Page 13

ONE YEAR LATER

THE ISLAND OF SPHINXES

Toned legs picked up speed, running through a flock of seabirds on the white beach. The birds scattered, as if they knew not to get in Lucienne Lam’s way on this sunny day when the azure sky bent to listen to the symphony of the ocean waves.

She was six feet tall and as regal as a queen. As the seagulls glided toward the heavens, their wings brushed the girl’s lustrous hair. Lucienne laughed.

She had just come back to Sphinxes—her headquarters on an unmarked island in the Pacific Ocean—after overseeing covert operations in Europe and Asia. Kian McQuillen and his team stayed behind to check the rest of the stations in the U.S.

An encrypted phone—Eidolon—vibrated on her belt. Sphinxes had been equipped with private encrypted satellite uplinks and an inaccessible underground network. Lucienne clicked on Eidolon and read the message: “A signal came.”

“You’d better be right this time.” Lucienne turned on her heels, springing toward a stone castle that leaned against the eastern sky in the distance.

When her ancestor bought the island centuries ago, the Scottish style castle was already built.

Lucienne and Kian had upgraded it to suit their needs.

Lucienne’s white jeep sped toward the castle. Two heavily armed soldiers guarded the entrance of the gate, while a dozen other soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the castle. Despite this, Kian had wired the fortified island with cameras.

Smiling, Lucienne threw her keys to one of the saluting soldiers and ordered him to park the jeep.

She ran into the castle in her white jogging outfit.

Across the ward, several commandos kept watch as a handful of engineers and technicians sat around wooden tables outside the café, drinking their coffee.

Lucienne entered the west wing. The important labs were all set underground. At a private elevator, she stopped, pressing her palm on a bio-scanner. The elevator opened. Lucienne entered and hit B3.

Stepping out of the elevator, she strode down the hallway toward a steel door marked SX1. She placed her left palm inside a glass cipher box. The door slid open.

Lucienne strolled into a laboratory that was larger than a baseball field. Under artificial sunlight, the scientists—almost all of them young and proud—were monitoring readouts on broadband electromagnetic receivers, dark-matter detectors, and other quantum devices.

Excitement and nervousness were thick in the air.

Lucienne darted her eyes toward Vladimir.

A scar above his left brow added a dangerous allure to his masculine beauty.

The scar forever reminded her of how her kiss had made him fall from the horse.

Her gaze quickly moved down to his well-muscled chest under his designer black shirt.

Lucienne tore her gaze away, but not before she caught a ghost of a smile on the corner of his lips.

She knew his smile was for the brilliant hacker, Ziyi Wen, and not for her.

She and Vladimir were keeping their distance now, ever since that second kiss rendered the prince unconscious for two days.

There couldn’t be a third. They both knew that.

Finding the Eye of Time was like chasing the moon in the lake. She had offered Vladimir a way out; he’d refused to leave her, but the golden boy laughed less these days. Over time, he had started to develop a dark, sullen expression, as if the world had done him a great wrong .

When he thought she wasn’t looking, Lucienne watched pain bleed him dry.

And no one knew how much his pain affected her.

She swept her gaze over her scientists and settled on Ziyi.

The petite beauty’s purple-streaked hair was down to her chin with heavy bangs.

Ziyi was seventeen days older than Lucienne.

The girl wore a yellow flowery Chinese qipao and high heels.

A thin gold chain clung around her slender ankle.

Lucienne’s old nanny, who had followed Lucienne to Sphinxes, had warned her, “If I were you, I would watch that foxy girl. I don’t like the way she flings her eyes at your prince.”

“Ziyi flirts with every guy,” Lucienne had answered crossly. “And Vladimir isn’t mine.”

Although Lucienne knew there was nothing between Ziyi and Vladimir, a stab of jealousy still lashed through her.

Vladimir had stopped his flirtatious teasing with her after their second near-fatal kiss, saving all his jokes for others, particularly Ziyi.

Lucienne quelled an acid feeling in her stomach.

“Speak, people,” she said. “You paged me.”

“We intercepted signals! I bet on one of my pinkies it’s not a false alarm this time.” Unable to contain her exhilaration, Ziyi jumped up from her seat and rushed to Lucienne’s side.

“The strongest outburst of high-energy particles ever,” another physicist confirmed.

“We wouldn’t release the lightning in the bottle until you got here,” Vladimir said.

He had finally given up ignoring her and left his post beside a copy of the ancient map they had taken from the monastery the year before.

The map marked a civilization surrounded by a ring of mountains.

The Dragonfly satellite failed to find a match since the map was made before the continents moved.

Vladimir had been obsessed with the map ever since Lucienne told him that her curse was tied to finding Eterne.

“Play it, Ziyi,” Vladimir ordered and moved to Lucienne’s other side. His shoulder almost brushed hers. His body heat passed onto her, and his scent entered her space. Lucienne forced herself to step aside casually.

Ziyi clicked a remote control.

