The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (42 page)

Seven’s eyes tracked to the weapon. “Can I shoot them?”

Lilly rolled her eyes. “I don’t even care. Just don’t let them leave.”

“Okay,” Seven said quietly.

Lilly pulled out her Nomad knife and cut Seven’s ropes. then handed her the gun. “We’ll be right out.”

Thunder boomed, echoing through the dome. There was a pattering sound: rain on the roof, high above.

Lilly and I headed back through the doors, into the thrumming facility. I could barely keep my body moving. I had to hold back everything that I now knew, all the thoughts coming at me, wanting to tear me apart, had to just focus on what came next, had to get to Leech . . .

And yet here now was Lilly. More confusion. More that didn’t make sense. I stopped running. Stood there unsteady in the hall, its walls groaning with activity. “Wait,” I said. “You told me to leave you.”

“Owen, come on, later—”

“No! Everyone’s been lying to me . . . forever! And that includes you.”

Lilly paused, gazing at me seriously. “Look, I wasn’t sure. To be honest, I didn’t know for absolute certain until a few minutes ago. I mean, I’d been feeling something since the moment we arrived here, hearing that music, but there was Seven, and she seemed like the real, if annoying, deal. But then we went into the temple . . .”

“You were there,” I said. “You were that shadow in the skull with me, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. But even after that happened, I thought it might be just something weird about that skull. After all, it sucked you in and you’re not the Medium.”

“True.”

“So I said good-bye to you in case I was wrong, but also because I needed to be left alone, by everyone, so I could figure it out. Honestly, I didn’t think you’d listen to me about Seven without proof. And she’d already mentioned cutting my heart out once . . .” Lilly sighed. “I meant the part, too, where I wasn’t going to be able to stand saying good-bye to you. So, if I was wrong, you needed to just leave anyway, and if I was right, well, I figured I could surprise you with evidence if I found it. So . . .” Lilly shrugged at me. “Ta-da.” She motioned to her neck. “Plus, no more gills. They disappeared this morning.”

I just looked at her and felt woozy. My thoughts were like a hive of bees, and there was no way to focus on each one. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to scream at her or hug her or maybe both.

She could see it on my face. “What happened in here?”

“I’ll show you,” I said, and a great tremor shook me as I considered that going to get Leech meant going near that cryo pod again. . . .

Things started to swim. “Whoa.” Lilly caught me by the shoulder. “Here.” She draped my arm over her shoulders and continued into the glass-walled reception area.

We ran out onto the platform. There was steam everywhere, billowing clouds. Moisture dripped from the railings, made the floor slick, puddles starting to form. The temperature was getting warmer, fast. Yellow lights flashed on every level, and the workstations were flickering, columns of data flashing across them.

“What’s going on?” Lilly asked as we climbed the stairs.

“They set off some kind of program.”

“Are they killing everyone?”

“I don’t know. Paul was in a copter. . . .” I worked to reassemble what I’d heard. “They were going to rendezvous nearby, something about a surprise, but, the point is, they’re coming.” We started across the catwalk. “Over here.”

Leech was still there, lying on the floor. He’d rolled over on his side in a pool of blood. We heard him cough as we approached. At least we hadn’t lost him yet. Through the din, I could just barely hear his tapes, still playing to Isaac.

The cryo tube was still open above him. There were lights blinking inside the glass. As we rushed over, I felt more waves in my brain. I didn’t want to look in there again, didn’t want to know what I now knew, what I had to face about everything.

Lilly dropped to her knees beside Leech. I stood on the other side of him. My eyes strayed from Leech to the profile of Elissa—
No
—back to Leech.

“Oh man,” said Lilly. There was blood everywhere. A slick around him. The source seemed to be his chest or shoulder, maybe abdomen—his whole shirt was soaked, and it was impossible to tell. “Carey,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

His eyes were closed, his face slack. “We have to get him back to Desenna.” Lilly hopped up and peered into the cryo tube. “I thought you came here to see Leech’s brother?”

I stepped to the tube again. Put my hands on the glass. It was warm now, the inside fogged with condensation. Looked back inside. Orange lights were flashing in sequence up and down the insides of the pod, and the blue frost was gone, but Elissa was still there, little Elissa.

More memories.

We like to play hide-and-go-seek in the apartment, but it’s so small. There are only four rooms with barely a place to hide in each. Elissa’s favorite is under the dining room table, and I can see her immediately but I pretend not to and we play until her cough kicks in. . . .

“Owen?”

“This is my . . . sister,” I said, choking on the words. “I’m a Cryo, Lilly. Paul lied to me. Set it all up.”

“Oh, God,” said Lilly. “Leech told me one time that he was worried about you . . . about what you thought about the world. He wouldn’t tell me what he meant. But . . . oh, Owen.”

“It’s all been a lie, everything.” The thoughts started crashing in now. “I had black blood, and they cryoed me. It killed her. Elissa. My sister. Only Paul changed my memories, set me up. He called it an insurance policy. Nothing I’ve been thinking this whole time has been real. Nothing I’ve wanted has been true. I’m not even who I am, or . . .” I fought the tides in my head, but the waves rushed over me. I slumped against the tube, arms draped over it. Lilly’s hand rubbed my back.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I rested my cheek on the warm glass.

And I cried.

The feeling hitched up out of me in little spasms, making my eyes hot, my throat tight. I looked down at Elissa’s still face, a face like mine, like my real mom’s, a match, a lost genetic code, restored in me now. . . . They’d both returned to their rightful places, back into the memories from which they’d been removed, filling the distance on the couch between my father and me as we watched soccer, long ago. . . . My vision blurred with tears.

“Owen,” said Lilly beneath the din of machinery. Her hand still on my back. “We have to go. I know it’s hard but we need to keep moving.”

