The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (12 page)

Something cold touched my lips. I flinched, then saw it was the stew can, its top gouged open. “Have some,” said Lilly. She pressed it against my mouth and tilted it up. Cool, congealed chunks slid onto my tongue: mushy meat, slick potatoes, gelatinous broth, decades old, but it was so salty and so much better than nothing. As I gulped down a few bites, I felt my mouth exploding with saliva, and I craved water, but we’d agreed to try to make it through the night without using any more of our last bottle.

I pushed the can away before it was gone. “You have the rest,” I said.

Lilly shook her head, and her hand returned to her gills. “I tried a few bites, but my throat is too sore to eat.” She held it out toward Leech. “You?”

“No thanks,” said Leech, crunching another dry noodle.

Lilly held the can back to my mouth and I sucked down what was left. When I was done, she held it in front of her and looked it over. She made a little laughing sound. “You guys remember recycling?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Leech with a chuckle. “That was hilarious.”

“We still do that out at Hub,” I said.

Leech sighed at this, shaking his head. I was going to ask why, but Lilly was going on.

“Do your part to save the planet,” she said in a mocking official voice, “that was the whole thing with recycling, right? And, like, back in Vegas in the fifties, we had to compost our food scraps and only flush the toilet when it was absolutely nasty. . . .”

“We had urine recycling,” said Leech. “So gross.”

I realized that Leech had never talked about where he was from.

“Yeah, us, too,” said Lilly. “They said you couldn’t taste it, but I swear sometimes it was kind of sour and chalky.”

“Yuck,” said Leech.

“And it’s just like, you look back on it,” said Lilly, “and . . . what was the point? We did all that stuff, trying to be environmentally conscious, and in the end it didn’t do a damn thing to save the earth. My family were big believers, recycling all our cans, reusing everything, even taking the UV light baths, and then some power plant would run for ten minutes and pump out more carbon dioxide than we could ever save, and everything would be screwed anyway. It was such a waste.”

I was surprised to hear something so cynical from Lilly. This was not like the girl from the raft. It seemed like everything since then had worn away at her sense of hope. “You had to do something, though, right?” I said.

“Yeah but”—Lilly had started tearing at the skin around her fingernails, like she did when her thoughts got serious—“what we should have done was headed north sooner, or at least gotten the hell out of places like Vegas, and listened to the warnings the planet was clearly giving us from the start. I remember all the politicians talking about how we could stop the Great Rise, how we were just around the corner from some policy or invention or whatever that would slow it down, but those were lies. It was all already in motion, you know? We’d been wrecking things for hundreds of years already, thinking that we could just act however we wanted and God would take care of us. And by the time people started waking up to the dangers, it was way too late. Nature had already made up its mind.”

“Yeah, but that’s because we basically are nature,” said Leech.

“What’s that mean?” said Lilly.

“I mean we’re a part of nature,” said Leech. “We’re not separate from it. The Great Rise was going to happen, same as everything else. Us warming the planet is no different from an elephant knocking down all the trees and making a savanna. It’s just life doing its thing.”

“We killed all the elephants,” said Lilly, “and practically every other animal.”

“Yeah, but that’s still just nature, too. It’s not like we came here from outer space. Nature made us. It’s not wrong, it’s just success. Survival of the fittest. Human beats elephant, or whale or any other extinct creature.”

“Except that
success
ended up killing off over half the human race,” I said. “We spoiled our own planet.”

“Not spoiled, just changed. Same thing every other animal does,” said Leech. “Take a disease or termites or something. They eat and multiply until there’re no more victims and they’re drowning in their own feces, and then they die off, and the ones that are left evolve.”

“And the cycle starts anew,” I said, remembering what the siren had said.

“Huh?” said Leech.

“Nothing.”

“So it’s okay for humans to just die out,” Lilly continued.

“
Okay
isn’t part of it,” said Leech. “It just is. Dinosaurs rise and fall. Humans rise and fall. Maybe next it will be rats or roaches or some intelligent plant. Point is, it’s all nature.”

I was surprised by this. Another thing I hadn’t expected from Leech was this kind of thinking about the world. And I also remembered where I’d heard it before. “Paul talked like that.”

“Yeah,” said Leech. “He called it natureism. He may be a jerk, but the idea makes sense.”

“And so do you agree that it should justify him doing whatever he wants?” asked Lilly.

“I’m not sure what I believe,” said Leech quietly. “Not anymore.” He returned to his drawing.

Lilly turned to me. “What do you think?”

“Um.” I wasn’t sure. “I think the thing about nature has a point. I mean, our brains evolved out of the same muck as every other thing that’s ever lived.”

“Great,” muttered Lilly, “you boys are useless. Maybe Paul’s right, then. Maybe this is all just ‘natural.’ So in that case, who cares about anything?”

“Come on,” I said, “maybe there
is
a reason for, like, recycling and all that: but it’s not to stop the world from changing. It seems like the world is going to change no matter what, whether humans cause it or something else. But . . . I think just because you’re part of nature doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. It’s like, you might have your own bedroom, and you can do whatever you want in it, but if you trash it too much, you can’t live in it anymore. Or something.”

“I like it, O,” said Lilly, and I finally thought I saw a spark in her eyes. “Do unto others as you would do to your bedroom. Bedroomism.”

