The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (26 page)

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding it.

Then she rubbed at her head. “Ooh,” she said. “I hate mornings.” She took another sip of soda. “I wanted to get this down before I picked you up.” She cocked her head toward the apartment. “How’d you sleep?”

“Not great,” I said. “You?”

“Ha. I stayed out late with my friends. There’s this place, Chaac’s Cove, where we go dancing. It was fu-un, but I’m paying for it now. Such is a goddess’s life. They’re all expecting you to make an appearance tonight, by the way.”

“I don’t dance,” I said, “I mean, I haven’t, really . . .”

“You will,” said Seven with a smile. We started up the street. “So, how’s that all going in there? I heard your voice raised. Trouble in the big reunion?”

I shrugged. “I guess. It’s weird. I lost it a little when we were talking about the liberation stuff here.”

Seven smiled ruefully. “Live bright!” She raised her fist to the sky. “Yeah, it’s a thing.” She let her arm fall around my shoulder as we walked. I glanced at it, and my first thought was
That shouldn’t be there
. Didn’t I have a girlfriend? That’s what Lilly was, right? Then again, friends could put arms around each other, and Seven and I were going to need to be friends, weren’t we? Maybe to Seven, an arm around the shoulders was no big deal. So I let it stay there and tried to calm the sensor going off in my brain, the technicians sounding alarms.

I could feel people’s eyes on us as we strolled up the narrow street, then over to the plaza. I also noticed that the two guards from Mom’s place were following us at a distance.

Off the main square, a market was bustling with activity, people moving between rows of stands shaded by soft woven awnings. The people were old and young and a blend of skin tones and face shapes that was so much more diverse than what I’d seen back at Hub or at Eden. And all of them were out in the bright, searing eye of the sun, letting it irradiate their heads and shoulders and arms, seemingly without fear.

“It’s hot,” I said, looking at my own arms, covered in a sweatshirt. I felt tingling from my Rad burns.

“Scorching,” said Seven. “You never totally get used to it.” She pulled her arm off me, and adjusted the long sleeve of her dress, then her hat.

“How come you’re not living bright?” I asked.

Seven smiled. “And melt my skin off? No thanks.” She looked around. “Living bright and chopping off fingers and dying young might be good for the suckers,” she said, “but not for me. I didn’t choose this place. I’m just the fair maiden locked away in the tower.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I didn’t ask to be woken up and turned into a great symbol of hope. Hell, I didn’t even ask to be cryoed.”

“Your parents?” I said.

Seven shook her head. “Not even. They were already dead.”

“What happened?”

Seven was quiet for a second before she spoke. “We were living in Buenos Aires during the Rise. My dad was in finance and I grew up in New York, but we traveled a lot. You probably read in school about what happened in Buenos Aires.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, things were already bad there, floods and storms, but then black blood hit, and conditions were so tight that it mutated and became supervirulent and twice as lethal. They set up a military quarantine. Nobody gets in. Nobody gets out. Five million people, and everybody died . . . my parents, my brothers. Everybody . . . except me.”

“How did you survive?” I asked. “Wait, let me guess: EdenCorp found you.”

“Yep,” said Seven. “I was a match with their ice bodies. They were arranging to get my whole family out, but then the mutation happened and the quarantine. And we all got sick. So they came at night,” said Seven. “We were in the group hospice. Whole families were getting rooms together to die in. It was late and my younger brother was dead and my dad was barely breathing. My mom was nearly gone . . . and this team of soldiers all in black with these gold visors, like robots, burst in. They asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t, but I also didn’t want to die. So I said yes. I’m sure they would’ve just taken me anyway. They loaded me on a helicopter and I remember looking up at one of those visors and then . . .”

Seven looked around. “Then I’m waking up in a bed in Desenna, and it’s twenty-five years later, and I’m Heliad, daughter of the sun. Just like that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sounds tough.”

“People have had it worse,” said Seven.

“What was your name before?”

“Ha,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling. “Doesn’t matter.” She stopped walking abruptly. “You hungry? I am. And you want some of this.” She pulled me across the street toward a market stall that had a trail of smoke wafting up from it.

A woman in a red dress and two young boys were grilling flat brown cakes on black skillets. Beneath, red tubes led to a solar battery.

Seven spoke to the woman in that version of Spanish I’d heard the night before. She smiled sweetly, her perfectly made-up face and sunglasses a goddess mask hiding the real person she’d let me see. The boys busily placed beans and some kind of orange vegetable on the center of the cakes and then folded them into triangular shapes. The woman picked them quickly off the skillets, placed them on squares of leaf, and held them out.

“Do we pay?” I asked.

“Never, that’s rule number four,” said Seven, taking the food. “It would be insulting for a god to pay for things. They think they’re gaining our goodwill with their gifts.”

The woman and the children saluted us with the two-finger motion. Seven nodded like she was used to it.

She handed me one of the triangles as we walked away. “Cocoa and eddo in masa,” she said.

It was chalky but tasty, a blend of chocolate sweet and vegetable tang.

“So are you mad?” I asked as we continued across the plaza toward the pyramid. “Like, at Eden, at Victoria? That this hasn’t been your choice?”

“I get cranky, sure,” said Seven, “but, I mean, given a choice between dead and goddess, I think I’ll take goddess.”

“So then what did you mean last night when you said it makes you feel like you might die?”

Seven eyed me. “Ooh, see the boy remember key details, watch the ladies swoon.”

“Seriously,” I said, and yet also made a note of this apparent ability of mine.

