The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (25 page)

“Owen?”

I was looking at the ground and I figured it looked like I was sulking, but I just felt like I was kind of stuck in place, my feelings all jumbled together. I hadn’t thought about Mom for so long, and now here I was with her and I was realizing how much I had missed her, missed having a mom, but at the same time, her words and reasoning were filling me with a dark frustration. No matter what she said, there was still a truth in her words that I’d always feared: We were something she’d needed to get away from to be happy.

How was I supposed to feel about that? Was I supposed to be happy for her that she found this life here, to be happy that she was happy, when that life didn’t include me or Dad? I didn’t know if I could handle this. A part of me wished I hadn’t found her at all.

“I know this is hard,” said Mom. “I didn’t mean for it to be hard. I . . . well, I didn’t even know you’d be showing up here. But, seeing you, sweetie . . .”

I didn’t want to look at her but then I did.

“Seeing you now makes me understand that I was wrong, all these years,” she said. “I missed you so much, Owen, and I should have let you know about me. I’m so sorry, I see that now and I think I’ve been a big fool.”

There it was. An apology. But did it help? I kept standing there.

“Will you please come in?”

I thought about leaving. Going back to the temple. If I went in, I was giving her what she wanted, I was saying that it was okay that she’d left us, that I was willing to forgive her . . . but I realized that while I
didn’t
think it was okay, and while I wasn’t sure at all if I was going to forgive her, if I was even capable of it . . . I did want to try having a mom again. At least to know what that felt like.

“Fine,” I said. I started up the steps.

Their apartment was small, a narrow kitchen with electric appliances, a sitting area with pillows on the floor around a central table, and then a bathroom and two small bedrooms. A giant wooden carving of Chaac spread its wings across one entire wall.

Mom set me up in the second bedroom, on a little grass mattress on the floor. She gave me a pair of soft gray pants and a T-shirt that were Emiliano’s and took my shorts, T-shirt, and sweatshirt to wash. I accepted the clothes, even though it was weird; but then, all of this felt weird. “Do you want some more food? Emil will be home in a bit.”

“Nah,” I said. “I think I want to go to bed. It’s been a long day, week . . . everything.”

“Okay, well, I can’t wait to see you in the morning.” She smiled hopefully at me.

I tried to return the smile. “Yeah.”

I used the bathroom and lay down on the bed. Mom came in and knelt beside me, helping me spread out a white mesh mosquito net that was hanging down from the ceiling.

“There we go,” she said, and she kissed my forehead. The feeling was so weird, like I’d time traveled back to Hub. “Good night, my boy,” she said, and drew another circle on my cheek with her thumb. Then she left me in the dark.

There was an open-air window with wooden blinds. Yellow light from the street made slanted lines on me and the wall. Outside I could hear the din of city life, people walking and chatting.

I wondered if Seven was out there somewhere. Wondered for a second at how she seemed to be into me. Then I shook that thought away and wondered how Lilly was doing.

I wondered how my father was, far away, and what he would think if he knew I was with Mom. Would he be happy that I’d found her? Upset that I was with her? He always tried to hide how much he missed her, how much it hurt him that she’d left. . . . I wondered if he’d gotten the message that I’d tried to call, or what Eden might have told him.

I ended up lying awake for hours, long after Emiliano returned and I heard him and Mom go to bed, after the sounds of the street died down. I lay there and in my mind I was in Desenna; I was in EdenWest; I was in Hub; I was in the Atlantean city; I was in my ship, flying over the wastes, and none of these places felt like home, none of them felt like where I belonged. It was like I’d come unglued from the world, like I was drifting on a wind; and even here, in a room in my mom’s apartment, I hadn’t yet landed. If anything, I felt more untethered than ever.

I SLEPT AT SOME POINT, BUT IT WAS RESTLESS. I SAW the red-haired girl again in her frog pajamas, standing waistdeep in ash. This time, her skin had the gray translucence and dark veins that mine had in that dream on the
Solara
. Black blood, and she was sinking. Then the hospital room, Mom sitting beside me, Paul looking down. Only now he held the giant black blade, its serrated teeth glinting in the pale lab lighting, like the basement lab in Eden. “Have to get this out,” he said, leaning over me and sawing. . . .