I smiled. It felt good to be talking, spinning ideas by blue light, free in the dark, like we had on the raft. It was also the first time in days that Lilly had used her old nickname for me. “Also,” I went on, “if you mess up the bedroom too fast, you end up breaking things, or in this case killing people. So sure, maybe on a million-year scale, the death of a few billion people doesn’t actually matter, but on a personal scale, part of being human is morality, and it’s wrong to kill another person. So maybe that’s where you draw the line.” I couldn’t help glancing at Leech as I said this, remembering the boccie balls, but he was drawing intently.

“So our creed is Thou Shalt Not Kill nor Muss Thy Bedroom,” said Lilly. “And so it was.” She considered the can in her hand. “That said, don’t suppose we’re going to find a recycling center out here.” She tossed the can over the side of the craft.

“I hope you two can live with yourselves when that can murders some poor little mouse down there,” said Leech.

“I like it better when you’re drawing quie—” Lilly was stopped by a violent cough. It grew, sharpening, and after a minute she was doubled over. I put my hand on the middle of her back, felt her rib cage convulsing.

“Yikes,” said Leech.

Lilly’s coughs made the whole craft shake. She lost her breath, and they became these dry stuck sounds, like there was nowhere deeper to go. Her body kept hitching . . . finally a long, slow breath sucked in and fell out.

I rubbed her back slowly. She got more breaths in. I ran my hand up to her shoulders, but then I pulled away. Something felt wet by her neck. I found smears of blood on my palm. I pushed her hair aside. “Your gills,” I said quietly. The slits were swollen with blood.

She touched them, looked at her fingers, and nodded, but she didn’t say anything. She just leaned back on the pink pillow, curled up, and closed her eyes. I put the blanket over her.

We flew on. A few hours later, Leech tucked himself in the front of the craft and dozed off. The moon was high now, just past full, its light much brighter than the vortex.

I watched the stars, adjusted for the winds, and tried not to think about anything: the long nightmare day we’d had, Lilly’s condition, Project Elysium, what we might find tomorrow, or the fact that we were nearly out of water. It all felt like too much, and I had an urge to just stop, and yet there was no stopping. Our only answer was to keep moving.

Sometime later, we passed over a small city, a forest of silent towers of steel, brick, and glass; a grid of still streets; and miles of dusty suburbs, appendages connected by highway arteries. For a moment, I thought I saw a light down there and brought us up higher.

A couple hours after that, as I fought exhaustion and sleep phantoms, I started to see white shapes on the ground. They were large, oblong, like the bellies of huge creatures, lying at odd angles. Most were pointed at one end, flat at the back. . . .

Boats. A marina on what had probably once been a lake. Masts stuck up like the horns of the long dead narwhals. Masts might mean sails, and sails could be used to make a new thermal balloon. Judging by how dim the vortex was, we were going to need one, soon.

I brought us down near the docks, between two concrete buildings. As I placed the craft on the cracked pavement, Lilly and Leech both stirred but didn’t wake.

I wanted to search for a sail now, but I couldn’t fight the exhaustion. I curled up on the floor near Lilly, thought about getting under the blanket with her, of how she’d held me through the night when my gills were changing, but I didn’t feel quite sure. So I moved close but not touching, my head on the bench. I stared into the mellow blue swirl of the vortex and let it pull down my eyelids.

I dropped into dreamless sleep until near dawn, when my eyes fluttered open to bright sky. Lilly was still asleep beside me. Her face looked dangerously red, and there was a fine mist of sweat on her forehead.

I raised my head to see that Leech was gone, and the vortex was dark.

I TRIED TO STAND BUT FELL BACK UNDER A WAVE OF bright spots and pain. It took a minute to fade. Everything hurt. My head felt squeezed, like my brain had dried up and pulled away from the inside of my skull. My eyes were sticking at the seams, and blinking didn’t help. My mouth felt like dry cloth.

I managed to get up. I checked my shoulder. It was sore and stiff. A brownish stain had seeped through the bandage covering my grilling fork wound.

We were in a triangle of shade, but the sun was creeping down into this space between the two buildings. The air had that electric feel of buzzing molecules, the world heating up, and the craft wasn’t moving again until we either made a thermal balloon or magically summoned lightning from the sky.

I pulled out our last water bottle, took a few sips, and fought the urge to drink it all.

I gently shook Lilly’s shoulder. Her breaths were short and raspy, her gills dry, cracked, red canyons with flaky rims, surrounded by brown crusts of blood and vomit. The surrounding skin was red and hot with infection.

“Lilly,” I said quietly.

“Nnn.” She flinched, batting at my hand. Her eyes slowly opened. They were bloodshot.

“Hey. We need to move.”

She nodded and slowly sat up, rubbing at her head. I passed her the water bottle. She took a few sips, but winced as she swallowed. “I don’t think there’s any part of me that doesn’t hurt.” Her voice was little more than a croak. “Where’s Leech?”

“I don’t know. Maybe looking for supplies.”

Lilly rummaged into her bag. “Here,” she said, holding out her bottle of NoRad.

“Thanks.” I squeezed a blob into my hands and passed it back to her. I covered my legs, neck, face, and hands with the purple slick, and then also reached under my clothes to cover my shoulders. I rubbed it gently over my scalp, the burn there igniting at the touch. My fingers came away with sickly pink pus. “This isn’t going to be enough to protect us.”

“No . . . ow,” Lilly moaned. She’d been trying to get the NoRad near her gills.

“I think they’re getting infected,” I said. I fished into Dr. Maria’s backpack and pulled out the medical kit. There were three little packets of AntiBac.