Waterfall (15 page)

“You met Solon’s visitor this afternoon?” Yusuf said. All eyes turned to Filiz.

“She is here with two children, her father, and two friends,” the Poet said. “They are kind people, tired from their journey. One girl is named Cat and she is very—”

“Enough about the others,” someone called from the back. “What about
her
?”

“She is a selfish brat,” Filiz said, and wondered why. Perhaps it was because the Poet had brought food and she also wanted to give the people something they hungered for. They desired an enemy, a common cause—someone to blame.

“Did she care about the innocent people who would die
because of her?” Filiz shook her head. “She thought her pain was more important than your lives. Now Atlantis will rise and wash us away. We are powerless.” Her voice grew louder as she went on. “We sit and wait and starve.”

“I’ve always wanted to visit Atlantis,” someone said in the back.

“Hush, boy,” Filiz’s grandmother said. “We have no food, no water to drink. My daughter is dying. And my granddaughter …” She looked away as the others finished her sentence in their minds.

“There is more food,” Filiz said, because she resented the distrust on her grandmother’s face. She was tired of feeling like an outsider among her people.

The room grew silent. Eyes like saucers watched Filiz. The Poet offered her no help. She wished she hadn’t said it—she was giving up her life’s one remaining pleasure, the time she spent with Solon in his cave—because now she had no choice but to explain.

“Solon has food. He has been preparing for this storm, stocking up. The Tearline girl feasted tonight as you starved.”

“And water?” a salt-boy beside the Poet asked.

“He has water, too.” Filiz glanced at the Poet. “We discovered this only tonight.”

“You will take us there tomorrow,” Filiz’s grandmother ordered.

“It’s not that easy,” the Poet said. “You know his home is protected.”

The gossipwitches had no interest in the Celans, so most in Filiz’s community had never personally encountered the strange, orchid-clad women, but they had heard the buzzing bees and felt the presence of magic in the nearby rocks. Once Pergamon had found a gossipwitch honeycomb, though he never told anyone where. Most Celans wouldn’t admit it, but Filiz knew they were afraid of all they did not know about the gossipwitches.

“We will bring you more food tomorrow,” the Poet promised.

“No. You will get us inside that cave,” Filiz’s grandmother said. “And we will see what is so special about this Tearline girl.”

“E
njoying the view?”

Eureka jumped at Solon’s voice behind her the next morning. She thought she’d been alone on the Bitter Cloud’s roof.

She’d climbed the stairs to the veranda at sunrise, curious about the view Ander had seen the night before when he came looking for her. Everything was silver in the morning cloud-light. The Tearline pond had risen, and Eureka didn’t think Brooks’s rock was still above the surface. She relived dropping that gun into the water, kissing Ander in the canoe, confronting the monster she was supposed to fear. She did fear him, and hate him, and love him.

He was—they were both—out there somewhere, hidden along the banks. She could feel them, the way she could still feel the nightmare from which she’d just awoken.

She’d dreamt she was scaling a mountain in the rain. Near the summit, the earth shifted beneath her. She grabbed hold of something slick and spongy, but it disintegrated in her fingers. Then the whole mountain crumbled, a dangerous rockslide under her feet. As Eureka succumbed to the avalanche, she realized she had not been climbing a mountain, but a vast heap of rotting arms and moldy legs and decomposing heads.

She had been climbing the wasted dead.

“I must admit”—Solon gazed at the pond—“your tears have improved this vista. It’s like how sunsets are more beautiful in polluted air.”

Eureka could no longer feel the rain. Droplets gathered twenty feet above her but never reached the white stone veranda. Solon must have pitched a cordon over them, though he’d said he rarely used his Zephyr anymore. He coughed and wheezed and lit a clove cigarette with a silver lighter.

“Sleep well?” He eyed her as if he’d asked a more personal question.

“Not really.” She felt Atlas spying on their conversation, observing every nuance of her body language. Goose bumps rose on her skin.

