in Australia. Every trip he takes has been shorter in duration than the one before it, which means this operation cannot be delayed. Janet, you must return to the subterranean location as soon as possible.”

  A glance at Janet inspired me to put an arm around her. She nodded without hesitation, but looked deeply unhappy that she had had so little time to enjoy her short-lived freedom.

  “One question, though,” she said in her soft voice. “How is Nero getting through security? If he’s as radioactive as he thinks himself to be, wouldn’t the machines detect him?”

  Ms. Shepherd looked impressed that Janet knew this. “Yes, they would. He flies under an alias that has a membership to a private airline. He can fly alone and bypass much of the security routine, so he is not delayed by the protocols that affect those who fly publicly. He has been using this alias since Christmas when he returned to Italy from Brazil. It was the intel you provided that led us to uncover this alias after we examined all flights between Rio and Naples. There are zero direct public flights and very few private ones, which made it easier for us. We never would have known where to look without your direction, so for that we thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Moving straight into the project. We’ve arranged for meetings with two individuals, the first will take place the moment you arrive at the location we will share with you at the conclusion of this call. In the interests of brevity, I won’t go in to the details of these meetings, you’ll understand their purpose the moment they commence. I will show you photographs of these individuals so you’ll know them on sight. Please follow their instructions and trust that they know what they’re doing. I realize you’d much prefer to know all the details ahead of time, but this is how agency work is executed.”

  This nettled me and I suspected Ms. Shepherd saw it in my expression. Her gaze shifted on the screen.

  “I understand you have an interest in agency work in the future, Ms. Cagney?”

  I was taken off guard and wasn’t sure how to feel about her knowing this. Most likely it was Basil who had told her I might be interested, but it still felt weird to have a complete stranger ask me about my future plans. “Maybe,” I said. “If an agent has to go into a situation blindly trusting allies the agency says they should trust, I’m not sure if that’s work I’m up for.”

  I felt Tomio shoot a surprised look my way.

  As was her way, Ms. Shepherd showed no emotion at my displeasure. “At times, that is precisely what is required. Agents do not always have the luxury of analyzing all of the intelligence that leads to decisions being made. In the field, you are given orders and you follow them knowing that you’re in the best hands possible and all outcomes have been analyzed.”

  I pressed my lips together against another retort. In my opinion, Ms. Shepherd could have used the time she’d taken to explain this to us to explain who we were meeting with and why.

  She continued, “After Janet is reinstalled, we’d like you not to return to your current location. We’ve arranged a safe-house for you. We do not believe you to be in danger where you are at this point in time, but when Nero returns to Naples, we’d rather you weren’t staying at a property owned by Enzo Barberini.”

  This made sense, but the mention of Enzo, whom I had not reported to since Gage disappeared, made my mouth feel dry. I also hated the agency lingo Ms. Shepherd was using, and realized that was protocol too. Referring to Janet’s re-incarceration underground as an ‘installation’ grated against my sensibilities.

  “That will be all. I know you have questions. Our contacts will make all things clear,” Ms. Shepherd said. “Remember to vacate the flat, take all of your belongings with you when you leave for the first meeting. Good bye, and good luck.”

  The screen flashed dark as she cut off the video call without asking us for opinions or thoughts. It had been on the tip of my tongue to ask if Basil was there.

  A new text message opened on the right-hand side of the screen, in the chat-flow. A list of three addresses in Naples. A photograph of a face was beside each of the first two addresses. The third address was that of our new safe-house.

  Tomio, Janet and I leaned forward in unison to squint at the faces. The first contact was a dark-skinned man, expressionless but with lively, dark eyes and a glimmer of white teeth between partly-open lips. The second address accompanied the face of a young blond woman, smiling widely. She didn’t look much older than me.

  Snatching his phone from the table, Tomio took a photograph of all three addresses and faces. Then he looked at Janet and me, bemused but eager. “Guess we better pack up.”

  With Tomio navigating and Janet in the back seat making noises of delight over the croissant and cappuccino we’d picked up from a corner bakery that was about to close, I piloted the tiny Fiat through the narrow streets. At another moan of delight from Janet, Tomio and I exchanged a look of amusement. It was late afternoon, the croissant wasn’t even fresh.

  “Just up ahead.” Tomio pointed to the left side of the street where a narrow garage door painted a bright, lime-green stood partially open.

  In front of the door, furiously chewing gum and grinning as I parked half on the sidewalk, was our first cont
act.

