Salt & the Sisters: A Mermaid Fantasy (The Siren's Curse Book 3) Page 9

  “You must have got my number from Georjie,” she said. “I don’t give my info out.”

  “Yeah, I hope that was okay.”

  “Sure, sure,” she replied, but I felt her interest cooling. She was wondering why I had called and what I wanted.

  “I’ll get straight to the point,” I said.

  “Okay,” she replied in the same all-business tone.

  “We found Atlantis.”

  Nothing. Dead air.

  “Petra?”

  “I’m here,” she replied. Her tone was now closed; I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not.

  “We found it and we need to excavate it, and quickly.” I launched into a rapid explanation about the siren’s curse, how we knew the location of Atlantis, and why we needed to go there.

  She listened quietly. I found myself hoping she hadn’t hung up, but I never heard a click so I didn’t stop talking until the story was out. When I was finished, I shut up and didn’t say anything again until she did.

  “You’re not messing with me?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Petra. I would never.”

  “I believe you.”

  Relief lifted a weight from my shoulders like a yoke carrying huge buckets of cement had fallen to the ground.

  “Thank you. The reason I’m telling you is not just because you’re an archaeologist, but because we’re going to need your help.”

  “I’m not an archaeologist yet.”

  “Close enough, plus you have a way of moving sand like no one I’ve ever seen. Will you help us?”

  I knew Petra had things going on. She had a brilliant hacker boyfriend, and goodness knew where she was in the world and what vigilante mission she was on right now. But I was hoping that the temptation of Atlantis would be too much for her to turn down.

  I was right.

  “I’m kind of busy,” she said haltingly, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “But when a fellow elemental calls and says they found Atlantis, well.” She took a deep breath. “That’s not something I can say no to.”

  “Great.” I couldn’t keep the grin from splitting my face in two. “When do you think you can be here?”

  “In Gibraltar?”

  “Yeah, we’re hoping to leave in less than a week. You could fly with us.”

  “I can’t leave that soon,” she said, and my heart fell. It buoyed again when she followed it up with, “But I can meet you in Mauritania if you tell me where you’ll be.”

  I let out a long breath but the thrilled pounding of my heart did not ease up. “We’ll be landing in the nearest city to the ruins. I’ll text you the info when it’s nailed down. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s Atlantis, I can’t tell you what it means to me either. It’s a once-in-a-century kind of find.” She paused and then said, hurriedly, “I have to go. Text me the details?”

  I said I would and then I hung up. I couldn’t help but clench my fist around my phone and do a victory punch into the sky in excitement. I whooped with joy and turned to face Antoni and Jozef, who were both staring at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “Petra’s going to meet us in Mauritania,” I said, directing this statement at Antoni, who had never met her but knew who she was and what she could do.

  “Who?” Jozef looked bemused.

  Antoni straightened up and his eyes widened. “The Euroklydon?”

  I nodded and hurried over to Antoni where I threw myself at him. He caught me in a bear hug.

  “That’s unbelievable, Targa. How did you get her to say yes?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” I replied, pulling back, my feet touching the ground again. “I said Atlantis and she was all over it.”

  Jozef’s expression was on the verge of thunderous. “You just told a total stranger that we have the location of Atlantis?”

  “She’s not a total stranger, she’s a passionate archaeologist, and she’s The Euroklydon.”

  Jozef blinked in further confusion. “She’s a storm from the Bible? Forgive me, I’m really not following.”

  I turned to clamp a hand on Jozef’s shoulder. “I don’t mean to over-promise, but she’s a helluva lot more than a storm, dude.”

  Eleven

  “There! Will you look at that!”

  Ivan’s awe-filled cry through the headset had every head swiveling quickly to find the best view as the aircraft crested another gentle red and rocky dune.

  From my place next to the window, I had a clear view of the massive circular shape visible in the rubbly, barren terrain of the desert below. Beside me, Antoni reached for my hand where it rested on my thigh. I looked up at him and squeezed his hand back before my gaze went back to the Eye of Africa growing ever larger.

