Aegis Rising (3 page)

Years passed, with the tribe and the strangers coming together. The natives shared their land and traditions with the strangers. In like manner, the outsiders showed the tribe the secrets of their own way of life and their history. They taught them to open the gates of their minds to the incredible powers inherent in themselves and nature. As time wore on, the two different communities intertwined. Most of the strangers, whom by now the tribe knew as the Islanders, had intermarried and the people had truly become one, sharing not only their lives but also their rich cultures and most importantly, a powerful prophecy that was bequeathed from generation to generation.

PART ONE

1

T
he small red plane shook violently as a flash of lightning streaked not more than two hundred feet from its nose. Muffled shrieks rose from inside. One voice rose above the others. “
Mr. Tyler!
We’re gonna crash!”

A deep voice from the cockpit growled, “No we won’t! Hang on!”

Tegan Ryder cast a terrified glance at her friends. The sixteen-year-old was scared out of her wits; this was without a doubt the most terrifying experience of her life. Beside her, Mariah Ashton drew in a sharp breath and clung to Tegan, her brown eyes wide and her body frozen. Although they were the same age, the fright that consumed Mariah made her appear like a horrified preschooler. Tegan only hoped that her friend was as strong on the inside as she normally was on the outside. She leaned back into her seat and screwed her eyes shut, attempting to will this horrible episode away.

Less than an hour ago, she had been enjoying a smooth flight on the Piper Comanche with her four closest friends. It wasn’t a big plane, but it carried six people comfortably in three rows. Tegan was listening to her iPod and sketching a Siberian tiger on a notepad. It would be an addition to the large collection of wildlife drawings that she had accumulated over the years.

Seated next to Tegan, Mariah was engrossed in a five-hundred-page mystery novel. She would only pause to push back her long copper-blonde hair and take occasional sips from a can of Dr Pepper, her favorite soda.

The girls were settled comfortably in the middle row of the plane. Jag Sanchez was seated in the back with Aari Barnes. The tallest one of the group with a golden-tan complexion thanks to his Brazilian-Italian ancestry, Jag was also the most athletic. He would occasionally participate in sports but, given the choice, would rather be honing his parkour skills or biking with friends.

Kody Tyler sat in the cockpit beside his father. He was proud of his short afro which he’d obtained from his father, and his striking green eyes that he acquired from his mother. Despite his skinny frame, he had an insatiable appetite for food, which astounded everyone around him.

Slumping down in her seat, Tegan yawned and pushed some strands of her ash-brown hair from her face. She looked out the window at the bright day and was just thinking how soft the clouds seemed when a yell of delight cut through the air.

“Dude, that’s amazing!”

Tegan pulled her earphone away and turned around to glare at her friends. Mariah did the same.

At the back of the plane, Jag and Aari were staring in awe at something on Aari’s portable gaming device. Jag gave Aari a congratulatory pat on the head but Aari ducked, not wanting his peaked, short-cut hair to be tampered with. “Oy! Don’t touch!”

“Alright,” Tegan sighed. “What gives?”

Aari elbowed Jag, eyes glued to the small screen. “You tell ’em.”

Jag raised his eyes heavenward. In a voice that was husky for his age, he answered, “He’s playing
Descending Tartarus
, the game that was recalled. Seems that el hacker here managed to sneak a download, and it’s actually working.” Then he added, amused, “Though I have no idea how he did it, and he won’t tell anyone.”

“Seriously?” Mariah peeked over her seat. “Can I check it out?”

Aari’s reply was curt. “Nope. I went through a lot to get this download. You’ll have to wait your turn. Come again in another year.”

“You hog.”

Aari didn’t tear his gaze away from the device but his ice-blue eyes twinkled. His fingers quickly moved over the controls and it was easy to see that he was enraptured with the game.

“To think you guys didn’t want to come with us to Dawson, just two weeks ago,” said Tegan. “Poor Kody would have been all alone with Mariah and me during the trip.”

Mariah nodded. “Imagine all the fun they’d have missed if we hadn’t changed their minds.”

