The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (29 page)

“Woo!” Leech was up on the rocky ledge. He put a hand over his bandaged eye and leaped off, crashing into the water. There was applause for his efforts, too.

I started to feel an ache in my side, my stupid cramp coming to life. I spied an outcropping of rock in the shadows along the edge of the wall and swam for it. I climbed out and sat. Leech joined me.

“This is cool,” he said. “Not totally sure I want to fly out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said. I scanned the water and caught a blur, not unlike the shimmer of the siren, as Seven skimmed by down at the edge of the light. I felt a moment of longing, watching her, remembering the nights in Eden when water had briefly felt so free.

Seven shot up toward us and emerged, eyes on me, and for a moment her mouth was moving but making no sound, and I saw the red openings still fluttering, creaturelike. Then she blew out a little puff of air and breathed in deep.

“So, how come you guys don’t have your gills anymore?” she asked. “It looks like you used to have them, flyboy.”

“Mine came and went pretty fast,” I said. “I think because I found my skull, so maybe yours will change soon. Just make sure you’re not underwater when it happens.”

“He’s the only one that happened to,” said Leech. “Mine took about two years to come and go. You said you haven’t been near your skull very often.”

“Just the one visit,” said Seven. “The gills formed right after that.”

“Maybe they’ll change when we go tomorrow,” said Leech.

“Yeah . . .” A shadow seemed to cross Seven’s face. “They’re fun, though . . . Plus, they really freak guys out when we’re kissing and I do this . . .” She held her breath, puffed her cheeks, and made a little hitching motion. Her gills opened briefly, a flash of red.

“That would freak a guy out,” I said, and was surprised to feel a little burst of jealousy toward these guys, whoever they were.

“Not you, though,” said Seven. I found her eyes on me. “You’d know exactly what they were.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, knowing there had to be a cooler response I could have found.

Seven pulled herself up out of the water and stood over the two of us. She shook her hair and sprayed us both. “Can you make room for little old me?” she said.

“We always make room for hot girls,” said Leech, and again I wished I could be that quick.

We both scooted to the side and Seven sat between us, her hip bumping me. She leaned forward, gathering her hair and tying it up on her head.

“Cool tattoo,” Leech said, looking at Seven’s back.

“Why, thank you.”

“Let me see,” I said.

Seven turned, revealing a carved-looking Chaac with squarish eyes and beak. “I got it to hide my cryo scar,” said Seven. “If you look close at the eyes and nose, you can see the white line.”

“Oh yeah.” I saw what she meant. There was a horizontal line of scar tissue, maybe ten centimeters long, between her shoulder blades. The black center line of each rectangular eye, and the top line of the square nose went right over it.

“Mine’s like that,” said Leech. He turned and pointed toward a similar faint line on his back.

Seven nodded to my midsection. “What’s your scar from?”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the little line just above my shorts, “It’s pretty lame. I had a hernia. Why do cryos have scars?”

“That’s where they put in the tubes,” said Leech, “to prep your organs and stuff.”

“Ah.” The lab beneath Eden flashed across my mind. “So why Chaac?”

“He’s the meat collector,” said Seven. “After a liberation, if a body’s not needed for wall duty, we take the body out to sea and sink it, to return the energy to nature, so it becomes part of the cycle. The trash sharks love it. Mother wanted me to get a tattoo of Tona, since he’s the one who takes the freed souls to the reed marshes of Tulana. That’s supposed to be the sacred part, what the death rite helps accomplish, but I think we’re all just meat, so Chaac’s the one I want watching my back. A little rebellion from the goddess!”

“Is Tulana like Heaven?” Leech asked.

“Not really. It’s not paradise. Souls go there to await reassignment. Like reincarnation. So it’s more like a purgatory. Actually, a lot of artists make it look kinda like Cryoland.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Blank,” said Leech, “a lot of white.”