Solon would want to know about Eureka’s encounter last night, but she could never tell him here, with Atlas possibly within earshot. She could never tell him anywhere if she planned on seeing Brooks again. It had to stay her secret.

“The gang rises,” Solon said as the twins bounded onto the veranda.

“What’s for breakfast?” William swung from the barren branch of a tree in the center of the veranda.

“There was supposed to be coffee,” Solon said, “but apparently my employees have quit.”

“I had the craziest dream.” Cat appeared at the top of the stairs. “My brother and I were driving my dad’s old Trans-Am across the ocean through all these giant schools of fish.” She rested her head on Eureka’s shoulder with un-Cat-like lethargy. She still hadn’t reached her family.

A moment later, Dad mounted the stairs, his weight steadied by Ander. Eureka touched the bandage around his shoulder. It was clean and tight.

“Better today,” he said before she could ask. The bruise spreading from his temple was green.

“You should be resting,” she said.

“He was worried about you,” Ander said. “We didn’t know where you were.”

“I’m fine—”

“Claire!” Dad shouted. “Get down!”

Claire had climbed atop the veranda’s stone rail. She leaned for a branch of pink bougainvillea, its petals bordered with brown.

“I want to get the flower like Eureka.”

She leaned too far. Her foot slid across the wet stone,
and she tumbled forward, over the rail. Everyone scrambled toward her, but William, who was always already next to Claire, was first.

His arm shot over the rail. His open hand reached out. By the time Eureka got there, William was holding Claire.

Except he wasn’t. Their hands didn’t even touch. Five feet of air separated the twins. Claire dangled over a steep drop, held aloft by an invisible force. As William reached down and Claire reached up, some kind of energy in the space between connected them and kept her from falling. She looked beneath her feet at nothing. She began to cry.

“I’ve got you.” William’s forehead beaded with sweat. His body was still except for his twitching fingers. Claire began to rise.

The rest of them watched as Claire slowly floated toward her brother’s hand. Soon, their fingertips connected, then each grasped the other’s wrist. Then Ander and Solon were hauling Claire up the rest of the way, onto the veranda.

“Thanks.” She shrugged at William after she was upright, safe.

“Sure.” He shrugged back as Claire ran to Dad to wipe her tears.

Eureka knelt before William. “How did you do that?”

“I just wanted to bring her back where she belonged,” William said. “With us.”

“Try it again,” Solon said.

“I don’t think so,” Dad said.

“Throw something in the air,” Solon said to Claire. “Anything. But let William be the one to catch it.”

Claire glanced around the veranda. Her gaze settled on the purple bag Eureka had set by the head of the stairs.
The Book of Love
peeked from its top.

“No!” Eureka warned, but Claire already held the book in her hands.

She hurled it into the sky. There was a small gray burst as the cordon became visible where the book pierced it. Wind and rain ripped through the hole it created. Eureka heard a loud buzz, like a riot of bees, then a tiny purple mushroom cloud bloomed in the sky. The book sailed over the Tearline pond below the veranda. It moved through the rain like it would never stop, like the answers to Eureka’s heritage would always be further and further away. After what seemed like half an eternity,
The Book of Love
struck a high peak of white stone and fell open on the face of a rock.

“My book,” Eureka murmured.

“I’ll get it back,” Ander said.

“The little thing has pierced my cordon
and
compromised the witches’ glaze.” Solon scratched his chin, horrified. His gaze darted around the Tearline pond, like he could suddenly sense Atlas, too. “Everybody run!”

“Wait.” William edged forward and rested his elbows on the veranda’s rail. He focused on the book across the pond.
After a moment, it rose from the stone, thumped closed, and sliced backward through the air. A purple shimmer blinked in the sky as the book passed through the glaze. Then came the gray burst at the cordon’s boundary. Everybody ducked as
The Book of Love
soared back to the veranda. It shot into William’s arms and knocked him off his feet.

“Amazing.” Solon helped William up, then hopped atop the veranda’s rail and examined his cordon, through which rain no longer fell. “It must be a counterquirk.”

