The Far Dawn (30 page)

That we are the comet dust cryo patients of the big bang.

We are nature
, someone said.

That we, each, are alive in this moment, together, not alone.

And I feel like I am a part of everyone and all things at once and forever.

Wind in our faces. Flying free.

27

FOR A WHILE.

Owen.

There is a small light in the distance, a pale blue, struggling through the murk.

Good-bye,
it whispers.

I blink. Pressure against my eyes. A blur of green.

Water.

The view upward wobbles. There are blocky shapes and lines that vibrate in the waves like strings.

A dock.

Lane lines.

Above, there is light and a pattern of triangular lines, some enormous structure, like a curving ceiling or . . .

A dome.

Slippery plants coil around my legs, slide along my arms. The water is cold, but a fake kind of cold, perfectly controlled.

Something reflects in the water. That blue glow. I move my head, and at the same time become suddenly aware of the pressure on my lungs.

A shape emerges from the greenish-brown water, swimming toward me. Large, globe-like eyes and a shimmering body.

A siren—

Or, a fish. A big, fat, fish.

They're just big dopes
, she said. Or did she?

Zombie koi.

In Lake Eden.

But . . . how can I be here?

The fish regards me. I wave my arms, which feel so weak, so spent, and the movement startles the beast. It darts backward, its tail stirring up a cloud of brown particles, creating camouflage. After sizing me up for another moment, the fish decides I'm not worth the trouble and slips away into the gloom.

The pressure in my chest increases. Have to breathe. Need air. There has been no air for—
weeks
—too long and the body can only survive like four minutes without oxygen, I read it in a book, but my hernia—
cryo scar
 . . . strange thoughts, memories or dreams, I can't tell, keep bleeding in—is cramping and I should never have taken that stupid swim test.

I scan the surface, looking for a streak of red on the dock. For Lilly. She needs to see me, needs to know I drowned. She's a lifeguard, the only one who can save me from this foolish choice.

But the dock is still. Little waves from the breeze make the lane lines shimmer, but that's all. No one swimming. No one splashing.

The need to breathe is overwhelming.
Go ahead, just use your gills
. But those are gone. Or were they ever there to begin with? But I have to breathe
now
or I'm going to drown—

No. I slam my hands down on the lake bottom and push myself up. I get my feet under me and thrust against the muck as hard as I can. I will not just lie down here and die, a pathetic turtle—
Ana
—on its back. I can save myself.

I shoot upward, through the brown and green and toward the mirror top of the lake, my chest ready to explode, kicking, cramp burning, and I burst free, my face into the air, sucking in a breath and slapping my arms against the surface to keep from dunking under again.

I squint in the light of the SafeSun lamps. It seems harsher than it had been, when we came down to the dock for the test. And where are my cabinmates? Leech? Beaker? Bunsen?

My ribs ache and I nearly slip back under, but ahead of me is the giant blue side of the trampoline raft. Just have to get there. I kick and thrash my arms, never the best swimmer to begin with.
I never should have taken this test!
but that still seems wrong. . . .

I grab the yellow ropes that stripe the sides, trying to pull myself up.

Just launch out of the water.
The thought passes by but it makes no sense. More strange memories, or are they dreams? I can't tell. Right now I need to keep kicking, to drag myself up onto the rubber, but my cramp is killing me, and I'm starting to get that tingling in my legs, like I do when the pain is overwhelming and they shut down, and my fingers slip from the rough ropes. I'm sliding back in . . .

Hands lock on my wrists.

“Grab on to me.”

I do and I pull and kick and am yanked up, belly whining against the rubber, and I'm on the raft, in a puddle of lake water.

I roll over on my back, gasping. And then bolt up to face my savior.

Lilly.

She is sitting back on her heels. Lilly Ishani, lifeguard and one of the CITs here at camp. “You okay?” she asks, breathless.

“Yeah,” I say, “thanks for saving me.”
Lilly saves me. I don't drown.

