Waterfall (18 page)

Murderer.

She hummed an old hymn to silence the voice. She stared at Dad’s restful expression and prayed for the strength to take care of the twins with as much courage as their parents had.

“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,’ ” Solon said. “Isn’t that how it goes?”

The psalm used to thrill Eureka. It was one thing to walk through the valley of death—but to walk through death’s shadow meant that you didn’t know where death was, or what light behind it made its shadow. The psalm made death sound like a secret second moon in the sky, orbiting everything, making every minute night.

On many nights, not long ago, Eureka had bargained with God to take her life and bring back Diana. She didn’t want that anymore. She didn’t look at Dad’s body and wish she were in his place. In a way, she already was in his place, and in the place of everyone she had killed, regardless of whether she knew their names. Part of Eureka had died, was always dying now, and becoming part of her strength. This was a muscle she sensed she would use when the time came to defeat Atlas and redeem herself.

“ ‘For thou art with me,’ ” she finished the psalm. “ ‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ ”

“You couldn’t cry at Diana’s funeral, either.” Solon took
a seat on an antique cockfighting chair, sipping prosecco carefully from a glass with a broken handle. “What gets you through it? God?”

Eureka stared at Solon’s broken glass and remembered the window shattering above her head the night Diana left her family. She remembered the water heater bursting in the hallway, the storm entering their living room. She remembered being unable to tell what was hail against her skin and what was glass. She remembered her feet on the soaked and shaggy carpet on the stairs. Then sobbing. Then Diana’s slap across her cheek.

Never, ever cry.

Solon was watching her as if he knew all about it.

“She wanted to protect you,” he said.

“You can’t control the way somebody feels,” Eureka said.

“No, you can’t,” Solon said, retying the satin ribbon of his robe into a sailor’s knot. “Not for long, anyway.”

Eureka looked down at Dad in the canoe. Before he’d died they’d grown apart. It was Rhoda, and then it was high school, and then it was the fact that she’d grown apart from everyone after Diana’s death. She’d always assumed she and Dad would have time to reconnect.

“After Diana died, the sunrise amazed me,” she said.

“You used to watch it with her?” Ander asked.

Eureka shook her head. “We used to sleep until noon. But I couldn’t believe the sun had the audacity to rise after
she died. I remember at her funeral, I told that to my uncle, about the sunrise. He looked at me like I was crazy. But then, a few days later, I found Dad in the kitchen, frying eggs. He didn’t think anyone was home, but he’d gone through an entire carton. I watched him crack one into a pan, stare at it as it cooked, then flip it onto a plate. They formed a stack, like they were pancakes. Then he tossed the whole plate in the trash.”

“Why didn’t he eat them?” William asked.

“
It still works,
he said, like he couldn’t believe it,” Eureka said. “Then he walked out of the kitchen.”

Eureka was supposed to go on, to say that Dad had taught her how to tell a joke, how to whistle through a sugarcane husk, how not to punch like a girl. He’d taught her how to fold a cloth napkin into an origami swan, how to tell if a crawfish was fresh, how to two-step, how to play a G chord on the guitar. He’d cooked her special meals before her races, researching the right balance of protein and carbohydrates to give her the most energy. He had shown her that unconditional love was possible, because he had loved two women who hadn’t made loving them easy, who took for granted that his love was always there. He’d taught Eureka one thing Diana never could have: how not to run away when it felt impossible to stay. He’d taught her to persevere.

But Eureka kept all that to herself. She gathered her memories around her like a secret shield, the shadow of a shadow in a flooded valley of death.

Solon poured another broken glass of wine and rose from the cockfighting chair. A cigarette dangled from his lips. “When a loved one dies in an untimely manner,” he said, “one feels as if the universe owes one something. Good luck, invincibility, a line of credit with the man upstairs.”

“You’re so cynical,” Cat said. “What if it’s the other way around and the universe has already blessed you with the time you had together?”

“Ah, but if I’d never loved Byblis, I wouldn’t miss her.”

