The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (2 page)

That was where the body was.

I slammed down on the pedals in the floor of the craft. The vortex engine, a black triangle of polished stone with swirling blue light in the center, hummed at a higher pitch. Its glow increased and I felt a teeth-rattling vibration as the antigravity propulsion kicked in. We leaped skyward, barely clearing the body.

Lilly jolted awake. “What happened?” She pulled up on my shoulder.

“Dead guy,” Leech reported.

Lilly craned back to see. “Jesus,” she muttered.

“I don’t think Jesus was involved,” said Leech.

The body was mostly bones, with some stretches of cooked, leathery skin still spanning joints. A few tatters of brown clothing fluttered in the breeze.

“There are more,” said Leech. He pointed to a heap of brown bones and clothing at the rubble-strewn base of the wall. “Looks like they were trying to get in.”

“What do you think
they
were, warnings?” Lilly was looking over my shoulder at the tallest building in town. It was brick, and about twelve stories. Incomplete letters on its side suggested it had been a bank. Brilliant sunbeams silhouetted skeletons, one displayed in each window.

A decorative border had also been constructed around the roof that gave the building a castlelike appearance, only these miniature battlements were actually stacks of skulls. Lots of skulls.

“I would take those as warnings,” I said.

“Looks like that’s what they were trying to protect.” Leech pointed in the other direction.

The wall made a rough circle through the town, and at its center, just beyond the downtown blocks, stood an enormous building, a giant expanse of flat, sand-covered roof. A tall sign beside it, white with faded blue letters, read:

W
ALMART
S
UPER
P
LUS
G
AMBLER
’
S
F
ALLS

“I used to go to one of those, back before I was cryoed,” said Leech. “It had pretty much everything. It makes sense that they defended it.”

There was another body strapped to the flagpole outside the front entrance, and all the glass doors had been covered with plywood. The body looked similarly leather skinned and old.

I banked the craft and headed out of town, toward the canyon I’d seen.

“What happened here?” Lilly asked quietly, watching the streets slide by. Most of the buildings and houses were flattened. A few beams and remnants of walls stuck up from the sand, along with the skeletal stalks of scorched trees.

She’d been asleep all night, except for one period where she’d stirred, whimpering softly to herself. The one word I’d been able to make out was “Anna.” She’d said it in a despairing way that took me right back to the secret lab beneath Camp Eden, where Lilly had found her best friend pried open and turned into a cruel science experiment, one that had been done in search of the Atlantean code that we had inside us. The image of Anna, of her ribs and her organs, the tubes, and her wide, terrified eyes . . . I couldn’t shake it.

“Like,” Lilly added, “who were these people?” I remembered her wondering about this very thing back on the raft at camp: Thousands of years from now, what would future beings think about this lost society of the twenty-first century, this
us
? Of course, on the raft, she’d been talking about an empty swimming pool in her old backyard in Las Vegas. Here we were talking about a massacre.

Maybe this was more than Lilly had bargained for. It was definitely more bleak and violent than anything I’d seen back at Yellowstone Hub, but I had at least heard tales of the things that happened out in the wild lands.

“Holdouts, probably,” said Leech. “That’s what they were called back in the Rise.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, suppressing a flash of annoyance. Even though we were out of Eden and back in my part of the world, Leech still liked to act like he was the expert on everything. But he was right in this case, so I let it go.

This whole part of the continent had once been fertile cropland, but during the middle of the Great Rise, the river system dried up. It had been one of the cruel jokes of climate change. The warmer the atmosphere got, the more water vapor it could hold, and so even though the oceans were rising, the land was drying out.

There had been time for people to evacuate, but not many places left for them to go. Aside from the lucky few who could buy their way into EdenWest, the other options had been grim. A family could either head for the coast and pack onto a tanker bound for the employee prefectures of Coke-Sahel, or make the migration north to the Borderlands of the Habitable Zone, where visas into the American-Canadian Federation were already rare and disease and crime were common.

“Instead of leaving,” Leech explained to Lilly, “they fortified, and tried to make a go of it, like at Hub or Dallas Beach. Those groups sometimes can get support from the ACF.”

“Most of them fail, though,” I said, “from plague or infighting or starvation. Sometimes all three.”

“Mmm,” said Lilly, still gazing at the wreckage below.

She shook her head and leaned into me. The warm press of her melted through the chill of the long night.

“Hi,” I said, glancing over. She was huddled in my LoRad pullover, her long, dark hair matted from sleeping. Her eyes were as clear and breathtaking as ever, sky blue with tendrils of pearl white. A curvy pattern of pale lines snaked down her almond-colored cheek, indentations from using her red waterproof bag as a pillow. I reached over and traced one of the lines in a slow S from her eye to her chin. “Funny sleep marks,” I said.

She smiled and kissed my cheek, her nose pushing into my cheekbone. I felt her eyelashes on my temple. The sensation was already something familiar. Even though it had only been two days since our first kiss, I had this feeling of knowing every detail of it, her lips, her breath, how it smelled a little salty—and I couldn’t imagine that I had ever not known that. Each kiss was like a dust storm across my mind, wiping everything else out.

But then she pulled away sharply. “Ow,” she groaned. She rubbed at her neck, at the slim red lines of her gills.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“They’re really sore,” she said, scratching lightly. “They feel dry.”

“Mine used to feel that way before I’d come down to the lake at night,” I said, “like they needed water.” There was barely any trace left of my gills. Not even two days since they had stopped working, and now it was almost like they’d never been. Another in a series of changes so complete that I could barely remember what had been before. Had I really swum for hours in the dark of Lake Eden? Had I really felt at home in the pressure and cold of water, felt stronger there than on land even? And now air was my home. Instead of water currents, I reacted to wind speeds. Instead of the pressures of different depths, it was the tension of sails against the breeze.

Lilly ran a finger over the faded lines on my neck. It caused only a faint echo. “I can barely see them.” She frowned and turned away.

“Hey,” I said, wanting to reach for her shoulder, but the morning thermal breeze was picking up, so I had to keep both my sore arms on the sail lines. Ever since my gills had faded, things had been different between us. Not bad, just . . . off. I’d lost my gills because I was an Atlantean, one of the Three. Leech was, too, but Lilly . . .

It didn’t seem likely. Her gills hadn’t faded like Leech’s and mine had. She’d also lied about seeing the siren, except Leech hadn’t seen her either, so that didn’t prove anything.

I still didn’t know why I’d seen the siren. I wondered if maybe it was because the skull beneath Eden had been mine. Maybe that was also the reason my gills had come and gone so quickly. Leech’s had probably faded because of prolonged contact. He’d been around my skull for years, working in the underground temple right above it. Maybe being here in the craft with my skull would be enough to make Lilly’s gills fade. . . .

Or maybe she just wasn’t one of us. And if that turned out to be the case, what did that mean for the rest of our journey? It had already crossed my mind that there might come a time when I could go and she could not, where the difference in our destinies would separate us. Maybe she felt that, too, like a cloud over us, despite the relentlessly clear sky. Thinking about it caused a cold squeeze of adrenaline in my gut.

“It will be okay,” I said. I didn’t know if I meant the pain in her gills, or us, or even the unknown that lay ahead of us. Either way, I worried that I was lying.

Lilly sighed. “Yeah.” She rubbed at her gills again. Her gaze stayed distant, like she didn’t quite believe it, either.

The sun was getting hotter by the minute, making my skin itch even through the heavy sweatshirt I was wearing. It was a product of EdenWest, though, with no UV Rad protection, and out here, it wouldn’t be enough. We’d spent a few hours in the late afternoon sun the day before, and I already had a sore feeling on my scalp, and worrisome pink blotches on my legs and hands.

“How about we rest inside that Walmart?” asked Leech, gazing behind us. “Then we could check it for supplies.”

“There’s nowhere to hide the ship,” I said. “I think that canyon will be safer, and, besides, ten more hours and we can be at Hub. We just have to hold out a little longer.”

“Yeah, but I’m hungry now,” said Leech. “And what makes you think your dad can even help us?”

“Who else can we go to?” I asked. Our only other option for supplies seemed to be tracking down a Nomad pod, but we had no idea where to find one, and Leech still liked to go on about how they were savages, even though Lilly and I knew otherwise. Before finally succumbing to sleep last night, Lilly had scanned the gamma link for the Nomad Free Signal but hadn’t found it.

Leech had a good point about my dad, though. Because really, it was hard to imagine what his reaction would be to my story:

Hey, Dad, listen. I know I only left for Camp Eden last week but I’m back and some things have . . . changed. And now I need help getting supplies without alerting anyone that we’re here because, oh, did I mention we’re on the run from the EdenCorp? They want me because I’m a genetic descendant of the ancient Atlanteans, one who can help them find the Brocha de Dioses—sorry, Paintbrush of the Gods—which is ancient technology that can reverse the course of climate change. You know, save the world
.

No, I know, saving the world sounds great! But there’s one problem: we don’t trust Paul and his board of directors and their Project Elysium, because they did a bunch of terrible things to our friends, not to mention how they’ve been running the search for Atlantis and us Atlanteans in secret for over fifty years. I know, right? If their reason was really as simple as saving the planet and the population, why would they be keeping it such a massive secret? Yes, that is pretty suspicious
.

What? Oh, right, What exactly is MY plan. We’re going to find the Paintbrush of the Gods ourselves and then decide what should be done. No matter what, we’ll protect it from EdenCorp
.

This craft? It’s mine. I know, cool, right? Yes, I can fly it. How? I learned from a dead kid named Lük, whose consciousness—well, technically his Qi-An life force—was trapped inside a crystal skull
.

So . . . does all that sound good? Okay, great! Now, we just need a bunch of food, a tent, and some other supplies, and then I need you to go ahead and let me fly off into the sunset with no word of where I’m going . . .

Just like Mom did
.

I probably wouldn’t add that last line. But even without it, how exactly was Dad going to react? When I tried to picture it, I could only imagine him freaking out.

And even if, somehow, he thought this all sounded fine—that it was perfectly okay for me to fly off to who knows where while being pursued by EdenCorp—then what? I was assuming that my dad, who had trouble with the two flights of steps up from the cavern promenade to our apartment because of his breathing issues, who could barely cheer on the Helsinki Island soccer team without breaking into wicked phlegm-filled coughs, was going to be able to ferry us supplies without collapsing?

Not likely.

But I hadn’t mentioned all this to Leech. I didn’t want to give him any more ammunition to add to his argument for bypassing Hub and heading southwest. Maybe going to Hub was dumb, but I couldn’t help wanting to go.

And it was more than just supplies: I also really wanted to see Dad. The feeling surprised me. We weren’t all that close, and yet as last night had passed, the feeling had come on strong. So much had happened in the last week, from drowning to my Atlantean awakening to our escape. All of it played in my mind like some brightly colored and impossible dream, and it was like, What had my life even been like back at Hub? It felt so distant, which was ridiculous because I could clearly remember the quiet nights on the couch with Dad, the lonely days walking to school and sitting more silent than not among my little class, the dank subterranean light, the smell of sulfur and rock. It was all right there in my mind . . . and yet it seemed like there was a gulf, a vast space, between that old version of me and this new one. And while new Owen, with a purpose, with Lilly, was definitely a big improvement on who I used to be, I also couldn’t help feeling unstuck somehow, like I had left my old reality and was floating outside it now, slightly out of sync with time and space.