First-Time Driver

By Elizabeth Anne Myrick

“Oh no! Oh no! Nixie, what have I done?” Jope yanked his hands away from the control panel. Lights blinked along the dash, but he pressed fists to his eyes and leaned his weight against the harness. He couldn’t bear to look at the teleportation platform across the cabin. It was ominously, horribly silent.

“Don’t touch anything,” Nixie hissed. Her hands flew over the controls, and the ship hummed in response.

“I’m not touching anything!”

“Why are you yelling at me? Stop yelling!”

“I’m not yelling!”

Nixie’s harness groaned as she leaned forward, looking out the cockpit window. The desert at night was a sea of black, but two hundred feet below, fires glowed orange against the sand. “Jope, do you know what you’ve just done?”

Jope pulled his fists away from his eyes and glared at his sister. “No, Nixie. Please tell me exactly how badly I’ve messed up my very first abduction.”

With a final beep, the ship quieted, and Nixie pushed away from the controls. Her neon blue hair had fallen from its ponytail and wisped across her quickly paling face. “Dad is going to kill us,” she whispered.

In unison, Jope and Nixie turned to the teleportation platform and stared at the block of limestone.

Jope had prepared for this moment for years—his very first abduction. Nixie had helped plan the surprise, suggesting the Sahara as a prime location. His father had a soft spot for ancient Egypt, and Jope thought it would be a fun birthday present to get one of the pharaohs for his dad. It matched his name—Farro—after all.

Except it wasn’t a pharaoh on the teleportation platform. It wasn’t a scribe or a stone cutter or even a slave—and there were plenty of those. Instead, he’d abducted a piece of the statue.

Just a lump of rock. No screaming. No crying. No pounding against the glass partition. Jope dreaded telling his dad that, instead of a birthday present, this year he’d be getting an alternate time continuum for his favorite monument.

“Fix it.” He turned to Nixie. “You have to put it back.”

“Put it back?” She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t one of those fancy hyperspace ships, Jope. It’s just a patrol. It can’t handle another teleportation for at least twenty-four hours.”

Jope groaned. “At least say the cloaking device is working.”

Controls clicked and beeped. “Yep. We still look like a cloud.”

“So the locals shouldn’t have noticed anything, right?”

“Except that a giant piece of limestone is missing? Sure. They didn’t notice a thing.”

Jope looked at the stone. He decided it was probably the statue’s nose. “It’s dark. No one will know what happened. We could just, you know, drop it.”

Nixie was silent. She unstrapped her harness and walked to the platform. “I mean… it’s not a wholly terrible idea.”

“We’ve gotta be quick.” Jope slipped out of his own harness and ran to the release button. “Before—”

The intercom beeped, and Jope wished he’d turned off the auto-answer feature. Static crackled, and then Farro’s voice crackled overhead. “Jope? Nixie?”

“Hey, Dad!” Nixie said brightly. But the look she gave Jope was panicked. “What’s up?”

More staticky silence, then, “I want you home in five minutes. We’ll talk about this when you get here.” The transmission cut out.

It would take twenty minutes to activate the drop chute, chuck the nose, and then recheck all the systems before warping home.

“Maybe he won’t be that mad,” Jope said. “He helped you put back that one author, right? And it didn’t break the time continuum. So no one would notice if we just put it back in a couple days, right?”

“First of all”—Nixie shook her head—“Mom is the one who made me put her back. Apparently, that lady hadn’t written, like, any of her famous books yet. Mom refused to lose Hercule Poirot to a faulty timeline, but people still noticed. She was missing for eleven days—and that was in the modern era. You just abducted a two-ton piece of limestone from hundreds of years before that. Maybe thousands. The amount of fuel that would take…” She shook her head. “The continuum’s messed up already.”

Jope hung his head while Nixie set the coordinates for home.

When the ship docked, Farro was waiting on the platform. He stormed into the ship before the doors had even fully opened.

“What were you thinking?” He fumed, rounding on Nixie first. “He got his license two days ago, and you think it’s a good idea to take him gallivanting across the centuries?”

“It was my idea,” Jope said. “I wanted to surprise you. Um. Happy birthday!” He motioned to the teleporter.

When Farro saw the limestone nose, he froze. “Is that…” He cleared his throat. “From the Sphinx?”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” Jope blurted. “I think it was the settings. I was trying for one of those old pharaohs—the forgotten ones, of course, ’cause I know better than to mess with people we still remember—but I’m pretty sure I bumped it to non-biological. And the guy was right under the nose when I aimed, and… and…” He stopped.

Farro was laughing.

“Um, Dad?” Nixie pushed her blue hair out of her face. “Are you okay?”

“Let’s add it to the collection.” With a grin, Farro led Jope and Nixie out of the ship.

They exited the port, followed him into a waiting hovercraft, and sped along the road. But they didn’t go home. Instead, Farro drove into one of the many storage units built into the mountain caves. Inside, lights and voices met them. Jope gaped.

A sprawling ancient city filled the space. Pristine marble columns, bubbling fountains, and even people, milling about as if everything was completely normal.

“Welcome to Atlantis,” said Farro. “My own accidental-abduction. Now, Jope. I think the Sphinx’s nose would look lovely displayed in the temple.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Anne Myrick was born in Missouri, grew her imagination along the rim of Kenya’s Rift Valley, and spent her early adulthood exploring the beauty of Germany’s Black Forest. An avid fan of fairy tales, iced coffee, and rain on a tin roof, she writes stories of hope sprinkled with magic. She lives in Kansas City with three roommates, two dogs, and one severely overworked vacuum cleaner.

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