The Lost Code (21 page)

“I’m the Aeronaut,” I say.

“There is a craft in this temple,” says Lük.

“Wait, you’re telling me I’m going to
fly
that thing?”

“Yes, but I will help you. That’s why I’m here. I trained to be an Aeronaut. And that learning will awaken inside you. Now that you’ve connected with the skull, I will be able to join you in your mind.”

“Like you’re going to download into me?”

“More like I have always been there, like memories you didn’t know you had. Other things will happen, too. More effects of your awakening.”

“Oh,” I say, “more of
that.
”

“Yes, but what’s important is that we can work on your training without the skull present.”

“Yeah, about the flying . . . ,” I say. “I know you can read my thoughts, so you might want to picture what I’m thinking about right now.”

Lük closes his eyes, then frowns. “That looks like some sort of giant dome structure.”

“Yeah. It’s going to be kind of a problem.”

“I’m afraid I won’t be any he—wi . . .”

Lük’s mouth is still moving, but his voice is cutting out.

The world around us flickers from dark to white.

“Hey,” I say to him.

“Y . . .” His mouth moves. “To make th—”

The world around me brightens. I brighten. The vision is fading. I am leaving the skull.

Everything turns to white, but then suddenly to black.

I feel myself returning, and time and space begin to solidify.

So does pain.

I LANDED BACK INSIDE MY BODY, FILLING ITS
spaces, feeling my heart pumping, my feet on the floor, my hand burning, and my breath—

Stopped. Pain around my neck. Tension. Everything squeezed tight.

My eyes opened and the room was dark except for light beams. Flashlights. In their sweeps I saw Lilly, held with an elbow around her neck by one of the two Security Forces guards we’d seen earlier.

There was an arm around my neck too.

The lights caught the skull, but its inner glow had gone dark.

“This is fascinating.” Cartier appeared. He walked over and picked up the skull, holding it in both his gloved hands, making little bouncing movements with his arms like he was testing its weight. “Mr. Jacobsen will be very pleased to know about this.” He looked at his officers. “His orders are to bring these two and the skull to his lab. Let’s go.”

I glanced over at Lilly. Her face was red. There was no way we were breaking these holds. I tried to say to her, with my glance,
It will be okay
, or something like that, even though I didn’t know how it could be.

But even though we were caught, I felt fuzzy, only loosely connected to the outside world after my time inside the skull. I could barely make sense of my limbs to walk, couldn’t quite pay attention. Despite the danger, it felt like my brain was busy with other things.

Gather round, everyone
, a technician was calling, waving his arms. The yellow suits clustered around a bank of consoles, looking at screens full of spiking meters.
You know those data vaults we’ve always wondered about?
There were murmurs among the others.
Well, they’re coming online.

I shook my head, trying to focus. Through the brain fog, at least a couple things were clear from all that had just happened.

The Nomads had been after the skull, and me. Did that mean they knew that I was an Atlantean? And they wanted to get me away from Project Elysium. So, was that what Lük was talking about? Was Project Elysium the thing that was going to destroy the Heart of the Terra, if we didn’t protect it?

My captor loosened his grip and pushed me through the narrow back-and-forth passage. I came out on the walkway above the little airship. He grabbed me by the arm, moving me ahead.

They marched us up the spiral stairs, back to the map room. There, Cartier pulled the jacket off the dead Nomad. When he yanked it loose, her arms flopped. Her head thudded on the marble floor. He took the jacket and wrapped the skull in it.

We climbed up the ladder, back into the mine tunnels, up and up until we were in the long hall with the concrete floor.

Ahead, I saw the side tunnel where Lilly and I had entered. Beyond that was the next ladder, the one that would likely lead us up into the Aquinara, and right to Paul. As I passed our tunnel, I thought halfheartedly about making a break for it, but I could barely process how to do that, and I was so tired, the exhaustion of the entire week overwhelming, and on top of that was this fuzzy-headed way my mind seemed to be so distracted.

Lilly, though, had all of her energy, and she had something I didn’t.

Her captor suddenly shouted in pain.

