The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) by Kevin Emerson

surprise,” I said, “Eden choosing who gets to survive and who gets to die.”
    I thought of the kids at camp, like Beaker and Bunsen, Xane, Mina. “We should have warned them,” I said. “Nobody at camp knows what’s coming. And I doubt they’re selectees.”
    “We didn’t exactly have time,” said Lilly.
    “I wonder who Test Subject Five is?” said Leech.
    “Paul said there were eleven total,” said Lilly. “Could be any of those bodies we saw in the lab. Anna . . . Could be me or Evan, Marco, Aliah . . .” She blinked at tears.
    “Paul might have been lying,” I said, “about Evan. They might have escaped. He’s lied about so many other things.”
    “Maybe,” said Lilly.
    A silence passed over us. The winds had calmed and the moon had risen, a swollen yellow disk. We flew for a while. Lilly fiddled with things. Leech drew.
    Something cold touched my lips. I flinched, then saw it was the stew can, its top gouged open. “Have some,” said Lilly. She pressed it against my mouth and tilted it up. Cool, congealed chunks slid onto my tongue: mushy meat, slick potatoes, gelatinous broth, decades old, but it was so salty and so much better than nothing. As I gulped down a few bites, I felt my mouth exploding with saliva, and I craved water, but we’d agreed to try to make it through the night without using any more of our last bottle.
    I pushed the can away before it was gone. “You have the rest,” I said.
    Lilly shook her head, and her hand returned to her gills. “I tried a few bites, but my throat is too sore to eat.” She held it out toward Leech. “You?”
    “No thanks,” said Leech, crunching another dry noodle.
    Lilly held the can back to my mouth and I sucked down what was left. When I was done, she held it in front of her and looked it over. She made a little laughing sound. “You guys remember recycling?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” said Leech with a chuckle. “That was hilarious.”
    “We still do that out at Hub,” I said.
    Leech sighed at this, shaking his head. I was going to ask why, but Lilly was going on.
    “Do your part to save the planet,” she said in a mocking official voice, “that was the whole thing with recycling, right? And, like, back in Vegas in the fifties, we had to compost our food scraps and only flush the toilet when it was absolutely nasty. . . .”
    “We had urine recycling,” said Leech. “So gross.”
    I realized that Leech had never talked about where he was from.
    “Yeah, us, too,” said Lilly. “They said you couldn’t taste it, but I swear sometimes it was kind of sour and chalky.”
    “Yuck,” said Leech.
    “And it’s just like, you look back on it,” said Lilly, “and . . . what was the point? We did all that stuff, trying to be environmentally conscious, and in the end it didn’t do a damn thing to save the earth. My family were big believers, recycling all our cans, reusing everything, even taking the UV light baths, and then some power plant would run for ten minutes and pump out more carbon dioxide than we could ever save, and everything would be screwed anyway. It was such a waste.”
    I was surprised to hear something so cynical from Lilly. This was not like the girl from the raft. It seemed like everything since then had worn away at her sense of hope. “You had to do something, though, right?” I said.
    “Yeah but”—Lilly had started tearing at the skin around her fingernails, like she did when her thoughts got serious—“what we should have done was headed north sooner, or at least gotten the hell out of places like Vegas, and listened to the warnings the planet was clearly giving us from the start. I remember all the politicians talking about how we could stop the Great Rise, how we were just around the corner from some policy or invention or whatever that would slow it down, but those were lies. It was all already in motion, you know? We’d been wrecking things for hundreds of years already, thinking that we