Each one was intensely focused on keeping another’s body aloft. They worked their breath as if they were wings beating for one another.
Eureka was finally close enough to see a figure at the base of the rainbow, alone in the dark on the veranda. He looked like someone’s great-grandfather. The rainbow streamed from his mouth like an endless puff of smoke. His back was arched uncomfortably, as if the rainbow began somewhere deep inside him. He wore a silk robe and a strange black mask.
The old man breathing the rainbow into the sky was Solon.
But it couldn’t be. His body looked ancient. The skin on his hands and his chest was mottled with age. His back was stooped. How had Solon aged a century in the space of an afternoon? When he explained the Seedbearers’ aging process, he’d said feeling nothing had kept him young for decades. What—or who—had revived Solon’s feelings, his capacity for love?
As Eureka hiked over rocks and approached the back of the veranda, the first silhouette stepped out of the rainbow. It was a boy about her age, wearing a baggy, mud-splattered suit. The suit was familiar, though the body wearing it looked vastly different from the last time she had seen it. The boy faced her and narrowed his eyes.
Albion had killed Rhoda, abused the twins. He was the mind behind Diana’s murder. He looked eighteen instead of sixty, but Eureka was certain it was him.
Three more Seedbearers stepped out of the rainbow. Chora. Critias. Starling. All of them were young. They looked like teenagers dressed in their grandparents’ clothes.
Eureka hauled herself over the rail. She was sore and bleeding. Solon had brought the Seedbearers here on purpose. Why? The rainbow broke off at his lips. What remained hung in the air in colored particles, then drifted to the ground like psychedelic leaves.
The hooded mask he wore looked as pliant as cotton, but was made of tightly woven black chain mail, so thin that up close it was transparent. Beneath the mask, Solon looked a million years old.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Solon said, his voice muffled. “It’s merely a mask over a mask over a mask.”
“What’s going on?” Eureka asked.
“My masterpiece.” Solon looked into the night sky, now darker and more dismal without the glorious light. “Those colored rays of breath pave a Seedbearer highway that connects us anywhere in the world.”
“Why would you do this?”
He patted her cheek. “Let’s greet our guests.” Through the mask, Solon’s smiling eyes surveyed the figures before him. “Eureka, I think you’ve had the pleasure of meeting these four tubes of crap.”
The Seedbearers stepped forward, as bewildered as Eureka.
“Hello, cousins!” Solon bellowed merrily.
“It took three-quarters of a century,” Chora said, “but the fool has finally come around. To what do we owe the pleasure, Solon?”
Solon’s laughter echoed behind his mask.
“Take off that ridiculous mask.” Albion’s voice was startling in its youthful timbre.
“Your bitterness seems to be treating you well,” Solon said.
“We have grown strong on hatred and revulsion,” Albion said. “Whereas poor Solon walks like an autumn leaf in its last throes. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love again?”
“It has always seemed to me that hate is a form of love,” Solon said. “Try hating someone you don’t care about. Impossible.”
“You betrayed us, and now you are pathetic,” Chora said. “Our business is with Ander. Where is he?” She glanced around. Eureka did, too, fearful of what had happened to Ander, to Brooks’s body, to Atlas.
“Ah, there they are!” Starling grinned. Her long braid was now a lustrous blond. “The little streaks of piss we should have killed when we had the chance.”
Cat and the twins emerged onto the veranda. Cat’s head was still abuzz with bees.