“That wave took my mother, too.”

“Indeed,” Atlas said cryptically.

By then the tree was a hundred feet tall and as thick as the ancient redwoods in the California town where Eureka had been born. The tree branched out. Sinewy limbs spun from its trunk, twisting wildly until its boughs overlapped in long and tangled fingers. Leaves sprang, wide and thick and glossy green. Jonquil-like white flowers exploded from their buds. Narcissus, Ander would say. Eureka’s ears heard each moment of this wild growth, as if eavesdropping on a sparkling conversation.

New trees sprang up around the first. Then a silver road encircled the sudden forest, which wasn’t a forest, but a magnificent urban park in the center of a rising city. Blindingly pristine gold- and silver-roofed buildings ascended from the marsh, stretching in all directions to form a perfectly circular capital. A ring-shaped river bordered the city; its swift current moved counterclockwise. On the far bank of the river was another mile-wide ring of land, this one verdant green and blooming with fruit trees and terraced grapevines. The agricultural band was encircled by another, clockwise-current river. At its edges, a final ring of land rose into towering purple bluffs. Beyond the mountains, the ocean lapping its rocks stretched into a blurry blue horizon.

Atlantis, the Sleeping World, had awoken.

“What now, bad girl?” Atlas asked.

“Get off! Get off!” the witches shouted. “We are going home to our mountain!”

Esme snapped her whip at Peggy, who reared in the sky. Eureka slipped backward. Her hands grabbed at Peggy’s mane, but not quickly enough. The horse threw Atlas and Eureka from her back.

They fell toward Atlantis. Eureka saw Atlas’s panic flash in Brooks’s eyes and it reminded her of something … but she fell so fast, she soon lost the boy and the body and the enemy and the memory.

She fell and fell, as she’d fallen through the waterfall in the Bitter Cloud. Back then she had landed in water and her thunderstone had shielded her. Ander had been swimming toward her. No one would save her now.

She landed on a green leaf the size of a mattress. She wasn’t dead yet. She let out an amazed laugh; then she slid off the leaf and was falling again.

Branches battered her limbs. She grabbed at a thick one. Her arms wrapped around it, as, incredibly, the branch wrapped around her. Its embrace held her still. Its bark was the texture of a tortoise’s shell.

Eureka shook bark and leaves from her wet hair. She wiped blood from a scratch on her forehead. She felt for her necklace. Still hot, still there. The lachrymatory was gone.

Atlas was also gone.

All around Eureka, lush trees continued to grow from the marsh, until they matched the height of the first tree. She was in the center of a canopy of trees in the center of a park in the center of a city in the center of what might be the only land left onearth.

Strange birds sang strange songs that Eureka heard in both ears. Vines snaked up the tree trunk so quickly, she jerked her arms away, lest they become portions of the forest. The trees smelled like eucalyptus and pecans and fresh-cut grass, but in every other way they were unrecognizable. They were broader and taller and more brilliantly green than any tree she’d ever seen. She climbed across another bough. It swayed under her weight, but the wood felt steady, strong.

“You’re losing, Cuttlefish.” Atlas jumped from a branch above her to one below. He climbed downward, and when he reached the tree’s lowest bough he turned slowly, winked at Eureka, and jumped.

He landed face-first in the thick-sprouting grass. After that he didn’t move.

Another trick. She was meant to follow him, to fear for Brooks’s well-being—and be trapped.

But she was already trapped. She was in Atlantis with her enemy. She was supposed to be here. This was a step along the path to redeeming herself. She couldn’t stay in this tree forever. She was going to have to go down and face him.

She descended the branches. The longer she looked at Brooks’s back, the more fearful she became. The body on the ground was the porch that led to the cathedral of her best friend’s soul.

Her feet touched Atlantean earth. She grabbed Brooks’s shoulders, rolled him over. She laid her head against his chest and waited for it to rise.

26

DISPOSSESSED

It wasn’t the first time Brooks had fallen.

A wave of déjà vu swept through Eureka as she laid her head against his chest:

They were nine years old. It was the summer before Eureka’s parents divorced, so she’d still had a whole and buoyant heart, a matching smile. She didn’t know that loss was alive in the world, a thief always about to slam you and steal everything you had.

That summer, Eureka and Brooks had spent sunsets high in the grand pecan tree in Sugar’s backyard, past the city limits of New Iberia. Brooks had a bowl cut and light-up Power Rangers sneakers. Eureka had skinned knees and a gap between her front teeth. She’d been shredding her way through the endless smocked dresses Diana kept pulling from the attic.

It happened on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe it explained why Sundays always made Eureka lonely. Brooks had been playing with the lyrics of her favorite Tom T. Hall song, “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” Eureka had been trying to harmonize with him. She’d grown annoyed with his improvisations and shoved him. He’d lost his balance, tumbled backward. One minute he was singing with her, and the next—

She’d tried to catch him. He fell for an eternity, his brown eyes locked on hers. His face grew smaller; his limbs stilled. He landed on his back, roughly, his left leg twisted beneath him.