I listened to the humming and whirring of the cryo facility through the glass of Elissa’s pod, her coffin. I heard Lilly, but I didn’t move. The tears were like energy seeping from me, some release, the last bit that I had left, draining out of me. This shell that had been scraped out, changed—what even was I?

She tugged at my shirt. “We have to get Leech and get out of here. Paul will come. We have to move.”

“I—” I started, but I couldn’t get up from the tube. More thoughts, battering around. If Paul had erased all this and hadn’t told me, what else had he changed? What more was he waiting to reveal when the moment suited him? Was I even from Yellowstone Hub? Was my name even Owen? Or were the old memories real and these new ones fake? Had there never even been an Elissa—was
this
girl a fake and my sisterless past real? Had Paul planted her to be revealed now? What was the truth? Was any of it real? “I can’t.” I sobbed more. “I can’t.”

“Owen . . .”

But, no. No. I slumped down. Fell to my knees. Caught my head in my hands. I couldn’t do anything. There was no going forward. No more.

You are Owen from Hub. You had a sister and you were cryoed—

She likes to jump on me when I’m reading in bed, but Dad says stop because it shakes the walls too much and isn’t polite to the neighbors—

No, empty beds, just you and Dad, a hollow center, they weren’t there, they were never there—

They were there
.

Far away, outside my closed eyes, there was a great hissing sound.

“Owen.” Lilly sounded more serious than ever. “We need to go. Now.” She tugged on my arm. “Hey!”

“I can’t,” I mumbled. It was all too much.

More wicked hissing sounds all around us. Massive clouds of steam.

“Don’t do this.” Lilly grabbed my shoulder. “We need to go—”

But I swatted her away and scrambled back, flipping over onto my butt and elbows. “No, I can’t!” Tears were surging out of me and I had no idea how to stop them. “I don’t even know who I am or what I was or anything!”

Lilly’s face darkened. “Yes, you do!” She lunged forward and landed on me, legs straddling my waist. She looked furious, her face bloodred.

“I can’t tell, I—” Everything inside felt like shelves tumbling, their contents flung free and shattering on the floor, like when we’d have an earthquake back at Hub—

There was no Hub—was—

Lilly smacked me. My cheek stung numb. “Stop it! Listen to me!” she shouted over the din around us. “You’re Owen!” She stabbed my chest with her finger. “This is YOU! And I
know
you and you have to get up and
run
with me! You need to DO it!”

“I can’t, just . . .” More thoughts in all directions. “How do I even know that you’re real?”

Lilly unleashed a clenched, animal-like scream. Her head thrashed down and her lips crushed against me. Our teeth collided. I felt her forehead, slick with sweat, sliding across mine. Our noses squished against each other. When she finally pulled away, she tugged on my lip so hard with her teeth that I felt a tear of skin. “NOW do you think I’m real? Did you FEEL that?”

I just nodded.

“That is you! And that is
me
. Now you get up with me, Owen, and you help me carry Leech and we are going to get out of here or we are going to die because I will
kill
you before I leave you behind! Do you understand me?”

Her eyes were black in the shadows, storms erasing their normal blue skies. Her entire torso heaved with her panting breaths. And the glow of the skull from her backpack had created a corona of light around her.

And for just a moment, the cyclone inside my hollow center, the empty gale winds of questions, ceased; and out of all of it, I understood something so clear, so true, like I’d opened a kind of gate into some view of infinite space and I was nothing and we were everything and through all of it, there was one thing I knew:

“I love you,” I whispered.

Lilly just glared at me. Her eyelids trembled. Tears started to slip down her cheeks. Her face grimaced in a look like she hated me so much right then, like she wanted to kill me. And I wondered if she really would—I had no idea anymore—as she slowly leaned down, her desperate breaths splashing on my already-wet face, until the tip of her nose touched mine and her eyes blurred into one, and she spoke in a livid whisper:

“If you really love me, then run with me. Get out of here alive. Because if you want to just stay here and die, then what you just said to me is a lie and I will hate you for all eternity.” She stared at me, a mountain lion assessing its prey. Her eyes dared me to disobey. Then she leaped back up to her feet.

I felt the words. I drank them. Let them tear me open and pin my insides in place and make me still . . .

“Okay.” And I got up.

I shook my head. And then I noticed what had happened all around us. The cryo doors had all swung open, and all the tubes, the hundreds of tubes, had slid out. Lines of clear coffins, of bodies.

“Help me get Leech,” said Lilly.

I was about to when there was another deafening series of hisses and clicks.

The top of Elissa’s cryo tube yawned open. All the tops throughout the complex, opening to the elements, so that the bodies could rot in the humid air and invite the flies and vultures, I guessed. Maybe this was what Paul had in mind. To punish Victoria by showing her how easy it was for him to kill these people that she’d tried to keep alive.

“I don’t want to leave her like this,” I said, stepping over to . . . yes, she was my sister. I knew that. Solid fact, pinned in place. There was her face.

We both like jelly and groundnut sandwiches, but she is weird. She eats the crusts and leaves the middles
.

“Owen . . .” Lilly sounded worried.

“I know we need to go,” I said. And I knew what I had to do.

I tell her that’s the best part, but she says that the middles are too squishy, too full
.

I reached down and pressed my thumb against her cheek. It was still cold, kind of half-thawed.

On the way to school we walk together, Mom a few paces behind, and Elissa likes to follow me, walking on the narrow concrete edge of the sewer aqueduct, and it annoys me, always so annoying because she is too little and it slows me down but mostly because I cannot stand the idea of her falling in, of her getting hurt
.

I drew a clockwise circle.

Asleep before me each night, her little face in green generator light, her cheeks deactivated, and all I hope is that she’ll make it through the night without any coughing fits. They wake me up and break my heart. I love her. My sister. I always have
.