The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (33 page)

“It’s a short drop,” I heard Victoria say.

I let my feet hang and let go. I fell for a second and landed on an uneven floor, sloping steeply downward. My ankle buckled and I started to fall, but Leech caught me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Sure.”

I looked around and saw that we were standing on a kind of mound, made of crumbled rock. This mound was entombed in a large square room, like the basement of the Mayan pyramid. We were standing on the exterior of the older pyramid, as if we were climbing down through one of those nesting dolls that get smaller and smaller.

“The entrance is at the base,” said Victoria.

The ceiling was just above our heads, huge stone blocks. I had no idea how they were suspended up there and suddenly I had this overwhelming sense of depth and even more so of weight, pressing down, massive weight that could crush us,
would
crush us. Even the air felt compressed. It was hard to pull in a full breath. There was dust in our eyes, a sour smell, and the sound of feet scuffling over loose stone as everyone skidded down the side of the ancient structure.

We reached a soft clay floor and edged along the Mayan wall facing the ancient structure, until Victoria’s light shone on a squat, narrow entrance.

She peered inside. “A minute of hell,” she said, “and there’s a room on the other side.” She took a deep breath and went in.

“God, I hate this part,” muttered Seven, following Arlo and his men.

“After you,” I said, motioning to Lilly.

She followed without replying, not even making eye contact with me. I felt what had been guilt souring into frustration. How was I even going to talk to her if she wouldn’t give me a chance?

The tunnel was tight, clutching at our heads and the backs of our necks. My shoulders scraped on the rough sides, and the feeling of tightness and compression became unbearable. I had this sudden urge to spread my arms, to kick at everything, to try to stand up and bash myself against this rock and make space. I would’ve taken the danger of being thousands of feet up in the air, any day, over this.

“Hey, keep moving,” Leech snapped from behind me.

“Owen.” Victoria’s light shone from up ahead. “You’re almost there.”

I held my breath and scuttled forward and finally made it through into a small, circular room.

“Okay,” Victoria whispered, almost like she was afraid even her voice could bring the earth down on us. “Time for Seven to do her thing.”

I saw that there was a triangular space in the far wall, with a handprint.

The key is inside you
. The siren’s voice took me by surprise. I looked around, but there was no blue light. Weird. It had felt like her.

“And I hate this part even more,” said Seven. She stepped to the pedestal, placed her hand on the spikes, scowled at Victoria, and pushed. Her breaths quickened, and then she hissed and snatched her hand away. In headlamp light we watched the trickles of blood slip down the spikes.

The room rumbled. Waterfalls of dust sprouted from the ceiling. The floor began to shift and turn, lowering and arranging itself into spiral stairs like the ones to my temple in EdenWest.

We followed them down. The pedestal was actually the top of a long spine, and the stairs spiraled around this, down into a wide-open space. As we descended, I felt that tremor starting up inside me, the magnetic hum of a presence. We were close to the skull. I hadn’t been expecting this feeling, since it wasn’t my skull, but it felt good. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.

We found ourselves in a cavernous hall, stretching in both directions. On one side was a long line of enormous stone columns, a wall behind them. The floor was covered with a thin layer of salt water. Drops plinked, the sound echoing.

Victoria led us down the hall, our footsteps splashing, and stopped at a section of wall between two columns. We gathered, and I saw that there were lines of carved symbols, pictograms and curly shapes that seemed to resemble letters.

“Whoa,” said Lilly, staring at the wall wide-eyed.

“Is that writing?” I asked.

“Atlantean writing,” said Victoria. “I can translate it with a few steps, but Seven can just read it. Would you please?”

“See the dog do tricks,” said Seven. She stepped to the wall and ran her fingers over the symbols.

“‘After the fracture and the flood,’” she read, “‘the masters and their magic consumed by the ravenous earth, there was a journey through aeons of dark as the world healed, the refugees seeking their heart but lost, so lost. And when the seas calmed and the land quieted and the stars could bear to watch once more, the memory descended in ships of blue light, to begin the rise, hoping to reach the heights of the masters, without resurrecting their horrors.’”

I thought of what the siren had said to me. “What does it mean by the horrors?” I asked.

“I think the Atlantean refugees believed that the Paintbrush was a horror,” said Victoria, “one that they never wanted to repeat. I have come to believe that the Three are actually a defense constructed by the Atlantean people in secret, to insure that their masters, or any future leaders, would never be able to repeat their mistakes.”

I pictured the priests on that pyramid top, Lük and his partners preparing to die . . . for a cause. It was different to think of them like that, a secret band, going to desperate ends to save the future.

“Why not just destroy the Paintbrush?” Leech wondered.

“I don’t think they could get to it,” said Victoria. “The masters were like the king who dies clutching his treasure, or that Pre-Rise story of Gollum who can’t give up the ring even as he falls to his end. Even with the world crumbling around them, they couldn’t relinquish their technology. To do so would be unthinkable. It is not so different from during the Rise . . . and so the people had to come up with another way.”

“So we’re kind of like rebels,” said Leech.

“I like it,” said Seven.

“Is there more there?” Lilly was peering at the wall, almost like she was doubting Seven’s translation.

“No,” said Seven. “What, that wasn’t enough?”

“Just wondering,” asked Lilly. She bent down, looking at a series of dull etchings beneath the main writing.

“I don’t think that’s anything,” said Seven doubtfully.

“Guess you don’t,” said Lilly. She shrugged and turned away.

