by Liz Kessler
On the other side of me, a bridge emerged from the wildflowers to cross a river that danced and sparkled like the finest jewels.
Behind me, what had been a wall was now a line of trees, the sun glinting between their branches as though they were full of dancing fairies.
Ahead, the river opened up into a pool. Above it, the highest waterfall I’d ever seen snaked through rocks and trees, to fall into the water below in a shimmering curtain. Next to the pool, someone was lying on a rock in the sunshine.
Lowenna.
I approached the pool, stepping carefully across the rocks till I reached the one she was lying on.
“Lowenna?” I whispered, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
She stirred at my touch. “What? What’s wrong?” She sat up, squinting into the sunlight. Then her eyes focused on me. “Who are you?”
“I . . . I’m Emily,” I said simply.
“Wait.” She reached out toward me, traced my face with her hand. “I know you,” she whispered. “Don’t I?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. Our previous meeting — touching palms across a porthole window — hadn’t exactly been your average way of getting to know someone.
I got as far as “I . . . um . . .” when she sat up and stared at me, squinting. “You’re familiar, but I can’t think where from. You’re not from Atlantis, are you?”
I realized how to answer her questions. I didn’t need words. I had something that would do a better job than any explanation I could give her.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the snow globe from Lyle. As I held it out toward her, Lowenna gasped and covered her mouth with her hands.
Then she gently took the globe from me. “No! I don’t believe it. Surely it can’t be. . . .”
She lowered her head, gripping the snow globe tightly, as if it were a long-lost family heirloom. As I watched her, I saw a tear drip onto it from her face.
I awkwardly reached out to her. “Are you OK?” I asked, touching her arm.
Lowenna nodded and looked up at me. She wiped her wet cheek with the back of a hand. “It’s just a shock to realize that it happened to me,” she said. “We always thought we were immune.”
“From Atlantis?”
Lowenna nodded. “How long has it been?” she asked urgently. “In your world — how long?”
“Um. The day you disappeared was last Friday.”
“So last Friday was day one?”
I nodded. “This is day six.”
Lowenna turned as white as the froth from the waterfall behind her. “Day six?”
I nodded. “Lyle said after today . . .”
“I know!” Lowenna held a hand up to stop me. Her face had softened with emotion. “My Lyle,” she said huskily. “How is he?”
I thought about the state he’d been in all week. The sunken eyes, unwashed clothes, pale skin. But then I thought about the glimmer of hope he’d had this morning when he came to see me off. Was it really only this morning? It felt like days ago. “He’s fine,” I said. “He wants you home.”
“I tried so hard,” she said. “The ship was in bad shape when we arrived. To be honest, it took me at least the first day to recover from the shock that I had come through with it.”
“Do you know why you did?” I asked.
Lowenna took a breath and closed her eyes. “I just know I got caught up in the earthquake. I was too close to the ship when it hit. I didn’t stand a chance. None of us did.” Her voice cracked as she spoke.
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.
“No. It’s good to talk about it. I need to remember.” She put her hand on my arm. “Have we got much time?”
I checked the countdown: 06:23. We had nearly six and a half hours. “A little.”
Lowenna motioned to a set of stepping-stones that led across the river to the other side. “Come on. Let’s talk as we walk. We need to go this way.”
“What about Miriam?” I asked. “The captain said she’d be with you.”
“That’s where we’re going now,” Lowenna replied as she reached out to help me across the rocks. “We’ll pick her up on the way.” Then she pointed at my wrist — at my chain from Aaron.
“Is that your snow globe?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. It’s important.”
“I know. So go on,” I said as I hopped from the rocks to the other side of the river. “What happened next? After you got here?”
“The ship was badly broken,” she went on as we walked. “Because of my work, I knew that we had a matter of days to fix things before we would stop wanting to . . . before Atlantis drew us in. Most of the others left even before that — completely bewitched by the magic of Atlantis. Some stayed behind with me, but then they gradually drifted away.”