“But you
did
love her,” Ander said to Solon. “Why can’t you cherish the time you had, even if it couldn’t be forever?”

“You see, this is the problem with conversation,” Solon said with a sigh, and looked at Ander. “All we ever do is talk about ourselves. Let us stop before we bore each other, well, to tears.” He turned to Eureka. “Are you ready to say goodbye?”

“Dad’s supposed to be with us,” William said. “Can’t I use my quirk to make him come back?”

“I wish you could,” Eureka said.

Solon unmoored the canoe, then pointed the vessel toward an opening in the darkness. “He will float through there and drift gently out to the sea.”

“I want to go with him.” Claire reached for the canoe.

“As do I,” Solon said. “But we still have work to do.”

“Wait!” Eureka pulled the canoe with Dad’s body toward her a final time. She withdrew the slender orichalcum chest from the inner pocket of his jean jacket. She held it up in the candlelight. The green glow within it pulsed.

“There it is,” Solon murmured.

Ander had already returned the spear and anchor to his backpack. Eureka claimed the heirloom Dad had never meant to leave her. She tucked the chest under her arm. Solon leaned in close, inhaling ferociously. When Ander leaned in, too, Eureka sensed she should keep the chest with her, in her bag with
The Book of Love.

She pressed her lips against her father’s cheek. He’d always hated goodbyes. She nodded at Ander, who poured a dark green bottle of pungent alcohol onto the wood crates beneath Dad. Eureka reached for the gossipwitches’ torch, still lit, resting among the stalagmites. She tipped the flame over the alcohol. The fire caught.

Clare stared ahead numbly. William turned away and sobbed. Eureka gave the canoe the smallest push, and Dad entered the wet darkness, joined the rhythm of the current. She wished him peace and soft light in a heaven without tears.

L
ate that night Eureka awoke in the dim stillness of the cave’s spare chamber, her mind haunted by the fading ghost of a nightmare. She’d been back in the avalanche of wasted dead. Instead of scrambling atop decaying bodies, this time, Eureka drowned in them. She struggled to dig herself out, but she was too deep in bones and blood and slime. It sluiced over her, warm and rank, until she couldn’t even see the rain. Until she knew the dead would bury her alive.

“You
think
you have all that you need!” Solon’s voice boomed over the waterfall.

She rubbed her eyes and smelled death on her hands. After Dad’s funeral, she’d washed them in the cave’s salty spring and filed her nails with a porous stone until there was
no place else for the blood she’d spilled to lodge. But she still smelled Seyma on her hands. She knew she always would.

“You’re wrong,” Solon said.

Eureka tilted her good ear toward the sound and waited for a response.

But Filiz and the Poet had gone home, and everyone else was asleep: William and Claire shared a blanket at the foot of Eureka’s bed. Cat was passed out on her side next to Eureka, singing in her sleep as she had always done, since their earliest sleepovers. Tonight she softly slurred the bridge from Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”

On Eureka’s other side, Ander slept on his stomach, his face buried in a pillow. Even in his dreams he disappeared. She laid her head close to his for a moment. She inhaled his scent and felt the warm power of his breath. Dim light displayed faint lines around his eyes and silver-blond hairs around his temple. Had they been there that morning? Eureka didn’t know. When you spent so much time looking at someone it was hard to measure how they changed.

Yesterday, the idea that love aged Ander appalled Eureka. But it wouldn’t matter now—Ander couldn’t possibly love her anymore. No one could. She wouldn’t let them. Freedom from love meant freedom to focus on getting to the Marais, damming her flood, finishing Atlas—and liberating Brooks.

What would Brooks think of what Eureka had done to Seyma? For the first time, she was glad that he was gone.

“I know,” Solon’s voice insisted. “I will deliver the last piece, but it’s complicated. Delicate.”

Eureka rose from her blanket and edged toward the hanging rug separating the guest room from the salon. The gossipwitches’ torch burned low, balanced between two stalagmites. Its amethyst stones provided inexhaustible and intelligent fuel: the flame adjusted itself during the day, burning brightest just before bedtime, soft as candlelight when everyone retired.

