The Lost Code (26 page)

THEY TOOK OUR BAGS, TOOK LILLY’S KNIFE, AND
marched us out across the fields to the swimming area. A long, sleek-looking motorboat was tied up at the dock, right where Lilly and I had first met. There were younger kids and CITs all around, stopping what they were doing to watch us go by.

“Owen!”

I glanced over to see Beaker on the far side of the dock, sitting in his bathing suit with his feet dangling over the side. The rest of my cabin was scattered in the water, their heads turned.

“I’m sorry!” Beaker shouted. “I did what you wanted!”

“It’s okay!” I called to him.

“Quiet,” said Cartier.

“Owen!”

I saw that now, of all people, it was Mina, looking over from a group of Arctic Foxes who had conquered the floating trampoline. “Are you okay?” She had this worried look on her face like she hadn’t recently hated me. For a second I considered that somehow, by blowing her off and then being missing, and now being captured, I seemed to have won back her interest. None of it made any sense to me, and none of it mattered now.

I wondered what they all must have been thinking, what they’d figured out. Did any of the others in my cabin, in the Foxes, have even a clue what was really going on here? Seeing them there, just doing their normal camp thing, I shouted, “It’s all a lie!”

“Quiet!” Cartier snapped again.

“They have Leech, too—” An officer’s gloved hand fell over my mouth. They shoved me into the boat. The motor revved to life, and we curved away from the dock, speeding out of the inlet.

Lilly and I were seated side by side, the wind slamming our faces. We crossed the wide body of the lake, between sailboats and yachts, even a water-skier, all of them oblivious. I wanted to shout at them, too.

I wondered what we were headed for, and if this was the beginning of a terrible end, if by this time tomorrow we would be on tented tables, Paul searching our guts for our big mysteries. I remembered what Aliah had said about test animals, and thought that the worst part would be not understanding why. Anna, Colleen, they probably never even knew why they were being subjected to such horrible things. And for as much as I knew, there was still so much more that I didn’t understand, and maybe never would.

Come on, think!
I told myself. The boat was nearing the Aquinara. We were headed back into the temple. There had to be something I could do to escape.

You should check out the new memories
, advised the technicians.
We think they’re fascinating!
They all turned back to a flickering screen.

Then show me!
I shouted at them. I closed my eyes and slipped back inside my head, looking for that memory that I’d been unlocking, of learning to pilot the craft with Lük. I gazed into the spotted darkness behind my eyes, and then light swept around me and I was back there, almost like restarting a video that had been on pause.

I was in the boat on the sunny afternoon, cold wind whipping. Lük was above, his craft rising. Others were already higher, lifting up into the clear sky.

Put up the thermal!
Lük shouted.

I looked down at the pile of fabric in my hand, but put that aside. I was looking for something else on the ship.
Where is that button?
I asked.

Button?
Lük asked.
There is no button. Just put up the thermal so you can fly!

I looked around some more. He was right. But there was a button on the ship in the temple. That little gold one.

And these things, they always start in water
, I asked,
right? Just with wind?

Lük looked confused.
You need wind to generate the initial momentum that activates the hydroelectric charge. That’s what ignites the heat cell. I’ve heard that some have been adapted to roll across desert plains and produce the same effect.

Okay
, I said.
Thanks.

But the thermal is only for achieving initial lift
, said Lük.
There’s a second system—

“Out.”

Back on the surface of my senses, I felt myself being grabbed.
Gotta go.
I could hear Lük protesting, but I pushed forward from the memory, back through darkness, and opened my eyes. We had arrived at a dock beside the Aquinara. Cartier led us inside, through wide glass doors, and across the plant’s main floor, where pipes and tubes of water twisted around in a huge space above us, the guts of Eden’s breathing system. Workers in white jumpsuits walked along catwalks, checking monitors and panels. I thought of how I imagined my insides. It was weird how similar this was, just on a bigger scale.

