Cat nodded toward the stony hills. “So go on with your bad self.”
Ander’s hand found its way into Eureka’s. She squeezed and started walking inland, hoping Cat was right and wondering how much there was left of the world to save.
5
DEEP FREEZE
Eureka and Ander followed a swollen stream through a shallow valley and into a world of soft white stone. They crossed a forest of rocky cones flanked by table mountains. They held hands as cacti bordering the stream reached out with needles inches long and sharp enough to tear away the skin.
Eureka worried about the cacti weathering the salt in the rain. She imagined her favorite plants around the world—orchids in Hawaii, olive groves in Greece, orange trees in Key West, birds-of-paradise in California, and the comforting labyrinths of live oak branches back home on the bayou—their fibers parched and shriveled, disintegrating into salt. She squinted to make the cactus needles appear longer, thicker, sharper, and imagined them fighting back.
Her mud-obscured running shoes reminded Eureka of the photos her teammates used to post after cross-country practice in stormy weather. Brown and gray points of pride. She wondered whether anyone would enjoy a rainy run ever again. Had she robbed the rain of its beauty?
They came around a bend where the steel-blue bay was visible below. There was the rock where they’d made landfall and the tall triangular boulder behind which Cat and her family crouched in front of Ander’s fire, hanging on. The boulder looked tiny. They had traveled farther than she had thought. It made her nervous to be so far away.
She looked beyond the boulder, at the ocean spreading around them in cloudy light. Slowly, a more regular geometry emerged. Man-made shapes sagged in the deluge. Rooftops. The ghost of the city that had been washed away.
She imagined people beneath those roofs, drowned in her pain. She had floated underneath her devastation in the thunderstone shield, but now Eureka saw it. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to disintegrate in the rain. She wanted to make everything right, right now.
“You know,” Ander said, “you’re going to make things better.”
Eureka tried to let his support make her stronger, like a buttress on a cathedral, but she wondered from where Ander drew his faith in her. He seemed to truly believe that she could fix things, but was it simply because he liked her—or was there more to it? He kept saying Solon would answer all their questions … if they ever found him.
The path widened into two forked trails. An instinct she couldn’t explain told her to go left. “Which way?” she asked Ander.
He pivoted right. “We go east. Or—north? We need to go up into the mountains so I can see more clearly where we are.”
Ander had seemed so confident a moment before, when he was believing in her. “Do you have a map?” she asked.
He stopped walking and faced Eureka with such sad eyes that she took his hand. She marveled at the way it fit in hers, like no one else’s ever had. He looked down and caressed her fingertips.
“I see,” she said. “No map.”
“The map is in my memory, drawn with lines muttered by my aunts and uncles when I was very young. I don’t know why I memorized their words, maybe because talk of the lost Seedbearer sounded strange and romantic, and there was so little excitement in my life.”