The Lost Code (20 page)

I flipped through the stack. On some of the ones deeper in the pile, a second set of grid lines seemed to have been drawn atop the first, at an angle to the blue ones. Sometimes there was a word or two scribbled in the bottom corner. I caught:
Matches Malaysian changes?
Another read:
Easter Island?
And also:
Recheck alignment to Hudson Polar.

A flash of light burst in the corner of my eye.

“Whoa!” I looked over to see that Lilly had placed her hand on the black sphere, and it had come alive, tiny pinpricks of light shooting out of it, hundreds of little beams hitting the walls.

“Stars,” said Lilly, gazing around the domed ceiling.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“All I did was put my hand on it.”

The lights coming out of the sphere had made the dome above us into a map of the night sky, though it was dimmed by the electric bulbs strung around. It was funny to think that someone had made a dome here, complete with a fake sky, long before Eden. Lilly looked from the stars to the floor, with its land and water shapes. “So, this room is like a giant map.”

“Yeah,” I said. I let the pile of maps fall to the table and started toward Lilly. There was a clink of glass and then a rolling sound. I looked down to see that I’d kicked something on the floor: a glass cylinder. It rolled in a slow circle, stopping against the outstretched fingers of the Nomad woman.

“What was that?” Lilly asked. She took her hand from the obsidian. The stars went out.

I bent down. It was a vial, missing its top. It had a yellow-and-white label and was mostly empty, except for a few leftover drops of blood. I picked it up and looked at the code printed on it: YH4-32.1 I felt a burst of adrenaline, my head spinning. “Uh-oh,” I said.

“What?” Lilly arrived beside me as I stood up. I looked down at the Nomad. Her dead eyes stared up at the ceiling like she’d seen something awe-inspiring up there, or awful. There was a bullet hole in her chest. A pool of blood with crusted edges spread out from beneath her back. I looked at her outstretched arm, leaning on the wall. The palm up, covered in blood. Not a smear, but instead evenly covered, almost like it had been painted on.

Lilly stepped past me and reached down to the body. There was a long, narrow knife in a sheath on the woman’s belt. Lilly unsnapped the button and took the knife. She stood up and slipped it into the waist of her shorts. “Just in case,” she said.

I nodded, my mind on other things. “The blood,” I said vacantly.

Lilly looked down at the body and exhaled slowly. “Yeah, gross.”

“No.” Things were spinning into webs. Dr. Maria taking my sample the day before yesterday, those looks she’d given me, given the bodies, up in the Preserve. “
My
blood,” I said.

“What?”

“The—” I was going to explain what this had to mean. Dr. Maria was working with the Nomads. She’d given them this vial of my blood, but to do what?

I looked around. There. A few feet back up the wall from where the Nomad had fallen was a small recess, a little triangular alcove carved into the wall at chest height. It was just above her feet, like that’s where she’d been standing when the bullet hit her.

“Over here.” Inside the recess there was a depression carved out in the shape of a hand. It almost looked smooth in the shadows but, peering closer, I saw the spikes. Tiny little pins made of something white, maybe bone. They were polished to perfect points. There were maybe twenty, spaced out around the handprint.

Lilly peered in at it. “Yowch,” she said. “That would be like putting your hand on a cactus.”

“Yeah,” I said. I moved my shaking hand toward it.

“What are you doing? Owen!” She grabbed my wrist.

“It’s my blood, on the Nomad’s hand,” I said. “She covered her hand with my blood to use this. The siren said the key was inside me.”

“What?”

“Back in the tunnels,” I said.

“Oh,” said Lilly. “But, so . . . you think the key is your blood.”

I nodded, but it was more like I
knew.
Almost like that boy Lük was watching me and smiling.

“The key to what, though?” Lilly asked.

I took a deep breath. “Let’s find out.” I tried to ready myself, to tense all my muscles as I put my hand over the spiked impression. I was shaking, but it seemed more like anticipation of what was about to happen than for the pain. I lowered my hand, the magnet pulling. . . . I pressed down, felt the resistance of my skin, bending against the little spikes. . . . And the popping as needle after needle broke through my armor, pierced me like a piece of fruit. Each stung, the pain a quick jolt, and then my whole hand began to come alive with screaming. My arm shook. I squinted against tears.

“Breathe,” Lilly whispered, rubbing my shoulder.

