The Far Dawn (3 page)

We'd been flying silent for a while, and I could feel all the dark thoughts starting to wake. Finally, I said, “Three layers of millet cookie . . . marshmallow in between two . . .”

“Ooh,” said Lilly, snapping out of a trance. “Um . . .” She thought while adjusting the sails.

“Strawberry cream between the others.”

“Oh! Me-O-Mys!”

“Yes.”

“I would kill for one of those right now. Or a whole box.”

“Me, too.”

Silence fell over us again. The appearance of the mountains meant we were getting close, close to something that felt dangerous, and with the Terra's warning, all too uncertain.

It also meant the end of these days together, of Lilly and me, in between worlds.

“Look,” she said. I followed her finger and saw a bony spine running along a ridge below, a crumbled wall. “Inca?”

“Probably,” I said. The wall mimicked our course, arcing from one ridge to the next, almost as if the Inca had made this same journey.

“Do you think he'll be there?” Lilly asked quietly, even though we were far too high for any stray person on the ground to hear us talking.

“I don't know,” I replied, just as quietly.

I knew she meant Paul. He had Leech's old maps, his sketchbook, and the radial sextant that had allowed Leech to plot the course to the Andes temple. They had Lilly's Medium skull, too. But he didn't have the maps in Leech's head, like I did, the maps the Terra had given me when Leech died. So did he know the exact location? Maybe he'd figured out how to use the sextant. Or maybe Leech had also sketched the route in his journal. I wished I could ask him.

Crack!

I heard the echoes of Francine's gunshot in the cryo facility again. Saw Leech spasming back . . . and later sinking in the waves . . . How could Paul have done that? Were we all that expendable?

The Three will fail. . . .

And I had another worry, one that had been gnawing at me along with everything else. “I hope we're not just leading him right to it again,” I said. That feeling was back, like we were being toyed with. Where were Paul and his fleet of hover copters right now? There could only be two reasons why they hadn't come after us since Desenna: because they were ahead of us or trailing us, and either way I felt all too certain that they were lying in wait again.

“What else can we do?” Lilly wondered aloud.

“Keep bearing toward that orange star,” I said, pointing to the south and west.

“Betelgeuse,” said Lilly.

“Yeah.”

“Orion's shoulder,” Lilly added. “A red supergiant. Like, a hundred times the size of the sun. Wouldn't that be amazing? To see something like that.”

“Yeah.”

“After those Mars missions back when we were kids, I always thought for sure we'd get to go into space, travel to the stars, find new planets to colonize and all that sci-fi stuff. I would have given anything to do that.”

“I know,” I agreed, except that before I was an Aeronaut, even just the height of a tall staircase freaked me out, never mind the idea of flying up and out of the atmosphere.

The mention of stars reminded me of something less romantic. I got up and moved to the mast. I'd tied a small piece of rope near the top.

Victoria's finger dangled from the end.

Looking at it reminded me of the sound. The sound that Mica's sacrificial knife had made, like tearing soaked cloth. The resistance I'd felt as the knife met bone . . .

I'd been drying the finger out each night while we flew, and then wrapping it tight while we slept, to keep bugs off it. The skin had shriveled now and turned a dead gray. It felt hard and rubbery, and had long since stopped leaking blood.

I reached into Dr. Maria's backpack and pulled out the white-handled knife that Leech had given me. There were flecks of dried blood by its hilt, from Eden soldiers back in the Rockies, and I tried not to think about how this trip was feeling all too similar to that one. . . .

I turned the blade away and pressed it into the skin of the finger. There was a moment of resistance, then a slice of the dried tissue curled free. I held the finger against the edge of the craft and kept whittling, removing grayish layers of skin and muscle, letting the flakes be carried away by the wind. Each stroke of the knife made a papery tearing sound.

“That is beyond gross,” Lilly commented.

“Yeah,” I said through gritted teeth. The knife began to hit bone, and I worked more carefully, exposing the hard fibrous curves.

Soon I began to see the bar code.

