The Lost Code (11 page)

He turned and sauntered up the path. Jalen and Noah looked a little surprised, and hurried after him.

Beaker and I trudged out of the water and started after the group.

“Should we tell Todd?” said Beaker.

“No,” I said. “That would just make things worse.”

I was damp all morning as we put on harnesses and helmets and crossed rope lines from one tree to the next. I stayed away from Leech but I watched him. He couldn’t do the ropes because his hand was still bandaged. He seemed back to his normal self, not angry, just grinning annoyingly and even bouncing the rope really hard one time when Todd wasn’t looking so that Bunsen fell off.

But the way he’d reacted to me talking about the DI . . . Maybe Leech’s being in tight with Paul meant he knew more about that stuff, and other things, too, like about us gill breathers. If there was one thing about Leech, it was that he seemed like he was observant, always looking for the detail that he could use against you later. But he was also cunning enough not to reveal what he knew. Did he know some of my secret? Did he suspect as much as the CITs did about what was going on here, or did he maybe know even more?

THE DAY DRAGGED ENDLESSLY UNTIL THAT NIGHT
, when I was back on the raft with my people. We’d been swimming for a while, and now a mellow quiet had settled over everyone. We were lying in our arrangement of spokes, feet to the center. I had my head hanging back just a bit off the edge of the raft, so that I could feel the evening breeze on my Adam’s apple. I stared up at the foggy projection of the moon, nearing full now. I imagined Aaron up there in the Eye, changing some setting to make it grow. It made me wonder if this moon was synched up to what the actual moon was doing, outside. And if not, if it was just Aaron’s whim, what was that doing to the animals in here? Creatures had navigation and cycles linked to the moon. There were theories that people did, too. Was it messing with all of our balance on some deep, primeval level?

I’d been waiting for a good time to ask the CITs if they’d seen anything like that siren. I still wondered if it was just something in my head, though, and I didn’t want to sound all weird and crazy. Besides, we’d been busy having fun, and now they were trading stories about their past lives and it was Lilly’s turn.

“I remember the last day of water,” she said. “I was eight, I think. It was January and, like, a hundred and five degrees. We woke up early ’cause we only had until one p.m. At one, Las Vegas was shutting down for good. They had already drained Lake Mead so low that the pumps were pulling in mostly silt. Just about everyone had left, heading north toward the HZ. My dad worked for the city, so we were part of, like, the last thousand people, there to close the coffin lid.

“We’d been packing for days, but then right before we left, I took a walk around our yard. We had a saguaro cactus in our backyard, but even it was brown and dead. Did you guys ever see those things? They were giant, built for so little water, but now we had even less. We’d had a pool, but it had been dry for a couple years, and the bottom had filled with sand ripples. I remember looking inside and thinking about how, like, in ten thousand years, some new humans, or whatever humans become, were going to come along and they were going to dig down into the new layers of earth and maybe all they would find would be this pool, this curvy cement thing, and, like, what would they think it was? Who would they think we were, or what our culture was, based on that?”

“Gill people,” said Marco. “And those were our water houses.”

“Ha,” said Lilly. “So anyway, the lawn was dried and gone, and it would crunch and disintegrate under my toes. From the back of the yard, I could see what was left of the Strip, you know, all those casinos that used to light up the sky so you couldn’t see the stars. They’d had this big closing party, like a festival really, that ended up getting out of control and going on for weeks, with all the Blazers coming in and going on this bender of booze and sex and gambling and everything.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Blazers were people, back when the Rise was really starting to hit, who decided that life was doomed, that everything was going to hell, so they just came to Vegas with everything they had left and tried to go out in a blaze of glory. Basically kill themselves. But it got so crazy it led to the Strip Fire, when ten of the casinos burned and people were dancing and throwing themselves into the flames and a lot of other terrible things you’d hear about. We stayed away from the Strip, but I remember being able to see the fire from my window, watching it go for days, and almost thinking it was beautiful. I mean, not actually beautiful but . . . you know how you feel like if the world is going to end, you want to be there to see it? You want to know what comes next?”

“Totally,” said Marco.

“It was like that. ’Course what came next was lighting our own house on fire.”

“You had to burn all your stuff?” Aliah asked.

