The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (21 page)

“No, not really like that . . .” I said.

“She’s hot.” Seven held up her palm. “Give me five. Flyboy snagged a hottie.”

I started to lift my hand, but then stopped myself. “She’s part of the team,” I said.

Seven raised her eyebrows. “Well, I think I might be jealous.”

“I’m barfing,” said Leech, pretending to wipe at his mouth. “Did I just barf? I can’t see.”

“Okay,” said Arlo. “You guys should probably get going. Owen, you’re going to fly just slightly east and then hold your position. You’ll hear a horn, and that’s when you come in over the city. Make for Tulana. It’s the big pyramid, you can’t miss it. Land just to the left of where the Benevolent Mother will be sitting.”

“Got it.”

“Time for the show,” said Seven. She unzipped her coat and started slipping it off, revealing mostly bare shoulders and a flowing white dress. Her neck and wrists were adorned with golden jewelry. She produced a sparkling tiara from her coat pocket and placed it on her head, then tossed the coat in the craft and did a little curtsy. “Like it? Official uniform: Daughter of the Sun.” She gazed at me. “It’s okay—you can check me out.”

“It looks good,” I said, keeping my eyes on hers. And it wasn’t easy, fighting the instinct . . .

“Ugh.” Seven sighed. “So chivalrous!”

“I’ll check you out,” said Leech, “but I’d need to use my hands.”

“Mmm, I think I’m starting to understand your nickname.” Seven stepped into the craft.

Leech felt for the side and climbed in after her. “Is that the outfit you swam out of the ocean in?” he asked. Again, I was amazed how he could keep the cool banter going.

“The same,” said Seven, grinning. “Except when it’s wet, it gets kinda see-through.”

“Thank you so much for that,” said Leech.

I stepped in, but Seven was sitting where I needed to be. “That’s where I sit,” I stumbled, “to fly.” Every sentence coming out of my mouth sounded so slow and stupid!

She scooted over barely far enough for me to sit, our hips jostling. I reached for the sail lines and found her staring at me with her jewel-like eyes and a wide grin. “Will you teach me? Pretty please? I’m good with knots and ropes.”

“Maybe later,” I said, and I wondered honestly how I was going to handle this.

“Okay,” said Arlo, stepping back from the craft. “We’ll see you inside.”

Suddenly Seven was right by my ear. “Relax, flyboy.” Her tone had completely changed. “This is just a show: See the princess dance and flirt.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s . . . you know, good to know.”

“You’re part of the royalty now, too,” Seven said like a co-conspirator, “and here are the first two rules. One, if people want you to be a god, be one, even when you feel like an imposter inside. Two, if rule one makes you feel like you might die, remember: It could be worse. You could be like everyone else. So, play the game, everyone’s happy, and we get out of here.” She leaned away and became a goddess again. “Woo!” she shouted. “Let’s do this!”

I powered up the vortex and curled away from the boat, out over the black water. The sky was nearly dark, a smattering of stars out, smudged by the damp air.

I brought us up to level with the buildings on the bluff and headed east like Arlo had said. We rose more, and I could see the grid of streets inside the city. I moved into position and hovered there. The roar of a crowd echoed in the distance.

“This is cool,” said Seven. It sounded more like the whispered, real version of her than the goddess.

Finally I felt like I could respond with my guard down. “Yeah,” I said. “Flying is one of the cool parts.”

Before us was a high wall atop sea cliffs, the toothy silhouette of dwellings on the other side. Below, waves crashed against the rocks. At regular intervals on the wall were torches. And in the gaps between those, bodies hung down over the side of the wall. In the dark I couldn’t tell how old they were, just that there were lots of them, stretching in both directions. It was a big city. A long wall. How many bodies did it take?

And I wondered again if we really wanted to do this. Here we were, on the dark shore of Heliad-7, our last chance to turn and run. . . .

But where would we go? We needed Leech’s eyes. And besides, Lilly was already inside.

