Waterfall (14 page)

The Poet listened to a Discman as he walked—so prehistoric—an old country song twanging in his earbuds when he took them out to call her name. His lips had been swollen and she knew he’d been kissing the Tearline girl’s friend. It made Filiz jealous, not because she wanted to kiss the Poet, but because she had never kissed anyone.

He tossed her a parchment-wrapped package. It was the size of the loaves of bread Filiz’s mother used to bake when
she was a girl and hunger was a greedy pleasure, dispelled by a ready meal. The Poet had another package under his arm.

“This is what Solon offers special guests,” he said in their native tongue.

They were the first comprehensible words she’d heard him say in months. She unwrapped the package.

It was
food
—warm, fried meat next to a mound of honey-glazed nuts and dried fruit the color of jewels. Something gooey smelled like paradise. Baklava.

It was all Filiz could do not to devour the entire contents of the package on the path in the rain. But she thought of her mother’s bony face.

“He’s been building a hidden stash for months,” the Poet said. “This was what I snuck today. But tomorrow …”

He trailed off, and Filiz knew that everything was about to change. As soon as she shared this food with her family, and the Poet with his, the whole community would know. Solon’s cave would no longer be a haven for Filiz—or anyone else.

“They’ll kill him,” Filiz whispered. She felt protective of Solon—or, at least, of the pleasure she derived from working in his cave. She knew it was selfish, but she didn’t want to lose the only touch of glamour in her life.

But her people were starving, so Filiz looked away from the Poet and said, “See you at Assembly.”

Back at the cave where she lived with her mother and grandmother, Filiz pulled a handful of branches from her coat and dropped them in the center of the floor. She snapped her fingers, igniting a flame from the tips of her chipped blue nails.

Not long ago, they’d had enough wood to keep a fire always burning. Now it was dark and cold when Filiz came home, and she knew it had been like that all day.

The branches crackled, hissed, smoked. Burning wet wood was like forcing love, but since the Tearline girl had cried, nothing was dry. The entire world was dark and cold and wet. The flickering light warmed Filiz’s mind and illuminated her sleeping mother. People said Filiz looked like her, even though Filiz dyed her hair and wore heavy makeup she stole from a drugstore in Kusadasi. She saw nothing of herself in her mother’s weary face.

Her mother opened her eyes. They were the same soft brown as Filiz’s.

“How was work?” Her mother spoke in the rolling, melodic Celan tongue, a mélange of Greek and Turkish and, some said, Atlantean. It was spoken only on these two square miles of earth.

Filiz’s mother searched her skin, looking for injuries, as she did every night. She used to perform the same nightly scan on Filiz’s father when he’d been alive.

“Fine.” When Filiz was a child, she loved the heavy, soothing feel of her mother’s gaze upon her skin. By the time the
woman’s eyes left Filiz’s body, her every scratch was healed. It was her mother’s quirk, the unique gift of magic every human being was born with. Growing up, Filiz had heard stories about people outside their community who lost their quirks as they matured. She hadn’t believed the stories until last summer, when she got a job in Kusadasi as a cruise-ship tour guide. The pale tourists she guided were often friendly but always vacant, little more than polite zombies who saw the world through camera lenses. Their quirks were so long forgotten that Filiz took to imagining what their gifts had been—maybe this banker used to travel back in time, or that real estate agent could communicate with horses. Only the tourists’ children’s fading quirks were recognizable. It depressed Filiz to watch them being raised to lose them, too.

For the Celans, the quirk was the last thing to go, after the heart stopped beating. The elderly could lose every other faculty—hearing, sight, memory—but their quirks would stay with them until just after their dying breaths. Filiz would never lose her quirk. If her fingers were unable to make fire, she would no longer be Filiz.

She slid away from her mother’s gaze, which felt babying and oppressive. Sometimes it was nice to leave a minor scratch alone. None of her deep wounds were on the surface anyway. She put her heavy bag down, not ready to address what it contained. She planned to play Gülle Oyunu, the game of marbles her father had taught her.

But she couldn’t take her eyes off the bag on the floor, the way the firelight played over it. She’d wolfed down a third of its contents before she got home. She wanted to offer her mother and grandmother the rest, but she was afraid of what it would unleash among her people, who had long looked upon Filiz with distrust. Of course, the Poet would be feeding his own family in his own cave, so there really wasn’t any avoiding the inevitable.

Her mother was watching her, full of questions. Lately there had been whispers about a visitor Solon would receive in the cave that all the Celans knew existed but none of them could see. Filiz knew her mother wanted to ask about it.

“She is here.” Filiz avoided the wild look in her mother’s eyes. She took off her sweatshirt and straightened her tight blue T-shirt. The fashions she had stolen in Kusadasi earned strange looks from the community, but Filiz hated the rough woven cloaks that were their style. Kusadasi had shown her how rural her home was. Now Kusadasi’s cutting-edge shops and sparkly hotels lay a mile underwater.

Filiz’s people had lived in these caves for thousands of years, since before Atlantis sank. Every generation prayed that Atlantis would not rise in their lifetime or in their children’s children’s. Now the girl who would bring it back was a hundred yards away.

“Eat.” Her mother put a kettle on the fire. “Eat, then speak. The Assembly is beginning next door.”

It should have been easy to present her starving mother with the stolen food, but her family’s hunger was so great Filiz feared a limited amount of food would only make them more miserable.

