Bloodline

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

I hit the ground hard on my sore ribs, gasping in pain. I groaned, rolling over onto my back, blinking until my vision cleared of the weird warped view.

My breath left me again, but this time, because of the sight before me.

Stars.

So many stars. They glimmered and gleamed silver-white on a black velvet backdrop. They were so incredibly bright. They lit up the whole night sky alongside a sliver of a moon. The scene was surrounded by the dark leaves of trees around me.

I blinked and slowly sat up, looking around in disbelief.

I was in some kind of jungle. There were so many different trees, vines lacing through them and shrubbery climbing the bases. The soil around me was dark, insects crawling everywhere over patches of grass and flowers. The air was hot and humid, and it was difficult to breath at first without taking deep breaths. Everything smelled so sweet. The sound of water running somewhere and birds calling out, animals growling and a distant roar.

Was I in Atlantis?

I felt a brief moment of panic.

I'd never been out of the compound before. Rae hadn't given me any sort of helpful advice to navigate the terrain or how to find the Atlantis compound.

Never, ever fight your genetic carriers, Seven. If you see them, fucking run.

Okay, so he left me with one last piece of terrifying advice. It was helpful as a whole, sure, but not for the fact that I had no idea what to fucking do now that I was actually in Atlantis.

Of course, sitting in the dirt wasn't going to help either, so I rose to my feet, my bones creaking and I groaned in pain. I stretched a little, cracking my back and neck before I gave myself a shake. I slid the coat I was wearing off and tossed it into the bushes nearby.

I was used to the hum of machinery and ear-ringing silence, but the sounds around me were so different, so... scary, frankly. I could hear chirping, groaning, humming, all sorts of exotic crazy sounds I couldn't even begin to explain. Something was making a repetitive croaking, a bird chirping somewhere in the trees overhead, and that distant roar echoed once more. It gave me goosebumps as I looked around in the darkness, swallowing thickly.

Alright. Fucking terrifying. Time to accept that, first of all. Second, I had to cope with the fact that I'd never been outside before. At least, not in a jungle. The mountains, for a brief few minutes, perhaps, with tall trees and pines, maybe a few birds here and there, but nothing like this. This was insanity. This was confusing. This was terrifying.

Great. So everything was terrifying.

Now it was time to find Thirteen.

It was the whole reason my ass was here anyway.

I just had no idea where to look, where to start.

A bright light flashed out the corner of my eye and I snapped my head around to look toward it. It was coming through the trees. It was bright, electrical. I followed it immediately, stumbling and tripping over vines and shrubs. I almost knocked myself the fuck out on several tree branches until I found myself stepping out of the trees and into a... street?

It didn't quite look like the streets from my textbooks, but it definitely had to be a street. It was paved with arrows pointing in certain directions. It was nighttime, so not many people were walking the streets. The bright light had come from what appeared to be someone's house. A skinny dark-skinned girl was taking a bag of garbage to a large cylinder fitted in the ground. She dumped it inside and went back into the house behind her, the sound of music playing and fading as she opened and closed the door.