“And there’s the dream,” said Seven. She looked at Leech. “Do you remember your cryo dream?”

“Yeah,” said Leech. “Strange.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“When they cryo you,” said Seven, “your brain freezes on kind of a single image or moment, like whatever you were dreaming about at the time you went under. And then, that’s the only thing on your mind for the whole time. You’re not actually thinking about it; it’s more like an impression, like a burn.

“Mine was this day from the week before the plague outbreak,” said Seven. “My whole family had gone to the beach. My two brothers and I played in the waves and the surf was high and Zane—that’s my older brother—he was surfing and he wiped out pretty bad. He hit the reef rocks and got all messed up and we had to fish him out. I’m not sure why it’s that image. Maybe because it was the last time we were together having fun, or because it was scary, or both. Who knows.”

“Mine was strange, too,” said Leech. He didn’t elaborate.

“The weirdest thing though,” said Seven, “is that I’m not even sure if that day at the beach actually happened, or if it’s just a dream my mind made up. Everything back before Cryo is foggy, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Leech.

“Dreams are weird,” I said. “I’ve been having one lately that’s totally freaky.”

“Could be your brain trying to tell you something,” said Seven. “I think our brains are kinda like this well.” She pointed at the water with her chin. “There’s the stuff on the surface where the light gets to, but then there’s all the deeper stuff that we can’t even see. I think dreams try to help us out sometimes by fishing up the things that have sunk too deep, that we’ve forgotten about, to show us, but they can’t tell us what it all means, so it’s like a collage, and we’re supposed to figure it out.”

“That’s a cool thought,” I said. I wondered about my own dream: Was the girl in the ash trying to tell me something? If my brain was collaging, what was it trying to get me to see?

“Whatever. Dream talk is dumb,” said Leech. “I’m going back to the ledge.” He slid into the water.

I sat there by Seven for a minute. She was quiet, knees to her chest, undoing and rebraiding her hair.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“Sorry,” she said. She was staring at the water, its swells making her green irises ripple. “Talking about Cryo, about the past, just makes me sad.”

“Because of your family?” I asked.

Seven shrugged. “There’s nothing like being grabbed out of your time, out of your life, and plugged in forty years later to make you realize that you have no importance. That’s one thing I think the Good Mother’s got right. We’re all just minute parts of nature. We’re made to grow and spawn and die. We think we’re the most important thing in the universe while we’re alive, but really each of us is just a little spike on a heart monitor, one of a trillion beats, little fluttering bursts of energy, that’s it.” She waved her hand. “These are just the anthills and we’re the ants and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar.” Her eyes stayed deep in the well. “Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“Sometimes,” I said, but I wasn’t actually sure that I had. I could see what she was saying, and I’d considered it before—the idea that I was only one of billions of people who had lived and would live, and we were only one planet in a vast universe, but . . . I thought about this morning, about the death rites. “I don’t know if that makes it pointless,” I said. “I think there’s still a point. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I feel like there has to be one.”

Seven shrugged. “Maybe for you. You have family. This is your time. It’s where you’re supposed to make your little blip on the monitor, the one that leads to the next blip and on and on. Not me, though.”

“Come on,” I said. “What about our Atlantean purpose?”

Seven laughed quietly. “Yeah, there’s that. That
is
something, I guess.”

“Something?” I said. “It’s everything. I mean, think about it. You do have a purpose. Maybe
this
is actually your place, and you’re supposed to make your blip on the monitor here. Maybe it’s not an accident, and all the random things that seemed to lead to now are actually part of a design, a plan. . . .” These thoughts were kind of surprising me as I said them. But I felt like I really did believe it. “And like you said, it’s better than the other options.”

Seven finally reeled her gaze in from the depths and looked at me. “Listen to you, all inspirational. You sound almost . . . religious. Like being an Atlantean really is divine.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, “but I do know that I never felt like I mattered, or like anything I did would be important. But now . . . I’m feeling like maybe it will be. People believe in us, people are counting on you, me, and
that
guy.” I cocked a thumb at Leech. “And now all we need to do is do it.” I liked these thoughts. Maybe part of my job as the Aeronaut was to get everyone on board.

