The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (15 page)

“His name is Darren Parker,” I said slowly. “I—I’m not sure he’s working tonight but this is his son, Owen, and I need to get him a message.”

“—arker?”

“Darren Parker.”

I heard voices, like whoever I was on the line with was talking to someone nearby. “—You think? Transfer him over to—What should I tell him, then?”

“They’re going to rat us out,” Leech warned.

But I had to keep pressing. “If he’s not there, can I leave him a message?”

“Listen, kid, that’s going to be tough b—”

The pad suddenly exploded with a shrieking high-pitched whine.

—EASE DO NOT FIRE! WE ARE A REGISTERED NOMAD POD! I REPEAT: PLEASE DO NOT FIRE! WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CHEYENNE DEPOT RAIDS! WE ARE A REGISTERED NOMAD POD NUMBER SIX EIGHTY-SEVEN BRAVO. I REPEAT . . .”

“That’s an emergency all-band broadcast,” said Leech.

“There,” said Lilly.

We could finally see up into the wide valley, awash in the flicker of flames and the bright darts of gun and rocket fire. A collection of vehicles snaked across the valley floor, following a sand-swept road toward us. I could see the canted angles of sailcarts and a trainlike conglomeration of electric wagons. Behind them to the north, an encampment burned. Tents in flames, flapping like fire birds in the breeze. Silhouettes scrambling in chaos.

Three heavy transport helicopters hovered, seeming to float in the night sky as if it were water. They took fire from Nomads positioned on the steep rocky sides of the valley. The copters retaliated with raining streams of ammunition.

“That’s definitely ACF weaponry,” said Leech. “Full-scale assault force.”

A bright light arced out from the hillside and clipped one of the transport helicopters. Smoke plumed from its side, and it dove away from the fight, ditching on the valley floor.

“I REPEAT: WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CHEYENNE DEPOT RAIDS. WE ARE A REGISTERED NOMAD POD. PLEASE, IT WASN’T US! THERE ARE UNARMED FAMILIES DOWN HERE! YOU—”

Another drone fighter screamed overhead and new rockets pummeled the hillside. The explosions roared, the flames joining one another and creating a momentary firestorm that dissolved into a wall of smoke. The broadcast cut to static. The sounds of gunfire slowed to an occasional pop.

I turned us farther south. Before we moved beyond the valley and the battle passed out of view, we saw one of the helicopters facing down the front of the fleeing caravan, destroying the first sailcart and then lowering its fat belly to the ground as the other vehicles ground to a halt.

Then we were back in darkness, the echoes of a few final gun bursts at our backs.

I thought of the Nomads we’d met back at Eden. Unlikely that Robard, who’d led the rescue operation, was among this group, but it would be others like them, ragtag tribes trying to carve out an existence with minimal supplies.

“Subnet signal is gone,” said Leech, surveying the computer pad. “The pod must have had a mobile zone, but . . . no more pod.”

“What is Cheyenne Depot?” asked Lilly.

“No idea,” said Leech.

“I think it’s military,” I said. That sounded right. “Maybe a jump base for ACF troops.”

“Those savages must have hit something pretty dear to the good ol’ Federation to earn a beat-down like that, especially this far south of the border,” said Leech.

“Whatever they did—” Lilly paused, coughing violently, “getting slaughtered was not an appropriate response.”

I kept us moving, feeling tight. It wasn’t just the slaughter. I’d missed my chance to talk to Dad. And that made the hum of worry increase. I didn’t even know why it was so vital to me. It wasn’t like I’d even contacted him from camp, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.

We flew on through empty dark, silent except for Lilly’s pained coughs.

FIRST LIGHT PAINTED THE HIGH GRAY PEAKS OF THE Rockies all around us. I’d been steadily increasing our altitude, up into thinner, colder air. The winds funneled between the peaks, shooting down the valleys. I had to tack back and forth, fighting them as we climbed.

I’d seen pictures of how these naked brown mountains had once looked: wearing skirts of trees, even blankets of snow, with glaciers like pendants at their throats. All of that was gone, now. They were just jutting stone peaks and valley floors of rubble. Some sickly yellow grasses had found niches to live on. As we climbed, following the arterial branches of mountain valleys like veins back to a heart, I saw the switchback trails of pronghorn, and even a sorry bone-bellied trio digging their hoofs at a scree slope, making little clinking sounds like someone sweeping up broken glass.

“Left,” said Leech. The sun was maybe a half hour from rising. A few stars still shone. Leech had been orienting to an orange star that he said was Venus. He kept checking his sketches. “Okay, we follow that valley southwest up to that saddle.” He pointed to a shallow V high above. “And over that, I think we’ve got it.” He checked his latest sketch. “There’s going to be a plateau, maybe with a canyon. It’s so weird . . .” he added. “I feel like I’ve been here before.” Leech tapped his pen against the paper. “Still can’t see what’s beyond this, though.”

Lilly coughed weakly. Her forehead glistened with sweat, and the fiery red around her gills had spread like a collar around her neck.

I increased our height again. There was a giant rock face in front of us, and I had to put us in a spiral to climb over it. We rose to parallel with the highest peaks now, the wide, blue dawn world falling away from us in every direction. The horizon seemed forever in the distance. The air was thin, brittle. I was taking deeper breaths but getting less out of them.

We lifted up into the saddle and entered an amphitheater surrounded by five jagged peaks. The basin in between them was a gentle bowl, sloping down to a V-shaped notch.

“There,” said Leech, pointing down.

A little canyon zigzagged through the basin, not much more than a crack in the shell of the earth. It began as a funnel-like rock fall, then followed the slope of the basin.

I brought us down. “I can’t fly in there,” I said. The canyon was barely ten meters wide, and without the precision of the vortex, I’d never be able to manage it.

“We hike in, then, I guess,” said Leech.

I turned the flame down to nearly off, and we settled toward the rocky slope. I landed in the shadow of the nearest peak, hoping it would keep the sun off Lilly.

“Lilly,” I said quietly. “We’ll be back. Just keep resting.”

“Nnn.” The sound was so fragile.

I turned back to Leech. He was looking at Lilly with something like actual concern. “I know,” he said like he was reading my thoughts. “We have to hurry.”

“Yeah.”

Leech gathered his sketchbook, the computer pad, and his boccie ball weapon. I slid the white-handled kitchen knife into a loop in my shorts. We hopped out and crossed a naked slope of loose scree that yawned down into the canyon entrance. Here and there, spiky white plants clung to the slope, like cacti but with felty fingers. As we neared the rock fall, something skittered across the broken pieces, making me jump. I spied a gray lizard, about the size of my hand, with white stripes. It paused, sizing us up, then darted out of sight.

We skidded down the rock fall, and dropped into cool shadows, climbing down between large boulders. The canyon leveled out into a smooth, curving hallway. The air smelled slightly sweet. Beneath a few of the overhangs of rock I saw actual splotches of moss, and a couple little bursts of green plants.

We walked for about a hundred meters. There started to be paintings on the walls, petroglyphs of wispy curved figures like you’d find on some rocks up near Hub, drawn by Native Americans. I saw hunters running, animals, shapes like birds, all sketched in burned reds and blacks.

The walls beneath the paintings started to get uneven, and now there were carvings. The paintings covered these in spots, as if the carvings were older. They were square designs with symbols inside, arranged like tiles. They were weathered, the corners smoothed or chipped and some whole sections crumbled away, but I could make out snakes, birds, spiders, and then some other shapes like stars and wild faces with long rectangular eyes and hooked noses, wide mouths, with bared teeth. There was something like a mammoth, and one like a big cat sitting on top of a turtle.

My eye caught one that made me pause: a figure that seemed to be a woman, floating above the ground. Angled lines burst out of the center of her chest that reminded me of light rays, and I felt a strange certainty that this was my siren.

