The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 by Thomas Greanias Page B

resist.
    He paddled with long, powerful strokes and they glided across the silvery surface. At 12,500 feet above sea level, Lake Titicaca was the highest lake in the world, and it felt like it. Serena thought she could almost touch the heavens.
    “Now the odd thing about this lake is that it’s located hundreds of miles from the Pacific, yet it contains ocean-variety fish, seahorses, crustacea, and marine fauna,” Conrad lectured with a wink.
    “And you think it’s seawater from the Genesis flood?” Serena asked.
    Conrad shrugged. “When the waters receded, some got dammed up here in the Andes.”
    “I guess that explains the docks in Tiahuanaco.”
    Conrad smiled. “Right. Why else would the ruins of a city twelve miles away have docks?”
    “Unless it was once a port and the south end of this lake extended twelve miles and more than a hundred feet higher,” Serena concluded. “Which means civilization flourished here before the flood and Tiahuanaco is at least fifteen thousand years old.”
    “Imagine that.”
    She could. She wanted to. A world before the dawn of recorded history. What was it like? Were people really that much different from us today? she wondered. There must have been women like me back then, she thought, and men like Conrad. He had dropped his skeptical pose and opened up so beautifully out here. So different from his posture before the academics.
    The night air was chilly, and Serena was huddled in the bow. Conrad paddled slowly. The twilight sky above was a magnificent turquoise blue, and the lake stretched on like glass for eternity.
    For the longest time they were silent, gliding along the reeds with only the dip of Conrad’s paddle making soft lapping sounds like an ancient metronome. Then, when they were in the middle of the glistening waters, he pulled up his paddle and let them drift beneath the stars.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked.
    “Nothing.” He produced a basket of food and wine. “Absolutely nothing at all.”
    “Conrad,” she began, “I really should be getting back. The sisters will worry.”
    “As well they should.”
    He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backward until she was lying down. He stroked her face and kissed her on the lips, and she shivered.
    “Conrad, please.”
    Their eyes locked, and she thought of his childhood pain, their connection, thought that if there was ever any man to do this with, any time of her life and any place on the planet, this was it.
    “Tomorrow I go back to Arizona and you go back to Rome,” he whispered in her ear. “And we can remember our last night in Bolivia as the night that never happened.”
    “You got that right,” she said, and pushed him overboard to a satisfying splash.
     
    Inside his compartment, as he packed his gear for the impending descent to P4, Conrad, too, was thinking about that night with Serena on the reed boat.
    He had always been in awe of her determination and courage. And her beauty was unmatched. Yet she wore it so effortlessly, as if she didn’t care whether she was seventeen or seventy. She was charming and self-effacing, even funny. But that night it had been her glimmering eyes, almost glowing under her dark hair, that had mesmerized him.
    She told him she had always admired his purity and single-mindedness. He was what he was, she said, and not like herself—someone able to pretend to be what she was not. He wondered what dark secret she was about to confess but soon realized she had none. Her only sin was being an unwanted child.
    It was then, for a fleeting moment, that he came closest to knowing her. For the first time he grasped her holy death wish and understood her drive to be a martyr, a saint, a woman who counted. If anything, he realized, her works of compassion were her way of avoiding intimacy. She feared being “found out” and thus not measuring up to her standards, much less God’s. She would do anything to avoid those feelings of not being needed, of