Landlocked (Atlas Link Series Book 2) (4 page)

sighed. “I’m not sure what you want me to tell you.” This was
not
how I wanted to spend the morning after the two-year anniversary, and this briefing was driving me insane. After an hour and a half, Sophia, Dr. Hill, Trevor, Pike, and I still sat around a legitimate round table made of mahogany in the smack dab center of TAO. An hour and a half of talking for a mission that lasted all of twenty minutes and failed. One we
knew
would fail.

“Would you mind telling me what happened again?” General Holt asked.

Holt. He was a decent guy. Aged somewhere around forty-five years, General Holt had seen a lot of combat. Way more than we’d all seen here in our tenure at TAO, combined. Then Holt had somehow landed this gig fifteen years ago and had commanded TAO ever since. He was a tall, stereotypical military man, still with a full head of brown hair.

When Trevor and I had first gotten to TAO, he’d treated us with the same respect Captain Marks had had for me when I’d first boarded SeaSatellite5. That is to say that General Holt had been welcoming and ready to teach us the ropes, but wary of our capabilities. Trevor could probably take down all of TAO within minutes, with his computer and engineering skills, and I… could definitely do some damage to say the absolute least. About the only thing I hadn’t been willing to do to prove myself to them was touch a gun. People usually died when I did. Even if Thompson had been the bad guy, even if it had been in self-defense, a gun was too powerful of a weapon for me. I didn’t want to handle them at all.

Unfortunately, TAO had decided to thrust that training upon me whether I liked it or not. TAO claimed gun training to be a part of the necessary skill-set to work here where getting into firefights with Lemurians could happen. I’d promptly flung water from someone’s water bottle at our trainer’s face as soon as he’d said it.

I didn’t need a gun. But Pike thought I did.

I now had a gun, and wasn’t happy about it.

“Chelsea?” General Holt prompted in my silence.

“Right,” I said. “Sorry. We went in, didn’t find anything—just like I said we wouldn’t— then we got caught in the middle of the siege. We had to exit hot, hence the choppy re-entry.” We hadn’t done damage to the room, but it wasn’t the smoothest transfer through time Sophia and I had ever worked.

“The calculations based off the Waterstar map say there’s a Link Piece there,” Dr. Hill retorted.

I shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say. We didn’t find anything in the immediate area when the calculations said we should have.” But again, Link Piece travel wasn’t an exact science. For all we knew, the calculations had picked up our Return Piece instead of a second or third Link Piece.

“Retry your calculations,” Major Pike told Dr. Hill.

I groaned. Great. Another trip to a Roman siege, if we could find another Link Piece to get there.

General Holt stood and so did Major Pike. “Re-run the data and keep me posted,” he said to Dr. Hill. “You have a new mission slated to leave tomorrow night, and then a three-day break period.”

Yes!
I could literally taste the freedom. It tasted like Sully’s Burgers on Castle Island in Boston. Nothing but me, a guitar, and the band for three beautiful days on that beach. My fingers fell under the table, contorting automatically to the chords of Phoenix and Lobster’s newest music.

“Meet here tomorrow at fourteen hundred for the briefing,” General Holt said.

“Yes sir,” came the choired response.

General Holt left, retreating to his office down the hall.

“I hope you all don’t mind, but I won’t be around at all during that break,” I said. Being able to teleport on command had that kind of perk. In the two years since discovering I had that ability, I’d been able to grow it to the point where I could teleport to mostly anywhere I had a connection, even a vague one. My hometown and the Franklin for example. I could teleport back to TAO, too.

Connections
. That’s all it was, all any of this time-travel stuff was—at least in present-day. You needed a Link Piece to go anywhere too far off the present course of time. As it was, I wasn’t convinced I didn’t show up a few seconds out of sync when I teleported. Sophia said she also noticed it.

“Do you plan on heading back to Massachusetts?” Pike asked. He always kept tabs on me and Trevor, like he expected us to up and disappear like SeaSatellite5.

A pang zipped through my abdomen, right under my scar. God only knew what the Lemurians did with them. Lemuria had wanted the station and the artifacts on board, so what became of the crew? Maybe if we found the right Link Piece rather than just
any
Link Piece, we could appear right after they—we—landed. Maybe only minutes could have passed instead of years.