My guard was already spinning around as I did, and there was Lilly, holding out the Nomad’s knife, its end glistening in blood. Her arm was extended toward the next guard, but it also seemed like she was trying to get the knife as far away from her body as she could. Her eyes were wild, looking as scared by what she’d just done as fierce because of it.

I had to move. I slammed my hands into my guard’s back, doubting what good it would do, but it sent him face-first into the nearby wall.

“Gah!” he shouted, collapsing to his knees and grabbing at his nose as blood poured out.

My eyes locked with Lilly and we spun and sprinted into the side tunnel. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cartier rushing back toward us, but his careful grip on the skull slowed him down, and then we were flying down the dark passage.

“Have to get to water!” Lilly shouted, her voice at a higher pitch than I’d heard before.

Shouts and footsteps behind us. Lilly was getting ahead of me. I told my legs to go faster, but they didn’t seem to get the message. Again, it was like all of my circuits were busy.

Lilly turned back. “Come on!” She grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me, and I barely kept my feet underneath me. Down the hall, around the wall at the end, into the chamber. I could barely see in the dark, needed the siren, but Lilly’s memory was true. She kept pulling me and running and then our feet splashed into icy water and we dove. Air out. Water in. My skin seemed to scream at the cold, and it shocked me back to reality. Kick. Pull. We shot through the tunnel, two fish finally thrown back into their sea.

We jostled through the listless koi and reached the opening and were back out into the green of the lake. We angled up and caught the push of the outflow current. Swimming, owning the water, and it was amazing to me that it was still daytime. How long had we been in there? It had felt like days, years maybe. I’d gone in looking for answers, trying to understand what I was. Now I felt like I knew more than I could even grasp.

‘Owen!’ Lilly shouted as she waited for me to catch up.

‘I’m trying,’ I said, kicking harder, because even though we were in our medium again, everything still felt off, slow, like my body was trying to do two things at once.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked Lilly.

‘Don’t know yet.’ She was kicking furiously.

I noticed that she was still gripping the knife in her hand. The water had washed off the blood, and now the blade snared and respun little shards of sunlight with each of her swim strokes.

We stayed deep, crossing the lake. Then, there was a new sound. We looked up and saw the bellies of motorboats sliding by above, two together.

‘They’re looking for us,’ said Lilly.

‘We have to go deeper,’ I said, starting to pull down into the darker layer.

‘Not good,’ said Lilly. Above, the boats were circling. She passed me. ‘Faster, Owen!’

‘I am,’ I said, but something was wrong. I was trying to swim, trying to go harder and faster than I ever had, and yet I was falling behind again.

Wow, look at that . . .
, said one of the technicians, like there was brand-new equipment suddenly in place.

Well, this is unexpected
, said another. The whole group of them were ignoring their usual posts.

And meanwhile I was slowing down. Everything felt weak. My arms were coming to a stop, my legs hanging loose, and my lungs starting to twitch—

Wait. The fluttering in my neck . . . There was stillness where there had been movement. I tried to swallow water, but the flow had stopped.

‘Hey!’ Lilly looked up at me from the deep shadows.

My gills weren’t working, and I was just hanging there in watery space, nothing happening . . . except now a tickle in my throat, a heaving feeling, something was coming up, out. Oh no . . .

I coughed out that little bubble of air from my lungs. Suddenly they were awake, and wanted to breathe, to take over. What had happened to my gills?

I grabbed at my neck, pressing on the folds, causing stabs of pain, but still nothing worked, the flesh soft, dead. And I was drowning again. Thrashing and trying to move, and down was up and I couldn’t understand what had happened or why now, after everything I’d been through, all I’d learned. Now I just needed air, air . . .
air
!

Lilly was coming toward me, but it was too late. My mouth opened. I was swallowing water and there was that cold again, the icy pain searing out from the inside. That feeling of safety, that comfort of water’s pressure, like this was my world—all of that was gone. The freezing liquid poured down my throat, into my trachea, and the pain and the cold and the dying happened all over again.

I tried to move. There was no moving. I tried to scream or close my throat, but nothing worked, nothing, all systems off-line, sinking. Lilly was fading into a blur of green, and it was all going to black, and even as I clawed weakly at the liquid—final desperate movements—the technicians were still huddled around something new, mumbling with fascination, like they didn’t even notice what was happening to me, like they barely even cared.