Seven sighed. “I guess that sometimes I just wish there had been a third option available.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, maybe to be a girl in the Northern Federation. You know, live on Helsinki Island, and just have that life: school, graduation, university. After that, get an internship at an office, work for the bureaucracy, be a paper pusher in a sensible suit and awesome shoes, maybe meet a cute intern boy at the company party. Just be normal. Anonymous. No living bright. That would be nice.”

“Maybe you can after we fulfill our Atlantean destiny,” I said.

“Ha, maybe,” said Seven. She didn’t sound convinced. “I’d take just getting out of here. But in the meantime, I figure this is a free pass. I should be dead, but I’m not. I’m a goddess, and now, bonus.” She wrapped her arm around mine. “I have a god to hang out with, too.”

“You mean Leech?” I said, hoping that sounded like a joke and also wondering if this arm thing could still just be considered friendly.

“Yes, sexy Leech.” Seven flashed a devious smile. Then she pulled her arm back.

We passed two older people slumped against a wall in the sun. Their skin was leathery and charred, black spots everywhere, some oozing yellow trails. One of them pointed to us and reached out, but the other grabbed his arm and pulled it down.

“Begging is forbidden,” said Seven. She considered them for a second, then reached for the last few bites of my food. “You mind?” She darted over and gave our leftovers to the two. When she came back, she said, “Just doing the goddess’s work. Those two will be gone soon, anyway. By the smell of their lesions, I’d say within the week.”

“That was nice of you,” I said.

Seven shrugged. “You have to do what you can, and at least pretend there’s a point to all this.”

We crossed the grand plaza. The main pyramid was maybe more impressive by daylight, because you could see its size compared to everything else, its crisp edges stepping up into the blue.

To our right, a team was building a new wall on the side of a building, hauling massive blocks up a long, slanted wooden platform. Others were working with spinning wheels and files to shape stones. I could see that some of them were carving faces.

“Looks just like it, huh?” said Seven.

“What?”

“The city where the Three died.”

“You’ve seen that?”

“Yeah,” said Seven, “the vision with the pyramid and the ash sky, and the three lined up and the throat slitting.” She rubbed her neck. “I felt like I was that girl who died.”

“For me it was the boy,” I said, “but, yeah, I felt that, too.”

“And those freaky priests with their knives . . . It must have been so sad, not just to die but to know your world was falling apart, that the people you loved were suffering. . . .”

“All by our hand,” I said, remembering Lük’s words inside the skull. “It’s nice to finally have someone who knows that stuff,” I admitted.

“I know,” said Seven. “Everybody around here is like,
yay, Atlantis!
and I want to say,
shut up
, you have no idea what it was really like.” She rubbed my arm. “I’ve been a lonely goddess.”

“Ha,” I said, and felt myself getting red. Because I had to admit, the part of me that had at first found Seven annoying was pretty much gone. She understood what we were part of even better than Leech did. And then, when it came to finding her attractive . . . well, that part had definitely grown. Never mind the whole situation where Seven seemed to find
me
attractive . . .

All of it made me suddenly think that I
had
to see Lilly, talk to her, connect, before these new thoughts went any further . . . maybe after whatever it was that Victoria wanted us for.

We entered the pyramid and made our way through a series of corridors to a set of metal doors. Seven pressed a button beside the door, activating a little speaker. She identified herself and the doors swung open.

While all the hallways through the pyramid had been stone and softly lit, the room we entered now was bright and white. There were computer consoles along the walls, not to the same degree of technology as they had in Eden, but there were monitors showing views of the ocean, what seemed to be radar, and a bunch of other camera views.

The room was alive with commotion, people hurrying around.

“Come on,” said Seven. She led me through the crowds and right up to one of the uniformed guards and threw her arms around his broad back.

“Nico!” said Seven affectionately. “High five!”

Nico was definitely one who girls would think was a catch. He glanced at Seven but then also quickly around the room, like he was checking who noticed before turning around.

“Ooh, sorry,” said Seven, pulling her arm back down but smiling devilishly. “I forgot, not in public.”

“Hi, Seven,” said Nico. He was quite a bit older, maybe twenty, and was crisply dressed in a navy blue officer’s uniform. Most of the workers in the room had brown military-style uniforms. He gave her a glimpse of a smile but then returned to a computer in his hand. “Sorry,” he said, “big doings.”

“I heard,” said Seven. “Any more details you can share?”

A queasy look came over Nico’s face. “You know I shouldn’t,” he said. He looked at me for a second, seemed to frown, but then his eyes just darted away, as if I somehow outranked him.

Seven gave a pouty sigh. “Fine. What good are you, then?”

“I—”

She play punched his shoulder. “Just kidding. Can you point me to the Exalted Mother?”

“She’s outside,” said Nico.

“Thanks, sweetie,” said Seven. She poked him on the nose, then turned to me. “Come on.”

We walked through a set of sliding glass doors out onto a stone balcony that jutted over the cliff above the docks. The rainbow-slicked ocean stretched away toward the horizon, undulating in its rubbery way.

“Was that your boyfriend?” I asked, trying to make sure that I sounded indifferent.
You ARE indifferent, aren’t you?
I wondered.

“Nah,” said Seven. “He’s a friend, and I’m a flirt. I like him, and he’d probably like more of me, but that’s all it is.” Seven eyed me. “Why, jealous?”

“Of course not.” Except maybe I had sized him up when we’d met.

We found Victoria at the wall, gazing down at the sea.

“What’s shaking, Mommy dearest?” asked Seven, leaning over and looking down.

“We have wounded incoming,” said Victoria tightly.

Below, a rusty ship was pulling in beside the
Solara
, belching black smoke. Its gangway squealed down, and a ragged crowd began to shuffle off, followed by stretchers.

“This way.” Victoria led us to a metal staircase that switched back and forth down the side of the cliff.

“Who are they?” I asked.