“We need to go.”

She turned to him, brimming with the same unbridled excitement she used to experience when she crossed a finish line first. She pointed at the water—

Brooks was gone.

“No,” she whispered. Come back.

Stupid. She’d wanted to see her friend so badly her mind had painted him in the waves.

“I thought I saw him,” she whispered. “I know it’s impossible, but he was right there.” She pointed weakly. She knew how she sounded.

Ander’s eyes followed hers to the dark place in the waves where Brooks had been. “Let him go, Eureka.”

When she flinched his voice softened. “We should hurry. My family will be looking for us.”

“We crossed an ocean. How would they find us here?”

“My aunt Starling can taste us in the wind. We must make it to Solon’s cave before they track us.”

“But—” She searched the water for her friend.

“Brooks is gone. Do you understand?”

“I understand it’s more convenient for you if I let him go,” Eureka said. She started toward the rainy outlines of Cat and her family.

Ander caught up and blocked her path. “Your weakness for him is inconvenient to more people than me. People will die. The world—”

“People are going to die if I miss my best friend?”

She yearned to go back in time, to be in her room with her bare feet against the bedpost. She wanted to smell the fig-scented candle on her desk that she lit after going for a run. She wanted to be texting Brooks about the weird stains on their Latin teacher’s tie, stressing over some petty comment Maya Cayce made. She had never realized how happy she was before, how rich and indulgent her depression had been.

“You’re in love with him,” Ander said.

She edged past him. Brooks was her friend. Ander had no reason to be jealous.

“Eureka—”

“You said we should hurry.”

“I know this is hard.”

That made her stop. Hard was how people who didn’t know Eureka used to refer to Diana’s death. It made her want to strike the word from existence. Hard was a biochemistry exam. Hard was keeping a great piece of gossip to yourself. Hard was running a marathon.

Letting go of someone you loved wasn’t hard. There was no word for what it was, because even if you didn’t let them go they were still gone. Eureka hung her head and felt raindrops slide off the tip of her nose. Ander must never have suffered so great a loss. If he had, he wouldn’t have said that.

“You don’t understand.”

She’d meant it as a way to let him off the hook, but as soon as it came out, Eureka heard how harsh it sounded. She felt like no words existed anymore; they were all so insufficient and mean.

Ander spun toward the waterand let out an exasperated sigh. Eureka saw the Zephyr visibly leave Ander’s lips and smash into the sea. It spat up a gaping wave that curled above Eureka.

It looked like the wave that had killed Diana.

She caught Ander’s eyes and saw guilt widen them. He inhaled sharply, as if to take it back. When he realized that he couldn’t, he lunged for her.

Their fingertips touched for an instant. Then the wave slid over them and swelled toward land. Eureka was flung backward, spiraling away from Ander into the battering sea.

Water shot up her nose, crashed against her skull, bashed her neck from side to side. She tasted blood and salt. She didn’t recognize the waterlogged moan coming from her mouth. She fell out of the wave as the water dropped out from under her. For a moment she was running on a path of sky. She couldn’t see anything. She expected to die. She screamed for her family, for Cat, for Ander.

When she landed on the rock the only thing that told her she was still, ridiculously, alive was the echo of her voice against the cold, incessant rain.

3

THE LOST SEEDBEARER

In the central chamber of his subterranean grotto Solon took a sip of tar-thick Turkish coffee and frowned.

“It’s cold.”

His assistant Filiz reached for the ceramic mug. Her mother had cast it specially for Solon on her wheel, had baked it in her kiln two caves to the east. The mug was an inch thick, designed to hold heat longer in Solon’s porous travertine cave, which sat in the constant clutches of a bone-deep chill.

Filiz was sixteen, with wavy untamed hair she dyed a fiery shade of orange and eyes the color of a coconut husk. She wore a tight, electric-blue T-shirt, black tapered jeans, and a choker studded with short silver spikes.

“It was hot when I brewed it an hour ago.” Filiz had been working for the eccentric recluse for two years and had learned to navigate his moods. “The fire’s still going. I’ll make more—”

“Never mind!” Solon flung his head back and poured the coffee down his throat. He gagged melodramatically and wiped his mouth with a pale arm. “Your coffee is only slightly worse when it’s cold, like being transferred from Alcatraz to Siberia.”

Behind Solon, Basil snickered. Solon’s second assistant was nineteen, tall and swarthy, with slick black hair combed into a ponytail and an impish twinkle in his eyes. Basil wasn’t like the other boys in their community. He listened to old country music, not electronica. He idolized the graffiti artist Banksy and had painted several of the nearby rock formations with colorfully distorted superheroes. He thought he had done the graffiti anonymously, but Filiz knew he was the artist. He liked to show off his English by speaking in proverbs, but he never translated them right. Solon had taken to calling him “the Poet.”