Teardrop

“You don’t know? I thought it was so obvious.”

Eureka lifted her shoulders, shook her head.

“Eureka, from the moment I was conscious, I have been trained to know everything about you—your weaknesses, your strengths, your fears, and your desires—all so that I could destroy you. One Seedbearer power is a kind of natural camouflage. We live among mortals, but they don’t really see us. We blend, we blur. No one remembers our faces unless we want them to. Can you imagine being invisible to everyone but your family?”

Eureka shook her head, though she’d often wished for invisibility.

“That’s why you never knew about me. I have watched you since you were born, but you never saw me until I wanted you to—the day I hit your car. I’ve been with you every day for the past seventeen years. I watched you learn to walk, to tie your shoes, to play the guitar”—he swallowed—“to kiss. I watched you get your ears pierced, fail your driver’s test, and win your first cross-country race.” Ander reached for her, held her close to him. “By the time Diana died, I was so desperately in love with you, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I drove into your car at that stop sign. I needed you to see me, finally. Every moment of your life, I have fallen more deeply in love with you.”

Eureka flushed. What could she say to that? “I … well … uh—”

“You don’t have to respond,” Ander said. “Just know that even as I have begun to distrust everything I was raised to believe, there is one thing I am certain of.” He fit his hand in hers. “My devotion to you. It will never fade, Eureka. I swear it.”

Eureka was stunned. Her suspicious mind had been wrong about Ander—but her body’s instincts had been right. Her fingers reached around his neck, pulled his lips to hers. She tried to transmit the words she couldn’t find with a kiss.

“God.” Ander’s lip brushed hers. “It felt so good to say that aloud. For my whole life, I have felt alone.”

“You’re with me now.” She wanted to reassure him, but worry crept into her mind. “Are you still a Seedbearer? You turned against your family to protect me, but—”

“You could say I ran away,” he said. “But my family isn’t going to give up. They want you dead very badly. If you cry and Atlantis returns, they think it will mean the death of millions, the enslavement of humanity. The end of the world as we know it. They think it will be the demise of this world and the birth of a terrible new one. They think killing you is the only way to stop it.”

“And what do you think?”

“It might be true that you could raise Atlantis,” he said slowly, “but no one knows what that would mean.”

“The ending isn’t written yet,” Eureka said. And everything might change with the last word. She reached for the book to show Ander something that had been bothering her since the reading of Diana’s will. “What if the end has been written? These pages are missing from the text. Diana wouldn’t have torn them out. She wouldn’t even dog-ear a library book.”

Ander scratched his jaw. “There is one person who might help us. I’ve never met him. He was born a Seedbearer, but he defected from the family after Byblis was murdered. My family says he never got over her death.” He paused. “They say he was in love with her. His name is Solon.”

“How do we find him?”

“None of the Seedbearers have spoken to him in years. The last I heard, he was in Turkey.” He spun to face Eureka, eyes suddenly bright. “We could go there and track him down.”

Eureka laughed. “I doubt my Dad is going to let me up and go to Turkey.”

“They’ll have to come with us,” Ander said quickly. “All of your loved ones will. Otherwise my family would use your family to drag you back.”

Eureka stiffened. “You mean—”

He nodded. “They can justify killing a few in order to save many.”

“What about Brooks? If he comes back—”

“He isn’t coming back,” Ander said, “not in any way you’d want to see him. We need to focus on getting you and your family to safety as soon as possible. Somewhere far from here.”

Eureka shook her head. “Dad and Rhoda would commit me again before they’d agree to leave town.”

“This isn’t a choice, Eureka. It’s the only way you’ll survive. And you have to survive.” Then he kissed her hard, holding her face in his hands, pressing his lips deeply into hers until she was breathless.

“Why do I have to survive?” Her eyes ached with exhaustion she could no longer deny. Ander noticed. He guided her to the bed, pulled back the covers, then laid her down and draped the blankets over her.

He knelt at her side and murmured into her good ear: “You have to survive because I won’t live in a world without you.”

29 EVACUATION

When Eureka awoke the next morning, dim, silvery light shone through her window. Rain drummed against the trees. She yearned to let the storm lull her back to sleep, but her left ear was ringing, reminding her of the strange melody Ander had conjured when he unsealed Diana’s locket. The Book of Love was cradled in her arms, spelling out the prophecy of her tears. She knew she had to get up, to face the things she’d learned the night before, but an ache in her heart held her head against her pillow.

Brooks was gone. According to Ander, who seemed to have been right about so much else, Eureka’s oldest friend wasn’t coming back.

A weight on the other side of her bed surprised her. It was Ander.

“Have you been here all night?” she asked.

“I’m not leaving you.”

She crawled across the bed toward him. She was still in her bathrobe. He wore his clothes from the night before. They couldn’t help smiling as their faces drew near each other. He kissed her forehead, then her lips.

She wanted to pull him down onto the bed, to hold and kiss him horizontally, to feel the weight of his body on hers, but after a few soft pecks, Ander rose and stood at the window. His arms were crossed behind his back. Eureka could picture the way he would have stood there all night, scanning the street for a Seedbearer silhouette.

What would he have done if one of them had come to her house? She remembered the silver case he’d pulled from his pocket that night. It had terrified his family.

“Ander—” She meant to ask what had been inside that box.

“It’s time to go,” he said.

Eureka groped for her phone to check the time. When she remembered it was lost, she imagined it ringing somewhere in the rain-swept Gulf, amid a silver school of fish, being answered by a mermaid. She rummaged through her nightstand for her plastic polka-dot Swatch watch. “It’s six in the morning. My family will still be asleep.”

“Wake them up.”

“And tell them what?”

“I’ll tell everyone the plan as soon as we’re together,” Ander said, still facing the window. “It’s better if there aren’t too many questions. We’ll need to move quickly.”

“If I’m going to do this,” Eureka said, “I need to know where we’re going.” She’d slid from the bed. Her hand rested on his sleeve. His bicep flexed against her touch.

He faced her and ran his fingers through her hair, drawing his nails softly along her scalp, the nape of her neck. She’d thought it was sexy when he ran his fingers through his own hair. This was even better.

“We are going to find Solon,” he said. “The lost Seedbearer.”

“I thought you said he was in Turkey.”

For a moment, Ander almost smiled, then his face went strangely blank. “Luckily I salvaged a boat yesterday. We sail as soon as your family is ready.”

Eureka watched him carefully. There was something in his gaze—satisfaction suppressed by … guilt. Her