Waterfall (32 page)

“You may call me the ghostsmith.” Delphine bowed slightly.

Brooks gasped, and Eureka wondered how he had experienced Delphine from the other side. His eyes housed a darkness that made Eureka feel less alone.

“I decide who is dead and who is not,” Delphine said. “And you are not.”

Eureka threw her arms around Brooks. He smelled like the old Brooks and sounded like the old Brooks; he held her like no one could but Brooks. Even though she had been tricked before, she knew this was real.

“Eureka,” he whispered in a voice that chilled her to her core. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t climb it, so he took over. Now there’s no way out.”

“Don’t worry,” she whispered back, confused by what he meant about climbing. “Now that you’re here, I can do it. I have to.”

She could feel him shake his head against her shoulder. “Whatever happens”—he pulled away to look her in the eye—“I love you. I should have said it long ago. It should have been the only thing I ever said.”

“And I love—”

“You may play with him once the sun has risen.” Delphine pressed a hand between their bodies. “I’ll even let you use the whip. Until then we have work to do.”

Eureka’s eyes begged Brooks for more about what he knew and where he’d been, but a waterfall sprang up around him like a cage that hung in the air. She couldn’t see him anymore.

“Eureka!”

Delphine returned to her potter’s wheel and pretended she couldn’t hear Brooks scream.

Eureka pressed her hands against the waterfall. It soaked her. Through it, she could feel Brooks’s shoulder, then his face. She wondered why she couldn’t feel his arms reaching back for her. “Stay with me.”

“He’s not going anywhere,” Delphine said. “You can trust me. Now you must prove I can trust you.”

“Delphine?” A crown of red hair hovered at the waveshop’s entrance. Atlas did not look happy.

“I
assumed you would be working when Eureka arrived,” Atlas said as he entered the waveshop. The golden light that Eureka’s footsteps had lit turned red as he approached.

Delphine did not look up from her wheel. She pedaled slowly, lengthening each note of the strange music.

“You said you were not to be bothered.” Atlas brushed Delphine’s dark hair to one side and rested a hand on her shoulder.

When Delphine looked up at Eureka she was really looking through her. “You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Show me one scratch on her body.” Atlas approached Eureka and made a close circle around her, seeming not to notice the cuts on her wrist, her bloodied shirt where his spiked cuff
had bound her waist. His breath was hot on her neck. His eyes moved across her skin like spiders. “She is in mint condition.”

Eureka envisioned spinning on him, twisting his neck until his arteries popped and the fire in his eyes went cold. She saw the murder in vivid detail, from the strained gurgle coming from his throat to the pathetic thud of his dead body in the sand. But she craved more than Atlas’s annihilation. She also had to steal the profits he had made from her tears. She had to undo the Filling, and she didn’t yet know how.

“You used my lightning on her,” Delphine said. “There are deeper wounds than scratches.” Her focus returned to the orichalcum kneecap her long fingers were shaping. “She must come to the tears in her own way.”

“She refused,” Atlas said.

Tension swam between their words. It reminded Eureka of her parents’ preliminary fights. The memory of Diana’s leaving returned—the nightgown tickling her ankles … the storm outside and within … the slap forever on her cheek, haunting it.

“I continue to refuse,” Eureka said.

Delphine reached for Atlas’s hand, stopping him before he lunged at Eureka. She stroked the coarse red hairs on his forearm. “Give it time.”

“Time.” A note of sarcasm entered Atlas’s voice as he gazed down the wave toward the dark eye of sky. “The one luxury we lack.”

“I sense them building in her,” Delphine said. “They will come before sunrise.”

Atlas bowed his head. “I am chastised. No harm will come to her when she is with me from now on.”

“She is with me from now on,” Delphine corrected.

“You have your work to do,” Atlas said. “Let me look after her tonight. I have something for her, a surprise.”

From inside his waterfall prison, Brooks bellowed violently.

“Who’s in the cage today?” Atlas asked with a nod.

Delphine’s gaze checked Eureka’s before she said, “A boy I want to play with later.”

“You always have liked to make them seethe first,” Atlas said. Eureka couldn’t tell if he was jealous or amused.

“I will destroy you!” Brooks shouted, his voice muffled by the sound of the waterfall.

“Oh, he’ll be fun.” Atlas chuckled.

Eureka’s teeth clenched. Atlas’s laughter made her hands itch to kill. She weighed her options. Defend her friend now and lose—or bide her time?

Atlas stepped closer to Brooks, surveying the waterfall cage. Then his fist plunged into it. The barrier curved pliantly around his fist, likely allowing Atlas to strike Brooks in the stomach, though Eureka couldn’t see her friend through the waterfall. When Brooks howled, Eureka felt his pain in her own gut, like a twin.

Then came a dull shatter, like a hammer against a block
of ice. She knew Brooks had tried to fight back, but his fist couldn’t penetrate the water. His cage didn’t work that way.

“Was that necessary?” Delphine asked, bored.

Eureka’s arms wanted to enclose the waterfall, to cradle Brooks. But she could show no reaction or Atlas would guess who was inside.

He stood before her now with his mesmerizing redwood eyes and sharp white teeth. He fingered a lock of her wet hair. “I have a present for you, Eureka. An apology for your experience with the lightning. With Delphine’s permission, I will take you to it.”

“You have nothing I want.”

“Perhaps no
thing.
Perhaps
someone.
”

“What sickness are you up to?” Delphine looked up from her wheel. The music’s pace quickened and Eureka became afraid.

Atlas shook his head and slipped an arm around Eureka’s waist as he steered her toward the wave’s exit. “I want to see the amazement on your face.”