Victoria had been a selectee. One of the very elite inside the Eden domes who'd been chosen for Project Elysium. For the trip to EdenHome, which Paul said was nearly prepared. They only needed the Paintbrush of the Gods to begin. But the location of EdenHome was secret. Victoria hadn't known, as she'd defected from Paul's plans years ago.

And there was still the other mystery, the one that had led the first people we'd met outside EdenWest to try to kill us: Harvey, Lucinda, and Ripley had wanted passage on the Ascending Stars. They were a rumor in Heliad-7, of lights going up into space, of the gods leaving. Lilly and I figured it must have had something to do with leaving the Edens. Maybe the Ascending Stars were some sort of special aircraft that Project Elysium had built. Or satellites or drones to deploy weapons built from the uranium we knew Paul had stolen. Maybe he was building defenses against anyone who would try to stop them. I still didn't know what it added up to. The only thing we were sure of was that Paul needed the Paintbrush to succeed. So we had to find it first.

And maybe we'd need this bar code. To access some place we'd need to get into to stop Paul or, if we failed, maybe even to sneak into EdenHome. It was more likely that if we failed, we'd die; but, though I hadn't thought about it at the time, I realized now that one of the reasons I'd taken Victoria's finger was as a backup plan.

It had to do with one of the first things I'd thought about Lilly. Back when we'd had gills, I'd imagined us finding clean ocean together, living on a beach, a little paradise.

Even though we were Atlanteans with a mission, sometimes I wanted that vision with Lilly, to just be in love with her there. Sometimes I wanted that far more than I even wanted to save the world, even though it seemed impossible that one could exist without the other. And so I'd found myself thinking: if we weren't able to stop Paul, maybe we could use the bar code to sneak into Project Elysium and be a part of EdenHome. Sometimes it was more than just a thought and almost a wish. We'd be together, and really, how terrible would that be?

Except that it would betray all the people—friends, family, and allies—who had suffered and died for our mission, a list so long now that it took the two of us to remember it. From Anna to Dr. Maria, Leech, and even Seven, to those whose fates we didn't know for sure, like Evan and the CITs, Robard and the other Nomads, our parents, brothers, and sisters . . .

But even though I hated the thought of letting them down, of those lives and sacrifices wasted, hadn't I also suffered and lost? Sure, we'd be turning our back on the rest of the world, but it wasn't like the world had been that kind to us. After all that I'd had to go through, was I really expected to risk my life just for some mission that I'd never even chosen?

Maybe I had chosen it, though. Sure, it started because of my genes, but since then, over and over, when I could have just run, could have just ignored what I was, I hadn't. Or I could have stayed in EdenWest or in Desenna . . . except all those places were traps. Paul would have strapped me to his machines, Francine would have captured me, Victoria would have had me killed. I'd had a choice, but by doing what was right for the mission, I had also been trying to survive.

And so, sometimes I wondered: What would happen if there came a moment when I had to choose between those two things: survival or the mission? Or worse, between the mission and Lilly? I felt like I knew the answer, like it was obvious, but what kind of hero did that make me?

I finished cleaning the finger, then cut free the single bone that was striped with the black lines of bar code. I wrapped a thin strip of leather around it, and then tied that to a loop of twine. I knotted it around my neck.

“Like it?” I said to Lilly.

“Very savage,” she said.

I smiled, but the word stung.
Savage.
I knew what she meant, but . . . it reminded me of bodies strung on walls, piles of corpses in dry riverbeds. Savage was like ruthless, selfish. . . .

I relieved Lilly and focused on flying instead. As we shifted positions and she handed me the sail lines, we kissed, and it was a momentary island of safety, and yet—

The Three will fail.

“What is it?” Lilly asked.

I realized I'd sort of paused in the middle of the moment. “Nothing.”

I'd told her about the Terra's visit and about her instructions to find the Sentinel, but I hadn't told Lilly the part about the lie. We had enough to worry about, and I didn't want her to know that I was doubting our mission or for her to doubt it, too. But I couldn't shake the Terra's comments.

It helped to have the sail lines in my hands. The feel of wind and movement brushed the thoughts back. We rose steadily, the ground beneath us becoming more rocky and precarious. An hour later the peaks had risen around us, and we began to wind our way up deepening valleys, following each branch into the moonlit mountains. The air became cold and thin, and the winds less predictable.