A low, long horn sounded.

“Ready?” I said.

“You bet,” said Seven.

“Whatever,” said Leech. “Tell me what it looks like.”

I pressed the pedals, and we flew into Desenna.

WE FLEW OVER THE WALL AND ABOVE A WIDE AVENUE of low concrete buildings with tin roofs. The street was dark. All the light was up ahead.

Arlo’s men had done good work on the mast. The craft was still a little unstable with the damage to the keel and the hull, but it was definitely better.

I spotted the central pyramid, a massive structure rising above everything else, so much like the one from my skull dream. Victoria must have re-created it from what she’d seen in EdenNorth. Wide staircases climbed its front and sides. The back merged into a long square building that abutted the cliff. In front of the pyramid was a wide plaza filled with thousands of people and surrounded by ornately carved buildings, some with columns and spires. It felt like we’d flown through a time warp into the ancient past, except for the giant video screens that were mounted on the sides of the pyramid, so that the crowd could see what was happening up top.

The buildings beneath us now were a few stories high, with wooden porches built on them. There were people on the roofs, all looking up at us and pointing and waving.

“Rule number three,” said Seven, leaning out over the craft, “always wave to the minions. They lap it up.”

“How many rules are there?” Leech asked.

“I don’t know,” said Seven. “I’m just making them up as we go.”

We soared into the main plaza, hundreds of meters wide, and as we did, there was an explosion of sound, wild cheering, the crowd throwing up their hands, waving signs, blowing horns. The sound and the sight gave me chills.

“Is that as many people as I think it is?” Leech asked.

“Yeah,” I said quietly.

“Woo!” Seven shouted, waving enthusiastically. “Now
this
is an entrance. Love us, you suckers!” she said.

The crowd was a frenzy of movement and sound. As we came closer, I could hear that there was a story being told. An amplified voice boomed through the plaza. It sounded like Spanish but not quite. Colored lights flickered and changed around the base of the pyramid. One made an outline of a giant serpent, another a turtle. They moved like waves washing over the stones. Images of fire and storms flashed over the video screens.

There was a hot blast of wind and a sizzle of electricity. A spear of lightning hurtled down and struck a metal pole at the back of the flat pyramid top. Bursts of flames ignited on building tops all around the plaza, coordinated with the strike.

The wind bucked the craft, and I fought to get us back on track. “What was that?”

“Part of the spectacle,” said Seven, sounding bored. “This is the creation myth of Heliad-Seven. How the waters rose and the earth was thrown into darkness—that’s the Great Rise—and the people were tricked into living in a false reality inside a dome. But then the Benevolent Mother heard the voices of the ancients and led everyone into the light. And when she did, the goddess Heliad was sent to earth by Tona as a show of faith. And she—that’s me—was a harbinger that the Three would return, to bring harmony to humanity.”

“So, we’re part of the big story,” said Leech.

“We’re the
stars
,” said Seven, “but, don’t forget: Victoria is the director.”

I flew us straight on and over the pyramid, then put us into a wide arcing turn, circling back out over the whole crowd, causing a huge roar from the people, before finally bringing us down on the wide, flat pyramid top, between glowing torches.

Across from us, Victoria sat in a giant golden chair, her assistants flanking her, only she wasn’t Victoria anymore. In addition to her crimson robe, her face was completely painted a vibrant jade green. Her hands, too. Gold rings adorned her fingers, and atop her head was a fan-shaped headdress that I guessed was supposed to represent the sun. The jade face gave the whites of her eyes an unsettling glow. Seven had called her the director . . . and for the first time since meeting her, I worried about what she really was.

We stepped out of the craft, and a giant man, built like a stack of boulders, motioned us toward the front of the platform. He wore a crimson robe, too. His hair was cut close above his heavy brow. In his hand was a giant black knife. It looked like it was made of obsidian, its blade hand chiseled into rough serrations. He fell in step behind us and I remembered the dream I’d first had from the skull: the three dressed in white, their throats being slit. . . . What exactly were we playing out here?

