No one argued, but in my head I was almost certain that whatever schemes they had cooked up, Asher was just as important as I was. It had taken the two of us to bust the lock, both of our blood.
We left the dance in a large group, the alarm still blaring through the school. It would ensure that most students were safely back in their rooms while we dealt with the threat.
“They remain outside,” Princeps Jones said as we walked. “They tripped the alarm solely to gain my attention.”
We ended up at the front entrance, the one I’d crossed almost a year ago with Ilia. There were dozens of the leather-clad Arterians spread out, but only one stood on the bridge. The only one without a helmet. Connor.
His focus was on me, intense and unnerving.
Everyone else stayed near the large front entrance on Asher’s command, while the two of us moved forward. He stopped me before I could step onto the bridge, leaving a ten-foot gap between us and Connor. “What do you want?” Asher said, his icy words whipping out with force.
Connor didn’t look away from me. He was staring at me like I was something special, and I really wished he would stop.
“Why are you here, Connor?” I asked him.
“You need to come to Atlantis,” he told me. “If you don’t return, they’re all going to die.”
I shook my head. “What do you mean? Who will die?”
Close up, I noticed that Connor’s hands were shaking. It was the first time I’d ever seen him rattled.
“You are the key, Maddison,” he said, his voice low and strained. “Asher’s parents searched for you for hundreds of years. The god-child held in stasis, the key to Atlantis rising. Only, you weren’t the only one in stasis. The rest of them are too, and now they’re all going to die. You’re the only one that can save them. You’re the only one who can stop Sonaris.”
I still didn’t understand. It didn’t make sense.
Connor took a deep breath. “Atlantis will rise, and if you’re not there to free your people, Sonaris will destroy them all.”
He took another step closer, and Asher held up a warning hand. “Don’t,” he said softly. The sort of softness that meant he was furious and already considering the murder plan.
Connor finally turned his gaze away from me to Asher. “I’m not joking around,” he said, and I remembered that these two had a history. I hadn’t asked Asher about it, because it had slipped my mind, but now I was curious. “Ash, it’s happening now. Sonaris could damn the entire world.”
“This was foreseen,” Asher said softly, and I realized he was trying to explain it to me. “A thousand years ago a prophet predicted it. My parents tried to force it into fruition. They lost their lives in the process. I have been trying to stop it from happening by refusing to step one foot into the waters of Atlantis.”
“Until me,” I added. “My kidnapping forced your hand.”
He nodded. “Yes, and I have no regrets. If anything, the last few months, and most of my life, has taught me that you can’t fight fate.”
“What do I have to do with it?”
Asher’s jaw was rigid, the muscles in his arms vibrating. “The daughter of the gods was the key to Atlantis’s demise, and she will be the one to return it. Her sacrifice returns the people, and in return, is the only thing to stop Sonaris.”
Connor was nodding. I could see him from the corner of my eye.
“So … you do believe I’m Sonaris’s daughter?” I asked, part of me hurt that he hadn’t confided this in me before.
Asher didn’t answer immediately. “I … I don’t know,” he finally said. “In some ways, it makes sense.”
For the first time I started to consider that I might actually be a ten-thousand-year-old half supe, half god. I must have been frozen in time, as a small child at least, because the earliest memories I had were being five and thinking I was human.
Someone had freed me from Atlantis, dropped me in the human world with a block over my power, and set this entire thing in motion.
“It wasn’t just your power that brought about the rise,” Connor said. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “It was the combination of almost direct descendants from the three royal lines.”
“Who is the third?” I asked. Asher was Cornipicus, I was Sonaris, but who was Jervania?
“Connor,” Asher said. “He’s almost as pure of blood as me. His parents were best friends with mine, and I was raised for some time with his family. I went between them and Jesse’s, until….”
“Until you left us,” Connor said bitterly. “We had a fundamental disagreement on the prophecy, and Asher has spent his time since avoiding anything to do with Atlantis.”
