Waterfall (6 page)

“Stay here with Cat. Look after Dad. We won’t be long.”

Her eyes met Cat’s. She felt awful for leaving.

“What?” Cat asked.

“If I hadn’t been so angry and depressed,” Eureka said, “if I’d been one of those happy people in the hall, do you think my tears would have done this?”

“If you’d been one of those happy people in the hall,” Cat said, “you wouldn’t be you. I need you to be you. Your dad needs you to be you. If Ander’s right, and you’re the only one who can stop this flood, the whole world needs you to be you.”

Eureka swallowed. “Thanks.”

Cat nodded toward the stony hills. “So go on with your bad self.”

Ander’s hand found its way into Eureka’s. She squeezed and started walking inland, hoping Cat was right and wondering how much there was left of the world to save.

E
ureka and Ander followed a swollen stream through a shallow valley and into a world of soft white stone. They crossed a forest of rocky cones flanked by table mountains. They held hands as cacti bordering the stream reached out with needles inches long and sharp enough to tear away the skin.

Eureka worried about the cacti weathering the salt in the rain. She imagined her favorite plants around the world—orchids in Hawaii, olive groves in Greece, orange trees in Key West, birds-of-paradise in California, and the comforting labyrinths of live oak branches back home on the bayou—their fibers parched and shriveled, disintegrating into salt. She squinted to make the cactus needles appear longer, thicker, sharper, and imagined them fighting back.

Her mud-obscured running shoes reminded Eureka of the photos her teammates used to post after cross-country practice in stormy weather. Brown and gray points of pride. She wondered whether anyone would enjoy a rainy run ever again. Had she robbed the rain of its beauty?

They came around a bend where the steel-blue bay was visible below. There was the rock where they’d made landfall and the tall triangular boulder behind which Cat and her family crouched in front of Ander’s fire, hanging on. The boulder looked tiny. They had traveled farther than she had thought. It made her nervous to be so far away.

She looked beyond the boulder, at the ocean spreading around them in cloudy light. Slowly, a more regular geometry emerged. Man-made shapes sagged in the deluge. Rooftops. The ghost of the city that had been washed away.

She imagined people beneath those roofs, drowned in her pain. She had floated underneath her devastation in the thunderstone shield, but now Eureka saw it. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to disintegrate in the rain. She wanted to make everything right, right now.

“You know,” Ander said, “you’re going to make things better.”

Eureka tried to let his support make her stronger, like a buttress on a cathedral, but she wondered from where Ander drew his faith in her. He seemed to truly believe that she could fix things, but was it simply because he liked her—or was
there more to it? He kept saying Solon would answer all their questions … if they ever found him.

The path widened into two forked trails. An instinct she couldn’t explain told her to go left. “Which way?” she asked Ander.

He pivoted right. “We go east. Or—north? We need to go up into the mountains so I can see more clearly where we are.”

Ander had seemed so confident a moment before, when he was believing in her. “Do you have a map?” she asked.

He stopped walking and faced Eureka with such sad eyes that she took his hand. She marveled at the way it fit in hers, like no one else’s ever had. He looked down and caressed her fingertips.

“I see,” she said. “No map.”

“The map is in my memory, drawn with lines muttered by my aunts and uncles when I was very young. I don’t know why I memorized their words, maybe because talk of the lost Seedbearer sounded strange and romantic, and there was so little excitement in my life.”

Eureka dropped his hand. She imagined Cat’s reaction upon learning Ander had led them to the other side of the world based on an imaginary map. She didn’t want to blame Ander. They were here now. They needed to support each other. But she couldn’t help thinking about the way that Brooks, though he couldn’t read a map even if you held a gun to his head, always wound up in the right place. He’d wound up in her imagination
earlier, skimming dark water with his arms. What shore had he landed on when she’d blinked and made him disappear?

Ander chose the path’s steep right fork. “Solon made plans before he escaped. He was headed for a cave in western Turkey, which he called the Bitter Cloud.”

