Shadowstorm (Sorcery and Science Book 6) (28 page)

A few steps ahead on the path, Everett and Leonidas had stopped. They turned around, and Leonidas waved Marin forward.

“A door,” he said, stepping aside to allow her to pass.

There were actually two doors: one blocking the wide waterway, the other blocking the narrow walkway. Marin slid a tool out of her belt and used it to pop open a panel on the wall. She tinkered around inside for a bit and then, as if by magic, the walkway door swung open.

“You two take the lead,” Everett said. “I don’t think this will be the last of the barriers.”

Ariella and Marin stepped through the door. The men followed, immediately resuming their gun talk. Inside this new area, more boats were docked, these ones bigger and fancier than the other ones. The first area seemed to be for simple rowboats and motorboats. The second was reserved for sleek racing boats. And with each successive chamber in the cave, the boats grew in both size and sophistication. By the time Marin had gotten them through the fifth door, they were surrounded by yachts so high that Ariella could see nothing of the water past the wall of metal bodies.

“The security on the doors is getting more complicated with each successive one we come to,” Marin said.

“They don’t appear to be giving you any trouble.”

“Yet.”

“Marin, you sabotaged a Hellean floating city. I think you can handle a few doors.”

Marin looked up, seeming to consider the thought. “They’re not quite the same.”

“They’re both tech—” Ariella stopped, gaping at the flowers on the walls. There weren’t as many lights in this chamber, so she finally realized what had been bugging her about those flowers since they’d first entered the cave. They were glowing.

“What’s wrong?” Marin asked.

“See those flowering vines on the walls?”

“Yes,” Marin said as Everett and Leonidas walked right on past them.

“They’re glowing.”

“Are they?” Marin squinted her eyes, staring hard at the red-orange blooms growing atop the loose weave of vines on the wall. “Oh, I see it now. It’s very faint. Ooh, I’ve read about something like this. Some scientists at Greenwood Labs developed genetically-altered flowers that glow in the dark when exposed to certain types of light.”

“These aren’t ‘genetically-altered’ flowers.” Whatever that meant. Ariella rose into her toes and plucked a flower from a nearby vine. “They are magic flowers.”

Marin looked down at the flower in Ariella’s open palms. “Magic as in Elition?”

“Yes.”

“Then what are they doing here, in a parking cave for boats?”

“That I do not know.”

Marin reached toward the flower, then retracted her hand. “So, what do these magic flowers do? Besides glow, of course?”

“They mostly just glow, though they can be used in some serums and…” She stole a peek ahead at Everett and Leonidas, but the guys were still walking. They were in the midst of a heated argument about some gun or another and didn’t seem to notice that Ariella and Marin had stopped. “The pollen can be ground up into a concentrated dust that has…medicinal properties,” she finished in a whisper.

“What kind of medicinal properties?” Marin asked, matching her whisper.

“There are several varieties of glowing flowers. Some heal. Some soothe burns. Some speed up the healing of broken bones.”

Marin nodded along. “That all sounds very useful. So, what can
this
flower do?”

“It’s a Pegasus Flare Flower,” Ariella said, brushing her fingertip across one of the silky petals. “It can be ground into Flare Dust. That’s very close to the Zephyr Dust you get from the rocks of Resonance Canyon in Zephyr.”

“And this dust helps with healing?”

“It can be used on burns. Among other things,” she added.

She must have blushed because Marin leaned in closer to whisper, “What are these other things? And are they the reason we’re whispering?”

They were whispering because Everett already knew about Zephyr Dust—and what it did. Davin had told him. The last thing Ariella needed right now was to have Everett tease her about Davin. They had work to do.

“I’ll get you a vial of the dust, and you can try it out yourself,” she promised.

“First you have to tell me what it does.”

“Just pour it into a full bathtub and let it do its magic.”

A perplexed look lined Marin’s face. “Like bath salt?”

“Much, much better than bath salt.”

Marin’s eyes gleamed with curiosity, but before Ariella could spell it out for her, Everett called back.

“Hey, ladies! Care to join us?”

It was then Ariella realized just how far ahead he and Leonidas had made it. “Later,” she told Marin, then they ran to catch up.