“I like it, flyboy,” said Seven, and she sounded almost tired as she said it but she also smiled, and slipped her hand into mine. I wondered at the hand holding—another friend thing? But then I saw a tear slipping down her cheek. Her face didn’t move as it happened, she just blinked.

“What’s up?” I asked. I squeezed her hand.

“I was not expecting someone like you to come along,” said Seven. “When I thought about Atlanteans arriving I pictured strapping mermen or something.” She laughed.

“Thanks?” I said.

She looked at me. “That would have been a lot easier to deal with than this.”

“Ha,” I said, while thinking,
This? Like “us”?
I made a little show of flexing my completely unstrapping biceps, but then Seven’s hand was pulling mine and when I looked up, she was leaning toward me, eyes growing, coming at my face. . . .

There was no time to move . . . or was there? But I didn’t. And then she’d grabbed my face in both her hands. Her nose rubbed across my cheek and her lips pressed into mine. . . .

I pulled away, and it had only been a second and part of me wondered if that really counted as a kiss. Seven let me go, and smiled at me and I knew that, yes, it had counted, no matter how taken off guard I’d been. There had still been that second when I could have moved.

She smiled. “Sorry,” she said.

“Oh, it’s—” I stammered, “I mean, no, I—”

“Not for that,” said Seven, her eyes narrowing. “For this.”

She shoved me off the rock. My back slapped the water and then I was under. I heard a second splash and opened my eyes to see Seven knifing past me into the dark.

I hung there for a moment, suspended beneath the surface, kind of stunned, trying to wrap my brain around what had just happened, and how I felt about it: shocked, amazed . . . excited?

I kicked up to the surface, breaking back into air, and I held my face up to the sun. The heat of the bright, the chill of the water, and a swirling storm inside me, causing shivers and thoughts and no thoughts, too. I had a feeling like all of this was
a lot
, and confusing, and yet I also felt . . . alive.

My eyes adjusted to the bright from above and I saw heads peering down at us from an observation point at the top of the stairs. Had they seen the gods kiss? Did they approve?

There were faces of all ages up there, but I noticed one that was familiar—

Our gaze locked but then she turned and disappeared.

Lilly.

My insides sank, the stormy feelings all suddenly freezing, locking me up. How had it looked, from up there? Could she tell I’d been taken by surprise?

But had I? And it never would have happened if Lilly had been here. But she wasn’t here. Hadn’t wanted to be here, and someone had moved into that free space, created by the distance . . .

“Owen! You gotta try this!” I spied Leech up on the high ledge. He tossed himself off, plummeting into the water.

Seven was making her way up the ledges to the same spot. She looked down at me, smiling like nothing had happened. “Come on, flyboy!”

I could stay here, treading water and worrying about what Lilly had seen or what she was thinking, or I could go try to find her and explain or . . .

“Dude . . .” Leech was beside me. “Come on, have some fun.”

“Yeah.” I swam to the ledge and started climbing after Leech. I would find Lilly later, I decided. Right now, I just wanted to stay with my team.

I climbed, I jumped, at first clumsily, and then with more success. Eventually I even tried a dive. We applauded each other, and laughed, and there were no more deep conversations or surprise kisses, just careless hours as the afternoon passed, and I didn’t think about what was ahead or behind us, or about Lilly or my mom or anything. I just had fun, being a god at play.

EVENTUALLY, WE LEFT THE WELL AND WANDERED THE market off the main plaza. Wherever we went, a bubble of awe and whispers formed around us, the Three, walking among the people. They saluted us, offered us things for free, our guards sometimes holding them back; and the more it happened, the more I felt at ease with it, like, yes, this was who we were.