The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (5 page)

I hated how the thought of them burned me. I needed to just deal. They hadn’t even been going out anymore when I showed up. But maybe it also felt like more evidence that our connection was no longer the same—or worse, that it had never even been what I’d thought it was in the first place. After all, she’d lied to me about seeing the siren.

All of these thoughts crowded in my head, spinning wildly and feeding off one another. Maybe that had been Paul’s plan. If so, it had worked. Lilly, Evan, Paul’s cryptic comments about me, and on top of all that, now we couldn’t go to Hub. And Dad was going to hear these allegations against me. What would he think of his son, the escapee and accused murderer? Would he be brought in for questioning?

Paul had cut us off from the world, given us nowhere to go that was safe. It all felt like too much, but I tried to push through the storm of doubt and focus.

“If he hacked into the pad,” I said slowly like I had to pull each word out of a giant, tangled heap, “then doesn’t that mean he knows our location right now?”

“Yeah,” said Lilly absently.

“And that means we need to get moving.” I looked at Leech. “Looks like you get your wish.”

Leech nodded seriously. I was glad to see he didn’t want to gloat. “So, the bearing then?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get it,” said Lilly. She’d snapped out of her trance. “If he knows where we are, why not just come get us? Why did he contact us first? It’s almost like he’s giving us a head start.”

“He probably wants to see what we’ll do,” I said.

“We’re still his lab rats,” muttered Leech, “even outside Eden.”

“So, what? . . . He’s just toying with us?” said Lilly. She sounded defeated again.

“No,” I said, feeling a surge of resolve. “He doesn’t have us yet.” I turned to Leech. “Where do we go?”

Leech pulled his little black sketchbook from the waistband of his shorts, along with Aaron’s subnet computer pad, which he’d been hanging on to all night. “I made some new sketches while you were asleep,” he said, kneeling down and opening the notebook.

I joined him. Lilly hesitated for a minute. I saw her reach up and rub at her gills, wincing. Finally she crawled over beside us.

“Check it out.” Leech pointed at a map drawn across two pages. “Things aren’t quite to scale here, but”—he pointed to a circle with a plus sign in the top right corner—“that’s EdenWest, and we’re about here.” He indicated a small dot, then moved his finger along a dotted line that left EdenWest and ran diagonally over the landscape toward the far corner into the triangles of a mountain range. It ended at a little star. “That’s the bearing, and that’s the marker.”

“I still don’t get how you are seeing these maps,” I said, “when we haven’t found your skull yet.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Leech. “I think, since the Atlanteans couldn’t know which skull we’d find first, they put a little bit of the information for me in all of them, you know, so we could get on course. That’s what allowed me to use the map room in Eden. And those maps I could see pointed to this place.” He indicated the star in the mountains.

I looked at the map and felt like something didn’t line up. Leech had drawn a compass rose in the top left. This was what was disorienting me. The compass was at a cockeyed angle. I pointed to it. “You’ve been saying that our bearing needs to be southwest. But doesn’t this compass mean that we’re supposed to go south instead of southwest?”

This question seemed to excite Leech. “Okay, right, it would,
if
those were the true compass directions, but see that’s the thing that I, well, that
we
figured out back in the navigation room in Eden. The maps that I see in my head, they’re oriented different. My north, is that way,” he said, extending his arm in the same direction as on the compass he’d drawn, “but really, actual north is that way.” He ticked his arm to the left like the hand of a clock.

“So,” said Lilly, “you have the wrong north in your head.”

“Not wrong,” said Leech, “just old. From about ten thousand years ago, during the Atlantean time.”

“So you’re saying the North Pole moved?”

“Well, it moves all the time, historically. Sometimes the poles even flip. But something bigger than that happened between the Atlantean time and now. It’s not so much that the pole moved as I think the
land
, the whole crust of the earth, moved. A lot. I think it was because of the Paintbrush. Point is, any map we find has to be recalibrated based on where things are now. That’s part of what makes the Atlantean sites so hard to find.”

“You never struck me as a big nerd,” said Lilly, and though her tone was still sullen, there was a slight gleam in her eyes finally.

Leech smiled at this.

“How far is it to the marker?” I asked.

Leech ran his finger along the line. “A thousand kilometers, give or take.”

I did the calculations in my head. “That’s like seventeen flying hours. We should have just enough power in the vortex to make it.” I looked up toward the top of the canyon, at the sun angling down the walls. “It’ll be light for a few more hours. We’ll be easy to spot. And we’re gonna fry out there.”

“May be more dangerous to stay,” said Lilly.

“Yeah,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let’s go.”

We threw our bags in the craft and climbed aboard.

“Here.” Lilly passed around her bottle of NoRad. We covered our faces and arms and legs, feeling it tingle as it sank in. We saved some for later, and I hoped it would be enough.

The vortex was still swirling, humming softly. I pressed on the pedals and we began to rise.

“Watch the walls,” I said to Leech. There was no wind down here, so the sails were useless. He leaned out and pushed off whenever we drifted close to the side.

We rose slowly out of the canyon. As the skull battlements on the bank building appeared, I watched for Paul’s forces.

“See anything?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Leech.

“Nada,” said Lilly.

“Okay.” I brought us up into the full heat of the late afternoon sun. A lot of good our escape would be if we all got Rad poisoning. I checked the wind: beneath thermal gusts, there was a steady breeze at about five knots.

My feet flexed, but I didn’t start us moving. As if it sensed my pause, my stomach rumbled again. I wondered if it had been loud enough to hear, and found Leech looking at me.

“Seventeen hours is a long time,” he said, “especially on one bottle of water.”

I sighed. “Seventeen at best.”

Leech glanced back toward town. “This could really be our best chance for supplies.”

