At last, they found a brooding Atlas leaning out the tallest tower toward the ocean. Wind rustled his wild red hair. Eureka steered Peggy toward him.
Crimson Devils stood guard behind the king in what appeared to be a strategy room. Behind the girls, old men with plaited golden hair and red velvet robes gathered around a water map.
Peggy's coat was camouflaged against the travertine palace. She flew close to the walls, beating her moth wings, staying out of Atlas's view, brushing Eureka's legs against the palace every now and then.
"The arks are ready, sir," a male voice called from the room. "The last survivors will board by first light. Perhaps it is time you let the ghostsmith know Eureka is at large?"
Atlas stared out at the sea. The pink sliver of sun in the east had grown into a copper band. "She will come back. We have unfinished business, and she knows it."
"That's right, Atlas," Eureka muttered. "Let's finish it."
She clicked her running shoes against the horse's sides. Peggy swooped before the casement, directly in front of Atlas. A look of exhilarated intrigue crossed his face.
"Wanna get out of here?" Eureka asked.
"You know what I want," Atlas said.
A dozen Crimson Devils drew crossbows.
"Hold your fire," Atlas said, then, to Eureka, "You killed six of my guards, you know?"
"Surprised?"
"I'm getting over it."
"Then come on," Eureka said.
A very old man with long white hair called from the back of the room, "Sir, we must advise you--"
"Nice to hear from you, Saxby," Atlas said. "I was about to check your pulse."
"I'm going to cry for you," Eureka said to Atlas. "I want to. And I want you with me when I do."
Atlas pressed a hand against his heart. "It will be an honor."
"She's lying." An elegant Devil angled her crossbow at Eureka.
"If you shoot her you will spend the rest of your life beneath the lightning cloak," Atlas said.
Slowly, the girl lowered her bow.
"My subjects don't believe you," Atlas said intimately.
Eureka found herself flirting back. "I swear."
"On what?"
She paused, unprepared to take emotional inventory. What principle other than Atlas's destruction could she pretend to honor now?
"Swear on his life," Atlas said. "Brooks. When I was part of him you used to look at us in this very particular way. Swear on what was inside you when you looked like that."
"I swear on my love for my friend that I will cry if you come with me."
Atlas's minions pushed forward, jockeying to be included.
"Just you," Eureka added.
"Yes. Cozier that way." Atlas smiled. When he climbed onto the windowsill, Peggy flattened one of her moth-wing wings like a ledge. Atlas walked across it to meet Eureka. She held out her hand and was surprised his fit hers as snugly as Ander's had.
He slid behind her on the horse, pressed his chest into her back. She felt his heat. His arms encircled her waist. Her heart raced--not with fear, but with a strange thrill, like she was sneaking out with a bad ex-boyfriend.
They lifted skyward, above the sleeping city, passing through an innocent golden cloud on their way to their last stop.
Peggy landed on the beach. Her wings spun whorls of sand before resting at her sides. In the distance, the Gossipwitch Mountains glowed in the rising sun. The waveshop hung suspended a mile down the shore.
"I assume Delphine isn't joining us, but still working feverishly on the final robot?" Atlas asked as he helped Eureka off the horse.
Eureka shrugged as if she didn't care about anyone but Atlas. "This will just be us."
"Most of my fantasies start like that."
Eureka faced the ocean with a racing heart. "I need to clear my mind, to let the sorrow in."
"Happiness always overstays its welcome." Atlas drew a lachrymatory from his pocket. "Water is therapeutic in ways your world doesn't comprehend. We have powerful water shamans in Atlantis. If you need help--"
"I'll do it on my own." Eureka walked to the water's edge. It licked her toes, warm and wonderful. Soon she had waded in up to her waist. She let her feet lift off the sandy floor. She treaded toward Atlas, who had followed her. Their knees brushed below the water. "Would you turn around?"
"I thought you wanted me to see."
"Just for a moment." She touched his hand under the water. Her other hand gripped the bleached coral arrowhead stained with Ander's blood. "I promise it will be worth it."
Atlas faced the shore. His gold and red tunic rippled with the waves. Eureka took the tunic's hem and slid the heavy fabric up his back, along his shoulders. "Lift your arms," she whispered in his ear.
