Chapter Text
“I want in.”
Sam smiled out at the sweeping blue tides, his ear pressed against his smartphone. He missed that voice. How long had it been? Eight months, he thought, since Avery’s ship had hit the ocean floor.
“Hello, Rafe, good morning to you too!” Sam couldn’t resist teasing.
“It’s dark out right now. Did you hear me?”
Sam could almost hear the pinch in Rafe’s expression; the ghost of a smile. “You read all the files I sent you? Patagonia gets really windy this time of year.”
“If the malaria in Madagascar didn’t stop me, wind won’t either.” Then, Rafe had the added benefit of his own army, but Sam maintained enough grace not to poke at a slow-healing wound.
His smile widened. He ducked his chin away from the Indian Ocean and turned his gaze towards his own shadow, scuffing his shoe in the red clay dirt. “I just wanted to make sure you knew not to bother with the hair gel. When will you be ready to head out?”
A beat of silence. “Tomorrow?”
Sam laughed and looked around. Chloe and Nadine were farther up the shore, and the breeze carried Chloe’s laugh all the way to where Sam stood. They’d be alright together. “I might be able to swing that. What time is it over there for you right now? Think we could call Victor about a plane ride?”
“You can fly in his plane if you want, but I’m sitting first class. It’s… two thirty-four in the morning. What are you doing?” Papers rustled over the phone. “Are you still in India?”
“Keeping tabs on me? You should be asleep.”
“Making front cover on National Geographic is hardly low-profile, Samuel. And I’ve been reading the files you sent me yesterday.”
Sam whistled. “And didn’t I look good? Yeah, I’m finishing up things here before I leave.”
There was more shuffling on the other end of the phone. Sam could hear Rafe measure his breath.
“What was finding the Tusk like? Was its owner more paranoid than Avery?”
“No, no,” Sam said, gesturing with his free hand despite Rafe being on an entirely different hemisphere. “Avery had us doing the whole Pirate Round on the Atlantic—while India is big, we stayed on the southern tip the whole time. There were still puzzles, though the biggest headache was Asav.”
“What did he want the Tusk for? The article didn’t go into detail.”
Sam hummed. “So you are keeping tabs.”
“Reading an article you weren’t even the focus of isn’t me keeping tabs. They only quoted you once.”
“Ah, but you counted,” Sam retorted. Rafe didn’t reply to that. “Anyway, he wanted to bomb a city and start a civil war.”
A disbelieving huff. “He couldn’t have done that without the Tusk?”
“Here’s the kicker: he wanted to use the Tusk as a way to ‘unite the people’ against the Indian government—after bombing them!”
“Someone was ambitious. So it wasn’t about the Tusk at all but getting the money for his army.”
Chloe and Nadine had drifted closer while Sam was still on the phone. Chloe waved at him and mouthed ‘who is it’, while Nadine raised a brow. Sam waved them off. Neither of them heeded his request and waited only a few feet away from him, granting him the illusion of privacy.
“Yeah, I don’t know how he thought that was going to work. In the end, we gave it to the Ministry of Culture who decided to ask only the minimal questions.”
“It removes any liability on their part for stolen artifacts. Most museums know better than to ask more than where you found it.” Unfortunately, Sam could see the moment Nadine recognized the voice on the other end of the call. Her face went through several emotions: disbelief, confusion, anger, and strangely enough, Sam thought he could tell when that anger became betrayal.
“Is that goddamn Rafe Adler?” she hissed, and Sam raised his hands in surrender. Even without the phone cradled into his ear he could hear Rafe mutter her name.
“Surprise,” Sam joked.
“Wait, Rafe?” Chloe asked, “The guy who tried to kill you and Nate?”
Sam brought his phone back to his ear just in time to hear Rafe say, “Call me when you’re ready, Samuel.” Shit. He was going to have to explain this himself.
“So, drinks first?” Sam suggested.
They were sequestered in a local bar Sam picked at random. The lighting was too dim, tables wiped down but still sticky, and the booth cushions had been picked at by previous occupants. Their first round of beers had made Sam pliant enough to start from the beginning for Chloe—she was a complete outsider to what happened, and Sam figured, since he was only going to say this all once, he should start before Madagascar, before Scotland, and before Panama.
