The ground shuddered so hard it made the air above it shudder, too. Peggy bucked and whinnied. And then:
The rain stopped.
Clouds stretched apart like cotton. Round rays of sun shone through. Eureka let them punch her shoulders, her lungs, and her heart, telling her brain to get happy.
“We are home!” the witches shrieked. “Look!”
The sun lit a long crack in the marsh below. The crack widened into a gorge and then, at its center, a small green dot appeared—
And began to grow.
The tree stretched skyward first. Its trunk shot up like it had been launched from the core of the earth. Eureka heard its creaking groan, and more … in both her ears. Birds singing, wind rustling, waves tumbling ashore—a wall of rich, reverberating stereo.
“I can hear again.”
“Of course,” Atlas said. “A wave of Atlantean origins took your hearing, now my kingdom restores it. There is yet more restoration in store.”
“That wave took my mother, too.”
“Indeed,” Atlas said cryptically.
By then the tree was a hundred feet tall and as thick as the ancient redwoods in the California town where Eureka had been born. The tree branched out. Sinewy limbs spun from its trunk, twisting wildly until its boughs overlapped in long and tangled fingers. Leaves sprang, wide and thick and glossy green. Jonquil-like white flowers exploded from their buds. Narcissus, Ander would say. Eureka’s ears heard each moment of this wild growth, as if eavesdropping on a sparkling conversation.
New trees sprang up around the first. Then a silver road encircled the sudden forest, which wasn’t a forest, but a magnificent urban park in the center of a rising city. Blindingly pristine gold-and silver-roofed buildings ascended from the marsh, stretching in all directions to form a perfectly circular capital. A ring-shaped river bordered the city; its swift current moved counterclockwise. On the far bank of the river was another mile-wide ring of land, this one verdant green and blooming with fruit trees and terraced grapevines. The agricultural band was encircled by another, clockwise-current river. At its edges, a final ring of land rose into towering purple bluffs. Beyond the mountains, the ocean lapping its rocks stretched into a blurry blue horizon.
Atlantis, the Sleeping World, had awoken.
“What now, bad girl?” Atlas asked.
“Get off! Get off!” the witches shouted. “We are going home to our mountain!”
Esme snapped her whip at Peggy, who reared in the sky. Eureka slipped backward. Her hands grabbed at Peggy’s mane, but not quickly enough. The horse threw Atlas and Eureka from her back.
They fell toward Atlantis. Eureka saw Atlas’s panic flash in Brooks’s eyes and it reminded her of something … but she fell so fast, she soon lost the boy and the body and the enemy and the memory.
She fell and fell, as she’d fallen through the waterfall in the Bitter Cloud. Back then she had landed in water and her thunderstone had shielded her. Ander had been swimming toward her. No one would save her now.
She landed on a green leaf the size of a mattress. She wasn’t dead yet. She let out an amazed laugh; then she slid off the leaf and was falling again.
Branches battered her limbs. She grabbed at a thick one. Her arms wrapped around it, as, incredibly, the branch wrapped around her. Its embrace held her still. Its bark was the texture of a tortoise’s shell.
Eureka shook bark and leaves from her wet hair. She wiped blood from a scratch on her forehead. She felt for her necklace. Still hot, still there. The lachrymatory was gone.
Atlas was also gone.