Goose bumps rose on Atlas's back. "You know how much I want this, but--"
"Shhh. Lift your arms."
He raised his arms and let her slip his tunic off. It sank into the ocean. Eureka caressed his back. Her nails etched soft pink waves across his skin.
"What are you thinking about?" Atlas asked.
"Terrible things." She raised the coral arrowhead. The dagger that could carve a gateway for Atlas to enter Waking World bodies ... and now she hoped it would do the same for her.
"Good," Atlas said.
She plunged the dagger into Atlas's back, enjoying the feel of his flesh catching the blade, giving way. His scream rang out. He spun and lunged as Eureka darted underwater.
She had not swum without her thunderstone in a long time. Salt stung her eyes. Atlas's blood clouded the water. From below, she watched him thrash, then lost him in a pool of panicked splashing.
She twirled, anticipating his attack from all directions. Her lungs burned with the need for air, but surfacing would be surrendering. Atlas could swim like a shark.
She had more work to do. Ander had only one set of gill-like slashes--and had not been possessed. Brooks, who had housed this monster's mind inside him, bore two sets. If Eureka wanted to get inside Atlas, wherever he was, she had to cut him a second time.
A jet of hot blood spooled over her shoulder. Eureka turned as Atlas's arm closed around her neck. She tried to swivel free, but he held fast. Her dagger stabbed at the water, his body barely out of her reach. She bit his forearm. Her teeth touched bone. Atlas squeezed her neck until she gagged on bloody water.
His other elbow crushed her nose. She felt the heat inside her head, tasted thick blood in the back of her throat. Her vision blurred. Blood was everywhere. She clasped her dagger tightly as Atlas pumped his legs to reach the surface.
When they broke through he released her neck, grabbed her wrists, and tried to wrest the dagger from her.
"I hope that felt good," Eureka said. "Because I'm about to do it again."
"I can take what I want for free--or you can pay to part with it." Atlas drove the hand holding the dagger toward her neck. "But I will have your tear."
Eureka laughed as the dagger sliced her skin and more blood flowed into the ocean. "Yes, you will."
She strained forward and snatched the coral dagger from her fingers with her teeth. When Atlas dropped her wrists to grab it, she slipped underwater. She swam toward him, a piranha with a single tooth. She found his back. With a nod of her head, she tore into his flesh.
The dagger plunged deeper than she'd expected. She still held it in her mouth, but Eureka's face now felt like it was a part of Atlas.
She felt something lift away, and then she felt nothing--at least, not in any way she was used to feeling. It had taken forever and happened so soon:
Eureka was inside the monster. Everything else was gone.
His interior was an ocean, barbed with reefs of dead coral, sharper than the dagger she'd used to cut her way inside, sharper than anything she'd ever conceived. What once she would have seen with her eyes and felt with her body, Eureka now sensed with her mind. All feeling had disappeared, replaced by a new knowing.
Then the coral slashed her thoughts--and Eure
ka could no longer ... remember ... her mission. She blacked out on a sharp shore inside him.
"Aaughh!"
Her mind screamed, using someone else's voice. She struggled to recognize the sound: Atlas's lips. Eureka's emotion.
The dagger had worked.
She tried to keep her thoughts still. They were all she had left of herself and they were in peril. Slowly, she allowed one in....
Face him. But as soon as Eureka thought it, she lost the ability to concentrate. Her mind had known deep pain before--shame, grief, desolation--all incomparable to this. The reef inside Atlas murdered thought, slicing it into unrecognizable shards the way a dead reef she'd once snorkeled over in Florida had sliced the flesh of her thighs. Face him had been removed from Eureka's consciousness, an urge she'd never considered.
Somehow she knew she had to ascend the bladelike reefs. Without a body, she would have to think her way up--but how? When thoughts died on this reef, she wouldn't get them back.
This was what trapped Brooks, she thought. Then that thought met the reef with a deadly, thunderous boom. It was mutilated, lost, and Eureka could remember nothing for a long while.
