Waterfall

by Lauren Kate

  She reached out. The skull's cheekbones were icy.

  Eureka drew away, and the skull blended into the larger design. It was like stepping away from a telescope on a starry night. The skulls were separated here and there by other types of bones: femurs, ribs, kneecaps. Eureka knew from her archaeological digs with Diana that this room would have set her mother's mind spinning.

  They walked deeper into the cave, Cat's stiletto heels clicking on the stone. The torch lit the space only a few feet ahead of Eureka and a few feet behind, so the others had to stay close. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, like giant frozen fingers thawing. Cat pressed on Eureka's head to signal her to duck under a spear-shaped one.

  Eureka tipped the torch in Cat's direction. The light made her friend's freckles stand out against her skin. She looked young and innocent--Cat's two least favorite qualities--which made Eureka think of Cat's parents, who would always see their daughter that way, even when Cat was sixty. She hoped Cat's family was safe.

  "Be-fri." Eureka spoke her half of the heart-shaped best-friends puzzle-piece necklace she and Cat had won during a Cajun line-dancing contest at the Sugarcane Festival in ninth grade.

  Cat automatically recited her half of the charm. "St-ends." She swung her hip out like they were still there, dancing in New Iberia, past Main Street's decorated storefronts, the fall night promising a new school year and football and cute boys with thick warm cardigans you could slide inside.

  They didn't wear the necklaces anymore, but every once in a while, Eureka and Cat performed the familiar call-and-response. It was a way of checking in, of saying I will always love you and You're the only one who gets me and Thanks.

  The cave smelled musty and ripe, the way Eureka's garage had smelled after Hurricane Rita. Its floor was surprisingly smooth, as if it had been sanded down. It was quiet except for the sound of water dripping from the stalactites into root-beer-colored pools. Pale tadpoles darted to and fro.

  The most remarkable thing about the cave was the absence of rain. Eureka had grown accustomed to the constant sensation of storm on her skin. Under the cave's cover, her body felt numb and charged at the same time, unsure what to make of the lull.

  The torch illuminated a dark space in the center of a small wall of swirling skulls at the far end of the passage. Eureka approached and saw that it was the entrance to a narrower passage. She pushed the witches' torch into the gloom.

  More skulls lined this smaller path, which narrowed into dark endlessness. Eureka's claustrophobia awakened and her hand tightened around the torch.

  Dad lifted his head from the mystical moth bower. He had talked his daughter down from panic attacks in elevators and attics since she'd been a child. She saw recognition on his face and was relieved he was still cognizant enough to understand why she was frozen at the door.

  Dad nodded toward the daunting darkness. "Gotta go through it to get through it." That had been his line in those bleary days after Diana died. Back then he was referring to grief. Eureka wondered if he knew what he was referring to now. No one knew what lay on the other side of darkness.

  Dad's bayou drawl was more pronounced away from home. Eureka remembered that the only other time he'd left the country was when he and Diana went to Belize for their honeymoon. The sun-soaked photographs were imprinted on her brain. Her parents were young and golden and gorgeous, never smiling at the same time.

  "Okay, Dad." Eureka let the walls embrace her.

  The temperature dropped. The ceiling did, too. Lit candles flickered sporadically along the way. Their shallow light faded into long stretches of darkness before the next candle appeared. Eureka sensed her loved ones at her back. She had no idea what she was leading them toward.

  Distant sounds echoed off the walls. Eureka stopped to listen. She could only hear them in her good ear, which she realized meant the voices were of her world, not Atlantis. They grew louder, closer.

  Eureka widened her stance to shield the twins. She held the torch with both hands like a bludgeon. She would strike whatever came.

  She cried out and swung the torch--

  At the edge of its light stood a small, dark-haired, barefoot child. He wore nothing but a pair of ragged brown shorts. His hands and face were grimy with something black and glossy.

  He called to them in what could have been Turkish, but Eureka wasn't sure. His words sounded like the language of a nearby planet from a thousand years ago.

  Slowly, William stepped out from behind Eureka's leg. He waved at the little boy. They were the same age, the same height.

  The boy grinned. His teeth were small and white.