It took them three rounds by the time Sam wrapped up the whole story up with its pretty happy-ending bow.
Chloe whistled. “Wow, that is… and you were just on the phone with him? He wasn't threatening you was he?”
“Nah, I, uh, offered to partner up with him again, actually. For real, this time.”
“Neither of you are tired of backstabbing the other yet?” Nadine scoffed before she took a swig of her beer.
Sam scratched at the peel of his bottle. “I fucked up, I know. I pushed him off the deep end–”
“You deserve each other.”
Sam opened his mouth but Chloe pounced before their conversation could turn any shade of hostile, saying, “Sounds like that treasure turned you both a bit mad, to be honest. What are you doing, Sam? I can come with you.”
The peel, soaked with condensation, lay limp on the table. Sam looked at the bottle he cradled in his hands. He wouldn’t keep Chloe off the job if she really wanted to join, but if Nadine and Chloe were already so solid, he didn’t want to have to worry about Nadine and Rafe being in the same country together either.
“I feel bad, ya know? When he wasn't threatening me in that hospital after the ship sunk, he looked… lost. And, God, leaving Scotland and stealing that cross…"
“That feeling’s called guilt, mate. What's this job you're looking at?”
Sam's eyes lifted back up to Chloe and sparkled. “Ever heard of the ‘City of the Caesars’, or by its other name, the ‘Wandering City’?”
“Another lost city? Still jealous of Nate?” Chloe teased, but she abandoned her beer to lean forward and listen.
“He's still got three cities on me! Of course I'm gonna look for more!” Sam drummed his fingers against the table. “It's supposedly somewhere in Patagonia and loaded with gold from the survivors of the Incan Empire. There's a couple writings about it from Sebastian Cabot and Sir Walter Raleigh.”
“You know there's a lot of these ‘lost’ cities in South America?” Nadine interrupted, although Sam recognized she was being blunt without the intention to mock. For now, anyway.
“Well, Nate found El Dorado, so who’s to say that one was real and the others aren’t?” Sam countered. He conveniently left out mentioning that El Dorado was just a cursed statue, according to Nate. “And maybe along the way, we'll get more clues about the other ones too, like the City of Z. Then, bingo, I catch up to his score and order can finally be restored.”
Chloe shook her head. “Okay, so you're inviting Rafe on this to fix things between you?”
“Maybe,” Sam frowned.
“You're not at all worried you’ll both kill each other for the treasure again?” Two pairs of eyes stared at him across the table. Sam started to peel another beer label and licked behind his teeth.
“I missed this—the hunt, finding something nobody else believed in. And… he knows his stuff; he can keep up. He held his own in Panama and managed to follow me and Nate’s heels. Maybe history won't repeat itself after we already lived it.”
“Surprisingly poignant,” Chloe said. She blew a loose lock of hair out of her face and sipped her beer, biting her lip as she thought. “Sure you don’t want backup?”
“I think we’ll be alright. He didn’t sound pissed on the phone, anyway.”
“Don't fall back on old habits," Chloe warned with a smile on her lips.
“Nate didn't tell me you were a therapist too,” he redirected gently, smiling back at her. He needed to partner up with her again on another adventure—after the City of the Caesars.
“Oh yeah, but I charge premium for that.” She winked and laughed, nudging her elbow with Nadine’s to coax a laugh out of her too. Sam felt Chloe’s shoe knock against his. “I might join your flight, just to meet this infamous ‘Rafe Adler’ of yours. You and Nadine paint an interesting picture.”
“Portrait of a madman, you mean,” Nadine quipped, “but I won’t stop you. He wasn’t the worst company before he got obsessed with the Drakes.”
“Ha, ha, he wasn’t obsessed with us,” Sam said.
Nadine stared at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“Okay, maybe a little, but he was more concerned about the treasure,” he conceded and rolled his eyes.
“Keep telling yourself that and you’ll believe it,” Nadine shrugged.