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.

YOU WOULD HEAR THEM FIRST. VIBRATIONS IN OUR
walls, making the coffee mugs dance on their perches above the stove.

Mom counted the seconds; the closer together the booms, the stronger the storms. And the bigger they were, the more excited she seemed to get. They usually came at night, when I’d be lying in my bed, the one lamp in our single bedroom buzzing low because of the power rationing. I liked to sleep with my back up against the wall, and when the walls rumbled, I’d feel it in my spine.

“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

Another rumble. Mom looked over at me, and maybe my six-year-old eyes looked scared, because she smiled and said, “Here comes the giant.” She got up, putting down the reader tablet, whose weak charge she’d nearly used up reading to me. She shrugged off her fleece shawl and made big steps around the room. “Boom boom boom,” she said.

A message blinked on the desk monitor. Mom stopped and slipped on her glasses to read it. “Ooh,” she said softly. “Owen, they’re here. Want to go see?”

No
, I thought. I didn’t really want to go see. I wanted to stay in bed. “I thought we were supposed to stay inside because they were dangerous?”

My mom smiled at me in a way that was maybe supposed to make me think I was being silly, except it also always made me feel like she was disappointed in me, in my caution, my fear. Dad wouldn’t have wanted to go out either, but Dad was at work. He worked a lot of nights, managing the battery storage of the geothermal energy charge. The batteries were always having problems.

“Nah,” my mom said, still smiling. “We’ll be fine.” She looked away as she said it. I’d seen her do that when she was talking to Dad, like having to deal with someone as fearful as me was trying for her. I got the feeling that, if I resisted anymore, she’d start to get frustrated. And with Mom, it always seemed like if you made her too mad, or disappointed her too much, she’d tune you out. Those moments scared me, as if even at that age I could sense that they were little auditions for when she really would leave us.

“Okay,” I said, and slipped out of bed.

She handed me my jacket. I put it over my pajamas and wondered if she’d notice and tell me to put clothes on, but she was too busy finding her camera and putting on a scarf and a cowboy hat, like she was getting ready for a night on the town. Mom always did that, as if every place she went was a stage.

We left the apartment and walked up the main cavern road through our neighborhood. The booming sounded again. Dust drifted loose from the cavern walls with each concussion. I put up my hand for Mom to hold, but at that moment she was busy waving to a few neighbors.

A small crowd had formed in the street, heading in the same direction as we were. In a way, everyone had been waiting for this moment for over a year now, even while we’d hoped to avoid it. There were other kids walking with their parents. Some carried flashlights and blankets to sit on. So my mom wasn’t the only one who felt this urge that I didn’t share. That only made me feel more inadequate.

The elevators up to the city concourse were closed for power rationing, so we had to take the stairs. The narrow metal flights switched back and forth up the rock wall. They shook and whined with the crowd of people on them.

We emerged on a flat rock ledge, on the inside rim of the Yellowstone caldera, looking out over a wide, flat plain. It was dark, starless. The leading clouds of the storm were already overhead. More thunder. Hot wind whipped our hair and clothes, bullied its way through the dry evening cold. The slender windmills atop the ridge were spinning furiously, making a droning hum.

“There,” said Mom. She and others were pointing to the west, where a dark-orange glow lit the underbellies of the clouds. A spear of lightning zigzagged down, causing a flash in the distant pine trees. The orange light illuminated gaps in the cloud columns, canyons rising high into the sky. They were called pyrocumulus clouds. Dry thunderstorms where, though there might be rain falling somewhere thousands of meters up, the little amount of water evaporated while it was still in the sky. The storms got nicknamed lightning rains because lightning was the only thing that made it to the ground.

This one was different though, bigger, fueled by the smoke of the Three-Year Fire, which had finally found us.

I didn’t like being out there. In fact, it might have been the most scared I’d ever been. All I wanted was to be back inside, and yet, there was my mom, Nina, her face to the scalding wind, holding on to her hat, watching the ridgeline with the same anticipation that I had watching a breakaway in soccer.

