Waterfall

by Lauren Kate

  Now she unbuttoned her own wet shirt, stripping down to the tank top she wore beneath it, and wrapped the cloth as tightly as she could around his shoulder. "Dad? Can you hear me?"

  "Is Daddy going to die like Mommy?" Claire wailed, which made William wail.

  Cat wiped the blood from William's face with her cardigan. She gave Eureka a bewildered WTF-do-we-do look. Eureka was relieved to realize William wasn't physically wounded; no blood flowed from his skin.

  "Dad's going to be okay," Eureka said to her siblings, to her father, to herself.

  Dad didn't stir. There was so much blood soaking through Eureka's attempt at a tourniquet. Even as the rain washed swells away, more flowed.

  "Eureka," Ander said behind her. "I was mad and my Zephyr--"

  "It's not your fault," she said. None of them would have been here in the first place if Eureka hadn't cried. Dad would be home battering okra over his oil-spattered stovetop, singing "Ain't No Sunshine" to Rhoda, who wouldn't have been gone. "It's my fault."

  She remembered something one of her therapists had said about blame, how it didn't matter whose fault anything was after it was done. What mattered was how you responded, how you recovered. Recovery was what Eureka had to focus on: her father's, the world's ... Brooks's, too. But she didn't know how any of them could recover from a wound so deep.

  A longing for Brooks swept over her like a sudden storm. He always knew what to say, what to do. Eureka was still struggling to accept that her oldest friend's body was now possessed by an ancient evil. Where was Brooks now? Was he as thirsty, cold, and afraid as Eureka was? Were those shades of feeling possible for someone welded to a monster?

  She should have recognized the change in him sooner. She should have found some way to help. Maybe then she wouldn't have cried, because when she had Brooks to lean on, Eureka could get through things. Maybe none of this would have happened. But all of it had happened.

  Dad breathed shallowly, eyes still tightly closed. For a few seconds he seemed to rest more easily, like he was detached from the pain--then the agony returned to his face.

  "Help!" she shouted, missing Diana more than she could stand. Her mother would tell her to find her way out of this foxhole. "How do we find help? A doctor. A hospital. He always keeps his insurance card in his wallet in his pocket--"

  "Eureka." Ander's tone told her, of course, that there would be no help, that she had cried it away.

  Cat shivered. "My alarm clock is going to go off any second. And when we meet at your locker before Latin, and I tell you about my insane dream, I'm going to embellish to make this part a lot more fun."

  Eureka scanned the barren mountains. "We're going to have to split up. Someone needs to stay here with Dad and the twins. The other two will look for help."

  "Look where? Does anyone have any clue where we are?" Cat said.

  "We're on the moon," Claire said.

  "We need to find Solon," Ander said. "He'll know what to do."

  "Are we close?" Eureka asked.

  "I tried to steer us toward a city called Kusadasi on the western coast of Turkey. But this doesn't look like any of the pictures I researched. The coastline is ..."

  "What?" Eureka asked.

  Ander looked away. "It's different now."

  "You mean the city you were trying to get us to is underwater," Eureka said.

  "Have you even met this Solon guy?" Cat asked. She was trolling the landscape for large swaths of seaweed, bundling them under one arm.

  "No," Ander said, "but--"

  "What if he sucks as bad as the rest of your horrible family?"

  "He's not like them," Ander said. "He can't be."

  "Not like we'll ever know," Cat said, "because we have no idea how to find him."

  "I think I can." Ander ran his fingers through his hair quickly, a nervous habit.

  Cat swiped rain from her cheeks and sat down with her mound of seaweed in her lap. She knotted strands of it together, until it almost resembled a blanket. For Dad. Eureka felt stupid she hadn't thought to do the same.

  "He thinks he can?" Cat muttered to her blanket.

  Ander lowered his face to Cat's. "Do you have any idea what it's like to reject everything you've been raised to believe? The one true thing in my world is what I feel for Eureka."

  "If I never see my family again--" Cat said.

  "That's not going to happen." Eureka tried to mediate. "Who's coming with me to find help?"

