The Far Dawn (2 page)

It also couldn't have been more different from the wells of sorrow I'd been sunk in at so many other times since we'd fled the death in Desenna. Dawn was always the worst. Lying in shadows trying to fall asleep after flying all night, with the faces of my lost family, of Carey, Seven, even little Colleen, waiting to greet me behind my eyes.

But between Lilly and me there was no more distance. No gills, no doubts, no differences even in our pasts. We were one against the world, and our kisses defied time. Holding each other now, our wet clothes stuck together, my hands rubbing her shoulders, her back, my lips exploring her chin, her neck, my body felt like it had a purpose so complete and obvious: no mystery, no technicians, no ancient DNA, just that I was meant to be here, now, like this, and our embrace seemed strong enough to keep the world at a distance.

“I love you, Lilly,” I said for the sixth time since I'd uttered it inside EdenSouth.

“I love you, Owen,” Lilly whispered back, her fifth time. Once I'd said it to her while she was sleeping.

And I felt so sure of it, so sure of us.

After a minute more of kissing, I said, “Mixits.”

Lilly's smile glowed. “Ding!”

We arranged our blankets in the driest spot we could find. Rain hissed on the palm leaves. We lay down and tucked in and kissed more, and for a while I forgot all the dark and doubt and everything outside the warm space between us.

“So, what was that?” I asked a little while later. The rain had stopped, the leaves still dripping. Lonely birds called in the jungle behind us.

“Mmm,” Lilly said sleepily. “You mean the flying?”

“Yeah.” I squeezed her tighter. “I thought you were dead, I . . .” A shiver racked my body.

Lilly held me tighter. “The wind knocked me out of the craft, and I was falling and—I don't know—it was almost like instinct. I started to sing, the melody that calls the Terra, and as I sang it I felt this . . . understanding, I guess. Like a connection to the air, to the ground, like I was part of all of it, not separate. And so then I just moved. With the wind, with gravity. It was such an amazing feeling.” Lilly sighed. “I think we're seeing the world all wrong.”

“How so?”

“I mean, not you and me. Everyone. Like, we're missing what it even means to be alive and part of something living. I felt connected to everything just now. Like we're all one being.”

“That's amazing,” I said, though in a way I felt jealous. When I wasn't feeling love for Lilly, all I felt was a lonely chill of loss and death. It was hard for me to believe that I was connected to anything in the world, other than her.

“I think the Atlanteans knew it,” said Lilly. “I wonder if there's a way to give it back to the world. If we all felt like this . . . things might be different.”

“Maybe we can,” I said, and I was glad to hear this from Lilly. She'd wondered, days ago as we flew over Gambler's Falls, why we should save this world, with all its horrors. It was a feeling of pointlessness that I knew, like humanity wasn't worth it. But I felt like Lilly was—like we
were
worth it, and now she sounded like her old self, on a mission, and it made me love her even more.

“Ooh,” said Lilly, “shooting star.”

I looked up. “Missed it.”

“Alien or trash?” Lilly asked.

“Mmmm . . .” We never knew. We just liked to guess together. “Three . . .” I counted down. “Two”—Seven never waited for one—“one . . .”

“Alien,” we both said at the same time, and because we'd guessed the same, we kissed and then laughed, knowing how silly a game it was and yet not caring at all.

“Time to sleep.” Lilly rolled over and I curled up behind her. “Another big day saving the world tomorrow.”

“Right.” I smiled. She sounded so content, finally getting to act on that fire she'd had in Eden. She'd yearned for this, to
do
something, to make a difference. I admired it, though I felt guilty inside that I'd never felt the same. Or maybe I had, too, before the cryo.

Soon I heard her breath slow. I tried closing my eyes, letting myself relax . . .

But there was Elissa.

Sinking in the ash . . . eyes popping open in her cryo tube . . . stumbling around the roof of the pyramid in Desenna, dead but alive.

I waited outside her classroom at the end of each school day.

I could see her now, in her favorite overalls, her hair in a braid.