Slowly, painfully, an idea came into focus: for much of Eureka's life, she had loathed herself. No shrink had ever found the pill to change the fact that her heart was a tank full of hate. Finally, it might do her some good.
I can't, she thought with purpose--an experiment.
When that rush of negativity left her mind and was shredded upon the coral, Eureka forgot a portion of her heavy fear. She had sacrificed it to the reef. She sensed herself moving higher inside Atlas.
Selfish.
Hypersensitive.
Suicidal.
One by one she acknowledged her deepest doubts and hesitations. One by one they left her, crashed upon the reef, and were destroyed. The dark echo of Suicidal's death rang in her mind as she rose toward the surface of Atlas's inner sea.
There is no way out. Someone she used to love had told her that. She couldn't remember who. Then the reefs slaughtered the sentiment, so it didn't matter anyway. Her mind climbed the last barbed branches of coral, amputating one last long-held fear like a useless limb.
Joy is impossible....
Suddenly she saw through Atlas's eyes. It was like her mind had fired across the synapse that connected thought to sight. It reminded Eureka of looking through the peephole in a hotel room door. She saw the red inner rims of his eyes framing a world painted different colors than the ones she used to see. The greens were saturated, the blues profound, the reds pulsing and magnetic. Her new vision was strong. She saw every scale of each darting fish. She watched an elderly gossipwitch ascend a distant mountain peak, and admired every golden fold of her jowls.
She stood waist-deep in the water and took a moment to inspect her new body, her taut thighs and the foreign flesh between them. She touched the muscles on her smooth, bare chest, the stubble growing on her cheeks. She made both of her biceps bulge. She yearned for someone to fight. With Atlas's camouflage she was liberated in a new way. She could be as ruthless as she'd always needed to be.
She scanned the beach. A turquoise palm tree swayed in the wind. She felt an irresistible urge to unbuckle Atlas's belt and pee on that tree. She laughed at the dumb cockiness of the idea when she still had so much to accomplish, such important tears to make him shed. And then she did pee, right there in the ocean, because she was inside a boy's body and it was insane. She slipped her pants down, freeing the most thrilling part of Atlas, and let go. She lifted each of her legs. She swiveled her hips. She made an arch in the shape of a rainbow.
When she was finished, she probed her back, touching the wounds she'd dug. They were numb. The coral dagger still protruded from Atlas's flesh. She pulled it out. Her new mouth screamed, but that was Atlas's reflex, his suffering, not hers.
"You're out of your depth," the lips of her new body said. It was Atlas speaking.
Her eyes went blurry, then her view of the beach was torn from her as her mind flowed backward onto the sharp dead coral below.
"Still want my tears?" she tried to say, but the words slurred, incoherent, from Atlas's lips. Moving his limbs was easier; she didn't know how to make Atlas's body talk convincingly. Yet.
What if he's right? Eureka gave that anxiety to the reef, using it to thrust her mind forward, crowding Atlas's dark, furious thoughts--destroy her ... punish her ... how?--until she forced her mind behind his eyes, and sensed his desires falling beneath hers. She hoped they shattered on the reef.
A corpse floated before her.
It took a moment to recognize it as her own.
She used to be the girl who looked like that. Moments ago, she'd had long, ombre hair, a bloody nose, skinny arms, and muscular legs. She'd had a beating, aching heart even though she'd tried to deny it. She checked her old body's pulse with Atlas's fingers. Nothing.
She had done it. Eureka Boudreaux had discarded herself. Her old blue eyes were open. They were the color of her father's eyes and their point of view wasn't hers anymore.
Eureka realized that even at her most extremely suicidal, she had never wanted to die. She had really wanted this, escape from a fixed identity, the chance to be many things at once--a bitch, a nymph, an artist, an angel, a saint, a strip-mall security guard, a tyrant, a boy. She had wanted to be loosed from the narrow way her world defined "Eureka Boudreaux." She had wanted to be free.
Her vision blurred. Atlas's desperation layered over hers. The mind that had possessed a thousand other bodies didn't know how to rid itself of one possessing his. His hands grabbed her corpse. He took his fury out on it.
