The Atlantis Secret

by S. A. Beck

  “He was found in a rough area of town about a mile from his car. He had been stabbed multiple times.”

  Jaxon winced, each word like the lash of a whip on her heart.

  “It appears he was the victim of a mugging. The police are investigating. What they’re trying to clear up right now is why Brett was walking in that neighborhood at that hour. It’s miles from his home. If anyone talked to Brett or knows anything about this, I’d ask them to please come to see me or any other teacher you feel comfortable with after assembly. Any bit of information, even if you feel it’s unimportant or not related to what happened, might help the police in their investigation and bring justice to Brett’s… murderers.” The last word came out choked.

  The room remained silent except for a few scattered sobs.

  After taking a moment to recover, Ms. Dennison said, “Brett Lawson was a fine student and a promising young man. I know he was dear to many of you, and he will be sorely missed. It’s important during times of tragedy to come together for support. Tomorrow, we’ll be bringing in a grief counselor to speak with you collectively and individually if you feel you’d like to speak with her. Your parents have also been informed. Right now, I’d like to hand the stage over to some of Brett’s teachers, who would like the share their feelings and memories of this fine young man.”

  The rest of the assembly was a blur. Jaxon sat, miserable and alone, as the golf coach tearfully related some anecdotes about Brett. Then a couple more teachers spoke.

  Grief welled up in her, followed by an empty desolation. Jaxon had never before experienced the death of someone she cared about. She had always been alone, with no family or close friends. The system had shuffled her around so much that she didn’t have time to get close to anyone, and she never stuck around long enough to see someone pass away.

  She didn’t know what to do with her feelings, how to handle them, and a terrible, crushing helplessness overcame her. Clawing up from the miserable darkness of her feelings came another emotion, far more vicious and hurtful.

  Guilt.

  He didn’t want to go last night, it whispered in her mind. You made him. You pestered him until he said yes. Even as you were driving in front of the strip mall, he said he didn’t want to go down that alley. It’s like he foresaw it, remember? He said he had a bad feeling about going out that night. But you made him.

  It’s your fault.

  Jaxon cringed. As the teachers went on telling anecdotes about her friend, each mention of Brett’s name made her curl up a little more, made her feel a little more responsible.

  At last, the teachers let them go. Everyone remained silent as they walked out of the assembly. Jaxon had known Brett was popular, but she hadn’t realized just how many people cared about him. Even Courtney looked as if she’d been punched in the gut.

  Jaxon noticed that no one went up to offer information to Ms. Dennison or any of the other teachers. Only Jaxon knew what had happened, why Brett would be in a neighborhood like that in the middle of the night.

  But what could she say? Should she tell them? Would that do any good? Jaxon couldn’t collect her thoughts. Everything seemed jumbled.

  In her car in the parking lot, Isadore was waiting to pick Jaxon up. As she slumped into the seat beside her foster mother, she gave Jaxon one of those stiff hugs that showed she wanted to demonstrate affection she couldn’t quite feel.

  “Oh, Jaxon, they sent us a text. I’m so sorry! He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Jaxon nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She didn’t want to burst into tears in front of the cold, distant woman.

  “They say he was murdered. How terrible! But why was he in a bad part of town so late at night?”

  Jaxon shook her head, pretending she didn’t know.

  “Did he tell you anything about that?”

  Jaxon shook her head again, feeling as though her denial was a betrayal.

  “I’ll take you home. You just try to rest and take your mind off it.”

  Jaxon resisted the urge to smack her. Take her mind off it? A friend of hers, the only one she had in the city, had just been murdered by some teenage thugs, and she was supposed to take her mind off it?

  Oh, and Isadore was taking her “home,” as if she’d ever had one of those. Jaxon slumped in her seat and stared out the window without seeing anything.

  It’s my fault. That’s all she could think. It’s my fault.

  When they got back to the Grants’ mansion, Jaxon begged to use the computer, and to her surprise, her foster parents said yes. They seemed to be Luddites even though Stephen was a scientist and they lived in the middle of America’s biggest city. Usually, they only let her use one of the laptops when she did her homework, but they weren’t putting up a fuss. Perhaps they felt intimidated by the first real emotions she’d allowed herself to show in front of them.

