“Maybe it was just gossip,” Ander had said, but they all sensed that the witches spoke the truth.
They had divvied up the last of the food—two small apples, a few gulps of water, the dregs of a box of muesli. After Eureka ate, hunger churned in her more fiercely than before. Her body was weak, her mind cloudy. She had not slept since waking from her nightmare of drowning in the wasted dead. Six nights remained until the full moon—if they even survived that long.
The rain had fallen for so long she didn’t feel it anymore. It had become as regular as air. She leaned over the veranda’s railing, touched Ander’s back so that he leaned over, too. Two blurry shapes looked up from the surface of the pond.
“You didn’t disappear just because you weren’t there in the Glimmering,” she said. “And I …”
“You’re not the face you saw, either?” Ander asked.
“I went to high school with that girl,” Eureka said. “Maya Cayce. We hated each other. We competed over everything. When we were young we used to be friends. Why would I see her in my reflection?”
“Somewhere all of this makes sense.” Ander’s fingers lightly traced her neck. “The question is: do we survive the journey there?”
Eureka turned from the reflection to the real. Her hands slid up Ander’s chest, her fingers twined around his neck—and she knew she shouldn’t. Her hands had murdered yesterday. They were out of food. The glaze would be gone by midnight.
“I wish we could stop everything and stand here forever.”
“Love can’t be stopped, any more than time,” Ander said softly.
“You’re talking like love and time aren’t connected,” Eureka said. “For you, they’re the same thing.”
“Some people measure time by how they fill it. Childhood is time, high school is time.” He touched her lips with a fingertip. “You have always been my time.”
“I would puke,” a voice said behind Ander, “but it might attract starving locals.”
Someone stepped from the shadows of the cherry tree. The witches must have dropped their glaze early. He had found them.
“Brooks,” Eureka said.
“Atlas.” Ander lurched forward. So did Brooks. Eureka was caught in the middle, both of their bodies against hers.
They would fight now. They would try to kill each other.
“Get out of here,” Eureka said quickly to Brooks.
“I think he’s the one who should get out,” Brooks said to Ander.
Ander’s lip curled in disgust. “You’re going to lose.”
Brooks’s face became a gruesome flash of rage. “I’ve already won.”
Ander drew the long orichalcum spear from its sheath at his hip. “Not if I slaughter that body before your world can rise.”
“Ander, no!” Eureka spun so that her body shielded Brooks. For a moment she felt the familiar heat of his chest. “I won’t let you.”
“Yes, please, Eureka, save me,” Brooks said. Then he lunged forward with all his might and sent Eureka tumbling. When Ander bent to check on her, Brooks rammed him hard. He grappled for the spear.
Ander’s back arched over the veranda’s rail. He couldn’t right himself. He grabbed hold of Brooks’s forearm and took him down with him. Eureka tried to stop them, but they were already gone.
She ran to the edge of the veranda. The spear had slipped from Ander’s hands and out of Brooks’s reach, too. The boys clutched each other and swung desperate fists as they tumbled through the air, each blow missing its mark, forced into truce by chaos and gravity. Then they splashed through the surface of the Tearline pond.
During the stillness that followed, Eureka couldn’t help imagining that both boys had disappeared from her life forever, that love was gone, that it was easier that way.
But the boys’ heads surfaced. They spun in the water until they spotted each other. Twenty feet of tears separated them. Brooks dipped back underwater and became a black blur. He swam toward Ander with ferocious grace.