Waterfall (26 page)

“I lie as frequently and as convincingly as I can. But then there is the matter of the Glimmering, which reveals only that which is truer than the truth. Do you happen to recall your reflection?”

The memory of that cold, cruel face flashed before Eureka’s eyes and she knew that the girl in the reflection wasn’t Maya Cayce. Her gaze had been wiser, darker, deeper. Her smile icier than that of even the most frigid high school queen. Eureka had been looking at Delphine. Her body tensed. She imagined squeezing Esme’s cheeks until no laughter could escape her pretty, painted mouth.

She blinked, surprised by the violence of her fantasy.

Esme smiled. “Delphine is who you come from, why you are the way you are. Dark-hearted. Mind as deadly as a nest of vipers. You are capable of great and terrible things, but you must free yourself of the bonds of love and kindness holding you back. Come with us. We will show you the way to the Marais. Then you will show us the way to Atlantis—”

“No.” Eureka rose and stepped backward.

“You’ll change your mind.” Esme followed Eureka to the doorway. She stroked the twisted end of her pipe. “Funny, isn’t it? Everyone thinks the bad guy is Atlas.…”

“Even Atlas thinks the bad guy is Atlas!” a witch in the background howled.

“When, actually”—Esme leaned forward to whisper in Eureka’s bad ear—“it’s you.”

E
ureka could barely see Ander through the rain as he ran from the entrance to the Bitter Cloud and caught her in his arms.

“Where have you been?”

Everything was different about him. His hair was wet, his clothes soaked and stuck to his skin. His eyes were a pure, crystal-clear blue, where they used to be clouded by a lovely melancholy.

Was this how Ander wore joy? He looked fantastic, but far removed from the brooding, unreachable boy she’d fallen for back home.

That boy would have hated that she’d run off to an artemisia-drenched witches’ lair. This boy’s embrace said:
All that matters is you’re here.

The truth had done this to Ander. He knew who he was—or who he wasn’t—and it looked good on him.

“I have something for you,” Ander said.

“Ander, wait”—any word not confessing her secret was a lie—“before you—”

He shook his head. “This can’t wait.”

His arms curved around her back and pulled her body against his. He tipped her backward and pressed his lips to hers. The salty rain flooded between their lips. This was what heartbreak tasted like.

Eureka felt like an imposter. She couldn’t breathe and she didn’t want to. What if she could die while kissing him, allow his love to suffocate her? Then he’d never know who she really was, she would never have to face the grand lie she had become, and the rest of the half-drowned world could go on paying for her pride.

She touched the corners of his eyes where she’d found wrinkles days ago. “Your face.”

“Do I look different?” Ander asked.

His eyes creased when he smiled. His hair was a thousand shades of flaxen gold. But Ander wasn’t an old man any more than Eureka was an old lady. They were teenagers. They were growing up and changing all the time and it couldn’t be stopped or slowed.

“You look like you,” she said.

He smiled. “You look like you, too.”

What did he see when he looked at her? Was her darkness swelling as visible as the shadows lifting from him?

He reached for the teardrop crystal that had absorbed her other pendants. He gasped and quickly drew his hand away, as if he’d touched a flame.

“From the gossipwitches?”

She nodded. “The locket, the thunderstone, and the ribbon are inside.”

“I can’t tell you how free I feel,” Ander whispered. “There’s no more risk in caring for each other. We can be together. We can go to the Marais. You can defeat Atlas. I can be with you the whole time. We can do this, together.” He touched her lips. His eyes swam over her face. “I love you, Eureka.”

Eureka closed her eyes. Ander loved a girl he thought he knew. He loved that girl very much. He had said it was the only thing he was sure of. But he could never love the person she truly was, a descendant of darkness, more evil than the most evil force Ander could imagine.

“That’s great,” she said.

“I have to kiss you again.” He drew her close, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart could never be in something so right, so good.

A violent rapping interrupted their kiss. Eureka jumped away from Ander and spun around. A shadowy figure leaned against the entrance to the Bitter Cloud holding an umbrella over its head.

Her heart quickened. Was it Brooks? She yearned to see him again—even though she knew he was bound to evil. Or maybe she yearned to see him
because
he was bound to evil.

“Who’s there?” Ander put his body between Eureka and the figure.

“Only me.”

“Solon?” Eureka wiped rain from her eyes and discerned Ovid’s lithe frame. The robot’s left hand had sprouted an orichalcum umbrella. Its face bore the loving, aged features that the lost Seedbearer had worn at his death.

“ ‘O a kiss, long as my exile, sweet as my revenge,’ ” the robot said in Solon’s voice. “That’s Coriolanus. Shakespeare already knew what you are learning, Eureka: the soldier can return from war but he can never go home.” The robot tipped its umbrella toward the Bitter Cloud. “Let’s talk inside. I’m waterproof, so rain makes me lonely.”

Ovid collapsed the umbrella as they entered the cave through the hall of skulls. Water streamed past their feet, the flood flowing toward the salon. The Bitter Cloud was desolate now and filling with salt water, nothing like the fascinating chamber of curiosities it had been when they arrived. The air was cold and dank.

Claire was throwing fistfuls of colored mosaic tiles in the air. William used his quirk to retrieve them before they hit the rising water.

“Eureka’s back!”

The twins splashed through deep puddles as they ran to her. William made it into her arms, but Claire stopped short of the robot and looked at it distrustfully.

She hunched her shoulders. “Why does Ovid look weird?”

“It looks like Solon,” William said into Eureka’s shoulder. “It’s scary.”