I woke to gauzy light. The mosquito net. Bright sun was splitting through the slatted window. The air smelled something like sweat and that fresh-cut grass back at camp, a kind of living smell. Birds called outside. There were hums and clangs of street activity. A sizzling sound came from the kitchen, along with a tangy, spicy scent.

I got up and found my clothes cleaned and folded at the foot of the bed. I didn’t remember a time when my clothes had been folded. Back at Hub, my few outfits had just lived draped over the foot of my bed. Something like folding clothes had never been a detail that Dad or I would get to. There was too much else to do around the apartment.

I got dressed and went to the bathroom. I checked my shoulder. The wound had scabbed over. The red smudge of infection had mostly receded. It was still sore but not as bad.

I found Mom at the low wooden table, laying out forks and cups of whitish-green juice. She was wearing a long flower-patterned skirt and a light blue sleeveless shirt. Her hair was up, earrings on. This matched what I remembered about her, too—how she’d always dressed up, even at home, like she wanted to be ready at any moment for a special event.

“There he is,” she said. “Well, someone got a good sleep.”

“Did I?” I said, rubbing my eyes. It didn’t feel like it.

“It’s nearly eleven in the morning,” said Mom. “You’ve become quite the teenager!”

“Guess,” I said, thinking,
I slept so long because I’ve been running for my life for a week
. I thought about telling her that, but then noticed that as she laid out the forks, her fingers were shaking. I let the comment go and sat down cross-legged at the table.

Mom sat across from me. “I still can’t believe you’re here, and that you’re . . . I mean,
the
Epics of the Three. You’re part of that, Owen. That’s . . . amazing.”

“I’ve just been worried about surviving it,” I said. “You know, you’re part of it, too. My Atlantean genes either came from you or Dad.”

“Huh,” said Mom. “Never thought of myself as having a purpose like that, raising a future world saver and all.”

Another flash of annoyance:
You didn’t exactly raise me
.

Maybe Mom realized how that sounded, too, because she changed the subject. “Emil’s making an old pre-Rise dish from this region called
motuleños
.”

“Modified,” Emiliano called from the stove. He wore a white apron over his black medic outfit.

He brought over two steaming plates. “Gull eggs, rice tortillas, no peas or cheese, but it’s similar otherwise. We’re pretty lucky here, foodwise, compared to most places.”

Emiliano put the plate in front of me. I’d never had any kind of real egg. The dish was smothered in a red sauce. I took a bite and my mouth exploded with salt and spice. I sipped the juice, and puckered.

“Sour, right?” said Mom. “Those are real limes. We’ve developed a strain that does well here.”

“It’s good,” I said. All of it tasted shockingly real compared to food up north, even in Eden.

Emiliano sat down. “You’re a medic, too?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I work mostly in dermal care.”

“Can’t you tell?” Mom said, proudly leaning her shoulder toward me. “Look at how good that skin looks.”

I didn’t think it looked good. The surface was heavily tanned, with freckles like someone had scattered a handful of pebbles across her shoulder. Many of them were dark, black: the kind of spots that we were supposed to watch for, because they could lead to melanoma. “I heard you guys don’t hide from the sun down here,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Emiliano. “One of the main teachings in Heliad-Seven is to live a life in the open. That’s why we left the false reality of the Eden dome, to live in the glory of the real light. It gives us life, after all.”

“I’ve heard that,” I said, glancing at Mom’s shoulder again, “and so you’re just going to be cool if you get Rad poisoning or whatever?”

“If that’s what happens,” said Mom, looking at Emiliano and smiling, “then so it shall be.”

I felt myself tightening inside. I wasn’t sure if it was the idea of my mom dying, or maybe the idea that she wouldn’t bother to protect herself, or maybe just that all this sounded like something so foreign to how I’d grown up, and yet it seemed like she wanted me to approve.