  Cat stared down at the seaweed. Eureka realized she was crying.

  Dad's wound was serious, but at least he was here with Eureka and the twins. Cat didn't even know where her father was. Eureka's tears had dissolved Cat's family. She had no idea what had become of any of them. All she had was Eureka.

  "Cat--" Eureka reached for her friend.

  "Do you know what the last thing I told Barney was?" Cat said. "I told him to eat two turds and die. Those can't be the last words I ever say to my brother." She cupped her face in her hands. "My mom and I were supposed to take this opera class where they teach you how to sing falsetto. My dad promised to cartwheel me down the aisle at my wedding...." She stared at Eureka's father, semiconscious in the mud, and seemed to be seeing her own father. "You have to fix this, Eureka. And not like when you duct taped your mom's rearview mirror back on. I mean, really fix, like, everything."

  "I know," Eureka said. "I'll find help. You'll call your family. You'll tell Barney what he already knows, that you love him."

  "Right." Cat sniffed. "I'll stay here. You two go." She laid her blanket of seaweed over Dad, then sat down miserably on a rock. She drew the twins into her lap, tried to cover their heads with her cardigan. This was a girl who refused to join summer camping trips if there was the slightest chance of drizzle.

  "Let me help you." Eureka tried to stretch the cardigan over the twins and her friend. She felt a twist of heat behind her and spun around.

  Under a crook of rock extending from the boulder, Ander had started a small fire using scraps of wood debris. It blazed at Dad's feet, mostly out of the rain.

  "How did you do that?" she asked.

  "Only takes a couple of breaths to dry out wood. The rest was easy." He lifted a corner of the seaweed blanket to reveal a pile of dry twigs and larger wood chips. "If you need more fuel before we're back," he said to Cat.

  "You should stay with my dad," she told Ander. "Your cordon could protect him--"

  He looked away. "My family can erect cordons bigger than football fields. I can't even shelter someone standing right beside me."

  "But back there, in your arms after the wave--" Eureka said.

  "That just happened without me trying, but when I try ..." He shook his head. "I'm still learning my strength. They say it gets easier." He glanced over her shoulder, as if reminded of his family. "We should hurry."

  "You don't even know where we are, where we're going--"

  "I know two things," Ander said, "the wind and you. The wind is the way I got us across this ocean and you are the reason why. But I can only help you if you'll trust me."

  Eureka remembered the day he'd found her running in the woods in the innocent rain. He'd dared her to get her thunderstone wet. She'd laughed because it sounded so absurd. You could get anything wet.

  If it turns out I'm right, he'd said, will you promise to trust me?

  Eureka liked trusting him. It gave her physical pleasure to trust him, to touch his fingertips and say the words aloud: "I trust you."

  She looked behind her and saw lightning strike a distant wave. She wondered what happened at the point of impact. She turned and gazed at the mountains and wondered what lay on the other side.

  She tightened her grip on the purple tote bag under her arm. Wherever she was going, The Book of Love was going, too. She leaned down to kiss her father. His eyelids tensed but didn't open. She hugged the twins.

  "Stay here with Cat. Look after Dad. We won't be long."

  Her eyes met Cat's. She felt awful for leaving.
r />   "What?" Cat asked.

  "If I hadn't been so angry and depressed," Eureka said, "if I'd been one of those happy people in the hall, do you think my tears would have done this?"

  "If you'd been one of those happy people in the hall," Cat said, "you wouldn't be you. I need you to be you. Your dad needs you to be you. If Ander's right, and you're the only one who can stop this flood, the whole world needs you to be you."

  Eureka swallowed. "Thanks."

  Cat nodded toward the stony hills. "So go on with your bad self."

  Ander's hand found its way into Eureka's. She squeezed and started walking inland, hoping Cat was right and wondering how much there was left of the world to save.

  5

  DEEP FREEZE

  Eureka and Ander followed a swollen stream through a shallow valley and into a world of soft white stone. They crossed a forest of rocky cones flanked by table mountains. They held hands as cacti bordering the stream reached out with needles inches long and sharp enough to tear away the skin.

