Waterfall (31 page)

“What are they doing?” Eureka gestured at the other two robots, which had not looked up from the glowing pit.

“I can’t wait to show you,” Delphine said, and drew Eureka closer.

“Wait.” Beyond the glowing pit, close to where the suspended wave’s lip hovered above the shore, five more robots slept on chaise longues beneath a wide umbrella.

“Those robots are still filling,” Delphine said. “Soon they will be alive with the experiences of hundreds of millions of souls.”

Eureka slid from Delphine’s grip and climbed a slope of sand toward the sleeping robots. Ocean sounds rushed above her, but the waveshop’s watery walls held still.

Wisps of light gathered around the robots’ skin. She knew this aura was made of ghosts, that all the energy flowing into the machines came from someone she had killed.

“What happens when they’re filled?”

“Then come the beatings,” Delphine said.

Eureka eyed the scars on the backs of the waking robots poring over their maps.

“They don’t wake from the Filling obedient,” Delphine said. “Not with all those willful ghosts competing inside.” She reached for a silver whip resting on a silver table near the sleeping robots. A blue jellyfish writhed at its tip. She passed the whip to Eureka. It was as light as a ghost.

“In my hand, this whip deals deep lashes of transformational pain. I train my robots to allow only their ghosts’
efficient and useful attributes to rise to the surface. This enables my boys to perform many millions of tasks—with no threat of rebellion.” Delphine paused, turned Eureka’s face to hers. “This work is in your blood and in your tears. Do you understand?”

Eureka was repulsed and shamelessly intrigued. “What kinds of tasks?”

“Anything. Everything. Dry out the world you drowned, pave roads, plant crops, slaughter stragglers, cure diseases, erect a stunning empire that spans the globe.” Delphine pointed at the robots’ glowing auras. “See the possibilities flowing in.”

Tiny images flashed around the machines: a hand writing a letter, a boot wedging a shovel into soil, a computer monitor filled with complicated code, a sprinter’s legs crossing a golden meadow. Just as Eureka recognized each flash it disappeared inside its robot, which acknowledged the acquisition with a muscle flex or a facial twitch, as if it were having a nightmare.

One robot’s eyes opened. Delphine placed two fingers in the infinity-shaped indentation on its neck and twisted clockwise, just as Solon had demonstrated at the Bitter Cloud.

“Go back to sleep, pet. Dream.…”

Eureka should have felt horrified, but there was something tempting about sparing a soul’s most essential knowledge, memory, or experience—and lobotomizing the rest. She wished she could have done it to herself after Diana died.

It wasn’t like Eureka recognized the dead flowing into the robots. She didn’t see her brother’s hands performing a magic trick or Cat solving a calculus equation in the robots’ auras.

“After the beatings,” Delphine explained with a smile, “I turn the ghost robots over to Atlas. Their dissemination across the drowned world has long been his vision. He will take care of the dirty work for us. All you and I have to do is wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“The opportunity to turn everything against him.”

Delphine led Eureka to a tall mirror in the center of the waveshop. It was made of softly undulating water. Eureka didn’t want to look, but the temptation was too strong. Cold gripped her stomach when Delphine’s stunning reflection appeared where Eureka’s should have been. When she looked at the space before Delphine, Eureka’s own face smiled darkly back.

“The world will be ours, Eureka.” Her voice sounded precisely like Diana’s. Eureka closed her eyes, leaning closer to her dark, seductive ancestor.

“You’re going to get rid of Atlas?” she asked slowly.

“Depose, dispatch, destroy … I haven’t yet decided which I like the sound of best. But—practical matters before poetry. You may know that one of my robots was stolen and never recovered. Tonight I make Ovid’s replacement. Would you like to help?”

Eureka knew from
The Book of Love
that Selene and
Leander escaped Atlantis with Ovid and the baby girl stowed inside their ship. But that had been ages ago.

“If the robot can be replaced,” she asked, “why wasn’t it done long ago?”

For the first time Delphine looked upon her coldly. Eureka lost her breath.

“It cannot simply
be
replaced like a lover,” Delphine said. “My robots require the darkest materials to come into being. But that wouldn’t have been in your book, would it? Neither would our fate after the flood. Selene missed all that, too. You don’t know what Woe was like, how we were stagnant beneath the ocean for millennia. Only our minds could move. Try to fathom the insanity that brews in one who must endure such impotence. Every Atlantean suffered, all because he dared to break my heart.”

