Waterfall (33 page)

Though she couldn’t see beyond the birds, Eureka was gripped by the sudden premonition that Ander was inside the cage. She imagined the lightning cloak enfolding him, scrambling his mind with torturous memories, stripping his sadness of meaning. Her heart raced the way it had the first time they kissed.

The cage landed with a boom on the stage. Atlas clapped his hands three times. The birds scattered into the night. Inside the cage—

Stood Filiz.

“Well?” Atlas asked Eureka, his arms spread wide as if to receive her enormous gratitude. “My Devils picked her up along the inner moat this morning. We have all sorts of ways to torture trespassers, but I said, ‘No, no, she must be a friend of Eureka’s.’ ” He turned toward the crowd and yelled, “And any friend of Eureka’s is a friend of mine!”

Filiz’s hands were stuffed in the pockets of her tight black
jeans. Her cheek was badly bruised, her T-shirt torn down the middle. Her chin was low, and her red hair hadn’t been washed in many miles. Her eyes rose slowly. No words found Eureka.

“I’m having trouble reading you, darling.” Atlas laughed for the audience’s benefit. “Is this what gratitude looks like in the so-called Waking World? Here I stage a beautiful reunion between you and your loved one, whoever she is. She followed you all the way here, so she’s clearly devoted. She has the most refined taste in hair color imaginable”—he waited for the crowd’s laughter to rise and fall—“and yet you look upon her as if she were offal. Has Delphine hardened you so much already?”

Eureka moved toward the cage. “How did you get here?”

If Filiz was in Atlantis, maybe Eureka’s loved ones were, too. No one should care enough about Eureka to follow her here, but she knew they did. Did Atlas have them imprisoned, too?

“Speak up, girl,” Atlas said. “We’d all like to know.”

Filiz swallowed, adjusted her black choker necklace. “My grandmother told tales of the Atlantean mountains where the gossipwitches live.” She spoke Atlantean, too. “Her grandmother told her that her grandmother told her”—she paused, swallowed, gazed into Eureka’s eyes—“that whoever visited those mountains would find the answer to life’s greatest question.”

“The Gossipwitch Mountains?” Atlas scoffed. “How
stupidly rumors warp over millennia! Those mountains are for the unclean and undesired. Forget the wisdom of your ignorant elders. You are fortunate to have trespassed upon civilization.”

“I can see that now.” Filiz’s gaze bored into Eureka, who raised her eyebrows as if to ask,
Are they here?
Filiz nodded subtly and looked toward the mountains.

“Open the cage,” Eureka demanded.

“Your tears will unlock her cage.”

Eureka would never cry to save Filiz. Filiz knew it. Didn’t Atlas?

Again Eureka recalled Delphine’s words that Atlas’s heart wasn’t tuned for love. In fact, he seemed to completely misapprehend it. He couldn’t see what others saw so clearly. Atlas thought love was his subjects’ affected adoration.

A flash of self-consciousness crossed his face as Eureka studied him. He drew a torch from its holder at the edge of the stage. The gossipwitches’ amethysts glowed at the base of its flame. Atlas thrust the torch inside the cage. Filiz screamed as tendrils of flame found her skin.

Atlas withdrew the torch and looked at Eureka. He tipped the flame. “Again?”

“Oh, how I wish I were in the mountains my elders spoke of,” Filiz said, rubbing the burnt places on her arms, staring hard at Eureka.

Could she trust Filiz? The two of them shared a murderous recent history. Was this a trick?

“If you like being burned, please continue discussing the mountains.” Atlas lifted the torch, preparing to strike Filiz again. Eureka stepped between them.

She slapped the torch from Atlas’s hand and shoved him. He stumbled across the stage. After he righted himself, he glanced quickly at the audience and forced a laugh. “So feisty!”

Buoyed by laughter in the crowd, Atlas grinned and picked up the torch. This time, as he approached, Filiz snapped her fingers, igniting a flame in her hand twice as tall as the one Atlas held.

“Was she not searched for fire starters?” Atlas roared at his Devils.

