For some totally strange and obviously unexplainable reason, the Crossroads staff apparently didn’t think that sending our team off completely on our own for this hunt was a very good idea. Well, technically they didn’t send any of the teams on their own, but when they announced that fact, everyone else pretty much immediately looked straight at us. So their reasoning wasn’t exactly much of a secret.
Instead, each team was being escorted by two members of the security team and a teacher. In our case, that was Wyatt, one of the other security guys, and Professor Dare. They weren’t supposed to interact with us or actually help at all unless something went wrong with the hunt. Instead, they would stand nearby and keep an eye on everything that was happening. That way, they’d be there to intervene in case Trice or anyone else ended up repeating their attack from the first hunt.
It was probably bad, but personally, I was almost hoping that at least Pace made an appearance. It would be a chance for me to grab the bitch and get that damn necklace away from her for Roxa. I couldn’t really think of any other way we were going to be able to get face to face with that girl again.
As for Wyatt, I had tried to make the case that he should stay with Koren instead, after everything that had happened. But he assured me that he had taken ‘measures’ to keep an eye on the other girl even if he wasn’t right there with her. I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but he seemed about as confident as Wyatt ever really was. Plus, Professor Katarin was the teacher watching over that team, and one of their security escorts was Reid Rucker. So they were as safe as possible. At least as safe as we were.
My slightly drifting line of thought was interrupted by a elbow in my side before Avalon spoke under her breath in a voice that was so quiet, it barely made it to my ear, “Focus on the mission, Chambers.”
Somehow, I managed to blush twice. First, at the realization that my wandering thoughts had been obvious. And then again at the thought that Avalon had been paying enough attention to me to notice. Of course, if I let myself think about that too much, I’d start thinking about the fact that she’d actually called me Felicity for once. In the days since it had happened, her voice saying my name had never been that far from my mind. Just remembering it then was enough to bring a third blush to my face.
There was no question why my roommate was hyper-focused on this hunt. She’d only gotten off her crutches and been cleared for full action the day before. I was pretty sure she’d spent the rest of the day working out in the training room to catch up, even dragging Shiori along to have a sparring partner.
“Right,” I coughed, forcing myself not to dwell on… any of that. Especially not on how nice it felt for her to whisper to—no, Flick, focus. Shaking it off, I looked around the portal room in the Pathmaker building where the rest of the team and our escorts were waiting to pass through the next door and to our destination. “So what are we going after today? Cyclopses rampaging through Dodger Stadium?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, Wyatt whirled on his heel. The man’s eyes were wide as he demanded, “Why? Did you hear about an attack? Why weren’t we notified? Did you submit the right-”
“Easy, Wyatt,” Professor Dare put a hand gently on his shoulder. “Miss Chambers was simply suggesting a humorous hypothetical. She does not believe that there is any actual attack on the stadium.” To me, she added with a touch of obvious amusement, “It is, however, interesting that you would choose that particular structure at random, out of all that you could have. Interesting indeed.”
“Err, it is?” I blinked, looking around at everyone else. They all looked amused as well. Not just the other security guard, but my teammates as well, even Avalon. At least, as much as Avalon allowed herself to look amused in public with other people around. “Why? What exactly am I missing?”
It was Columbus who answered. “One of the largest Crossroads weapons and technology laboratories in North America is hidden under Dodger Stadium. They make all kinds of awesome things there.”
Nodding, Sean patted Vulcan on the head pointedly. “Yeah, like my buddy here. That’s where he was crea—born,” he amended with a look down at the mechanical dog. “That’s his, you know, birthplace.”
My mouth opened and shut at all that. “Crossroads has a Development lab under a baseball stadium?”
“Why do you think they don’t tear it down or rebuild it?” Sands put in then. “It’s like… the oldest baseball stadium in the western half of the country. Third oldest, period. Crossroads makes sure no one actually does anything to it because of all the ongoing experiments and active weapons that they’re working on.”
“Oh.” Coughing, I looked back to Professor Dare. “What about the other two stadiums that are older?”
“Wrigley Field belongs to Eden’s Garden,” she replied with a thoughtful look. “Though we’re not supposed to know. But as far as I’m aware, Fenway Park, the oldest, is from people being sentimental.”
People, I noticed immediately. She hadn’t called them Bystanders that time, she just called them ‘people.’ Somehow, I found that interesting, and took a moment to study the woman curiously.
The professor noticed me looking and met my gaze evenly. “Is something wrong, Miss Chambers?”
I shook my head quickly at that. “Oh, no. I just—um. So where are we going today, if not a stadium?”
