The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (22 page)

Below, the droning grew louder. “MMMMMMMMMMM . . . ,” its pitch rising.

“I will be divine, the divine is inside me . . .” Aralene’s gaze darted about, like she was monitoring the arcs and dips of phantoms in the air around us. Her hands rubbed faster on her arms. Her head twitched, her chest heaving.

They led her to the short stone pedestal and turned her back to it, her profile to the crowd. Her eyes were spinning wild now, like her eyeballs had become unstuck in their sockets. Her smile had grown openmouthed. It didn’t look right, it didn’t look sane. . . .

And they gently laid her down on her back on the pedestal. She was still rubbing at her arms, but now the crimson-robed women grasped her wrists, held them down at her sides, and buckled them into the cuffs.

“MMMMMMMMMMMM . . .”

Victoria stood.

Mica stepped around to Aralene’s side, so that he was facing the audience.

“The divine inside us is ours to give!” called Victoria. “No one can stop us from being free, in whatever form we desire! We are free people! We are free souls!”

“MMMMMMMM . . .”

Mica’s hands rose, and he was holding the enormous knife, and I could see how crude and serrated its edges were. The blade was pointed down over Aralene’s chest. This would not be an orderly incision like Anna’s. There would be no electrodes and pumps.

“I am the divine!” Aralene was screaming now, her voice tattered and her face wild, and I couldn’t tell if it was happiness or terror or some of both. The women held her, one at her shoulders and one at her legs.

“She thinks she wants this,” said Seven. “Maybe she does. Either way . . .”

I stared at Aralene, chanting over and over, eyes spinning. “I am the divine!”

“We give the divine freely!”

“MMMMMM . . .”

I felt Seven’s hand slip into mine and squeeze. I glanced at her. “Get ready,” she said, her eyes dead serious. I didn’t squeeze back, but I also didn’t pull my hand away.

“MMMMMM . . . RAH!” The crowd went silent.

The knife plunged.

There was a crunch of bone, a sound of tearing.

Aralene screaming—but it died out.

Mica, bent over, his elbow and shoulder working up and down . . . sawing. . . .

Her body, convulsing.

I can’t watch this, I can’t. . . .

It was the lab beneath Eden. But instead of being hidden underground, we were atop a building, open to the world.

With an audience.

How could this be happening?

The knife did its work . . . Mica’s hand fishing inside, working its way into the body . . .

“MMMMMMMMMM . . . RAH!” the crowd pulsed again.

The hand grabbing . . .

No. You can’t do this to a person
.

This had to be wrong. How could this not be wrong?

Finally, Mica was standing, his hand emerging.

When he held it up, blood dripping down his arm and the organ glinting in the light, the crowd erupted in ecstatic cheers, and a frenzy of wild leaping and dancing, as if they fed on this, on the blood, on the death.

Victoria stood and moved to the body. The body of a girl. Her name had been Aralene, a sad girl from Texas, who needed help . . . now open to the sky. A girl no longer.

The two assistants unshackled the wrists and carried the limp body away.

Mica placed her heart in the depression of the bowl.

Victoria placed her hand atop it. She lifted her hand and opened her palm, painted in blood.

And I began to fall over. In the last few days I had seen things I had never imagined, things I had never dared fear, but this . . .

Beware the gods and their horrors
.

Beware this.

WHITE SPOTS GREW IN MY EYES . . . LOSING TRACK of my feet . . .

Seven gripped my hand tighter and leaned her shoulder against mine. “It’s okay, flyboy,” she said softly in my ear. “I told you to get ready. Remember, it’s just a show. All of it.”

“That wasn’t a show,” I whispered back. “It was a girl dying.”

“It was that, too,” said Seven.

“All hail the Three!” Victoria called. And I found her eyes squarely on me.

I looked away.

The crowd exploded one more time, and then it was over. Below in the plaza, drums began to beat through a din of excited voices.

“Come on,” said Seven. Everyone was proceeding off the platform, down a back staircase. It led through a hall with stone walls that had no ceiling and was instead open to the night sky. As we walked, I felt a salty sea breeze across my face, such a simple feeling of life, and I took a deep breath. I had to find my composure, had to figure out what we had gotten ourselves into, and yet I couldn’t find space to think around the memories of what I’d just seen.

We came to a stop at the bottom of the steps. Victoria was leading the small procession, and she had stepped to the wall. I watched her press her palm firmly against one of the smooth, symmetrical blocks. She held it there, then pulled it away and moved on.

As we walked past, I saw that she had made a handprint in blood. All down this entire hallway, each block had a similar print of a red hand. There were hundreds.

We passed through double doors made of glass. The next hallway still had stone walls, but the floor was made of brown tiles, and there was a modern ceiling with white lights.

Victoria stopped at a door and turned to Mica. “Take them to my chambers,” she said. “I’ll be up shortly.”

She and her assistants passed through the door. Mica turned to us. “This way.”

We followed the hallway to its end and started up a staircase that curved, its spiral getting tighter, as if we were in a tower. I walked behind Mica’s hulking frame. He smelled like sweat and something sour, and I wondered if it was Aralene’s blood. Behind me, Leech was leaning on Seven’s arm as a guide. No one spoke as we wound our way up.

We reached a thick metal door, and Mica led us into a round room with stone walls and a wood floor. Cool damp air, tinged with smoke, rushed through four wide, curving, open-air windows that nearly made a complete circle around the room. In the center was an antique-looking wooden desk, with two leather chairs in front of it. I knew where I’d seen a setup almost exactly like it: Paul’s office.

