Waterfall, page 21
part #2 of Teardrop Series
A snicker came from Eureka's other side. Another girl in another crimson dress. Her laurel wreath capped a smooth black bob, and her cold aquamarine eyes were focused on Eureka's right hand.
Crimson Devils, Atlas had called his guards.
"Where's Atlas?" Eureka said. Where is Brooks's corpse? she wanted to ask. She was used to the idea that the two boys occupied the same body. But she had watched her friend die, and only the enemy remained. A raging desire to kill Atlas flooded her.
"Watch," the second girl told the first.
Eureka felt a sting of heat, like the girl was injecting her fingertips with hot glue. A shimmery blue substance coated her fingers. Eureka touched the pad of her thumb to her forefinger and a jolt zipped through her, like the time she'd stuck her finger in an outlet when she was six.
"Don't." The dark-haired girl pried Eureka's fingers apart, smoothing more blue over Eureka's thumb. "It's going to hurt, but by sunrise, we'll have everything we ever wanted. He promised. Didn't he promise, Aida?"
"We're not to talk to her, Gem," Aida said.
"Sunrise." Eureka repeated the four-syllable Atlantean word. She tried to turn her head toward the window to gauge the time, but a crimson dress blocked her view.
"If he learns you were talking to his--"
"He won't." Gem glared at her companion.
"Then stop talking to her." Aida turned toward a desk on the left side of the room, which stood precisely where Eureka's identical desk stood back home.
"I want to see Atlas." Eureka squirmed against her bonds.
What was happening at sunrise? How could she destroy these girls and free herself before then? She closed her eyes and channeled the Incredible Hulk, master of transforming rage into strength. She willed the mirrored chest of drawers to become a thousand whirling glass daggers, slicing flesh, splashing crimson onto crimson. But then what? How would she find Atlas?
In Lafayette, escape had been her bedroom window, then the arms of the oak tree just beyond it. But when Gem shifted and Eureka could see out the window, no oak tree reached for her. Sun shone in. The light felt tired, evening's last rays.
They were very high up, a thousand stories above the ground. Gold and silver rooftops shimmered distantly below, and beyond them rings of water and land led to the ocean, which flowed into a horizon at the edge of whatever was left of the world.
"Tell me what happens at sunrise," Eureka said.
Gem was next to Aida at the desk. "Let me do the heartplate."
As Gem reached across the surface of the desk something strange happened to her hand. It blurred, like it had passed behind a pane of frosted glass. The blurring lasted only a moment. Gem's hand sharpened again and she was holding a silky piece of material, the same shimmery blue as whatever was on Eureka's fingers. Eureka thought she saw a lightning bolt flash across its center.
"Unbutton her shirt," Gem said.
Cold air braced Eureka's skin as Aida's fingers worked their way down her shirt. Then a feeling like nostalgia settled over her as the blue square was laid across her chest. Warm and heavy, it reminded Eureka of how she felt watching videos of Diana on her laptop.
Her breath came shallowly as Gem smoothed the heartplate over her chest. Aida ran a finger from Eureka's right temple, across her forehead, to her left temple, and Eureka understood that while she had been unconscious, the girls had affixed a band of the blue substance to her head.
"The ghostsmith counsels subjects before charging the cloak," Gem said.
"You've never met the ghostsmith," Aida said. "Besides, this is for Atlas. No wasting time. He wants the lachrymatories filled." She applied pressure to the inside corners of Eureka's eyes. Two blurry silver outlines fixed just below Eureka's vision. The lachrymatories. She was supposed to cry into them.
"It won't work," Eureka said.
"It always works," Gem said. She moved to the wall, where Eureka's painting of the weeping Saint Catherine of Siena hung in a cobwebbed corner. She flipped a switch Eureka couldn't see.
Pain crashed into Eureka. She was engulfed by absolute darkness. She arched her back. She tasted blood. The pain doubled, then redoubled.
When the pain was total and familiar, bright points of light entered her vision, meteors showering the sky of her eyelids. One point of light drew closer. Burning heat filled her pores. Then Eureka was inside the light.
