Teardrop

Eureka felt angry with her mother for leaving so many mysteries behind. Everything in Eureka’s life had been unstable since Diana died. She wanted clarity, constancy, someone she could trust.

Ander bent down and picked up the little yellowed slip of paper, which Eureka must have dropped. It looked like expensive stationery from centuries ago. He turned it over. A single word was scrawled across it in black ink.

Marais.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.

“That’s my mother’s handwriting.” She took the paper and stared at every loop in the word, the sharply dotted i.

“It’s Cajun—French—for ‘marsh,’ but I don’t know why she would write it here.”

Ander stared at the window, where shutters blocked the view of the rain but not its steady sound. “There must be someone who can help.”

“Madame Blavatsky would have been able to help.” Eureka stared grimly at the locket, at the cryptic piece of paper.

“That’s exactly why they killed her.” The words slipped from Ander’s mouth before he realized it.

“You know who did it.” Eureka’s eyes widened. “It was them, those people you ran off the road, wasn’t it?”

Ander slipped the locket from her hand and placed it on her bed. He tilted her chin up with his thumb. “I wish I could tell you what you want to hear.”

“She didn’t deserve to die.”

“I know.”

Eureka rested her hands on his chest. Her fingers curled around the cloth of his T-shirt, wanting to squeeze her pain into it.

“Why aren’t you wet?” she asked. “Do you have a thunderstone?”

“No.” He laughed softly. “I suppose I have another kind of shield. Though it’s far less impressive than yours.”

Eureka ran her hands over his dry shoulders, slid her arms around his dry waist. “I’m impressed,” she said quietly as her hands slipped under the back of his shirt to touch his smooth, dry skin. He kissed her again, emboldening her. She felt nervous but alive, bewildered and buzzing with new energy she didn’t want to question.

She loved the feel of his arms around her waist. She pulled closer, lifting her head to kiss him again, but then she stopped. Her fingers froze over what felt like a gash on Ander’s back. She pulled away and moved around his side, lifting up the back of his shirt. Four red slashes marked the skin just below his rib cage.

“You’re cut,” she said. It was the same wound she’d seen on Brooks the day of the freak Vermilion Bay wave. Ander only had one set of gashes, where Brooks’s back had borne two.

“They aren’t cuts.”

Eureka looked up at him. “Tell me what they are.”

Ander sat down on the edge of her bed. She sat next to him, feeling warmth emanate from his skin. She wanted to see the marks again, wanted to run her hand over them to see if they were as deep as they looked. He put his hand on her leg. It made her insides buzz. He looked like he was about to say something difficult, something that might be impossible to believe.

“Gills.”

Eureka blinked. “Gills. Like a fish?”

“For breathing underwater, yes. Brooks has them now as well.”

Eureka moved his hand from her leg. “What do you mean, Brooks has gills now as well? What do you mean, you have gills?”

The room was suddenly tiny and too hot. Was Ander messing with her?

He reached behind him and held up the green leather-bound book. “Do you believe what you read in this?”

She didn’t know him well enough to gauge his tone of voice. It sounded desperate—but what else? Did it also betray anger? Fear?

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems too …”

“Much like fantasy?”

“Yes. And yet … I want to know the rest. Only part of it’s been translated and there are all these strange coincidences, things that feel like they have something to do with me.”

“They do,” Ander said.

“How do you know?”

“Did I lie to you about the thunderstone?”

She shook her head.

“Then give me the chance you’re giving this book.” Ander pressed a hand to his heart. “The difference between you and me is that from the moment I was born I have been raised with the story you found on these pages.”

“How? Who are your parents? Are you in a cult?”

“I don’t exactly have parents. I was raised by my aunts and my uncles. I am a Seedbearer.”

“A what?”

He sighed. “My people come from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

“You’re from Atlantis?” she asked. “Madame Blavatsky said … But I didn’t believe …”

“I know. How could you have believed? But it is true. My line was among the few who escaped before the island sank. Since then, our mission has been to carry forward the seed of Atlantis’s knowledge, so that its lessons will never be forgotten, its atrocities never be repeated. For thousands of years, this story has stayed among the Seedbearers.”

“But it’s also in this book.”

Ander nodded. “We knew your mother possessed some knowledge of Atlantis, but my family still has no idea how much. The person who murdered your translator was my uncle. The people you encountered at the police station, and on the road that night—those people raised me. Those are the faces I saw at the dinner table every night.”

“Where exactly is that dinner table?” For weeks, Eureka had been wondering where Ander lived.

“No place interesting.” He paused. “I haven’t been home in weeks. My family and I had a disagreement.”