  “The Richat Structure.” Emun was in the co-pilot’s seat beside Ivan, his face so close to the window that his flight helmet bumped into the glass. “Atlantis has been visible from above this whole time.”

  “It looks like a meteor strike,” Mom’s voice came crackling through the headsets. “Only it’s a little too symmetrical. It looks like a perfect bulls-eye.”

  “That’s what they thought it was up until the sixties,” answered Jozef from where he and my mother were seated behind Antoni and me. Then Jozef laughed. “I mean, they thought it was an impact site, not a bulls-eye.”

  Ivan had flown us from Gibraltar to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania and the largest city of the Sahara. There, the sirens had rested before we met up with Petra and gathered water, food, and supplies while Ivan familiarized himself with the Bell 430 helicopter he’d chartered. Our ride was an ugly eight-seater bird that could land and take off easily from the uneven, hard-packed rubble of the Sahara.

  So far, all was going according to plan. Ivan had flown as low as he dared to avoid the sirens feeling ill or passing out. It was a refreshing change to be airborne without feeling like some monstrous kraken had its tentacles wrapped around me, pulling me back to earth. I wondered if we could always fly a chopper from now on. Scrap the bloody private jets.

  “It’s huge,” Ivan said, his helmeted head scanning the horizon through the windscreen.

  “Over forty kilometers across,” Petra said. It had been a while since she had said anything.

  “I thought you’d fallen asleep as soon as we left Nouakchott,” Mira said with a smile in her voice.

  “I did,” Petra replied, laughing. “Something about the sound of the blades knocked me right out.”

  “Where would you like me to put us down?” Ivan directed the question to the group.

  “Er, perhaps best not to land right on top of it,” Antoni replied, gesturing to a flatter area to the side of the outermost ring. “There, the south side, away from all those rough gunnels.”

  “The geological society will already have my head for this,” Jozef added as he braced a hand against the side of the helicopter while Ivan directed us in a loop toward the south.

  “If we’re going to dig up Atlantis anyway,” Mom said, “I can’t see why it matters if we land in the middle.”

  “We’re not sure what it will do to anything beneath the rubble if we land on it,” Petra replied patiently. “A true archaeologist wouldn’t dream of landing on top of a dig site––”

  “Amen,” Jozef interjected.

  Petra continued, “A true archaeologist wouldn’t allow anyone to do what we’re about to do. The Richat Structure is a mystery that has baffled researchers from almost every discipline since it was first discovered. There’ll be a lot of academic types up in arms when they learn what we’ve done.”

  “What, unearthed Atlantis?” Antoni called over the sound of the blades as Ivan shifted gears for landing. “They should be toasting the find of the century!”

  I looked back over my shoulder at Petra’s face. Her mouth twitched. “Archaeologists are rarely that gracious.”

  “I thought you were an archeologist,” Jozef said, also looking at Petra.

  She
bared her teeth in a feral smile. “Not yet. I’ve delayed my studies in favor of a couple of other projects.”

  “What other projects?” Jozef probed, keen interest in his tone. “Also in the field of archaeology?”

  Petra shook her head and looked back out the window as the ground beneath us surged closer. “More in the field of corporate demolition.”

  Antoni and I shared a look of startled amusement at that comment.

  “Nice and easy,” Ivan’s voice came through the headset as the landing skids of the chopper touched down. The blades had raised a red cloud of dust that obscured the horizon. He shut down the Bell’s engine and the whine began to slow. “Best give it a few minutes to calm down out there before stepping out.”

  Metallic snapping sounds echoed through the craft as seatbelts and shoulder braces were released. As I twisted to stow my harness, my eye caught Nike’s face as she lifted the headset off her ears. She looked pale and tired.

  “You okay, Nike?”

