Her bed.
Four cherrywood bedposts rose above her on the antique queen she’d slept in before she cried. The thrift-store rocking chair swaying in the corner used to be her favorite homework spot. An Evangeline-green sweatshirt hung over its arm. Eureka’s eyes throbbed from the haze of artemisia as her blurry reflection came into focus in her grandmother’s old mirrored chest of drawers across from the bed.
Wide metal cuffs bound her wrists to the upper corners of the bed, her ankles to the lower corners, and her waist across the center. When she tried to jerk free, something sharp cut into her palms and the tops of her feet. The cuffs were barbed with spikes. Blood pooled over the cuff on her right wrist, then trickled down her arm.
“How does it work?” A husky voice startled her.
A teenage girl stood at her bedside, bent over Eureka’s left hand like a manicurist. A laurel wreath adorned her amber hair. Her crimson dress plunged into a deep V ending just below her tattooed navel. She wore Eureka’s crystal teardrop necklace.
“Give me back my necklace.” The strange Atlantean words hurt as they left Eureka’s parched throat. She tried to kick the girl with her knees. Metal spikes bit her waist. Blood bloomed through her shirt.
A snicker came from Eureka’s other side. Another girl in another crimson dress. Her laurel wreath capped a smooth black bob, and her cold aquamarine eyes were focused on Eureka’s right hand.
Crimson Devils, Atlas had called his guards.
“Where’s Atlas?” Eureka said. Where is Brooks’s corpse? she wanted to ask. She was used to the idea that the two boys occupied the same body. But she had watched her friend die, and only the enemy remained. A raging desire to kill Atlas flooded her.
“Watch,” the second girl told the first.
Eureka felt a sting of heat, like the girl was injecting her fingertips with hot glue. A shimmery blue substance coated her fingers. Eureka touched the pad of her thumb to her forefinger and a jolt zipped through her, like the time she’d stuck her finger in an outlet when she was six.
“Don’t.” The dark-haired girl pried Eureka’s fingers apart, smoothing more blue over Eureka’s thumb. “It’s going to hurt, but by sunrise, we’ll have everything we ever wanted. He promised. Didn’t he promise, Aida?”
“We’re not to talk to her, Gem,” Aida said.
“Sunrise.” Eureka repeated the four-syllable Atlantean word. She tried to turn her head toward the window to gauge the time, but a crimson dress blocked her view.
“If he learns you were talking to his—”
“He won’t.” Gem glared at her companion.
“Then stop talking to her.” Aida turned toward a desk on the left side of the room, which stood precisely where Eureka’s identical desk stood back home.
“I want to see Atlas.” Eureka squirmed against her bonds.
What was happening at sunrise? How could she destroy these girls and free herself before then? She closed her eyes and channeled the Incredible Hulk, master of transforming rage into strength. She willed the mirrored chest of drawers to become a thousand whirling glass daggers, slicing flesh, splashing crimson onto crimson. But then what? How would she find Atlas?
In Lafayette, escape had been her bedroom window, then the arms of the oak tree just beyond it. But when Gem shifted and Eureka could see out the window, no oak tree reached for her. Sun shone in. The light felt tired, evening’s last rays.
They were very high up, a thousand stories above the ground. Gold and silver rooftops shimmered distantly below, and beyond them rings of water and land led to the ocean, which flowed into a horizon at the edge of whatever was left of the world.
“Tell me what happens at sunrise,” Eureka said.