Gem was next to Aida at the desk. “Let me do the heartplate.”
As Gem reached across the surface of the desk something strange happened to her hand. It blurred, like it had passed behind a pane of frosted glass. The blurring lasted only a moment. Gem’s hand sharpened again and she was holding a silky piece of material, the same shimmery blue as whatever was on Eureka’s fingers. Eureka thought she saw a lightning bolt flash across its center.
“Unbutton her shirt,” Gem said.
Cold air braced Eureka’s skin as Aida’s fingers worked their way down her shirt. Then a feeling like nostalgia settled over her as the blue square was laid across her chest. Warm and heavy, it reminded Eureka of how she felt watching videos of Diana on her laptop.
Her breath came shallowly as Gem smoothed the heartplate over her chest. Aida ran a finger from Eureka’s right temple, across her forehead, to her left temple, and Eureka understood that while she had been unconscious, the girls had affixed a band of the blue substance to her head.
“The ghostsmith counsels subjects before charging the cloak,” Gem said.
“You’ve never met the ghostsmith,” Aida said. “Besides, this is for Atlas. No wasting time. He wants the lachrymatories filled.” She applied pressure to the inside corners of Eureka’s eyes. Two blurry silver outlines fixed just below Eureka’s vision. The lachrymatories. She was supposed to cry into them.
“It won’t work,” Eureka said.
“It always works,” Gem said. She moved to the wall, where Eureka’s painting of the weeping Saint Catherine of Siena hung in a cobwebbed corner. She flipped a switch Eureka couldn’t see.
Pain crashed into Eureka. She was engulfed by absolute darkness. She arched her back. She tasted blood. The pain doubled, then redoubled.
When the pain was total and familiar, bright points of light entered her vision, meteors showering the sky of her eyelids. One point of light drew closer. Burning heat filled her pores. Then Eureka was inside the light.
She saw a faded floral-print suitcase by a door. Lamplight flickered somewhere. Her nostrils flared at the odor of broken pickle jars—that scent always brought her back to the night her parents split up. She saw Diana’s feet in their gray and pink galoshes, her hair wet with rain, her eyes dry with determination. The front door opened. Thunder outside was so real it rattled Eureka’s bones. The suitcase was in Diana’s hand.
“Mom! Wait!” Eureka felt the back of her eyes burning. “Don’t you love me enough to stay?” Never before had she voiced the question that plagued her all the time. She tried to pull away. It was just a memory. A memory of tears building before she’d known better.
It was so real. Diana leaving. Eureka left behind …
“No!”
The white light was whipped away. The searing pain cooled to a third-degree burn. Eureka shook like an earthquake, rattling the metal cuffs binding her to the bed. The afterimage of Diana was still abandoning her eyes.
A tall figure stood in the doorway of Eureka’s replica bedroom. He wore a long silver smock and a grease-smeared orichalcum welding mask.
“The ghostsmith,” Gem whispered.
Footsteps approached the bed. Silver-gloved hands plucked the lachrymatories from Eureka’s eyes. At least she had not cried. The ghostsmith slipped them inside a silver pocket in his smock.
He removed the heartplate from Eureka’s chest without a word. He pulled the blue material from Eureka’s fingers and forehead. She bore the pain silently and studied the gleaming surface of the ghostsmith’s mask. She wanted to see the face behind the orichalcum.
The ghostsmith deftly wove the fragments of blue material into a single long strand, a wide, blue glittering band. Then he wrapped it seven times around his wrist and used his other hand to knot it. A lightning bolt flashed through the fabric. Eureka wondered what it had looked like on her skin.