“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.”