by Lauren Kate
Ander propelled the shield closer to the surface with a crawl stroke. Eureka was eager to break free of the shield and terrified of what she'd find on the other side. The world had changed. Her tears had changed it. Under the ocean, they were safe. Above it, they could drown.
Eureka held still as Ander brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
"Almost there," he said.
They had already discussed how they would make landfall. Ander explained the ocean surges would be treacherous, so their exit from the shield had to be calculated. He had stolen a special anchor from the Seedbearers that would grip a rock and steady them--but then they had to pass through the limits of the shield.
Claire was the key. Where everyone else's touch met stone-like resistance, Claire's hands passed through the shield's edges like a wildfire through fog. She bobbed on her heels, swirling her hands against its surface, finger-painting an invisible escape. Her wrists passed in and out of the shield the way ghosts reached through doors.
Without Claire's power, the shield would pop like a bubble when it crested the surface and touched air. Everyone inside it would be scattered like ashes across the sea.
So once Ander found a suitable rock, Claire would become their pioneer. Her hands would pass through the shield and hook the anchor on the stone. Until the others were ashore, Claire's arms would remain partway in and partway out of the shield, keeping it open for their passage, keeping it from shattering on the wind.
"Don't worry, William," Claire told her brother, who was older by nine minutes. "I'm magic."
"I know." William sat cross-legged in Cat's lap on the translucent floor of the shield, picking pills off his pajamas. Beneath them, the sea built hills and valleys of debris. Black strands of algae slapped like shaggy beards against the shield. Branches of coral jostled its sides.
Cat hugged William's shoulders. Eureka's friend was smart and audacious--together they had hitchhiked to New Orleans, Cat wearing only a bikini top and cutoffs, singing raunchy Navy songs her dad had taught her. Eureka could tell Cat thought the plan with Claire was a bad idea.
"She's just a kid," Cat said.
"There." Ander pointed to a broad, barnacle-covered slab of stone ten feet overhead. "That one."
White foam sparkled beneath its crevices. The stone's surface was above water.
Eureka's arm joined Ander's in propelling the shield higher. The water changed from black to dark gray. When they were as close as they could get without breaking the surface, Eureka clasped her thunderstone and sent a prayer Diana's way that they make it out safely.
Though only Eureka could erect the shield they traveled in, Ander could maintain it for a while. He would be the last to leave.
He studied Eureka. She glanced down, wondering what she looked like to him. The intensity of his gaze had made her nervous when she first encountered him on the road outside New Iberia. Then last night he told her he'd been watching her for years, since both of them were very young. He'd betrayed everything he was raised to believe about her. He said he loved her.
"When we get above the ocean," he said, "we will see terrible things. You must prepare yourself."
Eureka nodded. She had felt the weight of her tears as they left her eyes. She knew her flood was more horrible than any nightmare. She was responsible for whatever lurked above, and she planned on redeeming herself.
Ander unzipped his backpack and withdrew what looked like an eight-inch silver stake with a wedding-band-sized ring at the top. He flicked a switch to release four curved flukes from the stake's base, transforming it into an anchor. When he pulled on the ring, a fine chain of silver links spurted from the top.
Eureka touched the strange anchor, amazed by its lightness. It weighed less than half a pound.
"Pretty." William touched the anchor's sparkling flukes, which were forked at the edges and had a scalelike hammered texture that made them look like little mermaid tails.
"It is made of orichalcum," Ander said, "an ancient substance mined in Atlantis, stronger than anything in the Waking World. When my ancestor Leander left Atlantis, he had five pieces of orichalcum with him. My family has held on to them for millennia." He patted his backpack and managed a mysterious, sexy smile. "Until now."
"What are the other toys?" Claire stood on her toes and stuffed a hand into Ander's backpack.
He hoisted her in his arms and smiled as he zipped his bag up. He placed the anchor in her hands. "This is very precious. Once the anchor grips the rock, you must hold on to the chain as tightly as you can."
The links of orichalcum jangled in Claire's hands. "I'll hold tight."
