Waterfall (28 page)

Esme flicked an amethyst whip against Peggy’s wing. The beast banked west. They were flying over water now. All land had disappeared.

“You don’t want to hear this,” Brooks said, “but I learned things from Atlas.”

“Like what?”

“The story of Atlantis is the longest cliff-hanger in history, but someone will finish it.…” As his voice trailed off in the rain, Eureka thought of Selene’s words in
The Book of Love:

Where we’ll end … well, who can know the ending until they have written the last word? Everything might change in the last word.

It was Selene’s life story, but everyone talked about their life as if it were a story: leaving out the boring parts, exaggerating the interesting sections, crafting a tale as if everything had inevitably led to this very moment on this very day, saying these very words.

Somehow, Eureka would finish this story. Future tellers of the tale could embellish what they wanted, but no Tearline girl would enter the scene after she exited. Delphine was alpha; Eureka was omega.

It was nearly dawn, the end of another sleepless night, five days until the full moon. Thunder cracked. Peggy raised her wings. Eureka couldn’t see the gossipwitches’ faces, but she could hear their jubilation and see where their leaping feet touched down on the wings.

“We’re getting close.” Brooks leaned over Peggy and gazed at the surging ocean waves.

Eureka didn’t recognize the white-tipped water; it looked nothing like the oceans she’d sailed, swum, flown over in planes, or navigated from within her thunderstone.

In the distance, waves thrashed the shores of a desolate strip of marshland coated in an undulating black sheet. Peggy neighed and dipped her head. She began her descent.

As they drew closer, Eureka saw that the black sheet was made of billions of brine flies that had claimed the marsh as their home.

Eureka touched her pendant. Its warmth was welcome now in the chilling rain. She imagined that Diana’s scrawled
Marais
had become a cursive sparkle in the diamond. Could Atlantis lie beneath this undistinguished streak of mud?

“We’re nearly there,” Brooks said. Atlas said. He turned his lips against her neck and whispered: “Cry for me.”

“What?”

“It’s the only way inside.”

“No—”

“Still holding on to Mom’s advice?” he asked, darkening as he spoke. “Wouldn’t you say that ship has sailed? How does it feel to fail your dead mother’s one request? How does it feel to fail the person who sacrificed her life in a war the world is really waging against you?”

She couldn’t let Atlas trick her. She had to trick him. But the third tear still had to fall. That was why she’d come to the Marais. Atlantis had to rise so those she’d killed would not be wasted dead. Their souls had to go into the Filling. After that, Eureka’s and Atlas’s plans diverged. He thought the souls of her world would do his work, but she would find a way to set them free.

She felt for the pocket of her jeans. Her fingers traced the outline of the silver lachrymatory through the fabric. Solon had left it to her when he died. He’d known what she had to do. Eureka called on the bright strength of the ones she’d left behind. She called on the darkness within her.

“You’re a pretty good villain, Atlas.”

He raised an eyebrow at the sound of his name, but he did not deny it. The game was over. “Pretty good?”

“Everybody has a weakness.”

“And what is mine?”

“Naïveté,” Eureka said. “You don’t know what every girl knows, from New Iberia to Vladivostok:
we
make the best bad guys. Guys never stand a chance.”

Eureka unscrewed the lachrymatory and pitched it over Peggy’s wings. The orichalcum vial tumbled through a sea of clouds. Her tears poured out, glittering like diamonds. A swell of heat against her chest startled her. Her hand flew to the crystal teardrop and was burned.

Her throat tightened. Her chest heaved. She wasn’t going to cry—but she felt the way she had when she shed the tears the lachrymatory contained. She felt those same tears form again, as if every tear had a ghost that could return.

The ground shuddered so hard it made the air above it shudder, too. Peggy bucked and whinnied. And then:

The rain stopped.

Clouds stretched apart like cotton. Round rays of sun shone through. Eureka let them punch her shoulders, her lungs, and her heart, telling her brain to get happy.

“We are home!” the witches shrieked. “Look!”

The sun lit a long crack in the marsh below. The crack widened into a gorge and then, at its center, a small green dot appeared—

And began to grow.

The tree stretched skyward first. Its trunk shot up like it had been launched from the core of the earth. Eureka heard its creaking groan, and more … in
both
her ears. Birds singing, wind rustling, waves tumbling ashore—a wall of rich, reverberating stereo.

“I can hear again.”

“Of course,” Atlas said. “A wave of Atlantean origins took
your hearing, now my kingdom restores it. There is yet more restoration in store.”

“That wave took my mother, too.”

“Indeed,” Atlas said cryptically.

By then the tree was a hundred feet tall and as thick as the ancient redwoods in the California town where Eureka had been born. The tree branched out. Sinewy limbs spun from its trunk, twisting wildly until its boughs overlapped in long and tangled fingers. Leaves sprang, wide and thick and glossy green. Jonquil-like white flowers exploded from their buds.
Narcissus,
Ander would say. Eureka’s ears heard each moment of this wild growth, as if eavesdropping on a sparkling conversation.

