“Ander, no!” Eureka spun so that her body shielded Brooks. For a moment she felt the familiar heat of his chest. “I won’t let you.”

“Yes, please, Eureka, save me,” Brooks said. Then he lunged forward with all his might and sent Eureka tumbling. When Ander bent to check on her, Brooks rammed him hard. He grappled for the spear.

Ander’s back arched over the veranda’s rail. He couldn’t right himself. He grabbed hold of Brooks’s forearm and took him down with him. Eureka tried to stop them, but they were already gone.

She ran to the edge of the veranda. The spear had slipped from Ander’s hands and out of Brooks’s reach, too. The boys clutched each other and swung desperate fists as they tumbled through the air, each blow missing its mark, forced into truce by chaos and gravity. Then they splashed through the surface of the Tearline pond.

During the stillness that followed, Eureka couldn’t help imagining that both boys had disappeared from her life forever, that love was gone, that it was easier that way.

But the boys’ heads surfaced. They spun in the water until they spotted each other. Twenty feet of tears separated them. Brooks dipped back underwater and became a black blur. He swam toward Ander with ferocious grace.

Ander’s body rose in the water, which quickly turned red around him. Then he was dragged beneath the surface.

All was eerily quiet again. Eureka paced the veranda for an hour-long minute before she remembered both boys had gills that allowed them to breathe underwater.

She dove in.

Water engulfed her. The thunderstone shield bloomed around her. She couldn’t see them. She plunged a few feet deeper, moving toward the opposite shore.

She sensed movement below her and slipped to the bottom of the shield. Brooks had Ander pinned to the floor of the pond and was tearing at his chest with his mouth, as if he were trying to eat Ander’s heart. The pain on Ander’s face was so severe that Eureka feared he would lose consciousness.

She dove toward the boys, swimming as hard as she could. She drew within five feet of them, balled her hands into fists to use against Brooks. This wasn’t her best friend; it couldn’t be. Then she remembered the shield. There was no way to reach Ander as long as it protected her. Did she have time to race to the surface, throw off her thunderstone, and swim back here again? As Eureka paused, Ander turned his head and exhaled.

A powerful wave sent Eureka tumbling backward, spinning end over end. She and her shield spun horizontally in the water, trapped within a swirling vortex. She felt herself lift up.

Higher and higher she spun, catching dizzy flashes of Brooks and Ander. All three of them moved in different orbits, caught in an underwater whirlwind made of Ander’s Zephyr.

The light above Eureka grew closer, more intense, until …

She shot out of the water, spinning upward. Her thunderstone shield evaporated. The whirlwind had surfaced to become an enormous tornado. Beneath her, Ander reached forBrooks. Blood flowed from his chest and entered its own orbit, splattering Brooks as he spun by.

Then Eureka was out of the wind spout, hurtling through the air, toward the nearby cliff that stood above the pond. As she fell from the sky, she was amazed by the sight of an enormous sloping rainbow that stretched beyond the horizon.

She heard a guttural cry and looked over her shoulder. Brooks was flying far into the distance, still a hostage of Ander’s Zephyr. She didn’t see Ander anywhere.

Eureka landed on a rock with a deep and painful thud. Her bones throbbed as she rolled to her side and cradled herself for a moment, shivering in the rain. She touched her thunderstone and Diana’s locket and the yellow ribbon, and she breathed. Eventually she struggled to her knees.

She didn’t know where she was, or where Ander or Brooks had ended up, but from the rock, she could see most of the Celan valley. It looked like a picture of the surface of the moon. She saw the orchid-ringed Glimmering to the south. She saw a thousand silver circles dotting the landscape, bodies of water born of her tears. She saw the white caps of far mountains, the elbow-shaped Tearline pond in the valley between the caves, and, not fifty feet away, Solon’s veranda.

She climbed toward it. The center of the veranda was where the rainbow ended. Ruby blended into vivid orange, then into gold, then into a verdant ivy green, then indigo, and, finally, into the toxic-lovely purple Eureka had come to associate with the gossipwitches. The rainbow stretched into a night now black as coal. Neither sunlight nor moonlight had made it.

Looking closer, Eureka saw four upright silhouettes inside the rainbow, floating toward the veranda. A buzz made Eureka think the gossipwitches had arrived, but she heard no laughter, saw no flash of orchid. And this buzzing was different, more like a rasp than the contented song of bees.

The four approaching figures were motionless—except for their heaving torsos. Eureka realized that the buzzing in the wind was the sound of labored breathing.

Seedbearers.

Each one was intensely focused on keeping another’s body aloft. They worked their breath as if they were wings beating for one another.

Eureka was finally close enough to see a figure at the base of the rainbow, alone in the dark on the veranda. He looked like someone’s great-grandfather. The rainbow streamed from his mouth like an endless puff of smoke. His back was arched uncomfortably, as if the rainbow began somewhere deep inside him. He wore a silk robe and a strange black mask.

The old man breathing the rainbow into the sky was Solon.

But it couldn’t be. His body looked ancient. The skin on his hands and his chest was mottled with age. His back was stooped. How had Solon aged a century in the space of an afternoon? When he explained the Seedbearers’ aging process, he’d said feeling nothing had kept him young for decades. What—or who—had revived Solon’s feelings, his capacity for love?