Waterfall (29 page)

She raised her head and studied the galaxy of freckles on Brooks’s cheeks. She brushed hair from his eyes. She felt the scar of his wound. His skin was warm. Were his lips?

She kissed him lightly, hoping like a little girl to revive him, hoping like a little girl to pretend.

She might keep her lips against his forever, penance for
having been stupid enough to leave with Atlas, stupid enough to drag Brooks’s body here, stupid enough to abandon everyone else she loved.

He stirred.

“Brooks?” She gulped and said, “Atlas?”

His eyes were closed. He didn’t seem to be conscious—but she had felt something shift. She studied him. His chest was still, his eyelids motionless.

There it was again.

Eureka’s fingers vibrated where they touched his shoulders. A gale swept over Brooks. A warm, buzzy feeling spread to her arms, the back of her neck. She pulled her hands from Brooks’s shoulders as an incandescence rose from his chest and hovered above his body.

Whose essence was this—Brooks’s or Atlas’s? Both of them had shared the body, like the ghost sharing Ovid. Eureka couldn’t see the essence so much as she could sense it. She passed a trembling hand through it.

Cold.

Footsteps sounded on dewy grass. A boy about her age stood over her. She’d never seen him before, yet he was familiar.

Of course—she had seen him depicted in the illustrations of
The Book of Love.

Atlas wasn’t handsome, but there was something alluring about him. His smile was assured. He wore brilliant, finely tailored clothing in shapes and pieces Eureka didn’t have
words to describe. They glittered gold and red, as if made of rubies. His reddish-brown hair was curly and wild. His fair skin was lightly freckled, and his eyes were soft copper—but haunted, vacant. They looked past her, into a distance only they could see.

She stood up and matched his height. He’d been with her for so long, but this was the first moment they’d met.

“Atlas.”

He didn’t even look at her.

The incandescence above Brooks’s body swirled toward the boy, and she knew it had not been her best friend’s soul. It was Atlas, discarding Brooks’s body in order to reclaim his own. But where was Brooks’s soul? Atlas closed his eyes and absorbed the incandescence into his chest.

After a moment, when he opened his eyes, they had changed into a deep, penetrating brown, like the center of a redwood tree—far different from the irises he’d had before. Eureka knew she was standing before the most powerful person she had ever met.

She knelt beside Brooks again. His chest was no longer warm. What would happen if she wept now? Could her tears reflood Atlantis and send all of them back underwater? What would happen to the wasted dead?

Atlas tilted his head. “Save your tears.”

His voice was rich and deep and strangely accented. Eureka understood him—and she understood he wasn’t speaking English. He knelt over Brooks, too.

“I didn’t know he was handsome. I can never tell if the inside matches the outside. You know what I mean.”

“Don’t talk about Brooks,” she said. She wasn’t speaking English, either. Intuition for the distant language must flow through her Tearline. The Atlantean tongue rolled fluidly from her, with the tiniest breath of translation in her mind.

“I don’t believe we’ve properly met. My name is—”

“I know who you are.”

“And I know who you are, but introductions aren’t simply polite, they are law in my country, my world.” He took her hand and helped her rise. “You must be my friend, Eureka. Only I am allowed enemies.”

“We’ll never be friends. You murdered the best one I had.”

Atlas’s lips turned downward as he glanced briefly at Brooks. “Do you know why I did it?”

“He was just a vessel to you,” she said, “a way to get what you wanted.”

“And what do I want?” Atlas stared into her eyes and waited.

“I know about the Filling.”

“Forget the Filling. I want you.”

“You want my tears.”

“I will admit it,” Atlas said. “At first you were just another Tearline girl to me. But then I got to know you. You’re really very fascinating. What a strange, dark, and twisted heart you have. And what a face! Contrasts beguile me. The more time I spent inside that body”—he sighed, nodded at Brooks—“the
more I relished being near you. Then you disappeared with …”

“Ander,” Eureka said.

“
Never
say that name in my kingdom!” Atlas shouted.

