Teardrop

28 SELENE’S TEARLINE

A thunderclap shook the foundation of the house. Eureka scooted closer to Ander. “Why would my mother have sealed her own locket?”

“Maybe it contains something she didn’t want anyone to see.” He slipped an arm around her waist. It felt like an instinctive motion, but once his arm was there, Ander seemed nervous about it. The tops of his ears were flushed. He kept looking at his hand as it rested on her hip.

Eureka laid her hand over his to reassure him that she wanted it there, that she savored each new lesson on his body: the smoothness of his fingers, the heat inside his palm, the way his skin smelled like summer up close.

“I used to tell Diana everything,” Eureka said. “When she died, I learned how many secrets she kept from me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wait.” Eureka flinched. “Did my mother have the Tearline?”

“No, but she knew you did. Her entire life’s work centered on preparing you for your destiny. She must have told you something about it?”

Eureka’s chest tightened. “Once she told me never to cry.”

“It’s true we don’t know what would happen if you really cried. My family doesn’t want to take the chance of finding out. The wave on the bridge that day was meant for you, not Diana.” He looked down, resting his chin against his chest. “I was supposed to ensure that you drowned. But I couldn’t. My family will never forgive me.”

“Why did you save me?” she whispered.

“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.”