Eureka looked from Ander to Solon and back again. They both were just boys. “I don’t get it. You said you were once in love—”

“Oh, I was,” Solon said fiercely. He swallowed the last drop of port. “There was no way to stop our love. It’s fate—Seedbearer boys always fall for Tearline girls. We have Tearline fever.”

Eureka looked at Ander. “This has happened other times?”

“No,” Solon said sarcastically. “All of this began the moment you started paying attention to it. Good God, girls are dumb.”

“It’s different with us,” Ander said. “We’re not like—”

“Not like me?” Solon said. “Not like a murderer?”

It hit Eureka then, what had happened to Byblis. She shivered, then began to sweat. “You killed her.”

Seedbearers were supposed to kill Tearline girls. Ander was supposed to have killed Eureka. But Solon had actually gone through with it. He had murdered his true love.

Ander reached for Eureka. “What we feel for each other is real.”

“What happened with Byblis?” Eureka asked.

“After one astonishing and amorous month together”—Solon leaned back in his chair, hands clasped over his chest—“we were sitting at a riverside café, our bodies turned toward each other, much like yours are now.” Solon gestured at Eureka’s and Ander’s knees brushing under the table.

“I reached my feeble hand across the table to caress her flowing hair,” Solon said. “I stared into her midnight eyes. I gathered all my waning strength and I told her I loved her.” He held out his hand and swallowed, drawing his fingers into a fist. “Then I broke her neck, as I had been raised to do.” He stared into space, his fist still raised. “I was an old man then, decrepit with the age that love had brought me.”

“That’s horrible,” Eureka said.

“But there’s a happy ending,” Solon said. “As soon as she was gone, my arthritis faded. My cataracts melted away. I could walk upright. I could run.” He smirked at Ander. “But I’m sure my story sounds nothing like yours.” He touched Ander’s eyes. “Not even in the pitter-patter of your crow’s-feet.”

Ander swatted Solon’s hand.

“Is it true?” Eureka asked.

Ander avoided her eyes. “Yes.”

“You weren’t going to tell me.” Eureka stared at his face, noticing lines she hadn’t seen before. She imagined him hobbling and wizened, walking feebly with a cane.

Solon said something, but Eureka’s bad ear had been turned to him, so she didn’t hear it. She spun around. “What did you say?”

“I said as long as he loves you, Anderwill age. The more intensely he feels, the more quickly it will happen. And on the off chance you’re not one of those entirely superficial girls—age will affect more than his body. His mind will go as swiftly as the rest. He will grow incredibly, miserably old—and stay that way. Unlike mortal aging, Seedbearer aging leads not to the sweet freedom of death.”

“What if he were to stop … loving me?”

“Then, my darling,” Solon said, “he would remain the strapping, frowning boy you see forever. Interesting dilemma, isn’t it?”

11

STAY, ILLUSION

“I need air,” Eureka said. The cave seemed to be shrinking, a hand tightening into a fist. “How do I get out?”

There’s no way out, Solon had said about Brooks. She sensed the same was true for her. She was trapped inside the Bitter Cloud, trapped in love with a boy who should not love.

“Eureka—” Ander said.

“Don’t.” She left them at the table and took the staircase down to the lower level. The waterfall’s roar grew deafening. She didn’t want to hear herself think. She wanted to dive into the pool and let the fall pummel her until she couldn’t feel angry or lost or betrayed.

To the right of the waterfall, around the back of the curved staircase, was a heavy black and gray tapestry. She slipped behind the staircase. At the far edge of the pool she steadied herself against the wall and lifted the tapestry’s corner.

A channel of water ran beneath it, leading from the pool to a dark, narrow infinity. Lifting the tapestry higher, she saw an aluminum canoe tethered to a post a few feet inside the watery tunnel.

The canoe was heavily dented and bore a cartoon profile of a Native American on the hull. A wooden paddle lay beneath its built-in seat, and a lit torch with a glowing amethyst base was inset in a groove in the prow. The current was lazy, gently undulating.

Eureka wanted to paddle to the unflooded brown bayou behind her house, glide beneath the arms of weeping willows, past jonquils sprouting from the banks, all the way back in time to when the world was still alive.

She climbed inside the canoe, untethered it, and raised the paddle. She was thrilled by her recklessness. She didn’t know where this tunnel led. She imagined Seedbearers tasting her in the wind. And Atlas inside Brooks tracking her in the mountains. It didn’t stop her. As the slosh of her paddle became the only sound Eureka heard, she watched the shadow show the torch cast on the walls around her. Her silhouette was a haunted abstraction, her arms grotesquely long. Peculiar shapes passed through her form like ghosts.

She thought of Ander’s body, the unfair shapes love would sculpt it into. What if Ander aged into an old man before Eureka turned eighteen?