  When he saw us coming, he ducked inside. We followed him under the open garage door, Janet still chewing the last of her pastry and starting on mine. I’d given her my croissant when it became apparent how much she’d enjoyed hers. Tomio and I shared a pizza instead.

  The first thing to greet us was an antique Peugeot car, which we had to turn sideways to get past. After that the garage opened up into a much larger room with much taller ceilings. It was as though a villa had at one time been attached to the garage, but had been gutted and set up as a mechanic’s paradise. Oil stained the concrete floors which otherwise gleamed, reflecting overhead fluorescent lights. Rows of floor to ceiling shelves lined the walls, loaded with mechanical and electronic equipment of all kinds, and from all eras—all neatly tucked away and labeled. Everything from radios to toasters, record-players to sewing machines large and small, and countless items I couldn’t identify on sight filled row upon row of fourteen-foot shelves.

  Our host had disappeared down an aisle, muttering to himself in Italian. He hadn’t bothered to introduce himself or tell us what we were doing here, but the contents of the shelves made it obvious. This would be the man to set us up with the Miner Lifeline radios Ms. Shepherd had mentioned.

  As we looked down the aisle where the grinning, gum-chewing contact had disappeared, we saw him perched on the aluminum platform of a rolling staircase. He pulled what looked like a large dress-box off the shelf. He carried it down the stairs—that’s when I noticed he was wearing a nametag with the word ‘Relay’ scribbled on it in black magic marker. He passed us and continued further back to a space with a galley kitchen across the back and several large work-tables with the guts of some mechanical thing strewn about. He set the box down on a table beside a smaller slanted shelving unit containing what looked like an upgraded telephone system from when the world still used human operators. Loops of wires connected with inputs on a dashboard with flashing green lights and backlit green panel across the top displayed a continuously changing list of frequencies.

  He took the lid off the box to reveal a collection of identical walkie-talkies. Picking one up, he turned it on and its screen lit up with a matching bright green shade. It also had a backlit keypad, handy for finding numbers in the dark.

  “Janet?” He bobbed his head indicating she should come closer, still chomping vigorously on his gum.

  As she swallowed the last of my croissant, she listened attentively as he showed her how to turn on and operate the walkie-talkie. Tomio and I crowded in to listen. Once he got talking, it was apparent Relay was not Italian. He spoke with a musical Sri Lankan accent.

  “These work without an established infrastructure, like most radio systems. Your communications will be received by them”—he pointed to me and Tomio—“and myself also. With underground comms, range is greatly reduced and requires a relay technique to get very far. Not this, but you still can’t go beyond five kilometers or you’ll lose the signal. The battery will keep charge for one week if you don’t use it too much. This is your replacement battery.” He grabbed a small black sack from a pile of them at the base of the box and handed it to Janet. “I’m told this operation should be concluded within ten days.”

  “What if it takes longer than that?” Janet asked.

  He gave her a blank look that said he could tell she was a rookie to the whole sting thing. “We’ll get new orders, in that case.”

  “What if something breaks?” Tomio asked.

  “If anything goes wrong, I’ll know it. Five times per second my routing algorithm is recalculating the best route through the strata for your communication packets to reach their destinations. If something goes amiss, I’ll know within five seconds and can adjust accordingly. But nothing will go wrong. This system isn’t pretty or fast but it’s robust and near unbreakable. Just keep yours on you at all time, check your battery life in a week if the operation hasn’t concluded yet, and if the agency doesn’t instruct you to pass these babies off to another contact, make sure you return them to me when it’s all over.” He gave one charger and a walkie talkie each to Janet and me.

  “Do you know what we’re using them for?” I asked as I took the gear, wondering how much info he’d been given.

  He paused chewing to look me full in the face for the first time. His brown eyes were wide and a little shocked. “No. Nor do I want to. I just want my tech back in one piece. Any questions?”

  The radios were easy enough to operate, so we didn’t have questions. Relay had us test them a couple of times to make sure we were comfortable with them, then he promptly and unceremoniously, kicked us out of his shop.

  Our next stop was two blocks from the underground entrance for the subterranean city tours. The young blond woman from the thumbnail stood just inside the open door of a ticket office sipping from a ceramic mug with a smiley sunshine painted on the side. She wore a blue jumpsuit with the arms tied around her waist. When she saw us approach she backed into the shadowy room behind her, beckoning us to enter.

