The Far Dawn by Kevin Emerson

shoulder.
    â€œWe’re losing our connection to the forces,” says Kael after a moment. “What will this world be, what kind of future can there be without the Terra?”
    â€œI should have known,” Rana mutters. “It felt wrong. I should have warned him, or we should have gone another way . . .”
    â€œDon’t,” says Lük.
    Rana pulls away, her eyes fierce. “Why not? His death means nothing!”
    â€œIt does if we succeed,” says Kael. “Deniel chose to be a part of this mission. Now we need to finish it. For him. For everyone.”
    â€œBut . . . ,” Lük says, and what he is about to say ignites a deep fear inside him. He glances up. “Those vents were going to be our escape. How are we going to get out if we can’t find the music?”
    Kael stares at the ground, Rana at Lük, and more tears well up. She doesn’t need to answer. Lük already knows. While they may try . . . they are probably not going to escape.
    â€œIt was always a risk.” Kael sighs.
    I feel Lük remembering his wish back in the apartment, to run, to turn away and flee instead of facing this. And now, it’s too late. I find him thinking of his family. His parents, his younger brother. They’ve already lost one son, Lük’s older brother Maris, a soldier, and Lük has not seen them very often since he came to the academy. The visits home have been brief. Too brief, now, it seems.
    â€œWe need to keep moving,” says Rana.
    The question of where to go is obvious. The three turn and gaze across the cavern. It stretches out of sight into blackness, a vast space large enough to hold a city. Huge chunks of rock, the size of icebergs, regularly topple away from the walls and splash into the magma river with explosions of sparks. The ledge that the three stand on grows wider as it stretches away from them, becoming a plateau, and in the distance a huge section thrusts out like the bow of a mighty ship.
    Perched on this triangular point is a vast tower of copper and brass metalwork.
    The Paintbrush of the Gods.
    The masters’ secret creation. Their scientists and alchemists have been working on it for hundreds of years.
    It resembles a sort of gigantic telescope, with a triangular base, filled with gears and glass balls, and then a huge cylinder that is angled downward, aimed at the magma river. Behind it are rounded structures arranged in rows reaching back to the cavern wall. Lük thinks they are the turbines, twenty electromagnetic vortex turbines each strong enough to power all the lights of Atlante. And in spite of their mission, Lük can’t help but to feel awe and wonder at the sight of this great device.
    â€œCome on.” Kael starts to jog toward the Paintbrush. Lük and Rana hold each other for another second, then lock eyes. Lük nods slowly, hating this, but they run.
    The magma cracks and bubbles below them, and waves of heat wash over the three. Rumbles signal new falls of rock crumbling away.
    Lük knows, from Master Alara’s teachings, that this is a spot where plates of the earth’s crust meet. The Atlanteans do not call it plate tectonics, but they think of the earth as Ana’s shell. The Paintbrush is placed on this fault line that stretches from beneath Antarctica up the spine of the South American continent, along North America, and around the Pacific Ocean, though none of these landforms are quite the same shape in Lük’s mind as they are in mine. The fault line is a deep, strong subduction zone with a spiny backbone of volcanoes, always active and moving. The Paintbrush will send a beam of vortex energy deep into this fault, causing a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions around the globe, releasing ash into the skies that will cool the planet. There will be some tectonic upheaval, but the Atlanteans have built monitoring stations at various points along the