Still, she eyed me for another couple seconds with obvious curiosity before straightening to address everyone. “Your mission this evening will take place on board the Sahara’s Camelot. It’s a cruise ship that went missing two weeks ago. We’ve located it, identified the threats aboard, and believe that they are within your ability to handle. Of course, if anything happens, we will be there to provide any assistance. As will your team mentor,” she nodded toward the corner where Deveron was standing.
“A cruise ship?” I blinked at that, suddenly even more interested than I already had been. “What about the passengers or the crew? I mean, are there, um, any survivors that we should be looking out for?”
The blonde woman shook her head once. “No. If there were innocent civilians still being hunted on that ship, we would not be playing games by waiting like this and sending in first-year trainees, Miss Chambers. The entire reason that we’ve decided to make this ship the location of one of your training hunts is the unique situation it presents. There are no innocents to worry about, and the ship itself is in the middle of the ocean. It’s safely separated from any possible further threat to more living civilians.”
Further threat. More living civilians. I noticed both of those terms, and knew what she was saying. There had been living, innocent people on that ship, but they were all dead by the time it was located. That’s why they didn’t mind sending just us in to deal with the threats, because there was no point to sending fully qualified and trained Heretics at that point. They might as well use it as a training tool.
And despite Professor Dare’s attempt to sound clinical, I could tell that it actually bothered her. There was a certain tightness around her lips and a narrowing of her eyes that proved she was genuinely upset that all of those people on that ship had been killed before the Heretics found it. She obviously hated it.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I’d checked in the history book. Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas, had been born in the year 1587. Four hundred and thirty years earlier. And even after all this time, the deaths of random civilians that she didn’t know still bothered her enough that I could notice her reaction.
Something else occurred to me then, and my eyes widened before I looked toward Scout. “Um.” Wincing, I tried to think of the best way to phrase this. “Are you sure this is the right… I mean, is it–”
Professor Dare’s voice was gentle. “Both Sands and Scout were told about this situation earlier and were asked if it would be too much. They declined the offer of an alternative hunting location.” Her gaze flicked that way before she added, “But if either of you have changed your minds on that…?”
The twins whispered briefly before Sands shook her head. “Nope.” She straightened pointedly, hand straying to catch her sister’s. “Scout says that stopping a monster on a boat would help her, not hurt.”
“Even if those civilians have already been killed, and you have no chance of saving them?” Dare asked.
I saw the flinch cross Scout’s face before she gave a single, firm nod. Her chin lifted a little as she set herself. Obviously, she was scared of going back onto a Stranger-filled ship in the middle of the ocean. Considering the memories that it would bring back, even if the ships in question were wildly different, I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d be able to be as brave as she was if our positions had been reversed.
Hell, even without that kind of traumatic memory, I wasn’t exactly doing that well with the idea of walking around a cruise ship full of dead people. It was a bit of a step up from ‘abandoned lake cabins.’
Beside me, Scout raised her hand before turning to whisper into Sands’ ear. The other girl listened and then spoke up. “Scout wants to know where you guys are going to be waiting and watching from.”
“Good question, Miss Mason.” Professor Dare nodded toward Scout before continuing. “The original investigating Heretics left a yacht close to the ship in question. Our transport will take us there. Then we will wait and observe the situation while your team takes the lifeboat over to the cruise ship itself.
“We will also,” she went on immediately before anyone could say anything else about it, “be monitoring your progress through other means as well. Suffice to say, we will have eyes on all of you at all times, and we will be close enough to intervene should the situation grow out of control. For the most part, however, conducting this hunt and handling the threats that present themselves is up to you.”
“What about Deveron?” Columbus asked even as my mouth was opening to do the same thing. He gestured toward the (much) older boy in the corner. “Is he staying back on the Heretic yacht too?”
Before Professor Dare could respond, Deveron shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “I’ll be on the ship with the rest of you. But I’ll stay out of the way, up near the lifeboat. You’ll get to do the hunt by yourself unless you ask for help.” Smirking just a little bit, he added, “You remember how it works?”
Columbus nodded easily. “Yeah, sure. We get a ten percent bonus for not involving you at all. If we have to ask for help with identifying them or anything else that has to do with knowledge, we lose five percent of the bonus. If we have to ask for you to help physically, then we lose the other five percent.”
“Indeed,” Professor Dare confirmed. “And should you need to ask us what creatures you are facing in the event that Mr. Adams fails to be able to identify them, you will lose ten percent from your final score. But remember, do not let that entirely dissuade you, because if you fail in your hunt specifically because you were unable to identify the threats and refused to request that information, you will lose twenty percent from your final score. In the long run, you will receive a better score if you ask for help and complete your mission, than if you fail to ask for help and thus fail in your mission because of it.”