“A what?” Eureka returned her book to her bag, and her bag to her shoulder.

“Yesterday, Claire trespassed the border of the witches’ glaze to enter the Bitter Cloud. Today, William does the opposite. He said it beautifully: he brings things back where they belong. The twins’ quirks are counterpoints. Counterquirks.”

“What is a quirk?” Eureka asked.

“The quirk—it’s …” Solon glanced at the others. “No one knows? Really?”

“Eureka killed Google,” Cat explained.

“A quirk is an enchanted inkling,” Solon said, “a fragment of magic with which every mortal soul is born. Most people never learn how to harness theirs, and die with their quirks still dormant. Quirks are as fragile as one’s sense of self. Unless one’s quirk is protected to survive the chilling effects of growing older, it disappears. A true pity, because even the most absurd quirks become essential in the proper context.”

“Do we get only one?” William asked.

“Ambitious lad,” Solon said. “Well, why should there be a limit? One quirk is a miracle, but don’t let me stand in your way. Quirk out as much as you like.”

“Do you have a quirk?” Claire asked Solon.

“Yes,” Cat answered for him. “Being a dick.”

“I possess the Seedbearer’s global quirk,” Solon said, “the Zephyr. Ander shares it, too. Groups often have global quirks, and sometimes counterquirks, like the twins. My neighbors, the Celans, can visit the dead in their dreams. But quirks don’t have to rely on heritage or who your parents were. Each of us has magic within us. We take our quirks from the universal store.” He paused. “William and Claire have already awakened their quirks. Perhaps the time has come for the rest of you to do the same.”

Eureka approached Solon. “You’re supposed to prepare me to go to the Marais,” she said. “We have eight days before the full moon.”

“Says the girl who disappeared last night when we could have been working.”

“She left because you dropped a bomb on her,” Ander said.

“A bomb I wouldn’t have had to drop if you had been honest,” Solon said.

“A bomb went off last night?” William asked.

“Everything good happens when we’re asleep,” Claire said, and crossed her arms.

“Eureka’s right,” Ander said. “This isn’t the time for magic tricks. Our enemy is out there. Teach us how to fight him.”

“Not us. Me. This is my fight,” Eureka said to Solon, to Ander, to Atlas wherever he was.

“If I were facing the darkest force in the universe,” Solon said, “I’d want all the help I could get.”

“Yeah, well, some people have less to lose than others,” Eureka said.

“Meaning?” Solon asked.

“You don’t love anyone, so you don’t care who gets hurt,” Eureka said. “When I go to the Marais, I’ll go alone.”

Solon snorted. “The day you’re ready to go to the Marais alone is the day I keel over and die!”

“Finally, you’ve given me a goal!” Eureka shouted.

A hint of green in the corner of Eureka’s vision grabbed her attention. Cat sat with her back against the trunk of the tree, which wasn’t barren anymore. Its branches sprouted tender green leaves, then flowered into a thousand pale pink cherry blossoms. Petals floated to the ground, showering Cat’s braids, as ripe red cherries swelled from the branches’ buds. The twins started laughing, leaping to pluck the fruit from the tree. Its branches curved forward, embracing Cat in what almost seemed like a gentle, grateful hug.

“How did you do that?” Eureka asked.

“Diana said you and Solon were supposed to be great friends,” Cat said. “I didn’t want you to fight. So I sat down
and focused on the love Diana felt for both of you. I was hoping you’d feel it for each other.”

“Cat.” Eureka sank to her knees. “Why do you love fixing people up so much?”

Cat ran her hands through the carpet of cherry blossoms around her feet. “I want everyone to fall in love.”

“But why?”

“Love makes people the best versions of themselves.”

Eureka plucked a cherry, handed it to her friend. “I think you found your quirk.”

“Eat one, Reka,” William said, dumping a fistful in her lap.

Eureka slipped a cherry in her mouth. As she chewed she found it difficult to stay angry at Solon. There was love inside the fruit. Love that was bigger than fear.