The Far Dawn (16 page)

An impossible line of thick silver wire, its end affixed to a giant metal pylon sunk into a bare slab of black rock.

Paul, at the top of a set of metal steps that led to some sort of pod, an oval structure that seemed to be attached to the wire, with two other soldiers following, all looking miniature before the pod and the wire stretching up out of sight.

Paul, turning and shooting those two soldiers point-blank.

Disappearing into the pod and slamming the door.

And then with a great magnetic hum the pod shot upward on the thread at a speed unimaginable, reflecting sunlight and looking like a firework . . .

Like an ascending star . . .

This I saw, all in a moment—

But not the lip of the ice rim exploding free.

“Incoming port side!” Mendes shouted.

We were almost there, cresting out of the cavern, sunlight on our faces now—

When the shard of blue crystal as large as our craft slammed into us.

With two hands, I might have been fast enough to avoid it.

Maybe not.

There was screaming.

The craft breaking apart.

And we were falling.

The daylight fading.

Cold.

Lilly.

All lost to the ice and darkness.

15

THE MORNING AFTER I ARRIVED AT CAMP EDEN, I drowned for the first time.

The next night, I drowned in the night air, before learning of my gills, before diving deep and finding my sense of balance and purpose in the underwater world.

Three weeks later, I drowned in the ice.

At first, I hung on to the wheel with my good hand as the ice crashed into the craft, the crystal windshield protecting me. I was still trying to work the pedals, to drive us out, to avoid the chunks raining down.

Until the windshield smashed. The ship keeled backward over itself, and in a blur of light and cold and the shouts of the soldiers and numbing pain I was separated from it and everything became darkness.

 

For a while.

Owen.

My eyes opened and there was cold, and light in shadowy blues, and faint forms. I couldn't move. Everything stuck in place. Pain in my leg, my wrist, a throbbing in my head, but it all felt far away. My vision was blurred and cold and I could feel the press of ice against my eyeballs. I couldn't blink.

I was maybe upside down.

Pinned in the ice.

Fingers stuck in place, every inch of my body pressed and held still, muscles trying to twitch in panic but nowhere to go.

No movement.

Distantly, I heard screaming. Desperate, animallike howling. Another person trapped.

Then thudding. Like a head against a wall. More wailing.

I flexed my legs. Nothing. Arms. No. Mouth—

Stuck half open, ice jammed into it, melting in a freezing trickle down the back of my throat. The cold aching against my gums. Tongue pinned in place.

No—

I could feel my heart beating wildly, desperately trying to move blood, to make heat.

Oh no.

This was different from the lake bottom. In Eden, I'd felt detached, as if my death were happening to someone else. My whole body had been changing and gills I didn't even know I'd had were in the process of saving my life.

And I hadn't known how to fight, back then. When I'd drowned, I'd only been two days removed from a secret twenty-five years in cryo, still having weird imaginings of technicians, feeling like some sort of passive thing that couldn't act on its own, a frozen body, which I'd actually been, without knowing it.

Since then, I'd tasted survival and blood, felt power and felt it taken from me, felt true and felt betrayed. I knew how to fight now, had fought so hard, only to be here frozen again, back in ice, trying to move. . . .

Can't move . . .

Can't move, can't move . . .

The distant muffled screaming became sobbing.

Became silence. Became death.

No, no, no.

Parts of me were going dark. Technicians turning out the lights on this hellish experiment that was my body. Technicians were easier, I knew now. Let me imagine someone else was in charge, that someone pulled the levers, turned the dials, that I wasn't just me, dying here, alone, frozen and manipulated by Paul, activated for a purpose by Atlantean alchemy . . .

Lied to by them all. Even the Atlanteans had lied to me, without meaning to.

Used. Moved like a puppet, even through time, even by the Terra, beaten and broken, failed, and . . .

loved . . .

Lilly
.

Oh no.

I'm not your math teacher. You don't need to give me your whole name.

No, Lilly, no.

I remembered that sunshine, and her red bathing suit and the pearl polish on her toes. How she spun her lifeguard whistle and how in that moment, on that dock, I had really believed that getting her to like me was the most important thing. Foolish, stupid me, thinking about a girl, when I was an experiment and a lie, weeks away from dying in the ice, as if she could possibly have been the most important thing compared to all that.

It was like I already knew you. Like we were already past all that.

Stupid Owen who thought that girl might be his ally, against what he had no idea. Who thought he might have found a friend. Who thought he might have found love.

Or maybe I'd been right, on that dock. Right about Lilly. We'd come so far, never could have made it without each other . . .

Only for it to end like this.

Oh, how we had no idea.

But maybe Lilly did. Her sad smile sometimes, the way she got distant, angry, frustrated that all we could do wasn't enough, the way she pulled away in Desenna, when it seemed that we weren't meant to do this together. There had always been a distance with her, as if inside she had always known, or feared, that this was how we would end up.

Cold. The ice. Can't move. My jaw going numb. Eyes no longer able to focus. Freezing . . .

She was somewhere below me, now. Somewhere so deep in the ice . . . both of us trapped in a tomb at the end of the earth. The white realm, where we would die.

There would be no getting to her in time.

Four minutes, that's how long I'd had to survive drowning in Lake Eden, except with my gills I'd made it ten. How long was it in ice? How long did I have? No gills this time. No—

No Lilly.

There's not much more we can do,
I imagined the technicians saying sadly. All the way back to the beginning, like I'd been drowned from the start.

“Owen.”

There was a light.

And I felt something, not a warmth, but an energy passing through me, a sense of electricity. It bled out in front of my eyes, coming from within me.

“It's me,” the voice said.