Dad took us up to the high ledges that one night to see a meteor shower that we'd heard about on the Northern News Network. But the climb made his lungs bad. Elissa and I had to help him back down the carved rock steps, and Elissa started coughing, too.

In the dark night hours since Desenna, and during the lonely dawns, I'd pieced most of it back together. These memories, so many from the life I'd lived up until we'd gotten the black blood, a full life with a twenty-five-year pause between my near death from plague and when I arrived at Camp Eden. In between, my mind had been frozen in a trap of technicians and cryo dreams, just waiting to be sprung. Now, I was slowly putting each memory back into place.

Elissa always sat on the arm of the couch beside Dad for soccer games. That way she could jump off if there was a goal.

But even the good memories were like old puzzle pieces with frayed edges, and so when they were replaced, they didn't quite fit right:

Mom liked to make cookies during the game, to give her something to do because the competition stressed her out. We rooted for New Murmansk, because we liked their maroon and green uniforms, and Vivechkin, their star forward. Mom wasn't always happy, life would get her down . . . but she wouldn't have left.

Paul had tinkered with my memories, given me a mother who'd abandoned me.

She would never have left.

Removed my sister with a surgeon's precision, leaving only a strange cryo dream that had haunted me. Having Elissa back in my mind was a warm relief. . . .

We took that family trip in the winter one time, when the days were shorter and safer, to a set of hot springs a few hours north of Yellowstone that were gas free and safe to soak in. Elissa thought they smelled like eggs—

But it was never too long before the other memories would creep in.

Dead Elissa, her body lurching around the top of the pyramid in Desenna, lifeless and cold.

Mom and Dad. They're . . . probably dead.

The agony was always there, lurking since Desenna, threatening at any point to rise like a wave and drag me down from the high of being with Lilly to the murky depths where I didn't feel connected to anyone or anything. And when I sank beneath it, I felt more alone than a single star in the black above. Even the warmth from Lilly beside me wasn't enough.

I pulled away from Lilly and quietly got up. I knew when my feelings went this way that sleep wasn't coming.

I walked out past the craft and sat on the edge of the cliff, dangling my legs over the rough black rock. The stars were beginning to fade, the horizon a pale blue. The last few thunderstorms flickered to the north and south, floating far out over the ocean like giant jellyfish.

How was I ever going to get past this feeling? That there was just me, alone in the universe. And no matter how much Lilly felt like we had a mission or a purpose, I couldn't help feeling like what did this Atlantean quest even matter? Who was it for? I would die, too, soon enough. Even if I somehow survived all this, then in thirty or forty years—maybe before that, if there was another pandemic. So what was the point? Why even bother? I had no family to go home to.

It was like Seven had said,
these are just the anthills and we're the ants and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar
. She'd felt meaningless because she was taken from her time. I'd tried to tell her that maybe this was her time. That maybe she was here now because of a design, a plan.

But I'd said all that before I'd known that I was like her. Taken out of time, used. I understood her so much more now, Leech, too, but what did it matter? They were both gone. Gone forever. How could there possibly be a point to all this random death?

The only answer I could find, that I kept coming back to like a beacon in the dark, was that I would do it for Lilly. That, and . . . what else was I supposed to do? Where else could we go? There was no third option, like Seven had wished for. Paul would hunt us down, wherever we went, and even if we escaped him, just ran off and hid somewhere, the world might be doomed if he found the Paintbrush of the Gods first.

We had to press on. I had to keep going, even if thoughts like these would haunt me forever.

Elissa liked ponies. All her life she wanted to see a live horse.

She never did.

She never will.

I sat there, watching the sky brighten and warm, watching the seagulls circle, and tried to be still as the storm swirled around me.

 

For a while.

Owen.

I'd been staring into the rainbow-oil shimmer of the sea. The horizon had grown white and the searing golden sun had just cleared the horizon.

