D. MacHale - The Lost City of Faar

“You trapped a dozen men down there!” Spader spat out in anger.

“And destroyed the heart and soul of Cloral,” Saint Dane replied calmly. “Not bad for an afternoon’s work, don’t you think?”

D. J. MacHale

The Lost City of Faar

I could feel Spader’s tension. He was out of his mind nuts with hatred for Saint Dane and was a hair away from lunging at him. But that would have been a huge mistake. So I put a hand on his shoulder. Spader jumped. He really was a raw nerve.

“Calm down,” I said as softly as possible.

Spader forced himself to take a breath and seemed to relax a bit.

“Pendragon, I am impressed,” said Saint Dane. “You’ve grown wiser since our adventure on Denduron.”

“I beat you on Denduron,” I shot back.

“So you think,” Saint Dane said. “Honestly, do you really think I care which territory is my first domino? Cloral will do just as nicely as Denduron. As I told you before, once the first falls, the rest will tumble in turn.”

“Cloral hasn’t fallen,” Spader spat out.

“But it will,” Saint Dane replied smugly. “Eventually they will find a way to purify the crops, but not before thousands have died and thousands more go to war. It was a delicate balance here, with all the habitats existing together. But now with Faar gone, the scale just tipped.”

Saint Dane then walked over to me and leaned down. Our eyes were on the same level and he was so close I could smell his breath. It was sour. I wasn’t surprised. But I wouldn’t back off. No way.

“It is all happening exactly as I planned,” he said softly. “Even if you managed to stop me here, I would simply move on to another territory. You have no idea what is waiting for you, Pendragon. If you continue to fight me, you will certainly go the way of all the pitiful Travelers who came before. Is that what you want? Do you want to die in futility like Spader’s father? Or Osa? Or Press?”

This last comment stung, but I wouldn’t let him know it.

“The offer still stands, Pendragon,” he said with a tempting smile. “When Halla is mine, there will be grand rewards for those who helped me. You seem to enjoy splashing around Cloral. I’ll give it to you. Do what you want with it. Restore their farms, make Spader an admiral, be their hero, make them love you. Whatever you want. It would be so easy and the fight would be over. What do you think?”

This is going to be hard to explain, but at that moment something changed for me. Yes, I was still afraid of Saint Dane. I still didn’t know much about being a Traveler or even why I was chosen to be one. There was still a ton for me to learn, but at that moment, something became very clear and it filled me with a sense of confidence that I hadn’t felt since, well, since I was on the basketball court at Stony Brook.

“You want to know what I think?” I asked Saint Dane. “I think if you truly knew what was going to happen, if you really believed this was all part of your plan and that you couldn’t be beaten, then you wouldn’t keep begging me to join you.”

Saint Dane blinked. I saw it. I had hit a nerve.

“What do I think?” I added. “It might not be here, it might not be today or even on this territory, but for the first time since I met you on Second Earth, I think that when this is all over, I’ll be the one who’s beatenyou…becausethatis the way it’s supposed to be.”

Something clicked in Saint Dane’s eyes. It wasn’t huge. He didn’t gasp or shout or anything like that, but I saw it: Saint Dane was afraid of me. I was sure of it.

The two of us stood there for a moment, not knowing who would make the next move. And that’s when I heard it. It was a far-off sound and hard to make out. But it was definitely a sound I had heard before. It was a faint whistling sound. It was coming closer, too. Fast. Where had I heard it before? It took me exactly two seconds to remember.

I turned to Spader and shouted, “Incoming!”

I grabbed him and dove down onto the deck. An instant later the submarine was rocked by an explosion. The control tower was hit by a water missile — just like the ones that Saint Dane had launched on Grallion. The sound I heard was that of an incoming bomb.

Boom, boom! Two more missiles hit the control tower and the submarine rocked in the water. But where was this attack coming from?

“Look!” shouted Spader, pointing off the port side of the sub. I looked and saw such a wonderful sight, for a moment I thought I was dreaming. But it was no dream. It was a fleet of speeder boats full of aquaneers, and they were attacking.

“Hobey, Pendragon! It’s Yenza,” Spader laughed. “She was a step ahead of us.”

That had to be the answer. When we didn’t resurface, Wu Yenza must have gone to get her rescue team. And they were coming in full force. Some of the speeders looked more like gun ships. They weren’t as big as the battle cruiser, but they would definitely stand up to this submarine.

There was frantic activity on the deck of the submarine.

“Dive!” shouted Saint Dane. “Get us below!”

A raider shouted, “Sir, we can’t!” He pointed to the control tower and sure enough, the first few missiles from Yenza’s aquaneers had blown a hole in the skin of the tower. If they tried to dive, they’d sink. Saint Dane looked at the damage, then spun to look back at the approaching fleet. He looked angry. I liked that. When he got angry, it meant things weren’t going his way, and that didn’t happen too often.

“The guns!” he commanded. “We’ll fight them off.”

He then ran along the deck and disappeared into the control tower. Spader and I were left flat out on the deck. Saint Dane no longer cared about us. And why should he? We were targets too.

“Time to go, mate,” said Spader. “Let’s slip over the side and we’ll swim for it.”

Three more missiles struck near the sub, sending up waves of water that splashed over us. The raiders were now on the guns and firing back. This was going to be a fierce battle — a natty-do, as Spader would put it — and I didn’t want to be floating in the water in the middle of it.

“I have a better idea,” I said. I got up and ran back toward the control tower. Two more shots hit the hull, rocking the sub and nearly knocking me off. But Spader caught me and kept me going.

“No place to run, Pendragon,” he said.

“Sure there is,” I answered.

I ran inside the control tower. Spader was right after me.

We had to push past a bunch of raiders who were scrambling to get to their battle stations. They didn’t care about us anymore. Remember, they were raiders. They knew nothing of Saint Dane’s grand plan to conquer all the territories and control Halla. All they knew was that they were being attacked.

Even Saint Dane wanted a fight. He stood at his station, barking orders, turning the submarine so it wouldn’t be such a wide target. If there were ever a time to get out of there, it was now.

I led Spader back the way we came, down the ladder into the hull of the ship and back toward the water tank we arrived in. I figured there was only one way we could get off this sub and survive in open water. We had to get to the hijacked hauler.

As we ran through the submarine we kept getting knocked around by the force of the missiles that were hitting the hull. Yenza was really pouring it on. That was cool, as long as Spader and I were off by the time she sent it to the bottom the same way she had the battle cruiser.

Luckily it’s kind of hard to get lost in a submarine, so we found the tank chamber pretty easily. When I threw the door open and we saw the hauler, Spader smiled.

“Why didn’t I think of this?” he laughed with surprise.

“You know how it works?” I asked.