The Lost City

by Amanda Hocking

  “Yeah, but I didn’t mean burglaries,” he said with a sheepish smile. “There’s rumors and urban legends about paranormal sightings and unexplained phenomena. The Mimirin’s official stance is that the Ögonen’s magic interferes with our basic reality sometimes, but I’ve heard varying explanations about it.”

  “Ghosts?” I repeated dubiously. “You were talking about ghosts?”

  “Sort of.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and avoided my gaze. “I was mostly just talking out of my ass.”

  “What?”

  “I was making up an excuse to walk you home.”

  I shook my head, not understanding. “Why?”

  “Why?” A nervous laugh escaped his lips, and when he finally looked up at me, his cheeks had reddened slightly. “Are you really gonna make me spell it out for you, Ulla?”

  While we’d been talking, the air had changed—feeling heavy and electric around me. I didn’t know what Pan was getting at, not exactly, but my heart fluttered, and I knew that whatever he was about to say, I wanted to hear it.

  “Maybe,” I replied quietly.

  “I’m saying—” He spoke slowly, deliberately, and he stopped suddenly when we heard a banging outside.

  “What was that? Are they coming back?” I asked, but he had already made for the fire poker by the wood-burning stove.

  Within seconds the door burst open and Hanna rushed in, with Eliana and Dagny at her heels.

  “Oh, jakla, Ulla!” Hanna gasped the very instant she saw the apartment. “What happened? What’s going on?”

  Dagny looked at Pan and me. “Did you two do this?”

  I scoffed. “No, don’t be ridiculous.”

  I explained what had happened—or at least the little that I knew. As I talked, Dagny immediately set to work organizing and cataloging her possessions to see if any were missing. Eliana listened, but she seemed mostly unfazed. She sat back on the couch, suppressing a yawn, and began folding clothes as I got to the end of my story.

  “So if you guys notice anything missing, let me know,” I finished. “It might help us understand why or who broke in.”

  “And what good will that do?” Hanna asked.

  She’d been standing in the center of the apartment the entire time, rubbing her hands on her bare arms despite the warm summer air coming in through the broken window. Her dark eyes were wide, and they kept darting around the room, lingering on the shadows in the eaves.

  “First thing in the morning, we’re going to meet with Sylvi Hagen and make a report,” Pan said.

  “Why not now?” Hanna asked.

  “Since nothing’s missing, and nobody saw anybody, I don’t think there’s much anyone can do tonight, but we’ll get it on record, and we’ll get security checking it out,” he explained in a measured tone.

  “But what about tonight?” She pointed at the shattered glass. “The window’s broken. It’s not safe in here.”

  “We’ll fix the window,” I promised her. “It’ll be safe here.”

  “I know dödstämpel,” Dagny interjected. “It’s like Vittra krav maga. And Ulla here is as strong as a Tralla horse.”

  “Thanks for that comparison,” I muttered.

  “Hanna, you don’t have to worry.” Eliana walked over to her and looped an arm around Hanna’s shoulder, gently hugging her close. “I’d never let anything happen to you. As long as I’m with you, I promise you’ll be safe.”

  40

  Officials

  I toyed with my necklace, sliding the charm along the chain, and my knee bounced up and down, seemingly of its own volition. The chairs outside of Sylvi Hagen’s office were made of a rigid plastic that was already causing a dull ache in my lower back, and Pan and I had only been sitting in them for about ten minutes.

  “Are you sure we should be meeting with Sylvi?” I asked. “You know, since she hates me?”

  “She doesn’t hate you,” he said gently.

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Okay, sure, she doesn’t like you,” he admitted with a sigh. “But this is still protocol. Minor domestic issues like this need to go through your immediate supervisor, and she needs to be the one to requisition security.”

  I sneered. “If she deems it worthy.”

  “Right. But she’s . . . more impartial than she may seem.”

  “Really?” I asked skeptically.

  “She cares about her job, and she does things by the book. She just gets annoyed when she feels like someone else doesn’t play by the rules.” His voice had taken on a resigned irritation.

  “You sound like you’re talking from personal experience.”

  He waited a beat before confessing, “She didn’t really like me even before you got here.”

  “I’m sorry to bring down your status,” I said, and I meant it. I was only here for a matter of weeks, but this was Pan’s job and his home. The last thing I wanted to do was make his time harder once I was gone.

  He looked at me with a smile. “You didn’t. I made my own choices, and I still think they’re the right ones.”

  Sylvi came out of her office, and she didn’t even attempt to smile as she greeted us. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, and she managed to make her brusque invitation to have a seat in her office sound both incredibly bored and deeply offended.

  “I would apologize for keeping you waiting, but you’ve wasted enough of my time in the short time you’ve been here, so I don’t really feel all that sorry about doing the same to you,” Sylvi said as Pan and I took our seats across the desk from her.

  “It’s always good to see you, Sylvi,” Pan said drolly.

