“The bugs made a big white diamond in the sky, then carried Dad up into the rain!” Claire added.
“These toddlers shit you not,” Cat said.
“Dad can fly!” William said.
Cat reached for Eureka’s thunderstone, studying its rain-reflective surface. “When they showed up on the beach, I knew they had something to do with you. It’s like, somehow, you fit in more here than you ever did at Evangeline.”
“And I thought I’d never find my clique,” Eureka said dryly.
“I mean,” Cat said, “you make sense where impossible things are possible. You’re one of those impossible things.” Cat held out an open hand to catch some rain. “Your powers are real.”
Eureka looked back toward the gossipwitches, but they were gone. All that was left of them was a single orchid petal, glowing on the ground. “I wanted to thank them.”
“Don’t worry,” a voice whispered in her deaf ear. It was the youngest gossipwitch, but she was nowhere Eureka could see. “Solon has a tab with us.”
“Where do we go?” Ander shouted into the rain.
The witches’ laughter shook the earth. Eureka felt something in her hand and looked down. A torch had appeared between her fingers. It had a long silver handle and widened into a broad fluted goblet near the top. A flame glowed from the goblet’s center, unextinguished in the rain. Eureka gazed into the center of the torch, looking for the oil or coal that fueled its flame. Instead, she saw a little mound of glowing amethyst stones.
“You’re welcome,” the young witch’s voice whispered in Eureka’s deaf ear.
“Give Solon our worst!” the old one shouted.
There was more laughter, then silence, then rain.
Eureka paced the grove, looking for clues her new torch might illuminate. Just past the trunk of one of the trees she slammed into something hard. She rubbed her brow. Nothing unusual was visible before her—just more rotting, twisted trees. Yet she had walked into something as solid as a wall. She tried again, and slammed into it again, unable to take another step.
Ander traced the invisible force with his fingers. “It’s wet. It feels like a cordon. It’s real, I can feel it, but it isn’t there.”
“Guys.” Claire waved from a few feet away. “Shouldn’t we just use the door?”
Eureka squinted as something white blurred in the space in front of her sister. Claire rose on her toes to reach above her head, revisiting what seemed to be a tricky spot several times. At the edge of the grove, under the crooked elbow of a hazelnut branch, just past a flat stone bearing a patch of lichen shaped like Louisiana, a wall of porous white rock sharpened slowly, incredibly, before them.
Claire had finger-painted it into existence—or into visibility, for the rock had been there before its painter.
“Here it is.” Claire’s hands moved over a black portion of the rock like she was polishing a car. The rock looked more and more like a rounded doorway.
Eureka wished Rhoda were here to applaud. It made Eureka think about Heaven, which made her think about Diana, and she wondered if two souls interested in the same earthly subjects could gather in the same celestial place to look down on them. Were Rhoda and Diana together, somewhere out there, on a cloud? Did Heaven still lie beyond the gray smear of sadness above?
She looked upward for a sign. Rain fell in the same lonesome rhythm it had been beating out all day.
Ander knelt next to Claire. “How did you do that?”
“Kids see more than adults,” Claire said matter-of-factly, and slipped through the door like a ghost.
7
FOR A SONG
Eureka turned to Ander. “Do you think this is really—”