The orange grew, and then the flames appeared, their brilliance reflecting off the white poles of the windmills along the ridge.

The fire had been moving around the American West for two years. For the first year and a half we’d counted its age in months like it was a toddler, but then it was too old for that. There were no resources or people to fight it, so it just burned and burned. Nobody knew how long it would last. It was a question of fuel. How many years would it take to burn every last tree in the American West? The answer turned out to be three years and one and a half months.

Aside from a near miss in month six, this was the first time it had ever come to us. Maybe, in a way, we’d felt left out.

It moved like some vicious, primitive predator, a swarm of ants, a herd of velociraptors leaping over the caldera rim and devouring the pine trees in bright bursts of sparks. The flames looked fluid, streaming down the hillside, and soon they were flooding the whole valley. When I saw it the next morning, all the green and yellow was gone, the land painted gray, the trees brittle black twigs, the river choked with ash.

All by our hand
, someone would say, or said, long ago.

As the fire stampeded by and brittle gray flakes snowed down on our hair and eyelashes, Mom rested her hand on my shoulder. “Isn’t it amazing?” she said. I knew she didn’t mean amazing like strictly good, but her voice was low with awe, if not excitement. Others around us seemed struck too, maybe because we had heard so much about this terrible thing, and now here it was, its marauding demon gaze finally falling on us.

I didn’t know if I thought it was amazing, or if I was terrified or what, but I looked up and saw Mom’s expression, and it was one I remembered many times after she left, not a year later: her eyes glassy and wide with wonder, her mouth slightly open, like seeing this, being this close to it, was spiritual for her. I don’t remember her ever looking at Dad or me that way.

The trees began to pop. Big, terrible cracks as trunks exploded, branches collapsing into the flames.

I started to cry.

Mom looked down at me, and I tried to hide it. I didn’t want to ruin her moment.

“Owen, it’s okay. You’re okay. . . .”

“Owen, you’re okay.”

I opened my eyes to find Lilly on her knees beside me. Her hand was on my shoulder. The heat of the Yellowstone fire was the SafeSun on my face. I looked around and saw that we were in the little clearing on Tiger Lilly Island.

It took me a second to understand where I was, or when I was. I’d really felt like I was back in Yellowstone, with Mom, six again. And I had a sinking feeling now. That night when the fires came had been terrifying, but it had been a relief to be back there, like none of what came next had ever happened, like it would never happen . . . except it all had. I was never going to be six again, and my life from then to now was never going to be undone, or redone. It just was.

My brain shuffled again, like it couldn’t quite find the present. I pictured the world inside the skull, Lük’s city under ash skies, that night at Yellowstone. That was what linked the two memories: that weird sense of being witness to the end, and the real acceptance that the world you knew wasn’t permanent, that it was fragile and temporary and could be destroyed at any moment. My genes had seen it before, and again.

“Try to breathe,” said Lilly.

I looked up at her, the recent past finally cementing itself. We’d run from the temple, swimming away, but then I’d stopped, things had stopped. I hadn’t been able to breathe.

I tried now. It worked, but it hurt. I tasted the metal lake flavor. Remembered it pouring into me. “Okay,” I croaked. “That’s the last time I’m doing that.”

I heard Lilly laugh quietly. Felt her fingers brush across my neck. “It’s your gills.”

“What?” I reached up and touched them, only to find that they were barely there. The slits, which had been deep, had connected my throat to the water, now felt like shallow indentations. “They’re gone,” I said vacantly.

“I had to drag you out of there,” said Lilly. “Pump your chest all over again. And you shivered like crazy all night, sweating, too, but I wrapped us both up in the blanket and held you, and by this morning you were warm again.”

I listened to this. Looked at Lilly sitting there in her baggy sweatshirt and shorts. I had spent the night wrapped in Lilly’s body . . . and I didn’t remember it. “Thanks,” I managed to say. “Again.”

Lilly shrugged. “You know me, professional Owen saver.” She smiled, but only for a second. “When I was pulling you, I saw that your gills were moving less. I think they gave you just enough oxygen to keep you alive until we got here, but . . . why are they gone?” She touched her own gills.