We rounded a bend and the space to either side widened, the canyon top still just a narrow squiggle of light high above, but the walls arcing out beneath so that we were standing in a kind of domed underground space. To our right, one hemisphere arced over a deep hole lined with stones that were striped as if there’d once been water. To the left . . .

“Dude,” said Leech.

The left half of the space was filled by a small city of stone. Rectangular buildings, two or three stories high and built from soft-looking tan blocks stretched right up until they just met the ceiling. Some had ladders extending up their sides. They had small windows. There was a circular building in the center.

“It looks like Anasazi,” I said, remembering the photos from history books at school. “Maybe a thousand years old.”

They were so still, so silent that I could hear a faint rush in my ears, maybe my blood. And there was something about that silence, that space, that almost made me feel like there was someone here. Some ancient presence, as if years in the thousands were really just seconds ticking by. It gave me a dizzying feeling of being infinite and incredibly small at the same time. Like I was everything and nothing.

“I feel weird,” Leech whispered.

“Me, too,” I replied. “What’s yours like?”

“There’s this pulling,” he said, “like I’ve got a magnet inside me.”

I remembered that feeling from beneath Eden. “Follow it.”

Leech nodded. I noticed that his legs were twitching, and then a fast-vibrating shudder ran up his torso and made him close his eyes.

“I felt nervous, too,” I said, hoping it would make him feel better, “when I was being drawn to open the skull chamber.”

Leech glared at me. “I’m not nervous,” he spat. “It’s the cryo sickness.” His voice quavered as he said it. “Damn . . .” I saw him shake again. He flexed his hands into tight fists, like he was trying to control it. “Guuuh!” he growled, and jumped up and down a couple times. “Okay, I’m fine. Let’s go.” He was still trembling as he moved ahead.

We climbed up an initial rock wall and crossed a narrow ledge in front of the first buildings. I peered through small doors, into shadowy rooms. There were items inside, pottery and wood structures, all of it neatly arranged, as if the people might be back at any time. It reminded me of the towns we’d flown over, like museum exhibits. At some point, maybe because of water, too, these people had walked away into history.

We climbed a series of creaky ladders and edged across a narrow ledge, our backs against the bricks, facing out at the cavern. “These people were either really small or spiders,” said Leech. We reached the rounded center building. “We’re going in here.”

There were no doors, so I boosted him up the side and he scrambled to the top. “This is it,” he said. He reached down and helped me up.

A ladder led through a round opening into darkness. We climbed down and found ourselves in a shadowy room. There was a blackened fire pit in the middle, and the sides were cluttered with pottery. Blankets hung on the walls, striped designs in faded shades of red and brown and white.

“You think we’re the first people who’ve been here since the Anasazi left?” asked Leech.

“It seems like it.” The feeling of time being vast and yet also instant, increased.

Leech was looking around. “So now what?”

I peered through the gloom. “There.” I pointed at the blanket hanging on the wall behind Leech. It was striped, but there was a hexagonal white patch right in the center, and woven into this space was a more geometric version of the Atlantis symbol I’d seen before.

“Hey,” said Leech, “that thing.” He stepped over and pulled the blanket aside. “Ahh . . . crap.”

I ducked and peered around him. Inset in the wall was a little triangular vestibule with another thing I’d seen before: a depression in the shape of a hand, full of tiny white spikes.

“Your turn, Mariner,” I said to him.

I heard Leech take a deep breath. “It better be mine this time,” he said, flexing his hand.

“It will be,” I said.

He placed his shaking palm in the depression and pressed down. “Oww . . .” he moaned. He held it for a few seconds, breathing hard, then jerked his hand free. We watched drops of his blood drip down the delicate spikes. “Nothing’s happening,” he said.

“It takes a second,” I said. The blood reached the base of the spikes and began to slip into the creases around them.

The rock around us rumbled. Dust clouded our vision. There was a grinding sound like of stone gears, and a section of the wall began to rise. It slid up into the ceiling and then there was silence. Leech pulled the computer pad from his waist and illuminated the screen. He took a deep breath and ducked through.