Teardrop

“Your mother knew the power of these heirlooms. She would have been afraid of having them fall into the wrong hands.”

“They fell into my hands, and I don’t understand.”

“Her faith in you survives her,” Ander said. “She left you these because she trusted you to discover their significance. She was right about the book—you got to the heart of its story. She was right about the thunderstone—today you learned how powerful it can be.”

“And the locket?” Eureka touched it.

“Let’s see if she was right about that, too.” Ander stood in the center of the room, holding the locket in his right hand. He turned it over. He touched its back with the tip of his left ring finger. He closed his eyes, pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle, and let out a long exhale.

Slowly his finger moved over its surface, tracking the six interlocking circles Eureka’s fingers had traced many times. Only, when Ander did it, he made music, as if sweeping the rim of a crystal goblet.

The sound made Eureka leap to her feet. She clutched her left ear, which was not used to hearing but somehow heard these strange notes as clearly as she’d heard Polaris’s song. The locket’s rings glowed briefly— gold, then blue—responding to Ander’s touch.

As his finger moved in figure eights, mazelike swirls, and roseate patterns around the circles, the sound it produced shifted and spun. A soft hum deepened into a rich and haunting chord, then rose into what sounded almost like a harmony of woodwinds.

He held that note for several seconds, his finger tranquil in the center of the locket’s back. The sound was reedy and unfamiliar, like a flute from a far-away, future realm. Ander’s finger pulsed three times, creating church-organ-like chords that flowed in waves over Eureka. He opened his eyes, lifted his finger, and the extraordinary concert was over. He gasped for air.

The locket creaked open without another touch.

“How did you do that?” Eureka approached him in a trance. She leaned over his hands to examine the locket’s interior. The right side was inlaid with a tiny mirror. Its reflection was clean and clear and slightly magnified. Eureka saw one of Ander’s eyes in the mirror and was startled by its turquoise clarity. The left side held what looked like a piece of yellowed paper wedged into the frame near the hinge.

She used her pinky to pry it free. She lifted a corner, feeling how thin the paper was, sliding it carefully out. Beneath the paper she found a small photograph. It had been trimmed to fit the triangular locket, but the image was clear:

Diana, holding baby Eureka in her arms. She couldn’t have been more than six months old. Eureka had never seen this picture before, but she recognized her mother’s Coke-bottle glasses, the layered shag of her hair, the blue flannel shirt she’d worn in the nineties.

Baby Eureka gazed straight at the camera, wearing a white pinafore Sugar must have sewn. Diana looked away from the camera, but you could see the bright green of her eyes. She looked sad—an expression Eureka didn’t associate with her mother. Why had she never shown this picture to Eureka? Why had she gone all these years wearing the locket around her neck, saying it didn’t open?

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.”