  Her gray eyes found mine and she gave me a weak smile. “Not built for helicopters, I’m afraid,” she replied in that strange accent and gentle voice I had grown to love.

  Mom gave a chuckle and touched Nike’s cheek, brushing a stray strand of white locks away from her friend’s face. “Nike’s not built for any kind of life above sea-level.”

  I felt a twist of concern and guilt as I watched Nike slowly unsnap her safety harness and fumble for the hat we’d found for her. I wondered, not for the first time, if we should have left her behind. I had put the question to my mother and she’d said Nike would never stand to be left behind. Besides, it was a curse we were dealing with. The odds that we’d need someone with some magical know-how were high. Mom had assured me that we’d take good care of Nike, and get her back to the ocean as soon as possible––whether we succeeded or failed at our mission.

  Emun was the first to step out onto the baked earth. A wash of hot, dry air swept through the helicopter as Ivan opened the door on his side.

  “Smells like…” Antoni paused, searching for words, “dry?”

  “A mermaid’s worst nightmare.” I put the light white fabric of my headcovering over my hair and draped it loosely in front of my face before following Antoni out from under the chopper’s door. “Of course, Atlantis had to be in the desert. If it was in the ocean, it would be too easy.”

  In with the supplies we’d picked up in Nouakchott were thin white tunics, robes, and headscarves. It took only moments to understand why Bedouins wore full-body light coverings in the dry heat and intense sun of the desert. Already, my lips felt dry. After I’d wrapped myself in fabric, I guzzled some water.

  Mom, Petra, and Nike followed us out and we stepped away from the chopper, blinking in the morning sun of the desert. We looked like ghostly nomads in our white tunics and head coverings. Only Petra had eschewed a tunic, and I wondered if it was her prior time in the desert, or the fact that she was practically made of sand herself that gave her some kind of immunity to the stifling heat.

  “Nothing about this is going to be easy,” Nike said as she sheltered her eyes and scanned the horizon.

  I looked at her uncertainly, recalling the conversation we’d had about my possible role in this. I felt like the bulls-eye stamped into the desert wasn’t the only target around. I wasn’t sure if she’d been referring to the dig part of the operation, or the breaking of the curse. I didn’t ask her to clarify.

  “You can’t even tell what you’re looking at from ground-level,” Emun commented, peering to the north over what looked like softly undulating ranges of broken wasteland. “No wonder it wasn’t discovered until we started sending satellites into space. It doesn’t look like anything at all.”

  Antoni grabbed his backpack from under the seat, unzipped it, and rummaged inside. Pulling out the Kirilian photography device we planned to use as a compass, he offered it to me. “Would you like to do the honors?”

  “Uh, she’d better not,” Mom said, grabbing the device as I was reaching for it.

  “I wasn’t going to touch the gemstone, Mom, believe me,” I said with humor. “A little overprotectivey, much?”

  “I’d rather not take any chances,” she muttered, turning away from me. “How does this thing work?”

  “There’s a gem already inside,” Antoni explained. “All you have to do is turn it on and then hold down the capture button.”

  I heard a click as Mum flicked the on switch. We all crowded around her, waiting as her thumb pressed down the capture button and held it.

  The machine made several quiet ticking sounds and a bright teal light shot from the eye like a laser.

  “Geez murphy,” Petra jumped back as the laser penetrated the ground at her feet. The beam followed an angled path from where Mom held the device toward the north and disappeared beneath the dusty soil.

  The ticking sound increased in speed and took on a grinding scream between the ticks.

  Mom looked up at Emun and then to Antoni. “Is that normal?”

  Antoni frowned. “Most definitely not normal.”

  He reached for the machine as the sound became so grating that Nike and I covered our ears.

  There was a loud sharp crack and a whining hiss, and the teal laser went out.

  We stood there in startled silence for a half-minute.

  “It wasn’t me,” Mom said, handing the device back to Antoni. “I did exactly as you said.”

