Xi'an, China:
As Nate stepped off the plane and on to the small private runway on the outskirts of Xi'an, the sun was already igniting the sky in a vibrant display of reds, oranges, and pinks as it dipped low on the horizon. A gentle breeze blew over the fields surrounding them, combining with the wind coming off the props and lifting his bangs as it caressed his smiling face. On every side of the lone strip of pavement beneath them swayed golden grasses, bowing and bending in the wind, rippling up and over the gently undulating hills towards the city. Inhaling deeply, Nate's smile grew just a bit wider as he savored the coolness of the evening.
A hand on his shoulder made him turn, and he met Elena looking at him with those wide, caring eyes of hers. His smile faded slightly. As the amber sunlight shone on her lovely features, he recalled their talk the night before and couldn't help but feel a little guilty. They hadn't argued, not exactly, but it was clear that something was eating at her, and for the life of him he couldn't nail down exactly what it was. She smiled wanly, her hazel eyes gazing into his, and her shapely mouth opened to speak.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Nate's eyes dimmed as a pit settled into his stomach, an inexplicable melancholy feeling washing over him. "Yeah," he said, sotto voce.
The door crashed against the side of the plane again, drawing both of their attention. "Where's Chloe and Charlie?" Sully's voice was loud and brash, and oblivious to the moment.
Distracted from his feelings by the interruption, Nate turned to Sully and remarked, "Should be here soon. Chloe's generally pretty on it, when it comes to work." The trio turned and looked down the paved road that split off the runway, curving past a metal outbuilding before turning to gravel as it passed through the chain-link fence that surrounded the small airstrip. In the distance they could see a small dust cloud kick up and travel steadily towards them. "Speak of the devil," Nate grinned.
As the dust cloud got closer, they could make out a forest green SUV at the front of it, the paint dull and sun-faded. The car turned the last corner and slowed as it entered through the gate and honked twice. Nate, Elena, and Sully held up hands in greeting and the car pulled up alongside of them, vague shadows of human forms visible through the heavily tinted windows. Both front doors opened at the same time, and Chloe and Charlie stepped out, smiling at their waiting friends.
"Nate!" Chloe smiled, putting her hands on her hips. "Good to see you again." Her greeting carried a genuine warmth, but she dutifully refrained from embracing in the presence of his new wife.
"You too, Chloe," Nate said cheerfully.
"Chloe!" Sully spread his arms wide and locked her in an overly-enthusiastic hug, while Nate smirked and raised his eyebrows at his questionable behavior. "How's my girl doin'?"
Chloe, caught quite off guard, stammered, "G-good!" Looking at Nate over Sully's shoulder, she furrowed her brows questioningly. He just shrugged in response. "How are you doing, Victor?" she asked.
Nate bro-hugged Charlie with a clap on the back and Sully moved over to say hello to him as well, leaving Chloe and Elena to face each other for the first time since Shambala. "Elena, sweetheart," Chloe was careful to keep her tone upbeat, though her smile became a bit wooden. "How have you been?"
Shaking Chloe's hand firmly, Elena replied sardonically, "Besides picking shrapnel out of my side and all the scarring, I'd say not half bad." She smiled wryly. "I suppose all that comes with the territory, though."
"You did marry a Drake," Chloe agreed.
"Oh believe me," Elena said. Putting her hands on her hips, she leaned closer to Chloe's ear and said more quietly, "I know."
Picking up on the undertones of Elena's words, Chloe's shoulders shook as a soft chuckle escaped her mouth. "Trouble in paradise, love?"
Before Elena had time to answer, Charlie interrupted by saying, "Bloody lovely seeing you all, but we should get this show on the road if we're going to get there at any reasonable time of the evening."
"True!" Nate agreed. Unaware of his wife's exchange with Chloe, he turned to the two women and swept his arm towards the SUV. "Ladies, your chariot awaits."
Having broken the ice with Elena, Chloe felt comfortable enough to give a joking, "Such a charmer!" in response, while Elena rolled her eyes with an "Oookay, cowboy," as she climbed into the back. As they rumbled out of the airstrip enclosure and onto the gravel road beyond, Nate eyed the car's sagging headliner.
"Spared no expense with this one?" he asked sarcastically.
"Talk to Charlie Cheaplin about that, mate," Chloe said, sporting a dark pair of sunglasses and looking out the passenger's side window. From the way back, Sully chortled at her pun. "I had something far more classy in mind."
"Oi! Wouldn't do to spend all our money on transport, now would it?" Charlie protested.
Though it was hard to tell behind her sunglasses, Chloe most likely rolled her eyes at this point. "Charles, love, I hardly think that renting a respectable vehicle would have broken the bank. If it would, we should reeeeally reconsider our chosen profession."
