The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (10 page)

We hurtled upward in an arc, town far below us. The sails caught, then luffed again, and we were thrown into a wicked spin.

“I don’t know how it works!” Ripley screamed, through sobs.

I struggled to throw my leg over the side, but the spin was too strong. “Press back on the left pedal!” I shouted.

Ripley stabbed at the pedals. The spin relented for a second, and I was able to drag myself into the craft.

I got to my knees but fell into her. “Get off me!” she screamed. I felt something hot and wet through my shirt and I finally got a good look at Ripley. Her face, her arms, every inch of skin was covered in tiny, oozing spots, little red holes with yellowish pus dribbling out. I could see the squirming white lines under the skin. Heat worm, a parasite that thrived in polluted water supplies. There was a treatment for it, but it was impossible to get down here. I remembered a couple cases in Hub, but I’d never seen anything like this. Ripley’s skin was literally alive with the wavelike pulsations of worms burrowing through her. They were probably in her muscle tissue, by now, an advanced state. Eventually they would start eating through her organs, her bones, her brain.

This was why Harvey and Lucinda were trading us to Eden: for the chance to save their daughter.

Ripley slapped at me. Her feet hit the pedals again and we were thrust into a steep dive. The sails caught and wrenched us into a spin worse than the first.

“Daddy, help!” Ripley screamed.

I tried to flip back inside my head and find Lük, thinking,
I need to pull out of a dive!
but I couldn’t find the Atlantean city. Everything was a blur.

“Get out of the way!” I gripped her bony shoulders and tried to push her toward the front of the craft.

“Leave me alone!” She wailed through snot and tears, and as I blocked her blows I saw the white smudges of worms leaking out of her nostrils and tear ducts. She writhed like a snared animal, her fists flying at me.

I held her firm. “Let me fly!” I shouted. With the world blurring around us, my gaze locked with her wide, young, worm-scribbled eyes—

And something happened. It was like reality slipped, or like there were two things in my mind at once. This Ripley girl in front of me screaming as we spun . . . but then over her appeared that strange, gray ghost girl with the red hair and frog pajamas from my dream. She was screaming and crying, too, writhing, terrified in my grip. And I was trying to pull her up, but once again she was sinking into ash, and there was heat and burning and . . .

And then there was more. I saw the Atlantean city, the training lake, Lük standing by his craft. “Ready for another test ride?” he asked through a whipping wind. This layered on the others, so that the gray sky of Lük’s world was also the ash and the spin and Ripley’s screams.

It was all too much, and I felt tearing in my head, like thoughts were pulling away from their scaffolding.

“You can use the—” Lük began but then his voice cut out. The Atlantean lake suddenly disappeared from my mind as if it had been switched off.

There was a squealing scream. I had lost my grip on Ripley, and the force of our spin had yanked her out of the craft. She clung to the side.

Sinking girl in the ash. Falling girl in the craft. Which was which?

I threw myself forward and tried to narrow my mind down to a single line of thought:
Grab the girl! Save the craft! Don’t die!
My hand found her moist, wormy forearm and pulled her in, dropping her to the floor.

Images slid again . . . burns on the girl in the ash, her breathing wrecked—

I gritted my teeth and tried to press in on my brain, fix everything in place. . . .
You are in the craft. Over Gambler’s Falls. Get up. Get up!

I opened my eyes and flailed around in the blurring spin until I got hold of the sail lines.

How do I stop this spin?
I tried to shout to Lük, but there was no answer. And no time.

I got into my seat, feet to the pedals. Had to figure this out. I felt the force of the spin, and backed off the thrust. Waited for the winds to catch a sail . . . There. I hauled it in and let the other sail billow out. The wind yanked us forward, and we made a curving arc that finally took us out of the spiral.

I banked around, and headed back. I tried to straighten the craft, but the bent mast was dragging us sideways. I was able to compensate but had to work harder to keep the ship straight.

