The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) Read Online Free

the dark green water with its ghostly blue siren, and finally into black sleep.
    For a while.
    Owen .
    I swam up from dark depths, the siren’s call beckoning. I was back in the lake and I had gills again, fluttering magically. The shimmering blue form floated before me.
    Who are you? I asked her, like I had the last time I’d seen her, in the skull chamber beneath Eden.
    And just like last time, the siren didn’t answer, only turned and wriggled off into the murk.
    I tried to swim after her, but my surroundings began to change. Water was replaced by walls: the dingy metal panels of our apartment back at Hub. I was suddenly much younger, in my bed wrapped in blankets and cowering against the wall.
    “Owen, they’re here. Want to go see?” Mom stood over me, her cowboy hat on. It was the night that the Three-Year Fire reached Yellowstone. She held out her hand, but I didn’t want to go because I felt certain about something: going out to see the fires makes her leave . Yet I was getting up anyway, just like I had in real life.
    Why was I back here? The second time I’d closed my eyes in two days, and both times I found myself reliving this same night. Once again we headed up and outside to the ledge on the caldera wall, to watch the pyrocumulus clouds sail overhead like the warships of a conquering army, to watch the herd of flames plunge over the rim, with me trying to be brave because my mom was enjoying the show, and yet inside feeling so scared, so vulnerable, certain that if my mother knew what I was feeling, it would make her leave us.
    But then, unlike that actual night, light began to bloom around me. Suddenly, it was the next morning, the sky gray, the world a dead wash of ash around the black skeletons of trees. The ash was smooth, erasing the lines and contours of the world. A canvas to start again. Gray flakes of it still fell from the sky, just like over the Atlantean city where Lük and I first met.
    The world smelled sour like burned wood and electricity. Everything swam in heat and there were spots of glowing red cinder here and there. And . . .
    Someone was screaming. A girl. I couldn’t tell if this was a memory, too, or a new dream reality. All I knew was that I had to reach her, had to hurry, so I turned and jumped off the ledge. I floated down over the burnscape, arms out, soaring.
    I landed on my knees in the ash, a fine powder, still warm. It clung to my arms, chalked my hands, smudged my jeans.
    Nearby, a tree carcass popped and hissed, its cinder jaws gleaming red.
    Owen .
    I looked up and there she was.
    Not the siren.
    A girl. She was young, with deep red hair that fell to her shoulders and quartz white skin, translucent like
    — like the skull —
    and reflecting the color of the ash. The ash and the skin nearly the same. Something was wrong with her. Maybe an illness.
    If it gets worse, she will leave .
    The girl gazed at me with enormous brown eyes and a kind of brokenhearted expression, her eyes so serious, her mouth so small. She wore LoRad pajamas decorated with smiling green frogs. . . . How old? Three? And what was her name? I felt like I knew it. Had known it at some point. It was something I was supposed to know. I could almost envision the blank spot where that information should have been, but it was lost to me. She held a toy crocodile, its velvety tail hanging down and making little swipes in the gray . . .
    And she was starting to sink into the ash. Inch by inch, up her pajamas as if she were being erased.
    I have to save her . That I knew for sure. I was worried about her, terrified , only the ash felt like mud, resisting me . . . and my legs were suddenly weak and useless, like my dream was at the mercy of technicians, laughing mischievously as they changed the rules.
    Wait! I kept trying to run, but my legs churned, and I sank, too, down into the ash which was now also the sky and water, and I was drowning, like in the lake all over again. The black trees floated