We entered a hallway, passed through keypad-locked doors, and took a staircase that dropped down five or six levels. A final door slid open into a large lab. The walls were covered with projections of maps, photos of ancient artifacts, and aerial shots of ruins. Pieces of rock were placed on tables, under giant microscopes. I saw holographic projections of rooms and mosaics, being rotated and studied by technicians.

At least there were no tented tables.

In the center of the room was the round hole in the floor that Lilly and I had seen from below, a ladder leading into it. The officers climbed down.

“After you,” said Cartier.

We descended into the cement-floored tunnel. We followed the same route, down passages lit with strings of bulbs on the ceiling, down more ladders, until finally we were back in the Atlantean map room. It looked like it had before, except for the other Nomad body being gone. The table of hand-drawn maps was still there, and Leech’s black cylinder case was now lying on top of it.

They marched us down the spiral staircase. As we crossed the catwalk at its base, I glanced down at the little Atlantean craft, lying on its dry stone floor. No water or wind for starting it. I glanced up at the black sphere and pedestal suspended above, that strange umbrella of copper beneath it, and then all the way up to the marble ball in the ceiling, trying to figure out what it all meant.

Hands pushed me in the back. “Keep moving.”

They’d strung lights around the dark walls, and through the narrow zigzagging passage. A thick tangle of power cords snaked along the floor. We squeezed through, back into the tiny skull chamber.

“Well, there he is.”

The light in the chamber was blinding, white coating the walls. There was a steady electric buzz, and snapping sounds of sparks. I couldn’t see the skull because it was on the other side of a silhouetted figure who eclipsed its light.

Paul stood to the right of the pedestal, wearing welding goggles to shield his eyes, gazing at the skull. The silhouetted figure was short, leaning forward, an officer on either side holding his arms.

“Okay, he’s done.” Paul motioned to the two officers. They started pulling on the figure’s arms, and it seemed to take a great effort, but then they had Leech free, and as they turned him to the side, we saw that they’d been holding his hands to the skull. “Nnnnaa!” he shouted. His face was wrenched in a knot, eyes closed, teeth bared. A shorter man in a white lab coat, also wearing goggles, appeared in front of Leech and held a square device up to his forehead like Dr. Maria had. The little glass ball glowed a greenish yellow, like a color in between how it had glowed for me, and for Colleen.

“Give him a breather,” said Paul, waving his hand toward a cot against the back wall.

Leech slumped weakly in the officers’ arms. There were electrodes stuck to his head in shaved spots, like there’d been for the CITs. Wires were attached to the crystal skull, too. Its hollow eyes gleamed at me, but I watched Leech as they laid him down on a cot behind the pedestal. Machines there were monitoring his vitals. His arms were twitching, his legs too, and for the first time, I felt something like bad for him. Leech, the camp favorite, the bully, who’d been controlling us all with nicknames and jokes, when all along he was being controlled.

“Well, Owen . . .” Paul turned around, lifting his goggles as he did.

For the first time I saw his eyes, finally saw what had been behind his tinted glasses, and regretted ever wanting to know.

They were seared, scalded, the whites a sickly blood crimson, threaded with black-burned veins. Except the irises were blue, an electric blazing blue, and I could see crisscrossing lines in them, geometric patterns, with little sparks of light flashing, and I realized his eyes were fake, circuitry, and his pupils were glass camera-lens holes. He must have seen my reaction, because he smiled. His pupils whirred open wider, the machines adjusting their focus. And while I’d found his smile strange with his glasses on, with them off, it was something soulless and cold that I felt sure would live on in my nightmares, if we ever made it out of this.

“Yes,” he said, waving a hand toward his face. “This is what happens when you stare into the face of the Gods. Or, in my case, a Sentinel created by the Atlanteans to alert their chosen children. Luckily there’s a doctor in EdenEast who makes excellent eyes. They even have direct holotech input, if I cared for such things. But I don’t. My eyes are for truth only. And you, Owen, you are truth.”

The eyes burned into me, sparks flickering. He motioned to the skull. “And this is yours, I take it?”

