Her mother opened her eyes. They were the same soft brown as Filiz’s.
“How was work?” Her mother spoke in the rolling, melodic Celan tongue, a mélange of Greek and Turkish and, some said, Atlantean. It was spoken only on these two square miles of earth.
Filiz’s mother searched her skin, looking for injuries, as she did every night. She used to perform the same nightly scan on Filiz’s father when he’d been alive.
“Fine.” When Filiz was a child, she loved the heavy, soothing feel of her mother’s gaze upon her skin. By the time the woman’s eyes left Filiz’s body, her every scratch was healed. It was her mother’s quirk, the unique gift of magic every human being was born with. Growing up, Filiz had heard stories about people outside their community who lost their quirks as they matured. She hadn’t believed the stories until last summer, when she got a job in Kusadasi as a cruise-ship tour guide. The pale tourists she guided were often friendly but always vacant, little more than polite zombies who saw the world through camera lenses. Their quirks were so long forgotten that Filiz took to imagining what their gifts had been—maybe this banker used to travel back in time, or that real estate agent could communicate with horses. Only the tourists’ children’s fading quirks were recognizable. It depressed Filiz to watch them being raised to lose them, too.
For the Celans, the quirk was the last thing to go, after the heart stopped beating. The elderly could lose every other faculty—hearing, sight, memory—but their quirks would stay with them until just after their dying breaths. Filiz would never lose her quirk. If her fingers were unable to make fire, she would no longer be Filiz.
She slid away from her mother’s gaze, which felt babying and oppressive. Sometimes it was nice to leave a minor scratch alone. None of her deep wounds were on the surface anyway. She put her heavy bag down, not ready to address what it contained. She planned to play Gülle Oyunu, the game of marbles her father had taught her.
But she couldn’t take her eyes off the bag on the floor, the way the firelight played over it. She’d wolfed down a third of its contents before she got home. She wanted to offer her mother and grandmother the rest, but she was afraid of what it would unleash among her people, who had long looked upon Filiz with distrust. Of course, the Poet would be feeding his own family in his own cave, so there really wasn’t any avoiding the inevitable.
Her mother was watching her, full of questions. Lately there had been whispers about a visitor Solon would receive in the cave that all the Celans knew existed but none of them could see. Filiz knew her mother wanted to ask about it.
“She is here.” Filiz avoided the wild look in her mother’s eyes. She took off her sweatshirt and straightened her tight blue T-shirt. The fashions she had stolen in Kusadasi earned strange looks from the community, but Filiz hated the rough woven cloaks that were their style. Kusadasi had shown her how rural her home was. Now Kusadasi’s cutting-edge shops and sparkly hotels lay a mile underwater.
Filiz’s people had lived in these caves for thousands of years, since before Atlantis sank. Every generation prayed that Atlantis would not rise in their lifetime or in their children’s children’s. Now the girl who would bring it back was a hundred yards away.
“Eat.” Her mother put a kettle on the fire. “Eat, then speak. The Assembly is beginning next door.”
It should have been easy to present her starving mother with the stolen food, but her family’s hunger was so great Filiz feared a limited amount of food would only make them more miserable.
She eyed the kettle. “What is it?”
“Soup,” her mother said. “Grandma made it.”
“You’re lying,” Filiz said. “It’s boiled water from the sky.”
“I didn’t say what kind of soup it is. It tastes good. Salty, like a broth.”
“You ate this already?” She stared at her mother, noticing her sunken eyes. “You can’t eat this!”