The Far Dawn (17 page)

The boards warped but still flecked with paint.

Three coffins at the edge of a cobalt sea.

 

Who went too far, and were lost

To the heaving earth

To the flood.

 

It has taken me two days to build them. Rusty nails pulled out with my teeth, hammered in with a rock now streaked with the blister blood.

I don't know why I bothered.

I could have sunk them in the waves, like Leech,

In the smoke, like Elissa,

In the silence, like Anna,

In time, like my parents,

In the ice, like . . .

 

Three who will wait

Until long after memory fades

And should the time come again—

 

But it won't.

This time, it is finally over.

This time, they are never coming back.

What's lost is lost.

Once, in a temple, beneath a lie, I said I wanted to be true. I wanted to see truth.

I have been true.

But still I sit here, as gentle waves lick the coffin edges.

I have not set them afloat.

Because to do that, I'd have to see.

See the truth.

Of what is inside.

And I cannot face that alone.

 

Around noon, General Mendes finds me.

“Heard you ate something today,” he says as he sits down in the sand beside me with a groan. I feel him smiling at me. “Progress.”

“I guess.” I pick up a handful of sand and sprinkle it over the smooth black surface of the pressure cast on my right wrist, watching it stream off. There's still a faint pain there, but at least the bones are set and the healing has begun, though I'm told it will take weeks.

“It's not surprising,” he says. “No one can resist Caesar's millet pancakes.”

“Pancakes are good.”

The sun is rising over the rolling ocean. Each day, here at the end of the earth, it draws a lazy arc across the lower third of the horizon, before retiring in the early afternoon.

I stretch out my legs and let the diagonal, golden rays light my face. You can only just feel its heat. Here, you don't even need NoRad. You can live bright without cutting out anyone's heart.

“So, I think we've pretty much covered it,” Mendes says. “Any other details that have come back to you?”

“Not really.”

Over the last day and a half, I have told Mendes my story, everything I can remember and more, from the moment I drowned in EdenWest.

It is all told, now.

I gaze down at the coffins.

The story is over.

“Any new recon?” I ask him.

“We finally got the drones charged up enough to send them to those coordinates you gave us.”

I turn to him. “The board of directors?”

Mendes shrugs. “There's nothing there, just open ocean. Unless there used to be an island, or they had a boat stationed at some point, I'd say you got some faulty information.”

Moros had lied, then. “Elysium Planitia,” I say.

“What's that?”

“That's what my source said their base was called. That was probably a lie, too.”

“Well, I'll run it and see if anything turns up,” says Mendes.

A few larger swells break against the black beach. Clear waves with white foam tips. A black object bobs to the surface a few meters beyond the breakwater. I've seen one before. A seal. Another long-forgotten casualty of the Great Rise that still exists down here.

But of course it does.

After all, this is the place.

The beach I'd imagined running away to, with Lilly. The place where the water was trash free, the fish still the work of a god who gave a damn, of a Terra that wasn't imprisoned. I'd imagined it to be tropical, something turquoise and coral like I'd seen in books. Instead, it's black and blue, but still . . . here it is. . . .

Lilly . . .

“We finished the excavation,” says Mendes around his cigar.

“Yeah?”

“That Paintbrush of the Gods,” says Mendes. “Pretty impressive. It seems to work on some kind of fusion technology. We barely understand it. Mercury and induction and it uses the magnetic field of the earth and its relative gravity. Same kind of thing that powered your ship.”

I listen. I wish it interested me.

“Anyway, the machine is useless without whatever Paul took from it. This, Heart of the Terra.” When I don't reply, Mendes checks his watch. “Listen, we need to pull out of here at eleven hundred hours. So . . .”

“You can leave me here.”

“No, I can't,” says Mendes. “Sorry. You're coming with us.”

“I know.”

He rubs my back and it feels fatherly, and I miss my dad so much I nearly sob. It has barely occurred to me how far from me he is, how long ago it really was that I saw him. That, if he is alive out there in this world now, he is very old.

Most likely, he is dead, too.

“Tide's going out,” says Mendes.

“Yes.”

“Let me help you do this,” he says. “Come on, son, it's the least I can do.”

Before the beginning there was an end,

Three chosen to die

Three coffins on a gray beach.

The meaning of the legend is very different now.

Why should we save this world,
Lilly said once,
when things like this can happen?

I never want to get up. I don't want to live this next moment. The one I know is coming. Tightness creeps over me.

I realize I am holding my breath.

I let it out.

Pull up my legs, brush sand from my calves.

And stand.

The coffins are perfectly lined up. A wave rushes between them, hissing on the sand.

I take a step. Another.

And the bodies come into view.

The excavation team found Evan first. He died of a bullet to the brain. The medic, a gentle man for a soldier, named Grayland, said that based on the path of the bullet, he would have felt nothing, and experienced at best a second or two of disjointed memories before he was gone.

There are no funeral homes on the empty coast of Antarctica, nor in a fleet of military warships. But they have experience with the dead, and Evan's face has been washed of the blood splatters, and a clean bandage covers where the bullet entered his forehead.

I focus so hard on his closed eyes, on his broad body between the boards.

The medic said there was evidence of neurological tampering. Of cognitive substitution. Of Paul's messing with another head, tinkering to make Evan a better version of his problem child Leech. Had he ever seen any of us as actual people, or just toys in his lab?

I stop at the foot of Evan's coffin. Mendes, his silver uniform pants rolled up, steps half into the surf by Evan's head.

I have been thinking about what to say to him. Not that I need to say anything. He is just a body now. I know that from when Leech died. The light, the person, they are gone. But I want to say something anyway, so at least Mendes, or that seal or the wind, hears it. Or just so I do.

