The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) Read Online Free PDF

into the pad,” I said slowly like I had to pull each word out of a giant, tangled heap, “then doesn’t that mean he knows our location right now?”
    “Yeah,” said Lilly absently.
    “And that means we need to get moving.” I looked at Leech. “Looks like you get your wish.”
    Leech nodded seriously. I was glad to see he didn’t want to gloat. “So, the bearing then?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t get it,” said Lilly. She’d snapped out of her trance. “If he knows where we are, why not just come get us? Why did he contact us first? It’s almost like he’s giving us a head start.”
    “He probably wants to see what we’ll do,” I said.
    “We’re still his lab rats,” muttered Leech, “even outside Eden.”
    “So, what? . . . He’s just toying with us?” said Lilly. She sounded defeated again.
    “No,” I said, feeling a surge of resolve. “He doesn’t have us yet.” I turned to Leech. “Where do we go?”
    Leech pulled his little black sketchbook from the waistband of his shorts, along with Aaron’s subnet computer pad, which he’d been hanging on to all night. “I made some new sketches while you were asleep,” he said, kneeling down and opening the notebook.
    I joined him. Lilly hesitated for a minute. I saw her reach up and rub at her gills, wincing. Finally she crawled over beside us.
    “Check it out.” Leech pointed at a map drawn across two pages. “Things aren’t quite to scale here, but”—he pointed to a circle with a plus sign in the top right corner—“that’s EdenWest, and we’re about here.” He indicated a small dot, then moved his finger along a dotted line that left EdenWest and ran diagonally over the landscape toward the far corner into the triangles of a mountain range. It ended at a little star. “That’s the bearing, and that’s the marker.”
    “I still don’t get how you are seeing these maps,” I said, “when we haven’t found your skull yet.”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Leech. “I think, since the Atlanteans couldn’t know which skull we’d find first, they put a little bit of the information for me in all of them, you know, so we could get on course. That’s what allowed me to use the map room in Eden. And those maps I could see pointed to this place.” He indicated the star in the mountains.
    I looked at the map and felt like something didn’t line up. Leech had drawn a compass rose in the top left. This was what was disorienting me. The compass was at a cockeyed angle. I pointed to it. “You’ve been saying that our bearing needs to be southwest. But doesn’t this compass mean that we’re supposed to go south instead of southwest?”
    This question seemed to excite Leech. “Okay, right, it would, if those were the true compass directions, but see that’s the thing that I, well, that we figured out back in the navigation room in Eden. The maps that I see in my head, they’re oriented different. My north, is that way,” he said, extending his arm in the same direction as on the compass he’d drawn, “but really, actual north is that way.” He ticked his arm to the left like the hand of a clock.
    “So,” said Lilly, “you have the wrong north in your head.”
    “Not wrong,” said Leech, “just old. From about ten thousand years ago, during the Atlantean time.”
    “So you’re saying the North Pole moved?”
    “Well, it moves all the time, historically. Sometimes the poles even flip. But something bigger than that happened between the Atlantean time and now. It’s not so much that the pole moved as I think the land , the whole crust of the earth, moved. A lot. I think it was because of the Paintbrush. Point is, any map we find has to be recalibrated based on where things are now. That’s part of what makes the Atlantean sites so hard to find.”
    “You never struck me as a big nerd,” said Lilly, and though her tone was still sullen, there was a slight gleam in her eyes finally.
    Leech smiled at