I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t. I was wincing, gritting my teeth, my body like a stone. I pressed harder. The spikes dug deeper, and around me I began to notice that nothing was happening.

I pulled my hand off. It felt like it was burning from the inside out. The holes were bright red, drops of blood bubbling out of them. They grew fat and then started dripping across my hand, making streaks. I rubbed it on my shorts and looked back at the handprint. The little spikes were coated, the blood dripping down, collecting around the base of each and seeping into narrow spaces around them.

The room started to shake.

“Owen . . . ,” said Lilly.

I glanced around. The walls were vibrating, dust falling from seams. A loud crack sounded from behind us and we turned to see the black sphere and its pedestal lowering into the floor. More sharp sounds, a deep rumbling, growing louder, and the floor around the pedestal began to lower too, but in segments, each lower than the next, forming a spiral staircase that led downward.

“Okay . . .” I watched, stunned. My blood had done this—opened a staircase into a floor, deep in an underground temple. “What is this?” I mumbled.

“The table!” Lilly darted forward. The floor was lowering beneath its far legs and it was starting to lean into the hole. Lilly grabbed its edge. I lunged for the papers, somehow remembering to slap my nonbloodied hand down on them. As we pulled the table back, its legs squealing, I considered that if it was positioned over these stairs, then that likely meant that Paul didn’t know that the floor opened. That this was a secret he knew nothing about.

The rumbling ceased and the floor stopped moving. A wide ring remained around the edge of the room, and the whole middle had sunk. We peered down. The staircase spiraled two times, narrowing as it went. The black sphere seemed to be suspended about halfway down, and below that, something flickered like metal.

I looked at Lilly. Her eyes were wide, but she waved her hand. “Lead on. Whatever this is, it’s for you.”

I almost didn’t want to. That vibrating inside me had reached a steady hum that made it hard to think. How could this actually be for me? And yet, was there really any doubt?

I started down the stairs. Each was wider at the edge, tapering to the center. We passed below the obsidian star ball, the pedestal, and saw that it was suspended in space by thin copper rods that stretched out from the wall. A dome of copper hung beneath the bottom of the pedestal, like a giant metal umbrella.

Below, we could see down to a stone-block floor. There was something on it, kind of a triangle shape. It looked almost like the hull of one of the little sailboats up at camp.

The stairs ended above this. A catwalk led over to the wall, to a narrow platform that ringed this lower chamber. Everything was carved from stone. We walked slowly across, arms out for balance. In the dim light spilling down from above, I could see that the boatlike object was about five meters below us. A final set of stairs continued down to it from the far side of the platform. The stairs above us kept the walls all in shadows.

I moved around the platform, keeping my back against the wall, until I got to the far staircase. I climbed down. The little craft was lying on a stone floor. It had more geometric sides than a sailboat, and could probably hold about four people. I stepped in. There were flat seats along the sides. It had a copper mast near the front, and a series of little metal poles, like the ones in a tent, that arched from one corner of the craft to the other, outlining a little dome over the front half of the craft.

In the center of the vessel floor was a triangular block of sleek black metal, and sitting on top of that was an oval-shaped clay object, like a pot. There were three more of these pots strapped inside the bow. Closer to me, I spied a tiny metal pole sticking out of the floor and ending at a little gold button. It had a curved depression in it about the size of a fingertip. In the middle of that depression was a little round hole. Its edge stuck up a little. It looked sharp. I wondered if this was another switch for my blood key.

“What is it?” Lilly asked from above.

“Some kind of boat,” I said, but I felt like there was more to it than that.

“Are we supposed to do something with it?”

“Don’t know.” If we were, I had no idea what. It wasn’t like there was any water down here to sail it on, and it seemed way too heavy for us to lift. I looked around at the walls.

Blue flickered up on the walkway.

“There,” I whispered, pointing.

“What?” Lilly asked. It was too dark for her to see where I was pointing. I got out of the craft and climbed back up the stairs. I was stepping lightly, trying not to make any sound. I had this feeling that something was down here. Something that we might awaken if we weren’t careful.

The siren seemed smaller, flickering along the wall, and then she disappeared as I arrived. I ran my hands over the stone and found a narrow gap, impossible to see in the shadows. It was barely wide enough to fit through. I had to turn sideways.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Lilly asked, behind me.