"Claire--" Eureka's fingers brushed her sister's hair, needing to convey that this wasn't a game. She thought about what Diana would have said. "I think you're very brave."
Claire smiled. "Brave and magic?"
Eureka willed away the strange new urge to cry. "Brave and magic."
Ander lifted Claire over his head. She planted her feet on his shoulders and plunged one fist up, then another, just as he'd instructed. Her fingers passed through the thunderstone shield and she flung the anchor toward the rock. Eureka watched it sail upward and disappear. Then the chain grew taut and the shield shook like a cobweb hit by a sprinkler. But it did not let in water, and it did not break.
Ander tugged the chain. "Perfect."
He pulled, drawing more chain inside the shield, lifting them closer to the surface. When they were only inches below the crashing waves, Ander shouted, "Go!"
Eureka grabbed the chain's smooth, cold links. She reached past Claire and began to climb.
Her agility surprised her. Adrenaline flowed through her arms like a river. When she crossed the shield's border, the surface of the ocean was just above her. Eureka entered her storm.
It was deafening. It was everything. It was a voyage into her broken heart. Every sadness, every ounce of anger she had ever felt manifested in that rain. It stung her body like bullets from a thousand futile wars. She gritted her teeth and tasted salt.
Wind slashed from the east. Eureka's fingers slipped, then clung to the cold chain as she reached for the rock.
"Hold on, Claire!" she tried to shout to her sister, but her mouth filled with salt water. She buried her chin against her chest and pressed upward, onward, urgent with a determination she'd never known before.
"Is this all you can do?" she shouted, gurgling through her torrential pain.
The air smelled like it had been electrocuted. Eureka couldn't see beyond the deluge, but she sensed that there was only flood to see. How could Claire hold on in all this thrashing water? Eureka envisioned the dispersal of the last people she loved across the ocean, fish nibbling their eyes. Her throat constricted. She slipped essential inches down the chain. She was up to her chest in ocean.
Somehow, her fingers found the top of the stone and gripped. She thought of Brooks, her best friend since the womb, her childhood next-door neighbor, the boy who'd challenged her to be a more interesting person for the past seventeen years. Where was he? The last she'd seen of him was a splash into the ocean. He'd dove in after the twins had fallen from his boat. He hadn't been himself. He'd been ... Eureka couldn't stomach what he'd been. She missed him, the old Brooks. She could almost hear his bayou drawl in her good ear, lifting her up: Just like climbing a pecan tree, Cuttlefish.
Eureka imagined the cold, slick rock was a welcoming twilit branch. She spat salt. She screamed and climbed.
She dug her elbows into the rock. She flung one knee onto its side. She felt behind her to make sure the purple bag containing The Book of Love--the other part of her inheritance from Diana--was still there. It was.
She'd gotten a portion of the book translated by an old woman named Madame Blavatsky. Madame B had acted like Eureka's sorrow was full of hope and promise. Maybe that's what magic was--looking into darkness and seeing a light most people missed.
Madame Blavatsky was dead now, murdered by Ander's Seedbearer aunts and uncles, but wh
en Eureka tucked the book under her elbow she felt the mystic spurring her on to make things right.
The rain fell so intensely it was difficult to move. Claire clung to the chain, keeping the shield permeable for the rest of them. Eureka thrust herself over the rock.
Mountains stretched before her, ringed by a pearly mist. Her knees slid on the rock as she turned and plunged her arm into the churning sea. She felt for William's hand. Ander was supposed to lift him to her.
Small fingers traced, then grasped Eureka's hand. Her brother's grip was surprisingly robust. She pulled until she could reach under his arms and heave him above the surface. William squinted, trying to focus his eyes in the storm. Eureka moved over him, needing to protect him from her tears' brutality, knowing there was no escape.
Cat came next. She practically launched herself from the water and into Eureka's arms. She slid onto the stone and whooped, hugging William, hugging Eureka.
"The Cat endures!"