The stars begin to glimmer like glass beads. The Milky Way gained depth, feathery folds, and I breathed faster to get oxygen.

“We have to stay hydrated,” said Lilly. She dug into the canvas bags of supplies at the front of the craft. Luckily, whoever had been tasked with stocking us for our journey back in Desenna hadn't known that Victoria was planning to kill us all along, because we were flush with water, mango, millet crackers, tapir jerky.

Lilly passed me one of the filmy plastic water bottles a hundred times recycled. The mineral-tasting sips reminded me of the cenote, of the cool and the trees and the sun of Desenna, where, for a moment, I'd had family. It also reminded me of Seven's lips, of her urgent kisses. . . .

But then I pictured her leaking blood and falling from my sight.

“You okay?” said Lilly.

I shook my head. It seemed like every thought I had eventually led to some dark corner. “Sure.”

I tacked back and forth up the barren valleys. Craggy peaks reached to the stars around us. The winds whipped, and after I spiraled up alongside a sheer face, we came out above the entire range, as if we were above the earth itself, close enough to fly to the moon.

“How much farther, do you think?” Lilly asked, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders, another around herself. The temperature was dropping fast here in the high altitudes, and though, like Lilly, I was wearing the jeans and sweatshirt that Heliad-7 had provided us, I was glad for the extra layer.

I checked the maps in my head. “A couple hours. By midnight maybe? Especially if the winds stay calm—”

A shriek of sound like clashing metal tore through the air around us. Lilly grabbed for her ears. The sound whined and then twisted into a static hum. And suddenly there was a tinny voice speaking:

“I
DO
, I
KNOW
, I KNOW
HOW THE WORLD WILL END.
”

The voice was a half whisper, a man or a teen, hoarse with frazzled edges.

And it was coming from the vortex engine.

“I
KNOW ABOUT THE ANCIENT ONES, THE
T
HREE, AND HOW THEY WILL ASCEND LIKE STARS AND LEAVE US.
I
KNOW ALL THEIR PLANS.
A
LL THEIR DEVIOUS PLANS.
A
LL ABOUT
P
ROJECT
E
LYSIUM
 . . .”

He spoke like he was trying not to let someone nearby hear him.

“What
is
that?” Lilly asked, cautiously taking her hands off her ears.

“P
LEASE HELP ME
,” the voice whispered, edged in static. “I
CAN TELL YOU HOW TO GET THERE.
I
CAN FREE YOU FROM THE BLOOD, SO MUCH BLOOD TO COME.
I'
VE FELT IT ALL . . . BUT WHAT DO
I
FEEL
? W
HAT IS REAL
?”

“We're picking up a message,” I said, “or a recording. The vortex is like a big magnet, reacting with the electromagnetic field of the earth. That's how it creates the antigravity field.”

“B
U—Y—
” the message clipped. “Y
OU JUST HAVE TO GET ME OUT OF HERE.
I'
VE DIED TOO MANY TIMES, FELT THE LIFE DRAIN OUT OF MY LOVED ONES  . . . WE ARE SO MANY BUT SO ALONE
!”

“Magnets are what powered my dad's guitar amplifier,” said Lilly. “Sometimes it would pick up a transmission or a stream.”

“B
UT IF YOU GET ME OUT
,” the voice went on, “I
CAN GET YOU THERE, TOO,
I
SWEAR
—” Rips of static or maybe a crashing sound in the background. “Y
OU JUST HAVE TO GET ME OUT, GET ME OUT OF
V
ISTA—
W
AIT
 . . .” More crashing. “N
O, GET BACK
! G
ET OFF
—”

There was a final screech and the transmission cut out.

“It must have been close by,” I said, gazing warily around the barren mountains. “Not sure where, though.”

“There's something.” Lilly pointed off starboard. “That's a light, isn't it? On that plateau?”

I peered at the outlines of peaks and ledges. Something blinked far off. “We should check it out,” I said, turning the craft toward it. “Whatever it is, there might be information we could use.”