She saw a faded floral-print suitcase by a door. Lamplight flickered somewhere. Her nostrils flared at the odor of broken pickle jars--that scent always brought her back to the night her parents split up. She saw Diana's feet in their gray and pink galoshes, her hair wet with rain, her eyes dry with determination. The front door opened. Thunder outside was so real it rattled Eureka's bones. The suitcase was in Diana's hand.
"Mom! Wait!" Eureka felt the back of her eyes burning. "Don't you love me enough to stay?" Never before had she voiced the question that plagued her all the time. She tried to pull away. It was just a memory. A memory of tears building before she'd known better.
It was so real. Diana leaving. Eureka left behind ...
"No!"
The white light was whipped away. The searing pain cooled to a third-degree burn. Eureka shook like an earthquake, rattling the metal cuffs binding her to the bed. The afterimage of Diana was still abandoning her eyes.
A tall figure stood in the doorway of Eureka's replica bedroom. He wore a long silver smock and a grease-smeared orichalcum welding mask.
"The ghostsmith," Gem whispered.
Footsteps approached the bed. Silver-gloved hands plucked the lachrymatories from Eureka's eyes. At least she had not cried. The ghostsmith slipped them inside a silver pocket in his smock.
He removed the heartplate from Eureka's chest without a word. He pulled the blue material from Eureka's fingers and forehead. She bore the pain silently and studied the gleaming surface of the ghostsmith's mask. She wanted to see the face behind the orichalcum.
The ghostsmith deftly wove the fragments of blue material into a single long strand, a wide, blue glittering band. Then he wrapped it seven times around his wrist and used his other hand to knot it. A lightning bolt flashed through the fabric. Eureka wondered what it had looked like on her skin.
"Come close, girls," a peppery voice echoed from inside the mask.
Gem and Aida had been trying to slip silently out the door. They turned and drew slowly toward the ghostsmith.
"Atlas ordered this done?" the ghostsmith asked.
Eureka discerned the faintest lisp.
"Yes," Aida said. "He--"
"You will pay for his mistake."
"But--" Aida began to tremble as the ghostsmith removed his mask.
A long, lustrous mane of black hair tumbled from it, revealing pale skin decorated by a dazzling constellation of freckles. Round black eyes peered from a dense curtain of lashes.
The ghostsmith was a teenage girl.
The ghostsmith was Delphine--Eureka's very-great-grandmother, source of the Tearline and Eureka's darkness.
The ghostsmith dipped forward and kissed Aida on the cheek. When her lips met Aida's skin a spark passed between them. A burning odor stung Eureka's nostrils and the girl's eyes filled with tears. Aida fell to the ground. She began to weep. She rolled back and forth, lost in sudden sorrow, a black hole opened with a kiss.
Aida's shaking gradually lessened. Her sobs quieted. Her final cry broke off midway, leaving a feeling of unfinished desperation in the room. She rolled onto her face. The stolen teardrop necklace clinked when it hit the floor.
Delphine's red lips loomed close to the other Devil. Gem turned toward the hall and ran. The ghostsmith darted after her, had the girl back inside the room in an instant. Her gloved hand clamped around Gem's neck.
Gem's lips quivered. "Please."
Inches separated their skin. Delphine puckered her lips, then paused. "You have worked for me before."
"Yes," Gem whispered.
"Did I like you?"
"You did."
"That is why Atlas chose you to betray me."
The girl said nothing. Delphine swooped to the ground, lifted Aida's corpse, and pushed it roughly into Gem's arms.
"Show Atlas what happens when he crosses me."
Gem staggered under Aida's weight and fled down the hall.
Eureka and the ghostsmith were alone. She turned toward the bed.
"Hello." Delphine's voice was softer. She'd switched from Atlantean to English. She avoided Eureka's gaze, looking instead at the bedposts, the desk, the rocking chair. "This must be distracting."
One swipe of Delphine's hand along the wall made the familiar furniture vanish. The room was gray and bare. The bed Eureka lay on was now a cot.