  “Let’s cut the pleasantries, shall we?” Sylvi leaned forward, resting her arms flat on her desk, and glared at us. “Something allegedly happened at your apartment?”

  “It wasn’t alleged. I took pictures.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. It didn’t have a signal here in Merellä, but it still took pictures. When I held it up for her, slowly flipping through the photos, her expression never changed from bored irritation.

  “You were robbed?” she asked.

  I put my phone away and sat back in my seat. “No, just ransacked.”

  “Do you have any enemies?” she asked.

  “I’ve been here for a week and a half,” I said with an empty laugh. “That’s not a lot of time to make a nemesis.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Sylvi locked her gaze on me when she said that. “So you don’t have any idea who would’ve done this?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “What about that strange little vagabond you have living with you?” Sylvi ruffled through some papers on her desk. “The one that’s being seen by Elof Dómari.”

  “Eliana?”

  She snapped her fingers and quit her searching. “That’s it. What about her?”

  “I don’t know why she would, but she has an alibi, so it definitely wasn’t her,” I said.

  “But does she have enemies?” Sylvi asked pointedly.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then quickly added, “She doesn’t know.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to get into this with Sylvi, especially since she didn’t really care anyway. “It’s complicated.”

  “If she’s become a bother to you, I’m sure that we’d be able to find housing for her,” she said. “I know that Elof finds her quite intriguing, and he’d certainly be able to convince the Mimirin to take her and help her.”

  “I . . .” I glanced over at Pan, but he looked just as thrown by Sylvi’s offer as I felt. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “I only suggested it to make your life easier, since you already seem to have so much on your plate, with your work in the archives, your own private investigation into your mother, a trio of flatmates, and now this break-in.” Then she waved her finger from one of us to the other. “Not to mention whatever is going on with you and Panuk.”

  “I�
��m helping her,” he snapped. “The way you’re supposed to be helping her.”

  “On the contrary, I am helping her.” She motioned to the papers on her desk, as if they meant something. “You, on the other hand, seem to have taken an unprecedented interest—”

  “I’m sorry, Sylvi,” Pan cut her off icily. “I didn’t realize that you had so little to do here that you could spend all this time making derogatory comments and digging into my personal life.”

  She twisted her lips into a tight, bitter smile. “Yes, well, I’m sure we all have better things to do. I’ve made a note of the incident in your file, and I’ll send a copy to security for their records, but I doubt anything more will be done with that. So, if that’s all you had to tell me, I think this concludes our meeting.”

  “Great. Thanks,” I muttered and stood up.

  “Oh, Ulla, I nearly forgot,” Sylvi said as I headed for the door. “Elof called down this morning, and he said the results from your blood test are in. You can meet with him at your earliest convenience.”

  41

  Results

  We were alone in the lab. Elof sat across the island from me with a manila folder in front of him. Pan had offered to come up here with me, but I didn’t want him getting in more trouble with Sylvi, so I told him he could go back to work. Elof had hardly spoken since I’d gotten to the lab, other than telling me to have a seat, and now it seemed he was taking forever to get into it.

  Or maybe it only felt that way, because I knew that beneath his fingertips was an answer to the question I’d been asking all my life: Who am I? It wouldn’t be the whole answer, obviously, but it was part of it. An explanation for things in my life—in myself—I’d been unable to explain.

  “I usually start these meetings by explaining the process, so you understand how we came to our results,” Elof began finally, and he seemed to be speaking deliberately slowly.

  Was this how he always spoke, and I’d just never realized it before? Or was he messing with me for some reason?

  “We start with the blood, as you already know,” he said, but I cut him off. I couldn’t take it any longer.

  “So, am I a Skomte?” I asked bluntly.

  “You are something,” he said with a strange smile that did little to ease the growing knot in my stomach.

  I licked my lips, and that’s when it hit me—he wasn’t messing with me. All his words were careful, precise, cautious. He was stalling.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You had significant markers for Omte, meaning that one of your parents was almost certainly from the Omte tribe,” he said.

  I waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, I pressed, “What about my other parent?”

  “They’re not a troll.”

  “I’m an OmHu?” I asked in surprise.

  “No.”

  “Okay, can you spit it out and tell me what it is that I actually am?”

  “That’s the thing.” He drummed his fingers on the envelope. “We don’t know.”

  All the air went out of the room, and I could only gape at him and let his words sink in. “Does that mean that I’m like Eliana?” I looked down at my arm, at the blue veins underneath my pale skin, and frowned. “No, that doesn’t make sense. I’ve cut myself plenty of times in my life, and it didn’t look anything like her blood.” Hers was shimmery, dark burgundy, and viscous.

  “There are some . . . similarities,” he answered carefully. “But the genetic makeup between trolls, humans, and—and—well, Eliana is very similar. Our hominid relationship is analogous to the canine one between domestic dogs with wolves, wherein we’re the wolves.”

  “Wolves with psychokinetic powers,” I added.

  He smiled crookedly. “Yes, that would be a more accurate description.”

  “But what does that make Eliana in that analogy?”

  “I suppose she would be something like . . .” He looked to the ceiling as he thought. “Garm.”

  “Garm? The Norse hellhound?” I asked, alarmed. “Are suggesting that Eliana is evil?”

  “No, no, of course not,” he replied quickly. “Garm was the first mythological dog that came to mind. I was merely trying to say that we were unaware that someone like Eliana existed before.”

  “And you haven’t encountered someone like me either, but I’m not the same as Eliana?”

  “That’s simplifying things a bit, but yes.”

  “Isn’t that a bit strange?” I asked. “That in the same week you discover two trollian beings with blood you haven’t encountered before?”

  “Not really, when you consider that we’ve only recently been able to collect and share data,” he explained. “For far too long, the Mimirin focused only on cataloging our written history, without doing anything to advance our knowledge. Our scientific studies have been severely underfunded and underutilized.

  “It’s only been in the last decade or so, as influential tribes began to realize that science might be the only means of combatting their own extinction, that we’ve made real leaps and bounds in the field of troglecology,” he went on. “So we’re constantly discovering new information or encountering things we haven’t seen before.”

  “Our entire society is built around who has the purest bloodlines, and you’re telling me that nobody has been checking the blood?” I asked skeptically.

  “This may come as a shock, but those in power tend not to fund investigations that might prove they’re not fit to hold the power they have,” Elof said. “The various Markis and Marksinna hold all the wealth and make all the decisions, and their power relies on the presumption that none of their ancestors ever lied or cheated to gain the inheritance given to them by blood. Why would they want to find out that they’re not entitled to everything they have?”

  “But now they can’t have children, and they’re willing to risk losing their titles and wealth to find out why,” I concluded.

  “Exactly. A legacy doesn’t mean much if there isn’t a future generation to appreciate it.”

  “So you think that you’ll be able to figure out what I am?” I asked.

  “Yes, absolutely, I believe we can,” he replied confidently. “It’s early in the summer yet, and with more time, we will come up with a better explanation.”

  “Am I . . . am I still a troll?”

  “Of course.”

  “If anyone asks about my tribe, what do I say?” I asked.

  “Tell them the truth. You’re a troll of mixed blood, raised in a Kanin village, looking for your family. That hasn’t changed.”

  I nodded slowly, not quite sure if I still believed that. But I said, “Yeah, that’ll work.”

  “On the positive side, I am not your only source for information about your past or where you came from,” Elof reminded me. “Your parents could shed light on that as well. You’re coming at the question from two separate angles, so it should only be a matter of time until you find the answers you’re looking for.”

  42

  Unknown

  I walked down to the archives in a daze. I stared at the floor, only vaguely aware of my bare feet on the cool tile, and I didn’t look up until I heard Pan saying my name.

  He stood outside the door to the archives, his hands shoved in his pockets and his thick brows pinched in worry.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I wanted to hear what you found out and to see how you were holding up. By the look on your face, I’m guessing it’s something not good.”

  “I don’t know.” I exhaled deeply. “It’s complicated.”

  “OmHu?”

  “No. No.” I shook my head adamantly. “Being an OmHu wouldn’t be any worse than being a Skomte, so why would I feel bad?”

  Many trolls would be disappointed to find out they were half-human, like being human was the worst thing you could be, and I didn’t want Pan to think that I felt that way about him. Not for one second since I’d met him had I thought Pan was less than me
or not good enough in some way.

  “No, you don’t have to do that,” he admonished me gently. “Not for me. You have every right to feel how you feel about who you are. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “What did you find out, then?”

  I ran my hands through my hair and groaned inwardly before launching into the vague explanation that Elof had given me.

  “So, basically, now I’m even more confused than ever before.” I slumped against the wall when I finished. “Before getting my blood drawn, Dagny had explained that they wouldn’t be able to use it to directly find my parents.” The technology existed, but they didn’t have the database or the time to run paternity/maternity tests against every available sample.

  I went on, “So I had known going in that this wouldn’t be the key to finding my parents, but I did think the blood test would give me some sense of my ancestry. That it could tell me just one little thing about myself.” I sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever know who I am.”

  “Really? You don’t know who you are?” He put his hand on the wall beside me and leaned as he spoke.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, but I still think you’re wrong. Your parents and your ancestors aren’t the definition of you. You’re more than the color of your eyes or your super strength or your beautiful smile.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay. Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  “I’m not.” He smiled at me. “I swear I’m not. I don’t want you to overlook what you already have and who you are. You have a lot going for you. You’re dedicated, you’re kind, you’re a lot of fun to be around.”

  “I don’t know about dedicated. I’m already late for work.” I glanced over at the archives doors.

  “I bet you stay late to make up for it.”

  “Yeah. That’s true. But I should get going anyway,” I said reluctantly, and he stepped back so I could go to work. “Thanks for coming with me this morning to see Sylvi, and thanks for being here for me now.”

  “Anytime.”