“So you tried to fix the ship?”
“Tried is the word, yes. The engines were damaged, but I managed to get a few volunteers to help mend the sails. Once we’d done that, we made our first attempt to get back — but we failed.”
Their first attempt. That would have been one of the times we’d seen them from Fivebays Island.
“My companions weren’t strong enough to keep trying, though,” Lowenna went on. “Certainly not strong enough to counter the magic that Atlantis was weaving around us. I was soon fighting a losing battle — except with the captain.”
“Phil? Why was he different?”
“That’s what I kept asking myself. My best guess was that he was a seagoing man who’d worked on ships all his life. Perhaps he’d built up some kind of immunity. I don’t know. I just know that he held out longer against Atlantis.”
“But not long enough?”
“No. We worked together for . . . I don’t know how long. We made a couple more attempts to escape. The sails were too weak to get us far, but we’d started to fix the engines. They were working intermittently. Meanwhile, I spent every waking hour working on my calculations for our course home. We were so close.”
“So what happened?”
“Phil succumbed like the others. He fought it — told me to remind him of his wife and kids, which I did regularly. But in the end, my words weren’t enough.”
“No. You need something you can see or touch, like a photo.” I held up my wrist. “Or like this.”
Lowenna studied me. “You’ve done a lot of homework, haven’t you?”
I shrugged. “Lyle did most of it.”
She nodded. “Anyway, that’s about it. Once the captain was gone and I was the only one left to try to get us home, the job was almost impossible. Soon after that, I lost my way. I was the only one still on the ship. I grew desperate. Scared.”
“That’s probably when I saw you,” I said.
Lowenna stopped. “Yes,” she whispered. “I remember everything now. You were at the window! You were outside the porthole.”
I nodded. “That was how I knew you hadn’t gone for good.”
“I wasn’t far off. It wasn’t much later that I succumbed to Atlantis, too.” She held her arms out wide. “You’ve got to admit — it’s hard to resist.” Lowenna reached out and squeezed my hand. Then, almost echoing Lyle’s words, she said, “You know I will never be able to thank you enough for this, don’t you?”
“I haven’t done anything yet,” I said. “The hardest part is still ahead of us.”
“You’re right. We need to get going. We haven’t got long.”
I checked the timer: 05:52. Less than six hours left! Time was running out so fast. “No. We haven’t got long at all!”
Lowenna quickened her pace. “Have you got all of the others?”
I nodded. “The others should all be there by the time we get back to the ship.”
“Just us and Miriam to go, then,” Lowenna replied as she led the way into a copse of trees. “Come on, she’ll be around here.”
I followed Lowenna into the trees. Leaves crinkled beneath us as we walked. The birdsong under the
trees was like an orchestra of pipe music. It was heavenly.
Ahead of us, a woman was pacing back and forth. She had something held against her shoulder.
“Miriam!” Lowenna called out. The woman turned. As she did, I could see what she was holding. A baby!
“Miriam has a baby?” I asked.
Lowenna laughed, her eyes lighting up and dancing in a way I hadn’t seen until now. “The baby isn’t Miriam’s,” she said as she reached out her arms and Miriam passed the bundle to her. “Miriam was helping out so I could have a nap. The baby is mine.”
I stared at the tiny little face with eyes that were shut tight, a scrunchy little nose, and a frowning, twitching mouth.
“Mine and Lyle’s,” Lowenna added. “This is our baby girl.”
“I — I didn’t know you had a baby,” I said, staring into its little face. “Lyle didn’t tell me.”
Lowenna paused. “Lyle didn’t know,” she said quietly.
“But how . . . ?”
“I was going to tell him that night. I had a whole celebration planned,” Lowenna said dreamily.
“That night? Last week?”
“Last week for you, yes. For me it was nearly seven months ago. She’s ten days old.”
I let out a breath. It was one thing being told that time worked differently in Atlantis. But to see proof like this — well, that just blew me away.