“No,” I said, but I also knew at this point, I was going as far as I could. The magnet pull was undeniable now. I slid into the narrow passage. My shoulder almost immediately hit stone. A flash of blue to my right. I struggled to turn myself and found that the passage continued that way. I slid until I hit another wall. The passage turned again, and again. I smelled the damp, cool stone against my bare skin. My wet shorts caught on the rough surface. The space was tight, I could barely inflate my lungs. I twisted around again, squeezing and sliding in pitch-black, and finally I slipped free into another chamber. This one was small with round walls bathed in brilliant white light.

“Owen?”

I turned back to the narrow, twisting hall. “I’m through. Come on.”

I waited, hearing Lilly’s arms and shoulders sliding along the rock. I stared into the black of the narrow entryway, waiting for her, and also not wanting to turn around and face what was behind me.

Lilly appeared. The white light washed over her face.

“Whoa,” she said, squinting to look over my shoulder. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

I already knew that it was. I turned around, holding a hand up against the blinding brightness. In the center of this small circular chamber was another pedestal.

On it was the skull.

It gleamed in pure crystal-white, the light seeming to come from inside it, just like in the vision. We walked over to it. I could feel it humming, or myself humming, it was hard to tell, but I felt like this was the source of the magnetic pull, or maybe we both were, and we were being drawn together. I stood over it, looking down into the clear crystal, its sparkles and fractures refracting its own light, making little rainbows. My bones and its stone seemed to be vibrating at the same frequency.

And I knew what to do.

I put my palms on the smooth crystal. It was warm.

“Owen, you’re glowing . . . ,” Lilly said.

But her voice was already distant. I was leaving. Into the white.

“HELLO.”

There is no time inside the 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.

And I feel that this sense is called something. But I don’t yet know the word. Or it feels more like I don’t remember it yet.

Above are dark clouds. I sit on a stone floor, outside. Tan pyramid peaks and carved spires of the stone city are just visible over a low wall. Soft white, heatless light glows from globes on metal stands around us, on nearby balconies, and in window recesses. The air is flecked with that gray snowfall.

I look down to find myself in a plain white fabric shirt and pants. My feet are bare. As flakes of the dark snow hit my clothes they make soft smudges, and though the flakes are cool, they are not wet.

“It’s ash.”

Across from me is the boy from the vision, Lük. Between us, the skull glows softly in the twilight, illuminating our faces.

“It’s midday, actually,” says Lük, hearing my thoughts. “It never gets brighter than this, anymore.”

He has a face similar to the siren’s—I think,
Primitive
, but that is wrong. That implies less intelligence, and I can feel the intelligence radiating from him like heat from a fire. My dad has photos of fifth-great grandparents from back at the dawn of photography, and even just that many steps back in time you can see how things have changed, like head shapes, nose curves, shoulder slants.

For Lük, the word I am looking for is
ancient
.

And yet he is so familiar that the first thing I ask is, “Are you . . . me? Or, am I . . .”

“No,” Lük replies. “You are you, and I am me. But we are related.”

“How are we speaking?” I ask. “I mean, you—You probably don’t speak English.”

“We are communicating beneath language,” says Lük, “through the harmony of the Qi-An.”

“The what?”

“There have been many names for it before us, and no doubt there have been many since, names that describe the energy that binds the cosmos. . . .” He closes his eyes and in the silence I feel a strange presence in my head, like fingers flipping through pages. “A term for it in your mind is yin-yang. We referred to it as the Qi-An.”

“Energy,” I say. “You mean like gravity.”

“Gravity is one face of the Qi-An. There are many more. The Qi-An gave birth to the living presence in the cosmos. It is called, let me see”—I feel that sensation again, like a breeze over my thoughts—“what you might call the Gaia. We called it the Terra.”

“And you’re . . . dead.”

Lük smiles. He glances over his shoulder. I follow his gaze and see the three pedestals where the skulls were, in the vision. “Yes,” he says. “Not in here, though.”

I look around. “Where’s here?” For a moment, I think to ask if this is heaven or something like that.

“There would be truth to that,” says Lük. “But I think, technically, rather than getting into talk of metaphysics and harmonic energy transfer for now, the easiest way to put it is to say that we are inside the skull.”

“How is that possible?”

“You are still standing in the temple, obviously, but the skull has”—Lük squints as he checks my mind again—“uploaded,” he says. “Your consciousness has uploaded to the skull, where mine is.”

“So,” I say, “you died, and they put you in here?”

Lük’s forehead creases as he thinks. “Close enough.”

