Eureka dropped his hand. She imagined Cat’s reaction upon learning Ander had led them to the other side of the world based on an imaginary map. She didn’t want to blame Ander. They were here now. They needed to support each other. But she couldn’t help thinking about the way that Brooks, though he couldn’t read a map even if you held a gun to his head, always wound up in the right place. He’d wound up in her imagination earlier, skimming dark water with his arms. What shore had he landed on when she’d blinked and made him disappear?
Ander chose the path’s steep right fork. “Solon made plans before he escaped. He was headed for a cave in western Turkey, which he called the Bitter Cloud.”
The path widened. Eureka sped into a jog. Her right wrist throbbed with every impact of her shoes against the earth, but running lent something familiar to the alien landscape. Her body found a gear she understood.
Ander kept up. When he glanced at her, an agreement flashed between them. They began to race. Eureka pumped her legs. Wind whistled at her back. The salt in the rain stung her eyes and the pain in her wrist was excruciating, but the faster she ran, the less she felt it.
She didn’t think she could ever slow down. They were lost and she knew it, entering a tight passage only a few feet wide, bordered on either side by sharply sloping stone. It was like running through a very narrow hallway in the dark. Every step carried them deeper into goneness, but Eureka had to run until this burning was out of her system, until this fever had subsided. Sometime, later, they would catch their breath and figure out what to do.
“Eureka!”
Ander stopped ahead of her. She skidded into his back. Her cheekbone slammed into his shoulder blade. She felt his muscles stiffen, like he was trying to shield her from something. She stood on her toes to see past him.
A dead girl lay at the edge of the stream. She looked about twelve. Leaves clung to her hair. She was on her side, straddling a long, twisted log. Eureka stared at her white blouse, her pale pink pleated skirt stained with blood. Ebony bangs were matted to her cheeks. Her long ponytail was tied with a cheerful yellow ribbon.
Eureka thought about who she’d been when she herself was twelve years old—big hands and feet like a puppy’s, perpetually tangled hair, a gap-toothed smile. She hadn’t yet met Cat. The summer she was twelve, she’d had her first French kiss. It was twilight, and she and Brooks had been swimming under the dock at his boathouse. Feeling his lips softly on hers was the last thing she’d expected when she came up for air from a breaststroke. They’d treaded water after the kiss, laughing hysterically because they were both too embarrassed to do anything else. She had been so different then.
She felt a burning at the back of her throat. She wished she were back there, in that warm Cypremort water, far away. She wished she were anywhere but standing over this dead girl.
Then she wasn’t standing over her. She was kneeling next to her. Sitting in the stream beside her. Lifting the girl’s misshapen, broken arm off the log. Holding her cold hand.
“I hurt you,” Eureka said, but what crossed her mind was I envy you, because the girl had left behind this world’s problems and its pain.
She started to pray to the Virgin, because that was how she’d been raised, but Eureka felt disrespectful quickly. Odds were this girl hadn’t been Catholic. Eureka could do nothing to help her soul get where it needed to go.
“I’m going to bury her.”
“Eureka, I don’t think …,” Ander started to say.
But Eureka had already pulled the girl’s body from the log. She lay her flat against the bank and smoothed her skirt. Eureka’s fingers dug through pebbles and reached mud. She felt the silty grit fill the space beneath her fingernails as she cast fistfuls aside. She thought of Diana, who’d never been buried.
This girl was dead because Diana had never told Eureka what her tears would do. Anger she’d never before felt for her mother seized Eureka.
“There won’t be time to attend to every death,” Ander said.
“We have to.” Eureka kept digging.