  Eureka worried about the cacti weathering the salt in the rain. She imagined her favorite plants around the world--orchids in Hawaii, olive groves in Greece, orange trees in Key West, birds-of-paradise in California, and the comforting labyrinths of live oak branches back home on the bayou--their fibers parched and shriveled, disintegrating into salt. She squinted to make the cactus needles appear longer, thicker, sharper, and imagined them fighting back.

  Her mud-obscured running shoes reminded Eureka of the photos her teammates used to post after cross-country practice in stormy weather. Brown and gray points of pride. She wondered whether anyone would enjoy a rainy run ever again. Had she robbed the rain of its beauty?

  They came around a bend where the steel-blue bay was visible below. There was the rock where they'd made landfall and the tall triangular boulder behind which Cat and her family crouched in front of Ander's fire, hanging on. The boulder looked tiny. They had traveled farther than she had thought. It made her nervous to be so far away.

  She looked beyond the boulder, at the ocean spreading around them in cloudy light. Slowly, a more regular geometry emerged. Man-made shapes sagged in the deluge. Rooftops. The ghost of the city that had been washed away.

  She imagined people beneath those roofs, drowned in her pain. She had floated underneath her devastation in the thunderstone shield, but now Eureka saw it. She didn't know what to do. She wanted to disintegrate in the rain. She wanted to make everything right, right now.

  "You know," Ander said, "you're going to make things better."

  Eureka tried to let his support make her stronger, like a buttress on a cathedral, but she wondered from where Ander drew his faith in her. He seemed to truly believe that she could fix things, but was it simply because he liked her--or was there more to it? He kept saying Solon would answer all their questions ... if they ever found him.

  The path widened into two forked trails. An instinct she couldn't explain told her to go left. "Which way?" she asked Ander.

  He pivoted right. "We go east. Or--north? We need to go up into the mountains so I can see more clearly where we are."

  Ander had seemed so confident a moment before, when he was believing in her. "Do you have a map?" she asked.

  He stopped walking and faced Eureka with such sad eyes that she took his hand. She marveled at the way it fit in hers, like no one else's ever had. He looked down and caressed her fingertips.

  "I see," she said. "No map."

  "The map is in my memory, drawn with lines muttered by my aunts and uncles when I was very young. I don't know why I memorized their words, maybe because talk of the lost Seedbearer sounded strange and romantic, and there was so little excitement in my life."

  Eureka dropped his hand. She imagined Cat's reaction upon learning Ander had led them to the other side of the world based on an imaginary map. She didn't want to blame Ander. They were here now. They needed to support each other. But she couldn't help thinking about the way that Brooks, though he couldn't read a map even if you held a gun to his head, always wound up in the right place. He'd wound up in her imagination earlier, skimming dark water with his arms. What shore had he landed on when she'd blinked and made him disappear?

  Ander chose the path's steep right fork. "Solon made plans before he escaped. He was headed for a cave in western Turkey, which he called the Bitter Cloud."

  The path widened. Eureka sped into a jog. Her right wrist throbbed with every impact of her shoes against the earth, but running lent something familiar to the alien landscape. Her body found a gear she understood.

  Ander kept up. When he glanced at her, an agreement flashed between them. They began to race. Eureka pumped her legs. Wind whistled at her back. The salt in the rain stung her eyes and the pain in her wrist was excruciating, but the faster she ran, the less she felt it.

  She didn't think she could ever slow down. They were lost and she knew it, entering a tight passage only a few feet wide, bordered on either side by sharply sloping stone. It was like running through a very narrow hallway in the dark. Every step carried them deeper into goneness, but Eureka had to run until this burning was out of her system, until this fever had subsided. Sometime, later, they would catch their breath and figure out what to do.

  "Eureka!"

  Ander stopped ahead of her. She skidded into his back. Her cheekbone slammed into his shoulder blade. She felt his muscles stiffen, like he was trying to shield her from something. She stood on her toes to see past him.

  A dead girl lay at the edge of the stream. She looked about twelve. Leaves clung to her hair. She was on her side, straddling a long, twisted log. Eureka stared at her white blouse, her pale pink pleated skirt stained with blood. Ebony bangs were matted to her cheeks. Her long ponytail was tied with a cheerful yellow ribbon.