“No, but most of it. You didn’t have to burn your house, but there was a citywide initiative not to leave too much fuel for wildfires, or possessions that might encourage vandals. Back then, there were reports of Nomad groups starting to organize, too, and word was they would comb over the abandoned towns, gathering supplies. For some reason, that bothered some people a lot. They didn’t want their things being taken by anyone else. But then there were other people who couldn’t bear to burn their stuff, like doing that was somehow burning their identity. It was like your things were somehow you. I’m not saying it didn’t suck to get rid of my bed, most of my clothes, stuffed animals, and all that, but I’m glad my parents decided to burn it. We’d backed up all our photos and videos and filled the trunk of the car with clothes and camping supplies for the drive north, and so it was kind of poetic, how by burning we were helping the earth recycle itself or something.

“We all stood at the end of the driveway, crowded around the incendiary line. Dad gave my brother, Anton, the match, but he didn’t want to do it, so he gave it to me. Then, just before I did, Mom freaked out and ran back inside and she came out with this dumb little lamp that was shaped like a palm tree, that I guess she’d gotten in college or something, and she was crying and was like, ‘Please can we just take this too?’

“Dad said okay, and then I lit the line and watched the spark go bounding up the driveway like a little freed animal, and then it hit the dead shrubs, and leaped to the baseboards, the front door, and then the house went up. We watched it burn and Mom cried and Dad kept saying over and over that it would be all right.”

“That must have been hard,” I said.

Lilly laughed. “I think I kinda liked it. Watching it all burn? I don’t know, it was . . . exciting. I mean, it was where I spent my whole life, and then suddenly all of it was being reduced to a thin layer of ash. I guess I should have been sad, but it didn’t even feel like we had a right to it anymore, you know? Who were we to get some house with eight rooms and two bathrooms and water and electricity that just magically appeared if you turned a knob or flipped a switch? Already, lots of people were living without that stuff, and we’d watch the news about the fighting and the riots up north and the mass suicides in Lagos, and my dad would say it could be worse.”

“You don’t miss it?” I asked.

“Nah,” said Lilly, like she was certain she didn’t. “Well, but it was strange. I mean, I was only eight, so I think I just assumed we’d get to have a new home pretty soon. But then we traveled north, spent a couple years in Calgary living in this one-room apartment where you shared a bathroom with the whole floor, and waiting for the war to calm down and for our ACF immigration papers to get processed. And things were bad there, and getting worse around the world, and then Mom started getting sick, and Anton took off and . . . that was when my parents decided to put me in here. . . .” She paused. Her voice had gotten heavier at that last part. When she continued, she was quieter. “And it was weird to wake up and have everything be perfect, you know? To be in this place. I felt like I’d missed out on the life I was supposed to have, almost like I’d died, and like this was the afterlife. Like I got cheated.”

“You were lucky,” said Evan. It sounded like he was trying to be sensitive. They seemed to have a truce in place tonight, but I still wondered if this would be the comment to break it.

“Right,” she said quietly.

Silence passed over us. I wanted to ask her about what had happened to her brother, what it was like to say good-bye to her parents, but I wasn’t sure if she’d want to talk about it, and the CITs probably already knew.

There was a white flash in the sky behind us, and a low rumble, like thunder. “What was that?” I asked, leaning my head back off the trampoline. Another bolt of white lightning appeared, zigzagging from straight above us over toward the hills. Thunder rolled around the dome. I had an urge to head for cover, like I was back home and lightning rains were coming.

“It’s particle de . . . ,” said Marco. “De-um . . .”

“Deionization,” finished Lilly.

“Nerd,” said Aliah.

I stretched my neck to look over at Lilly. “What’s that?”

“The solar radiation hitting the dome all day causes charged particles to build up,” she said. “The lightning burns it off. There’s that big antenna hanging below the Eye, and then a tower over behind Mount Aasgard.”

Another bolt flashed.

“It’s cool,” I said. “Safe lightning.”

“Yeah,” Lilly agreed.

We all watched and waited. There was one more flash, and that was it.

“Hey, Owen.” It was Marco. “Do you guys still have holotech out there in the Hub?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just, like, at the rec center, though. Not in our houses like I heard it used to be.”

“I heard they still have full-on holotech communities up north,” said Evan. “Even the porn ones.”

“Pervert,” said Lilly.

“You bet.” Evan grinned.

“What’s it like?” Aliah asked.

“The porn?”

“No, yuck! I was talking to Owen. What’s it like living out there, in the present? Like, the real world, not our little bubble here.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It probably stinks, I guess, compared to here, or what you guys remember the world being like.”

“Eden is way better than what the world was like b-freeze,” said Evan. “Everything was going to hell, if it wasn’t there already.”

“Yeah, but at least it was real,” said Lilly.

Evan made a sound like he was maybe laughing to himself, but he didn’t say anything.

