Waterfall (21 page)

“Come with me,” Ander cried. “Search for her. Atlas is out there. I know it.”

“All the more reason for you and me to stay home. We’re no match for him.”

“And Eureka is?”

“Let’s hope so,” Solon said. “If you were to meet Atlas in these mountains—”

“Maybe he’s already done the worst thing he can do to me,” Ander muttered.

Eureka paused at the top of the stairs. Embers of a fire glowed below.

“What do you mean?” Solon asked.

“There’s something I should show you,” Ander said.

Eureka peered over the staircase railing. Solon straddled a low-backed leather chair, drinking prosecco out of his broken glass and smoking a cigarette. Ander stood with his back to Solon. He looked thinner. Eureka was used to him holding his shoulders straight, but tonight they slumped as he lifted his shirt, revealing the muscles on his bare torso—and two deep gashes in his flesh.

Solon whistled under his breath. “Does Eureka know?”

“She has enough to worry about,” Ander said. He sounded intensely lonely.

Eureka knew about the gashes—she’d discovered them the first time she kissed Ander—but she didn’t know what they meant. There had been so much else to process the night her fingers found those strange slits in his skin. The intoxicating taste of his lips, the storm her tears had begun, Brooks lost in the bay, and the last, most haunting translation of
The Book of Love.

“There’s this, too.” Ander held a long piece of white coral shaped like an arrowhead. “It was inside me. I pulled it from the wound.”

Solon placed his glass on the floor with a soft clink, his cigarette dangling from his lips. He examined the coral, whipping his finger away when he touched its sharp point. “How long have you had this?”

“Since the day before the storm began.” Ander flinched slightly when Solon’s fingers probed his back. “Eureka went sailing with Brooks. I knew she wasn’t safe, so I followed her in the water. I saw the twins fall overboard”—he closed his eyes—“and her dive after them. But before I could do anything to help, something tore into me.”

“Go on.” Solon ashed his cigarette.

“It wasn’t invisible, but it wasn’t visible, either. It was a wave moving independently from the other waves, a sovereign force of darkness. I tried to fight it, but I didn’t know
how
to fight such a thing. I pity Brooks, now that I know what he endured.”

“The coral dagger carves a gateway for Atlas to enter Waking World bodies. It is so sharp because it is dead.” Solon leaned back in his chair. “I’ve never known Atlas to inhabit two earthly bodies at once, let alone a Seedbearer body. He grows bolder all the time. Or perhaps he isn’t working alone.”

Who else would he work with? Eureka wanted to ask. She sensed from the fear that flashed across Ander’s face that he knew whom Solon meant.

Solon handed the coral back to Ander. “Hold on to this. We will need it.”

“Am I possessed?”

“How would I know?” Solon asked. “Do you feel possessed?”

Ander shook his head. His arm twisted behind him to trace the gills. “But they won’t heal.”

Solon took a drag from his cigarette and said, “Worst-case scenario is your possessor lies dormant within you for now.”

Ander nodded miserably.

“On the bright side,” Solon said, “you should be able to breathe underwater. You could swim away and save Eureka the trouble of pretending she doesn’t love you.” Solon swirled the golden liquid in his glass. “Of course, there
is
the Glimmering.”

Eureka felt like an arctic wind had crossed the cave. She’d known the moment Esme spoke about her history that she would have to face the Glimmering, that it was part of her
preparation for Atlantis. She would do it alone. She didn’t want any of the others going near it again.

Ander leaned closer, hanging on Solon’s words.

“It looks like an ordinary pond,” the elder Seedbearer explained, “but it’s the masterwork of the gossipwitches. One’s reflection in the Glimmering is said to reveal who one ‘truly’ is, as ridiculous as that sounds. You could try it. I don’t believe in identity, reality, or truth, so there’s no reason for me to take the narcissistic peek. Which is ironic, because I’m extremely narcissistic.”

“How do I get there?”

“It isn’t far—south of the Celans’ caves, through a series of what used to be valleys before your girlfriend grew a conscience. Rapids likely roar there now. A gossipwitch could escort you, but”—his face twitched worriedly—“their help is costly, as you know.”

“You think I should go, even if it—”

“Burns your face off?” Solon finished Ander’s thought and stared sadly into his empty glass. “That depends. How badly do you need to know?”

The sky outside the Bitter Cloud was rusty gray, signaling dawn. Ander had spent his life watching Eureka from a distance—but that morning she was the voyeur.

She lagged behind, stalking him like a coyote stalks a deer.
He moved quickly over dark rocks, through stands of dying trees. The orichalcum spear’s sheath gleamed in a belt loop of his black jeans.

He looked different at a distance. When they were close, chemistry got in the way, making Eureka’s body buzz, clouding her vision so that all she saw was the boy she wanted. But out in the wild diluvian dawn, Ander was his own person.

She was so focused on her subject that Eureka hardly noticed the path they followed. It was different from the path Esme had illuminated that night. When Ander arrived at the Glimmering, Eureka crouched behind a boulder as the sky lightened in the east. The wind was cold, its chill bone deep. As always, Ander stayed dry in the rain.

Her arms wanted to hold him. Her lips wanted to kiss him. Her heart wanted … to be another kind of heart. She thought the person capable of yearning and love had died with Seyma and Dad. But the physical need lingered, undeniable.

She looked for Brooks’s body in the pine tree. She didn’t see him there, or anywhere.

