The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (32 page)

The structures were made of greenish glass and sleek metal beams in trapezoidal shapes, but unlike the polished perfection of the EdenWest city, these were coated in a film of red dust and cloaked in green and black molds. Waterfalls of vines cascaded through the cracks in the ceiling and braided their way down buildings, fanning out across the streets, and climbing other buildings. Trees had sprouted on rooftops and in clefts and cracks. Some whole sides of buildings were furry with colonies of moss, which in turn were sprouting leafy plants and more vines.

There was a strange quality to the silence, a hollow echo of the dome that made it seem somehow claustrophobic, even though the place was enormous. Without any TruSky to obscure the ceiling with haze, the place looked even more astoundingly big but also somehow confining, its rusty girders and burned panels like a prison.

We walked up a main avenue picking our way through debris. Our feet crunched on cracked hexagonal panels of dark glass. “Is this a SensaStreet?” I asked Leech.

“Yeah. Each block used to talk to you as you walked, respond to your moods based on the force of your step, body temperature—stuff like that. I never quite got the hang of it.” He spoke quietly with his head down.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, and then pointedly turned away.

Birds called, their wings fluttering in the cavernous space. I saw a long iguana sunning itself on a piece of debris at the side of the road. Doorways were cloaked with dark folds of spiderwebs. It was amazing how quickly the jungle had worked to reclaim this place. I thought of the towns on our flight from EdenWest, out in the desert, preserved like museums. This place, it seemed, would be gone in a few years, digested by nature.

After ten minutes we reached the lake. Like in EdenWest, there was a long body of water stretching toward the far side of the dome, only this one was greenish and choked with plant life. Far out in the water, a giant white shard of the ceiling stuck out at an angle. In its center were the broken remains of the Eye, a sphere half-submerged in the water. It had sprouted its own island of plants and trees on its top. Some kind of large bird was sitting on the very tip of the fallen piece. The Aquinara stood silent to our left.

We followed the edge of the lake. Ahead I saw a pyramid made of stone. It was like the one in Desenna but clearly older; and for a moment I thought it was Atlantean, like from my skull memories, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was made of flat layers, like stacked blocks of decreasing size. It had a square top and staircases leading up the sides. There were other buildings around it, crumbled remains mostly consumed by jungle. The scene had a weird time-loop quality, with these ancient structures encased by a giant dome from far in their future.

“Victoria?” Leech called. He pointed down a city street. “Is that it?”

A few blocks in, there was a strangely shaped building, about ten stories high, with smooth, curved sides. Unlike every other building in the empty city, soft pale light glowed from its windows. I realized what the shape was. It was the outline of a double helix, the shape of DNA.

“The cryo facility,” said Victoria. “Why?”

Now I knew why Leech had been quiet. “I think my brother is in there,” he said.

“Really?” said Victoria, sounding surprised.

“I’m not totally sure,” said Leech softly. “It’s what Paul told me.”

“It could be,” said Victoria. “We have the records back at Tactical.”

“And you said . . .” Leech spoke slowly. “They’re still alive in there, right?”

Victoria put a hand on his shoulder. “They are, but . . .”

“I see lights on,” said Leech.

Victoria sighed. “Yes, I left the power on to Cryo so I could keep our lovely Seven alive. I could have kept only her pod operating and shut off the rest, but . . . It’s funny, during the violence of the revolt and the coup, I had to make many hard choices about people’s lives. I’ve built a religion based on accepting death, but . . . I couldn’t pull the plug on those people.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Everyone should have a choice,” said Victoria. “It’s one thing to help volunteers free themselves from this world, but it’s another to just unplug five hundred people who thought they were going to be woken up.”

I thought back to the lab beneath Eden. I’d unplugged those kids . . . but Anna had asked me to. And the others, weren’t they beyond choice? It had seemed like it, like I was doing the right thing, but where was that line? Had I played God, thinking I knew best?

“So why haven’t you woken them up?” asked Lilly. For once, she sounded like her old self. “You woke up Seven.”

“Don’t sound so glad,” Seven said sarcastically.

Lilly didn’t look over.

“That’s the problem,” said Victoria. “About two years ago, we had a brutal hurricane. They’re always bad here, but this one—we named it Atlacamani, Aztec goddess of storms. All of Desenna lost power, including Cryo. They were without power for over five hours, which drained the battery backups. It wasn’t enough time to thaw the bodies, but it was long enough for the brains to lose their stimulative charge.”

“Are you saying they’re all brain-dead?” asked Leech.

“Yes, that’s mostly what I’m saying.”

“How can it be mostly?” he asked.

“Well,” said Victoria, “I’m not sure how much you know about the cryo process. When a subject is put into Cryo, a complete brain wave simulation is created, like a map of exactly how that brain works. The idea is that this is a backup of all the thoughts and memories and how the person thinks. And it can be reloaded if there’s a complication.”

“Tell them the other thing you can do with those,” said Seven.

Victoria shot a look at her. “What our lovely goddess is referring to is that, though it was strictly forbidden in the contracts that cryo subjects signed, some Eden technicians did learn how to perform selective manipulation of the brain wave maps.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means they could change your memories, alter them to suit their needs,” said Seven. “Mother
guarantees
she didn’t do that to me, though.”

“I certainly didn’t,” Victoria snapped. “That is a line I am not willing to cross. Identity is sacred. We’re nothing without it. But others didn’t feel that way.”

“When did they cross the line?” Lilly asked.

“I don’t really know the specifics,” said Victoria. “But I do know that there were certain cases of Cryos who did not volunteer, people the project deemed to be vital but who would not agree to work with them. And yet those people awoke from Cryo with memories as if they had chosen it willingly, and as if their families were fine with the decisions.”