“I never liked you,” I say to Evan's still face, “and you never liked me, but you probably would have lived. You would have lived, if it hadn't been for us. Or maybe that's not true. Maybe you would have ended up an experiment, anyway. I don't know. We did what we thought was right. I want you to know I'm not sorry for what I did, but I am sorry for what I didn't do. I could have been stronger, confronted you sooner. We could have come up with a better plan. Maybe worked together. And then, maybe . . . you'd still be alive. I don't know. I'm sorry.”

I stop there. It's nothing grand, but if Evan were still here, he wouldn't want any more from me. I nod to Mendes and we lug the box out into the surf. The first cold wave hits us in the thighs. The coffin begins to float. We push, and Evan is given to the sea. His coffin bobs over the swells, beginning to take on water. The coffins are only meant to get the bodies far enough off shore so that the tide can carry them away. Hopefully, they won't wash back up. Or maybe they will. It was all I could think to do. Mendes offered me a military service out at sea, with the pyres, so that the bodies become ash and briefly light the dark.

I declined. The blisters, some sense of effort, seemed like the least I could do.

The next box is Mateu. Grayland said he was still lingering when the ice crushed him. I wonder what it must have been like for him, a boy living in a slum in Lagos, completely unaware of all this drama, to be grabbed from his life, flown halfway around the world, for a handful of days to be one of the Three, to witness wonders and horrors and then to be shot at point-blank range. I never even spoke to him. Never had the chance.

“You were the rightful owner of the Aeronaut's knowledge,” I say to him. “You never knew that. You lived a life having no idea what you were connected to. I don't know, maybe that was better than knowing, since knowing just leads to death, but you no doubt deserved better than this. For that, I'm sorry.”

We set Mateu to sea. Evan's casket has moved far off shore, and looks half-submerged.

I step back to shore.

Turn.

It is time.

Oh, I do not want it to be time.

Mendes puts his hand on my back as I face the third coffin. I built this one more carefully than the others, with attention to the joints, using the straightest pieces of wood that the trash piles at the far ends of this beach had to offer. The straightest nails. So it would float the longest.

Grayland said that, like Mateu, the worst-case scenario was that Lilly had been in an unconscious fog, her memories wild and unhinged, a sort of sugar-rush dream, if the bullet didn't kill her instantly. And that would only have been until the ice fell on her.

He couldn't be sure, though, without a body.

She'd been too deep in the chasm. They couldn't dig down that far. But even if she had somehow survived the collapse, she would have succumbed to the cold within short order. Bottom line, Grayland had said, she wouldn't have suffered.

I had listened to this, and yet that whole first night I did not sleep, could not sleep with the thought of her down there, lost to the ice, never to see her face again, never to know for sure if she was gone.

And, worse . . .

To hope. Because I knew Rana had been down there with her. And Rana had power. She had kept me alive, and so there was still a chance . . .

And maybe that was why Rana had appeared along the river yesterday morning. Because she knew that to move on, I needed to lose that hope.

I spied her at dawn, from the hovercraft deck, standing at the edge of the milky glacial river . . .

Lilly's blue body floating beside her.

Beautiful Lilly Ishani.

Oh . . .

It is time to look.

Hello, Lilly.

She lies in the box I built for her. Her clothes have dried. Her hair is neatly gathered behind her shoulders. Like Evan, she wears a clean white bandage like a headband, covering the hole in her bluish skin. I put it on myself. Her face is still smeared with dirt.

My Lilly.

Rana slid her down through the chasms and fissures, to the glacial river, guided her out from beneath the ice.

So that I could be sure.

I look at her now and I do not know how to understand that she is just a body, that she is just the material that housed a life, without that life in it. The skin the same temperature of the air, structures made to hold something now departed. Like the houses on the coasts, the empty walls can fall away, bones and lungs can be turned back into molecules, can be turned back into energy. Flesh can rot. Bacteria can gnaw on brain stem. It doesn't matter, now. The light and the heat of the life inside are gone.

She is
gone
, and suddenly I feel like I hate that this body can still be here, hate that it can lie there reminding me of every moment we spent together—

Me-O-Mys!

while also being a cruel joke version of her, a cheap knockoff of the real thing, a cold and dead and empty trick that only reminds me that we are terminal, that we are born to die and that if we really knew that every day, why the hell would we . . . anything?

So many times on our journey I had thought of just turning the craft around and running, running for the nowheres of the world where no one would have bothered us, and yet those notions were as cruel a joke as this body lying before me. It was all useless.

We were doomed to this from the moment we met. I started building this coffin on this beach the first time I looked into her sky-blue irises on that Eden dock and thought I'd found someone who would be careful with my anxious feelings, my pathetic cowardice, my lame, stupid heart.

Lilly, Lilly, Lilly.

I was the weapon of your destruction, but was there any other way?

I will never know.

If she could hear me right now, she would probably tell me to shut up.

Because all these thoughts change nothing. Still she lies here before me, lost. I can't even fully measure how alone I feel. It is as if there is an enormous shadow falling over me from behind, and if I turn, the loneliness will be there in a big nothing so great it will devour me.

That might be easier.

I think of Seven stepping off the pyramid in Desenna and feel like I get it. Right now, that would definitely be easier.

“It's okay,” says Mendes, as if he can hear my thoughts crushing inward on themselves.

“Yeah.” But it's not okay and I don't think it will ever be.

All of this and more is why I have nothing to say to Lilly. Not now. Not like this. I have thought back on our weeks together and decided that I said most of it while she was alive.

Enough of it.

Doesn't matter if I didn't.

I look down at my left wrist. The leather band there is still damp. I gave it to her by the sea, just after Desenna. The bracelet I made for my father.