“Well,” I said, “out at Yellowstone, I mean, it’s not
that
bad, but we are underground most of the time, and you can’t really go anywhere. I feel like I live in a world right after the big party. Like, everything was amazing and alive and people were having the time of their lives way back when, and now when I live is like the next morning, and everything is broken and trashed, technology and ideas just lying around empty, and it’s like we missed it.”

“Yeah,” said Aliah, “and what about how I heard there’s a garbage patch out in the Pacific that’s so big that people live on it?”

“The Flotilla,” said Marco. “It sounds pretty cool, actually. Hey, we’d be rock stars out there, with our gills.”

“Come on,” said Evan. “They’d probably make us slaves for catching their food. At least here we get to do what we want.”

“Yeah, but, should we?” said Lilly.

“What do you mean?” asked Evan.

“I mean: Should we get to do what we want? Isn’t that how the whole planet got screwed? Because we thought we should be able to be, like, in holotech with our me-friends in Dubai, and eating sushi at a Mexican chain restaurant at the same time, while clothes we bought from bed were getting delivered to our front door? I mean, you know?”

“So you’re saying it’s bad to want things?” asked Evan. “It’s wrong to try to make things as good as they can be?”

“I don’t know, Eden boy,” Lilly snapped. The truce was over. “Why don’t you ask the six billion dead people?”

“It’s human nature,” said Evan.

“Part of it,” Lilly spat, “but not all of it. Some of it is selfish and reckless.”

“Honestly,” said Evan, “you’re a hypocrite. You live here in Eden. If you think it’s so
wrong
, why don’t you just leave?”

Lilly bolted up. “It wasn’t my choice to be here! It was my parents’, and they were just trying to protect me. Believe me, if I could get out of here, I would.”

“And do what?” said Evan.

Marco and Aliah giggled quietly to each other and then toppled back into the water. They’d apparently had enough of the argument.

“Something,” Lilly said, glaring at Evan. “More than the nothing you’re doing.”

“Whatever,” Evan muttered.

Lilly jumped up to her feet and started bouncing in the center of the raft. She looked at me. “Wanna swim? There’s a shipwreck.” She held out her hand.

“You’re taking him to the wreck?” Evan asked, clearly annoyed.

“Sure,” I said. I got up and took her hand and kept my gaze away from Evan as we bounced high and shot off into the deep.

It was a relief to be back in the water. The dark and cold pulled me into an embrace that seemed to make my skin irrelevant, like I was just a concentration of energy within a medium, and one with the world around me. I shoved air out of my lungs, a rebellion in bubbles, then flexed my throat and felt it seal off, felt my gills opening like windows slipping up, fresh breezes fluttering curtains.

Sinking through layers of deepening cold, losing sight. I arced back up to midlevel, the world of silhouettes where the MoonGlow died. I saw Lilly do the same. This was the depth, about five meters below the surface, where the primitive sinuses in our ears barely ached. I was dolphin kicking, just like in the butterfly stroke that drowned me, except not awkward at all when you were subsurface. It actually made my body a smooth wave within the fluid. It was the opposite of what you thought: muscles not taut and rigid, but loose, not fighting.

I swam toward Lilly and she darted left and spun a ring around me, a blur of trailing hair. I threw myself in a wild spin, trying to keep up with her, heard the chirps and vibrations of her strange fish laughter.

Then she was gone.

I looked around. Strained to see further in the dark. Behind me, I spied Marco and Aliah, floating in a tangle of each other beneath the raft.

Arms around my abdomen. Yanking me back. ‘Gotcha!’ My body pressing against Lilly’s. I felt an electric charge burn through me. Just as fast, she shoved me away, then swam around in front of me again. ‘The wreck is this way,’ she said.

I nodded. She took off ahead and I followed, working hard to keep up. She was fast, but I had been getting faster too, hour by hour, night by night.

Leaving the raft, we lost all contact with the earthly world. There was only black in all directions, and the fluid form of Lilly. As we swam, I spun onto my back, looking up through the shimmering glass surface at the projection of the moon and stars, here and there fractured by the geodesic superstructure of the dome.

I thought about what Lilly had said, how if we were something new, a new species, then there were thousands of miles of ocean where we could swim. Sure, there were the dead zones, the garbage gyres, the algae tides, and the gel-oil-plastics slick that made most of the coastlines useless. . . . But the ocean was massive. We could swim beneath the destruction until we found clean water, search the seas until we discovered the one archipelago where the surface was clear, the water blue, the coral still multicolored and the fish still the work of a fanciful God, not the gloom-and-doom Gods that seemed to be in charge now. Lilly and I could find that place and start over. Maybe even raise a gill family.