  Inside, she handed us blue jumpsuits like the one she wore. Just like Relay, she didn’t introduce herself but wore a tag with a hand-written name scrawled across it. Hers spelled Campano in a loopy script. This made more sense when the jumpsuits were on—it was easy to see the slogan on the back and chest for a company called Campano Gas. She gave Tomio a tool belt equipped with screwdrivers, meters and other items a gas technician might need, handed Janet a bag for her radio and battery and me a larger bag for the backpack containing the stuff we needed to return to the lair.

  “We’re going in disguised as gas techs?” Tomio asked as he zipped the jumpsuit up to his neck.

  Janet tucked her long coil of a braid underneath a matching blue baseball hat, which Campano had handed each of us. I twisted my curls into a bun and did the same.

  “Is it really believable that we work for a gas company?” I asked doubtfully as I looked down at my slightly too-big jumpsuit and black sneakers poking out the bottom. I thought the only ones who looked somewhat convincing were Tomio and Campano. Campano’s disguise included work boots and safety glasses. Tomio filled out his jumpsuit and looked like someone you could rely upon to fix a gas problem. I looked like someone playing in my dad’s work coveralls, and Janet looked like a hippy in a Burning Man costume.

  “It will serve its function,” Campano said in a heavy Italian accent as she fiddled with some complex looking piece of equipment sitting on the desk in the corner.

  She snatched up a pair of keys and a small hand-held device with a red backlit screen then ushered us out the door. We followed her on foot the block and a half to the subterranean entrance in the early evening light, acting like we had every right to be doing what we were doing. My heart was in my throat as we approached the gated entrance for the underground tours.

  Caution tape had been looped across the street and official looking sandwich-board signs that screamed Attenzione. Perdita di Gas had been set up. Campano led us to the gate, opened it, and stood aside for us to enter.

  I wondered how Janet was feeling about having to sacrifice her long-sought freedom so quickly after having gotten it, but to her credit she didn’t pause or complain. In fact she was the first to descend. I followed her and Tomio followed me.

  “Lead the way,” Campano said as she followed Tomio down the steps. “I’ll be mapping for the Agency as we go,” she explained as her hand-held monitor began to make a soft beeping sound. “Try not to take any wrong turns, it makes for a messy map afterwards.”

  Janet paused on the steps and I almost walked into her. She turned. “You’d better go ahead of me. I have no idea how to get back.”

  Tomio nodded and squeezed past me and Janet as he took out the rough map he had marked. He took the steps confidently and we followed like ducklings after a mama-duck.

  When we reached Nero’s front door, Campano produced another piece of equipment. It looked a bit like a high-tech stethoscope. One end—the bit that looked like a suction cup�
�fastened to the metal door beside the old combination lock, sticking like a magnet. The other end broke in two and had small nodes that she slipped into her ears. Putting a finger to her lips, Campano turned the dial slowly, listening to the lock’s inner mechanism. It took her a little less than five minutes to open the door. We stepped through into the rooms.

  “Madonna,” she muttered under her breath, looking around, her gaze flitting from the dusty shelves and office furniture to the plexiglass wall and the prison behind it. “Che monstro.”

  Campano took a slow, panoramic video of the rooms with a cell phone while Tomio, Janet and I put things back the way they’d been when we’d first arrived, referring to the photographs I’d taken when we weren’t quite sure where something had been. Tomio put the scribbles we’d taken back in their drawers, and replaced the small artifacts we’d removed from shelves, using the layer of dust to make sure they were precisely where they should be. I followed Campano’s example and took some of my own footage of the rooms and of Janet’s space and of Janet herself. I knew Campano was taking footage for the Agency, but I wanted Ms. Shepherd to see Janet as a human against the backdrop of her prison. While I knew this was the best plan we had, I felt a secret resentment against Ms. Shepherd for requiring it of Janet so blithely, without showing much empathy for what the woman must be feeling.

  When the rooms were back in their original, un-rifled-through-looking state, the only thing left to do was to lock Janet into her cell and clean the glass of fingerprints. She threw her arms around Tomio’s neck, then hugged me. I could feel her muscles trembling as she squeezed me. Her cool exterior was just a show. I admired her resiliency and fortitude. I swallowed around the lump in my throat as she let go and stepped back, giving me a wan smile. That smile was the most painful thing I’d seen since I’d watched Eira’s body jump under the paddles.

  We watched as Janet secreted her radio under some hanging folders in the bottom drawer of her desk. She turned to us. “You’d better go before I lose my nerve.”