His fingers tore her throat, ripped her skin apart, tore into the cartilage of her neck. His fists rained down on her brittle ribs, cracking what the witches' salve had half mended. Eureka didn't stop him; she knew nothing would bring her body back. She relaxed into his rage, curious when and how he would exhaust himself.
She'd been wrong to think he had no feelings. When Atlas's emotions erupted, they ruled him, the way falling in love with Ander had ruled Eureka. He knew rage but not its opposite. Eureka would guide him so deeply into joy that it would kill him--and, she hoped, raise the souls inside the Filling to a higher place.
But first she had to say one last goodbye.
33
WATERFALL
Eureka swam toward the waveshop as a king.
Every few seconds her vision blurred, and the ocean reeled with Atlas's rage. The only way she kept his thoughts at bay and her own thoughts above the reef was to focus on reaching Delphine. Soon Eureka could hold Atlas's mind off for a full minute. Then for three.
She came up for air, treaded water. She practiced making words coherent. "I'm almost through with you," she said.
She scanned the beach. The Gossipwitch Mountains loomed ahead. She thought she would have made it closer to Delphine, but she didn't see the suspended wave. She flung Atlas's foot over a sandbar and stood up, chest-deep in the ocean.
Lightning struck the water twenty feet ahead. But the sky above was clear. Something golden bobbed in the waves. Whatever it was had caused that lightning. Eureka swam toward it and discovered Delphine's loom.
She trained Atlas's remarkable vision on the beach. The naked body of a boy lay on the sand. Was it Brooks? No. The boy's skin was silver--a ghost robot. She waded forward, dragging Atlas's gaze across another robot, also sprawled upon the shore, perpendicular to the first. Soon she'd counted more robots. Seven of them were splayed, motionless, across the shore. Their bodies had been purposefully positioned, limbs extended at odd angles, to collectively create a design.
Or rather, each body had been stretched to form a letter. The ghost robots spelled a word.
Even if Eureka had never seen the labyrinthine written language of Atlantis on the pages of The Book of Love, her Tearline intuition would have decoded the message in the sand. The word was missing its last letter, but she was able to grasp its meaning.
The
transliteration sounded something like Eur-ee-ka.
It was Atlantean for joy.
Atlas roared, and Eureka felt her consciousness shoved backward within him. She saw only white and knew she was soon bound again for the coral as Atlas screamed, "Delphine!"
Eureka willed her mind forward to the place from which she could manipulate Atlas's body. She focused on ramming his fist into the center of his face. When she succeeded, she felt no pain but knew he did from the way his thoughts faded and her vision of the beach returned.
"Don't make me hurt you again." Her words in his throat sounded clearer, expressing the perverse flirtation she'd intended.
Movement at the crest of a sand dune--near the palm grove Atlas's vision painted turquoise--caught Eureka's attention. One ghost robot chased another. Their bodies were identical, but the pursuing robot was special: Ovid wore Solon's features as it lunged to grab the legs of the other robot and brought it down upon the sand.
Solon was the inscriber of the message in the sand. He'd withheld the meaning of her namesake until now, when she could use it. Did it mean he still believed in her?
The other robot struggled, then straddled Ovid's chest and wrestled its arms into surrender. Its fingers searched the sand and found a heavy rock. Eureka held Atlas's breath as the robot bashed the boulder into Ovid's head.
Sparks flew. Eureka couldn't see Ovid's face crushed beneath the stone; it was wedged deep into wet sand. She didn't know if ghost robots died, but she could see that Ovid would never rise again.
As the victor rose from the orichalcum carnage, Ovid's arm glided toward its opponent's face and touched its cheek, a gentle caress. Then it jabbed two fingers under the robot's jaw and twisted them into the infinity-shaped keyhole Eureka knew marked its neck. The ghost robot keeled over onto Ovid's chest, as if in an embrace. Neither of them moved again.
"Delphine!" Atlas's mouth shouted. "She will betray you--"
To quiet him, Eureka slashed Atlas's cheek with the coral dagger.
At the far end of the beach, where the waveshop had once been, Delphine lay on her back. Waves lapped her long hair. Brooks straddled her, a shocking, erotic pose that sent jealousy surging through a fault between Eureka's and Atlas's minds.