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Atlas paused at the midpoint of the second bridge they’d crossed since leaving the waveshop. At either entrance, two giant statues of his likeness drew long silver swords on each other.

When empty, both bridges stretched low across their wide
moats, but when tread upon, they rose into towering arches, offering spectacular views of the city ahead.

“I can give you a beautiful life, Eureka,” Atlas said. “You always wanted something more extraordinary than the bayou—didn’t you? If you help me, I will welcome you here. The cost is tiny, the reward endless.”

The nearly full moon hung over the skyline of Atlantis, which glittered like a galaxy fashioned into buildings. They were shaped like roller coasters, with gem-colored swimming pools slanting down their roofs. Parks burst through the city’s seams, astonishing flora growing so rapidly that the topography was ever changing. Commuter trains swam through the sky. Behind them, the Gossipwitch Mountains rose starkly.

“I have lived in a hundred other bodies,” Atlas said, “seen a hundred other worlds. None came close to my Atlantis. Imagine if we had never sunk …”

Eureka leaned against the bridge’s orichalcum railing. Now that she knew how the precious metal was mined, everything made from orichalcum looked like rotting flesh. “But you did sink.”

“That is literally ancient history.”

“Alternative history, you mean. Most people don’t believe you ever existed.”

Atlas forced a bitter laugh. “Most people no longer exist.”

Looking into the moat below, Eureka saw Delphine’s face in her reflection. “How did you forgive her?”

“What?”

“If Delphine had never cried that tear, you never would have sunk.”

“Did she say something about me, about that?”

The time it took Eureka to think of an answer made Atlas squirm. “You must really love her, that’s all I mean.”

As Atlas’s eyes probed Eureka’s for information, she understood that his relationship with Delphine had nothing to do with love, and everything to do with fear. Maybe no one else could see it, but Delphine ruled the king.

They walked down the bridge in silence and were greeted by a gathering of Atlanteans. Twinkling city lights illuminated the Atlanteans’ made-up faces, their exquisite jewelry and clothes. Atlas gave a gentle wave and the crowd broke into applause.

“Is this your queen, sir?” a woman’s voice called out in Atlantean. A bright blue heptagonal hat shielded her features.

Atlas raised Eureka’s hand high in the air. “Isn’t she marvelous? Everything I deserve?” His false smile deepened, as if seeing Eureka through his subjects’ eyes. “She could use a scrub, of course. And these clothes must be burned and never spoken of again. But where better to shop for replacements than in our city?”

As the crowd applauded, Atlas gestured toward a man at the front who was holding up a small black box.

“There he is! Smile for the royal holographer!” Atlas
slipped an arm around Eureka’s waist and held her close. She could feel his rapid breathing. “Imagine your dead friend stands in my place, and smile.”

The crowd cheered even louder at the first forced peek of Eureka’s smile. The applause was deafening, but their expressions were vacant as they clapped. She loathed them. Did they not know about the Filling? She wanted all of them turned into ghosts. They were either idiots or as selfish as their king.

The mob circled around her as she and Atlas passed a cobbler, a market, and a hologram shop, each with lifelike wax statues of Atlas marking their doorsteps, advertising their wares.

“I bought my
sole
at Belinda’s,” a prerecorded Atlas panned through a speaker outside the cobbler’s.

“Nothing turns me on like Atlantean ardorfruit,” his voice blared through the speaker above an Atlas statue about to bite into a golden triangular-shaped fruit. “Tender. Tangy. Take some home tonight.”

Atlas steered Eureka into a central triangle surrounded by grand and gleaming buildings. Flags of many shades of blue hung from a hundred eaves, cascading in the wind.

“They love me,” Atlas told Eureka without a hint of irony. They mounted a stage that appeared to be floating. Half a dozen Devils lined its perimeter.

“What’s the penalty if they don’t?” Eureka asked.

“Delphine could never connect with the public like this.”
Atlas glanced at Eureka, adding, “Her powers are remarkable, no one is arguing that, but without me, she’s just a witch in a wave.”

Eureka wondered whether he was lying for her sake or for his. Delphine wasn’t here because she didn’t have to be. She made Atlas do it for her. The king was a ghost, a puppet, like Delphine’s other creations.

They stopped in the center of the stage and looked down at a hundred Atlanteans. These people didn’t love him. No one did. Perhaps because it was so obvious he didn’t love anyone back. Eureka wondered if he ever had. Delphine said his heart wasn’t tuned that way. All of this mattered, but Eureka wasn’t sure how.

The royal holographer passed his device through the air before Eureka’s body, following her curves with his arm. Then he pulled a level and a great plume of silver smoke rose from his device. A huge hologram of Eureka popped into view in the middle of the audience, which parted, clapping and curtsying before her likeness.

“I give you,” Atlas boomed into an invisible microphone, “your Tearline girl! Eureka sacrificed her heart to resurrect your world. And soon her tears will bring you more good fortune. By tomorrow, the so-called Waking World, which has oppressed you for thousands of years, will be vanquished. We will have ascended. One question remains.” He turned to Eureka and kissed her hand with flair. “How to repay the
girl who gave her heart so you could taste the sweetness of supremacy? Eureka, my treasure, this gift wasn’t easy to come by, so I do hope you’ll appreciate it.”

He looked skyward. The crowds’ eyes followed. Eureka tried to hold off as long as possible, but curiosity betrayed her and her chin lifted toward the night sky. Something large and green and formless lowered toward her. When it was twenty feet overhead, Eureka saw it was a fleet of green Abyssinian lovebirds. There were thousands of them, carrying what looked like a huge golden birdcage toward the stage.