Ahead, smoke rose from all corners of the Walmart. In the craft, Ripley lay curled on the floor, whimpering.

I dropped back to the roof. The ship thumped awkwardly, stopping after a light bounce.

Lilly and Leech were just standing there, looking stunned by everything. They walked toward me. Lilly wobbled like she could barely stay up. Her face was gray.

“Ripley!” Lucinda staggered toward us, Harvey still lying on the roof. Her hands were covered in his blood. She wiped her hair out of her eyes, leaving blood smears across her cheek, down her nose and mouth.

Ripley dragged herself up, her body shuddering. I heard her teeth chattering, a mix of fear and the fever that was probably scorching her insides.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Ripley. I hadn’t even thought through what I was saying or why. “You can come with us, if you want. We can try to get you help—”

“I hope you burn in the glare of Tona!” she screamed, worm-clogged spit flying, and she lurched away, toppling out of the craft and then getting up and running for her mother. In my mind, I saw another flash of the girl in the ash. My head ached. What had happened to me up there?

“We need to move,” said Lilly, watching the horizon warily. Her knees hit the side of the craft and she pitched forward, dumping supplies onto the floor. Then she started to stagger in, but stopped. Her eyes darted around the craft. “Where’s my bag?”

A single glance and I knew: her red waterproof bag was gone. I also noticed that two of the three clay pot heat cells were gone. Dr. Maria’s black backpack was still there, wedged against the side.

“Crap,” I said. “During the spin . . . We can look for it. Come on.”

Leech hopped inside. “We don’t have time—”

“Yes, we do,” said Lilly, and even with the pain and fatigue in her voice, it was clear there was no arguing with her.

I hit the pedals and we lifted away from the roof, the ship now flying with a shudder, like a limp. As we rose, I looked back at the single form of Lucinda and Ripley, kneeling, clutched in an embrace beside Harvey. Clouds of black smoke erased them from my sight.

“We’re leaving them to die,” I said, the thought hollowing me out even further. “If it’s not the fire, it’s going to be Desenna for the betrayal, or Eden for failing to keep us here. And the girl’s got heat worm so bad that she’ll probably be dead soon, anyway.”

I looked over at Leech. He was watching them, too, but his eyes were narrowed, his face spotted with Harvey’s blood. “That’s their problem,” he said quietly.

I checked the horizon as we rose. Still no copters. To the west, the sun had tired to orange and was lowering through the cloudless sky.

I leveled off and started to make wide circles over town. The vortex responded more slowly to my movements. Its blue had dimmed.

“There,” said Lilly after a few minutes.

We lowered to a dry plot of land in front of a house, one in a row of skeletons on what had once been a residential street. Lilly’s bag was lying there on the hardpan of dirt and fossilized grass. She grabbed it and we lifted off and I headed southwest on Leech’s bearing as fast as we could go.

Lilly checked the contents of the bag. All the items were still inside, but I had known from the jangling sound the moment she’d picked it up that my crystal skull, my connection to Lük and the Aeronaut’s knowledge, had shattered.

“THAT WAY” LEECH SAID, POINTING OFF STARBOARD after checking the first stars that appeared in the twilight. There had only been four other words spoken between us in the hours since Gambler’s Falls.

“How are you?” I’d asked Lilly, as she put a bandage from Dr. Maria’s medical kit on my shoulder. We’d also found a bright pink Rad burn on my scalp, which had started to blister, and was smoldering more with each minute.

“Fine,” she’d replied, but she hadn’t sounded it, her voice hoarse like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.

She was curled beside me in the craft now, her head on the pink pillow, her blanket over her. One hand cradled her sore stomach, the other rubbed at her gills.

“Did you hear me?” Leech asked.

“Yes,” I muttered. I was slowly getting the hang of compensating for the bent mast, but the wind gusts had strengthened once the sun went down, hot gusts that seemed to be fleeing back to space, and the whole craft creaked ominously as I fought to keep it on course. My arms were trembling with fatigue, and my empty stomach, wasn’t helping.