I blinked, refocusing, and found her before me, shimmering in the air, my siren, who I now knew was the Terra. She appeared as she had before, with her waist-length black hair, the simple crimson dress with a copper and turquoise belt, the pendant of a great tiger around her neck. The new sun made her ancient lavender eyes glow.

“Hi,” I said, and then thought that was a dumb thing to say to a vision of a sort of before-the-gods god, but my brain was too fuzzy, and I added, “You look brighter.”

You are getting closer
, she said, her burning gaze steady on me,
but so is your enemy.

“Paul.” I looked over my shoulder, but Lilly still appeared to be asleep. “Did she call you?”

No, but I did hear her singing before and felt her awareness of Qi and An growing.

“Yeah,” I said, “she kinda flew.”

Yes. But it will not be enough.

The Terra's words sent a chill through me. “What do you mean?”

You are nearing the lair of a Sentinel. You must find it. And then we can speak more in the white realm.

“A Sentinel. In the Andes?”

Yes. Time grows short, Owen. Before the beginning there is always an end.

“I've heard that.” I found myself growing frustrated. “I'm a little tired for riddles.”

The Terra almost seemed to frown at this. Her light flickered.

You must be wary of the Three.

“Wary?”

The Three is a lie. It has always been.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked, but I also remembered Paul's words when he spoke to us in the canyon back in North Dakota:
The Three is a myth
, he'd said. And then he made it sound like I was somehow different. And I was; I'd been able to go inside Lilly's skull even though I wasn't the Medium.

“How can the Three be a lie?” I asked. “I mean, we were selected, and there are the skulls, the maps.”

The Three is very real. But the promise of the Three is a lie, because the Three will fail.

“Okay . . . but technically there isn't even a Three anymore,” I said. “Paul killed Leech.”

That is irrelevant.

“How can it be irrelevant?”

You will see.

“Fine, but . . .” This cryptic talk reminded me of what Lilly had read in the temple beneath EdenSouth. The end of the inscription, the part that Seven couldn't read, had said:

We must be wary of the Terra's patience. For if we fail her too often, she may make plans of her own.

I'd been turning this over and over: Lilly was the Medium, the one who was supposed to communicate with the Terra, Leech had been the Mariner, and I was the Aeronaut, the pilot.

Except then I was the only one the Terra actually spoke to. “Am I part of your plan?” I asked. “Of some different plan than just the Three?”

The Terra looked over my shoulder. I heard Lilly stirring.

Find the Sentinel, and I will show you.

“Owen?” Lilly called groggily from behind me.

I turned to her. “Over here.”

When I looked back, the Terra was gone.

I blinked for a second. My brain was so tired. I wondered if she'd been a hallucination. Except her strange words echoed in my head.

The Three is a lie. The Three will fail.

What did she mean? How could she even know that?

I got up and returned to Lilly, crawling under the blanket beside her.

“You okay?” she asked softly.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Sun's up. Keep sleeping.”

“Okay.”

I kissed her cheek and she rolled back over.

The thermal winds picked up, carrying the acrid scent of tar off the water. I put my hands behind my head and stared up into the palm leaves and diagonal slices of sunlight.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep, but for what seemed like hours, I just lay there, turning over the Terra's words and nursing a deep, cold fear. After all this, could we really be doomed to fail?

2

WITH THE RISE OF A WANING MOON HALFWAY through that night, we saw the first outline of the Andes in the distance. We'd left the ocean behind just after sunset, crossing jungle uplands that soon gave way to barren, dry hills. The monsoon wet was gone. We were back in the desert world. We passed dust-crusted towns, and cities as still as stone. At one point, we gave a wide berth to a trio of campfires with dancing shadows that were soaked in hellish screaming.

While Lilly flew, I sunk into my head and envisioned the maps, Leech's Mariner knowledge, and we set our course for the high mountain marker. Leech had oriented to an earlier version of the earth, before the Paintbrush of the Gods had caused the land to shift. The Atlanteans had literally remade the planet but had destroyed themselves in the process. Paul had said that he could perfect their science. I wondered how that could be possible.