  Eureka thought about who she'd been when she herself was twelve years old--big hands and feet like a puppy's, perpetually tangled hair, a gap-toothed smile. She hadn't yet met Cat. The summer she was twelve, she'd had her first French kiss. It was twilight, and she and Brooks had been swimming under the dock at his boathouse. Feeling his lips softly on hers was the last thing she'd expected when she came up for air from a breaststroke. They'd treaded water after the kiss, laughing hysterically because they were both too embarrassed to do anything else. She had been so different then.

  She felt a burning at the back of her throat. She wished she were back there, in that warm Cypremort water, far away. She wished she were anywhere but standing over this dead girl.

  Then she wasn't standing over her. She was kneeling next to her. Sitting in the stream beside her. Lifting the girl's misshapen, broken arm off the log. Holding her cold hand.

  "I hurt you," Eureka said, but what crossed her mind was I envy you, because the girl had left behind this world's problems and its pain.

  She started to pray to the Virgin, because that was how she'd been raised, but Eureka felt disrespectful quickly. Odds were this girl hadn't been Catholic. Eureka could do nothing to help her soul get where it needed to go.

  "I'm going to bury her."

  "Eureka, I don't think ...," Ander started to say.

  But Eureka had already pulled the girl's body from the log. She lay her flat against the bank and smoothed her skirt. Eureka's fingers dug through pebbles and reached mud. She felt the silty grit fill the space beneath her fingernails as she cast fistfuls aside. She thought of Diana, who'd never been buried.

  This girl was dead because Diana had never told Eureka what her tears would do. Anger she'd never before felt for her mother seized Eureka.

  "There won't be time to attend to every death," Ander said.

  "We have to." Eureka kept digging.

  "Think about your father," Ander said. "And my family, who will find you if we don't find the Bitter Cloud first. You can do more to honor this girl by moving on, finding Solon, learning what you must do to redeem yourself."

  Eureka stopped digging. Her arms shook as she reached for the gir
l's yellow ribbon. She didn't know why she pulled on the bow. She felt it loosen as it slid from the girl's wet black hair. The wind wove the ribbon between Eureka's fingers and blew a sudden lightness into her chest.

  She recognized the sensation distantly--it was an old friend, returned after a long prodigal journey: hope.

  This girl was a bright flame that Eureka's tears had extinguished, but there were more flames out there burning. There had to be. She tied the yellow ribbon around the chain bearing her thunderstone. When she was lost and disheartened, she would remember this girl, the first tear-loss Eureka had seen, and it would spur her on to stop what she had started, to right her wrongs.

  Eureka didn't realize she had tears in her eyes until she turned to Ander and saw his panicked expression.

  He was at her side immediately. "No!"

  He grabbed her broken wrist. The pain was blinding. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  Out of nowhere she remembered the heirloom chandelier back home, which Eureka broke when she slammed the front door in a rage. Dad had spent hours repairing it and the chandelier had looked almost like new, but the next time Eureka closed the front door, carefully, so lightly, the chandelier had trembled, then shattered into shards. Was Eureka like that chandelier, now that she'd cried once? Would the lightest force suddenly shatter her?

  "Please don't shed another tear," Ander pleaded.

  Eureka wondered how anyone ever stopped crying. How did pain fade? Where did it go? Ander made it sound temporary, like a Lafayette snowfall. She touched the yellow ribbon.

  She had already cried the tear that flooded the world. She'd assumed the damage was done. "What more can my tears do?"

  "There is an ancient rubric predicting the power of each tear shed--"

  "You didn't tell me that!" Eureka's breath came shallowly. "How many tears have I shed?"

  She started to wipe her face, but Ander grabbed her hands. Her tears hung like grenades.

  "Solon will explain--"

  "Tell me!"

  Ander took her hands. "I know you're scared, but you must stop crying." He reached around and cradled the back of her head in his palm. His chest swelled as he inhaled. "I will help you," he said. "Look up."