My calf had redoubled its throbbing, so I was glad when nobody rushed to claim the shotgun seat. I plopped down, stretching my legs out as far as I could. My foot nudged something, but I didn’t think anything of it.
“Uhm, Temi?” Simon asked. “Wo-would you like m-me to drive? If your leg hurts, I mean.”
“Thank you, but my knee would prefer the greater leg room up here.”
“You could have Del’s seat,” he offered.
“Hey,” I said.
“I’ll drive for now,” Temi said. “But thank you for the offer.” Something about the look she gave me implied she wasn’t sure Simon should be trusted with her car. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t take the opportunity to break a few speed limits myself, but I thought he’d genuinely wanted to help with her discomfort if he could.
I shifted again as we drove out of the parking lot, trying to find a comfortable spot for my leg. It must have swollen quite a bit, because my sock felt too tight. My foot bumped something again. Figuring it was Temi’s purse, I reached down to move it-and halted as soon as my fingers brushed the leather cover.
“Simon? I think I found your tablet.”
“What?” Simon leaned forward. “How?”
“I don’t know,” I said, though my heart beat faster. Was it possible Alektryon had escaped with it, chanced across the Jag, and returned the tablet when he saw the opportunity? But how would he have known the car belonged to us? Or what a car was for that matter?
Simon reached for the tablet, but I batted his hand away, and flipped the cover open. The drawing app was still up. My breath caught. His words from before were still there, the ones claiming he wouldn’t be anyone’s slave again, but there were a couple of new words in careful script.
“Is it still working?” Simon asked. “Did it get wet? Or, oh, what’s that?” He’d seen the drawing app.
“A new message,” I said.
We were speeding along the highway back into town, but the roads were empty, and Temi took a long look over.
“In Greek?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it say?” Simon asked.
“Roughly… Be wary. They are the enemies of humanity.”
“Similar to what the Roman said, right?” Temi asked.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Simon said. “I don’t think we’re going to see those guys again.”
“Probably not.” I’d barely made it out of that chamber alive; it was hard to imagine someone else going in deeper and surviving.
I couldn’t say that I’d miss Jakatra and Eleriss exactly, but I missed not solving any of the mysteries surrounding them. Would we ever learn who they were and where they’d come from? Not to mention who had created that monster, why it’d crawled out of the ocean in L.A., and why it’d killed all those people… Eleriss’s warning that there would be more monsters made me uneasy, and I wondered if we should have tossed the sword in the lake when we’d had a chance. Only time would tell.
EPILOGUE
Thanks to the curfew, the town was quiet, and we didn’t see another soul on the way back to the Motel 6. Temi had brought the sword inside, and it lay next to her on one of the beds. It didn’t glow when she wasn’t holding it, but it started up like a touch lamp whenever she brushed the hilt.
“Not too bad,” Simon said from the desk. He had the calculator up on his MacBook and had dug a scale out of the van. Our flakes of gold rested on its surface. “Given the spot price of gold, an estimate of the amount of pure stuff in our ore sample, and a subtraction of our expenses, including new headlights, a new windshield, food and motel bills, medical services-” he nodded toward Temi’s bandaged hand and my bandaged leg, “-and also minus the coin you won’t let me sell until you’ve researched it further, we’ve made over three thousand dollars for our work this last week.”
“Technically we didn’t get paid for the week’s work,” I said. “We got paid for scraping gold out of a crack before a tunnel filled up with water.”
Simon waved my objection away. “One must find a way to fund one’s philanthropy efforts. This was no different. Oh!” He leaned back toward the screen. “I forgot about the money we made from our web traffic. I wish we could have taken a few pictures of the dead monster to throw up there.”
“Three thousand dollars,” Temi said as Simon crunched more numbers.
I could tell from the wry twist of her lips that she found the amount more amusing than inspiring. Simon and I hadn’t made much more than that in the entire previous month, so I could hardly complain. But then I hadn’t won prize money at Wimbledon in a previous life either.
A sickly bleep came from the heater. My phone had been as unresponsive as Simon’s after the flood. I’d taken it out of its supposedly waterproof and drop-proof case to let it dry in hopes that it would come to life again. The bleep, however anemic, was promising.
“Text message from Autumn,” I announced with a sense of guilt. I’d forgotten that Eleriss and Jakatra had been after her before our diversion.
Three messages sent an hour or two apart offered variations of, Are you all right??
Yes, I tapped in, the cursor responding with irritating sluggishness. I’d have to find someone who could do more for the phone than setting it to dry by a heat vent. Are you? Has anyone bugged you?
No, made it to Phoenix safely. Ran the blood.
I paused, afraid to ask. Aside from a gold coin, an item that could have been minted anywhere, and the sword, an item a soldier had dismissed as a toy at first glance, we didn’t have any proof that there were strange… people from a strange culture roaming Arizona. Without proof, any article I attempted to submit about our encounter would be laughed into the rejection pile. But the blood… the blood was something tangible.
And? I prompted when a follow-up didn’t come through on its own. A long message popped up as soon as I sent mine. Autumn must have been working on it already.
It doesn’t match anything in the database, and the database is extensive. We have the DNA of weeds from the Galapagos Islands in here. Just about every mammal and reptile, and lots of birds and fish as well. Interestingly your sample is closest to human, albeit with a few inexplicable anomalies.
Aside from the fact that it exists?
Yeah. It’s closer to us than chimpanzees, as close as Neanderthals maybe. We’re perplexed by the fact that it doesn’t have a recognizable blood type.
We? I almost hit the icon to call her-I wasn’t ready to have this turned into some highly publicized find for reporters to paw over. But if she wasn’t alone… text messaging might be more discreet.
Autumn wrote, I’ve had a couple of perplexed scientists and professors in here with some interesting ideas. Outer space came up. Normally I would have LOLed at the guy, but he’s a chemist and pointed out the mercury level in the blood would probably kill a human-he thought it might make sense that its owner had evolved on a different planet with a much higher concentration of mercury. The biologist is still arguing with him, saying it’s too close to human DNA to have evolved anywhere except here. Being the science fiction fan I am, I suggested it was a traveler from the future, from when we’ve finished goobering up our environment, and there are higher concentrations of mercury on the planet.
“Why don’t you two talk to each other?” Temi whispered when she leaned in and saw the amount of text on the screen.
I shook my head. “We’re almost done.” As I spoke, I texted, File it as weird, I guess. I’m not sure the owners of the blood are still alive. We had a terrifying adventure today. Stop by on your way back, and I’ll tell you about it.