A voice answered Solon:

“I turned my back on you.”

A shiver went down Eureka’s spine. It was her father’s voice.

Eureka flew into the salon, expecting to find Dad sitting at the broken table, cracking an egg into a bowl and smiling, eager to explain the stunt he’d pulled.

The room was empty. The waterfall roared.

“Solon?” Eureka called.

A dim light glowed from the staircase that led to the cave’s lower level. Solon’s cloistered workshop lay below.

“I turned my back on you,” the voice repeated, drifting up the stairs. It sounded so much like Dad’s that Eureka stumbled as she hurried toward it.

At the base of the stairs, Solon sat on a spun silk rug under a hanging glass lantern. Someone sat across from him, his face turned away from Eureka. He was hard to make out clearly in the shadowy light, but Eureka knew it wasn’t Dad. He looked
as young as Solon, with a shaved head, broad shoulders, and a narrow waist. He was naked.

As Eureka reached the bottom stair, the boy’s head turned toward her, and her breath caught in her throat. Something about the strange boy reminded her of—

“Dad?”

Tears glistened in the corner of Solon’s eyes. “He fixed Ovid. Until now I wasn’t sure it would work. There was gossip, of course, but one can never trust a witch. And anyone else who might remember is either dead or in the Sleeping World.” He wiped his eyes. “Your father fixed it. Come and see.”

Solon took Eureka’s hand. She sat next to him on the rug, across from the naked boy. When she saw it more clearly, she realized it wasn’t human—it was a gleaming machine crafted in the shape of a very fit boy.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Solon asked.

Eureka’s eyes roved over the machine’s anatomically impressive body, but when she looked at the robot’s face, she found it hard to breathe. It was youthful, like an ancient Greek statue—but its features were unmistakably those of her father.

Heavy-lidded eyes gazed at her with paternal love. A hint of stubble stood along its chin. The robot smiled, and the crease along its nose was the one that Dad had passed down to Eureka and the twins.

“Eureka, meet Ovid, limited-edition orichalcum robot
from Atlantis,” Solon said. “Ovid, meet Eureka, the one who’s going to take you home.”

Eureka blinked at Solon, then at the robot, who extended its hand. She shook it, amazed to find it pliant like a real hand, with a firm, confident grasp.

“Why does it look like my father?” Eureka whispered.

“Because it holds your father’s ghost,” Solon said. “Ovid is a ghost robot, one of nine orichalcum siblings crafted before Atlantis sank. Eight still slumber in the Sleeping World, but Ovid got away. Selene stole it before she fled the palace, and it has lived in this cave ever since. If Atlas knew his precious robot was here, he would do anything to get it back.”

For the second time Eureka considered telling Solon about her encounter with Atlas at the Tearline pond. But it felt like a betrayal of Brooks. If Solon knew Eureka had secretly met Atlas, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. And she had promised to find Brooks again soon. Their triangle was delicate—Atlas wanted Eureka’s tears, Eureka wanted Brooks back, Brooks surely wanted freedom. It was best to keep things among the three of them for now.

“I turned my back on you.” The robot spoke in Dad’s voice.

Eureka pulled back her hand, horrified. Then, slowly, she touched the robot’s cheek—supple as human flesh—and watched its face brighten with Dad’s smile.

“I have looked after Ovid for many years,” Solon said. “I
always knew it was invaluable, but I could never fathom what made it run.”

Eureka circled the robot and found nothing familiar about its body. From the back, it looked like a sculpture in a fancy French Quarter antique store. Only Ovid’s face seemed possessed of Dad. She sat down facing Ovid. “How does it work?”

“Most modern robots are wired to function on a binary system,” Solon said. “Ones and zeroes. But Ovid is a trinary being, meaning it operates in threes. It’s very Atlantean. Everything is threes with them. Three seasons. Three sides to a story. Did you know they invented the love triangle?”