  Antoni took the device back. A thin wisp of smoke issued from the eye. He gave me a puzzled frown.

  “What do you suppose that means?” Petra voiced what all of us were thinking.

  “It means we don’t have a compass anymore,” Jozef said.

  “But we don’t need it,” I suggested. “Before it fuzzed out, the laser beam was pointing straight into the Richat Structure. Am I right?”

  There were a few mumbled agreements.

  “So, we figured we had to dig already. The device just confirmed that the rest of the aquamarine, whatever is left of it, is buried in there somewhere.” I looked over at Petra. “You’re on deck.”

  My stomach did a little flip of apprehension. I’d seen what Petra could do, but at times I questioned my own memory of what had happened on Saltford’s beach. Was she really as powerful as I remembered her to be? I hoped so, because she was my idea and if she couldn’t help us, not only would I be embarrassed, we’d be up a certain creek without a paddle.

  Petra stared across the expanse before us, then smiled and rubbed her hands together. “You might want to stand back.”

  It began as a dust devil. A small, almost elegant, swirl of sand lifted and rose into the air, just a stone’s throw from where we stood. If Petra hadn’t been staring intently at that very spot, I would have thought the tiny whirlwind was naturally occurring. When she began to move her fingers in an elegant dance, making spiral shapes with her long slender arms, I knew it had begun. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “You’re going to love this,” I told Antoni under my breath. “What I can do with water, Petra can do with…well, anything else, pretty much.”

  The dust devil became a double-helix of sand particles. The spectacle was way too organized to be anything but magic. Our necks craned as we watched the helix spiral high into the sky. Bits of sand were caught by the wind, scattered and blown off course, but the bulk of it arched high and began to descend far to the east of us.

  “There will be dunes where there weren’t any before,” Petra said calmly as her hands danced in the air in front of her––pushing and pulling the sands of the Sahara, a snake-charmer drawing a cobra from its basket. “Would you like one big one or a bunch of smaller ones?”

  “Jozef?” My mom said after a few moments of no one answering. I saw her elbow him in my periphery. “It’s your call.”

  I tore my eyes from the continuous stream of sand spiraling upward from the ground in front of us to look at my mother’s long-lost love.

  His face was pale but his expres
sion was amazed, his mouth open and eyes wide.

  “Uh, several smaller ones would be preferable. Please.”

  “You got it.” Petra began to walk as the column of sand thickened. A second spiral joined the first and quickly, like a sheet of rain moving across the land, pouring up from the earth instead of down, the two columns became one large one. The sound of sand moving was like a fine rain, a never-ending grainy swoosh.

  Petra’s arms moved for a while, adding helixes and columns of sand to the first large one, connecting them and adding more. Eventually, she put her hands down and the sandstorm continued.

  Suddenly, her chin jerked up. A loud hiss erupted from the Richat Structure as a huge, dark mass of earth and sandy rubble lifted and threw itself in a scattering rain of sand far beyond the edge of the outer circle.

  “As long as I live,” I heard Antoni say beside me over the continual hiss and sizzle, “I’ll never see anything like this again.”

  “Oh, you don’t know that,” I replied with a smile, my own gaze glued to the massive arch now blocking out part of the sunlight. “I know people who can do things.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Look!”

  We gazed at where Nike was pointing, down into the earth before us. It wasn’t much to look at yet, still just a lot of sand and stone. But here and there were ragged corners of rock that were not moving. They grew more and more visible as Petra removed the sand from over and around them.

  I realized Petra was now quite a long way from us, a much smaller figure following the edge of the structure’s out ring.

  “She means to walk the perimeter?” Jozef asked Mom.

  “I don’t know.” Mom bent and opened the backpack she’d dropped on the sand near her feet. “But if she is, we’d better follow her with water, and later––food. It’ll take her days to walk it. It’s almost forty clicks across.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” I said.

  My mom stood up. “What’s happening to her?”