“Leander.”

“Never say his name.”
Delphine repeated Atlas’s rule. Eureka now wondered if it was actually the ghostsmith’s rule. Was she the source of all Atlantean darkness?

Delphine smoothed her hair. She inhaled deeply. “There’s not much time. The replacement must be ready in time to catch the final ghosts.”

“How many souls are still alive?” Eureka asked.

“Seventy-three million, twelve thousand, eight hundred, and six,” the robot Lucretius called.

“I must finish before sunrise.” Delphine gestured toward
the opposite end of the wave, where no nuance of sunset remained in the sky. “When the morning light is centered there, our homeless ghosts will find their shelter.”

She took a seat at an already spinning potter’s wheel. Behind her, near the arching back of the wave, a tall golden loom displayed a half-woven square of shimmery blue fabric. Lightning flashed across it—more of Delphine’s agony.

“Gilgamesh,” Delphine called. “More orichalcum.”

One of the shoveling robots reached inside the pit and retrieved a huge, glowing red mass. As he carried it to Delphine, it cooled in the misty air to the silver of orichalcum. He eased it onto Delphine’s spinning wheel.

Her bare foot pumped the pedal, whirling the plate faster. The tempo of the song that had been playing throughout the waveshop sped up. It was melancholy and beautiful, all minor chords.

“This wheel generates the music that keeps the waveshop from crashing in on itself,” Delphine said. “It must be wound frequently, like a clock.”

As her hands glided through the fiery mass of orichalcum, it sizzled and softened into the consistency of clay. A muscular calf began to take shape.

“You’re sculpting the robot,” Eureka said.

Delphine nodded. “Do you know the nature of orichalcum?”

Eureka knew that the lachrymatory, the anchor, the chest
of artemisia, the spear and sheath that Ander had taken from the Seedbearers, and Ovid had been the only orichalcum in the Waking World. “I know it’s precious.”

“But you don’t know why?” Delphine said.

“Things are precious when they’re hard to come by,” Eureka said.

This made Delphine smile. “Long ago, I began an experiment: Grind the flesh and bones of my conquests into fine powder. Add heat and a gelatinous enzyme from the Cnidaria—you call it a jellyfish—while it is still in the medusa stage. Much like the stare of my snake-maned friend, the medusa enzyme transforms ordinary corpse powder into the most durable and lovely element in the world.” She caressed the orichalcum leg on her wheel. “And I transform that into whatever I please. I have mined orichalcum in this manner since before Atlantis sank. Atlas’s empirical conquests used to provide the bodies. Now your tears have given me endless material to work with. By sunrise, all that will be left to do is convert the living into ghosts.”

“What happens at sunrise?” Eureka asked casually, though she wanted to scream.

“The survivors are preparing arks. A community in Turkey has long anticipated a flood. Perhaps you know of them? The living are traveling there from around the world to board their ships. We can see them in the water map. This is convenient, because it gathers all the living souls in one place.
We must stage the final apocalypse before they disperse again across the seas.”

Eureka met Delphine’s eyes. They were so dark she could see her face reflected in them. “That’s why Atlas wants more tears.”

“Yes.” Delphine gestured over her shoulder, lighting the space behind her. What looked like a cross between a medieval catapult and a futuristic rocket launcher sharpened into view. “The rest of my cannons are in Atlas’s armory, but I keep an early model here.” She rose from her wheel, lifted the cannon’s hatch, and withdrew a palm-sized crystal globe. “A single crystal shell, armed with one of your tears, will do thirty-six times the damage of your world’s nuclear bombs.”

“But I’m not going to cry,” Eureka said.

“Of course you are.” Delphine returned the crystal globe to the cannon with care. “You’re unsettled by Atlas’s mistake with the lightning cloak. But no one will harm you—ever again.” She caressed Eureka’s hair. “We must all make sacrifices. Your tears are your contribution, though you may choose what makes them flow.”

“No.”

“Surely you have enough to cry about”—Delphine tilted her head—“losing your greatest love so recently? Remember, I know how you feel. I had my heart broken, too.”

But had it been Delphine’s broken heart that sank Atlantis—or pride and embarrassment and the pain of losing
her child? Were their Tearline stories truly as parallel as Delphine wanted Eureka to believe they were? Had Delphine had a Cat, a father, and siblings who loved her as heedlessly as Eureka’s did? Eureka didn’t think so.

