The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (45 page)

But they were fast, much faster than they’d been. Hands clutched at the side of the craft, yanking us to the side. Tattered hands, the skin shredded from tearing through glass and bodies.

I grabbed the wet sail lines, stabbed at the pedals, and we banked hard right, out away from the pyramid edge. The craft bucked and we were dragged back left. It was a boy, maybe twelve, his elbows on the edge of the craft, hanging on. His eyes were filmy but blue, and he had once had a delicate face with wavy black hair. His bloodstained teeth gnashed at me. His hand reached out, grabbed my shirt.

I flinched away and kicked as hard as I could, crushing his face. He toppled free. I wondered as he fell, had he been a candidate? Did he have the cursed genes like me? Had he been promised that he would wake up to a better future, that he would help save the world?

There was a tattered scream. I looked back at the platform and saw the horde swarming over Victoria.

More bodies were coming up the steps, reaching what was maybe their final destination. Their programming seemed to run out at this point, and aside from the ones crowded around Victoria, the rest were just milling around dumbly, bumping into each other.

I rose higher, buffeted by rain and wind. Banks of smoke began to obscure our view, but I got one more glimpse and there, in the fray, lit by the fires of the burning city, I saw a little face on the pyramid roof, one last time: Elissa.

My sister, blank and plague filled, dead but risen—into my mind and also into a dark world full of horrors, the horrors of gods like Paul.

A gust reeking of fire and death caught the sails and we began to accelerate away. I craned my neck, squinting in the rain, watching Elissa fade from view, lost among the shuffling bodies and smoke, lost to me, again.

We arced out over the city walls, through the swirling storm, away from Desenna, over the black jungle. I guided us out of the thunderstorm, and sped over the coastline. Below, waves made beautiful foam brushstrokes on the luminous sand. Above, a universe of stars glittered.

“Hey.” Lilly’s hand landed on my shoulder and I finally felt myself start to collapse.

“Like this,” I said, demonstrating how to move the pedals and the sail lines.

“I’ve been watching,” she said. “I’ll get the hang of it. South, right?”

“Right. And if the copters come—”

“I’ll tell you.”

It was time now. For everything I had seen, everything I now knew, to sink in. I collapsed into the hull, and let it all pull me under.

MOM AND SISTER DON’T LIKE SOCCER LIKE DAD AND
I do, but they know it’s part of the Tuesday night ritual. Dad will be late from the plant, Mom, too, from the clothing redistributor, so it is up to Elissa and me to get the pizza ready. We quarrel over who gets to knead the dough, but I’m older so I win. There’s not a lot of room in the apartment kitchen, so I roll it on the floor
.

As I work, I feel something falling on me, and I look up and sly Elissa is dripping millet flour down on my head. “You look like an old man!” She laughs, but then she starts to cough
.

I know to pause our fun, to get her inhaler. I hurry to the table, bring it back, and sit her on the step stool, her face dusted in flour. I help her squeeze and breathe. I rub her back
.

“Breathe in . . .” I say, “and out.”

“Breathe.”

“Come on, breathe.”

I shifted, hearing Lilly’s voice. I was half-awake, eyes closed, letting the memories stitch themselves back into place in my brain. There were gaps—these pieces I was getting back were like single cans of food on otherwise empty shelves—but they were something.

I sat up. Everything hurt, my body stiff. Rectangles of faint gray light painted brown walls. We were in a room. It was sometime close to dawn. The light was coming in through an empty space that used to be sliding glass balcony doors.

We’d landed on the roof of the abandoned hotel in the predawn. We climbed down onto the balcony of this room on the top floor. It had been some kind of suite, a hundred years ago. There was an impossibly wide bed, a giant bath, ornate furniture. None of the plumbing worked, chunks of plaster had fallen off the walls, and the bed looked damp and infested.

So we slept on the floor, which was covered with enough sand from years of storms that it was nearly like sleeping on a beach. We slept well, for a little while.

But now Lilly was with Leech, on the balcony. I got up slowly. The night before seemed distant, hazy, and there was more work to do in my head. I felt like I was going to need weeks, years, maybe the rest of my life, to put myself back together. Right now, though, Leech needed our help.

I stepped through the windowless door. It was hard to say what floor we were on—the rest of the building was underwater. There was a gentle sound as waves plunked around in the room below ours. Our balcony hung out over the sea. The coast was a few hundred meters behind us. It was amazing that this building had even stayed standing.

Leech was lying on a recliner chair. There had been two overturned and heaped in the corner of the deck, held there by a rusted chain and padlock, and the foam cushions of one had been pinned behind them. As we’d been coming in the night before, Leech had asked us to put him there, so he could watch the stars.

We didn’t argue. There was nothing more we could do for him. We all knew it.

We’d flipped over the chair, wrung out the cushion, and laid Leech there. We wrapped him in the fuzzy pink blanket we’d gotten at the Walmart. He had been shaking all over, arms, legs—blood loss or cryo sickness, probably both. And then he told us to get some rest and so we did.

He was still shaking now, and his breathing was paper thin.

Lilly had her hands on Leech’s chest. “Go slow,” she said. “Just try to get a breath in.”

He seemed to nod, and closed his eyes to try. There was a sound like wind whistling through a crack in a door.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said to him, knowing it was a lie, wondering why people always lied at times like this. I tried to pull the blanket up higher over his shoulders, but it was stuck in place by dried blood. There was a sand-speckled puddle of it on the floor.

Leech’s hand reached out and grabbed mine. His cold fingers gripped my wrist. I met his eyes, his squinty brown eyes, bloodshot now, his freckles so dark against his pale skin. “D—did Paul say why?” he asked.