The path widened. Eureka sped into a jog. Her right wrist throbbed with every impact of her shoes against the earth, but running lent something familiar to the alien landscape. Her body found a gear she understood.

Ander kept up. When he glanced at her, an agreement flashed between them. They began to race. Eureka pumped her legs. Wind whistled at her back. The salt in the rain stung her eyes and the pain in her wrist was excruciating, but the faster she ran, the less she felt it.

She didn’t think she could ever slow down. They were lost and she knew it, entering a tight passage only a few feet wide, bordered on either side by sharply sloping stone. It was like running through a very narrow hallway in the dark. Every step carried them deeper into goneness, but Eureka had to run until this burning was out of her system, until this fever had subsided. Sometime, later, they would catch their breath and figure out what to do.

“Eureka!”

Ander stopped ahead of her. She skidded into his back. Her cheekbone slammed into his shoulder blade. She felt his muscles stiffen, like he was trying to shield her from something. She stood on her toes to see past him.

A dead girl lay at the edge of the stream. She looked about twelve. Leaves clung to her hair. She was on her side, straddling a long, twisted log. Eureka stared at her white blouse, her pale pink pleated skirt stained with blood. Ebony bangs were matted to her cheeks. Her long ponytail was tied with a cheerful yellow ribbon.

Eureka thought about who she’d been when she herself was twelve years old—big hands and feet like a puppy’s, perpetually tangled hair, a gap-toothed smile. She hadn’t yet met Cat. The summer she was twelve, she’d had her first French kiss. It was twilight, and she and Brooks had been swimming under the dock at his boathouse. Feeling his lips softly on hers was the last thing she’d expected when she came up for air from a breaststroke. They’d treaded water after the kiss, laughing hysterically because they were both too embarrassed to do anything else. She had been so different then.

She felt a burning at the back of her throat. She wished she were back there, in that warm Cypremort water, far away. She wished she were anywhere but standing over this dead girl.

Then she wasn’t standing over her. She was kneeling next to her. Sitting in the stream beside her. Lifting the girl’s misshapen, broken arm off the log. Holding her cold hand.

“I hurt you,” Eureka said, but what crossed her mind was
I envy you,
because the girl had left behind this world’s problems and its pain.

She started to pray to the Virgin, because that was how she’d been raised, but Eureka felt disrespectful quickly. Odds
were this girl hadn’t been Catholic. Eureka could do nothing to help her soul get where it needed to go.

“I’m going to bury her.”

“Eureka, I don’t think …,” Ander started to say.

But Eureka had already pulled the girl’s body from the log. She lay her flat against the bank and smoothed her skirt. Eureka’s fingers dug through pebbles and reached mud. She felt the silty grit fill the space beneath her fingernails as she cast fistfuls aside. She thought of Diana, who’d never been buried.

This girl was dead because Diana had never told Eureka what her tears would do. Anger she’d never before felt for her mother seized Eureka.

“There won’t be time to attend to every death,” Ander said.

“We have to.” Eureka kept digging.

“Think about your father,” Ander said. “And my family, who will find you if we don’t find the Bitter Cloud first. You can do more to honor this girl by moving on, finding Solon, learning what you must do to redeem yourself.”

Eureka stopped digging. Her arms shook as she reached for the girl’s yellow ribbon. She didn’t know why she pulled on the bow. She felt it loosen as it slid from the girl’s wet black hair. The wind wove the ribbon between Eureka’s fingers and blew a sudden lightness into her chest.

She recognized the sensation distantly—it was an old friend, returned after a long prodigal journey: hope.

This girl was a bright flame that Eureka’s tears had extinguished, but there were more flames out there burning. There had to be. She tied the yellow ribbon around the chain bearing her thunderstone. When she was lost and disheartened, she would remember this girl, the first tear-loss Eureka had seen, and it would spur her on to stop what she had started, to right her wrongs.

