She remembered something one of her therapists had said about blame, how it didn’t matter whose fault anything was after it was done. What mattered was how you responded, how you recovered. Recovery was what Eureka had to focus on: her father’s, the world’s … Brooks’s, too. But she didn’t know how any of them could recover from a wound so deep.
A longing for Brooks swept over her like a sudden storm. He always knew what to say, what to do. Eureka was still struggling to accept that her oldest friend’s body was now possessed by an ancient evil. Where was Brooks now? Was he as thirsty, cold, and afraid as Eureka was? Were those shades of feeling possible for someone welded to a monster?
She should have recognized the change in him sooner. She should have found some way to help. Maybe then she wouldn’t have cried, because when she had Brooks to lean on, Eureka could get through things. Maybe none of this would have happened. But all of it had happened.
Dad breathed shallowly, eyes still tightly closed. For a few seconds he seemed to rest more easily, like he was detached from the pain—then the agony returned to his face.
“Help!” she shouted, missing Diana more than she could stand. Her mother would tell her to find her way out of this foxhole. “How do we find help? A doctor. A hospital. He always keeps his insurance card in his wallet in his pocket—”
“Eureka.” Ander’s tone told her, of course, that there would be no help, that she had cried it away.
Cat shivered. “My alarm clock is going to go off any second. And when we meet at your locker before Latin, and I tell you about my insane dream, I’m going to embellish to make this part a lot more fun.”
Eureka scanned the barren mountains. “We’re going to have to split up. Someone needs to stay here with Dad and the twins. The other two will look for help.”
“Look where? Does anyone have any clue where we are?” Cat said.
“We’re on the moon,” Claire said.
“We need to find Solon,” Ander said. “He’ll know what to do.”
“Are we close?” Eureka asked.
“I tried to steer us toward a city called Kusadasi on the western coast of Turkey. But this doesn’t look like any of the pictures I researched. The coastline is …”
“What?” Eureka asked.
Ander looked away. “It’s different now.”
“You mean the city you were trying to get us to is underwater,” Eureka said.
“Have you even met this Solon guy?” Cat asked. She was trolling the landscape for large swaths of seaweed, bundling them under one arm.
“No,” Ander said, “but—”
“What if he sucks as bad as the rest of your horrible family?”
“He’s not like them,” Ander said. “He can’t be.”
“Not like we’ll ever know,” Cat said, “because we have no idea how to find him.”
“I think I can.” Ander ran his fingers through his hair quickly, a nervous habit.
Cat swiped rain from her cheeks and sat down with her mound of seaweed in her lap. She knotted strands of it together, until it almost resembled a blanket. For Dad. Eureka felt stupid she hadn’t thought to do the same.
“He thinks he can?” Cat muttered to her blanket.
Ander lowered his face to Cat’s. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to reject everything you’ve been raised to believe? The one true thing in my world is what I feel for Eureka.”
“If I never see my family again—” Cat said.
“That’s not going to happen.” Eureka tried to mediate. “Who’s coming with me to find help?”
Cat stared down at the seaweed. Eureka realized she was crying.
Dad’s wound was serious, but at least he was here with Eureka and the twins. Cat didn’t even know where her father was. Eureka’s tears had dissolved Cat’s family. She had no idea what had become of any of them. All she had was Eureka.