Cat sat in Solon’s cockfighting chair with her eyes closed. Eureka poured some of the witches’ salve into her hands and massaged it over the bees, which now crawled all over her friend’s scalp. Cat flinched at first, then gazed up at Eureka. Tears dotted her eyes.

“Are they gone?” she asked, patting her hair.

“No.”

“It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Good.”

Eureka helped Cat to her feet. Cat’s heels sank into a puddle—then both of her feet lifted off the floor. It lasted just a second. Cat looked down at her feet, then at Eureka, then down again. She held out her arms and furrowed her brow and made herself levitate, this time for longer, a full foot off the floor.

She touched her bee braids and giggled a laugh that didn’t sound like Cat. “That bitch turned me into a witch.” She gazed at Eureka with wide eyes. “You know, this is the first thing in a long time that actually feels
right
?”

“Sit down.” Solon’s voice spoke through the robot. “Watch closely. Prepare to have your minds blown.”

They gathered around the fire pit with the waterfall tumbling and the skulls eavesdropping, just as they had when Solon welcomed them to the Bitter Cloud. Ovid presided in Solon’s place, holding his old, empty broken glass.

Solon’s features wavered, then twisted gruesomely, like the robot’s face was made of clay. William whimpered in Eureka’s lap. Then Ovid’s nose tapered. Its lips swelled. Its cheeks grew longer.

“Poet?” Cat leaned forward shakily.

The Poet within the robot seemed to size up Cat’s new do approvingly, then he twisted out of recognition as another face filled the orichalcum void.

Seyma’s features sharpened and squashed as if someone had pressed her face against a sheet of glass. She grimaced and was pulled away, replaced by the thin, old lips of Starling, then, more rapidly, by the dark grimace of Critias, the wizened ruthlessness of Chora, and, finally, by the cold hatred in Albion’s eyes. He struggled to speak through the robot, but couldn’t. Eureka got the gist of what he wanted to say.

At last, their father surfaced.

“Daddy—” Claire cried in the voice she used when she was having a nightmare.

Dad was gone, replaced by Solon.

“You will encounter all of them eventually,” Solon’s voice said. “For now, while they are learning to be ghosts, I control a great percentage of the robot’s drive. I will sow seeds of
resistance from inside, but as the others mature they will have their own agenda. We must make our move soon, while I can still be your primary guide.”

Eureka rose. “Let’s go.”

“Sit,” he said. “First I must show you the way.” Again Ovid’s features softened. This time, they became a screen on which a waterfall appeared. A projection of white water streamed down the robot’s forehead. In the center of its face a strange bubble vibrated. It took Eureka a moment to recognize it was her thunderstone shield. A small version of Ovid appeared beneath the shield, its body arced in a gorgeous dive as it balanced the shield on its shoulders.

At the end of the waterfall, Ovid’s screenlike face became bright white and bubbly. Soon, the bubbles cleared and the water turned a deep turquoise. Then Ovid was swimming, a strong and rapid breaststroke, the shield strapped to its back with an orichalcum band.

A version of Eureka was inside the version of the shield. It was like watching a movie of herself in a dream. Someone sat beside her, but the image was too small to see who it was.

The vision faded from Ovid’s blank face. Solon’s sculpted features returned.

So the waterfall was how Eureka would get to the Marais. She looked down at her crystal teardrop and prayed her thunderstone still worked.

“Ovid is adept at open-sea swimming,” Solon’s voice said,
“but within these caves the currents are capricious. The angles of the tunnel-like flumes that lead to the outside world are deadly sharp. Your journey will be smoother once you clear them.”

“How do I do that?” Eureka asked.

“How do
we
do that,” Ander corrected her. “You must time your departure between three and four in the morning, when the moon draws the tides high, and the flumes’ currents flow toward the egress of the caves. You already practiced how to enter the waterfall when you fetched the orchid. Do it again. Filiz will join you; I always promised I would take her with me. All others who wish to accompany you must run with you into the fall. And then, like love itself, Ovid will lead you where you need to go.”

Again the robot’s features shifted into their bland, attractive, neutral state. It closed its eyes. It whispered: “Rest.”

During the long electric moment that followed Eureka became sure of three things:

She could not take her loved ones with her. They would not let her go alone. She was going to have to ditch them.

W
ind spun Eureka’s hair as she staggered to the edge of the veranda. She tried to find Diana’s star, but there was no sign of a universe beyond the rain.

Since Diana had died, it was like an organ had been removed; Eureka’s body didn’t work the way it had before. How could Diana, the sparkling woman Eureka had treasured, have descended from darkness?

And yet Diana
had
abandoned her family. She’d slapped her daughter so roughly it turned Eureka’s emotions inward for a decade, until they nearly killed her. Diana held deadly secrets behind her brilliant smile.

Selfish. Heartless. Narcissistic.
When her parents divorced, Eureka heard people in New Iberia call Diana these things.
Eureka had dismissed it as bayou gossip. She’d convinced herself these attributes belonged to the accusers, that they projected their failings onto Diana’s absence.

Eureka considered that the woman she aspired to be was also the woman who manipulated, lied, then disappeared. Diana had been a ghost in Eureka’s life, filling her with feelings while telling her not to feel. She had raised a daughter who ran cross-country, treasured the twins, fell in love too easily—and was a murderer. Once you put murder on your résumé, no one saw anything else. Eureka was as full of dark contradictions as Diana. She was moments away from abandoning everyone she loved, leaving them to unknown, watery fates.