“And those flashes may have something to do with that,” Kailani replied.
“We’ve got supplies and equipment,” Ben added, giving us an encouraging half-smile.
“And I covered the shuttles in a protective spell,” Kailani said. “The telescope is watching us at all times. They’ll check the feeds. They’ll probably see what happened.”
Rose scoffed. “They might send backup.”
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Ben replied. “But, in the meantime, we’ll do our job. We’ll check out that weird coliseum you saw, too,” he added, giving me a brief nod.
I looked out into the distance once more. The lighthouse was still standing. The ice had melted away on the beach, though the path that Nevis had made for us was still there. The flashes had had no interest in it, whatsoever. They’d been aiming for us, not our tools and contraptions.
Somewhere farther away to the east was a mysterious structure made of clear, crystal-like materials, where I’d seen someone, though I hadn’t been able to make out their identifying features. We were definitely going to check it out.
We’d stumbled across something incredibly dangerous here.
Our elders were still missing. There was no trace of them anywhere. We had lots of questions with no answers, and a handful of bruises to show for what had just happened.
When we’d built the resort on Noagh, we’d had no reason to think this might go wrong. We’d done our due diligence. Despite my occasional pangs of guilt, I had to admit, there was nothing more we could’ve done to prevent this.
We’d only wanted to give our founders the proper vacation that they deserved.
Harper
My blood was boiling.
The communication channel wasn’t working. I couldn’t reach out to our team on Strava. I’d been trying for the past hour, at least.
The telescope feed was quite accurate, though, and the blood spell worked, so, at least for a while, I’d had eyes on them. I’d watched over them while they searched the resort. The lenses moved and changed their angles to follow them around, connected to them through Arwen’s blood spell.
The first few hours had been relatively uneventful, from what I could tell. Rose and the team had made it to the cave, which we couldn’t even see from Calliope, even with that nifty telescope, because of the thick jungle foliage. However, I’d taken notes from Derek’s video, and I’d marked the cave’s location on the screen map, so I knew where they were shortly after midnight.
Then they’d gone back to the resort and had taken the boats out. Once they reached a small island with a lighthouse and a modest pier, it all went haywire. I saw the ice tower go up, courtesy of Nevis, but then the entire screen flashed white, and I couldn’t see anything for the better half of an hour.
The door to our operations room on Mount Zur opened with a click, demanding my attention. I stood up straight just as Caspian walked in. His aura was warm and gold, as always, instantly soothing me.
“Is everything okay?” Caspian asked, frowning as he sensed my angst. With our souls connected, I couldn’t hide anything from him. Not that I would’ve ever wanted to, anyway.
I shook my head. “Not really.” I pointed at the white screen. “It’s been like that for a while now.”
Caspian came over and stared at the screen for a few seconds. “Have you heard from them?”
“Comms aren’t working,” I groaned. “Even with all the upgrades that Jovi fitted them with. I don’t think we’ll be able to talk to them.”
“We were supposed to at least have eyes on them,” Caspian replied, crossing his arms.
“I did, until half an hour ago,” I said. “They were okay, on another island about seven miles northeast of Noagh. Then the screen went white and—”
I stilled as the screen flickered several times, and then the telescope feed came back in full view. I held my breath, trying to figure out what we were looking at. The topography had changed. They weren’t on the lighthouse island anymore.
“I guess it’s working now?” Caspian cocked his head to the side, visibly confused.
“Yeah, but… Hold on,” I replied, then fiddled with the screen controls to zoom in on the forested island. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Ben and Rose come out of the woods first, followed by the rest of the crew. “They’re okay,” I breathed. “Thank the stars.”
“At least we’ve got a better view now, instead of just black dots,” Caspian said.
It wasn’t exactly high definition, and I only had a close-up aerial view, but I could tell that they were all in one piece and moving at a steady pace. I looked around and saw nothing that would set my instincts ablaze, either.
Nevis generated another ice path across the water, which they used to get back to the resort, without taking the four boats they’d left on a neighboring island.
“As long as I’ve got eyes on them, I’m cool,” I muttered. “I would’ve gone ballistic if the feed didn’t come back soon.”
Caspian chuckled softly, then put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. His body heat seeped through my skin. He kissed me, ever so gently, making my heart sing. One minute alone with him was all I needed to settle my nerves. Caspian was my cure for pretty much everything.
“What do we know so far?” he asked.
“Nothing new, from what I could tell without an operational comms system,” I replied. “My guess is they’ll pack a message in a swamp witch spell and send it over soon enough.”
“Do you think this is Neraka all over again?” His brow was slightly furrowed, and his jade eyes glimmered with concern—the kind I hadn’t seen since I’d first landed on Neraka myself.
I shook my head again. “They’re not stuck there. We can see them,” I said, giving him a reassuring smile. “We’ve been over this before, babe. This definitely isn’t like Neraka. We’ve learned our lessons.”
He nodded, then looked at the screen. “What about them? Did you see what they’ve been doing?”
