Landlocked (Atlas Link Series Book 2) (18 page)

raveling along Link Pieces took milliseconds longer with only Sophia there to guide our way. I wasn’t sure anyone else had noticed, but my over-thinking brain did. Calculating the time difference kept my mind busy from obsessing over failing to find Valerie, again. If there was one thing she was good at, it was covering her tracks. It’d only been days, but I almost resigned to not finding her—she’d hidden herself too well. But that was my new project, the next thing to focus on with Chelsea gone. The only thing I had to contribute to the cause of finding SeaSat5.

“Stop daydreaming,” Pike said as he pushed by me, securing our immediate perimeter in our new time-place.

All around me jungle vines clutched to the ruins of an old stone building. Trees with leaves bigger than my head—with flowers to match—towered to the sky, further concealing the brick. A thick mix of rain, humid air, and plant life rushed my nostrils. My allergic reaction was immediate. My eyes watered and I sneezed a few times.
Holy. Pollen.

“Oh, my word,” Dr. Hill exclaimed.

I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my fatigue jacket. My eyes followed the building behind us from its base to the spire standing atop its roof. Vines crept their way up the stone, slithering through window openings like welcomed guests. As if they were a part of the original design.

Chelsea would have loved this.

“What do you think?” Pike asked Dr. Hill, thumbing toward the structure in front of us.

The building was clearly ancient, even for the time period we were supposed to be in. Which was something with a B.C. Even then, was it possible something this advanced stood unoccupied for so long?

A few moments passed before Dr. Hill admitted, “I honestly have no idea. Anything I can think of makes little sense for the time period we’re supposed to be in.”

“Can we go inside?” I asked. We wouldn’t find a Return Piece in this thick jungle. There had to be something inside, or Sophia wouldn’t have seen the presence of another Link Piece.

“Probably,” Dr. Hill said. “But we should be careful. We have no way of knowing how old these ruins are.”

“Can you guess?” Sophia asked.

Dr. Hill paused, studying the vegetation growth. “Not with any accuracy. By the history we know, there shouldn’t be anything here. The intricate spire denotes great importance, but the lack of care suggests it’s been abandoned for years. I’d say it’s at least a hundred years old or older.”

“We’ll go careful, then,” Pike said. “We don’t have much of a choice. I’m not wandering around miles of South American Rainforest to find a way home.”

I didn’t blame him. Rainforests were as beautiful as they were deadly.

We circled the building as best we could, given the thick forest growth, until Major Pike discovered an opening that probably used to be a door. I couldn’t help but think back to those old Indiana Jones movies and wonder if this was wise.

We encountered no traps, trick doors, or resistance of any kind as we entered the belly of the building. Dr. Hill babbled the entire way. I mostly tried not to trip on debris and upturned stones. Of all the time periods we’ve been to, none of them involved abandoned ancient buildings. Being in this one made me understand why Chelsea and Dr. Hill were so fascinated by them. People
lived
here, or at least walked here. Used the building.
Built
the building. Now they were gone, the structure left for us to explore. It was strange, almost melancholic.

We turned a sharp corner and entered a hollowed-out space with a ceiling that rose high in the middle. The spire room.

“This must have been a hall of prominence,” Dr. Hill said. He stared with wide eyes at every stone we passed in the circular area. Every surface. Every bit of writing, or lack thereof. Everything was a clue to him, another puzzle.

Colored stones lined the inset at the center of the fifty-foot diameter area. Anything that once stood on the center was already long gone, probably looted by treasure hunters. I pulled out my scanner, one of the devices TAO built and employed to compensate for lack of super soldiers to identify Link Pieces. The scanners weren’t even eighty percent accurate, though. They worked off the same idea as limiting Chelsea’s powers did: electronic wave interference indicated the presence of something Link Piece related. Or, in the case of Chelsea’s powers, electronic interference could take away or restore them. We’d learned that when SeaSat5 had been hijacked, and ran into issues with it again in the future against Germay.

I scanned the area for anomalies and came up with nothing. Not surprising, given the lack of any significant artifacts in the room. Half a dozen carvings hung on the walls, but this place had been cleared out long ago.

“I’m going to explore the next room over,” Sophia announced. “My concern at this point is not finding a Return Piece.”

“The Waterstar map said one was here. And you confirmed it,” Dr. Hill called out half-heartedly. Something told me he wouldn’t care if we got stuck here for good.

Pike cleared his throat. Obviously
he
cared.

“I’m only human,” Sophia returned.

“I’ll go with Sophia,” I announced. I didn’t want to be in the middle of
that
verbal sparring match if one started.

I followed Sophia through another set of doorways arching wide overhead. With every step, my frown deepened. Chelsea should have been here. She would have been as captivated by this as she was the day we found the Atlantean outpost. She also would have helped Dr. Hill determine everything about this place. Even though she’d graduated, Chelsea had gone back to school at a local Ohio college for a couple classes in Art History and Archaeology, to beef up her skill set. I mostly thought it was a way for her to get off the base, but as I walked through these ancient halls, I realized it was about so much more than that.

