Teardrop

She’d always disliked weather forecasts, preferred finding spontaneity in the atmosphere. The early morning had been bright, with dregs of former clouds sticking to the sky. Now those high clouds turned gold in the thinning light, and hairlike wisps of fog filtered through the oaks, giving the forest a dim incandescence. Eureka loved fog in the woods, the way the wind made the ferns along the oak branches reach for mist. The ferns were greedy for moisture that, if it turned to rain, would change their fronds from tawny red to emerald.

Diana was the only person Eureka had ever known who would also rather run in rain than in shine. Years of jogging with her mother had taught Eureka to appreciate how “bad” weather enchanted an ordinary run: rain pattering on leaves, storm scrubbing tree bark clean, tiny rainbows cast on crooked boughs. If that was bad weather, Diana and Eureka had agreed, they didn’t want to know good. So as the mist rolled over her shoulders, Eureka thought of it as the kind of shroud Diana would have liked to wear if she’d had her choice of funeral.

Before long, Eureka reached a white wooden marker some other runner must have nailed to an oak tree to mark his or her progress. She slapped the wood the way a runner does when she hits her halfway mark. She kept going.

Her feet pounded the worn path. Her arms pumped harder. The woods darkened as rain began to fall. Eureka ran on. She didn’t think about the classes she was missing, the whispers whirling around her empty seat in calculus or English. She was in the forest. There was no place she’d rather be.

Her clearing mind was like an ocean. Diana’s hair flowed weightlessly across it. Ander drifted by, reaching for that strange chain that seemed to have no beginning and no end. She wanted to ask why he’d saved her the other night—and what exactly he’d saved her from. She wanted to know more about the silver box and the green light it contained.

Life had become so convoluted. Eureka had always thought she loved to run because it was an escape. Now she realized that every time she went into the woods, she sought to find something, someone. Today she was chasing after nothing and no one because she didn’t have anyone left.

An old blues song she used to play on her radio show streamed into her mind:

Motherless children have a hard time when their mother’s dead

.

She’d been running for miles when her calves began to burn and she realized she was desperate for water. It was raining harder, so she slowed her pace and opened her mouth to the sky. The world above was rich, dewy green.

“Your time is improving.”

The voice came from behind her. Eureka spun around.

Ander wore faded gray jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a navy vest that somehow looked spectacular. He gazed at her with a brazen confidence quickly belied by his fingers running nervously through his hair.

He had a peculiar talent for blending into the background until he wanted to be seen. She must have sprinted past him, even though she prided herself on her alertness while running. Her heart had already been racing from the workout—now it sprinted because she was alone again with Ander. Wind rustled the leaves in the trees, sending a spray of raindrops to the ground. It carried the softest whiff of ocean. Ander’s scent.

“Your timing is becoming absurd.” Eureka stepped backward. He was either a psychopath or a savior, and there was no way of getting a straight answer out of him. She remembered the last thing he’d said to her: You have to survive—as if her literal survival were in question.

Her gaze swept the forest, seeking signs of those strange people, signs of that green light or any other danger—or signs of someone who might help her if it turned out Ander was the danger. They were alone.

She reached for her phone, envisioned dialing 911 if anything got weird. Then she thought of Bill and the other cops she knew and realized it was useless. Besides, Ander was just standing there.

The sight of his face made her want to run away and straight to him, to see how intense those blue eyes could get.

“Don’t call your friend at the police station,” Ander said. “I’m just here to talk to you. But, for the record, I don’t have one.”

“One what?”

“Record. Criminal file.”

“Records are meant to be broken.”

Ander stepped closer. Eureka stepped back. Rain studded her sweatshirt, sending a deep chill through her body.

“And before you ask, I wasn’t spying on you when you went to the cops. But those people you saw in the lobby, then later on the road—”

“Who were they?” Eureka asked. “And what was in that silver box?”

Ander pulled a tan rain hat from his pocket. He tugged it low over his eyes, over hair that, Eureka noticed, didn’t seem wet. The hat made him look like a detective from an old film noir. “Those are my problems,” he said, “not yours.”

“That’s not how you made it seem the other night.”

“How about this?” He stepped closer again, until he was only inches away and she could hear him breathing. “I’m on your side.”

“What side am I on?” A surge in the rain made Eureka retreat a step, under the canopy of leaves.

Ander frowned. “You’re so nervous.”

“I am not.”

He pointed at her elbows, jutting from the pockets into which she’d stuffed her fists. She was shaking.

“If I’m nervous, your sudden pop-ups aren’t helping.”

“How can I convince you that I’m not going to hurt you, that I’m trying to help?”

“I never asked for help.”

“If you can’t see that I’m one of the good guys, you’re never going to believe—”

“Believe what?” She crossed her hands tightly over her chest to compress her shaking elbows. Mist hung in the air around them, making everything a little blurry.

Very gently, Ander put his hand on her forearm. His touch was warm. His skin was dry. It made the hairs on her damp skin rise. “The rest of the story.”

The word “story” made Eureka think of The Book of Love. Some ancient tale about Atlantis had nothing to do with what Ander was talking about, but she still heard Madame Blavatsky’s translation run through her head: Everything might change with the last word. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked.

Ander smiled sadly. “You’re good at science, right?”

“No.” To look at Eureka’s last report card, you’d think she wasn’t good at anything. But then she saw Diana’s face in her memory—the way anytime Eureka joined her on one of the location digs, her mother bragged to her friends about embarrassing things like Eureka’s analytical mind and advanced reading level. If Diana were here, she’d speak up about how irrefutably good Eureka was at science. “I guess I’m all right.”

“What if I assigned you an experiment?” Ander said.

Eureka thought about the classes she’d missed today, about the trouble she’d be in. She wasn’t sure she needed to add another assignment.

“What if it was something that sounded impossible to prove?” he added.

“What if you just tell me what this is all about?”

“If you could prove this impossible hypothesis,” he said, “would you trust me then?”

“What’s the hypothesis?”

“The stone your mother left you when she died—”

Her eyes whipped up, finding his. Against the verdant forest, Ander’s turquoise irises were edged with green. “How did you know about that?”

“Try getting it wet.”

“Wet?”

Ander nodded. “My hypothesis is you won’t be able to.”

“Everything can get wet,” she said, even as she wondered about his dry skin when he’d reached for her moments ago.