“For the most part, no. I’ve only seen them move around, here and there,” I replied. “The telescope follows them around with its blood spell. Otherwise I’d probably lose them, if I had to operate it manually. But then that white flare came up and blocked the feed.”
“And no sign of Derek and his group, either.”
“Nothing. Rose and company checked the resort and the cave, then moved farther to the northeast by approximately seven miles,” I explained briefly. “Now, they’re going back to Noagh. I suppose they’ll rest up and start fresh in the morning.”
Caspian grunted, then walked over to the telescope and checked its lenses.
“Not that I’m a genius with these things, but the charms look intact,” he said. “Whatever that flare was, I don’t think it came from here.”
“Are you sure? I should get Jovi or Arwen to look at it, though, just to be certain.”
He shrugged, then gently moved the telescope around, keeping his eyes on the large screen. I followed the feed until a strange view unfolded before us.
“Hm…” he murmured, staying by the telescope. “That’s strange, don’t you think?”
It was a round building, something akin to an ancient Roman coliseum, but made of glass or diamond or some kind of clear and sturdy crystal. It shimmered strangely under the moonlight, but the image was clear enough to make me conclude that it wasn’t a natural element.
“That’s a building,” I said. “That’s artificial…”
“Was it supposed to be there?”
I exhaled, then flipped through the annotated maps I’d saved on my tablet, to the same coordinates. “Oh, boy. No. This wasn’t there before,” I replied. “At least, not before we scanned the planet and started building the resort.”
“Let me see if I can zoom in from the lens, directly,” Caspian said, turning one of the small gears at the end of the telescope. “There’s still some wiggle room, I think.”
I listened to the mild clicks of the gear as
he twisted it. A crackling sound came out from the telescope, prompting Caspian to freeze. We looked at each other with wide eyes, then back at the screen. My stomach dropped.
The telescope feed was gone completely.
The screen had gone black.
“Oh, no,” Caspian muttered, looking horribly guilty. It nearly broke my heart.
“Crap,” I croaked.
We were going to have to get Arwen in to try to fix it. If something had broken, it was most likely a part that could be replaced. Neither Caspian nor I was an expert on the matter, however, and, after what had just happened, we wouldn’t have touched the telescope with a ten-foot barge pole, ever again.
At least our search crew was okay, even though Derek and his group were still missing, and there was the weirdest construction that had appeared out of nowhere on an island—dangerously close to Noagh.
The weirdness factor on Strava had just been dialed up to eleven.
Derek
My eyes peeled open. My mouth and throat felt as though I’d swallowed an entire cotton field. Sharp pain cut through my brain, pulsating and spreading outward in blistering heatwaves. My first instinct was to touch my head, looking for a blade or foreign object stuck in it—otherwise I couldn’t explain the agonizing discomfort.
I groaned, then held my breath for a second, as I listened to the noise travel before it hit the walls and came back to me. I was staring at white lights mounted on a glass ceiling. Beyond it was black stone. I inhaled through my nose, catching every scent around me.
Moss. Moisture. Glass.
When it felt safe enough to move my eyes and head around without crying out in pain, I checked my surroundings. I was in a glass box, lying in a bed. It felt soft and comfortable. Water trickled somewhere below. I looked down and spotted the little stream going through the moss-covered floor. It looked eerily familiar.
“Derek?” Sofia’s voice made my heart jump.
I sat up—a little too fast. The pain came back with a vengeance, making me hiss.
“Derek, are you okay, honey?” Sofia asked.
She sounded close, yet far away. My blood ran colder than usual as I turned my head and saw my wife in a glass box next to mine.
“What the—” I muttered, then found the strength to stand.
My entire body hurt. I wobbled for a while before I regained my stability.
“Derek… Talk to me. Are you okay?” Sofia replied, looking terribly concerned. She sat in a bed similar to mine. The stream crossed through her section of mossy stone floor, too.
I nodded slowly. “For the most part. I see all my limbs are intact, but I feel like I’ve got the world’s worst hangover,” I said. “I haven’t felt like this in hundreds of years… Turning human felt better than this.”
I checked my bed again. There were soft blankets and a pillow on it. Someone had gone to the trouble of providing us with comfort in our… captivity.
“Where are we?” I breathed.
All around us, there was nothing but stone. Attached to our glass enclosures were several more identical boxes. I moved closer to the wall in front of me and stifled a yelp. We were all here, each kept separately, but close to one another. There was always a wall connecting the couples. Most of them were still out of it, but Lucas and Vivienne were starting to come to.
I dashed over to Sofia’s side, ignoring the earth spinning around me for a moment, and slapped my hands on the glass, desperate to touch her, to hold her, to keep her safe and close… but who was I kidding? We were trapped.
“Sofia, how are you feeling?” I asked her, my voice gruff and trembling.
“Like I chugged down a bucket of glass,” she murmured, glancing around. “Baby, what is this place? How did we get here? Do you remember anything?”
“I… I’m not sure…”
I checked the place out again, this time with more clarity as our circumstances came into focus. This was similar to the cave we’d found, with black walls and a rounded ceiling, and moss growing nearly everywhere. The stream passed through each of the glass boxes, then went around in a circle, delineating our collective prison.