Lilly dies in the ice
.

Thoughts are lining up out of order, new, old, real, imagined. “I—” I start to say.

Lilly stares at me. Her eyes are huge, clear, seeing me. I realize now that she is soaking wet. And wearing jeans and a tank top and sweatshirt, all filthy, not her red lifeguard bathing suit. I look down and see that I am in gray pants and an olive-green shirt.

Lilly nods over my shoulder. “We're here.”

The docks are empty. So is the beach. The play fields of Camp Eden silent, no movement on the hilltop by the dining hall. No flag waving on the flagpole.

I turn and see a plume of gray smoke in the direction of the EdenWest city. Above, no TruSky or SimClouds, the SafeSun lamps naked and fake. There are cracks in the dome. Some burned-out panels have fallen away, revealing triangles of lethal blue sky.

As I gaze from one to the next, I notice the tiny square in my vision.

The eye I traded for a chance to bring Lilly back . . .

Okay
. My thoughts quiet.

It all happened.

And this is real . . . unless . . . I stare hard at my hand, and poke it. Solid. We are not inside a skull.

Lilly coughs. I turn back to her. She's wringing out her hair. “Why did I wake up on the bottom of a lake?” she wonders.

“This is where the Terra left us,” I say. “Given some of the places we've been, it's not so bad.” As I say this, though, my brain finally starts to catch up to my racing heart. “We . . . but, Lilly, you . . .”

She gazes at me, and seems like she's about to speak, but tears fall instead.

Lilly is here. The Terra . . .

What do you wish?

I stumble toward her on my knees, the raft bouncing us awkwardly, and I almost fall over—

But I reach her.

I reach her and I grab her and hold her as tight as I can. I feel her breath on my neck and her wet hair against my face and it's Lilly, it's Lilly, it's Lilly.

Alive.

The wind seems to speak.
Thank you, Owen
.

And this is really me?
I ask.
And this is really Lilly . . .

Yes.

And why are we here?

This is the place where you chose to be true, to the Terra, to yourself. And you have been true, Owen. Now, live well.

And I know then that the Terra will never speak to me again. But she doesn't have to. I will hear her. Her music has returned to us all.

“You okay?” Lilly asks, as if she should be the one asking such a thing.

Except then I realize that I have hitched up, breath stuck, and that tears are spilling out, though only from my one eye.

“I love you,” I say.

She breathes long and slow. “Tenth time,” she says.

I will never know how she heard the seventh through the ninth.

“I love you, too.”

We hug for a while. We kiss so hard we bang teeth, and we both taste like lake water.

“Also,” Lilly says, “we kinda did it, didn't we?”

“Yeah,” I say, looking around. “Somehow, we did.” A flood of adrenaline washes through me, a mix of relief, happiness, guilt. “There's so much that happened. And the choices I made, things I want to say . . .” And these thoughts are just a door to so much more, the things I did, the people we lost . . . “If it hadn't been for you,” I say, “I don't know if—”

Lilly puts a finger to my lips. “Later. Maybe.”

“Okay.”

We kiss again and I pull back just enough to glance toward shore. “Where are we going to go?” I remember the reports of this Eden having a revolt. Will the camp or the city be safe to get supplies? And where to after that? We could look for Nomads or head north. We could make for Yellowstone, try to find out if my parents are alive.

And who will we be in this new world? I feel different inside. Is everyone feeling this? This sense of
belonging
? And how will we all react? The wars, the devastation, even the selectees on
Egress
 . . . what will happen now?

Lilly shrugs. “We'll go somewhere,” she says. “Sometime.” She takes my hand. “But later.”

We lie back on the warm raft, and let our heads hang off the edge, our hands entwined, our shoulders and hips touching. We stare up at the ceiling of the dome, at the Eye, at the holes to the sky. Outside is the new world, but for now we are here.

The SafeSun dries our clothes and makes us shut our eyes, and we fall in and out of sleep, and kiss again later, and lie there some more.