Outside, Desenna glittered in night light, a world of fire and smoke and a commotion of voices, of vibrant life in the tropical dark. The main pyramid was off to our right. Behind us was the black of the sea. To the front and south, the city stretched away in a flickering grid. There seemed to be electrical power for maybe a half a kilometer and then just firelight after that.

“She’ll be up shortly,” said Mica, and he left us.

I walked to the wall and leaned out, looking at the city.

“Um . . .” It was Leech. Seven had led him to the window. “I think I’m glad I couldn’t see what just happened.”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at Seven. “So, are we in any danger of that happening to us?”

She shook her head. “Nah, that’s just the show for the masses. It keeps them happy.”

“Happy,” I said, still in disbelief. “That girl . . . her face. It was like she was excited to be there. Like she wanted to be killed.”

“She was drugged,” said Seven.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Doped up and chopped up,” said Seven, “just the way the Good Mother likes it.”

“That’s not entirely accurate.” Victoria strode in, back in her black coat and boots, her skin its natural color. The faintest trace of the jade green remained around one eye socket. It was as if that person onstage had been someone else entirely. “All volunteers are given something we call Shine. It’s made from psilocybin and opium. It frees their minds of fear and numbs the pain of the liberation.”

“So they don’t know what’s happening?” I asked.

“In the very end, no. But before that, they know what they have chosen,” said Victoria. “You saw that girl in Houston today.”

“Her name was Aralene,” I said, feeling like it was important, like we owed her that.

“I know what her name was,” said Victoria. “And I know that Aralene knew what she was doing. The medication simply helped her to be at peace with the choice. Obviously, no matter what a person’s wishes, the body is a simple machine and it will try to avoid being killed, but the body doesn’t always know what’s best. It wants to preserve its genes, at whatever cost, but that doesn’t mean that those particular genes are worth preserving.”

I thought Victoria was sounding a lot like Paul. “How can you make a choice like that for someone?” I asked.

“I don’t make the choice, Owen,” Victoria replied, a note of frustration in her voice. “I didn’t make that girl suicidal. The world does that. Nature does that.”

“Bad Nature,” said Seven like she was scolding a dog.

Victoria noted the uncertainty on my face. “I told you,” she said, “that you would have to take a couple things on faith, until we had a chance for more frank conversation.”

I shrugged. “So?” I didn’t know what else to say. I was one part frustrated, one part afraid to say anything that could lead to the other end of that black knife.

“Look,” said Victoria, “Aralene had tried to kill herself three times. Things aren’t like they used to be. Unless you’re lucky enough to live in the Federation, or in an Eden, there are no psychiatrists or counselors or mood-enhancing pharmaceuticals anymore. But that said, even a hundred years ago, when that girl could have been put on depression medication and given endless therapy sessions, she might have lived, but what kind of life would that have been?”

“Okay,” I said. I could see her point . . . maybe, but I was still a long way from feeling like that equated with what we’d just seen.

“Aralene wanted to die,” Victoria continued. “Well, she probably wanted to be happy, but that wasn’t in the cards for her. Depression is medical. It’s chemical. It’s not her
fault
. It’s just how she was built, part of nature’s trial and error. So, I believe that if she wished to end her suffering, then she should be allowed to, and that choice should be given honor. Rather than have her bleed herself in a dark corner of the world and die alone, why not celebrate that divine spark inside her, as we deliver it back to nature, energy given back to the great cycle, toward a better future? And in the process, give glory to thousands of people, who will celebrate her?”

“You mean cheer as she’s cut open,” I said. “How is that
glory
? Even if she wanted to die, to have all those people thrilling in it? How is that right?”

“Fair point,” said Victoria, “but that’s the one thing that
is
still like it used to be. People need spectacle. People need magic. People need to believe in something. And if you look at human history, people also need blood.

“Often, in a successful society, these needs coincide. Look at all the wars in human history, and tell me one that wasn’t fought over bloodlust. There was always another way, but it never mattered in the end. Wars, genocides, witch hunts . . . There is something inside the human creature that
needs
the killing, the blood, to thrive, to feel unity.

“Now,” said Victoria, “I don’t have the weaponry to start a war with anyone. I can’t even provide my people with simple entertainments like television, due to the sanctions. But what I do have is a population with no access to advanced medical care. Do you know the sickness and sadness we see? And there’s nothing to be done. We can’t operate on people’s metastasized cancers. We can’t cure their Rad cataracts. We can’t vaccinate against the plagues, and we certainly can’t help them when they’re suffering from severe depression.”

“So you’ve convinced them to die,” I said.

“What I have convinced them of is that life is short and brutal, but it can still have glory. In this new world, we can hide inside a dome or underground or inside layers of Rad protection, trying desperately to live as long as we can, or we can live bright, and when our time comes, we can return boldly to nature, by the knife. We all die someday, Owen, and out here, on the edge of the world, our own death is one of the only things we can control. We can wither, be eaten away by virus or sadness. Or we can be our own masters.”

“How many people have you killed?” I asked.

“Liberated,” Seven chimed in.

Victoria sighed. “Personally, only the handprints you saw. The ceremonial event like tonight is not how most people choose to go. I would never make someone hobbled by the measles five or late stage melanoma show himself on a stage. In those cases, we prefer a quiet infirmary ceremony. Seven’s seen these: She administers the death rites. They are quite lovely.”

“Yeah, my favorite part of the day,” said Seven sarcastically.

“We only need a few public displays to keep the people engaged and help remind them that we’re fragile, that during our short stay together, we need to be kind to one another and have community.”

“That’s weird logic,” I said. “Community out of killing.”