Glow

by Joss Stirling

  There was a break and a mark where she had rested the pen on the paper.

  I didn’t go on to say what I planned as I realized I could hear you laughing. ‘Time?’ I imagined you saying. ‘Sweetheart, the feud took eons to develop; you’re not going to resolve this in a week.’ In fact, I don’t think I’m going to resolve it by words—the people here just dismiss me as naive when I say something they don’t agree with. I think it will have to be by action, but what action I can take, I’m not sure. I wish you were here to advise me. You know the players on the other side far better than me. But I’m going to have to do something soon or I’ll never shift them from their old ways and I can’t live with that, at least not here.

  That was the hint he needed that she was thinking of leaving if it came to the crunch. He didn’t think the Teans would change but Meri had to have her chance to make the attempt. It was also the green light to stop hanging back. If he was going to help her escape, he had to locate her. But how? The best resourced people he knew were the Perilous and that would be like asking the fox to find the hen coop.

  You’re not to worry about me.

  Too late, darling.

  I have my friends around me.

  Yeah, Ben and Francis: some backup they had proved when they ejected him from the yacht.

  Concentrate on keeping yourself safe. I love you so much that it feels like part of me is missing when you’re not with me. It feels a little like grief. Neither of us are safe and the threat so unrelenting. Despite this, I keep expecting to see you, hoping to see you, on the streets. If I catch sight of a person with blond hair ahead of me, I run to catch up and then I’m disappointed.

  Here was the first clue she’d let slip. She was able to go places where she stood a chance of seeing a Perilous like him. That had to be outside of the control of the council, a town where ordinary people went. He deduced that meant that Atlantis wasn’t a Tean-only settlement. But where would the Teans allow her to go? He had got the impression onboard the yacht that they did not intend to let her out of their sight.

  But the worst thing would be to find you were actually here as that would be a death sentence for us both as things stand. It’s what I wish for but know I mustn’t want. So be safe, Kel. Keep your distance. Don’t take unnecessary risks. I’ll find you when I can.

  Love and kisses

  Meri

  ‘Well.’ He slipped the phone back in his pocket.

  ‘Yeah, from the little I read she sounded lonely. Why did you abandon her?’ asked Sadie.

  ‘Not through choice.’

  ‘Thought as much. Is she surrounded by bad people?’

  Kel pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to marshal his thoughts. ‘Yes and no. They don't mean to harm her but they might anyway. What’s that phrase? She might end up collateral damage?’

  ‘Then how are you going to rescue her?’

  ‘Good question. Can you contact her for me?’

  ‘The only route I have at the moment is to send a letter via Theo. I’ve searched online like I did for you but she’s not surfaced.’

  ‘I think she’s spending part of her time in a town or city. Would you be able to run facial recognition software and see if any of the security feeds can pick her out?’

  Sadie swirled the melting ice in the bottom of her glass. ‘That’s like finding a needle in a haystack—no, a field of haystacks when you know it could’ve been dropped anywhere.’

  ‘But if you started with southern Europe? Portugal and Spain, near the coast?’

  ‘Better, but it will take a lot of computing time.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll get some friends back in the UK to start the run. I haven’t got powerful enough kit to do it from my hotel room. I can’t promise much though. Not all camera feeds are online. Most really top security places—airports, stations and so on—keep that stuff ring-fenced and that takes time to hack.’

  Nixie came back smelling of the bathroom’s soap. From the condition of her hair, she’d taken the chance to have a thorough wash.

  ‘It’s not too bad back there,’ she said coolly, taking her seat again. ‘I’d use it while you can, Kel.’

  This clued Sadie into something she obviously hadn’t considered before. ‘Where are you two planning on staying tonight?’

  Nixie gave her a cynical smile. ‘Where do you think No-Homers sleep, Sadie?’

  ‘A hostel?’

