Waterfall (36 page)

“Aaughh!”

Her mind screamed, using someone else’s voice. She struggled to recognize the sound: Atlas’s lips. Eureka’s emotion.

The dagger had worked.

She tried to keep her thoughts still. They were all she had left of herself and they were in peril. Slowly, she allowed one in.…

Face him.
But as soon as Eureka thought it, she lost the ability to concentrate. Her mind had known deep pain before—shame, grief, desolation—all incomparable to this. The reef inside Atlas murdered thought, slicing it into unrecognizable shards the way a dead reef she’d once snorkeled over in Florida had sliced the flesh of her thighs.
Face him
had been removed from Eureka’s consciousness, an urge she’d never considered.

Somehow she knew she had to ascend the bladelike reefs. Without a body, she would have to think her way up—but
how? When thoughts died on this reef, she wouldn’t get them back.

This was what trapped Brooks,
she thought. Then that thought met the reef with a deadly, thunderous boom. It was mutilated, lost, and Eureka could remember nothing for a long while.

Slowly, painfully, an idea came into focus: for much of Eureka’s life, she had loathed herself. No shrink had ever found the pill to change the fact that her heart was a tank full of hate. Finally, it might do her some good.

I can’t,
she thought with purpose—an experiment.

When that rush of negativity left her mind and was shredded upon the coral, Eureka forgot a portion of her heavy fear. She had sacrificed it to the reef. She sensed herself moving higher inside Atlas.

Selfish.

Hypersensitive.

Suicidal.

One by one she acknowledged her deepest doubts and hesitations. One by one they left her, crashed upon the reef, and were destroyed. The dark echo of
Suicidal
’s death rang in her mind as she rose toward the surface of Atlas’s inner sea.

There is no way out.
Someone she used to love had told her that. She couldn’t remember who. Then the reefs slaughtered
the sentiment, so it didn’t matter anyway. Her mind climbed the last barbed branches of coral, amputating one last long-held fear like a useless limb.

Joy is impossible.…

Suddenly she saw through Atlas’s eyes. It was like her mind had fired across the synapse that connected thought to sight. It reminded Eureka of looking through the peephole in a hotel room door. She saw the red inner rims of his eyes framing a world painted different colors than the ones she used to see. The greens were saturated, the blues profound, the reds pulsing and magnetic. Her new vision was strong. She saw every scale of each darting fish. She watched an elderly gossipwitch ascend a distant mountain peak, and admired every golden fold of her jowls.

She stood waist-deep in the water and took a moment to inspect her new body, her taut thighs and the foreign flesh between them. She touched the muscles on her smooth, bare chest, the stubble growing on her cheeks. She made both of her biceps bulge. She yearned for someone to fight. With Atlas’s camouflage she was liberated in a new way. She could be as ruthless as she’d always needed to be.

She scanned the beach. A turquoise palm tree swayed in the wind. She felt an irresistible urge to unbuckle Atlas’s belt and pee on that tree. She laughed at the dumb cockiness of the idea when she still had so much to accomplish, such important tears to make him shed. And then she did pee,
right there in the ocean, because she was inside a boy’s body and it was insane. She slipped her pants down, freeing the most thrilling part of Atlas, and let go. She lifted each of her legs. She swiveled her hips. She made an arch in the shape of a rainbow.

When she was finished, she probed her back, touching the wounds she’d dug. They were numb. The coral dagger still protruded from Atlas’s flesh. She pulled it out. Her new mouth screamed, but that was Atlas’s reflex, his suffering, not hers.

“You’re out of your depth,” the lips of her new body said. It was Atlas speaking.

Her eyes went blurry, then her view of the beach was torn from her as her mind flowed backward onto the sharp dead coral below.

“Still want my tears?” she tried to say, but the words slurred, incoherent, from Atlas’s lips. Moving his limbs was easier; she didn’t know how to make Atlas’s body talk convincingly. Yet.

What if he’s right?
Eureka gave that anxiety to the reef, using it to thrust her mind forward, crowding Atlas’s dark, furious thoughts—
destroy her … punish her … how?
—until she forced her mind behind his eyes, and sensed his desires falling beneath hers. She hoped they shattered on the reef.

A corpse floated before her.

It took a moment to recognize it as her own.

She used to be the girl who looked like that. Moments ago, she’d had long, ombré hair, a bloody nose, skinny arms, and muscular legs. She’d had a beating, aching heart even though she’d tried to deny it. She checked her old body’s pulse with Atlas’s fingers. Nothing.

She had done it. Eureka Boudreaux had discarded herself. Her old blue eyes were open. They were the color of her father’s eyes and their point of view wasn’t hers anymore.

Eureka realized that even at her most extremely suicidal, she had never wanted to die. She had really wanted
this,
escape from a fixed identity, the chance to be many things at once—a bitch, a nymph, an artist, an angel, a saint, a strip-mall security guard, a tyrant, a boy. She had wanted to be loosed from the narrow way her world defined “Eureka Boudreaux.” She had wanted to be free.