Jag grinned. “Yeah. I wonder if we’ll find a Sasquatch up at the lake-side cabin.”

Tegan turned and reached over her seat to ruffle his hair. “With you around, who needs a Sasquatch?”

Jag pulled away and brushed his hair from his face, scowling at her. “Hey!”

Tegan snickered. Mariah prodded her with an elbow and chided, “Just because he’s the tallest doesn’t make him a Sasquatch.”

Pretending to flex a muscle, Kody grinned and hollered from the cockpit, “He may be the tallest, but we all know who’s the strongest!”

“Yeah, Sasquatch over here is,” Tegan hollered right back to Kody’s disappointment. It was true; the trouble-maker boy was strong.
If only he’d focus more on his studies and stay out of fights, he’d be a great student,
she thought to herself.

Kody sniffed. “Well, I’m the most charming, then.”

“Yeah,
right
.” Aari looked up from his game. “Only in your dreams, you are. I’ve got more charm in my pinkie finger than you’ve got in your entire body.”

Grinning, Jag leaned back against his seat with his hands behind his head, enjoying the jest and staying above it.

Tegan and Mariah looked at each other. “Charm?” Mariah croaked. “We’d probably run into a flying pig sooner than finding one person on this planet who has been charmed by either of you.”

The two boys protested. “Come on,” Kody complained, pointing at himself, “you girls know that this guy right here is the charmer of the bunch.”

Aari raised an eyebrow. “Dream on, pal.” He stuck his neck out to face Tegan and Mariah. “Look at me. You can’t deny that my dark red hair is a chick-magnet.
And
you’ve both seen how I can charm—”

“Grannies!” Kody yelled, chuckling. “Yeah, you were really good at the seniors’ bingo party at Sunset Home last week. Those wonderful elderly folks
adored
you, you ‘cutie-pie’ volunteer. But me, I charmed Jag’s cousin. She’s
gorgeous
.”

“Hey, Kode-man,” Jag said, the first sound he’d made in a while, “hate to break it to you, but Tess has a boyfriend now. Life has changed for her since she turned eighteen. Or so she says—I hardly ever get her teenage-girl ramblings.”

“
What?
” Kody exclaimed.

Seeing another round of banter coming, Tegan promptly plugged in an earphone to shut it out and passed another to Mariah and looked out the window. She watched the scene that rolled out below the plane. It was a beautiful mountain range. Recalling the map they had studied before the trip, she guessed that these were the Mackenzie Mountains, the northern cousin of the famous Rockies. Then her sharp gray eyes caught something. “That’s a really strange-looking ridgeline,” she muttered.

Mariah leaned over. “Yeah.” She blinked. “It’s running east to west—the others stretch out from north to south. Wait . . .  there’s another one running adjacent to it.”

The girls agreed that it was indeed unique, but as the plane advanced, the curious ridgelines fell out of sight and their interest drifted off elsewhere. The endless mountain range rippled beneath their gazes and before long the two had dozed off.

Now here they were an hour later; the plane was shaking like a leaf in the storm, terrifying the passengers inside. Tegan peered through her long eyelashes, now wet with tears. Although the Comanche was built tough, it wasn’t designed for this kind of extreme pounding. The freak storm had come out of nowhere, taking Samuel Tyler and his passengers by surprise. The plane wobbled for a moment before its nose tilted downward. Like a roller coaster passing the tip of its ascent, the dive came suddenly. This time, there were no stifled shrieks; instead, deafening screams echoed throughout the cabin.

“Dad! Pull up!
Pull up!
” Kody wailed, his usual calm shattered.

Mariah screeched, rendering Tegan half deaf. Wincing, she leaned over and clasped her hand over Mariah’s mouth. Mariah clammed up immediately. Tegan glanced back and caught the exchange of looks between Jag and Aari. She knew the boys were scared stiff as well.

“Great way to start off a vacation,” Jag murmured to Aari, who had gone pale.

“Oh, God.” The pilot’s voice sounded distressed.

“Dad?”