“So,” I said to Emiliano, “if you don’t treat anybody’s illnesses, what do you do as a medic?”

“Oh, there’s plenty to do. We can splint broken limbs, treat people’s cuts and abrasions and minor infections. But we have to leave the advanced care in Nature’s hands.”

“It’s beautiful when you think about it,” said Mom.

I
was
thinking about it, and I felt my pulse speeding up. “So,” I said, “when somebody gets too ill, too broken, that’s when you just kill them?”

Emiliano kind of winced at what I’d said. “It’s not
killing
. It’s very peaceful, the way we do it at the clinic. Everybody knows that it’s selfish to prolong our lives and drain the resources of the people.”

I turned to Mom. “So if those sun spots on your shoulders get bad, and you get sick, you’d kill—sorry,
liberate
yourself.”

Mom sighed. “Owen . . .” She gave me another look that I remembered from so many years ago: like she was disappointed, the curve of her mouth suggesting that maybe she’d rather I wasn’t here ruining her perfect breakfast in paradise with her boyfriend. Maybe she already wished I hadn’t shown up, that she was still the free spirit who had abandoned me. “I remember Hub,” she said. “All that hiding in the dark. It’s better here in the light, living bright. It’s worth the risk.”

My next thought just shot out. “So, in
your
world, if my dad had all his complications from the cave molds and dust . . . he wouldn’t get treatment. No rebreather, no nebulization shots. Right?”

Mom’s face twisted further. I was definitely something awkward to have around now.

“Well,” said Emiliano, “I mean, we can’t even get some of that stuff here.”

“So he’d be dead by now,” I said. “My dad would have drowned in his own phlegm, or you would have liberated him.”

“Probably,” said Emiliano, “if his condition was severe.”

I stood up and started for the door. “It
is
severe.”

“Owen, wait . . .” Mom called.

I whirled. “And after you let my dad die, who would take care of his child? Not his mom, ’cause she took off to try to find her happy place!”

“That’s not—”

But I was at the front door.

“Where are you going?”

I stopped. My feelings were like those waves in Houston, crashing against the debris of sunken memories inside me. I felt bad for saying what I had, and yet I felt like I’d had to. “I can’t be here right now,” I said. “I’m going to find my people.”

“Okay . . . I’m sorry this is hard, I—I love you.” Mom made a motion like she was pinching a kiss off her lips and then flung it toward me. “Catch it,” she said.

Without even thinking, I moved my hand up and made a snatching motion near my face and something about that movement, if your muscles could have memories, triggered a deep, lost feeling inside. I had done that before, we had done this, so many years ago, a gesture of love that I had lived without for so long, and it made me want to either scream and leave or run and hug her.

But I just caught the kiss and grabbed the door. “Bye,” I said.

Outside, the sun hit me straight on, like flames to my face. I stopped on the steps, taking a deep breath. The two guards stationed outside glanced at me.

“Hey, flyboy.”

Seven was sitting in the shade beside the stairs, leaning against the base of the wall, legs stretched out. She wore a white wrap dress with long sleeves. Lines of brightly colored flowers were woven at the hem, and rootlike curls wound up from the flowers to the center of her stomach, where they encircled an elaborate floral version of the Heliad-7 symbol. Her hair was up beneath a woven white hat that shaded her face. Her long legs were crossed and she had a small woven shoulder bag in her lap. Her face had that perfect makeup sheen to it, like she was glazed pottery. She had on these retro-looking sunglasses with gold rims, and was drinking purple soda from a weathered glass bottle that was beaded with condensation.

“Hey,” I said. I hopped down the stairs and stepped over to her. “What are you doing here?”

She sipped her soda, then belched. “The Good Mother sent me to fetch you. Something’s going down at Tactical that she wants us to see. Apparently, it’s important.” She held out her hand, like she wanted me to grab it. I did, and she pulled herself up. She got on her feet and her body bounced into me. I stepped back.