“Now is what I want,” I say.

We listen to the plunks of water beneath the raft and to the rustle of the leaves as desert breezes howl through the cracks in the walls. We listen to our breaths amplified by the raft, and smell the metallic brown of the lake, and feel the heat of the rubber, and we watch as a butterfly drops down and regards us with its camera eye, and all of it is music, and we feel like forever, and we never feel alone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF ON THIS PAGE BECAUSE you read this whole series, thank you. If at any point during the journey you dropped me a line or wrote a review or took a moment to tell me what you thought, thank you five times more. You helped me to make this the best it could be. If I could charter a seaworthy vessel and take you all on a trip to Antarctica, believe me, done deal.

Also thanks to Katherine and Katie and everyone at Harper, to George and Caitlin and the team at Sterling Lord, to my friends and family and the librarians and booksellers and teachers who have been so generous. I had a blast. I hope you did, too.

FACT or FANTASY

in the Atlanteans series
By Kevin Emerson

 

I'm a big fan of science fiction and fantasy. How big? I can't make fish sticks without calling them fish fingers and custard, I refer to the night sky as “the black,” and I always make time for second breakfast (well, technically more like elevenses). I was also a K–8 science teacher for many years, and a biology major in college. So, I love writing stories that blend both real science concepts and fantasy elements.

In the Atlanteans series, I got to explore so many cool ideas! While many parts of the series are pretty obviously fantasy, there are a number of interesting science concepts at work. So the question is: which ones are which? To find out, let's play FACT OR FANTASY! And any words that you see in
bold
are definitely worth looking up to learn more!

 

QUESTION #1:

In
The Lost Code
, Owen and others at camp spontaneously grow gills. Is this possibility FACT or FANTASY?

ANSWER: This is FANTASY, but there are four interesting concepts I was thinking about:

 

1. Gill Slits:
Human embryos do have structures that look like gills, and these are called gill slits. These, of course, do not develop into gills, and so scientists are debating whether it is even accurate to call them this. Still, some people think these gill slits are a leftover echo of the long-ago animals we evolved from, kind of like how we have a
vestigial tail
.

2. Junk DNA:
Later, Owen is told that the Atlantean skull activated parts of his “dormant” or “junk” DNA and is making his evolutionary clock spin out of control. This is what caused him to grow gills. Triggering such changes is fantasy, too, but we do have large areas of our DNA that seem to be inactive, and there is a lot of speculation as to what “dormant” genes do or did. I wanted to play with the concept that our DNA is our connection to the past, almost like a history book of how we evolved.

3. Metamorphosis:
Later in the book, when Lilly thinks about how Owen's gills came and went so quickly, she refers to how some frogs can go through a metamorphosis from gill breathers to lung breathers in only twenty-four hours. This really happens! There are a number of other animals (notably insects) that perform such feats. This concept also served a theme in the book about how our bodies change without our control (you may have noticed that Owen's gill-growing happens right about the time that teens experience many bodily changes). Those changes affect who we are, what role we play in a community (like the camp kids), and how we see ourselves.

4. Selective Pressure:
Finally, there is a concept called selective pressure, which has to do with how the environment causes species to change. Since the world in the Atlanteans is changing so rapidly, I wanted to touch on this idea that after we change the environment, the environment might change us.

 

QUESTION #2:

In
The Lost Code
, the earth has suffered from the Great Rise. Owen describes many facets of this: oceans rising, wars, plagues. Obviously the Great Rise is in the future, but is the possibility of such a thing based in FACT or FANTASY?

ANSWER: Obviously the Great Rise that has destroyed the world in the Atlanteans is something I imagined happening in the future and is not real, but most of the concepts behind the Rise are FACT. (That said, it's extremely unlikely that they would all happen simultaneously over the next fifty years! The Great Rise is like a “perfect storm” of climate catastrophe.) Still, let's talk about the four main concepts behind the Great Rise: