Landlocked (Atlas Link Series Book 2) (28 page)

I paced the alleyway between the Franklin and the pizza shop next door. This alley held too many memories. Here, I’d met Chelsea, had scared Dave off of her. And together we’d lost SeaSat5 in this very spot. Meeting Valerie in this space felt weird, wrong. And she was late on top of it. I was due back to TAO soon, but they thought I was flying back from Tennessee, not hoping to catch a ride from Sophia in Boston.

The sun beat down between the two buildings. I shielded my eyes from its bright rays. They seared my eyeballs, making my head pound. I’d never drink again. To make it worse, my vision did that blue tint thing again, where everything became encased in sapphire hues and lines.

Finally, Valerie strolled around the corner, halting thoughts of a map I shouldn’t be able to access. I pushed off the brick wall and met Valerie. “What’d you find?”

She looked over her shoulder and pushed me back down to the end of the alley. “Not even the least bit curious why I’m late? Geez.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Not sure,” she said. “Might be being followed. I risked a lot to get this information for you. But I had to know, too.”

My heart sank. “What’s going on? Who’s following you?”

She flashed me a wink. “Now’s not the time to go all big brother on me, Trev.”

Oh, this was bad. She didn’t use childhood nicknames lightly. “Valerie.”

She shook her head. “
La Ciudad Blanca
. I don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle, but the ones I do have I can’t share. Not yet.”

I glared at her, not because she was holding back, but because she probably also wouldn’t share the reason why. “Why not?”

She put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows—she wasn’t going to budge. “Who they are, how they’re involved with Atlantis and Lemuria… it won’t mean anything if you don’t get SeaSat5 back.”

“Then what’s
La Ciudad Blanca
?”

Valerie pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and opened it up. It was a screenshot from one of our vest cams during the jungle trip.

“How did you get that?” I asked.

“I taught you how to hack, remember?” She held it up. “What you found, it’s the remnants of
La Ciudad Blanca
. The White City. But it’s contextually wrong. You said you were somewhere in Brazil, right?”

I nodded. The name of the city didn’t ring a bell, but the way her speech quickened told me I could ask questions later. “According to Dr. Hill. He thought we were in Brazil.”

“Well, he’s either an idiot or something’s wrong. If the city’s ruins have been moved, there must have been a reason. Whole cities don’t just
move
,” Valerie said.

Except Atlantis. “So what’s the point?”

“I’m not sure the two events—the city moving and you being infected by a Link Piece from the future—are related. I think it was an unfortunate coincidence. It’s interesting because
La Ciudad Blanca
is tied to the area that once worshiped Quetzalcoatl.”

Again, ancient history wasn’t my thing. “Queza-what now?”

She didn’t bother to stop and correct me. “Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent god, sometimes associated with craftsmanship and art.”

“Link Pieces.” For whatever reasons, Link Pieces were always manmade, always technically a piece of art or a book—things that could be considered crafted. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Valerie.”

“I’m not sure, either. I’m just telling you what I’ve learned.” Her fingers gripped my arm. “Trevor, you guys are in deep and you don’t even know it. And Chelsea chasing down Lemurians isn’t helping. I don’t think they’re at fault here despite everything we’ve been led to believe.”

“How could they
not
be?”

Thompson had hijacked the station in their name. They’d needed the Link Pieces we’d found at the outpost to form a path to Atlantis, to destroy it. The Lemurians had taken SeaSatellite5 because of the cache, and they’d wanted to take Chelsea, too, to use the Waterstar map in her head. It was straightforward.

Valerie shook her head. “I think we’ve been looking at this wrong the whole time.” She leveled her eyes with mine. “You need to get Chelsea back to TAO. It’s not safe and I can’t tell you why.”

I swallowed hard, fists clenching. “I can’t
get
Chelsea to do anything.”

“You need to, Trevor. Before it’s too late.”

A helicopter flew overhead. Pretty normal for the city, but it was enough to send Valerie into the shadows.

“I need to go,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. Tell Dr. Hill what I said about
La Ciudad Blanca
. See you soon.”

She disappeared in a torrent of red and orange flames before I could say anything to make her stay.

Dr. Hill leaned back into his chair and rubbed his eyes in harsh circles. “Valerie.”

He wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t blame him. Valerie had tortured him during the hijacking, so any childhood connection I had to her was canceled out in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, moving forward from that. “Apparently the fact we found the ruins of the White City is a big deal.”

“Care to elaborate?” Pike asked from the doorway of Dr. Hill’s office.

“
La Ciudad Blanca
is like the poorer version of El Dorado,” Dr. Hill supplied. “It’s supposedly a city hidden somewhere in eastern Honduras, lost to myth and non-existent archaeological evidence. If this is true, it would explain why I couldn’t make sense of the site. Although the fact this is another mythological place has me concerned.”

It also appeared to have him depressed. Dr. Hill’s normally bubbly self remained hidden under some invisible weight of pessimistic nature. Something must have happened while I was away.

“What’s got you so down?” I asked.

His eyes lifted to mine. “I could ask you the same thing. According to Sophia, you dragged your feet the whole way here.”

“I made some shitty choices,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

With a shrug, he said, “Fair enough. We uncovered some worrisome information while you were gone.”

Somehow I managed to suppress a groan. I didn’t think I could handle more “worrisome information.” Valerie’s warning echoed in my head:
You need to get Chelsea back to TAO. It’s not safe
. “Do I want to know?”

“Aside from what we’ve already conjectured regarding the statue Link Piece we found in the jungle—in that it was manufactured, brought from the future, and left there for someone to pick up—we’ve recovered some of the footage from our vest cams from the Altern Device mission.”

“And how do those two things go together?” Obviously that’s why he’d preempted his statement with talking about the statue.

“The Altern Device connected Chelsea and yourself,” he said, “to solve a puzzle. It had to be you two because of the connection you have.”

“Had,” I corrected involuntarily. “I already know all of this. Tell me what you’re really getting at.”

Dr. Hill leaned forward and placed his forearms on his desk. “We were made aware of some technological jumps the Lemurians are making regarding Link Piece travel.”

My stomach clenched. Was this was Valerie was so worried about? “And?”

“It appears as though our initial unease regarding the Altern Device was well-placed. According to our contact, Germay’s people had discovered a way to manufacture Link Pieces like the one we saw on our last mission. The Altern Device fuses connections made in humans into objects.”

My mind spun, a deluge of thoughts flying in and out of my consciousness. I sat down in the spare chair opposite Dr. Hill and placed my hands on the desk while I processed this.

The statue Piece was manufactured, that much we’d guessed. But that Germay’s people had been doing it all along? If that was our future, it was possible that a good portion of the pieces we came across were also manufactured, possibly planted to mess with our progress in finding SeaSat5. Or exploring the Links and expanding our understanding of the Waterstar map in general.

But what was Germay after in making Chelsea and I use the Altern Device? They already had the Waterstar map. Chelsea and I weren’t important enough. It wasn’t our connection that mattered.

It was
when
we were from. What we’d both discovered.

The Sargasso Sea cache.
The Atlantean outpost we’d found two years ago.

My eyes darted to Dr. Hill’s. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He didn’t say anything, just watched me piece things together.

“Why?” I shouted.

“Trevor—”

This must be what Valerie knew, or at least part of it. With a secret this big she had to let us work it out on our own. But even she couldn’t have foreseen the absurdity being displayed by people I
thought
were on my side.

“No,” I said. “You can go to hell. You think I sold us out, huh? That I went and told my family exactly where we were going on our next mission, so they could go steal and use Germay’s damn machine to make a Link Piece that’d bring them to SeaSat5? So they could leave
another
Link Piece that’d get someone sick, then—oops, I infected myself?”

Bile sloshed in my throat. I focused all my willpower on keeping it from coming up, which in turn released my hold on my words. “Why in God’s name would I do that? Why would I infect myself with the bubonic plague just to appear
innocent
?”

My vision blurred and formed to the azure storm, dates and times whizzing by. My head felt like it were a balloon about to break free from its string leash.

“Just because my parents screwed me where SeaSat5 was concerned,” I said, “and just because I made the mistake of not saying something when I could have two years ago,
does not
mean I’m at fault now. Dammit, Connor.”

I had no time to apologize for use of his first name. My vision reduced to a pinprick of light and I fell to the floor.

Major Pike was there when I woke up in the Infirmary. He sat in a chair near my bedside, a mission file propped in his hands. “It was a test,” were the first and only words he said when he noticed I’d awoken.

“Screw you. All of you,” I responded. Coming on the heels of the anniversary of SeaSat5’s disappearance and of Valerie’s warnings, the accusations—even fake—burned too much.

Pike shut the file in his hands and leaned in. “We had to know you weren’t working with them.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” I wouldn’t. He knew that. General Holt did, too. But that wasn’t enough, I guess. “I’ll admit I’ve been working with Valerie. She’s not dead. She was the other Lemurian aboard SeaSatellite5 when it was hijacked. She’s the reason Thompson knew about the artifacts, yes, and yes, she helped him take the station. But when she realized Thompson would kill everyone on board to take the Link Piece cache, she acted against him. Then she disappeared.”

I took a deep breath. I shouldn’t have to defend my actions to these guys. “I thought she might have some useful information on everything that’s been going on. So yes, I looked her up. Yes, I talked to her. But that’s it. No one else. I haven’t spoken to my family in over two years.”

Major Pike’s only response to my explanation was a measured intake of breath.

“Valerie’s gone now,” I said. “She said someone’s after her. I’ll likely never see her again, and if I do, it won’t be for a while. She’s not a threat.” To me, at least. And apparently not to Chelsea, either.

“Chelsea needs to be made aware of this growing situation,” Pike said.

I looked at him like he’d asked me to move the entire planet with a beach shovel. I touched a finger to my nose. “Not it.”

She’d find out about Lexi and Valerie. And she’d find out about the plague. She’d also find out about our
connection
being abused once more. Someone else could act as the messenger this time. I was done playing that role.

“Trevor.”

“No way in hell. Sorry, Pike. I’m not doing it. Besides, I don’t want her knowing about me being sick anyway.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because knowing her, she’ll try to blame it on her not being there to stop it.” Even if she hated me, we were all we had left of SeaSat5. If I died while she was gone, she’d add me to the list of people whose deaths she blamed on herself. “Then whatever information she’s gathering on the Lemurians will be for nothing. She’ll stop getting that inside info and come back.”