Top Gun Tiger (Protection, Inc 7)

And she was about to lose control.

Chapter 8

Ethan

Ethan’s head was swimming, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay on his feet. He might be useless when it came to protecting Destiny, but at least he wouldn’t let himself become a liability. He was so focused on forward momentum that he almost pitched over when she came to a stop.

They were standing at yet another fork in the stream. One ran down a steep hill over a bed of slimy-looking green rocks. The other vanished into a dark, ominous-looking cave. He didn’t like the look of either route.

“Downhill, we break our necks,” he muttered. “Into the cave, and we get eaten by a grue.”

Destiny’s clear laugh made him feel better, just by hearing it and knowing that whatever else happened, she was at his side. “Why am I not surprised that you play dorky old computer games like Zork, nerd boy?”

“Why am I not surprised that you recognized the Zork quote, nerd girl?” Studying the routes more closely, he said, “There’s no water coming out of the cave, so it has to go somewhere. I vote we face the grue.”

“Better than the hell hog.”

Destiny passed him her flashlight, and he lit the way as they ventured into the cave. The rippling stream echoed eerily across the black and empty space, which smelled strongly of earth and moss and bats. When he shone the light upward, a thousand pinpoint red eyes stared back at him, and the flock of roosting bats chittered angrily. He quickly moved the beam back down to the ground.

“Thanks a lot,” Destiny said. “I’m much happier now that I know there’s about a million rabid bats nesting ten feet over our head.”

“Would you rather have them lurking on the ceiling and not know they’re there?”

“Yes. Yes, I would.”

They followed the twisty tunnel downhill until it suddenly dead-ended in a pool. Ethan shone his flashlight on a wall of solid stone.

“Oh, damn,” she said. “Worst of both worlds: we have go back past the bats again, then down the slippery slope, and we lose time.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, more to himself than her. “Water flows in but not out. It has to go somewhere.”

“Down? The pool must be deeper than it

looks. Or maybe there’s some tiny crack in the wall, below the surface, and it flows out from there.”

“Or maybe that’s not a wall,” Ethan said slowly. “Let’s keep walking. I want to see it closer up.”

The cold water was ankle deep, then calf-deep, then knee-deep by the time they reached the wall on the other side. Ethan felt so hot that he would have expected it to feel refreshing, but instead he felt simultaneously overheated and chilled: a deeply unpleasant combination. The only sensation that wasn’t awful was the warmth and solid strength of Destiny’s body next to his.

He reached out to run his hand over the wall.

It went through.

He felt as well as heard Destiny’s soft gasp. But it was one of wonderment, not fear.

The “wall,” he realized, was made of some kind of hanging lichen the same color as the cave itself. It hung in long narrow sheets, like flypaper, but appeared to be one solid mass until you actually touched it. Now that he was pushing one sheet aside, he could see more of the forest, the stream running along the moss…

…and a glint of gold.

Not metallic gold, but a warm smooth amber shade. Gemlike.

A golden city lay before them, nestled into the cup of the valley. Slender towers, delicate minarets, homes and temples and palaces and streets, were all carved from the same lovely amber stone. Ethan’s heart leaped. This was no simple village, but a sophisticated city. It would have cell phones, a hospital, hot food and warm beds…

And then he registered the lack of human voices and saw the empty streets. Rainbow-colored parrots flew in and out of windows, monkeys swung from the arched bridges, and a tiny spotted deer bolted down a street, its hooves clattering. But there were no people. The city was deserted.

Destiny exclaimed, “The Golden City!”

“You know where we are?”