Alessia in Atlantis by Nathalie Laine

Author:Nathalie Laine [Laine, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nathalie Laine

28

Alessia found Kella waiting at the tunnel exit. Behind her, fleets of crabs patrolled the street, dragging landfarers from their homes as friends and passersby yelled at them to stop.

“What are you doing here?” Alessia asked. She was about to say sorry for snapping at Kella earlier, when Kella spoke.

“Oh, just coming to observe more amazing feats of mind control.”

“Kella, come on.”

“No! I’m serious. Why stop at cheating at Tackles? You can mind-control people into giving you money—”

“Look, I know you mean well, and I’m sorry I got angry earlier. But can we please not argue about this? Don’t you think I feel terrible about putting Naror in hospital? I’m going there now to check he’s okay. Are you coming?”

Kella didn’t answer so Alessia spun, wounded, and marched through the mayhem on the street. Within a few steps though, Kella was following—silent and scowling, but shuffling into the hospital with Alessia nonetheless.

The hospital—which had struck Alessia last time as being a happier place than Selvan hospitals, with its light blue walls and vibrant-colored furnishings, made to resemble a tropical coral reef—was now a cluster of stress. Nereid doctors rushed around picking up the slack as half their colleagues were questioned by crabs.

“We heard that you were treating a landfarer,” Carcinor’s voice rang out from the end of the corridor. He and another crab were interrogating a nereid doctor.

“I-I’m not,” she stuttered. Alessia felt the doctor’s anxiety buzzing inside her like a swarm of trapped bees. She was hiding something. But an even stronger emotion pulsed out from the door behind her. Someone fearing for their life, and someone fearing for their child’s.

“This way,” Alessia murmured to Kella.

The crab pushed the nereid doctor aside and entered the room from which the fear had come. Alessia ran behind Carcinor to look inside. Four empty beds with seaweed blankets draped over them surrounded a cart of lobster tail chalices full of medicine. The crab barely fit in the room, and after knocking over the cart with a terrible clatter, to see if anyone was hiding behind, he started lifting the blankets off the beds to look beneath each.

Fear radiated from under the bed in the back-left corner. Alessia needed to stop Carcinor and the crab before they lifted that blanket. She latched on to both of their minds. It came easier now that she’d done it once, like muscle memory.

There’s nothing here. You should leave this room alone.

The crab ripped the blanket off the bed on the right. Empty.

“Stop this right now! You’re damaging hospital property,” the nereid doctor tried.

The crab ignored her and scuttled to the left. He grabbed the seaweed blanket between his pincers.

Don’t lift it. There’s nothing here. You should leave this room alone.

He stopped, holding the blanket but not lifting it. Carcinor pinched his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if suffering from a sudden headache. Alessia smacked her numb lips and held her concentration.

“I think we should leave this room—” Carcinor started. But before he could finish his sentence, Alessia was on the ground.

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