“Look there,” Everett said as they closed in.

He was pointing at a door. Unlike all the doors Marin had opened, this one looked very plain. In fact, it was the first normal door Ariella had seen since they’d entered the cave. And it was inside the side wall, not blocking the walkway passage.

“There are others,” added Leonidas.

He was right. Ariella counted three doors on that wall. Up ahead, where the walkway ballooned into a dead-end alcove, there were at least five more.

“They must lead to buildings above ground.” Leonidas walked past the closest door. He stopped at the middle one and began to look it over. “This one,” he called back to them.

“Are you sure?” Everett asked.

“Pretty sure. I’ve studied the aerial maps of the island. Based on how far we’ve walked, this one should be right about under the laboratory. They probably need access to the boat parking area so that they can easily go out and collect research materials.”

Or people?
Ariella buried the thought. Just because the Selpes and Avans were neck-deep in kidnapping Elitions for experimental evils, that didn’t mean the Varenese were doing it too. She was just being paranoid. But then what were all the Elition flowers about? And why were there Elition Varenese? Some way or another, the Varenese were messing with magic. Ariella only hoped that this messing around was limited to plants.

Leonidas opened the door, which was surprisingly unlocked. Marin followed him, then Everett, and finally Ariella at the rear. As she entered the stairwell, she looked up at the vertical tunnel. Those rows of zigzagging stairs seemed to go on forever, but in reality it took them only a few minutes to reach the door at the top. Past the door, a final row of steps led them up into the middle of a small room.

“This doesn’t look like a high-tech research facility,” Marin commented from in front of Ariella.

It really didn’t. The room was small and dusty and…were those garden tools in the corner? Ariella walked over to a wall of shelves stacked with pots, scissors, and various other garden supplies. A few bags of earth sat beneath the shelves, and a rack was leaned up against the adjacent wall.

“It’s a garden storage shed.” Everett pivoted around slowly to face Leonidas.

“We must be close. My calculations can’t be that far off,” the spy insisted, stepping over a fallen broom on his way to the shed’s door.

Marin joined him at the door. “Maybe you should leave the calculations to me.”

He turned his head to roll his eyes at her. “You can’t even calculate the tip at a restaurant.”

“Sure I can. I’m usually just too distracted calculating other things.”

“Like how much of a final burst you’d need to give an airship’s engines if you want to cross the Wilderness in three hours and twenty-six minutes?”

“For instance.” She grinned at him. “First, I have to take the wind into account. Then there’s the—”

“Are you two going to take a look outside to see where we are, or are you just going to debate mathematical formulas all day?” Everett cut in.

“We’re looking, we’re looking,” Marin grumbled, but the frown didn’t reach her eyes. Those were lit up with a happy twinkle. If Leonidas was teasing her again, maybe he was finally starting to cheer up.

They opened the door a crack and peeked out. When they closed it and turned around again, Leonidas looked very pleased with himself.

“I told you so.”

“We’re close?” Ariella asked.

“Yes, we’re on the facility’s grounds. Which is a good thing because there’s an enormous electric fence surrounding the whole place,” Leonidas said. “I could see the lab right across the grounds, no more than two hundred meters away.”

“That’s not too far.”

“Before you think about just making a run for it, you should know something, Ariella,” Marin said. “Not only are there search lights scouring the grounds, there are also guards and dogs pacing around outside. It’s as though they are looking for something.”

“Or someone,” said Everett. “We must have triggered a silent alarm.”

Marin gave him an indignant glower. “It wasn’t me. I bypassed the alarms on each of the doors.”

“Maybe the alarm was on the unlocked door, the one that led us up here,” Everett suggested, his eyes turning to Leonidas.

“Hey, there.” He threw his hands up in the air. “I didn’t see any alarms on that door.”

“Invisible lasers?” Ariella asked Everett.

“Could be.” Everett cracked the door open to take his own peek out. “Guard dogs.” He grimaced. “I hate guard dogs. And I don’t even have any meat to distract them.”

“Does that even work?” Ariella asked.

“It depends on the dog.” Everett allowed himself a single sigh, then turned to the group. “Ideas, anyone?”

“We need a distraction.” Leonidas looked at Marin. They all did.

