“Shhh. Lift your arms.”
He raised his arms and let her slip his tunic off. It sank into the ocean. Eureka caressed his back. Her nails etched soft pink waves across his skin.
“What are you thinking about?” Atlas asked.
“Terrible things.” She raised the coral arrowhead. The dagger that could carve a gateway for Atlas to enter Waking World bodies … and now she hoped it would do the same for her.
“Good,” Atlas said.
She plunged the dagger into Atlas’s back, enjoying the feel of his flesh catching the blade, giving way. His scream rang out. He spun and lunged as Eureka darted underwater.
She had not swum without her thunderstone in a long time. Salt stung her eyes. Atlas’s blood clouded the water. From below, she watched him thrash, then lost him in a pool of panicked splashing.
She twirled, anticipating his attack from all directions. Her lungs burned with the need for air, but surfacing would be surrendering. Atlas could swim like a shark.
She had more work to do. Ander had only one set of gill-like slashes—and had not been possessed. Brooks, who had housed this monster’s mind inside him, bore two sets. If Eureka wanted to get inside Atlas, wherever he was, she had to cut him a second time.
A jet of hot blood spooled over her shoulder. Eureka turned as Atlas’s arm closed around her neck. She tried to swivel free, but he held fast. Her dagger stabbed at the water, his body barely out of her reach. She bit his forearm. Her teeth touched bone. Atlas squeezed her neck until she gagged on bloody water.
His other elbow crushed her nose. She felt the heat inside her head, tasted thick blood in the back of her throat. Her vision blurred. Blood was everywhere. She clasped her dagger tightly as Atlas pumped his legs to reach the surface.
When they broke through he released her neck, grabbed her wrists, and tried to wrest the dagger from her.
“I hope that felt good,” Eureka said. “Because I’m about to do it again.”
“I can take what I want for free—or you can pay to part with it.” Atlas drove the hand holding the dagger toward her neck. “But I will have your tear.”
Eureka laughed as the dagger sliced her skin and more blood flowed into the ocean. “Yes, you will.”
She strained forward and snatched the coral dagger from her fingers with her teeth. When Atlas dropped her wrists to grab it, she slipped underwater. She swam toward him, a piranha with a single tooth. She found his back. With a nod of her head, she tore into his flesh.
The dagger plunged deeper than she’d expected. She still held it in her mouth, but Eureka’s face now felt like it was a part of Atlas.
She felt something lift away, and then she felt nothing—at least, not in any way she was used to feeling. It had taken forever and happened so soon:
Eureka was inside the monster. Everything else was gone.
His interior was an ocean, barbed with reefs of dead coral, sharper than the dagger she’d used to cut her way inside, sharper than anything she’d ever conceived. What once she would have seen with her eyes and felt with her body, Eureka now sensed with her mind. All feeling had disappeared, replaced by a new knowing.
Then the coral slashed her thoughts—and Eureka could no longer … remember … her mission. She blacked out on a sharp shore inside him.
“Aaughh!”
Her mind screamed, using someone else’s voice. She struggled to recognize the sound: Atlas’s lips. Eureka’s emotion.
The dagger had worked.