She eyed the kettle. “What is it?”

“Soup,” her mother said. “Grandma made it.”

“You’re lying,” Filiz said. “It’s boiled water from the sky.”

“I didn’t say what kind of soup it is. It tastes good. Salty, like a broth.”

“You ate this already?” She stared at her mother, noticing her sunken eyes. “You can’t eat this!”

“We have to eat something.”

Filiz grabbed the kettle handle, which burned her in a way the fires she ignited never did. She cursed and dropped the kettle, spilling its contents on the floor.

Her mother fell on her knees, scooped water in her hand, brought it to her lips.

“Stop it!” Filiz fell on her mother, wrenching her hands from her mouth. She grabbed her bag and produced a wedge of baklava, a greasy veal cutlet. She pressed the food into her mother’s hands. Her mother gaped at the food as if her hands were on fire. Then she started eating.

Filiz watched her mother scarf half of the cutlet down. “Is there more?” she whispered.

Filiz shook her head.

“We are dying.”

The Assembly took place in Filiz’s great-uncle Yusuf’s cave. After Solon’s cave, which none of the others had ever been allowed to see, let alone enter, Yusuf’s cave had the largest room for gathering. The fire was dwindling, Filiz’s pet peeve. A large painted evil eye watched them from the back wall. Filiz wondered if the eye was blind; it hadn’t protected her people in a long time.

She had not been to an Assembly in years, since before her father died. She went tonight because she knew the Poet was going to rat out Solon and his food. She wanted to do what she could to temper the Celans’ reactions.

“It is happening.” Yusuf furrowed his wiry white eyebrows as Filiz entered the room. His skin reminded Filiz of a pan-fried quail, brown and tight and cracking from sun. “The animals we have long hunted now hunt us. Our home has become treacherous as everything around us starves.”

The group was small that night, less than twenty of her neighbors. They looked haggard and feral. She knew that these were the healthiest of them, that everybody absent lay in a nearby cave, too malnourished to move.

The Poet was there, sitting between two other boys his age. The boys’ dark skin had a strange white tint. It took Filiz a moment to realize that their skin was caked with salt. They must have been out in the rain all day building the arks. It was
an old project of the Celans, in preparation for the flood that generations of them had feared. There were many ancient stories of heroes riding out past floods in sturdy arks. Few took their construction seriously, even stealing the food the ark builders had begun to stockpile when the famine hit last year. But everything was different now that the tear rain fell from the sky. Filiz didn’t know where the Celans thought they’d sail to, or how they would survive at sea, but many were convinced the arks would be their salvation.

Filiz had grown up with the Poet and the other boys, but since she’d been to Kusadasi she felt like an alien all the time—too rural for the city, too cosmopolitan for home. Before the flood, she’d concluded that to be happy she must sever ties with the mountains, that one should not hold on to situations out of guilt.

Her grandmother Seyma sat atop a cushion next to Yusuf. Her white hair cascaded past her knees. Seyma claimed her quirk worked only when she was sleeping—she could visit others’ dreams—but Filiz knew she could snake inside another’s mind at any time of day.

Her neighbors made room as Filiz stepped toward the center of the Assembly. She knelt down before the fire, snapped her fingers, and brought the flame roaring back to life. She never thought much of her quirk until moments like these, when its value became obvious. All the Poet could do was sing and whistle like a bird, a useless gift. Birds never had anything comprehensible to say.

Filiz sat next to a child named Pergamon. He was like a silent shadow, always following her around. His quirk was the otherworldly power of his grip. Filiz had often heard his parents shrieking when Pergamon held their hands. Now he was napping, his soft cheek resting on his arm.

Everyone here had a magical talent, but no one could cause food or drinking water to appear out of thin air. A person with a quirk like that could rule the world.

When the storm began the other day, it had not rained for months. Some Celans had wept happy, foolish tears. Some had fallen on their knees, thanking God, drinking rain. Though most were wise enough to spit it out at the taste of the salt, there was one boy who had been so thirsty he couldn’t stop drinking until his body convulsed with seizures. Even those with healing quirks like Filiz’s mother could not ease his dehydration. And the salt in the rain had tainted what little drinking water they still had.

The boy died. Filiz had gone to the small service for him that afternoon, just before she went to work. Then she’d entered Solon’s cave and met the girl responsible for his death. Solon had watched her reaction, but he must have known she wouldn’t say or do anything. Now that the tear rain was falling, the girl was their only hope if Atlantis rose.

That was what Solon said anyway. How the Tearline girl would succeed was Filiz’s greatest question. Perhaps her people were right—they should build their arks and prepare for the worst.

Filiz felt her neighbors’ eyes on her and wondered whether the Poet had told them yet. Then she saw a plate of food being passed around. Men and women were slapping the Poet’s back and laughing. The Poet, the hero. Filiz watched him bask in the glow. What good would it do a roomful of starving people to have a single bite of food? Maybe they were too hungry to ask now, but as soon as the food was gone, wouldn’t they demand to know where it had come from, how to get more?

She wasn’t angry at the Poet, she realized. She was angry at Eureka. She watched Pergamon sleepily place a bite of spinach in his mouth. The boy next to him took the plate and licked it clean.

The Poet watched Filiz with as much suspicion as she felt for him. He used to ask her why she avoided the Assemblies. Now he clearly wished she wasn’t there.