New trees sprang up around the first. Then a silver road encircled the sudden forest, which wasn’t a forest, but a magnificent urban park in the center of a rising city. Blindingly pristine gold- and silver-roofed buildings ascended from the marsh, stretching in all directions to form a perfectly circular capital. A ring-shaped river bordered the city; its swift current moved counterclockwise. On the far bank of the river was another mile-wide ring of land, this one verdant green and blooming with fruit trees and terraced grapevines. The agricultural band was encircled by another, clockwise-current river. At its edges, a final ring of land rose into towering purple bluffs. Beyond the mountains, the ocean lapping its rocks stretched into a blurry blue horizon.

Atlantis, the Sleeping World, had awoken.

“What now, bad girl?” Atlas asked.

“Get off! Get off!” the witches shouted. “We are going home to our mountain!”

Esme snapped her whip at Peggy, who reared in the sky. Eureka slipped backward. Her hands grabbed at Peggy’s mane, but not quickly enough. The horse threw Atlas and Eureka from her back.

They fell toward Atlantis. Eureka saw Atlas’s panic flash in Brooks’s eyes and it reminded her of something … but she fell so fast, she soon lost the boy and the body and the enemy and the memory.

She fell and fell, as she’d fallen through the waterfall in the Bitter Cloud. Back then she had landed in water and her thunderstone had shielded her. Ander had been swimming toward her. No one would save her now.

She landed on a green leaf the size of a mattress. She wasn’t dead yet. She let out an amazed laugh; then she slid off the leaf and was falling again.

Branches battered her limbs. She grabbed at a thick one. Her arms wrapped around it, as, incredibly, the branch wrapped around her. Its embrace held her still. Its bark was the texture of a tortoise’s shell.

Eureka shook bark and leaves from her wet hair. She wiped blood from a scratch on her forehead. She felt for her necklace. Still hot, still there. The lachrymatory was gone.

Atlas was also gone.

All around Eureka, lush trees continued to grow from the marsh, until they matched the height of the first tree. She was in the center of a canopy of trees in the center of a park in the center of a city in the center of what might be the only land left on earth.

Strange birds sang strange songs that Eureka heard in both ears. Vines snaked up the tree trunk so quickly, she jerked her arms away, lest they become portions of the forest. The trees smelled like eucalyptus and pecans and fresh-cut grass, but in every other way they were unrecognizable. They were broader and taller and more brilliantly green than any tree she’d ever seen. She climbed across another bough. It swayed under her weight, but the wood felt steady, strong.

“You’re losing, Cuttlefish.” Atlas jumped from a branch above her to one below. He climbed downward, and when he reached the tree’s lowest bough he turned slowly, winked at Eureka, and jumped.

He landed face-first in the thick-sprouting grass. After that he didn’t move.

Another trick. She was meant to follow him, to fear for Brooks’s well-being—and be trapped.

But she was already trapped. She was in Atlantis with her enemy. She was supposed to be here. This was a step along the path to redeeming herself. She couldn’t stay in this tree forever. She was going to have to go down and face him.

She descended the branches. The longer she looked at Brooks’s back, the more fearful she became. The body on the ground was the porch that led to the cathedral of her best friend’s soul.

Her feet touched Atlantean earth. She grabbed Brooks’s shoulders, rolled him over. She laid her head against his chest and waited for it to rise.

I
t wasn’t the first time Brooks had fallen.

A wave of déjà vu swept through Eureka as she laid her head against his chest:

They were nine years old. It was the summer before Eureka’s parents divorced, so she’d still had a whole and buoyant heart, a matching smile. She didn’t know that loss was alive in the world, a thief always about to slam you and steal everything you had.

That summer, Eureka and Brooks had spent sunsets high in the grand pecan tree in Sugar’s backyard, past the city limits of New Iberia. Brooks had a bowl cut and light-up Power Rangers sneakers. Eureka had skinned knees and a gap between her front teeth. She’d been shredding her way through the endless smocked dresses Diana kept pulling from the attic.

It happened on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe it explained why Sundays always made Eureka lonely. Brooks had been playing with the lyrics of her favorite Tom T. Hall song, “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” Eureka had been trying to harmonize with him. She’d grown annoyed with his improvisations and shoved him. He’d lost his balance, tumbled backward. One minute he was singing with her, and the next—

She’d tried to catch him. He fell for an eternity, his brown eyes locked on hers. His face grew smaller; his limbs stilled. He landed on his back, roughly, his left leg twisted beneath him.

Eureka still heard her scream in her mind. She’d leapt from the branch to the ground. She’d knelt beside him on skinned knees. First, she’d tried to pry his eyelids open, because Brooks’s smile was mostly in his eyes and she needed to see it. She’d said his name.

When he didn’t stir or answer, she prayed.

Hail Mary, full of grace …

She said it over and over, till the words were tangled and held no meaning. Then she remembered something she’d seen on TV. She pressed her mouth against his …

Brooks’s arms encircled her and he kissed her, long and deep. His gleeful eyes popped open. “Gotcha.”

She slapped him.

“Why did you do that?” She wiped her lips on the back of her hand, studied the shine their kiss made below her knuckles.

Brooks rubbed his cheek. “So you’d know I wasn’t mad at you.”

“Maybe now I’m mad at you.”

“Maybe you’re not.” He grinned.

In those days, it was impossible to stay mad at Brooks. He’d limped back to the tree, and as he’d ascended its branches, he’d sung new, worse lyrics to the song:

They never talked about the kiss again.

Now, on the foreign forest floor, Eureka buried her face in his chest. His body seemed at peace. She wondered whether Atlas had finally gone away and left behind the body of her best friend.