Before the Devils could answer, Filiz hurled her fireball at Alas. Eureka grabbed Atlas by his hair and made him duck. If the fire grazed him, Filiz would die.

The fireball flew into the crowd and landed on a man’s blue fur coat. Atlas reached through the bars of the cage and grabbed Filiz by the neck.

“I’ll do it!” Eureka shouted. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll cry.”

“Eureka,” Filiz warned.

An approving roar sounded from the crowd. Atlas watched them for a moment, then released Filiz. He straightened, smiled, and nodded behind him. Two Devils approached Eureka. One of them handed her a lachrymatory made of silver, woven with blond human hair. Eureka thought of Aida, whom Delphine’s pain had killed.

“Not here,” Eureka said to Atlas as she took the lachrymatory.

“But, darling, they have come for the show,” Atlas said.

“I’m not an actor. What I feel is real.”

“Of course.” Atlas masked his disappointment. “Give her every comfort she desires,” he announced before the crowd, then lowered his voice for the Devils. “I don’t care what you have to do. Fill the vial by sunrise.”

E
ureka had to reach the mountains.

Filiz had given her a signal: answers awaited her in the gossipwitches’ lair. At least, Eureka
thought
that was the signal. Maybe Filiz had been lying. Maybe Eureka was taking a hint that hadn’t been dropped.

It didn’t matter. Getting to the mountains was the only plan she had.

Once she got there, she might have to face four people she had loved and left behind. It would eat up essential energy. But Eureka had become skilled at shutting down her heart. She would take what she needed from the witches, then move on.

First, she would have to lose the Devils ushering her
through the coral tunnel. Six of them, armed with orichalcum billy clubs and crossbows tucked into sheaths sewn into the back of their crimson dresses. These girls were stronger than they looked. Their biceps flexed; veins protruded from their forearms. If they returned her to Atlas’s castle, it meant the lightning cloak for Eureka.

“She’s dragging,” one murmured. “Trying to slow us down.”

“Hurry up.” Another girl gripped Eureka’s neck and jerked her to the side.

Red coral stung the center of Eureka’s brain. She hadn’t seen the wall coming.

One of the Devils made a retching noise, and Eureka watched as the girl wiped blood off her hand. Eureka understood, dimly, that the blood was her own.

Something told Eureka to jerk her upper body toward the girl, who responded with a practiced block that sent Eureka to the ground. The Devils were trained for combat.

Eureka spat blood. The girl’s feet inched away from where it landed.

Two Devils lifted Eureka under her arms. They walked her through the tunnel, farther from the mountains. Eureka wondered about the depth of their combat experience. They’d been frozen beneath the ocean for many thousands of years in a realm where no one aged or died. What cause could they have fought for, what enemy could they have killed? What could these girls know about loss? Eureka wanted to teach them.

She remembered Delphine’s lips on Aida’s cheek. Pain seeking pain in the astral light. Pain was power, Delphine had said.

“I need to rest,” Eureka said.

“Don’t respond,” a brunette Devil said.

“Water.” Eureka reached for a red leather canteen around the girl’s waist. “Please.”

“Atlas said she’d trick us.”

“A dehydrated person can’t cry,” Eureka said. “If you want to keep your job, give me a drink.”

She’d made them nervous. As the brunette slowly unscrewed her canteen’s lid, Eureka dipped toward the other, a slender blond girl wearing blue-tinted glasses.

Eureka didn’t know what she was doing. She thought about Delphine and her broken heart. She thought about Diana and the wave that broke her body. She thought about her own agony flowing across every day that followed. She kissed the blond girl’s cheek.

Zzzzt.

Sharp pain filled Eureka’s body as a vision filled her mind: A younger version of the blond girl was being dragged across the threshold of a house by older, laughing Crimson Devils. Before she could say goodbye to her family, the girl was flung into the back of a silver wagon. Eureka heard a door slam and saw darkness and felt sobs.

Back in the tunnel, the blond girl screamed, and Eureka screamed, and it lasted only a moment, but when Eureka’s
vision cleared she saw the Devil on the floor, convulsing, dying.