“There might be something else on the way,” I said immediately, feeling the urge to go, to run, and maybe also not wanting to give in to Leech, but I reminded myself that we had to be past that kind of thinking if we were going to survive out here. And he was right. We’d already flown six hundred kilometers, and over all that land, this was the only place we’d seen that might possibly have supplies.

I gazed at the Walmart, feeling a surge of worry.

“It’s probably worth checking out,” said Lilly.

“Yeah.” I yanked on the sail lines and we banked around. We were a few hundred yards away when there was a flash of light. The Walmart SuperPlus sign, standing high above the vacant parking lot, was flickering to life. A weak light, barely visible in the afternoon sun, only a few of the bulbs inside the cracked plastic working, but still: on.

I slowed the craft. “You all saw that,” I said.

“Generator?” Leech asked.

I looked around for the gleam of a wind turbine somewhere nearby.

“There,” said Lilly, pointing at the roof. “Underneath the sand: solar shingles. Enough are exposed to make a charge.”

“It just turned five o’clock,” said Leech, checking the computer. “The sign’s probably just old tech on a timer. And, if there’s power to run the sign, there could still be power in the freezer cases and stuff.”

These were realistic possibilities, but I couldn’t help mentioning, “Or there could be people.”

“What are the odds?” said Leech.

“Fine. We’d just better be fast,” I said, and ignoring the ringing of my nerves, I brought us down toward the store.

I KEPT A WIDE BERTH AROUND THE FLAGPOLE BODY. The plywood covering the front doors and windows seemed intact and formidable, so I looked for another entrance. There was a little doorway sticking up near the center of the roof. I landed on the sand beside it.

I hopped out beside Lilly and we checked the warped metal door. “Locked,” I said, jiggling the handle. “It doesn’t look too strong though . . .” I shook it back and forth harder.

“Here, let me.” Lilly pulled me back and delivered a vicious kick. The door smacked open, yawning inward on one hinge.

“Nice,” I said, turning to smile at Lilly, but she’d already headed back to the craft. I stepped into the doorway. “Stairway into darkness,” I reported. I started down, but Lilly grabbed my arm again.

She’d gotten her knife, the one she’d taken from a Nomad body back in Eden. “You should stay,” she said. “We can’t leave the ship unguarded. We’d be screwed without it, and you’re the only one who can fly it.”

“Makes sense,” Leech agreed, joining her.

“You’re staying, too,” she said to Leech. “You’re the two who have to get to Atlantis.” She slipped the knife in her belt. “I’m the expendable one.”

“Hey,” I started, “we don’t know that for sure—”

“Don’t,” said Lilly. She rubbed at her gills, grimacing. “I’ll scout it out and come back with a report.” She started down the stairs.

Leech gave me a slight nod and started after her.

When Lilly turned, he said, “I’m gonna watch your back.”

“I don’t need—”

Leech brushed past her. “Okay, you watch mine. Going in there alone is stupid and you know it.”

Lilly grabbed Leech by the shoulder and stepped in front of him. “Fine, but you follow me.”

Leech fell into step behind her. As he turned and started down the next set of stairs, he looked up at me. I nodded, knowing he actually meant it as a kind of pact between us this time, rather than as a challenge.

Their footsteps slapped on the concrete stairs. The sound faded away, and then I was alone with the hollow afternoon wind, waterless, bracing my skin with grains of sand.

I kicked at the side of the ship, hating that Lilly was down in the dark, and it wasn’t me that was with her. I thought about going down anyway, but she was right. If anything happened to the ship, we were goners. But still . . . I wondered if I was even on her mind right now, or if it was just Evan. I knew that wasn’t fair of me, probably wasn’t even true, but I couldn’t help it.

The sun beat down on me. I thought to stand in the shade of the doorway, but first I walked around the perimeter of the roof, scanning the horizon. The distant stone hills were still, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Eden was out there somewhere, that they were watching. I looked down the streets leading away in right angles, each ending at a section of the wall, half-expecting to see gold-visored peace forces lunging over the jagged battlements.

I passed close to the front of the store, and paused to look at the body on the flagpole. It had been lashed to the pole with thick purple ropes, like the kind of cord you’d use for cave diving or mountain climbing. There were two big awkward knots, one at the waist and one at the neck, and the body was slumped over to the side. It was dressed in a white shirt and pants. There were stains on it, patches of burned reds and black, but overall the clothing and the body seemed to be in better shape than the one we’d seen on the wall. Maybe this one wasn’t quite as old.

I thought of what Lilly had said, this morning:
Why should we save this world, when things like this can happen?
I wondered what would lead people to do this. Madness, I guessed. I remembered hearing stories of massacres, mass suicides and genocides as resources dried up. There had been some weird stuff, too, about when EdenSouth fell to the Heliad-7 cult, rumors of human sacrifice and even cannibalism, but I never paid too much attention to the news programs my dad would have on in the mornings. Other than the sports, most of the news was just dark and depressing.

I figured these bodies were supposed to be warnings. And what had become of the people who’d killed this person? Had they left? Died themselves? Or were they still here, somewhere? Probably not, given the state of things. But I still felt my nerves humming, and wanted to get moving.

Beware the horrors
.

I flinched. The voice had come from beside me. There was no one there . . . Wait, there was. An impression, faint, flickering, like a smudge of the light. Now I could see her: the primitive face, the short figure, her skin cast in a blue shimmer, hair black, dress maroon. She wore a necklace with a tiger carved out of soapstone, her waist and forehead adorned by strings of hammered copper and turquoise, ruby, and jade.

The siren.

“You,” I said. “You still exist.”

She shimmered like a projection, her amber eyes overlaying the horizon.
I have existed since the beginning. And I would visit you more, but it takes a great effort to reach you
, she said,
even briefly
.