The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (13 page)

Lilly tilted her head and pulled her tangled hair out of the way. I squeezed out a dab of the clear ointment and carefully pressed it onto the first gill line. She winced.

“I’m sorry,” I said, being as gentle as I could.

“It’s okay,” said Lilly. “Just get it on there.”

But I realized that I hadn’t just been apologizing for my touch. There was more on my mind to say. “No, I mean sorry for all this. For everything I’ve put you through.”

Lilly eyed me sideways. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, I mean, just . . .” I finished one set of gills, pushed her chin with my finger, and started on the other. “Because it’s my fault. All this stuff that’s happened to you, because of me . . .”

Lilly flinched away like I was a spider. “Because of you.”

“No, well, I mean, yeah, since you’re not one of the Atlanteans . . . I just, I don’t know, feel bad . . .” I trailed off because it seemed like every word I said was making her eyes darken and her mouth tighten further.

“I’ll finish.” She snatched the AntiBac from my fingers.

“What?”

“You think this is about you. . . .”

I tried to figure out what I’d said wrong. “Well, no . . . but, I mean all this has happened because me and Leech are part of the Three and—”

Lilly threw the packet at me. “This was my choice, Owen! I chose to help you and come with you.”

“I didn’t mean that you didn’t have a choice, just that, you told me to leave you up at the Eye, but I didn’t, and now—”

“I was trying to save you!” Lilly shouted. “I
wanted
to go with you, to be here, but at the time it looked like there was no other way, and—Whatever.” She got out of the craft on wobbly legs. “Even if I
only
have these stupid gills, even if I only have
some
of the super-special DNA that you have, that doesn’t mean I’m not connected to it. And that’s, uh! That’s not even why I’m here! I can’t believe you don’t get that!” She threw her hands up and stalked off.

“Lilly, wait.” I got up, but my legs were like jelly. I sat back down, white spots clouding my vision. I heard Lilly’s footsteps trudge away across the sand.

I sat there for a few minutes, head spinning, a salty, metallic taste in my mouth, and wondered what I’d said wrong. Lilly had been so down since we’d left Eden, so why wouldn’t I feel sorry about that?

I tried standing up again, and made my way out from between the buildings. I passed a collapsed deck and piles of round tables and shredded umbrellas. The early morning sun scalded my cheek. I felt my sweat evaporating instantly.

Ahead, the land sloped down steadily, first as bone-white sand, then as stripes of brown and red rock, down and down to the boulder-strewn low point of a long-dry lake. The docks were the floating kind, like back at camp. They lay on the sand, kinked in crooked S shapes like the spines of ancient dinosaurs. The boats were leaning over, piled against one another. Others were scattered out on the sand, tied to buoys, their sand-crusted hulls facing skyward.

“Lilly!” I called. I hopped onto the nearest deck, the old planks creaking, and hurried into the shadows between the boats. The thermal breezes whistled between them, clattering loose rope lines.

I heard serrated coughs up ahead, and found Lilly hanging down from the chrome railing of a sailboat. She dropped to the sand, a rolled-up sail under her arm, and knelt in the shade beneath the hull. She started rolling it out. The sail was blue and red, made of thin nylon.

“I’m gonna need scissors and twine,” she said.

“Okay, but what did I say back—”

“Later. This now.” She coughed again.

“I don’t know how we’re going to design a thermal without Lük’s help,” I said.

“My mom taught me how to sew,” said Lilly, spreading out the sail. “I know—how very pre-Rise of me, right? But she was into making her own saris for us. And she taught me basic stitches. So, hey, I can actually be useful!”

She set to work, measuring and punching holes with her knife like I wasn’t even there.

I walked back up the dock, surveying the boats, wondering which to search for supplies—

Until I heard a low sound. A voice. Close by. I took a few steps back. . . . It was coming from up inside a tall, cockeyed yacht. The boat’s giant black propeller was at my waist height. There was a sneaker tread in the sand on one of the blades.

It sounded like Leech. Talking to someone.

I climbed up to the deck as quietly as I could. A sliding glass door was half open. I peered inside. Leech sat on a little couch in a small cabin with dark wood walls, hunched over the subnet computer, talking quietly to it. The screen was lit but I couldn’t tell with what. It seemed unlikely that there was a subnet connection here, but still . . . I turned my ear closer—but my shifting weight made the floor creak. Leech’s eyes snapped up.

I ducked back but I knew he’d seen me, so I stepped in. There stuffy air had a dry, baked smell. Leech had already turned the computer off.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Leech made his classic squint. “What do you mean?”

My nerves were ringing, and I hated how Leech inspired that feeling in me. “I heard you talking,” I said.

Leech stood. “Yeah, well, I talk to myself when I’m bored. I was just looking for food, but everything’s picked clean.” He started toward the door.

I stepped in front of him. “I saw you talking into the pad. Who were you talking to?”

Leech stopped inches from me. “You know, just because we’re all
brothers on a quest
now doesn’t mean that I forgot what happened in the Preserve. I still owe you.”

“Who were you talking to?” I said, my heart pounding. “Was it Paul? You’re still working with him—”

Leech was on me before I could react. He grabbed me by the neck and threw me down. I toppled over a little coffee table that was bolted to the floor, and I felt a bell-ringing pain in my leg. I landed with my back on the couch, legs on the table, and butt sunk down to the floor. There was a gash on my shin, blood flowing out.

Leech just glared at me. I saw that his hand had lowered to his waist, where a long section of green plastic netting hung from his belt. Cradled inside the netting was the boccie ball, still crusted in dark smears. Now he could swing it.

“Like it?” said Leech. “Lilly’s got a knife, you’ve got a ship. I figured I needed something, too.” He pointed to my cut. “We’re even for the Preserve. But if you think that I would talk to Paul, that I would—I don’t know what you’re thinking—rat us out, to
him
, after everything he did . . . you’re crazy.”

