Page 56 of The Outcast
“Shit, I promised to update her,” he said before answering. “Hey, Mom.”
“Indiana, listen, I know where Sparrow is.”
I leaned closer to Indiana despite Christina’s voice sounding loud and clear in the cabin.
“Athena and Linea have worked on locating her energy all night and they think they found her.”
Indiana bit his lip. “That’s great, Mom, but we’re following an interesting lead already.”
“That’s what your father and Jones said. They wouldn’t listen to me, but Athena said it’s urgent! Keith is unstable and he was suicidal before he turned up at the academy.”
I lowered my brow. “How would she know? Did Athena ever meet Keith?”
“No, of course not, but that’s the thing about the energy work she and Linea do. They can tap into people’s energy field and pick up information. Athena said that Sparrow is calling for help and that she sees trees around her. Trees, a small cabin, and a lake.”
“Mom, that’s all there is up here in Alaska. That’s not a solid clue.”
“No, but she gave me the exact coordinates. Thatissolid.”
I had enormous respect for Athena, the Motlander priestess that I’d met when Pearl and Freya took me to meet her family. She hadn’t seemed like a person who was out of touch with reality and for some reason, the stone of lava in my stomach eased up its burning when Christina said that she knew where Sparrow was. Acting on instinct, I spoke up. “Christina, it’s me, Banni. Give us the coordinates and we promise to go and see if she’s there.”
“Thank you, Banni!” Christina quickly gave us the coordinates that I wrote down in my mind where I had already stored the coordinates from the other cabins.
“I’ll call you back, Mom,” Indiana said and ended the call with an apologetic look at Aubri. “She means well.”
I was quiet for a moment as I analyzed maps in my mind. “I see a lake in a forest at the coordinates she just gave us.”
“Do you see a cabin too?”
“No, but these are historical aerial maps from before the Toxic War. Any buildings would most likely be long gone and new ones could have been built.”
“We’ll go there once we’ve checked off cabin eleven,” Aubri declared.
“No. We’re going there now.”
“Why?”
“Because these coordinates are almost the exact same as cabin seventeen.”
Indiana and Aubri stared at me. “You’re joking?”
First, I changed the destination of the drone and then I showed them on a map. “You may not believe in Athena and Linea’s abilities, but how in the hell would they know the location of one of these cabins?”
Aubri scratched her eyebrow. “That’s weird. Maybe she talked to someone in the group who gave her the addresses of the cabins.”
Indiana shook his head. “Unlikely. I’m telling Khan that we’re going to cabin seventeen instead of eleven.”
“She’s there,” I said with hope filling my chest and then I remembered something Athena had told me when I visited her last year. “Although religious doctrines were banned hundreds of years ago here in the Motherlands, I still pray all the time. It’s my way of connecting to the universe to make my wishes for humanity known.” Closing my eyes, I prayed that we would find Sparrow unharmed and that I would get a second chance to tell her that her feelings for me were reciprocated.Please, let us get to Sparrow in time.
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CHAPTER 19
Ceremony
Sparrow
Keith offered me breakfast before it was even light outside. I refused to eat. After that he exited the cabin and stayed away for at least two hours. The thought that a wild animal had killed him made me happy because in that case he couldn’t come back and rape me. At the same time, I understood that his death would likely be my ending too. I cried as my brain tried picking which death I would prefer: dying tied up and starving or raped and killed by a madman.