“It was after deciphering this message,” said Victoria, “and considering the roles of the Three and the masters, that I realized I needed to rebel, too, against Eden’s plans. The horrors all over again. It couldn’t be more clear that what Paul is doing will lead to tragedy. I felt, too, that there must be some better way to live in this world. And so Heliad was born.”

She turned. “The navigation room is this way.”

Everyone followed except Seven. She was still looking at the wall. “What’s up?” I asked her.

“Your friend there is acting pretty weird.” We both watched Lilly wandering away from the group, gazing around. “Any idea what her deal is?”

“No,” I said, “less than ever.”

We caught up, reaching an arched entryway at the far end of the wide hall. We stepped through it and found another navigation room, larger than what we’d seen in the Anasazi city, more like the one in EdenWest. A curved dome with an obsidian ball perched in the center.

“Finally,” said Leech. He placed his hands on the ball. Light ignited from inside, and stars burst to life on the walls. Leech put the sextant to his good eye. “Swelling is down just enough.” He turned slowly around, hovering on a spot, then lowering the sextant and sliding the jewel dials on it, then looking again. “This would have made the room in EdenWest make a lot more sense.” He reached to his back pocket and pulled out his notebook. “Can I get a light?”

Leech sat down cross-legged on the floor and started sketching. Arlo shone his light over his shoulder. I saw Leech’s hand shaking around his pen. “This is going to take a while,” he said, “but I think I can do it.”

“The rest of you,” said Victoria, “let’s go to the skull.”

We walked back into the large hall. On the wall opposite the columns, Victoria’s light uncovered a narrow entryway. As we squeezed through the tight back-and-forth passage, I could already see the brilliant white, the skull anticipating Seven’s arrival.

We crowded into the tiny chamber and there it was, dead and yet so alive, tuned to our frequencies and glowing. Looking at it, I had that same magnetic feeling of warmth and certainty that I’d had around my own skull.

“Okay,” said Seven. “Here goes.” She closed her eyes and placed her hands on the crystal. Light jumped around her fingers and then seemed to crawl up her arms, illuminating her. This must have been how I looked when it had happened to me. Her eyelids fluttered, and her body seemed to freeze in place. She had uploaded.

Come home, Rana
.

The voice spoke in my head. I looked around, looking for the siren, but, no, this voice was different. It had come from the skull, from the brilliant light behind those hollow eyes.

That voice wouldn’t be for me, and yet . . . I felt a strange urge, the magnet heating up. I stepped toward the skull.

“Owen?” asked Victoria.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t be sure, but I placed my hands on the cool white stone.

The light leaped over me, too, and I dissolved into the white.

“HELLO.”

There is no time inside the crystal skull. There is before, and there will be after, but within the crystal electric medium there is only a sense of now and that all things are and have been and will be. Qi-An. The harmony of nature and all the beings within it.

I am standing in a wide room. The floor is tiled with large polished stones. Fires burn in copper bowls hanging by chains from the high ceiling, casting warm light. To my left are other rooms and halls stretching as far as I can see. There are columns to my right, similar to the columns outside the skull chamber, only here they lead into the night. A warm breeze rushes in, curving around the columns, carrying the whisper of the sea.

A girl sits before me, kneeling on a pillow. She is in white, with flowing ebony hair. I have seen her before. In the first vision I had of the skull, where I saw the Three having their throats slit. I remember her sad eyes, terrified but resolved, just before her consciousness was transferred. She has features like Lük: ancient, but also like she could almost be a sister of mine, and yet a gulf of time yawns between us.

But she is not the only one here. There is another girl, sitting in the same position, on a pillow to her left. That girl is not looking at me. She is looking straight ahead, and now I see that Seven is standing beside me. Seven’s eyes are closed, her hands clasped at her waist.

I look from one Atlantean girl to the other. They are identical. Except that the girl in front of Seven is silent and still. And the one in front of me is speaking.

“You are inside the skull,” she says.

“What am I doing in here?” I ask. “Are you Rana?”

“Yes.”

I look at her still twin. “Who’s that?”

Rana glances around the chamber. “There is only you and me.”

I turn and touch Seven’s shoulder, saying, “hey,” only my fingers go right through her. She stands unaffected, eyes still closed. Maybe we have each made our own connection to the skull, and in her mind, Rana is speaking to her as well. But still I wonder: Why is this happening to
me
? I’m not the Medium. When Leech was hooked up to my skull, Lük didn’t speak to him. . . .

“This way.” Rana stands. Her sandaled feet click on the stones. “You are the memory of the Qi-An, of the First People.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You are the Atlantean Medium,” she says to me.

“No I’m not,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to listen. Just walks toward the columns. It is as if she is a program, and she is running for me even though she’s really meant for Seven. Maybe she has mistaken me for Seven, but how is that possible? My skull was so precise.

Rana holds her hand out toward me. “You must hear the song of the Heart, so that you may sing to it. Come, I will show you.”

I wonder if I should try to leave. But then I feel drawn to her, compelled to learn from her, so I take her hand. It feels like an exposed wire, hot and sizzling with electricity.

She leads me across the wide floor and between the thick columns.

We step into a cool, starry night, ten thousand years in the past. We are in a vast courtyard. I find that I am barefoot. The grass is supple between my toes. Tan stone buildings, ornately carved with figures and symbols, make a square around us. This is not Lük’s city.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“This is Tulana, grand city to the south,” says Rana. She moves like a breeze to the center of the courtyard, where there is a statue of a jaguar sitting atop a turtle.

“Is this where the Heart of the Terra is located?” I ask.

“No,” says Rana. Moonlight falls on her shoulders. “This is before,” she says, “before the masters tried to force the Terra to obey, before they unleashed the ash and fire.”