“You said they wanted to hurt me.”

“They do,” Ander said miserably.

“Why?”

“Because you are also a descendant of Atlantis. And the women in your lineage carry something very unusual. It is called the selena-klamata-desmos. That means, more or less, Selene’s Tearline.”

“Selene,” Eureka said. “The woman engaged to the king. She ran off with his brother.”

Ander nodded. “She is your matriarch, many generations back. Just as Leander, her lover, is my patriarch.”

“They were shipwrecked, separated at sea,” Eureka said, remembering. “They never found each other again.”

Ander nodded. “It is said that they searched for each other until their dying day, and even, some say, after death.”

Eureka looked deeply into Ander’s eyes and the story resonated with her in a new way. She found it unbearably sad—and achingly romantic. Could these thwarted lovers explain the connection Eureka had felt to the boy sitting next to her—the connection she’d felt from the moment she first saw him?

“One of Selene’s descendants carries the power to raise Atlantis again,” Ander continued. “This is what you just read in the book. This is the Tearline. The Seedbearers’ reason for existing hinges on the belief that raising Atlantis would be a catastrophe—an apocalypse. The legends of Atlantis are ugly and violent, filled with corruption, slavery, and worse.”

“I didn’t read anything about that in here.” Eureka pointed at The Book of Love.

“Of course not,” Ander said darkly. “You’ve been reading a love story. Unfortunately, there was more to that world than Selene’s version. The Seedbearers’ goal is to prevent the return of Atlantis from ever happening by—”

“Killing the girl with the Tearline,” Eureka said numbly. “And they think I carry it.”

“They’re fairly certain.”

“Certain that if I were to weep, like it says in the book, that—”

Ander nodded. “The world would flood and Atlantis would return to power.”

“How often does one of these Tearline girls come along?” Eureka asked, thinking that if Ander was telling the truth, many of her family members might have been hunted or killed by the Seedbearers.

“It hasn’t happened in nearly a century, since the thirties,” Ander said, “but that was a very bad situation. When a girl begins to show signs of the Tearline, she becomes a kind of vortex. She piques the interest of more than just the Seedbearers.”

“Who else?” Eureka wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Ander swallowed. “The Atlanteans themselves.”

Now she was even more confused.

“They are evil,” Ander continued. “The last possessor of the Tearline lived in Germany. Her name was Byblis—”

“I’ve heard of Byblis. She was one of the owners of the book. She gave it to someone named Niobe, who gave it to Diana.”

“Byblis was your mother’s great-aunt.”

“You know more about my family than I do.”

Ander looked uncomfortable. “I have had to study.”

“So the Seedbearers killed my great-aunt when she showed signs of the Tearline?”

“Yes, but not before a great deal of damage was done. While the Seedbearers try to eliminate a Tearline, the Atlanteans try to activate it. They do this by occupying the body of someone dear to the Tearline carrier, someone who can make her cry. By the time the Seedbearers succeeded in murdering Byblis, the Atlantean who had occupied the body of her closest friend was already invested in that world. He stayed in the body even after Byblis’s death.”

Eureka felt an urge to laugh. What Ander was saying was insane. She hadn’t heard anything this crazy during her weeks in the psychiatric ward.

And yet it made Eureka think of something she’d read recently in one of Madame Blavatsky’s emails. She picked up the translated pages and thumbed through them. “Look at this part, right here. It describes a sorcerer who could send his mind across the ocean and occupy the body of a man in a place called Minoa.”

“Exactly,” Ander said. “It’s the same magic. We don’t know how Atlas learned to channel this sorcerer’s power—he’s not a sorcerer himself—but somehow he has managed it.”

“Where is he? Where are the Atlanteans?”

“In Atlantis.”

“And where is that?”

“It’s been underwater for thousands of years. We can’t access them, and they can’t access us. From the moment Atlantis sank, mind channeling has been their only portal to our world.” Ander looked away. “Though Atlas is hoping to change that.”

“So the Atlanteans’ minds are powerful and evil”—Eureka hoped no one was listening at her door—“but the Seedbearers don’t seem much better, killing innocent girls.”

Ander didn’t respond. His silence answered her next question.

“Except Seedbearers don’t think we’re innocent,” she realized. “You were raised to believe that I might do something terrible”—she massaged her ear and couldn’t believe what she was about to say—“like flood the world with my tears?”

“I know it’s hard to swallow,” Ander said. “You were right to call the Seedbearers a cult. My family is skilled at making murder look like an accident. Byblis drowned in a ‘flood.’ Your mother’s car hit by a ‘rogue wave.’ All in the name of saving the world from evil.”