Lilly . . .

“It's Rana.”

I could hear her, her voice so close it was like it was coming from inside my ears. I tried to talk back, but my mouth, filled with ice . . .

“I am with you. I can keep you here, on the border,” she said.

I felt a surge of energy. Rana was inhabiting the same space as me. She was literally inside me, or around me, like our two bodies had merged. I could feel the energy through me, radiating in every muscle and fiber.

“I will stay with you.”

Lilly . . .
I wanted to ask. Rana had been down there with her. I'd never heard that soldier say if Lilly was deceased or not. There was still a possibility.

But unlike the Terra, Rana couldn't hear my thoughts.

I felt my body calming, there in the ice, as Rana inhabited me, her lingering power of the Terra keeping me from fading.

Time passed, formless.

I heard another muffled moan somewhere in the ice.

Someone succumbing.

I tried to remember the death rite of Heliad-7.
Be at peace. . . . You have played your part . . . now we . . . we . . .
My brain was too slow.

Too cold.

Then, in the distance, a rumble, like thunder . . .

One . . . two . . . three . . . Mom would count, Elissa and I with our blankets pulled tight up to our eyes.

Or machinery.

“They are coming,” said Rana. “Digging down. You only need to hold on a little longer.”

I tried to be calm, the feeling of blood in my head, the cold at my edges, the blue everywhere, and the electric sense of Rana between my molecules.

Thank you,
I thought to her, but she didn't hear me.

And all I could think of was Lilly, but I couldn't bear to picture her at the bottom of that chasm, an object tossed into a well. Better to think of the last time I had seen her, in the Andes, fighting breathlessly to save us, heroically.

Better to think of her arcing through the clouds, carrying me to safety.

Of those nights between Desenna and now, flying down the ruined coast, when we had been free of our last horrors and before we'd known what was next.

Secret nights when it had just been us, and the wind and the rain and sky, and a blanket beneath trees in the shade, pulling it over our heads to keep out the sun and mosquito hum.

Double brownies for the rain virgin!

They seemed so short now.

Those days.

But there was still hope. There had to be.

The rumbling became a metallic whine. The sound of crunching ice. Whining of turbines.

“Hang on, Owen,” said Rana.

As we waited there, I felt like I could feel the ten thousand years that she'd lingered, the world she'd watched change; and in her energy I felt like I knew that during that entire time, every moment of those three million days, she had been incomplete, brokenhearted because she had lost a love that had fit her right, like feeling safe with someone watching you dress, the last simple moment she and Lük had shared, that night in Atlante.

I knew now that she had never recovered, and if I got out of this ice and Lilly didn't . . .

Neither would I.

The light grew brighter. Blurs of movement. The flutter of helicopter blades.

“I will find you, later,” said Rana. “There is something I must do. Do not despair, Owen. I am sorry about Lilly. But you must survive. And we will fight on. Promise me you will fight on until the masters fall.”

I couldn't reply. I had no idea what to say. To fight on. Or to fade. That seemed easier.

I felt Rana's light leaving, felt the raw cold sinking back in, my blood thickening and slowing, my brain going fuzzy on the carbon dioxide of my weak breaths . . .

Fading . . .

“I love you, Lilly,” I tried to say through the ice.

Seventh time.

I should have said it four thousand more.

If you really love me, then run with me,
she'd said.
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.

Okay,
I thought,
I will live. If I can.

Scraping. A giant shove and the ice moved around me.

“Here!”

Brilliant light. Silhouettes. Soldiers.

Hands pulled me from the ice.

And I knew that I would live. And I did not know if that felt like a relief or a curse.

They wrapped me in blankets and put me on a stretcher and loaded me into a helicopter as the winds howled and the weak winter sun set. I tried to speak, but couldn't make the muscles work.

“Try to rest,” a medic said.

There were other bodies around me. Nearby I saw Mendes. Unconscious but alive. As they'd pulled me out, I'd been grimly aware that there was a different helicopter for the bodies whose faces were completely covered. Most of the soldiers were over there.

The copter lifted off. Before the sound of the whupping blades overwhelmed everything, I heard the pilots say, “Lieutenant says call it. It's getting too cold. And besides, it's been too long. Anyone who's still down there is long gone.”

Long gone.

We rose into the sky as the sun sank.

Darkness fell on the grave of the ancients.

Darkness fell over me.

I remembered the chocolate blue of the cenote, in the fading light of day . . .
See ya,
I had said to Lilly.

See ya,
she had replied.

And I had climbed up to the surface and when I'd looked back she'd been gone, as if she'd never been. As if I'd had a glimpse then, though I barely realized it, of this.

Of now.

Of the utter emptiness of the world without her. Of breathing while knowing she was no longer.

I felt, too, a vague tingling, the beginnings of the guilt that would probably burn me for the rest of my life, a creeping hollow sense of failure not only for not saving her—

She pulled you from that chasm in the Andes. You couldn't do the same?

but also for every moment I didn't spend loving her better.

Really? You went out with Seven and her friends instead of pleading and screaming and dragging Lilly, if necessary, with you? Or just staying by her bed?

The warmth of the copter and the blankets began to thaw my limbs, and with their return came a flood of pain. When the medic asked me if I needed medicine, I said yes, and he stuck a needle into the skin between my fingers, and as I slipped away I only thought:

Lilly.

Please.

No.

16

Before the beginning, there was an end

Three chosen to die

 

Three coffins on a gray beach.

 

To live in the service of the Qi-An

The balance of all things.

Three guardians of the memory of the first people

They who thought themselves masters of all the Terra

 

Simple boxes built from the wreckage piles.