It did another thing, too: it made me even more determined to make this work. Lyle had a daughter and he didn’t even know it! We had to get Lowenna and her baby back home where they belonged. We had to.
I leaned over to take a closer look at the baby. As I did, she opened her eyes and gurgled at me. “What’s her name?”
Lowenna grimaced. “She doesn’t have a name yet. I know, I know. It’s terrible. I just — even though I was losing sight of my real life, I think a part of me was holding on to it strongly enough to believe that I would get back there one day — and I didn’t want to name her until she’d met her daddy. It felt wrong, somehow. I call her ‘my treasure.’”
I reached out a finger to stroke the baby’s face. “I understand,” I said. “And she’s going to meet her daddy. I’ll make sure of it.”
Lowenna smiled at me. “Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s go join the others. We can explain everything to Miriam on the way back to the ship.”
As the three of us walked, as I passed Miriam a sheet of paper with a picture of her own sons on it, and as Lowenna and I explained our plans, my determination grew stronger and stronger.
We had just over five hours to do it, but nothing would stop us now. We were getting away from Atlantis — tonight.
It wasn’t working.
Lowenna, Miriam, the baby, and I had gotten back to the ship as fast as we could and met up with the others on the top deck. After a final roll call to check that everyone was on board, we’d gotten down to work.
The captain had a few more nuts and bolts to adjust — things he hadn’t fixed before he’d lost himself to Atlantis. He spent about an hour down on the lower deck with a couple of the other men, and between them, they got the engines going again.
Meanwhile, Lowenna put all her navigational charts in order and plotted the complicated route home.
The passengers had pulled up all the ropes, closed all the doors, fastened down everything loose, tidied up the spillages and mayhem all around the ship. The engines were in working order. This was it. We were ready to leave.
But we weren’t going anywhere. The ship wouldn’t budge.
We even tried hoisting the sails. Nothing.
We all gathered on the top deck. All except the captain. He was still inside, trying to get us going.
“What’s the matter? Why aren’t we moving?” one of the women asked. She was an older lady with white hair, on the ship with her husband, who was sitting next to her. “Have we checked the anchor?” she asked. “It’s not stuck, is it?”
“We’ve checked the anchor, Ruth,” Lowenna replied. “It’s not that, and it’s not the sails or the engine, either. I’ve charted our route. We all know it’s going to be a complicated journey — and not one that many would manage to follow — but we’ve put all the coordinates into the computers, and our captain is one of the best there is. We should be on our way. I don’t know what’s stopping us.”
I checked my countdown watch: 03:37. Less than a third of the time I’d started with. How had that happened so quickly? I could feel a flickering in my body, as though a panicked fish were flapping around inside my stomach.
“Are you all absolutely positive you haven’t brought anything back to the ship from Atlantis?” I asked. “Gifts for your family? Little trinkets? Chocolates? Anything?”
“We’ve checked all the cabins and all the communal spaces and there’s nothing anywhere,” one of the men, Charlie, said. “Anything we found was either left behind on the island or has been thrown from the ship.”
“We’ve even frisked one another to make sure there’s nothing in our clothes!” added Tony.
“It doesn’t make sense. We should be moving,” Lowenna mused. She jiggled the baby as she talked, staring out to sea and murmuring as she thought aloud. “The ship’s fixed, the route is mapped, we have nothing here from Atlantis . . .”
And then, as I watched her bounce her beautiful baby on her hip, it hit me. The moment it did, I wished with all my might that I was wrong — but I knew I wasn’t.
“You have.” My voice came out as a croak.
“Huh?” Lowenna turned to me. The baby gurgled as she moved.
I cleared my throat. “You have something from Atlantis,” I said, forcing unwelcome words out through an unwilling throat.
I kept my eyes focused on Lowenna. As she gazed back at me, I saw the truth dawn in her eyes.