"You've got it pegged all wrong," Sully chimed in from the back. "This car's great. It's even got a cigarette lighter in the backseat..."
"Sully!" Chloe shrieked. "If you light up in here, I swear to God that this fifty-dollar rental is coming out of your pocket!"
"It was not fifty dollars..."
It was around nine that night that they pulled up to their hotel in downtown. As the crew began to shuffle about, collecting their bags and stretching their travel-cramped limbs, Chloe stirred in the passenger's seat, waking from her sleep she had fallen into shortly after their departure from the airport. As she sat up straight and looked out the windshield, she frowned.
"Dark out tonight, isn't it?" she observed.
Elena, still seated behind her, reached forward and gently removed the sunglasses from Chloe's face.
"Oh," Chloe said. "Right."
Nate entered the hotel behind Charlie and followed him to the receptionist's desk, wheeling his and Elena's suitcase behind him. "I have a reservation," Cutter announced to the young woman behind the counter. "You can find it under Quartermane."
As the receptionist looked up the name, Nate smirked and raised an eyebrow at Charlie. "You're not really much on the subtlety thing, are you?"
"I have my fun," Cutter said in a low voice as he handed some money to the woman. Slinging his duffel over his shoulder as the rest of the crew walked in through the revolving door, he made for the elevators.
As they walked down the hall to their respective rooms, Chloe called over her shoulder, "Meet up in our place to talk about the plan?"
Nate and Sully exchanged a glance, then simultaneously answered, "Sure!"
Stopping in front of his and Elena's room, Nate fished in his pocket for his key card when suddenly he felt a hand clap onto the handle of the suitcase he was toting. Looking up, he met his wife's smiling face as she held up her own card. "Go ahead," she said, nodding toward the others who were moving further away from them. "Do what you need to do. I'm gonna hit the hay, though. I've been really busting it to get this new job, and I'm feeling tired."
Grinning, Nate kissed the top of her head. "Thanks, sweetheart," he said before leaving the suitcase with her and jogging off to catch up.
A couple hours later, the whole gang- minus Elena- sat around the table in the hotel room Chloe and Charlie had gotten together ("for the sake of economy"). Everyone, that is, except for Nate, who was pacing around and gesticulating like an eccentric professor as he explained everything they knew thus far about their mission, more or less lost in his own world in that way Nate always got when he was expounding on history. Empty beer bottles and takeout containers from their supper littered the room like it was a college frat house, and Chloe absently spun a bottle on the table as Nate was wrapping up his monologue.
"...and that's why we need to talk to Ming jie," he concluded, turning to face his small audience. "Until we can figure out where Newton hid his secret lab, this little piece of parchment is about all we have to go on."
"Yeahhh," Charlie pondered. "I'll have to put some thought into that whole 'chapel of the moon' thing."
"Uh, excuse me," Chloe piped up, raising her hand as if she was in school. "Who's this Ming jie person?"
Nate used a nickel to pry the top off another beer as he answered, "Guy I helped out a couple years ago. Got into a bad situation with some pirates and they were about to burn his boat to the ground. I helped- disperse them."
Chloe's mouth formed a small "o" and she gave the bottle on the table another spin. It came to rest with the neck pointing at Charlie, and the two smirked conspiratorially at each other. Cutter gave the bottle a spin of his own, but his smile vanished as it ended pointing at Sully. Deflated, he promptly picked it up and tossed it over his shoulder into the trash can behind him.
"Just one thing bothers me about this," Cutter spoke, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. Nate raised his eyebrows and looked at him expectantly. Eyes flicking between his three companions to ensure he had their attention, Charlie forged ahead. "I'm not sold that Aristotle didn't do anything with what he knew. Just think about it: he has this esoteric knowledge about a technologically advanced empire that potentially holds the key to eternal life, and he personally tutored not one, but two military heroes- Alexander, and Antipater- in a time of significant unrest in Greek history. Do you really think he just sat on all that intel because of some kind of conscientious obligation?"
The room was quiet as the implications of Charlie's words sunk in. Chloe flipped through Newton's journal which was sitting open in the middle of the table. "Why does this seem so familiar?" she asked, stopping on a page and pointing at the image sketched out on it.
Nate peered over her shoulder and saw the same star emblem he and Elena had used to track down the astrolabe in Delphi. "The Argead star?" he asked. "Represents the sun. It was used in ancient Greece." He shrugged. "I know what you mean though. I feel like it should mean something more to me, but I can't place what it is."
Sully's eyes wandered to the clock on the wall and saw it was almost midnight. Speaking for the first time in a good ten minutes, he said, "Well, how about all you historians let your brains mull over this while we sleep? It's getting late, and we've got a lot to do tomorrow."
