Landlocked (Atlas Link Series Book 2) by Jessica Gunn Read Free Book Online Page A

that needed whatever connection they thought we had couldn’t be just a game. That she’d gone out of her way to call us out by our heritages on top of it all…
    A pit sunk into my stomach and began to rot. Something wasn’t right.
    “Why her?” Pike asked Germay. “You get the gamer kid, but leave her out of it.”
    “As I said,” Germay repeated as if she were talking to a child, “they have the connection required.”
    Connection
. I bit my cheek. Atlantean-based powers had to do with connections. For teleportation, Chelsea had to go somewhere often enough or have a strong emotional connection to a location. Link Pieces formed from connections between objects and the location of their creation. Puzzle pieces, that’s all it was.
    This time I did look at Chelsea. Our eyes met and our understanding of what we might get ourselves into saturated the moment. Connection didn’t begin to describe what we had. Because we had met
just once
, Chelsea’s powers dragged her across the world and under half a mile of ocean to me on SeaSatellite5. Because of what we had, we fell in love. Fell apart. Lost our friends. That would be enough to drive most people apart; we’d gone our separate ways, but we were still connected by pinkie fingers as a safety-blanket.
    I tilted my head, asking for her response before I said anything to Germay.
    She nodded. “Fine, but I want my powers back. And I want Sophia’s returned to her, too.”
    “They will be returned to you after the game,” Germay promised, a smile forming on her thin lips.
    “And I want you to promise you won’t hurt them,” Chelsea added. “We do this stupid thing and we walk, that’s the deal.”
    Germay nodded. “Absolutely.”
    Chelsea’s eyes slid to Pike’s, exchanging a mutual look of distaste. We were being played. But with no weapons, and Sophia and Chelsea powerless, we had no choice but to follow along.
    At least for now.



ermay and two of her attendants sat Trevor and I at a machine she called the Altern Device. It looked like one of those two-way mirror exhibits the children’s science museums had when I was a kid—only with glass instead of a mirror separating me from Trevor. The clear panel sat perpendicularly to a touch screen table in front of me. On either side was a single seat, one for me and one for Trevor. The whole set-up looked super sci-fi, with glowing screens and lit up displays.
    We sat without prompting and looked at each other through the clear glass separator. I had half a mind to start touching the buttons on the screen in front of me. Would one act as a light switch, and if flipped on, would Trevor disappear from sight? The touch screen on the desktop lit up. It was blank, waiting to be given input.
    “Please remain still as my assistants calibrate the machine to the two of you,” Germay said.
    I opened my mouth to respond when one of her
assistants
came up next to me and grabbed my head. She attached a square electrode to my right temple before I could react. An electrical current passed into me from it and I cussed something awful and inappropriate as it stung my temple. This was stupid, and that we had no other option until my powers returned made it all that much worse. I didn’t trust Germay or her people. Yet here we were, plugged into a machine with no way out and no weapons to make a stand.
    Across the way, Trevor also recoiled from the current. “What the hell was that?”
    His eyes locked with mine, but before I could say anything, the screen below me came to life. The faint blue glow from Trevor’s screen highlighted the contours of his cheekbones, the way his laptop screen used to back on SeaSat5. It courted my focus, and soon I was staring, drawn to the allure of Trevor’s face as if I were seeing him for the first time.
    My screen brightened even more, snapping me back to reality. I hadn’t studied Trevor so closely, drawn in by every detail of him, in months. Butterflies rushed around my stomach as if