“Cat—” Eureka reached for her friend.
“Do you know what the last thing I told Barney was?” Cat said. “I told him to eat two turds and die. Those can’t be the last words I ever say to my brother.” She cupped her face in her hands. “My mom and I were supposed to take this opera class where they teach you how to sing falsetto. My dad promised to cartwheel me down the aisle at my wedding.…” She stared at Eureka’s father, semiconscious in the mud, and seemed to be seeing her own father. “You have to fix this, Eureka. And not like when you duct taped your mom’s rearview mirror back on. I mean, really fix, like, everything.”
“I know,” Eureka said. “I’ll find help. You’ll call your family. You’ll tell Barney what he already knows, that you love him.”
“Right.” Cat sniffed. “I’ll stay here. You two go.” She laid her blanket of seaweed over Dad, then sat down miserably on a rock. She drew the twins into her lap, tried to cover their heads with her cardigan. This was a girl who refused to join summer camping trips if there was the slightest chance of drizzle.
“Let me help you.” Eureka tried to stretch the cardigan over the twins and her friend. She felt a twist of heat behind her and spun around.
Under a crook of rock extending from the boulder, Ander had started a small fire using scraps of wood debris. It blazed at Dad’s feet, mostly out of the rain.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“Only takes a couple of breaths to dry out wood. The rest was easy.” He lifted a corner of the seaweed blanket to reveal a pile of dry twigs and larger wood chips. “If you need more fuel before we’re back,” he said to Cat.
“You should stay with my dad,” she told Ander. “Your cordon could protect him—”
He looked away. “My family can erect cordons bigger than football fields. I can’t even shelter someone standing right beside me.”
“But back there, in your arms after the wave—” Eureka said.
“That just happened without me trying, but when I try …” He shook his head. “I’m still learning my strength. They say it gets easier.” He glanced over her shoulder, as if reminded of his family. “We should hurry.”
“You don’t even know where we are, where we’re going—”
“I know two things,” Ander said, “the wind and you. The wind is the way I got us across this ocean and you are the reason why. But I can only help you if you’ll trust me.”
Eureka remembered the day he’d found her running in the woods in the innocent rain. He’d dared her to get her thunderstone wet. She’d laughed because it sounded so absurd. You could get anything wet.
If it turns out I’m right, he’d said, will you promise to trust me?
Eureka liked trusting him. It gave her physical pleasure to trust him, to touch his fingertips and say the words aloud: “I trust you.”
She looked behind her and saw lightning strike a distant wave. She wondered what happened at the point of impact. She turned and gazed at the mountains and wondered what lay on the other side.
She tightened her grip on the purple tote bag under her arm. Wherever she was going, The Book of Love was going, too. She leaned down to kiss her father. His eyelids tensed but didn’t open. She hugged the twins.
“Stay here with Cat. Look after Dad. We won’t be long.”
Her eyes met Cat’s. She felt awful for leaving.
“What?” Cat asked.
“If I hadn’t been so angry and depressed,” Eureka said, “if I’d been one of those happy people in the hall, do you think my tears would have done this?”
“If you’d been one of those happy people in the hall,” Cat said, “you wouldn’t be you. I need you to be you. Your dad needs you to be you. If Ander’s right, and you’re the only one who can stop this flood, the whole world needs you to be you.”
Eureka swallowed. “Thanks.”