“Howdy, Mica,” said Seven to the large man. She didn’t seem concerned.

“Miss Seven,” Mica replied beneath the din. He gave her a formal nod.

We stood in a line and faced the sea of wild, cheering people, the ocean wind at our backs.

Mica raised his hands high over his head, and a wave of quiet swept over them all. It was eerie how quickly it happened, leaving an echoing silence in its place, as if the crowd were a single organism.

The silence held. . . .

“And the memory descended,” called Victoria, her voice being amplified into the plaza, “in ships of blue light!”

The crowd exploded. I could pick out individual people jumping, hugging one another. The air sparkled with confetti.

Mica’s hands rose again. Silence.

I felt a brush of hair and found Seven by my ear. “This could go on awhile.”

“Fear not that the gods depart!” Victoria called. “Fear not the rumor of Ascending Stars! For the gods have heard our call! The gods have come home to us! And we shall live again in harmony as the ancients did! We shall live free in the light!”

This must have been some kind of cue, because all at once the thousands shouted in reply:

“LIVE BRIGHT!”

Seven was by my ear again. “Good little fanatics, aren’t they?” she said quietly. I glanced at Mica, standing a couple of feet behind us. He eyed Seven disapprovingly, but then looked away.

“The three have returned to complete their prophecy!” Victoria boomed. She really did sound convincing, a leader of the masses. “The three will heal the Heart!”

More cheering. Mica’s hands. Silence.

“To make this journey, the Three will need to feed of the divine!”

“THE DIVINE IN US ALL!” the crowd replied. In the wake of this statement I heard weeping and sighs, little mouselike echoes in the giant space below.

“The divine burns within us! It is our gift, our treasure. It is ours to give! We live bright in the world’s glory, we do not fear, and then we give our divine back to the gods so that the cycle may continue!”

“WE GIVE THE DIVINE!”

A sound began to resonate throughout the plaza. At first, I thought it was a machine, but then I recognized that it was a human noise. The crowd below was making a sort of unison moan, an
mmmm
sound. The single note had a thousand layers and sounded like a million insects, or some kind of primeval tone, the sound of nature or creation itself.

“Mmmmmmmmm . . .” they droned.

“Get ready for the fireworks,” said Seven.

And now I heard a new voice from behind us. “The divine in me, the divine in me, I give . . . I give . . .”

“Dude,” said Leech, “what is happening?”

I turned, thinking that I recognized that voice. Two women in crimson were leading a girl onto the pyramid top, a girl all in white.
Like the skull vision
, I thought again, but then I saw that the girl wasn’t wearing robes but instead one of the pure white jumpsuits that I’d seen in the freezers in Gambler’s Falls, with the Heliad symbol on the breast. A volunteer.

And I knew her. Aralene. The suicidal girl from the docks in Houston. She had been cleaned, her hair now radiant. Her face was painted a sparkling silver, so that she seemed to glitter like a robot, only with dark red lips and purple around her eyes. The women were guiding her but she wasn’t fighting it. Her eyes were wide, and her arms crossed, her wrists no longer bound. She rubbed her biceps, kind of like she was cold, only slower, and with more force.

She shuffled forward, bare feet on the stones, as if in a trance. “I am the divine, I am the divine,” she repeated, and I saw that she was smiling, her eyes wide. More than just wide, her irises were darting around to the sky and the crowd, like the world was a surprise and a wonder, almost as if she could see some magic that the rest of us couldn’t.

As she moved to the center of the platform, I saw that something had been wheeled out. It was a short square of stone, a meter wide. It had leather cuffs on the sides, and a depression in the middle.

And, yes, I knew what this was, and yet my brain couldn’t quite accept it.
People like poor Aralene there, they come to us for help
, Victoria had said.
It’s the least we can do
.