A flake of ash falls on my eyelashes. I look around. “And where is this?”

Lük stands. “Come see.”

We get up and he leads me to the wall. We lean over the edge. He is shorter than me by almost a foot.

The city fills the center of a steep-walled mountain valley. Snow-capped peaks soar on either side. To our left, twisting veins of light trace roads that lead farther up into the valley’s tail, where a glacier looms. To our right, the city ends at a massive wall. On the other side is a rough and frothing sea. Huge waves roll into a winding fjord and pound against massive stone docks in explosions of white spray. There are boats tied there, enormous boats with giant sails, their edges and masts gleaming with copper plating and bolts.

“This is our last city,” says Lük. “The rest are lost, and soon this one will be, too.”

“Who are—Who
were
you people?” I ask.

Lük turns to me. “We have been called by many names: Viracocha in the Inca tradition, Tartessians in southern Spain, and, most commonly, Atlanteans. From the Atlantis of your myths. Not that we called ourselves that. For thousands of years we navigated the world, building our cities, learning from the earth, the ocean, and the stars, creating a great global civilization. But much of what we have known has already been lost. We’re dying out. This is the end.”

I look over the glowing city. I turn to Lük. “Are you serious?”

This seems to amuse him. “Very.”

“And this,” I say, “
this
is Atlantis?”

“Part of it,” says Lük. “There were once many cities around the world.”

As we pause, there is an ominous rumble. I see Lük’s fingers tighten on the railing as he tenses in fear. I do too. I feel like I know this fear in my bones, as if some part of me remembers this past, but still I have to ask, “What was that?”

“That,” he says, “is what we’ve done to ourselves. We learned enough about the Terra to think that we could change it. Once, we felt the rhythms of Qi-An, heard nature’s whisper and acted as one with it, of it. But as we advanced technologically, we lost our ear for that divine music. We thought we could control the Terra itself. Thought we could shape the world in our image.”

I think about the Great Rise and its causes. About how this sounds familiar.

“Yes.” Lük agrees with my thought. “As a result we made things worse. Terribly worse. We harnessed power we had no right trying to control. Now, the entire world is falling apart. We’ve lost the sun, caused a great flood. I believe you know this flood, from your myths.”

“You mean like,
the
flood? From the Bible?”

“Yes. Noah and his ark, the story of Manu in the Hindu tradition, Deucalion of the Greek myths, Utnapishtim in the epic of Gilgamesh. All speak of the same event. And it’s more than just a flood. Whole continents are moving, sinking, mountains rising, all of it by our hand.”

He waves down to the city. “We must leave here, now. The skies have become too unstable, so we will only travel by sea. That is the safest way to ride out the flood. When the cataclysm subsides, we’ll disperse, and take up our existence in the stable corners of the world. We’ll pass on what we feel is safe, let it change, let it adapt. But some things, we will leave behind, to be lost in time.”

I look down into the streets and alleyways of the ancient city. “And this is all happening, or happened, how long ago?”

“About ten thousand years,” says Lük. “Give or take.”

Below, these Atlantean people make their way in slow moving lines toward the giant docks. I feel grief for them, almost like they are family. It makes a knot inside me.

“That is because they are,” says Lük.

“What?” I ask.

“You, Owen, your family. You are an Atlantean. Through the thousands of years from me to you, the human . . . what would you call it . . .”

I feel his fingers sifting through my mind.

“Yes, genetic code . . . has branched and evolved, with certain traits being favored over others, forming vast variations. New areas of the human code have been favored, come alive, while others have fallen dormant and been lost. And through all that change, you contain what is closest to the pure Atlantean version.”

“Code, you mean, like DNA?”

Lük sifts through my mind. “Yes, but it is more than how you think of DNA. It’s not just eye color and whether you are tall or short. It is also perception and memory. You carry in your genes an understanding of the Atlantean consciousness, a connection to our existence. Our lost civilization lives on inside you.”

“Okay,” I say, thinking that this is all crazy, unbelievable, and yet I feel like I completely believe it, as if I’ve always known it. “So you’re saying I have, like, Atlantean DNA inside me, and it’s been, what, turned on?”

“That is more precise than you know.”

“But turned on by what?”

“By proximity to this skull. It is tuned to the Qi-An frequencies of your Atlantean genes, designed to make them function once more.”

