“Wait for the others.” Critias nodded into the darkness. “They are here.”
Chora staggered toward them from the east, Albion from the west, the storm glancing off their cordons. They approached Starling’s cordon and stiffened, girding themselves for the unpleasant entry. When Starling’s cordon had absorbed them, Chora looked away and Starling knew her cousin didn’t want to risk feeling nostalgic or pathetic. She didn’t want to risk feeling. It was how she had lived for thousands of years, never looking or feeling older than mortal middle-aged.
“Starling is listing the fallen lands,” Critias said.
“It doesn’t matter.” Albion sat down. His silver hair was soaked, his neat gray suit now mud-stained and torn.
“A million deaths don’t matter?” Critias asked. “Didn’t you see her tears’ destruction on your journey here? You have always said we were the protectors of the Waking World.”
“What matters now is Atlas!”
Starling looked away, embarrassed by Albion’s outburst, though she shared his vexation. For thousands of years the Seedbearers had struggled to prevent the rise of an enemy they had never met in the flesh. Long had they suffered the projections of his terrible mind.
Imprisoned in the sunken realm of the Sleeping World, Atlas and his kingdom neither aged nor died. If Atlantis rose, its residents would be restored to life exactly as they had been when their island sank. Atlas would be a strapping man of twenty years, at the zenith of his youthful power. The Rising would make time begin again for him.
He would be free to pursue the Filling.
But until Atlantis rose, the only things stirring in the Sleeping World were dreaming, scheming, sickened minds. Over time Atlas’s mind had made many dark voyages into the Waking World. Whenever a girl met the conditions of the Tearline, Atlas’s mind worked to be near her, to draw tears from her eyes that would restore his reign. Right now he was inside the girl’s friend Brooks.
The Seedbearers were the only ones who recognized Atlas each time he possessed the body of a person close to the Tearline girl. Atlas had never succeeded—partly because the Seedbearers had murdered thirty-six Tearline girls before Atlas could provoke them into weeping. Still, each one of his visits brought his unique evil into the Waking World.
“We are all remembering the same dark things,” Albion said. “If Atlas’s mind has been this destructive inside other bodies, waging wars and murdering innocents, imagine his mind and body united, awake, and in our world. Imagine if he succeeds in the Filling.”
“So then,” Critias said, “where is he? What’s he waiting for?”
“I don’t know.” Albion tightened his fist over the fire until the smell of burning flesh alerted him to move it. “We were all there. We saw her cry!”
Starling thought back to that morning. When Eureka’s tears fell, her sorrow had seemed bottomless, as if it would never end. It had seemed that each tear shed would multiply the damage to the world tenfold—
“Wait,” she said. “Once the conditions of her prophecy were met, three tears needed to fall.”
“The girl was a blubbering mess.” Albion dismissed her. No one took Starling seriously. “Obviously, the three required tears were shed.”
“And then some.” Chora looked up at the rain.
Critias scratched the silver stubble on his chin. “Are we sure?”
There was a pause, and a burst of thunder. Rain spat through the cordon’s hole.
“One tear to shatter the Waking World’s skin.” Critias softly sang the line from the Chronicles, passed down by their fore-father Leander. “That’s the tear that would have started the flood.”
“A second to seep through Earth’s roots within.” Starling could taste the spreading of the seafloor. She knew the second tear had been shed.
But what about the third, the most essential tear?