While we all nodded quickly to that, Wyatt started to hand out the same communication pins that we had used during the first hunt (and also when we had been breaking into the security office at school). “Take them, take them,” he encouraged. “I’ve added my own enchantment to improve the pins.”
Blinking up at that as I took one of them and fixed it to my uniform, I asked, “What enchantment?”
The others looked just as curious as I was, but Wyatt shook his head while lowering his voice. “Shh. It’s a secret improvement. They could be listening. They are listening. So shush.” Raising his voice then, he spoke with the voice of one of the worst actors I had ever heard. “No… I didn’t say… enchantment. I said… encampment. Good luck dispatching this encampment of monsters on that ship. Yes, that’s it.”
Then, as we all stared at him, Wyatt silently gestured toward the pins we had put on. His hand indicated each of us before pointing back to the pin that he wore. He put his fingers close to it and mimed pressing it before quickly stepping over to grab me by the shoulders. The (rightfully) paranoid man tugged me over to him, then did the same to each of the rest of the team. Then he gestured to the pin again and gave us another one of those wide, goofy and incredibly endearing buck-toothed smiles.
It took me a second before I realized what he was saying. Or rather, what he was pantomiming. Then I got it. Apparently, he had included an emergency teleport system into the communicator pins. When he activated it, the spell would transport the other pins (as well as anyone wearing them) straight back to where he was. So if we got in trouble, he could immediately yank us out of it and back to safety.
Well, that was useful. And it made me wonder why that wasn’t just standard practice at this point.
“Come,” Professor Dare instructed, walking past us to put her hand into the black circle next to the door on the other side of the portal room from the entrance. As the door cycled to our destination, she looked back to the rest of us with a somber look. “As I said, you should all be able to handle this situation. But it is dangerous. And I will warn you now that you will see the bodies of the people that we were unable to save. Do not let that discourage you too much. It is not your fault. Instead, let it prompt all of you to learn to fight better, and to eventually graduate so that we have more Heretics available to hunt these monsters before they have time to engage in such vicious and violent attacks.”
Her voice softened. “That said, if any of you need to take a break because of the bodies you find, do not be ashamed of asking for it. There will be no penalty for such a request, and no one will shame you for it. This will, sadly, not be the worst sight you witness as Heretics. But no one can see this kind of thing without being affected. At least,” she amended softly, “No one with whom I would wish to associate.”
By that point, the portal had finished cycling, the air around us growing chillier. She withdrew her hand from the black circle and opened the door, gesturing for us to step through. So, taking a breath, I did so.
Or I started to, anyway. Before I could actually make it through the doorway, Wyatt pretty much pushed his way in front of me and went through first. He was there for a couple seconds before poking his head back through and giving the rest of us the okay sign. “You can come through now!”
On the other side of the doorway, I found myself standing on the deck of the yacht, as if I had just come through the door of the bridge or cockpit or whatever it was called on boats. Again, raised in Wyoming.
For a moment, I took in the sight around me. The sky was dark, and the ocean below the yacht was even darker. It looked sinister the way the ocean around the Crossroads island never really did. Even the chilly wind seemed to be trying to convince us to turn away, to go back.
Slowly, I raised my gaze to take in the sight of our actual destination. A soft gasp escaped me at the sheer size of the ship. To my completely uneducated eyes, the Sahara’s Camelot was freaking enormous. As long as almost three football fields, and with at least eight floors (or decks) above the main deck and who knew how many below. The thing looked positively gigantic. And evil. Maybe in the sunlight on a calm ocean, with laughing and partying guests all over its many decks, the ship would have looked inviting. But right now, I couldn’t think of a more sinister-looking place I’d ever seen.
And we were supposed to search the whole place.
“A ghost ship,” Columbus muttered from beside me after he and the others had come out. “We’re going on a god damn ghost ship.”
“Well,” Avalon spoke up, sounding almost perky for her at the prospect as she headed straight for the side where the lifeboat was waiting. “We better get over there then. Hurry up.”
Sean shook his head woefully. “You see what happens when she gets cooped up for weeks on crutches? Girl gets gung-ho about the first chance she gets to actually kill some bad guys again.”
Instead of responding to him, I glanced back to the twins. “You guys sure you’re all right? Scout?”
They both hesitated, and I saw the tenseness in the silent girl herself. But she gave a slight nod before pointedly stepping over to join Avalon at the boat.
“Professor,” I spoke quietly to Dare, my eyes trying to convey what I couldn’t say.
“We know,” the woman replied softly. “Trust me, we know. But better this happen now, in a controlled environment that we are right here for. If anything goes wrong or it starts to be too much, we will intervene. I promise.”
Swallowing hard, I nodded before starting over to join the rest of my team. “Well guys, I guess we should get our butts over there, huh?
“Those monsters won’t slay themselves.”