Eureka would call her bluff. “I want my best friend.”

You really loved him best of all, Atlas had said. Had he been right?

“Then you shall have him,” Delphine said.

“He’s dead.”

Delphine lowered her lips toward Eureka’s, the way she’d done to Aida. But no spark flashed between them, only the warmth of red lips on Eureka’s right cheek, then her left. Diana used to kiss her like that.

She heard a series of metallic snaps as the barbed cuffs were released from around her wrists, then her waist, then her ankles. Delphine slipped an arm under Eureka’s neck and raised her from the bed. “Only the ghostsmith decides who is dead.”

28

THE GHOSTSMITH

Delphine led Eureka through a tunnel made of jewel-toned coral reef. They emerged from a sand dune on an empty beach and left matching trails of footprints as they strode toward the sea. The sun was pink and low.

By sunrise, Gem had said. That was how long Eureka had to defeat Atlas.

Farther down the shore, dark purple rocks rose into jagged mountains.

“Isn’t that where you were born?” Eureka asked Delphine. “You were raised in the mountains by the gossipwitches.”

By now, Esme and the others must have made it back. Eureka imagined Peggy alighting on one of the crags, a dozen delighted witches sliding off her wings. After all these years and all they’d seen, would their return home satisfy them?

Delphine stared into the blue horizon. “Says who?”

“Selene. The Book of Love.” Eureka felt for her bag and realized it was gone, of course, stolen by the Devils along with her crystal teardrop. She was bereft of all the things that used to strengthen her.

It was better that way. Rage strengthened her, the way other people’s pain strengthened Delphine.

“Snuff out that dim fairy tale,” Delphine said. “Our future burns too bright.”

Ahead, a soaring wave climbed the water. It curled like a swimming giant’s arm toward the shore. Eureka braced herself for the wipeout, but where the mighty beast was about to break—where the wave’s foaming lip was inches from shore—it defied gravity and the tides and whatever moon still spun in the sky. It hung, on the verge, as if captured in a photograph.

“What is that?” Eureka asked.

“It is my waveshop.”

“You build waves there?” Eureka had come to associate rogue waves with Seedbearers, but maybe Delphine had been behind the wave that killed Diana.

Delphine tossed her head. “Occasionally. Architecturally.” She gestured at the suspended wave like it was a building she’d designed. “I specialize in the dead and dying. That is why I am called the ghostsmith. My range is wide, as all things yearn to die.”

She led Eureka along the shore until theyfaced the suspended wave’s barrel. Its trough looked dim and cavernous, like a room with a sand floor and curving water walls. A pale oval of daylight shone through the opposite end.

“I have waited an eternity to bring you here,” Delphine said.

Eureka wondered what she meant, what lie Eureka represented to Delphine. She thought about Delphine absorbing pain from everyone she’d ever tortured. She knew pain made its own time. After Diana died, minutes had outstretched millennia.

“Come inside,” Delphine said. “See where I do my most essential work.”

Eureka studied the wave, seeking the trap.

“Don’t worry,” Delphine said. “This wave looks on its last legs, as if it is about to rejoin the sea that bore it. But I can keep it up forever. You’ll see once you’re inside.”

The wave’s motion had somehow been arrested, but when Eureka touched the wall of water, she bruised her fingers on the unexpected rush that churned within it. She drew closer to Delphine and entered the suspended wave. The ocean wrapped around them like a shell around two black pearls.

Music played from somewhere. Eureka was chilled to recognize it—Madame Blavatsky’s bird Polaris had sung the same tune outside her window in Lafayette.

Damp sand lit up beneath Eureka’s feet as she walked farther into the oblong space the wave had carved. By the time she reached the center of the waveshop, the ground shone with brilliant golden light.

They were not alone. Four teen boys had their backs toward Eureka. They were naked, and the impulse to stare at them was strong. Each of their backs bore scars from lacerations. The slight silver sheen of their skin was familiar. These were ghost robots, like Ovid, vessels for Atlas’s Filling.

Two of the machines used shovels to chuck a crumbly gray substance from a small slag heap into a glowing pit at the far end of the suspended wave. The other two robots were locked in debate. They weren’t speaking English or Atlantean. They didn’t seem to be speaking the same language even as themselves. A single robot made one point in what Eureka thought was Dutch, switched to Spanish to second-guess himself, then concluded in what sounded like Cantonese. The others responded in languages she guessed were Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and a dozen more unrecognizable tongues. They spoke in tones Eureka was used to hearing just before a fight at Wade’s Hole. She glanced at Delphine, who held a fragile smile on her lips.

She remembered Dad’s ghost battling Seyma’s ghost and, later, the Seedbearers’ ghosts inside Ovid. It had been chaos: multiple identities struggling to claim one robotic body. Solon had said these machines were built to accommodate many millions of dead souls. Eureka wondered how many ghosts were already inside each of these silver boys.