“A dehydrated person can’t cry,” Eureka said. “If you want to keep your job, give me a drink.”
She’d made them nervous. As the brunette slowly unscrewed her canteen’s lid, Eureka dipped toward the other, a slender blond girl wearing blue-tinted glasses.
Eureka didn’t know what she was doing. She thought about Delphine and her broken heart. She thought about Diana and the wave that broke her body. She thought about her own agony flowing across every day that followed. She kissed the blond girl’s cheek.
Zzzzt.
Sharp pain filled Eureka’s body as a vision filled her mind: A younger version of the blond girl was being dragged across the threshold of a house by older, laughing Crimson Devils. Before she could say goodbye to her family, the girl was flung into the back of a silver wagon. Eureka heard a door slam and saw darkness and felt sobs.
Back in the tunnel, the blond girl screamed, and Eureka screamed, and it lasted only a moment, but when Eureka’s vision cleared she saw the Devil on the floor, convulsing, dying.
Eureka’s pain subsided slowly, like a temper. She spent an instant admiring Delphine for silently enduring this agony when she’d killed Aida. Eureka was dizzy and wanted to vomit.
The canteen fell to the ground. The brunette Devil glanced between Eureka and her convulsing friend. She took a step backward.
“You’re next,” Eureka said.
She paused, fearing the pain killing the second guard would cause.
Thwack.
Stars exploded before Eureka’s eyes as an orichalcum club hit the back of her shoulders. Eureka spun around, her lips homing in on her attacker. She shoved another Devil aside—and froze.
It was happening again. Her hands barely touched the girl—she was only trying to move the Devil out of her way—but the pain came, and then another vision. A wall of fire. A baby screaming on the other side of it. Then Eureka was in the mind of the Crimson Devil as a young girl, the moment she gave up on saving her baby sister, the moment she turned away and ran from the blaze into the night.
The girl in her hands dropped to the ground. Eureka’s hands groped for another. It didn’t need to be a kiss. When she was enraged, all of her skin could kill. She was her own lightning cloak.
The club struck her spine. She howled and grabbed behind her, finding flesh. New pain. New visions. A boy and a girl kissing, hotly, madly, breathing fast. Eureka didn’t recognize either of them, but she felt the pain of heartbreak and betrayal on behalf of the girl in her grip. She heard the club hit the ground, and then felt the girl slide, lifeless, from her hands.
Her arms flailed again, this time grabbing two Devils at once. Her vision hadn’t cleared enough for her to see them, but Eureka could feel them writhing and, more keenly, she could feel the wild telescoping of their deepest agonies:
Fat. Dull. Worthless. A mother’s voice branded one girl’s heart.
And then a different mother, lying dead in a cold room, tiny embers of a fire remaining in the hearth. Blood all over the sheets. All over the Crimson Devil sobbing at the woman’s side.
Eureka reached for more flesh, more pain. A bottomless hunger for agony grew inside her. Her vision cleared. She was grasping at air, alone in the coral tunnel. Crimson dresses fanned around her feet. Had she killed them all so quickly? One, two, three, four, five—
“Don’t move,” a voice behind her called.
Eureka turned and something blade-sharp bit her gut.
Wetness. Heat spooling through the fingers clutching her stomach. Everything red. An orichalcum arrow lodged in her flesh. She grimaced and yanked it out. Green vapors swirled from her open wound. The glowing arrow was artemisia-tipped.