  Eureka relaxed for half a second--and that was when the boy lurched forward, grabbed William's and Claire's hands, and dragged them into the darkness.

  Eureka screamed and ran after them. She didn't realize she had dropped the torch until she'd run deep into blackness. She followed the sounds of her siblings' cries until somehow her fingers found the waist of the boy's shorts. She jerked him to the ground. Cat held the torch to light Eureka's struggle with the boy.

  He was shockingly strong. She strained fiercely to pry the twins from his grip.

  "Let go!" she shouted, not believing that anyone so small and young could be so strong.

  Ander heaved the boy into the air, but the child wouldn't let go of the twins--he lifted them off the ground with him. William and Claire writhed and cried. Eureka wanted to dismember the boy and make his head part of the mosaic on the walls.

  Neither she nor Ander could pry the boy's tiny fingers free. Claire's arm was swollen and red. The boy had worked himself out of Ander's hold, had slipped through Eureka's exhausted hands. He was dragging the twins away.

  "Stop!" Eureka shouted, despite the absurd futility of the word. She had to do something. She scrambled after the three of them and, without knowing why, she began to sing:

  "To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him."

  It was a Teddy Bears song from the fifties. Diana had taught it to her, dancing on a humid porch in New Iberia.

  The boy stopped, turned around, and stared at Eureka. He gaped like he'd never heard music before. By the end of the chorus, his iron grip had relaxed, and the twins slid away.

  Eureka didn't know what to do but keep singing. She had reached the song's eerie bridge, with its one sharp note beyond her range. Cat joined in, nervously harmonizing; then her father's rich, deep voice met Eureka's, too.

  The boy sat cross-legged before them, smiling dreamily. When he was sure the song was over, he rose to his feet, looked at Eureka, and disappeared into the recesses of the cave.

  Eureka collapsed on the ground and pulled the twins to her. She closed her eyes, enjoying the fall of their breath against her chest.

  "I take it that wasn't Solon," Dad said from his bower, and everyone managed to laugh.

  "How did you do that?" Ander asked.

  Eureka recognized the wonder in his eyes from a look that Diana had given her a few times. It was a look only someone who knew you really well could give, and only when they found themselves amazed to still be surprised by you.

  Eureka wasn't sure how she had done what she'd done. "I used to sing that when the twins were babies," she said. "I don't know why it worked." She stared in the direction the boy had run. Her pulse raced from the victory, from the surprising, simple joy of singing.

  It was the first time she'd sung since Diana died. She used to sing all the time, even make up her own songs. Back in seventh grade, when they'd still been friends, Maya Cayce had entered a school poetry contest using song lyrics lifted from Eureka's journal. When Eureka's stolen song won, neither girl mentioned it. Maya won twenty-five dollars, had her poem read over the intercom on Friday morning. It became the thing between them, a loaded glance over sleeping-bagged knees at slumber parties, and later, over kegs at house parties. Was Maya dead now? Had Eureka taken her life the way she'd taken Eureka's words?

  "I think that boy wanted us for his friends," Will
iam said.

  "I think we have our first fan." Cat handed the torch back to Eureka. "Now we need a band name. And a drummer." Cat brainstormed band names as they continued more cautiously down the narrow passage. Her rambling was comforting, even if Eureka couldn't afford the energy to attend to every manic idea darting catlike through her friend's mind.

  White and dark blue tiles now paved the floor beneath their feet. Mounted on the wall was a marble plaque, into which were chiseled the words Memento mori.

  "Thanks for the reminder," Cat quipped, and Eureka loved that Cat knew the sign meant "Remember that you must die" even though she hadn't been in the Latin class where Eureka had learned the phrase the year before.

  "What does it mean?" William asked.

  "A slave called it out to a Roman general who was going into battle," Eureka said, hearing her Latin teacher Mr. Piscadia's drawl in her mind. She wondered how he and his family had weathered her flood. Once she'd seen him and his son at a park walking a pair of brindle boxers. In her imagination, a giant wave washed away the memory. "It meant 'You are mighty today, but you're just a man, and you will fall.' When we studied it in Latin class, everyone got hung up on how it was about vanity and pride." Eureka sighed. "I remember thinking the words were comforting. Like, someday, all this will end."