Her vision blurred. Atlas’s desperation layered over hers. The mind that had possessed a thousand other bodies didn’t know how to rid itself of one possessing his. His hands grabbed her corpse. He took his fury out on it.

His fingers tore her throat, ripped her skin apart, tore into the cartilage of her neck. His fists rained down on her brittle ribs, cracking what the witches’ salve had half mended. Eureka didn’t stop him; she knew nothing would bring her body back. She relaxed into his rage, curious when and how he would exhaust himself.

She’d been wrong to think he had no feelings. When
Atlas’s emotions erupted, they ruled him, the way falling in love with Ander had ruled Eureka. He knew rage but not its opposite. Eureka would guide him so deeply into joy that it would kill him—and, she hoped, raise the souls inside the Filling to a higher place.

But first she had to say one last goodbye.

E
ureka swam toward the waveshop as a king.

Every few seconds her vision blurred, and the ocean reeled with Atlas’s rage. The only way she kept his thoughts at bay and her own thoughts above the reef was to focus on reaching Delphine. Soon Eureka could hold Atlas’s mind off for a full minute. Then for three.

She came up for air, treaded water. She practiced making words coherent. “I’m almost through with you,” she said.

She scanned the beach. The Gossipwitch Mountains loomed ahead. She thought she would have made it closer to Delphine, but she didn’t see the suspended wave. She flung Atlas’s foot over a sandbar and stood up, chest-deep in the ocean.

Lightning struck the water twenty feet ahead. But the sky above was clear. Something golden bobbed in the waves. Whatever it was had caused that lightning. Eureka swam toward it and discovered Delphine’s loom.

She trained Atlas’s remarkable vision on the beach. The naked body of a boy lay on the sand. Was it Brooks? No. The boy’s skin was silver—a ghost robot. She waded forward, dragging Atlas’s gaze across another robot, also sprawled upon the shore, perpendicular to the first. Soon she’d counted more robots. Seven of them were splayed, motionless, across the shore. Their bodies had been purposefully positioned, limbs extended at odd angles, to collectively create a design.

Or rather, each body had been stretched to form a letter. The ghost robots spelled a word.

Even if Eureka had never seen the labyrinthine written language of Atlantis on the pages of
The Book of Love,
her Tearline intuition would have decoded the message in the sand. The word was missing its last letter, but she was able to grasp its meaning.

The transliteration sounded something like
Eur-ee-ka.

It was Atlantean for
joy.

Atlas roared, and Eureka felt her consciousness shoved backward within him. She saw only white and knew she was soon bound again for the coral as Atlas screamed, “Delphine!”

Eureka willed her mind forward to the place from which she could manipulate Atlas’s body. She focused on ramming
his fist into the center of his face. When she succeeded, she felt no pain but knew he did from the way his thoughts faded and her vision of the beach returned.

“Don’t make me hurt you again.” Her words in his throat sounded clearer, expressing the perverse flirtation she’d intended.

Movement at the crest of a sand dune—near the palm grove Atlas’s vision painted turquoise—caught Eureka’s attention. One ghost robot chased another. Their bodies were identical, but the pursuing robot was special: Ovid wore Solon’s features as it lunged to grab the legs of the other robot and brought it down upon the sand.

Solon was the inscriber of the message in the sand. He’d withheld the meaning of her namesake until now, when she could use it. Did it mean he still believed in her?

The other robot struggled, then straddled Ovid’s chest and wrestled its arms into surrender. Its fingers searched the sand and found a heavy rock. Eureka held Atlas’s breath as the robot bashed the boulder into Ovid’s head.

Sparks flew. Eureka couldn’t see Ovid’s face crushed beneath the stone; it was wedged deep into wet sand. She didn’t know if ghost robots died, but she could see that Ovid would never rise again.

As the victor rose from the orichalcum carnage, Ovid’s arm glided toward its opponent’s face and touched its cheek, a gentle caress. Then it jabbed two fingers under the robot’s
jaw and twisted them into the infinity-shaped keyhole Eureka knew marked its neck. The ghost robot keeled over onto Ovid’s chest, as if in an embrace. Neither of them moved again.

“Delphine!” Atlas’s mouth shouted. “She will betray you—”

To quiet him, Eureka slashed Atlas’s cheek with the coral dagger.

At the far end of the beach, where the waveshop had once been, Delphine lay on her back. Waves lapped her long hair. Brooks straddled her, a shocking, erotic pose that sent jealousy surging through a fault between Eureka’s and Atlas’s minds.

But something separated Brooks’s and Delphine’s bodies. Eureka had to get closer to see what it was. She dove back into the ocean, drawing all of Atlas’s speed as she swam.

“Delphine!” Atlas shouted as soon as Eureka surfaced.

Her dagger slashed his other cheek. Blood rained upon the water.

At the sound of Atlas’s voice, Brooks lifted his gaze. His eyes darkened with a hatred Eureka reminded herself was not meant for her.

Brooks had pinned Delphine to the beach beneath the same waterfall that had once imprisoned him in her waveshop.

“Where is Eureka?” Brooks and Delphine asked in unison.