On a wall-mounted screen, a cluster of dark dots fired like lava out of a three-dimensional black hole.

“Make sure there’s no breach.” Lucienne studied the running dots. “I don’t want anyone outside the Sphinxes getting wind of this.”

“Already checked,” Vladimir said. “As soon as the particle outburst happened, we jammed the signal from the source.”

Lucienne nodded in appreciation. Vladimir was like Kian. They always thought three steps ahead.

“I also hacked into other networks, browsing classified databanks, searching for any sensitive keywords,” Ziyi said. “You have me guarding our network, so we’re solid.”

“And we’re exclusive.” Vladimir winked at the girl.

Ziyi giggled.

They were totally flirting. Was Vladimir trying to make her jealous? If so, then he was making a mistake. The Siren wasn’t known to be forgiving.

“Good.” Lucienne kept her tone flat.

Vladimir’s gaze flickered to her face, but Lucienne kept her blank stare on the screen.

The dark dots shifted to an array of numbers, strange symbols, and glyphs.

It’s happening just as the first scroll foretold: A burst of dark energy, then an indecipherable code. Lucienne’s eyes glistened brightly before they dimmed. The phenomena should happen only after she activated the Eye of Time, but she hadn’t. Something was wrong.

“Record the numbers,” she ordered.

The numbers and symbols flickered, then disappeared.

Lucienne’s sharp stare snapped to Ziyi .

Ziyi ran her fingers frantically over the keyboard, typing a sequence of commands. “I . . . I don’t know what happened,” she said, breaking a sweat. “I’m working on it . . . C’mon!”

“Track the source,” Lucienne said.

“Tracking,” Ziyi answered. A second later, she pulled up a map on the screen and zoomed in on the spot. “I have the coordinates. 71°23′20″N 156°28′45″W71.38889°N 156.47917°W .”

“Where is it?” Lucienne asked.

“The islands of Alaska,” Vladimir said.

“Precisely,” Ziyi said. “It’s Attu Island, the westernmost island in the Near Islands group of the Aleutians.”

“That territory is the only World War II battlefield on United States soil,” said Vladimir, positioning himself behind a desk computer. “I’m checking if it’s the Attu Station, which is the only inhabited area.”

Ziyi pulled another screen and started reading from it. “High-speed winds, lots of sulfur, more than 300 small volcanoes form a volcanic arc occupying an area of 6,821 square miles and extending about seven—whatever. Can people really survive there?”

“Twenty-one native Aleuts still live there,” Vladimir said. “The signal came from the center of the island—Attu Mountain.”

“Show me the map,” Lucienne said.

A map of Attu Island zoomed in on the coordinates until a detailed framework of Attu Mountain formed. Lucienne felt her heart skip a beat. It shared the same rough outline as the drawings on the ancient map.

“The map detailed lakes, mountains, and a village, but this satellite map labels the region as a multitude of mountains,” Vladimir said.

“The land must have been cloaked,” Lucienne said, “impenetrable by the satellite—”

“Until a high-particle outburst blew its cover,” Vladimir finished her sentence .

Lucienne turned to her crew. “We might have found the lost city.”

Her crew rose, cheering and applauding. Vladimir whistled loudly. He came back to Lucienne’s side. His warm hand reached for hers. “Lucia,” he said, eyes shimmering golden light. “It exists! A civilization hides itself in plain sight.”

“You should never have doubted me.”

“I didn’t doubt you.” Vladimir swallowed. “I just—”

A thin smile at the corner of her mouth, Lucienne subtly slid her hand out of Vladimir’s and returned her gaze to the screen. “Dragonfly on the coordinates,” she ordered.

Ziyi scurried after Lucienne and Vladimir to the adjacent satellite lab. Other crews continued to monitor the dark matter in action as Ziyi took over the operations from a technician, maneuvering the control panels.

“Satellite coordination enabled. Uplink established,” Ziyi reported.

On the wall-sized glass screen, a silvery, metallic gate stretched high into the sky. The gate looked ancient, yet futuristic. Can it be a gateway to a higher civilization? Lucienne’s heart raced. Her mouth went dry.

“Dragonfly searched the area,” Ziyi said. “I swear to God: the gate wasn’t there before.”

“Scan the gate,” Lucienne said.

Dragonfly’s high-resolution camera roved over the gate until an eye-shaped, thumb-sized chip loomed into view.

“On the eye,” Lucienne said, her voice shuddering.

Vladimir moved closer to her, protective.

The frame of the camera froze on the metallic eye as it discharged faint static bursts.

Lucienne held her breath, until Vladimir broke the spell. “The coordinates are three hours away if we take the Apache Longbow; less than half an hour if I fly BL7.”

“Will you ever get tired of finding any excuse to fly BL7?” Ziyi asked.

“It does feel like you’re a god flying the Black Lightning,” Lucienne said. A smile sparkled in her eyes. “You’re allowed to be a god today, Blazek.” She then turned to Ziyi. “Page Kian. I need him back to Sphinxes.”