Pulling Dad up was like an exhumation. He moved slowly, as if drawing himself up required a strength he had never hoped to possess, though Eureka had cheered him across the finish line of three marathons and watched him bench-press his weight in the sweltering garage at home.
Finally, Claire rose in Ander's arms above the surface of the waves. They held the orichalcum chain. Wind lashed their bodies. The shield glimmered around them--right up until Claire's toes slipped past its bounds. Then it split into mist and vanished. Eureka and Cat pulled Ander and Claire over the ledge and onto the rock.
Rain pinged off Eureka's thunderstone, stabbing the underside of her chin. Water sprayed up from the ocean and down from the sky. The rock they stood on was narrow, slippery, and dropped steeply into the ocean, but at least they had all made it to land. Now they needed shelter.
"Where are we?" William shouted.
"I think this is the moon," Claire said.
"It doesn't rain on the moon," William said.
"Head for higher ground," Ander called as he unhooked the anchor from the rock, pressed the switch to retract its flukes, and slipped it back inside his backpack. He pointed inland, where the dark promise of a mountain sloped up. Cat and Dad each took a twin. Eureka watched the backs of her family as they slipped and slid along the rocks. The sight of them stumbling and helping each other up, traveling toward a shelter they didn't know existed made her loathe herself. She'd gotten them--and the rest of the world--into this.
"Are you sure this is the way?" she shouted at Ander even as she noted that the rock they'd landed on jutted out above the sea like a small peninsula. Every other way was white water. It stretched forever, no horizon.
For a moment she let her gaze float on the ocean. She listened to the ringing in her left ear, deaf since the car accident that had killed Diana. This was her depression pose: staring straight ahead without seeing anything, listening to the lonely and unending ring. After Diana died, Eureka had spent months like this. Brooks used to be the only one who let her go into these sad trances, gently needling her when she was through: You're a nightclub act without the nightclub.
Eureka wiped rain from her face. She couldn't afford the luxury of sadness anymore. Ander had said she could stop the flood. She would do it or die trying. She wondered how much time she had.
"How long has it been raining?"
"Only a day. Yesterday morning, we were home in your backyard."
Only a day ago, she'd had no idea what her tears could do. Her eyes focused on the ocean, made wild by a single day's rain. She leaned down and squinted at something bobbing on its surface.
It was a human head.
Eureka had known she would face terrible things above the ocean. Still, seeing what her tears had done, this demolished life.... She wasn't ready. But then--
The head moved, from one side to the other. A tan arm stretched out of the water. Someone was swimming. The head pivoted toward Eureka, took another breath, and disappeared. Then it appeared again, a body moving fast behind it, riding the waves.
Eureka recognized that arm, those shoulders, that dark, wet head of hair. She'd watched Brooks swim to the breakers since they were little kids.
Reason vanished; amazement prevailed. She cupped her hands around her mouth, but before the sound of Brooks's name escaped her lips, Ander leaned in next to her.
"We need to go."
She turned to him, brimming with the same unbridled excitement she used to experience when she crossed a finish line first. She pointed at the water--
Brooks was gone.
"No," she whispered. Come back.
Stupid. She'd wanted to see her friend so badly her mind had painted him in the waves.
"I thought I saw him," she whispered. "I know it's impossible, but he was right there." She pointed weakly. She knew how she sounded.
Ander's eyes followed hers to the dark place in the waves where Brooks had been. "Let him go, Eureka."
When she flinched his voice softened. "We should hurry. My family will be looking for us."
"We crossed an ocean. How would they find us here?"
"My aunt Starling can taste us in the wind. We must make it to Solon's cave before they track us."
"But--" She searched the water for her friend.
"Brooks is gone. Do you understand?"
"I understand it's more convenient for you if I let him go," Eureka said. She started toward the rainy outlines of Cat and her family.
Ander caught up and blocked her path. "Your weakness for him is inconvenient to more people than me. People will die. The world--"
"People are going to die if I miss my best friend?"