"He commissions convincing holograms," Delphine said, "but Atlas does not appreciate the horror of nostalgia. No one wise looks back at what they were." She poured water from a pitcher into a goblet that glistened like a star. "Are you thirsty?"
Eureka wanted a drink badly, but she jerked her chin away. Water spilled down her chest.
Delphine put the goblet down. "Do you know who I am?"
Eureka looked into Delphine's dark eyes and, for a moment, saw her mother. For just a moment, she wanted to be held.
"You're the villain," she said.
Delphine smiled. "I am certainly that, and so are you. We're a team now. I'm sorry about the lightning cloak. When I designed it"--she stroked the blue band on her wrist--"I never anticipated it might be used on you."
"What is it?" Eureka sensed she wasn't finished with the lightning cloak. The more she understood, the more she could withstand.
"It is woven of my agony, so pure and deep that it connects to all agony inside everyone it touches. What you felt was my pain seeking your pain in the astral light. Had I not interceded, you would have felt every shred of misery you've ever known and ever would know in the future. Call it a mother's intuition that I got here in time." Delphine touched Eureka's cheek with her gloved hand. "Pain is power. Over time I have absorbed it from many thousands of agonized souls."
"What about Aida?"
"Another soul put out of her misery, another bump to my arsenal of pain," Delphine said. "She was also a message to Atlas. We send each other little notes throughout the day."
"Take me to him," Eureka said.
" 'Take me' is such a submissive phrase," Delphine said, trying too hard to mask her jealousy. "Is that really what you want? Because I can give you anything, Eureka."
"Why would you help me?"
"Because"--Delphine seemed stunned--"we're family." She slipped her gloves off and clasped Eureka's hand with long, cold fingers. "Because I love--"
"What I want is impossible."
Delphine sat on the edge of the bed and recovered from Eureka's interruption. She flashed a lovely smile. "There's no such thing."
Eureka could have asked for the safe retrieval of the twins and Cat and Ander--but if that were what she truly wanted, she would never have abandoned them. She wasn't their protector anymore. Maybe Delphine was right about not looking back at what you used to be.
"All you have to do is ask," Delphine said.
Eureka would call her bluff. "I want my best friend."
You really loved him best of all, Atlas had said. Had he been right?
"Then you shall have him," Delphine said.
"He's dead."
Delphine lowered her lips toward Eureka's, the way she'd done to Aida. But no spark flashed between them, only the warmth of red lips on Eureka's right cheek, then her left. Diana used to kiss her like that.
She heard a series of metallic snaps as the barbed cuffs were released from around her wrists, then her waist, then her ankles. Delphine slipped an arm under Eureka's neck and raised her from the bed. "Only the ghostsmith decides who is dead."
28
THE GHOSTSMITH
Delphine led Eureka through a tunnel made of jewel-toned coral reef. They emerged from a sand dune on an empty beach and left matching trails of footprints as they strode toward the sea. The sun was pink and low.
By sunrise, Gem had said. That was how long Eureka had to defeat Atlas.
Farther down the shore, dark purple rocks rose into jagged mountains.
"Isn't that where you were born?" Eureka asked Delphine. "You were raised in the mountains by the gossipwitches."
By now, Esme and the others must have made it back. Eureka imagined Peggy alighting on one of the crags, a dozen delighted witches sliding off her wings. After all these years and all they'd seen, would their return home satisfy them?
Delphine stared into the blue horizon. "Says who?"
"Selene. The Book of Love." Eureka felt for her bag and realized it was gone, of course, stolen by the Devils along with her crystal teardrop. She was bereft of all the things that used to strengthen her.
It was better that way. Rage strengthened her, the way other people's pain strengthened Delphine.
"Snuff out that dim fairy tale," Delphine said. "Our future burns too bright."
Ahead, a soaring wave climbed the water. It curled like a swimming giant's arm toward the shore. Eureka braced herself for the wipeout, but where the mighty beast was about to break--where the wave's foaming lip was inches from shore--it defied gravity and the tides and whatever moon still spun in the sky. It hung, on the verge, as if captured in a photograph.