“Lük said they were a side effect of activation,” I thought out loud, “of everything reorganizing. . . .”

“I don’t think I understood any of that,” said Lilly.

“Oh, right.” I struggled to sit up, and then told her about the time inside the skull: Lük, the Atlanteans, the Qi-An, and the Terra.

“Well,” said Lilly, sounding a little shocked by it all, “I guess it wasn’t the bug juice. Marco will be disappointed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And so I think my gills disappearing is maybe just part of the changing.”

“Leech should have called you Frog-boy instead of Turtle,” said Lilly.

“What’s that mean?”

“Sorry”—Lilly pointed her thumbs at herself—“one of my CIT duties is leading nature walks. But so when frogs change from tadpoles to adults, they lose their gills and tails and grow giant mouths in, like, a single night. You’re not going to grow a giant mouth, are you?”

I smiled, but also felt around my face. “I don’t think so.”

“So, you’re one of three Atlanteans,” said Lilly. “The Aeronaut.”

“Yeah,” I said, “at least, I guess I will be.” I saw that she was frowning, looking away. “You’re one, too,” I said. “You’re either the Navigator or the Medium. We’ll know when we find your skull.”

Lilly’s lips were pursed. “Right,” she said.

“What,” I said, “you don’t believe me?”

“No, I do.” She turned and rummaged through her red bag. “Here.” She handed me half a chocolate bar.

“Thanks.” My throat hurt with each swallow, but the chocolate reminded my body about food.

“It’s just a lot,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean, I know I’m the one who was all, ‘We have to get out of here and figure out what’s going on,’ but,” Lilly said slowly, “I stabbed someone. I could have killed him. Taken a life.” She stared at the ground beside me. “I keep hearing the sound the knife made when it tore clothing and skin. I keep feeling how it caught on his ribs when I pulled it out. . . .”

I reached out and rubbed her knee. “You were brave,” I said. “You got us out of there.”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

I shook my head. “All of this is hard. I mean, these changes are happening to me, and I can’t control any of it. It’s like I’m just along for the ride.”

“Like puberty wasn’t hard enough,” said Lilly. She managed to smile. “But you did make a choice, Owen. When you ran, back in the Preserve. You made the choice to find that skull, to know why this is happening, to take control. All we can do now is try to find out what’s behind all this.”

“I guess.” That made it sound a little better. “So, now what?”

“We can’t go back,” said Lilly, gazing off in the direction of camp. “The boats were out searching for us all night. And I saw flashlights in the woods. But even if they weren’t looking for us, I mean, what we saw down there . . .”

Lilly gazed toward the dome roof. “This whole place is built on a lie—its history, its purpose, even its location.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Paul’s probably got the skull by now. That’s where Cartier said he was taking it.”

“But you’re the only one who can use it, right?”

“Right.”

“And so once Paul figures that out, finding you is going to be his number-one priority.”

“Project Elysium’s number-one priority,” I said. “I want to know what that is.”

“Yeah,” said Lilly. “And also, I swam back just before dawn to look for Marco or Aliah, or even Evan. I figured after we didn’t show up at the ledges, they might have been out at the raft, but they weren’t there. I need to make sure they’re okay. Paul will know they’re lying by now. And, I think anyone with these”—she pointed to her gills—“is in danger.”

“So what should we do?” I asked. I was trying to come up with something, but my brain still felt foggy, slow, like my body was still distracted. It had gotten rid of my gills. What was it busy with now?

“The ledges,” said Lilly. “Marco and Aliah might have left us some word up there, about what was going on in camp, or where to meet next.”

“If they ever got up there,” I said.

“Yeah, well”—Lilly was suddenly almost snapping at me—“we can’t just sit here until the security teams find us. Stand up.”

I did and she took the blanket I’d been lying on and stuffed it into her waterproof bag. She pulled off her sweatshirt and stuffed it in, too. Then, she zipped it closed and started rolling down the top to fasten the big metal buckles.

As she was doing that, I found myself staring at the long grass that was matted in a flat rectangle where the blanket and our bodies had been. I tried to picture us lying there together, curled tight, but my mind was more concerned with something else. Something else I could do . . .