The hall itself was dark, but lights and ventilation systems had been fitted on the ceiling of each of our glass boxes. The air was clean and fresh, and I had a feeling all the vegetation acted like a natural filtration system, despite the seemingly closed space.
I checked every corner and wall bottom. It was sealed tight with a solid mixture of metals. I clawed at it, trying to see how deep I could go, but I stopped when my fingers started to bleed. I was hurting myself, and not making any progress, either.
I punched the glass. All it did was make my knuckles hurt. The pane didn’t even crack or budge. “Honey, I think we’re utterly stuck here,” I said quietly.
“Ugh, I feel like I’ve been run over by an eighteen-wheeler,” Lucas groaned as he slowly got up.
One by one, our group came to and experienced the same stages of shock, horror, and the cold-blooded calm that came afterward, where our critical thinking kicked in.
“I thought this was supposed to be the perfect tropical vacation,” Claudia snapped. “I’m pretty sure it didn’t include getting locked up in this place.”
“It definitely wasn’t in the brochure,” Yuri replied, leaning against the glass wall so he could stay close to her. Claudia gave him a pained look, placing a hand on the glass as tears came up to her eyes.
“I wish I could hold you right now,” she whispered.
It broke my heart to see her like this. To see all of them like this. My Sofia was brave and composed, but I knew that, deep down, she was feeling the same anguish as me. We looked at each other for a while, before she took a deep breath and turned her head so she could see everyone.
“Is everybody okay?” she asked, raising her voice.
We all nodded in almost-perfect unison. Sofia had this way of capturing our attention with the skill level of a snake charmer. She’d gone into damage-control mode, and it was part of the reason I’d insisted that we share GASP leadership from day one.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” she added.
I thought about it, but it took me a while to get past the blur.
“I think we got back from the cave, after I showed it to you guys,” I said.
“Ah, yes, the weird metallic pods and glowing cables,” Cameron replied, pursing his lips.
“Oh, right. And my wife’s blunder. Can’t forget that, now, can we?” Yuri chuckled dryly.
Claudia let out a low growl. “I didn’t think it would come off so easily. Total health and safety violation for whatever was in that pod.”
“Wait,” Corrine grumbled. “We came back to the resort, for sure. We talked about what we’d seen. I was quite firm in my theory that it was a stasis chamber of sorts, meant to preserve a species of intelligent life.”
“We had dinner,” Lucas said, frowning. “We agreed to go back to Strava twelve hours earlier to bring back a research team and organize a proper study of that cave. We went to bed early, too.”
As I replayed that evening in my head, I made it to the point when I’d closed my eyes, in bed, with Sofia soft and purring in my arms. I nodded slowly, then felt chills running down my spine.
“I woke up in the middle of the night,” I remembered. “I’d heard a noise, I think. And I found myself staring into a pair of big, black eyes.”
A couple of seconds passed, until Marion gasped. “Mon dieu! I remember that too! Big eyes, and black like ink! All over! There were no pupils, just black, glossy eyeballs beneath the eyelids…”
“And there was a strange scent,” Sofia added. “I can still smell it. Lemony and… something else, something pungent, like ammonia or something.”
“Holy crap, they knocked us out with gas or something!” Xavier croaked, staring at us with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. “We were knocked out!”
I sighed. “Then nothing. Everything went dark. I woke up in here, just now.”
/> “How long do you think we were out?” Ibrahim asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on how potent that gas or whatever they took us out with was.”
Corrine brought her index and middle fingers up to her lips. She whispered a spell, then placed her fingertips on the glass. We all heard the sizzling sound. Smoke came out from her contact with the glass. Flames burst violently and nearly swallowed her whole, but Corrine was quick to pull herself out of harm’s way. The fire got instantly sucked through the ventilation system above them, then dissipated.
“Corrine, are you okay?” I asked, worrying about her.
She checked her blistered fingers, then looked at me and nodded. Her face was covered in soot. “Not doing that again,” she replied.
“What were you thinking?” Ibrahim reprimanded her.
She scoffed, then leaned against the glass wall where he stood. “I was thinking fire might get us out of here, but, clearly, I was wrong.”
I looked at the glass box again. Only then did I notice the tiny incisions along the ceiling’s edges. Symbols had been carved into it, smaller than my fingernail. That was magic of some kind, for sure. The scribbles reminded me of runes.
“There’s some kind of magic at work here,” I said, pointing at them.
Corrine followed my gaze, then looked up and gasped. “Hah! I see them! But wait…” She frowned again. “I don’t recognize any of it. What the hell?!”
“Maybe it’s there to repel magic of any kind,” Ibrahim offered. “That was a low-level fire spell you performed. It shouldn’t have blown up in your face like that.”
“Someone’s deliberately keeping us in here and prohibiting us from using magic?” Lucas concluded, extremely alarmed. He checked his pockets. “Dammit. My lighters are gone. I’m useless without a fire source. And the box is sealed tight with something, I can’t thin myself and sneak out.”