  She looked at the others, their surprised faces. Cat's sarcasm was a cover for her genuinely sunny disposition. Dad didn't want to consider that his daughter felt so much pain. The twins were too young to understand. That left Ander. She met his eyes and she knew he understood. He gazed at her and didn't have to say a word.

  Ten steps later, the path dead-ended. They stopped before a crooked wooden door with brass hinges, an antique bell, and a second, silver plaque:

  Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.

  "Abandon all hope, ye who enter," Ander translated.

  Cat stepped closer to the plaque. "This I like. Talk about a killer tramp stamp."

  "What's a tramp stamp?" Claire asked.

  Eureka was surprised. Ander had told her he had never gone to school, that Eureka herself was the only subject he'd ever studied. She wondered how he'd learned Italian. She imagined him sitting at a computer in a dark bedroom, practicing romantic phrases from an online course he listened to through his earbuds.

  "It's from Dante's Inferno," he said.

  Eureka wanted to know more. When had he read the Inferno? What had made him pick it up? Had he liked it, made his own lists of who belonged in which circle of hell the way Eureka had?

  But this wasn't Neptune's Diner in Lafayette, where you hunkered down in a red vinyl booth with your crush and flirted your way into each other's secrets over cheese fries and chicken gumbo. She sensed that, like Mr. Piscadia's leisurely walks in the park, those kinds of dates now lay at the bottom of the sea.

  She reached for the bell and rang.

  8

  TRIAL BY ORCHID

  A panel in the door slid open.

  Eureka's reflection greeted her. Her ombre hair was soaked and tangled. Her face was swollen and her lips were cracked. Her blue irises looked dull from exhaustion, but she couldn't tell if crying had made her eyes something they hadn't been before.

  Cat pursed her lips at her mirror face. Her fingers scrambled to rebraid her pigtails. "I've looked worse. Usually in the context of more ... pleasant circumstances, but I have looked worse."

  Eureka watched Ander avert his eyes from the mirror. He was jiggling the doorknob, trying to get in.

  "What's a mirror doing on a door in the middle of a cave?" Claire asked.

  William raised a finger to the glass. A magician had visited his preschool a few months ago, and Eureka remembered that one of the things William had learned was how to detect a two-way mirror: a regular mirror had a small space between the reflective surface and its glass covering; a two-way mirror did not. If you pressed a finger to the glass and saw no gap in its reflection, someone was on the other side, watching you.

  Eureka looked down at William's finger. There was no gap. He looked up at Eureka in the mirror.

  A voice made them jump. "Who do you think you are?"

  Eureka held William's shoulders as she spoke into the mirror. "My name is Eureka Boudreaux. We came from--"

  "I didn't ask your name," the voice cut her off. It was soft and deep--a boy's voice--seasoned with the slightest German accent.

  It was odd to be looking at herself, addressing a disembodied voice, and discussing the nature of identity.

  "When who you are changes all the time," she said, "the only thing you have is your name."

  "Good answer."

  The door creaked open, but no one stood behind it. Ander led them through the doorway, into a grand, circular room. Rushing water echoed off a distant ceiling.

  Eureka held her torch over the moth-wing bower. Dad had drifted to sleep, but his tightly clenched jaw told her that, even after the salve, his pain was severe. She hoped help was inside this cave.

  A vast tile mosaic covered the floor. Its design depicted the Grim Reaper grinning through bloody fangs. A sickle sparkled in his left hand, and where his right hand ended, a fire pit had been built into the stone. Its blaze emanated from the Reaper's bony fingers.

  Between the stacks of skulls, the walls were decorated with dark murals. Eureka stared at one depicting a great flood, victims drowning in a violent sea. A day ago it would have reminded Eureka of the Orozco murals she'd seen with Diana in Guadalajara. Now it could have been a window outside.

  "We came all this way to end up in some freak's bachelor pad," Cat whispered in Eureka's good ear.

  "Freaks can be valuable friends," Eureka said. "Look at us."