Why had they shot him? How could they no longer need him when he was one of the Three? I shook my head. Hating it. “No,” I said. “They took your sextant and your sketches, but . . . no.”

Another wicked shudder wracked Leech, and he seemed to nod. “Wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “Cryo sickness was going to get me anyway. It was only a matter of time . . . I’m glad I found Isaac. In my cryo dream we were playing Monopoly. We played for hours when we wanted to stay out of Dad’s way.”

I remembered him leading games in our cabin. “I’m sorry,” I said uselessly, “about everything.”

“No,” said Leech, “don’t be. I should have told you more, told you everything, from the start at camp. We didn’t have to be enemies, could have been a team, could have gotten out sooner and made it farther and . . .”

“We were a team,” I said to him. “You saved me last night.”

“You saved me first,” said Leech.

“Then we’re even.” I reached out and gripped his fist. “Friends?”

Leech kind of laughed. It looked like it hurt. “Sure.” His other hand slapped on top of mine. Our eyes met. “You have to stop them,” he said.

“We will,” I said, a lump growing in my throat, “but we need to know where to go. Where the next marker is.”

Leech nodded. “South,” he said. “If you . . . paper . . .” He was shaking too much, his mouth still moving but the words lost.

“I’ll look,” said Lilly. She went inside.

Leech started tapping his leg. “Pen . . .”

I fished his pen out of his pocket and pressed it against his palm.

“Here.” Lilly returned with some damp, stained stationary. It said
La Tortuga de Oro
at the top in gold lettering, with a script sketch of a turtle among waves.

I held the pad out for Leech. He took a deep, pained breath and then, he tried to draw. He made what looked like a coastline, but then his hand devolved into shaking, and the pen made erratic black strokes.

“Damn!” he shouted. He tried again, more shaking. Scribbles where he’d once been able to make such intricate art. He slapped the paper away and hurled the pen off the balcony. He stared desperately up at the sky, blinking tears, looking betrayed. “I—”

He seemed to freeze midbreath. His eyes slipped back in his head. He slumped down. I put a hand over his chest. All was still.

“No,” I said quietly. It wasn’t fair. Leech didn’t deserve this fate. How did he deserve any of what had happened to him? And now that he was gone, what chance did we have?

Lilly leaned over him, tears falling, and kissed his forehead. When she stood back, she took a deep breath and started to sing. Her voice sprang to life in the pure note that I had heard inside her skull, the song of the Medium, this high, lilting tone, only Lilly knew more of it than I’d heard, loops and darts, a melody of the ancients, of the sea, of the wind—

And of light.

The white glow began to light the horizon, illuminating the folds of haze. I looked up and watched it grow. The horizon brightening with the eerie white . . .

And then she appeared.

The siren dissolved into being beside us, hovering just beyond the balcony. Lilly was still singing, eyes closed and swaying.

Owen
, said the siren. She reached out her hand, like she wanted mine.

But I didn’t respond. So much reality had been undone for me, I’d already considered that the siren had never even been real, that she was just a part of the damage done to my mind. The fact that she was back now only made me wonder again . . .

You asked me what I am
, said the siren.

I had.

But you know what I am, in your heart
.

Did I? I considered the song, the light on the horizon.
You’re . . . the Terra. Aren’t you?

Yes. I am the living earth. I am the nexus of Qi and An
.

So
, I said,
you’re like . . . a god?

The Terra almost seemed to smile
. I am before the gods. There will be time for questions. Now, I need you to take my hand, before the Mariner is gone
.

I reached out and placed my hand in hers. I didn’t expect it to even feel like anything, but it was solid, her grip tight. With her other hand, she reached over to Leech, and touched two fingers to his forehead.

And I felt a strange opening in myself, a widening of knowledge, as if information was being given to me, uploaded. I saw maps. I saw two coastlines where there was one, I saw compass directions overlaying one another . . . I was seeing Leech’s thoughts, the Terra giving them to me.

And I saw the way to the marker, high in the Andes.

The Terra moved her hand away.
There. You can make the journey now. I will see you when you arrive
.

Arrive?
I asked.
Where?

In the white realm
. The Terra winked out. Lilly had stopped singing. She was gazing at me. “I saw her. The siren. That was her, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s the Terra. She helped me see how to get to the marker. She gave me Leech’s knowledge of it.”

Lilly’s eyebrow cocked. “The Terra. And she
spoke
to you? Gave you Leech’s Mariner knowledge? I didn’t hear her say anything . . . and you’ve also been inside my skull, even though you’re technically the Aeronaut. Can you explain all that?”

“Not yet,” I said. Lilly was still looking at me, worried. “What?”

“There was something else down in the temple,” she said. “Another part of the inscription. Seven could read some of it but not all. Remember those other symbols?”

“Yeah.” I said. “You could read them?” Lilly nodded. “What did it say?”

Lilly pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “I wrote it down as soon as I got back.” She unfolded the paper. “It said: ‘And when the Three have been truly revealed, they will return, to defend against the masters. And yet has not this journey been made before? Over and again the cycle repeats, and so we must be wary of the Terra’s patience. For if we fail her too often, she may make plans of her own.’” Lilly looked at me. “What do you think that means?”

I just shook my head. “I don’t know . . . do you think I’m part of the Terra’s plan?”

“Maybe. It seems like everyone has a plan of their own.”

“Great,” I said.

“Yeah.” Lilly looked back at Leech. “Good-bye, Carey,” she said. She put her hand on his, lying on his stomach.

I put mine on hers. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything. Maybe there was nothing to say.

Around us, seagulls called. The wind kicked up frothy waves that started to smack the building, misting us with salty spray that smelled like oil. The first rays of sun speared through the mist, and when the waves crashed against the building, the sun and the oil made brilliant rainbows. It was a beautiful day on the ruined earth.