“Still want my tears?” she tried to say, but the words slurred, incoherent, from Atlas’s lips. Moving his limbs was easier; she didn’t know how to make Atlas’s body talk convincingly. Yet.
What if he’s right? Eureka gave that anxiety to the reef, using it to thrust her mind forward, crowding Atlas’s dark, furious thoughts—destroy her … punish her … how?—until she forced her mind behind his eyes, and sensed his desires falling beneath hers. She hoped they shattered on the reef.
A corpse floated before her.
It took a moment to recognize it as her own.
She used to be the girl who looked like that. Moments ago, she’d had long, ombré hair, a bloody nose, skinny arms, and muscular legs. She’d had a beating, aching heart even though she’d tried to deny it. She checked her old body’s pulse with Atlas’s fingers. Nothing.
She had done it. Eureka Boudreaux had discarded herself. Her old blue eyes were open. They were the color of her father’s eyes and their point of view wasn’t hers anymore.
Eureka realized that even at her most extremely suicidal, she had never wanted to die. She had really wanted this, escape from a fixed identity, the chance to be many things at once—a bitch, a nymph, an artist, an angel, a saint, a strip-mall security guard, a tyrant, a boy. She had wanted to be loosed from the narrow way her world defined “Eureka Boudreaux.” She had wanted to be free.
Her vision blurred. Atlas’s desperation layered over hers. The mind that had possessed a thousand other bodies didn’t know how to rid itself of one possessing his. His hands grabbed her corpse. He took his fury out on it.
His fingers tore her throat, ripped her skin apart, tore into the cartilage of her neck. His fists rained down on her brittle ribs, cracking what the witches’ salve had half mended. Eureka didn’t stop him; she knew nothing would bring her body back. She relaxed into his rage, curious when and how he would exhaust himself.
She’d been wrong to think he had no feelings. When Atlas’s emotions erupted, they ruled him, the way falling in love with Ander had ruled Eureka. He knew rage but not its opposite. Eureka would guide him so deeply into joy that it would kill him—and, she hoped, raise the souls inside the Filling to a higher place.
But first she had to say one last goodbye.
33
WATERFALL
Eureka swam toward the waveshop as a king.
Every few seconds her vision blurred, and the ocean reeled with Atlas’s rage. The only way she kept his thoughts at bay and her own thoughts above the reef was to focus on reaching Delphine. Soon Eureka could hold Atlas’s mind off for a full minute. Then for three.
She came up for air, treaded water. She practiced making words coherent. “I’m almost through with you,” she said.
She scanned the beach. The Gossipwitch Mountains loomed ahead. She thought she would have made it closer to Delphine, but she didn’t see the suspended wave. She flung Atlas’s foot over a sandbar and stood up, chest-deep in the ocean.
Lightning struck the water twenty feet ahead. But the sky above was clear. Something golden bobbed in the waves. Whatever it was had caused that lightning. Eureka swam toward it and discovered Delphine’s loom.
She trained Atlas’s remarkable vision on the beach. The naked body of a boy lay on the sand. Was it Brooks? No. The boy’s skin was silver—a ghost robot. She waded forward, dragging Atlas’s gaze across another robot, also sprawled upon the shore, perpendicular to the first. Soon she’d counted more robots. Seven of them were splayed, motionless, across the shore. Their bodies had been purposefully positioned, limbs extended at odd angles, to collectively create a design.
Or rather, each body had been stretched to form a letter. The ghost robots spelled a word.
Even if Eureka had never seen the labyrinthine written language of Atlantis on the pages of The Book of Love, her Tearline intuition would have decoded the message in the sand. The word was missing its last letter, but she was able to grasp its meaning.
The transliteration sounded something like Eur-ee-ka.