  She laughed, the sound hollow. ‘Oh yeah, and there are so many of them these days.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The French government closed most of the hostels to No-Homers as it was claimed they were attracting migrants into the cities. They prefer us out in the countryside where our numbers aren’t so disturbing. Lots of other European governments have done the same.’

  ‘Oh God, I should’ve realized. I heard about that policy but didn’t realize what it meant.’

  ‘People don’t until it becomes their problem. Don’t worry: we’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘Uh-huh, no you won’t. You’ll come with me. I have a room with a nice safe floor for Kel. You can share the bed with me.’

  ‘You have to register in hotels,’ said Nixie patiently, as if explaining matters to a child.

  ‘And I have. You think the concierge is going to worry when a couple of members of the school tour party come back to my room? I bet you they won’t even look twice.’

  ‘They will if it is a hospitality robot on duty and they are usually given the evening shift.’

  ‘Nixie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Comp-punk.’ Sadie pointed at herself.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Trust me, that sucker won’t see you or I’ll fry his circuits.’

  15

  Basic scuba course completed, Meri was eager to move on to the next phase and join a diving team. She checked the noticeboard outside the archeology department daily. Unlike her colleagues on the training scheme, all her requests to join one so far had been turned down. She’d made it plain to the leaders that she didn’t expect to be allowed in the water yet, that she was happy to make the tea and coffee in the galley while the more experienced people did the work, but that didn’t stop the rejections coming back. At first she thought it might be her age, then her nationality, but now she suspected that Rio was behind it. He hadn’t taken her rejection of his proposal well—not that she had expected anything different—but this payback seemed spiteful.

  Lula caught her staring glumly at the latest list of expeditions. ‘Hey, Meri, not seen you out on the shore.’

  ‘That’s because I haven’t been.’

  ‘You must put yourself down for a trip. It’s amazing. I swam into a wreck last weekend—a cruise ship that went down in a storm in the twenties. It’s mostly been stripped bare but you can still see the structure and why it sank. Don’t be afraid to have a go. You’ve got to go on at least four dives to get credit for the course.’

  ‘I have put myself forward, Lula. Every week. I think I’m being excluded.’

  ‘But you were the best in our class! Even Raymond said so, despite you being the youngest. Maybe the team leaders just look at your age and don’t know how good you are?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Or maybe they’d been instructed to leave her off by a certain person.

  ‘I’ll put in a good word for you with my team leader, George. He’s fair: he’ll give you a chance.’

  ‘Thanks.’ But she wouldn’t hold her breath.

  ‘So, er, how are you?’

  Desperately lonely. Evenings and weekends at the palace were empty, the days at the university no better as it felt like she moved in a bubble of isolation. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Do you want to join some of us tomorrow night—if you’re free that is? Rio said you were very busy with remedial classes.’

  ‘What remedial classes?’

  Lula blushed. ‘He said you had a lot to catch up on as you’d missed years of school due to your il
lness.’

  ‘He said that?’

  She glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, I wasn’t supposed to mention it. I know it’s a sore subject for you—the breakdown and everything after losing your parents.’

  She was going to strangle Rio. ‘He’s mistaken. I’m not ill and haven’t been.’

  ‘He said you’d say that.’ Lula pressed her forearm in a ‘I get you’ gesture. ‘Still you seem recovered now to me, and he seems a little over-protective for a distant cousin, so how about it?’

  ‘How about what?’

  ‘Coming out with my friends and me?’

  Meri forced her brain away from creative ways in which Rio could meet with an accident. ‘I’d love to.’

  Lula laughed and flicked her long black hair over her shoulder. ‘I haven’t told you what we are doing yet.’

  ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘We’re going to the festival in the city square. There’ll be dancing, food, music.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful.’