"What is that?" Eureka asked.
"It is my waveshop."
"You build waves there?" Eureka had come to associate rogue waves with Seedbearers, but maybe Delphine had been behind the wave that killed Diana.
Delphine tossed her head. "Occasionally. Architecturally." She gestured at the suspended wave like it was a building she'd designed. "I specialize in the dead and dying. That is why I am called the ghostsmith. My range is wide, as all things yearn to die."
She led Eureka along the shore until they faced the suspended wave's barrel. Its trough looked dim and cavernous, like a room with a sand floor and curving water walls. A pale oval of daylight shone through the opposite end.
"I have waited an eternity to bring you here," Delphine said.
Eureka wondered what she meant, what lie Eureka represented to Delphine. She thought about Delphine absorbing pain from everyone she'd ever tortured. She knew pain made its own time. After Diana died, minutes had outstretched millennia.
"Come inside," Delphine said. "See where I do my most essential work."
Eureka studied the wave, seeking the trap.
"Don't worry," Delphine said. "This wave looks on its last legs, as if it is about to rejoin the sea that bore it. But I can keep it up forever. You'll see once you're inside."
The wave's motion had somehow been arrested, but when Eureka touched the wall of water, she bruised her fingers on the unexpected rush that churned within it. She drew closer to Delphine and entered the suspended wave. The ocean wrapped around them like a shell around two black pearls.
Music played from somewhere. Eureka was chilled to recognize it--Madame Blavatsky's bird Polaris had sung the same tune outside her window in Lafayette.
Damp sand lit up beneath Eureka's feet as she walked farther into the oblong space the wave had carved. By the time she reached the center of the waveshop, the ground shone with brilliant golden light.
They were not alone. Four teen boys had their backs toward Eureka. They were naked, and the impulse to stare at them was strong. Each of their backs bore scars from lacerations. The slight silver sheen of their skin was familiar. These were ghost robots, like Ovid, vessels for Atlas's Filling.
Two of the machines used shovels to chuck a crumbly gray substance from a small slag heap into a glowing pit at the far end of the suspended wave. The other two robots were locked in debate. They weren't speaking English or Atlantean. They didn't seem to be speaking the same language even as themselves. A single robot made one point in what Eureka thought was Dutch, switched to Spanish to second-guess himself, then concluded in what sounded like Cantonese. The others responded in languages she guessed were Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and a dozen more unrecognizable tongues. They spoke in tones Eureka was used to hearing just before a fight at Wade's Hole. She glanced at Delphine, who held a fragile smile on her lips.
She remembered Dad's ghost battling Seyma's ghost and, later, the Seedbearers' ghosts inside Ovid. It had been chaos: multiple identities struggling to claim one robotic body. Solon had said these machines were built to accommodate many millions of dead souls. Eureka wondered how many ghosts were already inside each of these silver boys.
One of the debating robots held what looked like a sheet of water. It was a map--or a reflection of a map. It hovered between his hands like paper and appeared to be composed solely of different shades of blue.
He pointed at the center and said in a Cockney accent, "Eurasia by sunrise, innit?"
Eureka's eyes adjusted to make sense of the map. Coastlines remained foreign, but the turquoise shape of the Turkish mountains she and Ander had climbed to reach the Bitter Cloud appeared in the center. She allowed herself to think of her loved ones for a moment. If Eurasia was still in question, could they have survived the Rising?
"Ander," she whispered.
One of the robots whipped around. Its lean orichalcum face bore the stern expression of a middle-aged woman--but only for an instant. It quickly morphed into the gaunt, furious features of a young man who was about to snap. It made a fist.
Eureka made one, too.
Delphine slid between them and placed cool hands on Eureka's shoulders. "Lucretius," she said in Atlantean, "this is my daughter."
Lucretius's features changed again, into those of an avuncular man. Silver whiskers sprouted from its chin. "Hello, Eureka."
"I am not her daughter."
"Don't be silly." Delphine's strong massage was like ice on the back of Eureka's neck. "I've told everyone about you."
"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."