And Ander. He was nothing like Leander. He was a boy who hadn’t deserved any of the shattering pain he’d known in his life. He’d loved Eureka because of his heart, not his destiny. The thought of him made Eureka turn inward, backward, to the moment she’d first seen him on the dusty road outside New Iberia. He had showed her love was possible, even after heart-erasing loss.

“You know where he is,” Eureka said. If Ander and the twins and Cat could at least be spared …

“You must not worry yourself with what might have been,” Delphine said, “only with what broke you. Love is crippling. Heartbreak gives us our legs.”

“Then why are you with Atlas?” Eureka asked before she could stop herself.

“With Atlas?” Delphine asked. “What do you mean?”

“The way you talk about him, sending each other notes.” Eureka paused. “Your tears have the same power as mine. They could fill the cannons, but he won’t put you through the pain of shedding them. It’s because he loves you. Doesn’t he?”

Delphine doubled over laughing. It was a cold sound, a winter wind. “Atlas cannot love. His heart’s not tuned that way.”

“Then why—”

“Your problem is you feel ashamed,” Delphine said. “I am more in love with my power than I could ever be with a boy. You, too, must embrace your darkness.”

Eureka found herself nodding. She and Delphine envisioned different destinies for Eureka, but maybe, at least for a moment, their paths intersected.

Delphine wiped sea mist from her face. “Did you know I have had thirty-six Tearline daughters? I loved them all—cruel ones, bashful ones, dramatic ones, homely ones—but you are my favorite. The dark one. I knew it would be you who reunited us.”

There was endless adoration in Delphine’s voice that reminded Eureka of the way Diana used to talk to her. It had sometimes made Eureka shy away from Diana’s love. It was the kind of love Eureka didn’t think she would ever understand. Maybe Delphine had not been lying when she said she would do Eureka any favor.

“What you said before, about getting to decide who is truly dead …”

Delphine nodded. “The fate of your friend Brooks. Atlas told me about him.”

“Could you bring him back?”

“Would it make you happy?”

“Then you could bring all these people back.” Eureka pointed at the ghosts filling the machines. “You could stop turning corpses into weapons and bring them back to life.”

Delphine frowned. “I suppose I could.”

“How?” Eureka asked.

“If you’re asking about the limits of my powers, I have yet to find them.” Delphine clasped her hands beneath her chin. “But I believe you’re asking what I
will
do. These ghosts have a higher purpose. I promise you won’t miss them when they’re gone. But”—she smiled—“our army can spare one. Even a strong one. Assuming he has not been pulverized. You shall have your Brooks, on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“You must never leave me.” Delphine drew Eureka into a tight embrace. “I’ve waited too long to hold you. Say you’ll never leave me.” Then she whispered, “Call me Mother.”

“What?”

“I can give you what you want.”

Eureka glanced up at the suspended wave and saw in it the wave that had killed Diana, that wave that had stolen Brooks away. An instinct rushed into her: she didn’t understand why, but she knew if she could get Brooks back, somehow she could fix things.

She pushed through her sickened heart into a black space where there had never been a Diana and no reason to feel a thing about using this word:

“Mother.”

“Yes! Go on!”

Eureka swallowed. “I will never leave you.”

“You’ve made me so … happy.” Delphine’s shoulders
shook as she pulled away. A single tear shone in the corner of the girl’s left eye. “What’s about to happen, what I’m about to do for you, Eureka, you must never tell anyone. It must be our special secret.”

Eureka nodded.

Delphine took a step back and blinked. The tear left her eye and fell.

When it hit the sand, Eureka felt it deep inside her. She watched the earth split open as a single white narcissus flower sprang up from the sand. It grew rapidly, rising several feet, branching out into more flowers, countless blooms, until the plant was taller and wider than Eureka.

Then, slowly, the flower transformed into a figure. A body. A boy.

Brooks blinked, stunned to find himself before Eureka. His hair was long and untamable. He wore cutoffs, a green Tulane sweatshirt, his father’s old Army baseball cap—the same clothes he’d worn the last day they’d sailed together at Cypremort Point. Goose bumps rose on his skin, and Eureka knew that he was real. He looked at his hands, up at the suspended wave, into Eureka’s eyes. He touched his face. “I didn’t know the dead could dream.” He gazed at Delphine, who walked to stand beside them. “Maya?”