  ‘OK, we meet at the gates at six.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’ Rio was going to pay for his lies. So it hadn’t been anything she had done that had left her friendless but deliberate misinformation spread by her rival. He’d just moved into the ‘enemy’ category because there was no possible excuse to leave her friendless other than he wanted to weaken her for his own advantage. No wonder he’d played his kind and understanding card just before his proposal: he’d imagined she’d be so desperate, she’d welcome even his overtures of friendship.

  Taking encouragement from Lula’s invitation, Meri went on to the library with a lighter heart. Now she knew what was going on, she could counter. Like her decision to come here in her free time: it had taken a while to get over her dislike of Dr Severn since the incident with Daro but he had information she needed and so she had swallowed her misgivings and began going to him for briefings on Tean history. Regarding her as the heir to the throne awaiting her coronation, he had made it a priority to fulfil her requests for teaching. So far he hadn’t mentioned anything about Teans taking on Perilous patterns when touching them or glowing eyes and Meri hadn’t worked out how to drop such a specific query into conversation.

  ‘Ah, Miss Marlowe!’ he exclaimed. There were others in the library so he couldn’t address her by her title here, much to Meri’s relief. ‘Come to hear more about the flight from Atlantis?’ They’d left off their last lesson with the tale of the tidal surge that took their homeland below the waves. ‘We think that happened three thousand years ago, give or take a century.’

  ‘Yes, Dr Severn. It was quite a cliffhanger.’

  He waved her to a chair where he had a pot of tea waiting for her. He made his awareness of her status plain through little touches like that, not offered to other students. ‘We don’t get everything we know about Atlantis only from the Greeks these days. Now we’re able to excavate Atlantis, we get some of the information from the primary source.’

  ‘Like the crown and my ring.’ She pulled the peril ring around to show the stone. She still hadn’t had it resized. It kept slipping her mind.

  ‘Yes, but even better than that: Atlantis had its own writing and we’ve cracked the code. I’ve just finished a new set of translations I thought you might enjoy.’ He put a file of photographs in front of her. ‘These are mosaics salvaged by our team, painstakingly reassembled and cleaned in the laboratories down the corridor from where we are sitting. For years the inscriptions defeated all of our translation software until we discovered this fragment of pottery in the hold of a trading vessel—a wreck caught in port during the tidal wave.’ He put another picture on the desk, this one showed a shard that looked nothing special, patterned with a series of scratches and indentations. ‘This is the equivalent of the Rosetta stone for the Atlantean language.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Nothing very exciting because it is merely a record of a cargo in duplicate. But from such uninspiring soil, marvellous things will grow! The Atlanteans were trading with the ancestors of the Phoenicians. They were a sea-going people whose language is the origin of our own alphabet. If you look here you can recognize some familiar letters even if you don’t understand what they say.’

  ‘So what was the cargo?’

  ‘See these marks here? That means slaves—and cedar wood.’

  ‘Who was selling and who was buying?’

  ‘Scholars are still arguing but my belief is this records a trade—wood for slaves. Atlantis did not have much room for forests and outgrew her natural resources as she developed faster than other societies at the time.’

  ‘So her resources were slaves, and that means the Perilous?’

  ‘Indeed. There was always the problem that, due to marriage laws restricting Tean alliances, the slaves bred much more quickly than the Tean overlords so in this way they could control the numbers.’

  Meri could feel a headache brewing as it did when thinking about the unequal relations between the two. This ancient injustice had carried with it the seeds of her people’s destruction. They thought they were saving their race but instead they were creating the scourge that would kill them. So stupid, so cruel!

  Enough, Meri. She had to concentrate on what Dr Severn was telling her, not dwell on matters that upset her. ‘And the translation cracked the code of the Atlantean language?’

  ‘Oh yes. I was the one who found it in a forgotten box of fragments actually.’ He tweaked his bowtie, brimming with pride. ‘It’s easy to overlook when it doesn’t glitter and shine like the artefacts we recover. We are now fairly confident that we understand its grammar and lettering system. We were surprised to learn that it isn’t an alphabet but a pictographic language.’