She yearned to go back in time, to be in her room with her bare feet against the bedpost. She wanted to smell the fig-scented candle on her desk that she lit after going for a run. She wanted to be texting Brooks about the weird stains on their Latin teacher's tie, stressing over some petty comment Maya Cayce made. She had never realized how happy she was before, how rich and indulgent her depression had been.
"You're in love with him," Ander said.
She edged past him. Brooks was her friend. Ander had no reason to be jealous.
"Eureka--"
"You said we should hurry."
"I know this is hard."
That made her stop. Hard was how people who didn't know Eureka used to refer to Diana's death. It made her want to strike the word from existence. Hard was a biochemistry exam. Hard was keeping a great piece of gossip to yourself. Hard was running a marathon.
Letting go of someone you loved wasn't hard. There was no word for what it was, because even if you didn't let them go they were still gone. Eureka hung her head and felt raindrops slide off the tip of her nose. Ander must never have suffered so great a loss. If he had, he wouldn't have said that.
"You don't understand."
She'd meant it as a way to let him off the hook, but as soon as it came out, Eureka heard how harsh it sounded. She felt like no words existed anymore; they were all so insufficient and mean.
Ander spun toward the water and let out an exasperated sigh. Eureka saw the Zephyr visibly leave Ander's lips and smash into the sea. It spat up a gaping wave that curled above Eureka.
It looked like the wave that had killed Diana.
She caught Ander's eyes and saw guilt widen them. He inhaled sharply, as if to take it back. When he realized that he couldn't, he lunged for her.
Their fingertips touched for an instant. Then the wave slid over them and swelled toward land. Eureka was flung backward, spiraling away from Ander into the battering sea.
Water shot up her nose, crashed against her skull, bashed her neck from side to side. She tasted blood and salt. She didn't recognize the waterlogged moan coming from her mouth. She fell out of the wave as the water dropped out from under her. For a moment she was running on a path of sky. She couldn't see anything. She expected to die. She screamed for her family, for Cat, for Ander.
When she landed on the rock the only thing that told her s
he was still, ridiculously, alive was the echo of her voice against the cold, incessant rain.
3
THE LOST SEEDBEARER
In the central chamber of his subterranean grotto Solon took a sip of tar-thick Turkish coffee and frowned.
"It's cold."
His assistant Filiz reached for the ceramic mug. Her mother had cast it specially for Solon on her wheel, had baked it in her kiln two caves to the east. The mug was an inch thick, designed to hold heat longer in Solon's porous travertine cave, which sat in the constant clutches of a bone-deep chill.
Filiz was sixteen, with wavy untamed hair she dyed a fiery shade of orange and eyes the color of a coconut husk. She wore a tight, electric-blue T-shirt, black tapered jeans, and a choker studded with short silver spikes.
"It was hot when I brewed it an hour ago." Filiz had been working for the eccentric recluse for two years and had learned to navigate his moods. "The fire's still going. I'll make more--"
"Never mind!" Solon flung his head back and poured the coffee down his throat. He gagged melodramatically and wiped his mouth with a pale arm. "Your coffee is only slightly worse when it's cold, like being transferred from Alcatraz to Siberia."
Behind Solon, Basil snickered. Solon's second assistant was nineteen, tall and swarthy, with slick black hair combed into a ponytail and an impish twinkle in his eyes. Basil wasn't like the other boys in their community. He listened to old country music, not electronica. He idolized the graffiti artist Banksy and had painted several of the nearby rock formations with colorfully distorted superheroes. He thought he had done the graffiti anonymously, but Filiz knew he was the artist. He liked to show off his English by speaking in proverbs, but he never translated them right. Solon had taken to calling him "the Poet."
"You can lead a horse to water, but your coffee tastes like poop," the Poet said, chuckling into Filiz's glare.
The Poet and Filiz looked older than their boss, whose pale and sculpted face was as smooth as a child's. Solon appeared to be about fifteen, but he was far older than that. He had searing blue eyes and shorn blond hair dyed with black and brown leopard-print spots. He stood over a silver robot that lay on a long wooden table.