Eureka didn’t realize she had tears in her eyes until she turned to Ander and saw his panicked expression.

He was at her side immediately. “No!”

He grabbed her broken wrist. The pain was blinding. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Out of nowhere she remembered the heirloom chandelier back home, which Eureka broke when she slammed the front door in a rage. Dad had spent hours repairing it and the chandelier had looked almost like new, but the next time Eureka closed the front door, carefully, so lightly, the chandelier had trembled, then shattered into shards. Was Eureka like that chandelier, now that she’d cried once? Would the lightest force suddenly shatter her?

“Please don’t shed another tear,” Ander pleaded.

Eureka wondered how anyone ever stopped crying. How did pain fade? Where did it go? Ander made it sound temporary, like a Lafayette snowfall. She touched the yellow ribbon.

She had already cried the tear that flooded the world. She’d assumed the damage was done. “What more can my tears do?”

“There is an ancient rubric predicting the power of each tear shed—”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Eureka’s breath came shallowly. “How many tears have I shed?”

She started to wipe her face, but Ander grabbed her hands. Her tears hung like grenades.

“Solon will explain—”

“Tell me!”

Ander took her hands. “I know you’re scared, but you must stop crying.” He reached around and cradled the back of her head in his palm. His chest swelled as he inhaled. “I will help you,” he said. “Look up.”

A narrow column of swirling air formed over Eureka’s head. It twisted faster, until a few raindrops faded and slowed … and turned into snow. The column became thick with bright, feathery flakes that tumbled down and dusted Eureka’s cheeks, her shoulders, her sneakers. Rain thundered against the rocks, splashing into the puddles all around them, but over her head the storm was an elegant blizzard. Eureka shivered, enthralled.

“Stay still,” Ander whispered.

She felt goose bumps as hot tears cooled, then froze against her skin. She reached to touch one, but Ander’s fingers covered hers. For a moment they held hands against her cheek.

He drew a spindle-shaped silver vial from his pocket. It looked like it had been crafted of the same orichalcum as the
anchor. Carefully, he pulled the frozen tears from Eureka’s face and dropped them into the vial, one by one.

“What is that?”

“A lachrymatory,” he said. “Before the flood, when Atlantean soldiers went to war, their lovers made presents of their tears in vials like this.” He placed the pointed silver lid atop the vial, slipped it into his pocket.

Eureka was jealous of anyone who could shed tears without deadly consequences. She would not cry again. She would make a lachrymatory in her mind where her frozen pain could live.

The snowflakes on her shoulders began to melt. Her wrist ached more deeply and miserably than before. The windy rain returned. Ander’s hand brushed her cheek.

There now,
she remembered him saying the first time they’d met,
no more tears.

“How did you do that,” she asked, “with the snow?”

“I borrowed a band of wind.”

“Then why didn’t you freeze my tears before I cried the first time? Why didn’t someone stop me?”

Ander looked as haunted as Eureka had felt when she lost Diana. Outside of her own reflection, she had never seen anyone look so sad. It attracted her to him even more. She was desperate to touch him, to be touched—but Ander stiffened and turned away.

“I can move some things around to help, but I can’t stop
you. There is nothing in the universe half as strong as what you feel.”

Eureka faced the girl in her half-dug grave. Her dead eyes were open, blue. Rain gave them vicarious tears.

“Why didn’t you tell me how dangerous my feelings were?”

“There’s a difference between power and danger. Your feelings are more powerful than anything in the world. But you shouldn’t be afraid of them. Love is bigger than fear.”

A high giggle made both of them jump.

Three women wearing amethyst-colored caftans stepped out from behind scrubby trees on the other side of the stream. Their garments were woven out of orchid petals. One was very old, one was middle-aged, and one looked young and crazy enough to have roamed the halls of Evangeline with Cat and Eureka. Their hair was long and lush, ranging from silver to black. Their eyes scoured Eureka and Ander. Swarms of buzzing bees made clouds in the air around their heads.