  ‘Like Chinese?’

  ‘More like the Central American languages, Mayan and so on. The pictures represent sounds, not the thing they show. The sounds build up to the word. Let me explain by an English example. If I drew this, what word am I spelling?’ He sketched a tree and then a shining sun.

  ‘Tree…sun. Treason?’

  ‘Yes. Neither sign has anything to do with the meaning of the word they spell.’

  ‘So they have pictures for each phonetic sound in the language?’

  ‘That’s it.’ He beamed at her.

  ‘So do we know what Atlantean sounded like?’

  ‘Sadly not. I’ve tried using the oldest languages from the region that we do know, looking for common words such as “star” or “sea”, but plugging them in to the programme only produces a best guess and nothing that yet sounds right to me.’

  Meri leafed through the photos. She stopped at one in which the mosaic was barely visible, still half-covered by sand and seaweed. It showed part of the profile of a female, hair curling around her head like octopus arms, the single eye radiating like a sun. A tingle of excitement ran through her.

  ‘Ah, we call that the Gorgon Mosaic.’ He picked it out of the pile. ‘I shouldn’t have left that in there because it isn’t yet in our collection on dry land. Extracting it is proving very difficult as it lies under a fallen staircase in an out-of-the-way temple. The building it is in collapsed. We thought it was due to volcanic activity or maybe the tidal wave, but now we think it was deliberately destroyed before either event. Whatever the case, I believe Rio Cruz’s team is working on it this spring, hoping to bring up the mosaic and solve the mystery of what happened to the temple. We want the work complete before the storm season stops the dives.’

  ‘Those aren’t snakes.’ Meri pointed to the waving locks.

  ‘Aren’t they? That’s what they look like to me. And that eye looks like it would turn you to stone, doesn’t it? We speculate that the Atlanteans might have had an early version of the Medusa story. Maybe they originated it?’

  Meri didn’t think so. She’d seen something uncannily similar, in the mirror after her last kiss with Kel. ‘What about the translation?’

  ‘We’ve got a few words from the edge. The
y don’t make much sense.’

  ‘Can you translate them for me anyway?’

  ‘Why not? Don’t forget your tea.’ He nudged the cup towards her.

  To encourage him, she sipped at the tepid brew. He fumbled with his notes.

  ‘Ah yes, here it is. This is what I’ve got so far. I’m afraid it is all very gloomy stuff, predicting the end of the world: “Dark skies. Days’ end. Together we glow.” I think that last part might be a mistake, or used for poetic effect. Maybe it rhymed with another word on the inscription? If you go by the mosaic itself, it makes more sense to translate it as “burn”.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, just look at the drama of the figure! All that scary hair and suns for eyes!’ He expected her to return his smile so she did—a feeble attempt but it must’ve passed because he carried on. ‘But the word can definitely be translated as “glow” in most circumstances. I’ve identified it used elsewhere in Atlantean writings to signify something equivalent to the welcome warmth of a fire on a cold day, or the heat of a bread oven. There’s another word for burn or scorch.’ He put the picture back in the file. ‘But that’s the excitement of research: you never know what might turn up next. When the rest of the mosaic is uncovered, I’m sure we’ll have more clues to go on and can refine our translation.’

  But Meri was sure it was correct as it stood. ‘You think the mosaic predicts the end of the world?’

  ‘Obviously. Don’t you?’

  ‘No, I think it is a love poem.’

  He laughed, assuming she was joking. ‘Goodness. If that’s the Tean idea of beauty back three millennia ago, then their women must’ve been formidable!’

  ‘Meri, that tickles.’

  She smiled and kissed Kel’s smooth skin stretched out beneath her. He smelt of shower gel and something that was pure Kel. Spirals twisted their way up and over his collarbone, meeting in the middle their mirrored counterparts over his sternum. ‘I think I need to trace each one.’

  He groaned. ‘I’m not sure I can stand it.’