Before Sam could argue further, Chloe squeezed out from the booth. “Since it sounds like it’s going to be our last night together out here, let’s finish it off with another round, hm?”
“You’re gonna have me flying hungover,” Sam jokingly chastised.
“They’ll have coffee and water,” she reassured him, earning a laugh from both Nadine and Sam.
Sam had ended up falling asleep after their trip to the bar, smooshing his face into the arm of his hotel room’s couch, and snoring away for hours. Dusk had long since overtaken New Delhi, the night sky enveloping the city and sharing its stars. Eventually, Sam awoke, blearily staring out the window to recognize how much time had passed.
A faint pounding began in his head. Right, he needed to rehydrate and then call Rafe back. Needed to figure out flights, hotels, warmer clothes—Sam hadn’t yet stepped into the kitchen and was already caught in a web of details.
Opening the fridge, Sam grabbed the first water bottle he could reach and washed his dry throat. Before he’d even taken a second gulp, he’d dialed the phone. Rafe picked up on the second ring.
“Am I speaking to a dead man?”
“Yeah, laugh it up. You didn’t have to face her interrogation.”
“Jesus, you sound like you were run over.”
“Part of the interrogation,” Sam joked and took another gulp of water. His throat felt a little less raw but not by much. “We went to a bar, and Chloe was nice enough to pay for the drinks.”
“So, naturally, you took advantage.”
Sam pressed his hand over his heart. “Ouch! You cruel, cruel man.”
“I’ve heard it before,” Rafe had said, his tone pitched in that way Sam always struggled to read as part-irritated, part-teasing. The distance between them and hidden expressions made the diagnosis impossible. “Well? What’s your plan, Samuel?”
“I’m flying out to Bariloche in a few days. We’ll find a hotel to set up in and talk supplies—remember, it’s going to be cold.”
“Yeah, I was reading the forecast. Snow is expected for them all week.”
“Snow isn’t great, but they’re about to be hit by spring. We’ll be golden once it hits September.”
Rafe huffed on the phone. “That’s not for another week.”
“A couple days of sight-seeing won’t get us killed,” Sam told Rafe, spinning his bottle’s cap on the counter. When it twirled back in reach, he clamped his hand over the cap and looked back into the common room. His laptop—a cheap thing he’d grabbed that was functional enough to hook up to the internet and allowed him to do his travel research—sat closed on the coffee table.
“Mm, not afraid someone else is after the treasure?”
Sam considered the question, sipping his water and taking himself and the phone back to the couch so he could search for the quickest and most inexpensive flights. “I haven’t heard word about Patagonia from any other treasure hunters so far. I think anyone we’ll find will be too busy scrambling over whatever is left of El Dorado. Or they’ll just be nosy tourists.”
“Right, and we’re not nosy tourists at all.”
“Far from it,” Sam grinned. “Okay, I just booked a flight, so I’ll get to Bariloche on Friday morning if there’s no delays.”
“I’ll see you then.” The phone beeped in Sam’s ear, telling him Rafe had ended the call. Sam fired off a quick text to Chloe letting her know his flight, and he trusted her to pass that information onto Nadine if she wanted to come—although Sam hoped Nadine wouldn’t come anyway. Yes, she was much more pleasant to be around when working together, but bringing her to meet Rafe in Argentina was only spelling trouble to Sam. He was already tiptoeing around the bitter elephant in the room when talking to Rafe.
After a minute, Chloe sent back a thumbs up emoji and nothing else, so Sam assumed she was booking the same flight. That or returning to sleep. Either way, Sam was satisfied, so he set his phone back on the coffee table and used his laptop to browse through his compiled research files.
An hour later, Sam closed the laptop and his eyes. He was going to sleep off this hangover and then look for warm clothes in the daytime. Still, laying on the couch and waiting for sleep to claim him took longer than he expected it to. There was a prickling under his skin, a physical manifestation of the excited nerves eager to throw himself back into the dangerous game of finding fairytales.
If the Wandering City was a real city, unlike Nathan’s truth about El Dorado, then the greed Sam could never escape could be satisfied. Diamonds, gold, silver, and who knows what else they could uncover…