“Mr. Tyler?”

“What is it?”

The lone adult in the plane looked back as he began to radio for help. His face was creased with stress and his eyes were troubled. “I think we just lost the left engine.”

“What!”

Sure enough, the left side of the cabin went silent as the engine sputtered and came to a halt.

“Are we going to crash?” Aari asked, terrified.

The pilot’s eyes narrowed. “No! The right engine is working fine. I just need to compensate with the rudder.”

As Kody’s father furiously fought with the flight controls, the friends held their breaths. In what felt like half a dozen lifetimes, the plane’s nose slowly inched back toward the horizon.

“Okay,” cheered the pilot. “We’re back in business!”

Just as the friends started to breathe a sigh of relief, Mariah pointed up front and yowled. There, in the plane’s path, another lightning bolt flashed. Tegan jolted in shock. They were not out of the storm yet.
At least we weren’t there,
she comforted herself, and then spoke her thoughts out loud, “It’s alright. Remember what they say: Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.”

She spoke too soon.

There was a blinding flash of light followed by an ear-splitting
crack
and the plane veered violently to the right. “Gaaah!”

“What’s going on?” Aari barked.

“We got hit by lightning!” Kody bellowed. “It hit the
right
engine!”

Like puppets on a string, everyone turned their heads to look, and to their horror realized that Kody was correct. But worse, the only working engine they had left was on fire.

“We’ve lost all power!” Kody’s father turned around. “We’ll have to find a clearing and glide the plane in!”

Despite the situation, Kody raised an amused eyebrow. “A clearing, Dad? In this forest?”

“Just look for one!” his father snapped. “We’re running out of altitude.”

The friends quickly stretched their necks out as far as possible to look down.

A few frantic moments later, Tegan called out, tapping wildly at her window. “Hey! What about that clearing down there?”

“Are you crazy?” Mariah objected. “Look at the big rock smack in the middle of it! We can’t land there!”

Aari looked up. “I think I found something!” He waved his hand in the direction of what looked like an opening on the forest floor. “Mr. T! Check out the clearing on your left by that creek!”

“That spot’s too small for this plane!” Kody pointed out urgently.

Six pairs of eyes frantically scanned the surroundings below.

“Aw,
man!
” Jag exclaimed. “The fire’s spreading in along the wing!”

That was followed by another shout from the cockpit. “We’re losing airspeed! We have to land
immediat
—”

He was cut off by a loud blast. The right engine cowling burst apart. The plane was now trailing smoke and flame over the forest, no more than a thousand feet above the tree-tops. Like an injured dragon, the red Comanche bucked and twisted over alpine firs that punctuated the landscape.

Forced to choose between the clearings that Tegan and Aari had spotted, Kody’s father decided to maneuver the plane toward the site by the creek. Although it was the smaller of the two, it appeared safer, with no jagged rocks to wreck their inevitable attempt to bring the plane down.

Mariah grabbed Tegan’s arm with a look of mortal fear frozen on her face. Tegan grabbed back, wordless.

Kody was muttering under his breath. Aari sunk low in his place while clinging onto his gaming device. Jag, holding onto the crucifix on a chain around his neck, looked on ahead as though he was able to foresee the impending tragedy.

A blur of trees zoomed past the windows at a dizzying speed.

The plane rattled uncontrollably, jarring the passengers to the bone. A series of booms and screeches deafened them.

The last thing they heard before the crash was their pilot’s words: “Hold on, kids! We’re going in—”

Then it was all black.

2

T
he thunderous roar swept across the valley and echoed through the mountains. Many rushed out of their homes to gaze at the stormy sky, some stunned, some awed, and others curious. But only five of them were intent. They were the Elders. They stood in silence as the words of the prophecy echoed in their minds.

A bright red object was streaking across the sky. The long trails of flame and smoke from its wings resembled the fiery feathers of a bird legendary to the people of the tribe. There were gasps as blinding streaks of lightning reached for the creature. As they traced the object in the sky, it began to sputter. Within moments it went quiet.