Eureka put both books on her bed. Her fingers ran over the worn green cover of The Book of Love, traced the three ridges on its spine. She touched the peculiar raised circle on the cover and wished she knew what it had looked like when the book was newly bound.
She felt the rough-cut pages of Madame Blavatsky’s old black journal. She didn’t want to violate the dead woman’s privacy. But any notes inside this book held all that Eureka might know of the legacy Diana had left her. Eureka needed answers.
Diana, Brooks, and Madame Blavatsky had each found The Book of Love fascinating. Eureka didn’t feel worthy of having it all to herself. She was afraid to open it, afraid it would make her more alone.
She thought of Diana, who believed Eureka to be tough and smart enough to find her way out of any foxhole. She thought of Madame Blavatsky, who hadn’t blinked when asking if she could inscribe Eureka’s name as the rightful owner of the text. She thought of Brooks, who said that her mother was one of the smartest people who’d ever lived—and if Diana thought there was something special about this book, Eureka owed it to her to understand its complexities.
She opened Blavatsky’s translation journal. She leafed through it slowly. Just before a block of blank pages was a single sheet scribbled in violet ink, titled The Book of Love, Fourth Salvo.
She glanced at Ander. “Have you read this?”
He tossed his head. “I know what it says. I grew up with a version of the story.”
Eureka read aloud:
“Sometime, somewhere, in the future’s remote nook, a girl will come into being and meet the conditions to commence the Rising Time. Only then will Atlantis return.”
Atlantis. So Blavatsky had been right. But did it mean the story was real?
“The girl must be born on a day that does not exist, as we Atlanteans ceased to exist when the maiden tear was shed.”
“How can a day not exist?” Eureka asked. “What does that mean?”
Ander watched her closely but didn’t say anything. He waited. Eureka considered her own birthday. It was February 29. Leap day. Three years out of four, it didn’t exist.
“Go on,” Ander coaxed, smoothing the page of Blavatsky’s translation.
“She must be a childless mother and a motherless child.”
Immediately, Eureka thought of Diana’s body in the ocean. “Motherless child” defined the shadowy identity she’d inhabited for months. She thought of the twins, for whom she’d risked everything that afternoon. She’d do it again tomorrow. Was she a childless mother, too?
“Finally, her emotions must be tempered, must brew like a storm too high in the atmosphere to be felt on earth. She must never cry until the moment her grief surpasses what any mortal being can bear. Then she will weep—and open up the fissure to our world.”
Eureka looked up at the painting of Saint Catherine of Siena hanging on her wall. She studied the saint’s single, picturesque tear. Was there a relationship between that tear and the fires from which the saint offered protection? Was there a relationship between Eureka’s tears and this book?
She thought of how lovely Maya Cayce looked when she cried, how naturally Rhoda wept at the sight of her kids. Eureka envied these direct displays of emotion. They felt antithetical to everything she was. The night Diana slapped her was the only time she remembered sobbing.
Never, ever cry again.
And the most recent tear she’d cried? Ander’s fingerprints had absorbed it.
There, now. No more tears.
Outside, the storm raged furiously. Inside, Eureka tempered her emotions, just as she’d been doing for years. Because she’d been told to. Because it was all she knew how to do.
Ander pointed at the page where, after a few lines of blank space, the violet ink resumed. “There’s one last part.”
Eureka took a deep breath and read the final words of Madame Blavatsky’s translation: