“You can’t rely on someone else to define you. Especially not me.”

“You talk like we’re strangers,” he said. “But I know who you are.”

“Tell me.” He had touched her most vulnerable reflex. Eureka immediately regretted her words.

“You’re the girl who described falling in love more truly than anyone ever has. Remember? Love at first sight that shatters your world’s skin. Not fearing someone’s flaws and dreams and passions.” He took her in his arms and held her tightly. “The unbreakable bond of reciprocal love. I’ll never stop caring for you, Eureka. You think all you feel is sadness. You don’t know what your happiness could do.”

Ander believed there were more sides to Eureka than she would allow herself to see. She thought about the way Esme had tapped the thunderstone when she said there were exceptions to the Glimmering’s deadly rule. Eureka approached the pond, slipped her necklace over her head. She held the stone over the water.

“What are you doing?” Ander asked.

The Glimmering answered. Lacy bands of water formed from its depths and drew up around the surface, like a deck of liquid cards being shuffled. A mauve fog spread out above the Glimmering, then gathered into a cloud of concentrated purple in the center, inches from the softly gurgling spring. The cloud stretched into a spire of purple vapor, which imploded and vanished into the center of the pond.

The Glimmering had stilled into a shining mirror.

“I don’t think we should do this,” Ander said.

“You mean you don’t think I should do this.”

“You could die.”

“I need to know who I am before I go to the Marais. The witch told me. My history is in here.”

She expected him to protest. Instead, Ander took her hand. The gesture moved her in a way she hadn’t expected. The two of them lined the toes of their shoes up with the edge of the water. Eureka’s heart was pounding.

They leaned over the Glimmering.

The surface filled with color and she saw the outline of a girl’s body. She saw a stunning white gown where her jeans and blue button-down shirt should have been reflected. She took a breath and lifted her gaze slowly, toward the reflection of her face.

It was not Eureka’s face. The girl looking up from the Glimmering had dark hair and big, searching black eyes. She had dark skin, high cheekbones, a broad, confident smile. Her lips parted when Eureka’s lips did; she tilted her chin at the same angle as Eureka’s chin.

Maya Cayce, Eureka’s nemesis from Evangeline, the girl who’d stolen her journal, who’d tried to steal Brooks, stared back at her. Eureka gaped. How could it be? In her reflection, her lips curled into a smile. The image burned into her. It would be there forever, locked in the amber ofher soul.

“I don’t understand,” Ander said blankly.

“What does it mean?” Eureka murmured. “How can it be her?”

“How can it be who?” Ander sounded dazed and haunted. Eureka pointed at her reflection, but she saw that Ander’s eyes were fixed to the space where his reflection … should have been.

No one was there. Nothing looked back at Ander but the lead-colored sky.

19

EVICTED

“The trick is to be calm and illogical, just like him,” Solon was saying to the twins when Eureka and Ander returned to the Bitter Cloud later that morning.

They sat before the broken fire pit in the center of the salon. Candles dwindled in stalagmite candelabra. Glass shards littered the floor. No one had thought to clean up after the raid. The twins faced Ovid, who sat cross-legged on a green and gold Turkish rug. His posture was lifelike, his features uniquely appealing, but his eyes were as dead as stones. Claire and William lay on their stomachs, examining the robot’s gleaming toes.

“Solon, no—” Eureka said. The robot was neutral now, but she knew how quickly he could morph into the ghosts he carried. Hadn’t the twins been through enough without having to see Dad’s dead face in the machine?

She wondered whether the Poet’s ghost inhabited the robot, whether the acquiring radius Solon had mentioned now reached the Glimmering.

“Don’t worry, he’s asleep.” Solon stood behind Eureka, placed his index and middle fingers along the right corner of her jaw, like he was checking her pulse. Then he twisted his fingers clockwise and whispered: “For when you need to know.”

He was showing her how to power down the robot. She noticed the subtle infinity-shaped indentation on the inside of Ovid’s jaw.

“We need to talk to you,” she said. “We just came from the Glimmering.”

Solon’s eyebrows shot up. “Did your vanity survive?”

“What’s the Glimmering?” Claire asked as she climbed on Ovid’s shoulders the way she used to climb on Dad’s.

“I saw something in there,” Eureka said to Solon.

“Her hissstory,” a soft, feminine voice sang.

Eureka turned and saw no one. Then bees appeared, a few at a time, until they were swarming the eye sockets of the skulls on Solon’s walls.

The gossipwitches entered the salon in swaying caftans. They arranged themselves in the shape of a triangle, with Esme at the point closest to Eureka.

“Well, good morning, Ovid,” Esme said. “I see your crapshoot tinkering finally paid off, Solon. Tell me, how did you bypass the valve filled with vermilion sands? Or didn’t you? Oh—did someone die?”