Ander’s eyes looked sunken. She sensed the fear in him, like a hunter senses it in prey. He paced the shore, ran his fingers through his hair. He inhaled deeply and pressed his hand against his heart. He stood where the water lapped the shore, closed his eyes, and hung his head.

“This is for you, Eureka,” he said.

She stepped out from behind the rock. “Wait.”

He was at her side in an instant. He studied her lips, her dusting of freckles, the widow’s peak in her hairline, her shoulders and fingertips, as if they’d been separated for months. He touched her cheek. She leaned into him for a moment—blissful instinct—then forced herself away.

“You shouldn’t be here,” both said at the same time.

How similar their preservation instincts were, their tendency for sadness. Eureka had never met anyone as intense as Ander—and even that was familiar. People in New Iberia often said Eureka was “intense,” meaning it as an insult. Eureka didn’t think it was.

“If my family finds you … if Atlas does,” Ander said.

Eureka looked around, her gaze hovering on the empty pine tree. “I have to know the truth.”

Ander faced the Glimmering. Rain glanced off the air around his skin. Now that she was up close, Eureka admired the ridges of Ander’s cordon.

“Me too,” he said.

“When Brooks was taken,” Eureka said, “he became so different. I see now that it was obvious.” Bitter rain struck her lips. She hated that she’d done nothing to help Brooks, that he struggled alone. Was she making the same mistake with Ander, afraid to confront a frightening change in him?

“You don’t know me well enough to know if I’m different,” Ander said.

Eureka watched a cloud drape his face in shadows. It
was true. He had guarded his identity closely. Yet he knew so much about her.

“You know yourself,” she said.

Ander grew impatient. “If I’m possessed, I can’t be around you anymore. I won’t let him use me to kill you. I would go into the far distance and never see you again.”

Then Ander would be free from his feelings for her. He wouldn’t grow old like Solon had when he’d been in love with Byblis. Wasn’t that what she wanted? She tried to picture carrying on without him, toward Brooks and Atlas and the impossible dream of untangling them and redeeming herself. Would it be better for Ander if he left her now?

“Where would I go?” Ander moaned softly, closing his eyes. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I weren’t next to you. That’s who I am.”

“You can’t rely on someone else to define you. Especially not me.”

“You talk like we’re strangers,” he said. “But I know who you are.”

“Tell me.” He had touched her most vulnerable reflex. Eureka immediately regretted her words.

“You’re the girl who described falling in love more truly than anyone ever has. Remember? Love at first sight that shatters your world’s skin. Not fearing someone’s flaws and dreams and passions.” He took her in his arms and held her tightly. “The unbreakable bond of reciprocal love. I’ll never
stop caring for you, Eureka. You think all you feel is sadness. You don’t know what your happiness could do.”

Ander believed there were more sides to Eureka than she would allow herself to see. She thought about the way Esme had tapped the thunderstone when she said there were exceptions to the Glimmering’s deadly rule. Eureka approached the pond, slipped her necklace over her head. She held the stone over the water.

“What are you doing?” Ander asked.

The Glimmering answered. Lacy bands of water formed from its depths and drew up around the surface, like a deck of liquid cards being shuffled. A mauve fog spread out above the Glimmering, then gathered into a cloud of concentrated purple in the center, inches from the softly gurgling spring. The cloud stretched into a spire of purple vapor, which imploded and vanished into the center of the pond.

The Glimmering had stilled into a shining mirror.

“I don’t think we should do this,” Ander said.

“You mean you don’t think
I
should do this.”

“You could die.”

“I need to know who I am before I go to the Marais. The witch told me. My history is in here.”

She expected him to protest. Instead, Ander took her hand. The gesture moved her in a way she hadn’t expected. The two of them lined the toes of their shoes up with the edge of the water. Eureka’s heart was pounding.

They leaned over the Glimmering.

The surface filled with color and she saw the outline of a girl’s body. She saw a stunning white gown where her jeans and blue button-down shirt should have been reflected. She took a breath and lifted her gaze slowly, toward the reflection of her face.

It was not Eureka’s face. The girl looking up from the Glimmering had dark hair and big, searching black eyes. She had dark skin, high cheekbones, a broad, confident smile. Her lips parted when Eureka’s lips did; she tilted her chin at the same angle as Eureka’s chin.

Maya Cayce, Eureka’s nemesis from Evangeline, the girl who’d stolen her journal, who’d tried to steal Brooks, stared back at her. Eureka gaped. How could it be? In her reflection, her lips curled into a smile. The image burned into her. It would be there forever, locked in the amber of her soul.

“I don’t understand,” Ander said blankly.

“What does it mean?” Eureka murmured. “How can it be her?”

“How can it be who?” Ander sounded dazed and haunted. Eureka pointed at her reflection, but she saw that Ander’s eyes were fixed to the space where his reflection … 
should
have been.

No one was there. Nothing looked back at Ander but the lead-colored sky.

“T
he trick is to be calm and illogical, just like him,” Solon was saying to the twins when Eureka and Ander returned to the Bitter Cloud later that morning.

They sat before the broken fire pit in the center of the salon. Candles dwindled in stalagmite candelabra. Glass shards littered the floor. No one had thought to clean up after the raid. The twins faced Ovid, who sat cross-legged on a green and gold Turkish rug. His posture was lifelike, his features uniquely appealing, but his eyes were as dead as stones. Claire and William lay on their stomachs, examining the robot’s gleaming toes.