His smile caught her off guard. She looked away.

“Who’s been filling your head with ghost stories?” he asked.

“Eureka.” Ander’s voice called from a dark distance.

She spun around. She couldn’t see him on the other side of the pond. Because of the witches’ glaze, she couldn’t even see the cave from which she’d come. He must have noticed the light of her torch, but could he see her? Could he see Brooks?

Brooks squinted, also unable to see through the witches’ glaze. “Where is he?”

“Stay here,” Eureka said to Brooks. “He has a gun. He’ll kill you.” She didn’t know if Ander still had that gun, or whether the eerie green artemisia bullets harmed anyone besides Seedbearers. But she would do anything to keep the two—three—boys apart.

Brooks rose to his feet. “That would be interesting.”

“I’m serious,” she whispered. “I say one word and you’re dead.” She narrowed her eyes, addressing Atlas. “You’d be sent back to the Sleeping World for who knows how long. I know you don’t want that.”

Eureka heard the click of a gun being cocked. Brooks held a black pistol to his temple. “Should I save him the trouble?”

“No!” She stood up in the canoe and reached for Brooks, needing that gun far from his head. She thought he was reaching for her. Instead he handed her the gun. The weight of it surprised her. It was warm from being in his hand. She darted a glance back in Ander’s direction. She hoped he hadn’t heard her. “What are you doing?”

“You said you knew what happened to me. Maybe”—he grinned—“you think I’m dangerous? Here’s your chance. Stop me.”

She stared at the gun.

“Eureka!” Ander called again.

“That’s not what I want,” she whispered.

“Now we’re getting to the heart of things.” Brooks touched her shoulder, steadying her in the canoe. “You want something. Let me help.”

The tumble of rocks behind her made Eureka spin around again. Ander was closer, outside the glaze. The sudden sight of him tugged at her and she couldn’t help wanting to be closer. He was climbing down a path that ended at a shallow ledge twenty feet above the pond.

“I have to go.” Eureka used her paddle to push off Brooks’s rock.

“Stay with me,” he said.

“I’ll find you when I can,” Eureka said. “Now go.” She sat back in the canoe and paddled away from the ledge, toward the center of the pond. “Ander.” She waved. “Over here.”

Ander’s eyes found her in the water. He arched his arms over his head, bent his knees, and dove. She watched him glide downward, his blond hair rippling, his toes pointed to the sky. When his body broke the surface, it made no splash. Eureka held her breath as he disappeared into her tears.

She looked tothe rock where Brooks had been, but he was gone. Had their exchange been real? It felt like a nightmare where nothing happened but the atmosphere was deadly. She slipped the gun into the pond. As it sank, she imagined it coming to rest at the bottom of the flooded valley in the hand of a drowned Turk.

A splash arose from the pond. Eureka ducked—then saw that Ander had risen with it. He stood atop a towering, starlit waterspout like he was a magnetizing moon.

He had dragged much of the water from the pond under him. As her canoe grazed the bottom, Eureka saw the muddy ghost of the path that had once connected Solon’s cave to his neighbors’. This was what it had looked like before Eureka’s tears. She tried to memorize every detail of the unflooded land below, imagining a past Poet and Filiz walking through it on their way to work, the Poet picking a bud from a drowned olive tree. She didn’t see the gun.

Ander’s waterspout subsided gently, refilling the valley with tears until he was level with the pond. Then he was hovering on a small wave alongside Eureka’s canoe.

“Were you talking to someone?”

“My mom. Old habit.” She held out her hand and he climbed into the canoe.

“I never wanted you to find out like this,” he said.

“You didn’t want me to find out at all.”

“When you didn’t know, I could pretend it wasn’t happening.”

Eureka shivered and looked around. The clouds had covered all the stars and Brooks was nowhere. “Everything is happening.”

She searched Ander’s face for signs of aging. She wouldn’t mind him having wrinkles or gray hair, but she refused to be the cause of his old age. Falling more deeply in love would drain Ander’s life away. They shouldn’t even have let it go this far.

“I trusted you,” she said.

“You should.”

“But why don’t you trust me? You’ve known my secrets longer than I have. I don’t know any of yours. I don’t know if you’ve been in love before. I don’t even know your favorite song or what you want to be when you grow up or who your best friend is.”

Ander looked at his rain-blurred reflection in the water. He thought for a long time before saying, “I used to have a dog. Shiloh was my best friend.” He smashed a fist into his reflection. “I had to let him go.”

“Why?”

“It was part of my Passage. Until recently, I aged like any other boy, day by day, season after season, adding inches and scars to my body. But on my eighteenth birthday, I was inducted in a family ceremony.” He gazed up, remembering. “I was supposed to repudiate everything I cared about. They said I’d live forever. When Seedbearers do something cruel, our bodies grow younger, like we’re traveling back in time. I gave up Shiloh, but I couldn’t give up loving you because it’s all I am.”