“I didn’t know this was going to happen. I didn’t know it would be like this.”
“No one knew,” he said. “But your tears were always inevitable, no matter what my family thought. You were on a path.” It was the same word Madame Blavatsky had used the first night Eureka and Cat went to her atelier. “And now we are all on that path with you.”
Eureka looked around the floating shield as it pitched through the deluged yard. The world beyond was eerie and dim, unrecognizable. She couldn’t believe it was her home. She couldn’t believe her tears had done this. She had done this. She felt sick with strange empowerment.
An arm of the swing set somersaulted over their heads. Everyone ducked, but they didn’t need to. The shield was impenetrable. As Cat and Dad gasped in relief, Eureka realized she hadn’t felt less alone in months.
“I owe you my life,” Ander said to her. “Everyone here does.”
“I already owed you mine.” She wiped her eyes. She’d seen these motions made countless times before in movies, and by other people, but the experience was entirely fresh to her, as if she’d suddenly discovered a sixth sense. “I thought you might be mad at me.”
Ander tilted his head, surprised. “I don’t think I could ever be mad at you.”
Another tear spilled down Eureka’s cheek. She watched Ander fight the urge to abscond with it to his own eye. Unexpectedly, the phrase I love you sprinted to the tip of her tongue. She swallowed hard to keep it back. It was the trauma talking, not real emotion. She hardly knew him. But the urge to voice those words wouldn’t go away. She remembered what Dad had mentioned earlier about her mother’s drawing, about the things Diana had said.
Ander wouldn’t break her heart. She trusted him.
“What is it?” He reached for her hand.
I love you.
“What happens now?” she asked.
Ander looked around the shield. Everyone’s eyes were on him. Cat and Dad didn’t even seem to begin to know what kinds of questions to ask.
“There is a passage near the end of the Seedbearer Chronicles that my family refused to talk about.” Ander gestured at the flood beyond the shield. “They never wanted to anticipate this happening.”
“What does it say?” Eureka asked.
“It says the one who opens the fissure to Atlantis is the only one who can close it—the only one who can face the Atlantean king.” He eyed Eureka, gauging her reaction.
“Atlas?” she whispered, thinking: Brooks.
Ander nodded. “If you have done what they predicted you would do, I’m not the only one who needs you. The whole world does.”
He turned in what Eureka thought was the direction of the bayou. Slowly he started to swim, a crawl stroke like she and the twins had used to get to shore the day before. His strokes increased as the shield moved toward the bayou. Without a word, the twins began swimming with him, just as they’d swum with her.
Eureka tried to grasp the concept of the whole world needing her. She couldn’t. The suggestion overpowered the strongest muscle she possessed: her imagination.
She began a crawl stroke of her own, noticing Dad and Cat slowly do the same. With six of them paddling, the wild currents were just barely manageable. They floated over the flooded wrought-iron gate at the edge of the yard. They pivoted into the swollen bayou. Eureka had no idea how much water had fallen, or when, if ever, it would stop. The shield stayed several feet below the surface. Reeds and mud flanked their path. The bayou Eureka had spent so much of her life on was alien underwater.
They swam past broken, waterlogged boats and busted piers, recalling a dozen hurricanes past. They crossed schools of silver trout. Slick black gars darted before them like rays of midnight.
“Will we still look for the lost Seedbearer?” she asked.