“Because of Leander,” Eureka murmured. “Your brother who stole—”

Atlas grabbed Eureka’s throat. “
Everything from me.
Understand?” His grip loosened. He composed himself with a breath. “He is flushed from both our lives now. We will not think of him again.”

Eureka looked away. She would try not to think of Ander. It would make her mission easier, even though it was impossible.

“When you were gone,” Atlas said, “the ghost of your beauty haunted me.”

“You want one thing from me—”

“I want always to be near you. And I get what I want.”

“You haven’t gotten what you wanted in a long time.”

“I didn’t have to bring you here,” Atlas said. “I saw your tears fill the lachrymatory. I could have taken it and left you rotting in those mountains. Think about that.” He paused and gazed into the treetops thousands of feet above. “We were getting on so well,” he whispered in her no-longer-bad ear. “Remember our kiss? I knew you knew it was me all along, just as I imagine you knew I knew you knew. Neither one of us is dumb, so why don’t we stop pretending?”

He reached for her with a warm, strong hand. Eureka whipped away, mind whirring. She needed to resume pretending,
to never stop, if she was going to survive. She had to trick him and she didn’t know how.

“Are you wishing you had shot me when you had the chance?” Atlas asked, grinning. “Don’t worry, there will be yet more chances for you to end my life—and to prove your love by sparing it.”

“Give me the gun and I’ll disprove it now,” she said. “You know why I didn’t shoot.”

“Oh yes.” Atlas gestured toward Brooks. “Because of this corpse.”

The trees beyond Atlas rustled as ten girls in thigh-high boots and short red dresses with orichalcum breastplates stepped out from behind them. Their helmets shifted colors in the sun and hid their faces.

“Hello, girls,” Atlas said, and turned to Eureka. “My Crimson Devils. They will see to your every need.”

“Her bed is ready,” one of the girls said.

“Take her to it.”

“Brooks!” Eureka reached for his dead body.

“You loved him,” Atlas said. “You really loved him best of all. I know it. But you shall love again. Better, stronger”—he caressed Eureka’s cheek—“deeper. As only a girl can do.”

“What should we do with the body?” one of the girls asked, nudging Brooks’s chest with her boot.

Atlas thought a moment. “Have my ostriches had breakfast?”

Eureka tried to scream, but a harness fell over her face. A
metal bar snapped between her teeth. Someone tightened the harness from behind as green artemisia vapor swirled before her eyes.

Just before she lost consciousness, Atlas held her close. “I’m glad you’re here, Eureka. Now everything can begin.”

E
ureka awoke chained to a bed.

Her
bed.

Four cherrywood bedposts rose above her on the antique queen she’d slept in before she cried. The thrift-store rocking chair swaying in the corner used to be her favorite homework spot. An Evangeline-green sweatshirt hung over its arm. Eureka’s eyes throbbed from the haze of artemisia as her blurry reflection came into focus in her grandmother’s old mirrored chest of drawers across from the bed.

Wide metal cuffs bound her wrists to the upper corners of the bed, her ankles to the lower corners, and her waist across the center. When she tried to jerk free, something sharp cut into her palms and the tops of her feet. The cuffs were
barbed with spikes. Blood pooled over the cuff on her right wrist, then trickled down her arm.

“How does it work?” A husky voice startled her.

A teenage girl stood at her bedside, bent over Eureka’s left hand like a manicurist. A laurel wreath adorned her amber hair. Her crimson dress plunged into a deep V ending just below her tattooed navel. She wore Eureka’s crystal teardrop necklace.

“Give me back my necklace.” The strange Atlantean words hurt as they left Eureka’s parched throat. She tried to kick the girl with her knees. Metal spikes bit her waist. Blood bloomed through her shirt.

A snicker came from Eureka’s other side. Another girl in another crimson dress. Her laurel wreath capped a smooth black bob, and her cold aquamarine eyes were focused on Eureka’s right hand.

Crimson Devils, Atlas had called his guards.

“Where’s Atlas?” Eureka said.
Where is Brooks’s corpse?
she wanted to ask. She was used to the idea that the two boys occupied the same body. But she had watched her friend die, and only the enemy remained. A raging desire to kill Atlas flooded her.

“Watch,” the second girl told the first.

Eureka felt a sting of heat, like the girl was injecting her fingertips with hot glue. A shimmery blue substance coated her fingers. Eureka touched the pad of her thumb to her
forefinger and a jolt zipped through her, like the time she’d stuck her finger in an outlet when she was six.

“Don’t.” The dark-haired girl pried Eureka’s fingers apart, smoothing more blue over Eureka’s thumb. “It’s going to hurt, but by sunrise, we’ll have everything we ever wanted. He promised. Didn’t he promise, Aida?”

“We’re not to talk to her, Gem,” Aida said.

“Sunrise.” Eureka repeated the four-syllable Atlantean word. She tried to turn her head toward the window to gauge the time, but a crimson dress blocked her view.

“If he learns you were talking to his—”

“He won’t.” Gem glared at her companion.

“Then stop talking to her.” Aida turned toward a desk on the left side of the room, which stood precisely where Eureka’s identical desk stood back home.

“I want to see Atlas.” Eureka squirmed against her bonds.

What was happening at sunrise? How could she destroy these girls and free herself before then? She closed her eyes and channeled the Incredible Hulk, master of transforming rage into strength. She willed the mirrored chest of drawers to become a thousand whirling glass daggers, slicing flesh, splashing crimson onto crimson. But then what? How would she find Atlas?

In Lafayette, escape had been her bedroom window, then the arms of the oak tree just beyond it. But when Gem shifted and Eureka could see out the window, no oak tree reached for her. Sun shone in. The light felt tired, evening’s last rays.

They were very high up, a thousand stories above the ground. Gold and silver rooftops shimmered distantly below, and beyond them rings of water and land led to the ocean, which flowed into a horizon at the edge of whatever was left of the world.

“Tell me what happens at sunrise,” Eureka said.

Gem was next to Aida at the desk. “Let me do the heartplate.”

As Gem reached across the surface of the desk something strange happened to her hand. It blurred, like it had passed behind a pane of frosted glass. The blurring lasted only a moment. Gem’s hand sharpened again and she was holding a silky piece of material, the same shimmery blue as whatever was on Eureka’s fingers. Eureka thought she saw a lightning bolt flash across its center.

“Unbutton her shirt,” Gem said.

Cold air braced Eureka’s skin as Aida’s fingers worked their way down her shirt. Then a feeling like nostalgia settled over her as the blue square was laid across her chest. Warm and heavy, it reminded Eureka of how she felt watching videos of Diana on her laptop.

Her breath came shallowly as Gem smoothed the heartplate over her chest. Aida ran a finger from Eureka’s right temple, across her forehead, to her left temple, and Eureka understood that while she had been unconscious, the girls had affixed a band of the blue substance to her head.

“The ghostsmith counsels subjects before charging the cloak,” Gem said.

“You’ve never met the ghostsmith,” Aida said. “Besides, this is for Atlas. No wasting time. He wants the lachrymatories filled.” She applied pressure to the inside corners of Eureka’s eyes. Two blurry silver outlines fixed just below Eureka’s vision. The lachrymatories. She was supposed to cry into them.

“It won’t work,” Eureka said.

“It always works,” Gem said. She moved to the wall, where Eureka’s painting of the weeping Saint Catherine of Siena hung in a cobwebbed corner. She flipped a switch Eureka couldn’t see.

Pain crashed into Eureka. She was engulfed by absolute darkness. She arched her back. She tasted blood. The pain doubled, then redoubled.

When the pain was total and familiar, bright points of light entered her vision, meteors showering the sky of her eyelids. One point of light drew closer. Burning heat filled her pores. Then Eureka was inside the light.

She saw a faded floral-print suitcase by a door. Lamplight flickered somewhere. Her nostrils flared at the odor of broken pickle jars—that scent always brought her back to the night her parents split up. She saw Diana’s feet in their gray and pink galoshes, her hair wet with rain, her eyes dry with determination. The front door opened. Thunder outside was so real it rattled Eureka’s bones. The suitcase was in Diana’s hand.