What I wouldn’t give right now to know all she knew about this stuff, to be able to see what she’d seen that day we found the outpost. She’d picked out that Amarna piece like it was nothing, and was able to tell the Captain her hypothesis. She’d blamed it on a recent project for an archaeology class, but you could tell she was so obsessed with ancient history; it had sucked her in and told her all its secrets.

“I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding a Return Piece after all,” Sophia said as she stopped dead in her tracks.

“What do you mean?” I peeked past the doorframe into a room that literally looked like a grocery store for artifacts. As if you could take a cart down the aisles and pick out whatever artifacts you needed for the week. “Holy hell.”

Rows and rows of tables stretched out before us for at least a hundred yards. Each table was covered in layers of items, everything ranging from statues and idols to texts, paintings, and reliefs. I hadn’t seen anything like this, anything so
untouched
since the outpost.

Layers of dust and time sheltered the artifacts. Gold coins were scattered on the tables and on the floor. It looked like a scene straight out of a National Treasure movie, only the room was very clearly booby-trapped. Everything screamed this was too easy, too perfect to just run in, snatch up what we needed, and leave.

“Don’t touch anything,” I told her.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” she said, eyes narrowed in concentration. “For the record, there’s at least twenty Link Pieces in the immediate vicinity. Don’t think they’re what we need, though.”

So this temple was another cache, much bigger than the one at the Atlantean outpost. I lifted my scanner and verified what Sophia had said. There they were, twenty Link Pieces glowing blue on the screen.

“I’m going to take a quick walk and see what else I can find. Don’t touch anything,” I warned again.

“You either,” she said.

We each took an aisle and combed through it. I walked slowly and scanned the floors, the walls, and the tables, looking for any sign of a trap trigger or another Link Piece. We reached the end of the room twenty minutes later, without triggering anything or finding a Return Piece.

Sophia sighed and appraised the other ten aisles. “This will take days to wade through.”

“You’re right,” I said, taking in the expanse.

She moved to another aisle. “I’ll begin scanning another aisle for a Return Piece, but won’t touch anything until you confirm with there’s no trigger with that x-ray device you have there. You do the same until Major Pike and Dr. Hill come for us. Does that sound like a good plan?”

A chill scuttled up my spine.
Not really
. We were lucky with the outpost in the Sargasso Sea; it was a museum or a lab, so it hadn’t been booby-trapped. This just
felt
like one huge trap.

“Yup,” I said.

She had to be careful. We both did.

Sophia worked swiftly, looking at each object in turn for no more than a few seconds. She’d been identifying Link Pieces for TAO for five years now, so I was confident her quick assessments would be sound.

I took to scanning my own new aisle now, working at a much slower pace. Each scan cost me a full minute per object if I wanted a reading of any value. One artifact almost made me jump when a scanner immediately recognized a trip-switch underneath it. If I lifted the urn off the stone, a mechanism would trigger God only knew what. Indiana Jones came back to haunt me. I shivered, imagining darts flying my way.

The next artifact over, a carved statute made out of what looked to be clear quartz, was chiseled into the form of a large, curvy, pre-historic woman. It glowed red on the scanner screen. I peered closer. What made it so different? Nothing had ever glowed red on the scanners before, at least not when I’d been using one. Link Pieces glowed blue, not crimson. I changed the scanner settings to look for trip mechanisms, but nothing registered.
What?

“Hey, come look at this,” I called to Sophia. There was no trigger showing up on my display, so I let my fingers brushed the polished quartz as I cleaned off some of the dirt. This was the weirdest thing we’d ever come across.

She turned to me. “What is it?”

I lifted the small, perfectly carved statue in the air for her to see. “It’s glowing red on the scanner. Isn’t that—”

“Trevor, no!” she screamed, eyes wide as saucers.

I jerked my hand down and replaced the statue on the table. “What? What happened?”

She ran to me, practically vaulted over the table standing between us to do so, with wild eyes and shoved me away from the statue. My pulse raced, sweat slicking my palms and neck. I’d never seen her act this way before.

“What’s going on?” I asked her, breath quickening.

Sophia raised her hands. “Don’t.”

“What?” I asked again.

Pike ran into the room with Dr. Hill right behind him. “Everything okay in here?”

Sophia held a hand out. “No one move. Don’t touch him.”

Pike’s head tilted in question but he heeded her warning. His fingers inched toward the gun at his hip. “What’s wrong?”

“Trevor found a Link Piece,” Sophia said.

“Yeah, I can see that much,” Pike said. “What’s wrong with it?”

I pointed to the readout. “It’s red. I don’t know—”

Blinding pain pierced my skull, ripping me from reality. I slammed my eyes shut as stinging needles sprang from the nerves in my head to every receptor in my body. I fell to the floor, a ragged scream clawing its way out of me, stripping my lungs raw. It hurt. It hurt so damn much.