“You’re going to get rid of Atlas?” she asked slowly.
“Depose, dispatch, destroy … I haven’t yet decided which I like the sound of best. But—practical matters before poetry. You may know that one of my robots was stolen and never recovered. Tonight I make Ovid’s replacement. Would you like to help?”
Eureka knew from The Book of Love that Selene and Leander escaped Atlantis with Ovid and the baby girl stowed inside their ship. But that had been ages ago.
“If the robot can be replaced,” she asked, “why wasn’t it done long ago?”
For the first time Delphine looked upon her coldly. Eureka lost her breath.
“It cannot simply be replaced like a lover,” Delphine said. “My robots require the darkest materials to come into being. But that wouldn’t have been in your book, would it? Neither would our fate after the flood. Selene missed all that, too. You don’t know what Woe was like, how we were stagnant beneath the ocean for millennia. Only our minds could move. Try to fathom the insanity that brews in one who must endure such impotence. Every Atlantean suffered, all because he dared to break my heart.”
“Leander.”
“Never say his name.” Delphine repeated Atlas’s rule. Eureka now wondered if it was actually the ghostsmith’s rule. Was she the source of all Atlantean darkness?
Delphine smoothed her hair. She inhaled deeply. “There’s not much time. The replacement must be ready in time to catch the final ghosts.”
“How many souls are still alive?” Eureka asked.
“Seventy-three million, twelve thousand, eight hundred, and six,” the robot Lucretius called.
“I must finish before sunrise.” Delphine gestured toward the opposite end of the wave, where no nuance of sunset remained in the sky. “When the morning light is centered there, our homeless ghosts will find their shelter.”
She took a seat at an already spinning potter’s wheel. Behind her, near the arching back of the wave, a tall golden loom displayed a half-woven square of shimmery blue fabric. Lightning flashed across it—more of Delphine’s agony.
“Gilgamesh,” Delphine called. “More orichalcum.”
One of the shoveling robots reached inside the pit and retrieved a huge, glowing red mass. As he carried it to Delphine, it cooled in the misty air to the silver of orichalcum. He eased it onto Delphine’s spinning wheel.
Her bare foot pumped the pedal, whirling the plate faster. The tempo of the song that had been playing throughout the waveshop sped up. It was melancholy and beautiful, all minor chords.
“This wheel generates the music that keeps the waveshop from crashing in on itself,” Delphine said. “It must be wound frequently, like a clock.”
As her hands glided through the fiery mass of orichalcum, it sizzled and softened into the consistency of clay. A muscular calf began to take shape.
“You’re sculpting the robot,” Eureka said.
Delphine nodded. “Do you know the nature of orichalcum?”
Eureka knew that the lachrymatory, the anchor, the chest of artemisia, the spear and sheath that Ander had taken from the Seedbearers, and Ovid had been the only orichalcum in the Waking World. “I know it’s precious.”
“But you don’t know why?” Delphine said.
“Things are precious when they’re hard to come by,” Eureka said.