Marin was busy chewing on her thumb, which meant she was already thinking one up. “I need supplies.”

“You have a whole shed full of supplies here,” Everett told her.

Her eyes panned across the bags of earth, the pots, the fertilizer—all the things that were pretty useful for gardening, but probably not so useful for creating explosions.

Marin sighed. “I suppose they’ll have to do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

~
Fire Escape Plan ~

527AX January 18, Lord Varen’s Island

ARIELLA GAVE THE clump of hacked-together materials in Marin’s hand an icy glare, snatched it up, and tossed it halfway across the lawn. A faint splash, followed by an even fainter clink, told Everett that it had hit its target. The guards only clued in, however, after the big explosion of water and fountain fragments. Startled shouts spread in a contagious echo across the lawn.

The guards ran toward the fountain, their boots splashing through the stream of water gushing out of the enormous fissures in the basin. A second explosion went off, shooting jets of water in every direction. One of the jets took a guard in the stomach, which slammed his body hard against the man behind him. The two entangled men smashed into the garden shed, hitting it so hard that the thin wooden wall at Everett’s back shook. Thankfully, they also hit the shed so hard that it knocked both men unconscious.

Guards were still rushing toward the fountain, though more cautiously now, as though they feared what little remained of it would explode in their faces. Their dogs kept pace with them, their yapping barks blaring over all the other sounds of the night. Everett saw a silver and black streak of movement blur past a row of evergreens. Ariella. A few seconds later, the trees burst into fiery flames.

“Fire!” roared one of the guards, and they all scrambled for water hoses to put it out.

They wouldn’t have much luck. Ariella had sprinkled the trees with some pollen from the flowers growing in the cave. The fire was fake, though from where Everett was, it sure looked real. While the guards were busy unrolling a very long hose, he and Marin darted across the lawn to the statue of a rearing horse. No, not a horse. His eyes honed in on the stubby horn on its head. A unicorn.

Ariella had already made it to the door of the building. She pressed herself flat against the stone wall, hugging the shadows. If not for the bright shiny blanket of silver hair, she would have been nearly invisible. If they were going to keep breaking into guarded facilities, Everett really needed to get her a hat.

Leonidas was not far behind Ariella. Peeking his head out from the bundle of scrubs he was crouched behind, he shot Marin a thumbs up.

The guards had managed to unroll the hose far enough to reach the burning evergreens. The man at the front squeezed down on the handle, and water shot out. The moment the stream hit the fake fire, the red-orange flames shot up even higher. They dropped the hose as one. Realizing that the threat lay elsewhere, their eyes scanned the surroundings. Marin didn’t give them much time to look. She pulled out the remote she’d constructed using supplies from the garden shed. She pressed down on the button, and five garden machines across the grounds simultaneously exploded, including the lawnmower beside the shed. She was good. Really good. Ariella had been right when she’d promised that Marin would be useful.

The guards were running across the grounds in a heated panic. Chaos was the best cover. Everett and Marin joined Ariella and Leonidas at the door. Usually, Everett picked the locks, but the one on that door looked pretty high-tech, so he stepped aside for Marin to give it a try. It was a good choice. She had it open in no time, and the four of them slipped inside the building before the guards outside were any wiser.

“Where were you all my years working for SIN?” Leonidas asked her as they crept down the hall. “All those break-ins… You would have made the perfect partner.”

“Where was I? Dodging your overbearing ego.”

Leonidas lips spread into an innocent smile. “I? Ego?”

“Especially once you got your SIN badge. You were insufferable.”

His smile darkened. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing they took it away from me.”

“Leo, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s ok. For what I did, I deserved to lose it.” His eyes avoided hers. “Oh, look. Is that Storage Hall 2 way down there?”

Leonidas rushed off further down the hall, Marin followed after him, and Everett decided that—whatever
that
was—was absolutely none of his business. He walked beside Ariella, scanning for guards at every intersection. The scientists who worked there seemed to have all gone home for the night. Every lab they passed was dark. Marin and Leonidas were waiting beside a lab at the end of the hall, which turned out not to be Storage Hall 2 after all. According to Cameron, Storage Hall 2 was where the artifact would be.