I nodded at Pike. “Yes. The band and I have some rehearsing to do.”

“Would you like to get in a sparring session before you leave, then?” Sophia asked.

“Most definitely.” I stood. “Is now a good time?”

She gestured toward the door. “Of course.”

Fifteen minutes into our sparring session and we still had no clear winner. When SeaSat5 had been hijacked, my wacky strength ability was untrained, undisciplined. I could throw a punch with the best of them, but landing one depended largely on how expectant the other party was of me throwing it in the first place.

Sophia had raised my skills to par, and I’d caught on so well that on a good day, we were evenly matched. She’d been studying various martial arts from a young age, before she came over to the United States to study for school. Add in all the Atlantean super soldier perks, and she could be a pretty unstoppable force. Stick us together with a small line of guns firing in your direction, and there was little your Lemurian powers or buddies could do to help you.

Sophia’s fist flew past my ear, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“You’re slowing down,” she pointed out. “Should we stop discussing your relationship issues?”

I tossed a punch back at her, then dropped and swung my leg around. It didn’t connect, so instead of knocking her to the ground, I looked like a misshapen top spinning around in a room full of gym equipment, mats, and punching bags. My sparring sessions with Sophia were more like therapy sessions lately. With me coming close to besting her, and the anniversary having just passed yesterday, we couldn’t really help it.

I liked Sophia. She was pretty cool. Her parents had moved to Ireland when she was still a baby, so her Irish accent betrayed her caramel skin. Sophia was Atlantean-strong like me, and she could control water too. She could also teleport. But she was smart, calculating in ways I’d never be.

“You need a relationship to have relationship issues,” I said and rose, no longer an upturned sea turtle.

Sophia stepped back and dropped her hands, signaling the end of the session. “Break up again?”

My eyes slid to the ground, then shot to the ceiling with exasperation. “I don’t know what we are. Half the time he’s the same guy I’ve always known. Then we’ll be on a mission and what happened with SeaSat5 comes up, and I want to slug him all over again.”

“It’s been two years,” she ventured slowly.

“It’s a wedge.”

Sophia lifted her hand and closed it into a fist. I followed the line of sight to a water bottle on the other side of the room. She moved her fist in a tight circle. The water within the bottle responded, gyrating into a tiny whirlpool that moved the bottle under Sophia’s direction. Right across the room into her waiting palm.

Show off.

She unscrewed the top and took a drink. “So talk it out, and move on or get back together.”

“We do talk about it sometimes. But that’s not the whole issue.”

“Then what is?”

I sat on the mat beside me. “He’s mad I won’t let him protect me. Like ever.
Men.
”

Sophia’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re not exactly someone who needs protecting.”

“Exactly!”

She held up her right pointer-finger. “That doesn’t mean he won’t want to. You’re someone he cares about, Chelsea. Someone a lot more powerful than he is. And you haven’t always been that way. He’s been trying to protect you from the start, as far as I can tell.”

I rolled my eyes. When Trevor and I had met, I was at my lowest. We had both ended up in that alley in Boston, both escaping something. Then Dave had mugged me and Trevor had intervened. How much more vulnerable could you get?

Was that what attracted him to me in the first place? Was his perceived ability to protect me what had attracted
me
to
him
too? I mean, a little… I guess.

Okay. A lot.

“I’m not that girl anymore,” I said.

Sophia smiled. “Yes, you are. Somewhere inside, she’s still there. Underneath the façade you put up.”

My eyes narrowed. “What façade?”

“The can-do attitude. The sense of invulnerability. You think no one can touch you,” she said.

Well, has anyone? There was a huge potential to get injured anytime we traveled through time. Everything from falling off cliffs and poison darts to swords and god-knew-what diseases. Still, I hadn’t gotten more than a scratch on any mission, including the times we’d run into Lemurians who weren’t exactly thrilled to see us. Did that make me good or damned lucky?

“Why don’t you take your leave time to think about the difference between strength and foolishness,” Sophia said. “You are powerful, yes, but you’re still human. You’re still a young woman with a man who cares for you very much, despite everything. Don’t toss him to the wayside because you think his chivalry is irritating.”

I swallowed hard. “You’re right.” I’d given Trevor the short stick all along, and I knew it.

A knowing grin spread across her face. “Of course I am.”