  Near the far wall of the room, a spiral staircase made of stone curved up, to a floor above, and down, to another floor below. But as they walked farther into the room, Eureka saw that the far wall was moving, that it was a waterfall cascading from an unseen source down white stone. The ceiling opened up and the floor dropped off and there was a gap of several feet between the edge of the ground and the waterfall. It made Eureka claustrophobic and she didn't know why.

  Just in front of the waterfall, a dark green slope-back leather chair stood atop a sleek fox-fur rug. A man sat in it, his back to them. He faced the waterfall, reading an ancient book and sipping something fizzy from a golden champagne flute.

  "Hello?" Ander called.

  The man in the chair was still.

  Eureka stepped deeper into the room. "We're looking for someone named Solon."

  The figure spun to face them, propping his elbows atop the studded back of the chair. He lifted his chin and surveyed his guests. He looked fifteen, but his expression had a serrated edge that told Eureka he was older. He wore suede moccasins and a maroon satin robe belted loosely at his waist.

  "You've found him." His voice held an absence of hope. "Let's celebrate."

  Cat tilted her head toward Eureka and whispered, "Schwing."

  It hadn't occurred to Eureka that the boy was hot--though, now that Cat mentioned it, he was. Very. His eyes were a pale, spellbinding blue. His close-cropped hair was blond with intriguing black and brown leopard-print spots. The slinkiness of his robe suggested they had stumbled into his boudoir.

  The Solon she'd heard about defected from the Seedbearers seventy-five years ago. Was this boy pretending? Was the real Seedbearer somewhere hidden away?

  "You're Solon?" Eureka asked.

  "Read 'em and weep." He glanced at Eureka. "Not literally, please."

  They endured an awkward silence.

  "Please don't take this personally," Solon said, "whatever that means, but I've been hoodwinked by those witches so many times that, before I welcome you into my salon, I require some proof of your quote-unquote identity."

  Eureka felt her empty pockets. She had no means of identifying herself, other than her tears. "You might have to take my word for it."

  "No, please keep that." The boy's blue eyes twinkled. "Do you see that f
lower at the top of the waterfall?"

  He raised an index finger. Thirty feet above them, a vibrant fuchsia orchid grew out of the stone. It was stunning, undisturbed by the rushing water. It reminded Eureka of the gossipwitches' caftans. At least fifty bright-lobed blooms clung to the orchid's vine.

  "I see it."

  "If you are who they say you are," Solon said, "bring it to me."

  "Who are 'they'?" Eureka asked.

  "One vexed identity at a time. You first. The orchid ..."

  "Why should we believe you are who you say you are?" Cat asked. "You look like a freshman gamer too wimpy to carry my books."

  "What Cat means is," Eureka said, "we were expecting someone older."

  "Age is in the eye of the beholder," Solon said, and tipped his head toward Ander. "Wouldn't you agree?"

  Ander looked paler than usual. "This is Solon."

  "Fine," Cat said. "He's Solon, Eureka's Eureka, and the Cat's the Cat, not that you're interested. We're thirsty, and I'd like to know if my family's pushing clouds around or what. I take it you don't have a phone?"

  "The orchid," Solon said. "Then we'll talk."

  "This is ridiculous," Cat said.

  "She shouldn't need to prove herself to you," Ander said. "We're here because--"

  "I know why she's here," Solon said.

  "If I bring you the orchid," Eureka said, "you'll help us?"

  "I said we'll talk," Solon corrected. "You'll find that I'm an excellent conversationalist. No one has ever complained."

  "We need water," Eureka said. "And my father's hurt."

  "I said we'll talk," Solon repeated. "Unless you know someone else in the neighborhood who can give you what you seek?"

  Eureka studied the waterfall, trying to determine the texture of the white rock wall behind it. The first step would be getting beyond the water to the rock. Then she'd have to worry about climbing.

  She looked at Dad, but he was still asleep. She thought of the hundreds of trees she and Brooks had climbed throughout their childhood. Their favorite climbing time was dusk, so that when they nestled into the tallest branches, the stars would just be coming out. Eureka imagined attaching all those tree limbs onto one colossal trunk. She imagined it stretching into outer space, past the moon. Then she imagined a tree house on the moon, with Brooks waiting for her inside, floating in a space suit, biding his time by renaming constellations. Orion was the only one he knew.