“It was hard when your mom died.” The robot paused, its lower lip jutting out the way Dad’s did when he was thinking. “It was hard before that, too. I knew you were mad at me, even though you didn’t. I was afraid you’d leave me, too. So I protected myself, added people to my life like armor against loneliness. I married Rhoda; we had the twins. I don’t know how it happened, but I turned my back on you. Sometimes when you try not to repeat your mistakes, you forget that the original mistakes are still unfolding. I never planned to live forever and it wouldn’t matter if I had. Man plans, God cancels. I want you to know I love you. I believe in you.” His orichalcum eyes gazed into hers. “Ander makes you happy. I wish I could take back what Diana said about him.”

Today I met the boy who’s going to break Eureka’s heart.

“I don’t believe it anymore,” Dad said. “So you tell him to take care of you. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Learn from mine and make your own and tell your children what you did wrong so they can do even better than you. Don’t turn your back on what you love because you’re scared. I hope we’ll meet again in Heaven.” The robot made the sign of the cross. “Make things right, Eureka. Stare your mistakes straight in the eye. If anyone can, it’s you.”

Eureka flung herself into Ovid’s arms and embraced it. Its body felt nothing like Dad’s, and that made her miss him more than she had since he died. She grew disgusted with herself for allowing one of Atlas’s machines to make her feel.

When she pulled away the robot’s face looked different. She couldn’t see Dad anywhere. The orichalcum features seemed to be rearranging themselves in a deep tangle of movement. It was a horrifying sight. Eyes spread. Cheeks slackened. The nose hooked at the bridge.

“What’s happening?” Eureka asked Solon.

“Another ghost is surfacing,” Solon said. “Now that your father opened Ovid, it will draw all the newly dead within a certain radius to it. Think of it as a vortex of local ghosts.”

“My dad is trapped inside with other dead people?” Eureka thought of her nightmare and drew her arms around her chest.

“Not dead people,” Solon said. “Ghosts. Souls. Big difference. The biggest difference there is.”

“What about Heaven?” Eureka believed in Heaven, and that her parents were there now.

“Since your tears began the Rising, all the souls who perish in the Waking World are trapped in a new limbo. Before you cried, they would have made their way, like the souls that died before them, wherever they were destined to go.”

“But now?” Eureka asked.

“They are being held for the Filling. They cannot flow into Atlas’s other robots until those robots rise with the rest of Atlantis. And if Atlantis doesn’t risebefore the full moon, the dead’s deterioration will be too great. The souls won’t make it into the machines, or to Heaven—if there is such a place—or anywhere else, for that matter.”

“That’s what you meant about the wasted dead,” Eureka said.

Solon nodded. “Your tears have already killed many. In order for their souls not to rot and waste away, Atlantis must rise in the next seven days. All ghosts must flow into the machines. Your mission will be to find some method of release.”

“Release into what?” Eureka asked.

“A better fate than eternal enslavement by the Evil One.”

As the features on the robot’s face fixed into place, Eureka began to sweat. Solon didn’t have to tell her who the other ghost was inside Ovid. She recognized Seyma, the woman she had murdered, wrinkling the robot’s skin.

“Filiz!” Seyma’s ghost began her death message in a language Eureka was surprised to understand. “Do not let the Tearline girl deceive you. She is the world’s worst dream come true.” The old woman’s voice softened. “A blind man could see how much I love you, Filiz. Why you never saw it, I don’t know.”

Then the robot closed its orichalcum eyes. Seyma was gone.

“Ovid is programmed with some sort of translation device,” Solon said. “It knows what the listener will understand.”

“My father’s ghost and the ghost of the woman who murdered him are together inside this machine? How does that work?”

“The mind boggles,” Solon said. “An unfathomable number of ghosts can populate Ovid’s body, propelling its thoughts and deeds like the atoms of a wave. They will make Ovid brilliant, and immortal—and conflicted, I assume. World wars could rage inside a single orichalcum body … if some clever ghost were to organize a resistance.” Solon paused and drummed fingers against his chin. “Actually, that sounds like fun.”

“How many ghosts are in it now?” Eureka touched her yellow ribbon. “There was a girl we passed on the way to the Bitter Cloud. I wanted to bury her.…”

“So far it seems only two ghosts are imprinted. Ovid’s acquiring radius is quite small at the beginning, but will grow with each ghost that fills the machine. It will be a grand rite of passage when Ovid acquires its third ghost. Then this miraculous trinary robot will be fully operational, ready for the world, such as it is.”

“That’s when I go to the Marais,” Eureka realized.

“In good time. Remember, someone else still has to die before Ovid is ready to guide you. Before that grisly occurrence, I suggest you go upstairs and get some rest.” Solon smiled into the waterfall. “I wonder who the lucky bastard will be.”