The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (3 page)

I fiddled with the leather bracelet that I’d made back at camp. Crude stamps spelled out
Dad
, followed by a coarse etching of what, at the time, I’d thought was just a funky symbol for Camp Aasgard, but that I now knew was an Atlantean symbol, maybe for Atlantis itself.

It was the old me and the new. And so maybe I just wanted some concrete connection between the two, like before I could go be this crazy thing, this Aeronaut, I needed to make sure I was still old Owen, too. A week ago, I wouldn’t have imagined wanting that, but now I found that I did.

All of which was why I said to Leech, “You haven’t
lost
your bearing, have you?”

“Of course not,” he replied.

“So after Yellowstone, we’ll correct our course.”

Leech gave me a weird look: less annoyed, more serious. “Look, I just think it’s wasting precious time.” He almost sounded worried.

“Well,” said Lilly, “I vote with Owen. So deal with it.” She started rubbing her back. “It’s getting hot, fast. Is that where we’re headed?”

“Yeah.” We were coming up on the small canyon. It was narrow and curvy, its walls striped in every shade of brown.

“Looks homey,” Leech muttered.

“It’s concealed,” I said. “That’s the point.”

On its bank was what had likely been a park. There was a wide expanse of cracked pavement, a flat area with picnic tables awash in drifts of sand, the skeleton of a playground poking out. Beside it, the canyon opened into a wide mouth, like there had been a waterfall. Below that was an empty scoop of land; maybe it had been a pond. Kids had probably gone swimming there, way back when.

But as we passed over the park, we saw that now the dry pond was something very different.

“Aww, man!” said Leech.

“Uh . . .” Lilly breathed, sounding nauseated.

The dry depression was piled with bodies.

THERE WERE TOO MANY BLACKENED BONES TO count, hundreds of people, all dumped one atop the next, the entire pile burned. A deep set of ruts, tire tracks that no water had ever come to wash away, led to an enormous dump truck parked back beside the city wall.

“Plague, you think?” asked Leech.

“Probably flu,” I said. “It always hit bad in places with close quarters. Maybe RP two.”

“What?” Lilly asked.

“Rise pandemic two,” I said. “People called it red tide. One of the symptoms was busted blood vessels across a victim’s face. I was little when it happened, and we got lucky out at Hub. There were only about ten cases and they got them quarantined in time.”

“Red tide?” said Leech, like he thought that was a stupid idea.

“Well, what do you think it was, then?”

Leech peered at me for a second, then just shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, it probably took out most of the town, but I bet that was just the beginning. There’s a thing, population trauma syndrome, where survivors of pandemics lose their grip on reality. Maybe that’s when they started building battlements out of skulls and hanging bodies on sticks.”

“Is there a thing with boys knowing so many details about plagues and death?” Lilly asked.

“It’s interesting,” I said.

“Agreed,” said Leech, and we actually shared a rare almost-grin.

“They shouldn’t be contagious anymore, after baking in the sun for years,” I said, bringing the craft down over the bodies. I noticed now that there were no skulls. They’d all been put to use back in town.

Lilly spoke quietly as she peered down at the tangle of limbs. “Why should we save this world, when things like this can happen?”

I shrugged, but didn’t reply. She had a point, but again I was surprised by her tone. Of everyone back at camp, Lilly had been the one most passionate about taking action to make things better.

“We should just keep going,” Leech muttered. “I’m not going to be able to rest with those things nearby.”

“I gotta sleep,” I said. “I’ll get as far from them as I can.”

I brought the craft over the dry falls and into the mouth of the narrow canyon. We floated through shady curves. The riverbed was a strip of light sand, boulders here and there. The rock walls looked like they’d been smoothed by hands.

“Okay, now we give this a try,” I said. I pressed the pedals all the way back, and we touched down gently on the sand. I watched the vortex dim. We’d already lost the thermal balloon in our escape from Eden. If the vortex went completely out, the craft would be useless.

I closed my eyes and drifted inward, a sensation like falling backward into water, until the outside world disappeared. I felt the hum of the nearby crystal skull, which was tucked in Lilly’s bag.

Around me was the setting I’d seen before: a stark gray beach along a crystal-blue alpine lake, surrounded by steep, snowcapped mountains. Behind me was the Atlantean city, in a fjord that, according to Paul, was in Greenland, a city that would also be their last outpost. Its narrow spires reached for the high clouds. The flat roof of its tall central pyramid was lit with pale white globes.

You’re sure this will work?
I asked Lük, who sat cross-legged nearby, coiling sail lines. He was my age, both ancient looking and strangely like me, our genes linked but separated by hundreds of generations.

Both our craft were tied to stakes in the sand. They drifted in the water, little waves making plunking sounds against their wooden hulls. There were no other students around.

He spoke.
A charge to the mercury vortex engine should last you a couple thousand kilometers
under smooth flying conditions. It uses nearly no power when idle
.

Okay, good
, I said.
At some point, we’re going to need to construct a new thermal
.

Lük closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. A shadow crossed his face.

What?
I asked.

He looked around, frowning.
We will need to reconnect with the skull to access that information. It should . . . it should be here, but it’s not
.

Huh, okay
, I said. He was still peering at me.
What?
I asked again.

