The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (17 page)

Power charge . . . it was hard for my brain to keep up. He meant the lightning. “Okay!” I shouted. “What do I need to do?”

“We have a lock on your position, so I just need you to take a straight line bearing and hold yourself as steady as you can. Let us know when you’re stable and we’ll deliver the charge.”

“What is he talking about?” Leech asked.

“We’re about to get struck by lightning again,” I said. But keeping the craft straight was going to be tough. We were wobbling, listing, and still losing altitude. The holes in the thermal had widened, and the sails didn’t have the same responsiveness with their damage.

I straightened us as best I could. “Okay!” I shouted but as soon as I did, we bounced to the side, rocking back and forth.

“Wait—” but I felt a tingling through my body, and white lightning tore down through the front starboard side of the craft, sending wood chunks flying, igniting part of the hull in flames, and sending us pitching violently downward.

“Did that do it?” asked Arlo.

“No, we need another!”

More bullets tore at the sails. There was a wicked explosion as lightning found one of the copters behind us, but the last one bobbed and weaved and stayed in pursuit.

I fought to get us straight. It was even harder now. One of the sail lines slipped out of my sweaty hand. My arms were so tired. “Grab that!” I shouted to Leech. “Come back here and haul it this way!” I pointed with my chin.

Leech flailed for the line as another round of bullets tore at us. One of the three lines holding the thermal snapped. The other two strained. If we lost the balloon, we’d be in a free fall to the rocks below.

The craft shook, and Leech tumbled into me and then got up and yanked the sail line. There was a moment of straight flight—

“Now!” I shouted.

Energy burst from the sky. It was corralled by the mast, which lit up red hot as the charge siphoned through it. But unlike back in Eden, the mast was damaged now, and the energy traveled wildly down it, ribbons of light flashing out. One of these tore into the thermal balloon, which burst into flames.

Just then I remembered what would happen next. “Watch out—” but the ceramic heat cell exploded. I heard shards digging into wood and clanging off the mast. I turned my head, bracing for the sting, but only felt it on my leg. I turned back and saw that the cell had been jostled loose by the energy, and its debris had all flown off the starboard side. I’d been spared, and so had Lilly—

But not Leech. He was slumped over, head buried in his arms, his skin flecked with blood. And he’d lost hold of his sail line, leaving us to yaw back toward the notch wall. . . .

I finally heard the high-pitched whine of the mercury vortex coming back to life, spinning its beautiful blue. The leftover chunks of heat cell were falling into it and melting in swirls of white fire.

The thermal balloon was in flames. I tore at the one singed line that was still holding its fiery remnants. My fingers burned, but the charred rope unraveled and disintegrated. The balloon leaped free, flapping away behind us, a fiery demon that the final copter had to swerve violently to avoid.

I slammed my feet against the pedals and the vortex engine screamed. The force of the acceleration shoved me back. But we were still headed toward the wall beside the notch.

“Give me your line!” I shouted to Leech, but he wasn’t moving. I shoved my hand down between his chest and arms, grabbing for the rope.

The wall was closing. My fingers found the rope, yanked it out, angled the sail. . . .

We hurtled through the notch, the hull just scraping the rocks, and out of the alpine basin at howling speed.

I looked back and saw the last copter lunge out of the gap but then veer off sharply, heading back to the basin. Another lightning burst barely missed it, exploding into the rocky cliffs. I watched the copter leave and understood: Just as back at EdenWest, they couldn’t shoot us down with the vortex engine going, or the fall would kill us. Disabling the thermal balloon and causing our slow descent into their clutches had been their only option. And for now, Paul still needed us alive, didn’t he? Except he’d been about to shoot Leech . . . Maybe he’d been bluffing. Either way, it seemed that, at least for the moment, we’d escaped again.

I grabbed a blanket and patted out the flames on the charred side of the craft. Then I flew down a wide valley, sweeping toward the distant desert wastelands.

“Looks like you’re clear,” said Arlo. The computer was lying on the floor. “If you can set a course southeast at sixty degrees, we can rendezvous with you.”

“Hold on a sec!” I called. Rendezvous with Heliad . . . Did we even want that? I looked to Leech. His head was still buried. “Hey,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder.

He grunted something unintelligible and slapped my hand away. As he did, I saw the blood on his forearm.

“You okay?” I asked.

Leech slowly lifted his head and moved his hands away. It was possible, amid the blood and shredded skin and the shards of battery sticking out, that one of his eyes was still there, a flickering of white in the red.

But the other . . . it was only a mess of blood and flesh.

“I can’t see,” he whispered. His hands were fumbling around. One of them closed on the sextant, clutching it tight, and yet, it was useless to him like this, and we were useless without our Mariner.

Unless . . .

“Okay,” I called to the computer pad. “We’re coming. I can’t set a precise bearing, but I can head southeast or close enough.”

“Lie down,” I said to Leech. “I’ll get us to Heliad.”

“Dangerous . . .” he mumbled . . . “We don’t . . .”

“I know,” I said. I looked from him to Lilly, passed out, infected. “But we’re gone if we don’t.”

Leech nodded slightly. “It hurts.” He collapsed to the floor of the craft, his arms over his eyes.

“We’ll be waiting at the Houston docks,” said Arlo. “Biggest cluster of lights on the horizon. You can’t miss it.”

“Got it.”

“We’ve stored a cache of water and food for you, about fifty kilometers out from your current position. You’ll hit an old interstate, and there will be a rest area with a gas station. On the roof of that station, in the northwest corner.”

“We’re gonna need medical help,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We’re dispatching a full team. Dr. Keller is overseeing it personally. We’ll be en route momentarily. See you soon, Owen.”

The computer went dark.

I angled us southeast and pressed the vortex pedal to the floor. We left the mountains, back into the desert heat. The craft bucked and vibrated, stumbling on the air, as broken and beaten as the rest of us, but at least with the vortex we had speed again.

A half hour later, I put us down on the roof of the dusty service station and retrieved a thick silver cooler bag tucked in the corner. I fed water gingerly through Lilly’s cracked lips. I helped Leech get a bottle down. When I took my own swigs of the frosty liquid, I nearly gagged on its completeness, its cold life.

There was fruit in the bag: something green and oblong. I cleaned my knife of Eden blood; tried not to remember that feeling, that sound; and then sliced through the green rind—resisting like skin—to find an airy, sweet orange flesh inside.

“Papaya.” Leech groaned as he tried it, holding a piece in one hand and the sextant still in a death grip in the other. He was shaking all over. The blood on his eyes had begun to dry, making plates of thick, black crust. I wondered if he would ever be able to see again.

There were crackers, a round of cheese. I had to remind myself to go slow. Let the fruit settle and save the rest for later.

As I ate, I glanced over the wall of the service station, to where whoever had delivered this bag had also hung a fresh corpse from the roof above the empty gas pumps. A pool of blood beneath it. Another warning: Beware of Heliad . . .

And that was where we were going.

I took off again, across the wastelands toward the coast. We flew in silence, the merciless sun beating down on us. I covered Leech and Lilly completely with our two blankets, then hunched as deep as I could into my sweatshirt, but there was going to be no relief from the radiation. The burning intensified on my shoulders, my scalp. My legs began to sear. Pain grew and folded in on itself, my body too overwhelmed to even register it. And all the while I tried to think of nothing, to just stare through the daze of hurt and headache and the blinding light, muscles cramped and locked into place, and fly, fly toward the horizon, hoping I could get us there. . . .

To a land that inspired tales of blood, volunteers willing to die in service of a sun goddess, who was one of us. A cult that had overthrown an Eden, that had wielded lightning from the sky and smote down Paul’s forces . . .

And it was that thought, later, as the sun mercifully set and the stars rose, that made me realize why the closer we got to Houston, to safety and healing for Lilly, to help for Leech, and a meeting with our third companion, the tighter and louder a nervous hum whined inside me.

I had once thought Paul and Eden had acted like gods. The siren had warned me to beware the gods and their horrors. Now we were willingly putting ourselves in the clutches of another deity, the Benevolent Mother of Heliad-7. Both wielded death, Eden in secret labs, Heliad out in the bright sun. And both wanted us. But while I knew all too well what Paul had planned for us, I had no idea what lay in store for us on this next dark shore.

Be at peace. Let yourself glow unbridled
.

You have played your part; now we celebrate your release
.

And as we set you free, know that you will be divine
,

Divine in your freedom, a conqueror of fear
.

—F
ROM THE
D
EATH
R
ITE OF
H
ELIAD
-7

IT WAS NEARING DAWN WHEN I SAW THE LIGHTS OF Houston glimmering on the horizon. All night, we’d flown through cold and silence, Leech and Lilly lying still except for one waking, when we all ate cheese and bread, barely speaking. Lilly only managed a couple of bites.

In those last hours, I thought about almost nothing, my brain in a kind of half-conscious daze, my body shaking from the pain of the rad burns. I kept the stars in their same position in my view, kept the blue of the vortex at its brightest, and just covered kilometers, getting as far as I could from all the horrors we had seen in the last three days.

Houston had a small working electrical grid. A few pale lights glowed in the buildings close to the new coast. Where the power didn’t reach, fires flickered in skyscraper windows, in alleyways, a world of silhouettes and shadows.

The air had become humid, a strange wet feeling against your skin, far stickier than Eden. The sky had turned purple and gray, the horizon layered with folds of misty clouds, a soft blur like everything had been smudged. Beneath it was the rippled expanse of the sea, its surface showing a mirrorlike version of the sky. The swells made little flashes. Nearer, white scribbles formed on the tops of breaking waves. They crashed to shore, against heaping piles of debris, the remains of the homes and buildings that had once covered the miles from here to the pre-Rise coast. Offshore, I could see the occasional remnant of a building sticking out of the water. There was a sour smell and taste of salt and a gentle rushing sound.

I had never seen the ocean before. Only pictures. It seemed so mysterious, shrouded and secretive, and while I was glad to see it, to know we’d made it here, the sight also caused a steady tremor inside me, a great feeling of the unknown, something like I’d felt in the Anasazi city, a sense that I was a very small being in a very large world.

There were three long wooden docks at the water’s edge. On the middle one, two torches began to wave in semicircular patterns. A signal, bringing us in.

I flew out over the water and made a wide arc back to the dock. The torch waver was standing beside a tall ship. It was wide and square, floating on two skinny hulls. Above each hull was a mast, though I saw no sails furled, no booms at all. Crew members moved on and off it in lines, busily loading and unloading supplies.

I put us on the dock with a little thud, and finally let go of the sail lines. I could barely straighten my fingers. They were curled in clawlike grips. My palms were striped red and white. I had blisters that had popped open, leaked blood, then scabbed over, only to tear open again.

“Where are we?” Leech asked quietly, still lying with his arm over his eyes.

“The docks in Houston,” I said. I turned to Lilly and rubbed her shoulder. “Lilly, we made it.”

She didn’t respond. I saw the movement of her breathing beneath the blanket, my only indication that she was still with us.

“Welcome,” said the man who’d waved us in. He snuffed his torches out in a metal bucket of water and laid them down on the dock. When he stood, he raised his right hand, the fingers spread, his pinkie gone. “I’m Arlo, captain of the
Solara
, and assistant to Dr. Keller. You must be Owen.”