“So, this thing, and this awakening, that’s why I have these?” I point to my gills, but at the same time I am looking at Lük and realizing that he doesn’t have the lines on his neck. “Wait, do you—”

“The awakening process involves the activation of parts of your code that have been dormant for thousands of generations,” says Lük. “The process of turning on these areas is bound to cause some upheaval on the genetic level, a bit of reshuffling. Any side effects of the awakening should select themselves out in time as the organization progresses.”

“Oh,” I say. “So you guys aren’t gill people.”

Lük looks at me and suddenly he laughs. It is an odd sound, short and sharp, again showing the gulf of time between us. “No. Though our babies have gills, sometimes, but they fade. And we have legends of gill people, in the past. We did all come from the sea, after all, if you go back far enough.”

Now it is my turn to laugh, though less enthusiastically. “So this is, like, spinning my evolutionary clock, kinda.”

He nods.

“And the others who have gotten gills,” I say, “they’ve got some of this Atlantean DNA in them, too?”

“Yes, but they are not pure, like you. Every human has some amount of the ancestry, and these other gill people you speak of likely have more than most. Their proximity to this skull will produce effects, but only you are the true Atlantean. The only one that heard the skull’s call.”

By
call
I think he must mean the siren. “But Lilly,” I say, “my friend out there, heard it, too.”

“I see her in your mind,” says Lük. “Well,
this
skull is only for you.
I
am only for you, but she may well be one of the three, in which case, there is a skull for her, at another location.”

“The three?”

“Yes. There are three Atlanteans. That is how we designed the skulls, to find the three with the most pure version of the code, within parameters such as age. Only a youthful brain is elastic enough to handle these transformations. And your body is young and strong, which will be necessary for what’s to come. Also, the skulls are tuned to specific aptitudes. So, not only do you have to be pure enough, but you must also possess the right skills.”

I think that I should feel fear, or more frustration at being told all this, because none of this is my choice. It’s completely beyond my control. Instead, what I feel is peace. Again, it’s as if I have known this already, as if a part of me, a purpose, is waking up for the first time in my life. “Okay, and what’s to come?”

“There is a legend,” says Lük. “Like this: ‘Before the beginning, there was an end. Three chosen to die, 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, who went too far, and were lost to the heaving earth. To the flood. Three who will wait, until long after memory fades. And should the time come again, when masters seek to bend the Terra to their will, then the three will awaken, to save us all.’”

The words sound like truth to me, like something I’d known all along.

“Now that you have been awakened, it is your destiny to return home. You must protect the Heart of the Terra. It is in danger.”

“In danger from what?”

“From the very machinery that we built. Someone has discovered our sin, and seeks to use it. If they do, humanity will near extinction once more. And this time it may plunge over the edge.”

“Who found this . . . sin that you’re talking about?”

“I am unaware of the exact events that have taken place out in the world, only what they must mean if you have arrived here. If you are here, talking to me, then the Sentinels were activated. How to describe this . . .” He checks me. “Okay,” says Lük. “Think of the Sentinels as sensors that were tripped. The sensors activate the skulls, and the skulls find and activate the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans return to the Heart of the Terra to protect it. How this all happens I can and will explain to you, but not now. We have to go slow. Even your young brain is only so elastic.”

“Okay, sure, but . . .” I am already feeling exhausted. He’s right: it is more than enough to know I’m an Atlantean, descended from an ancient culture. “Where am I supposed to go? Like, where is this Terra? Wait, are you going to tell me it’s inside all of us, or something?”

“No, it is very real and had a location. But finding it is the job of the Mariner.”

“The who?”

“Each Atlantean has a purpose: there is the Mariner, who can locate the Heart of the Terra; the Medium, who can speak to it; and the Aeronaut, who can get you all there.”

“Which one am I?” I ask.

Lük looks at me for a moment, then he glances up.

I follow his gaze. “What?” All I see are the heavy cloud bottoms, dark, raining ash.

But then a light. A craft drops down out of the black, arcing on the wind. It is large, triangular, with sails billowing off its central mast. It reminds me of a bigger version of the craft outside the skull room. A blue light glows from its center, like a power source.

“Wait, you guys could fly?” I ask.

“You don’t map the earth and build a worldwide culture by boat,” said Lük. “That would take ages. Now, look at the ship and tell me: Why is he listing like that?”

“He’s battling probably a thirty-knot crosswind from the southeast,” I answer immediately. Then it occurs to me that I knew that, just like I’d been sensing winds the last few days.

Lük is smiling.