Nate visually checked with Chloe and Charlie and then agreed. "Good idea. We'd better keep at the top of our game to stay ahead of Floki and Garnier." He scooped up Newton's journal and pulled an elastic band around it as he reached to put it back in his pocket.
"Mind if I hang on to that for the night, mate?" Cutter asked. "I'd like to keep working on this for a bit."
"Knock yourself out," Nate said, handing him the leather-bound book.
Arriving at his own door a minute later, Nate pulled out his wallet and extracted his key card. He swiped it and the light on the knob flashed green, and he gently pushed open the door to his room, careful not to disturb Elena. Moving in the dark so as not to wake her, he found the bathroom and stepped inside, flicking the light on when the door was mostly shut, but as he was turning the handle to avoid the latch making a noise as it closed, he suddenly heard a sound that stopped him in his tracks.
"Nate?" It was his wife's voice, and was slurred like she was sleep talking, but then it came again with increasing clarity and urgency. "Nate? Oh... Nate...OH MY GOD, NATE!" She nearly screamed the last one, and he burst from the bathroom, instinctively reaching to his side but finding no gun. Elena was sitting up in bed and frantically patting the empty covers beside her as she groaned over and over, "Nate, oh no, Nate..."
Nate pulled up short, bewildered by his wife's behavior, but quickly reached out to wake her from the nightmare she was apparently having. "Elena, honey," he said gently. "Hey, I'm here!"
Elena turned her head to look at him with panicked eyes that slowly softened as recognition dawned on her. She threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around him in a crushing embrace. "Oh, thank god," she breathed into his shoulder.
Nate gently pushed her back into a sitting position on the bed and flicked the lamp on as he sat down beside her. "Hey, you okay?" he asked.
Elena's head flopped forward and shook side to side. "Yeah... yeah, I'm okay," she said. Her voice was still shaky and breathless.
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, Nate pulled her tightly to himself. "Bad dream?"
"I- yeah, bad dream." She sighed and wiped her forehead. "It seemed so real," she agonized. "And then they... and you were..." She trailed off and shook her head more violently to clear the visions from her mind.
"Hey, it's okay..." Nate reassured her. "I'm here, 'Lena." He lay down with her on the bed and tenderly turned her to face away from him so he could rub her shoulders, continuing to speak softly to comfort her. For many quiet minutes they lay like that in the warm ambiance of the single bedside lamp in the otherwise dark hotel room far from home. Elena was curled up, her knees to her chest, in her usual sleepwear of a T-shirt and panties, while Nate, still fully dressed and smelling faintly of beer, continued to dig his thumbs into her shoulders and upper back in an attempt to dispel the considerable tension there. He had lost track of how long they had continued that way when all of a sudden he felt a small tremor ripple down Elena's body. Suspicious, he slowly trailed one hand along her arm, up her neck, and across her cheek, the skin feeling petal-smooth beneath his calloused palm. Reaching her cheekbone, he lifted his hand and found it to be wet.
"Elena?" he asked with concern, pulling on her shoulder to roll her back towards himself. Her hands came up to hide her face, but Nate had already seen and he lightly grasped her wrist. "Honey? What's going on?"
She sobbed, the noise hitching as she tried in vain to stop herself from crying. Nate wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into himself as she continued to shake with silent tears, occasionally punctuated with a gasp. As he held his wife while she rode out her grief, Nate stared straight ahead at the opposite wall of the hotel, thinking about things to say to maybe comfort her, only for his mind to immediately remind him that he was almost no good at sympathetic sentiments. He had no way of knowing what she was crying about yet, but it didn't take a genius to realize it probably had to do with him. So he lay there, and he thought. Thought about the ways he'd hurt her, skipped out on her, not followed through with promises to be there for her. He thought about just how much he sucked at being a husband, or even just a responsible, consistent presence in anyone's life. The pressure he felt to be the hero in these kind of circumstances that often caused him to push himself so hard and so far that he left others in the dust. If only he could somehow find a way to be there for Elena at the same time he was out there trying to stop psychopaths with delusions of grandeur...
His dark musings were interrupted by Elena speaking his name, her voice sounding frail and vulnerable. "Nate?"
"Yeah, honey?"
She pulled away from him just enough that she could look into his face. "Promise me... promise me that you'll get out of this before it finishes you. That you won't leave me... alone..."
Nate's expression was sober as he gazed down at her. He nodded, struggling to find words. "I won't," he said softly.
He continued to hold her despite knowing somewhere in the back of his mind he should get undressed for bed. He held her, telling himself that she needed him to, to keep her safe and close to him. But deeper down, he knew that he was holding on to her just as much for his sake as for hers.
Sleep did not come easy that night for Nate.