We glared at each other for a second. I wondered if I believed him. Then he looked toward the door. “Where’s Lilly?”

I pulled myself up. “Making a new thermal. She needs twine and scissors.”

“Well,” said Leech, “let’s find some.” He moved into the galley area.

I watched him for a second, wanting to press him again or to just take off without him. But neither was an option.

I headed down a small staircase and found myself in a triangular bedroom at the bow of the ship. There was one big bed and a set of bunk beds, some little family’s hideaway from the world. Parents, two kids. They’d all slept here, out on the water, listening to the waves hitting against the boat. Were any of them still alive? Most likely not. What had they done when the Rise hit? Migrated north? Succumbed to disease? Tried to get into an Eden? I thought of Harvey and Lucinda, back on that Walmart roof, the desperate measures they’d taken to try to save their child.

And it hit me that for every one of these skeleton boats, there had been a family, and for every abandoned house in every empty town we’d flown over . . . hundreds, thousands, millions into the billions, all over the earth. They weren’t just numbers, they’d been lives, each one with bunk beds and special sheets and they took vacations, had dreams, maybe even missions they were on, and they’d all been alive and they were all gone now. It was staggering to try to think about.

We searched three boats and found scissors and a few different thicknesses of rope. No water or food anywhere. Leech also collected knives, and by the time we returned to Lilly, he had four in his belt.

Lilly was resting beside the fabric, her face dangerously red, her hands shaking.

“Let me help,” I said. “It’s going to need an opening in the base for the heat—”

Lilly glanced darkly at me. “Please go do something else.”

“Right.” I started up the dock.

I heard footsteps, and Leech joined me. “She doesn’t want my help either.”

We returned to the craft without speaking. It was still in the shade, barely. I untied the one remaining clay pot and twisted it into grooves on the top of the vortex. Then I knelt beside the little silver wheel on the side of the craft. It had cups for catching water, to make it spin. Slim copper-colored arms, an alloy that hadn’t turned green in thousands of years, connected the wheels to the hull. When the wheels spun fast enough, they’d make a charge to spark the heat cell.

I tried spinning the wheel with my palm, but I couldn’t get it going very fast before my hand was throbbing.

“That’s obviously not going to work,” said Leech. He was leaning against the wall in the shade, watching.

“That’s really helpful,” I replied, and tried again.

I heard him sigh. “Try this.” He knelt on the other side of the craft and pulled off his sneaker. He slipped it over his hand, and started hitting the wheel with the sole.

“Good idea,” I admitted, and tried it, too. It worked great.

My arm quickly got sore, and I became aware of the foul odor that was wafting off the two of us, but soon the wheel began to hum, and finally there was a white spark. A tiny jet of flame burst from the copper nozzle atop the heat cell. I twisted it down to a low, blue simmer.

“Nice work,” I said to Leech. My head was swimming, and when I tried to stand, my legs buckled again.

“Come on.” Leech gave me a hand. “Let’s head back to that yacht.”

We stumbled down the dock, the sun blinding now, told Lilly where we’d be, and then climbed into the oven-hot cabin. We opened the windows, slapping away the crust of sand, but the breeze barely helped.

I lay on the couch. Leech on the floor.

“Florida,” he said after a while.

“What?”

“That’s where I grew up, at Inland Haven. Paul found me there when I was eleven.”

I’d heard of Florida. It was one of the first parts of the United States to submerge.

“Inland Haven was the last high ground in the state,” said Leech. “The first pandemic hit when I was ten. Killed my mom, bunch of relatives. Paul found me after that. Eden was matching their Atlantean samples against the international genetic database. He told me pretty straight up what he thought we were, and that we had a chance to be the key to saving the world.”

“You mean ‘we,’ like us?”

“No. Me and my brother, Isaac. The genes run in families, you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “I just hadn’t really thought about it. I don’t have a sibling.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Leech sighed. “Paul offered to take us both to Camp Aasgard. This was, like, 2038, so EdenWest wasn’t built yet, but they’d found the temple and were doing research there. Not long after we got there, I got the gills, very first case, and Paul said that he wanted to freeze us until they could build the right facilities and find the other Atlanteans. He said it would take decades, maybe longer, and that by the time we woke up, our families would probably be dead.”

“That’s tough,” I said.

“It was just what I wanted to hear.”

“Really?”

Leech exhaled hard. “Let’s just say my dad didn’t adjust well to life after Mom was gone. He was never the perfect dad candidate to begin with, not in his DNA, I guess. And he would get mad. Mad with his fists and . . . other things.

“One time Isaac got the end of a metal spatula. He had partial hearing loss after that. So we took Paul’s deal. He felt more like a father to me than my own. Someone who thought I mattered, who I thought cared. Except, when you came along, that changed.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Whatever. I should have seen it coming,” he said. “Paul always told me when there was a new test subject, like you, or the other CITs. Kids with potential. I didn’t know about that lab you found, where Anna was, but I knew the rest. I felt like his second-in-command. But I wasn’t anything to him except an ingredient. Something to be collected and measured and used.”

“What happened to your brother?” I asked.

“When I woke up from Cryo, Paul said that they thought his DNA was a better match for an Atlantean temple at another facility.”

“Did Paul tell you where they sent him?”

“EdenSouth,” said Leech. “He was in Cryo there when the Heliad-Seven uprising happened. Communications have been cut off ever since. Nobody knows what happened to the Cryos. They could be dead, still frozen, woken up. Probably dead.”

“But he could be alive,” I said.

Leech shrugged. “What are the chances? EdenSouth was destroyed—that’s what they say anyway. The cryo systems probably were, too.”