I didn’t answer him.

“That’s okay. I already know that it is. And knowing that, I feel an apology is in order. I should have come right out and told you what I suspected about you from the moment I saw your DNA sample, but . . . just like with the others”—he waved dismissively at Lilly—“I thought I’d let the truth reveal itself.”

“Why couldn’t you just tell us?” asked Lilly bitterly.

Paul sighed. “I
could
have, but think it through: You’re probably smart enough to have figured out at this point that we’re using Camp Eden to find the Atlanteans. But what would have happened if I’d sat everyone down at the start of the session and announced that we were looking for the genetic descendants of an ancient race, and that everyone had been selected based on their potential match, and that we expected those who were top candidates to exhibit odd symptoms? We would have had kids drowning themselves, making fake gills, and who knows what else. And for you, Owen, for the true Atlantean, it’s such an enormous concept, such a huge change, that I thought you had to discover it on your own, organically. But, either way, you know now, so we can move forward. And I feel like a proud parent, seeing you all come this far.”

Lilly made a hissing sound.

“Now, now,” said Paul. “Anyway, the timing is perfect. I was running into a wall with Carey.” He motioned toward Leech, who was lying still on the cot. “He was the very first one to have the symptomatic gills, all the way back when this place was still Camp Aasgard. It was his condition that brought my team here. And when I saw his drawings, that’s when I knew we were close. We Cryoed Carey while we established the dome here, and excavated the navigation room.” Paul motioned to the ceiling. “When we brought Carey down, that room really ignited his powers, and since then, he’s been making all these maps. I thought it was that obsidian star chart that was activating him, but all along it was this skull, hiding beneath my feet.
Your
skull. Which means there’s one out there for him somewhere, I gather.”

I didn’t respond.

Paul glanced at the skull again. “Just amazing. It makes sense, now. You know, my father was the one who found the first Atlantean city, up in Greenland. It had been covered in glacial ice since about ten thousand years ago, after a sudden and cataclysmic natural event that changed the entire earth. The crust of the earth moved; there were massive tsunamis, floods—I mean literally the ones that ancient myths speak of—and the world was plunged back into an ice age until, well, technically just a few hundred years ago.

“My father’s team of climatologists was drilling the Greenland ice sheet for ice cores, trying to understand past climate changes, trying to find a way to stop the Great Rise. I was thirteen at the time, traveling with them. The ice sheet had already receded farther than any modern human had ever seen, and then one day, there was a massive glacial calving in one of the fjords, and there it was, this ancient city. It was made from the same stone as the great Pyramids, and yet it was thousands of miles north. And as if that wasn’t amazing enough, there was all that we found inside once we’d tunneled through the ice, including a temple not unlike this one, only larger.

“There were three tombs inside,” Paul went on. “Three young bodies, well preserved in the ice, their throats slit. And there was a message inscribed in the rock that my father translated. It took him months, sitting in a tent up there, running the symbols through ancient Sumerian, cross-referencing them with the earliest Mesoamerican codices. It said:

“‘Before the beginning, there was an end.’”

I finished for him, “‘Three chosen to die, to live in the service of the Qi-An, the balance of all things.’”

Paul’s eyes clicked wider, the circuits flaring. “You know it.” His mouth fell open almost like he was hungry. He rubbed his palms and sighed. “And you know about the city?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen it.”

He sighed. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for you. To be connected, to be the conduit to the ancients. To know that
power.
I mean, for almost forty years I’ve been studying this temple and the others we’ve found, translating texts and unpuzzling megalithic structures. I probably know the Atlanteans better than anyone else, even better than my father did. But you . . .” Paul’s voice lowered almost to a growl. His mouth moved and I almost expected to see him lick his lips, a predator stalking its juiciest prey. “You
are
the one.
You’ve
been on the inside looking out, haven’t you? You’ve seen their world. And now, Owen, I need you to tell me everything. You’ll do that, won’t you?”