I’m not sure
, said Lük.
I am noticing other gaps in information. I believe the skull should have created a more complete melding between us. We should convene again
.

Okay, after I get some rest we can have another skull session
.

I swam back up to the surface and took my feet off the pedals. The vortex dimmed to the faintest glow I’d seen so far, but it stayed lit, emitting a low hum.

“We’re good,” I said, grabbing the black backpack that Dr. Maria left behind with us. Lilly hauled her bag out and we all retreated to a spot near the wall, deep in the safety of shadows where the rippled sand was fine and soft. As I dropped down to my knees, I felt my entire body shutting down.

Lilly spread out her blanket. We sat in a triangle and I pulled out two of the remaining soymeal bars from Dr. Maria’s pack, along with a single water bottle. We had only one more bar, a package of synth veggie crisps, and no more water.

I tore open the wrappers and started breaking the dirtbrown bars into chunks. “Two thirds each,” I said.

As I handed two bits toward Leech, I thought of the moment in the predator-prey game when he hadn’t given me the food credits, when I’d pushed him and we’d started a fight that we’d never finished. We locked eyes now, and I wondered what we would do with that unresolved hate, now that we were partners. He raised his eyebrows and took the two pieces, like he was acknowledging what I felt, too: we might annoy each other, but we were also a long way from those identities we’d still been pretending to have in the Preserve.

The few bites of pasty bar only made me more hungry. I opened the water bottle and took a single sip before passing it around.

“You know,” said Leech as we ate, “given that most everybody in this town seems to have died suddenly and terribly, there might actually be some supplies left over in that Walmart.”

“We’re not going in there,” I said. “If you were from out here and knew the protocol for red tide, you’d know that it can be carried by mice and roaches, which are bound to be in there, especially if there’s old food lying around.”

“Listen to the brain,” said Leech.

“I am, actually.”

Leech laughed to himself. “Red tide . . . Sorry, I can only listen to it for so long.”

“What do you know?” I said. “You were cryoed for what, thirty years—”

“Forty-seven and a half,” said Leech. He stopped laughing.

“Right. Out here, this is my world.”

“As far as you know,” said Leech. He shoved his soymeal bites in his mouth, then got up and started trudging down the canyon, kicking sand. “I’ll take first watch.”

“I do know!” I called after him, and immediately hated how defensive I sounded. I reminded myself that I was at least his equal.

Leech waved a hand over his shoulder. “Whatever. Boys’ room is this way.” He disappeared around the corner, but not far enough that we couldn’t hear him relieving himself.

“Nice.” Lilly groaned.

“I can’t believe we’re stuck with him.” I said. I lay back on the sand, lacing my fingers behind my head and staring at the curving rock above us and the slim river of visible sky. The sand smelled like it had been washed. A low layer of cool air hovered over it. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, my legs turning to cement.

There was a light sound of static from beside me. Lilly had pulled out her computer pad. She was running her finger back and forth, causing a warbling hiss of empty gamma link frequencies as she scanned for the Free Signal again. When we’d left Eden, we’d had Paul’s phone, but it had self-destructed when Lilly tried to use it, like we’d seen Aaron’s do. She’d thrown it overboard.

Lilly sensed me looking. “Get some sleep.”

“Right.” I wanted to talk with her more, but sleep pulled me down. I drifted beneath the static from the computer, back through a dark night’s journey, through the open air vent, back into the TruSky of EdenWest, past the hover copters, down to the lab and bodies we’d seen, down into the dark green water with its ghostly blue siren, and finally into black sleep.

For a while.

Owen
.

I swam up from dark depths, the siren’s call beckoning. I was back in the lake and I had gills again, fluttering magically. The shimmering blue form floated before me.

Who are you?
I asked her, like I had the last time I’d seen her, in the skull chamber beneath Eden.

And just like last time, the siren didn’t answer, only turned and wriggled off into the murk.

I tried to swim after her, but my surroundings began to change. Water was replaced by walls: the dingy metal panels of our apartment back at Hub. I was suddenly much younger, in my bed wrapped in blankets and cowering against the wall.

“Owen, they’re here. Want to go see?” Mom stood over me, her cowboy hat on. It was the night that the Three-Year Fire reached Yellowstone. She held out her hand, but I didn’t want to go because I felt certain about something:
going out to see the fires makes her leave
. Yet I was getting up anyway, just like I had in real life.

Why was I back here? The second time I’d closed my eyes in two days, and both times I found myself reliving this same night. Once again we headed up and outside to the ledge on the caldera wall, to watch the pyrocumulus clouds sail overhead like the warships of a conquering army, to watch the herd of flames plunge over the rim, with me trying to be brave because my mom was enjoying the show, and yet inside feeling so scared, so vulnerable, certain that if my mother knew what I was feeling, it would make her leave us.

But then, unlike that actual night, light began to bloom around me. Suddenly, it was the next morning, the sky gray, the world a dead wash of ash around the black skeletons of trees. The ash was smooth, erasing the lines and contours of the world. A canvas to start again. Gray flakes of it still fell from the sky, just like over the Atlantean city where Lük and I first met.

The world smelled sour like burned wood and electricity. Everything swam in heat and there were spots of glowing red cinder here and there. And . . .