  Jaxon searched through the LA Times website, cursing herself as her dyslexia kept making her enter typos the search engine couldn’t decipher. Her spelling always came out worse when she felt stressed.

  How can you type Brett’s name wrong, you idiot!

  Finally, she got it right and found a short article on page twenty-five of the morning edition.

  A flower show in Beverly Hills got a two-page spread on pages twenty-three and twenty-four.

  Seventeen-year-old high-school student Brett Lawson was found murdered in the early hours of this morning on West 79th Street in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of South Los Angeles.

  Police on a routine patrol spotted the body of the Hidden Hills Academy student lying in a garbage dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant. The body lay half inside the dumpster but still clearly visible from the nearby street.

  The cause of death was numerous stab wounds to the neck and torso. Abrasions on the victim’s knuckles indicate that he put up a struggle. The city coroner puts the time of death at approximately 1:30 a.m.

  The victim was not a resident of the neighborhood and had no drugs on his person or in his system, making police question why he was in the area. A wallet containing money and a credit card was still on his person. His vehicle was found parked several blocks away and untouched.

  Police have no suspects and are urgently requesting any witnesses to come forward.

  Jaxon sobbed and put her face in her hands. A garbage can. Those bastards had stuffed him into a garbage can.

  She spent the rest of the day in a miserable haze. Her foster parents wisely left her alone. They canceled her private lessons and did not ask for the computer back. A couple of times, she checked the Internet for more about Brett but found no new information.

  The next few days at school felt like a bad dream. Everyone left her alone. Even Courtney looked stricken by the news and forgot to bully her. The grief counselors visited the school, said some nonsense about everyone needing to come together to share their pain and sense of loss, and then went back to their happy lives. Some well-intentioned teacher who knew Jaxon and Brett had been hanging out tried to talk her into seeing the school counselor, but Jaxon brushed him off. Nothing anyone could say could make her pain go away.

  In the afternoons, she went through her homework on automatic then had her private lessons. Her yoga instructor never said a word about Brett although she must have known because she went through more relaxation exercises than usual. Jaxon appreciated the sentiment even though the exercises didn’t help.

  Marquis, her aikido teacher, helped a lot more.

  In the afternoons, Jaxon helped Isadore clear out the furniture in one of the rooms in the Grants’ mansion and lay down padding on the floor. Marquis would come in his van and unload various weights, exercise equipment, a punching bag, and racks of strange Chinese martial-arts weapons. Marquis hadn’t trained her in the weapons yet, but they made an appropriate backdrop. The punching bag was getting a lot of use, though.

  Ever since her first lesson, she’d been imagining hitting Courtney when she practiced her punches. She wond
ered if Marquis would let her paint the brat’s face on it but decided asking would be a bad idea. Marquis told Isadore everything that happened in those lessons, and Jaxon’s CPS records had already labeled her as a “problem case” with “violent tendencies.”

  So instead she kept her mouth shut and went through the moves Marquis taught her. Those moves got more interesting every day. At first, he had been teaching her simple blocks and flips, things to keep an attacker from hurting you. Now, he moved on to more aggressive techniques—punches, arm locks, and roundhouse kicks. Jaxon found it a bit strange. Aikido was supposed to be a soft, defensive martial art of deflecting an attacker’s force away and stopping them without hurting them, but the more recent techniques were more like combat training. She wondered if her teacher had switched her from aikido to something like kung fu without telling her.

  Jaxon didn’t care. She thrilled at the idea of punching and kicking her opponents. She kept having to remind herself to pull back on her strength, though. Despite being short and light, she was stronger than a grown man who lifted weights. When one day Marquis put on a pair of padded gloves and had her practice throwing punches at them while he ducked and wove, trying to avoid her, she could see the sweat breaking out on his brow. He backed off step by step, not just to keep her guessing where to land the next punch, but to soften some of the force of her blows. Some of the tougher hits made him hiss through gritted teeth.