Eureka’s pain subsided slowly, like a temper. She spent an instant admiring Delphine for silently enduring this agony when she’d killed Aida. Eureka was dizzy and wanted to vomit.

The canteen fell to the ground. The brunette Devil glanced between Eureka and her convulsing friend. She took a step backward.

“You’re next,” Eureka said.

She paused, fearing the pain killing the second guard would cause.

Thwack.

Stars exploded before Eureka’s eyes as an orichalcum club hit the back of her shoulders. Eureka spun around, her lips homing in on her attacker. She shoved another Devil aside—and froze.

It was happening again. Her hands barely touched the girl—she was only trying to move the Devil out of her way—but the pain came, and then another vision. A wall of fire. A baby screaming on the other side of it. Then Eureka was in the mind of the Crimson Devil as a young girl, the moment she gave up on saving her baby sister, the moment she turned away and ran from the blaze into the night.

The girl in her hands dropped to the ground. Eureka’s hands groped for another. It didn’t need to be a kiss. When
she was enraged, all of her skin could kill. She was her own lightning cloak.

The club struck her spine. She howled and grabbed behind her, finding flesh. New pain. New visions. A boy and a girl kissing, hotly, madly, breathing fast. Eureka didn’t recognize either of them, but she felt the pain of heartbreak and betrayal on behalf of the girl in her grip. She heard the club hit the ground, and then felt the girl slide, lifeless, from her hands.

Her arms flailed again, this time grabbing two Devils at once. Her vision hadn’t cleared enough for her to see them, but Eureka could feel them writhing and, more keenly, she could feel the wild telescoping of their deepest agonies:

Fat. Dull. Worthless.
A mother’s voice branded one girl’s heart.

And then a different mother, lying dead in a cold room, tiny embers of a fire remaining in the hearth. Blood all over the sheets. All over the Crimson Devil sobbing at the woman’s side.

Eureka reached for more flesh, more pain. A bottomless hunger for agony grew inside her. Her vision cleared. She was grasping at air, alone in the coral tunnel. Crimson dresses fanned around her feet. Had she killed them all so quickly? One, two, three, four, five—

“Don’t move,” a voice behind her called.

Eureka turned and something blade-sharp bit her gut.

Wetness. Heat spooling through the fingers clutching
her stomach. Everything red. An orichalcum arrow lodged in her flesh. She grimaced and yanked it out. Green vapors swirled from her open wound. The glowing arrow was artemisia-tipped.

The remaining Devil stood twenty feet away, her crossbow resting on her shoulder. As Eureka stumbled toward her, she loaded another arrow, aimed shakily, and fired. A green flash bloomed through the tunnel.

Eureka ducked. Or maybe she fell. She was on her knees. Breath was impossible, a knife slicing organs. She saw an orichalcum club lying on the floor and thought of the organs and blood and bones mined to build it. She thought of those ghosts trapped in the Filling. Adrenaline rushed through her. She crawled on her knees and reached a hand around the Devil’s ankle.

The pain of the arrow wound tripled as the essence of Eureka’s agony flowed into the girl and the girl’s agony flowed into her. This time the vision was of a dappled silver horse, stolen from the girl’s family by the gossipwitches.

Eureka got up slowly. Artemisia clouded her mind. She took limited, shallow breaths, hardly enough to sustain her as she moved through the tunnel, away from the castle, away from the fantasy of guilt.

Nothing was real but her pain. When she exited the coral tunnel on the sand dune, she didn’t believe it. She watched her fingers unbutton her shirt, her hands tie it around her chest to stanch her wound.

The moon looked like her mother’s face. The roiling ocean sounded like her father cooking in the kitchen. But her father never sang when he cooked. What did she hear? It was so familiar.

Music from Delphine’s waveshop boomed in Eureka’s ears. Her other mother. Mother murder.

Brooks was in there. She wanted to go to him. No. She spat on the sand, disgusted with herself. She turned toward the purple Gossipwitch Mountains. The only way to release Brooks was to win.

She remembered the gossipwitch salve that had healed her once before. One foot in front of the other. Up the slope. Tripping over rocks. Trail of blood behind her. Clouds over the moon. The tide of pain was high.