“So you’re saying our memories could be lies,” said Leech darkly. “I might never even have wanted to be a Cryo . . .”

Victoria frowned. “I am saying that it is possible. But I have no idea if that was done in your cases. Then again, there’s not much I would put past Paul.”

“So,” asked Leech, “what about reloading the brain wave maps?”

Victoria smiled sadly. “After Atlacamani, when we restored power and rebooted the system, we found that the security systems had reset. We have the brain wave maps in storage, but we are locked out of the programs that would allow us to reload them.”

“You don’t have a password?” Leech asked.

“There are multiple layers of security, and, no, I don’t. Paul does, as do certain key members of the project programming teams, but—well, I can’t very well ask them, can I? Arlo has had a team working on it, but it’s been almost two years and we haven’t been able to circumvent the encryption yet. So for now, the cryo facility is a room full of frozen bodies, only nobody’s home.”

“But you could tell me,” said Leech, “if he’s in there.”

Victoria nodded. “Yes. We’ll check the moment we get back, okay?”

“Thanks,” said Leech.

Victoria continued on. “The temple is this way.”

Leech kept staring at the distant building. He looked small, standing there, the same kid with sloping shoulders and scrawny arms who used to make me so angry. I stepped up beside him. “Hey,” I said. “Sorry.”

He had his arms across his chest, holding his biceps, and shaking, cryo sickness making him look like he was cold in this muggy air. “It’s okay,” he muttered. “He’s in there, I think.”

“I’m sure Paul didn’t mess with your memories,” I said, not knowing but thinking that Leech’s story of meeting Paul had sounded true. How could you be sure, though? I couldn’t imagine that, the idea of having your very memories, your very identity in doubt.

Leech shook his head. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. He turned and looked at me seriously, his good eye seeming to glare almost like he was mad, but I had finally learned that this was also his trusting face. “Will you come with me, when I go in there?”

“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t expected that question. Did this mean that we were, like, real friends now? But I knew my answer. “Yeah. Definitely.”

He nodded and we started after the group.

We passed Lilly, who was standing at the lake’s edge, staring out across the water. A breeze swirling down through the broken dome fanned her hair back off her shoulders. I heard a rustle, and saw that below a small wall, waves lapped against thick black plastic, the lake’s false bottom revealed.

My first instinct was not to say anything. She seemed to be spacing out. In fact, it sounded like she was singing to herself. But I saw that the group was getting ahead of us. “Hey,” I said. “Are you coming—”

She turned and her eyes reeled in like she was returning from some distant daydream. But when she saw me, her gaze hardened. “You don’t need to worry about me. You’ve got other things on your mind. And so do I.” She started catching up.

“Lilly . . . Yesterday wasn’t what it looked like,” I tried.

She didn’t stop. “That depends on what you think it looked like.”

I felt a sinking inside, and also that distance again. Was it even possible to make amends at this point? Was it even worth it?

I walked a ways behind her, as we crossed a wide, flat stretch of overgrown grass and shrubs toward the pyramid. It seemed like it had once been a park. There were benches and statues buried in the overgrowth.

We reached the base of the giant structure, gathering beside one of the wide staircases that led to the summit. It was made of huge gray stones, all interlocking with precise seams. The side of the stairs was decorated with a giant serpent, ending at a carved stone head at the base, its tongue curling out to the ground.

Arlo stood in a recessed doorway cut into the wall beside the stairs. There was a modern-looking steel door there with a keypad lock, another behind-the-curtain Eden moment, only this door was splotched with rust.

“This was the central pyramid of Chichén Itzá, a late classic Mayan city,” said Victoria. “The Mayans were master astronomers. This pyramid is perfectly aligned to the equinoxes. It is over a thousand years old, but this is not the first pyramid to exist in this location. It is built on the ruins of a prior structure, and beneath that one lies even another: the original Atlantean temple that marked this spot, ten thousand years ago.”

Victoria pointed across the field, to where two large walls made a kind of wide aisle. “The Maya used that structure for a ball game, but its original design was for a different purpose they never guessed at. Owen knows what it is.”

I felt eyes turning to me. I didn’t know what Victoria meant . . . but as I studied the ball court, I saw how the angle fit the probable wind currents, how the hoops for the ball would likely line up. . . . “It was a landing area. For Atlantean craft. Ships a lot bigger than mine.”

Arlo typed in a code and there was a grinding sound as locks opened. He pushed the door inward on creaking hinges and led us in.

The passageway was cool and dank, narrow, with a flat concrete floor and a curved ceiling. It seemed like something Eden had dug. Arlo, Victoria, and the soldiers lit headlamps.

It led straight in toward the center of the pyramid, then intersected with another tunnel running perpendicular. This passage had stone walls like the exterior. A Mayan passage. We followed it, having to hunch over. The air was heavier, dense with mold and dust. We turned left, again and again, making a square spiral inward, until we arrived in a cramped room. It was barely wide enough for us all to stand shoulder to shoulder. Its ceiling stretched up into darkness as if we were at the bottom of a well. The walls were decorated with more looming faces, sinister and square.

“Step to the walls,” said Victoria.

We all crowded back, and when the headlamps aimed at the floor, we saw that there was a round stone in the center with notches in its edges. Arlo and another man bent and began to lift, straining. The stone scraped, and they had to twist it back and forth. It was a half-meter thick, and when they finally removed it, it thudded so heavily that I felt the walls tremble.

“In we go,” said Victoria. She sat down and scooted herself into the hole. Her headlamp illuminated a series of carved depressions in the rounded side, making a ladder. She descended out of sight.

We followed, me climbing down after Seven. I lost count of how many steps there were. Maybe we’d gone down ten meters, maybe more, when I reached out with my foot and found space.