  That just encouraged her. Rage welled up inside her heart, and a red haze descended over her vision. She imagined she wasn’t striking at her martial-arts teacher but at those nasty boys, smashing their leering faces as they surrounded the girl. She fantasized about finding Brett before they descended on him and busting their heads. In her vision, they would get what they deserved, and Brett would still be alive.

  Jaxon growled, a deep, inhuman sound of animalistic fury, and threw another punch.

  Marquis let out a grunt and stumbled back, turning almost three hundred sixty degrees from the force of the blow. For a moment, he was helpless. Jaxon stepped in for the kill.

  For the kill? Jaxon pulled back at the last moment, her fist still poised midair, ready to crack her instructor in the side of the head.

  Marquis reacted an instant later, taking a step back and getting into a defensive position, eyes wide with shock.

  He’s not the enemy, calm down. Get a grip on yourself!

  Jaxon forced her arms to go slack, taking several deep breaths to try to slow her racing heart and clear the red haze from her vision.

  But the rage remained, bubbling just beneath the surface.

  The sound of applause made them both turn. Isadore stood in the doorway, clapping her hands.

  “Well done, Jaxon, well done! You’re progressing very well.”

  “I got a bit carried away.” Jaxon’s voice came out harsh, deep. She barely recognized it as her own.

  “Not at all,” Marquis said. “You’re just finding your pace.”

  Jaxon suddenly felt embarrassed. Looking down at her feet, she said, “Everyone says I need to control my anger.”

  “You do,” Isadore said. “And that’s what you’re doing in these lessons. Learning to control your anger, to focus it into something useful.”

  Jaxon looked at her, puzzled. It seemed so strange that the rich career woman with no children of her own would want to take her in. Isadore and Stephen lived almost like recluses. They never had friends over, only went out for work and shopping, and never talked about anything other than their work and her education. Why would they want to take in a CPS problem case and train her up with all these classes?

  “Useful for what?” Jaxon asked.

  “Fighting for what’s important,” Marquis said.

  Jaxon looked at him, and their eyes met. She saw determination in those eyes and a bit of fanaticism, and she had a strange inkling that this life was all some sort of illusion. She’d had plenty of adults lie to her over the years and had gotten good at detecting when someone was handing her a line. She wasn’t some charity case who had lucked out by getting adopted by millionaires. Maybe that had been the situation at first, but they knew at least some of her potential. No matter how much she’d tried to hide her abilities, Marquis and Isadore had seen she was far stronger and faster than an ordinary girl. They wanted to build that up, to make her into something special.

  But what? And why?

  “Fighting for what’s important.” Maybe. She sensed that was the only answer she’d get.

  She imagined those boys again, all the other criminals she’d beaten up, all those bullies and pervy foster fathers, and all the evil in the world. Everyone had always dismissed her as useless, but she had found a use for herself.

  She thought of Brett, but she didn’t feel sad—only angry.

  Yes, it had been her fault he had died. Her mistake hadn’t been going out in the first place, though, it had been going out unprepared. Their little night adventures were too dangerous for them. She and Brett hadn’t really understood the consequences of their actions. They’d been two kids playing with fire, and he got burned.

  Next time, she’d be ready.

  All those thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant, more felt than spelled out.

  She gestured toward the rack of weapons. “Are those just for decoration?”

  A smile tugged at the corner of Marquis’s mouth.

  “For the time being. You need to work on a few things before we start sparring with weapons.”

  “So you are going to teach me how to use them.”

  “Later.”

  “How about now?”

  Marquis shook his head.

  “You need to learn control first.”

  “Teach me control, then.”

  Marquis gestured toward the punching bag hanging from a chain attached to a steel ring in the ceiling.

  “First, I think you need to let off a little steam.”

  Her instructor went to the punching bag, a thick, padded cylinder as big as she was and twice as heavy, and held it steady with both hands. Jaxon got on the opposite side. Isadore stayed at the doorway, watching.

  “Straight punches,” Marquis told her. “As fast and as hard as you can.”