“I don’t know if it’s the nanocapsules that are still in my gut or your flying,” Leech said, now holding his stomach, too, “but I am going to lose whatever I’ve got left in here.”

“I’m working on it,” I said quietly and had to resist the urge to bank the craft hard enough for him to accidentally fall out, or at least hit the side hard. I also resisted saying that the craft wouldn’t have been damaged if Ripley hadn’t panicked, and Ripley might not have panicked if Lucinda hadn’t appeared screaming, holding her bloody father . . . bloody because of Leech. But I had enough of a battle on my hands just keeping us in the sky.

Because of the damage, I was also having to push the vortex engine harder to keep us at speed. I estimated that we’d slowed to about forty kilometers an hour, and I didn’t dare go any slower. The engine’s light was growing dim. Under this strain, it wasn’t going to get us to the marker.

I’d tried to find Lük in my head, but he was gone. The mountain lake was still there, but its surface was still, windless. There were no boats, no students around, the city perfectly silent. The whole scene was like a program that had been paused.

I held the sail lines in one hand and reached into Lilly’s bag, moving my fingers gingerly, until I found a sharp edge. I pulled out a half-moon shard of broken skull the size of my hand. The crystal was cold, heavy, and dark. Blurry reflections of the stars twinkled faintly in it, but that was all. Its white glow, all its memory, was gone.

No more tips, no more training. If I was going to keep us flying, I’d have to do it on my own. And it was a lonely, hollow feeling, like something that had been lit up and glowing warmly in my mind was now shut off. Screens gone black, the technicians staring at their consoles blankly . . .

No, no more technicians. They were gone, too. Needed to be. They’d been a nice idea, a way to deal with that feeling of not knowing myself, of not being in control, but now I knew how much was up to me. I still couldn’t control the forces against me or what change my Atlantean DNA would reveal next, but I was the only one in charge of how I would deal with it. Like right now: I was keeping this craft in the air, not Lük, not technicians. Just me. I had to do these things, believe in my powers, or we were going to end up back in Eden. Owen, boy from Hub, descendant of Atlantis, one of the Three who had to defend it against Paul. That was who I was and I had to
be
it.

And the weak groan from beside me was another part of this: I had to take care of Lilly, like she’d taken care of me when my gills had failed. I’d brought her out here, even after she told me to leave her, and so she was my responsibility, but it was more than that. I wanted to be responsible for her. To her. Looking at her lying beside me, hurting, I didn’t care about her past with Evan. I didn’t even care that she’d lied about the siren. None of it mattered. I couldn’t let it.

I wanted to show her what I could do. I wanted us to get through this and have each other, whatever that meant. I’d only known her a little over a week, but from a dream of finding a little archipelago somewhere to just waking up tomorrow, I had no vision of the future that didn’t include her. It was like she’d said back on her island,
like we were already past all that
. Past uncertainty and doubt, past worry about trust. We just
knew
each other. I’d thought when I first met her on the dock that I loved her, but that thought had been stupid, because now I knew that I actually did, and it was a deeper, almost scary feeling. I had an urge to wake her and tell her all this . . . but I let her sleep and focused on flying.

I took one more look at the skull shard and threw it out into the black.

Lilly stirred a half hour later. “You should eat,” I said. Flying had gotten a little easier, the gusts dying down to empty desert cold. I could spare a free hand, and passed her the stew can we’d gotten.

Lilly looked at the can warily. “I don’t think I want to put anything in there right now,” she said, her voice leathery.

“It’s been a few hours since the poison. I think we’re in the clear.”

Lilly considered this, then took the can. She whittled at the seam with her knife, the dimming blue glow of the vortex on her lips and nose. As she did, she asked, “What was that, back there?”

I glanced over my shoulder for what seemed like the millionth time, but all I saw were stars down to no stars where the earth began, and a faint silver aura of approaching moonlight.