Lowenna’s face drained of color. “No,” she whispered. “No!” Wrapping both arms so tightly around her baby, I was almost afraid she’d squash her, she stood there, shaking her head, and repeating the word, over and over again. “No. No. No. No.”
Miriam came over to Lowenna and put a hand on her arm. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
Lowenna continued shaking her head. Tears fell from her face onto the bundle in her arms.
“It’s the baby,” I said hoarsely.
“I don’t understand,” Miriam insisted. “What about the baby?”
“She was born here!” Lowenna cried. Her voice was like the howl of an injured animal. “She’s from Atlantis. As long as she is on the ship, we can never escape!”
I wasn’t sure how long we stood in silence after that. Actually, I had a fairly reasonable guess. My countdown watch was saying 03:16. Just over three hours to go, and we had discovered a problem I had no idea how to solve. I wasn’t sure that there could be a solution.
“I’m not leaving her behind,” Lowenna said, clutching her baby tightly to her chest. “I’m not leaving her.”
One of the other younger women came forward and put an arm around Lowenna’s shoulders. “No one is suggesting you leave her behind,” she reassured her. “No one would even think it.”
“Sally, I know. But then we can never get away,” Lowenna said. “Unless . . .” She paused. “Unless you go without me. We’ll stay here. I’ve given the captain everything he needs to get back. You can do it.”
“You’re not staying behind,” I said. “You know that after today, there will never be a way back.” I thought of Lyle’s pale, gray face, his dark eyes, the hope I’d seen in them when he waved me off. “You’re not staying behind,” I repeated more firmly.
“But there’s no other way,” Lowenna insisted. “Better for you to leave us behind than for everyone to be stuck here forever.”
“There must be another way,” I insisted. “There has to be.” My brain was working double time. There was something here. A solution. I could sense it, almost feel it, itching the corners of my mind. Numbers, hours, baby, portal . . .
I could f
eel Lowenna beside me as I thought, her baby in her arms, rocking her, soothing her, whispering comforting thoughts, when really she was the one who needed comforting.
“You know, it’s strange,” she said as she looked at her baby. “She’s always had this little worried look on her face. Always a little frown. I thought it was just the shape of her face — but maybe it was this. Maybe, somehow, she knew. My baby knew all along. Knew we were doomed.” Lowenna’s voice broke, and a tear slipped down her cheek and onto the baby’s head.
“Hey, shush, now. Don’t say things like that,” Miriam murmured. “No one’s doomed. We’ll sort this out. We’ll think of a solution.”
Lowenna shook her head. “There is no solution,” she cried. “I can’t bear it. My love for my husband and my love for my baby, pulling me in opposite directions — and me torn into two pieces between them.
Wait! That was it!
“No one needs to stay behind!” I said. “We can all get back home. I’ve got an idea.”
Everyone hushed and came closer as I explained my plan. “There’s a portal. That’s how I got here. It will open again in”— I checked my watch: 02:51 —“less than three hours. It will stay open for as long as the slack tide and the dusk are in tune.”
“How long is that?” a man asked.
“I don’t know. A matter of minutes. You lose track of time when you’re going through the portal.”
“Makes about as much sense as everything else around here,” one of the men mumbled.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “All I know is that I was thrown around in a swirling tunnel of lights and electricity and . . .” I glanced at Lowenna. She was holding the baby even closer. I decided she didn’t need too much description of the journey. “Anyway, there isn’t long — but there’s long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” Ruth asked.
“To get back,” I said.
“You mean you’re not going to come with us on the ship?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It’s not for me. Or at least, it was.” I looked at Lowenna again. I could see she knew where I was going.
“You’d let us use the portal?” she breathed.
“It’s a loophole. A glitch in Atlantis’s armor. A back door to sneak through without anyone knowing. It’s all about ‘between’ states. The dusk and the slack tide are two. You have to have two more between states for it to work.” I turned to Lowenna. “You’re a semi-mer, like me.”