  Marquis put one leg behind the other to brace himself.

  Jaxon smacked the punching bag with her right fist. It made a satisfying thump against the padding, and Jaxon felt Marquis give a little. She followed with her left, then her right again, picking up speed.

  The rage came back, and everything turned red again. Her fists became a blur, the thumps on the punching bag like some techno beat. She had to step forward as Marquis was slowly pushed back inch by inch by the force of her blows.

  She picked up the pace. Marquis leaned his entire weight against the bag, both feet braced, his face red and sweaty with strain. Jaxon gave a final punch and heard a loud tearing sound.

  She blinked and looked at her hand. She’d broken through the bag, her fist buried in the padding.

  Marquis peered around the bag and looked at her arm with wonder.

  Isadore let out a low chuckle from her vantage point at the doorway.

  “You can add that to your bill, Marquis.”

  Jaxon yanked her hand out of the hole she had made and found her skin raw. Blood seeped out of little cuts on her knuckles.

  My muscles may be strong, but my flesh is like a normal person’s. Better remember that.

  Marquis bandaged up her hands, and for the rest of the day, he taught her kicks. They used a mannequin on which he had painted red dots that corresponded to all the pressure points in the human body, and he taught her which ones would do the most damage to an opponent. Once again, Jaxon had a feeling he was teaching her something other than aikido.

  For several days, it went on like that, each lesson increasingly challenging and increasingly aggressive. But the lessons didn’t let her blow off steam. Afterward, the rage seethed inside her. The urge to sneak out at night felt almost overpow
ering. She wanted to hunt those punks down.

  Three things held her back.

  First, the neighborhood where they’d fought was miles away, and she didn’t have a ride.

  Second, she knew they wouldn’t be there anyway, not after killing someone. They’d have gone off to have their jollies somewhere else.

  Third, Jaxon knew that if she found those kids again, she’d kill them.

  In her more rational moments, that thought scared her. Her rage scared her. She’d always been angry—at her parents for ditching her when she was a newborn, at all her crappy foster parents, at her social workers who never understood, and at all the bullies at all the group homes and schools she’d ever been to.

  Now, she was enraged at a group of rich kids who wanted to attack a girl and killed a guy just for being a decent human being. At times, that rage overwhelmed her and she caught herself clenching her fists and fantasizing about doing horrible things to everyone who had ever hurt her.

  Jaxon felt as if she had been born on another planet. All the cruelty and callousness she saw seemed so alien to her. She’d never act like that, and it scared her to think that people like that might pull her down to their level. She’d started getting too much of a kick out of punishing the bad guys, had started needing it. It had become a bit like addiction, and that addiction had taken away someone she cared about.

  Thus, she didn’t go out at night hunting for prey. Instead, she hid in Stephen’s greenhouse and worked on her part of the garden.

  Her foster father was some sort of expert on poisonous plants. He had a big lab at UCLA and did extra work in his own spacious greenhouse in the backyard. Stephen had set aside one corner for her, and that was where she could witness yet another of her strange powers. The inhuman strength and speed were weird enough, but this “talent” was downright inhuman. All she had to do was touch a plant, and it would grow before her eyes. If she held a seed in her hand, it would sprout within seconds.

  She’d tested this power when she was living in the Welcome Forever Group Home, exploring its limits. Jaxon found that if she did it for too long, she’d feel fatigued, as if she’d just had an hour-long session with Marquis. The plants seemed to be getting their energy and nutrients from her. The soil around them wouldn’t suddenly become dry and barren. A plant took a lot of energy to grow to full size, and she figured doing it so quickly would suck up all the water and nutrients the soil had to offer. Plus, when she made a seed sprout, all she had to do was hold it in her hand. She’d asked Stephen a few sly questions about plant growth and learned that a seed contained its own energy to sprout, so as an experiment she held a seed for longer. She watched in awe as the seed cracked open and let out a little bud before growing millimeter by millimeter. She shuddered as thin roots coiled around her hand like tentacles while the plant grew to full maturity. There was no way a seed could do all that with its own energy.