His other elbow crushed her nose. She felt the heat inside her head, tasted thick blood in the back of her throat. Her vision blurred. Blood was everywhere. She clasped her dagger tightly as Atlas pumped his legs to reach the surface.

When they broke through he released her neck, grabbed her wrists, and tried to wrest the dagger from her.

“I hope that felt good,” Eureka said. “Because I’m about to do it again.”

“I can take what I want for free—or you can pay to part with it.” Atlas drove the hand holding the dagger toward her neck. “But I will have your tear.”

Eureka laughed as the dagger sliced her skin and more blood flowed into the ocean. “Yes, you will.”

She strained forward and snatched the coral dagger from her fingers with her teeth. When Atlas dropped her wrists to grab it, she slipped underwater. She swam toward him, a piranha with a single tooth. She found his back. With a nod of her head, she tore into his flesh.

The dagger plunged deeper than she’d expected. She still held it in her mouth, but Eureka’s face now felt like it was a part of Atlas.

She felt something lift away, and then she felt nothing—at least, not in any way she was used to feeling. It had taken forever and happened so soon:

Eureka was inside the monster. Everything else was gone.

His interior was an ocean, barbed with reefs of dead coral, sharper than the dagger she’d used to cut her way inside, sharper than anything she’d ever conceived. What once she would have seen with her eyes and felt with her body, Eureka now sensed with her mind. All feeling had disappeared, replaced by a new knowing.

Then the coral slashed her thoughts—and Eureka could no longer … remember … her mission. She blacked out on a sharp shore inside him.

“Aaughh!”

Her mind screamed, using someone else’s voice. She struggled to recognize the sound: Atlas’s lips. Eureka’s emotion.

The dagger had worked.

She tried to keep her thoughts still. They were all she had left of herself and they were in peril. Slowly, she allowed one in.…

Face him. But as soon as Eureka thought it, she lost the ability to concentrate. Her mind had known deep pain before—shame, grief, desolation—all incomparable to this. The reef inside Atlas murdered thought, slicing it into unrecognizable shards the way a dead reef she’d once snorkeled over in Florida had sliced the flesh of her thighs. Face him had been removed from Eureka’s consciousness, an urge she’d never considered.

Somehow she knew she had to ascend the bladelike reefs. Without a body, she would have to think her way up—but how? When thoughts died on this reef, she wouldn’t get them back.

This was what trapped Brooks, she thought. Then that thought met the reef with a deadly, thunderous boom. It was mutilated, lost, and Eureka couldremember nothing for a long while.

Slowly, painfully, an idea came into focus: for much of Eureka’s life, she had loathed herself. No shrink had ever found the pill to change the fact that her heart was a tank full of hate. Finally, it might do her some good.

I can’t, she thought with purpose—an experiment.

When that rush of negativity left her mind and was shredded upon the coral, Eureka forgot a portion of her heavy fear. She had sacrificed it to the reef. She sensed herself moving higher inside Atlas.

Selfish.

Hypersensitive.

Suicidal.

One by one she acknowledged her deepest doubts and hesitations. One by one they left her, crashed upon the reef, and were destroyed. The dark echo of Suicidal’s death rang in her mind as she rose toward the surface of Atlas’s inner sea.

There is no way out. Someone she used to love had told her that. She couldn’t remember who. Then the reefs slaughtered the sentiment, so it didn’t matter anyway. Her mind climbed the last barbed branches of coral, amputating one last long-held fear like a useless limb.

Joy is impossible.…

Suddenly she saw through Atlas’s eyes. It was like her mind had fired across the synapse that connected thought to sight. It reminded Eureka of looking through the peephole in a hotel room door. She saw the red inner rims of his eyes framing a world painted different colors than the ones she used to see. The greens were saturated, the blues profound, the reds pulsing and magnetic. Her new vision was strong. She saw every scale of each darting fish. She watched an elderly gossipwitch ascend a distant mountain peak, and admired every golden fold of her jowls.

She stood waist-deep in the water and took a moment to inspect her new body, her taut thighs and the foreign flesh between them. She touched the muscles on her smooth, bare chest, the stubble growing on her cheeks. She made both of her biceps bulge. She yearned for someone to fight. With Atlas’s camouflage she was liberated in a new way. She could be as ruthless as she’d always needed to be.

She scanned the beach. A turquoise palm tree swayed in the wind. She felt an irresistible urge to unbuckle Atlas’s belt and pee on that tree. She laughed at the dumb cockiness of the idea when she still had so much to accomplish, such important tears to make him shed. And then she did pee, right there in the ocean, because she was inside a boy’s body and it was insane. She slipped her pants down, freeing the most thrilling part of Atlas, and let go. She lifted each of her legs. She swiveled her hips. She made an arch in the shape of a rainbow.

When she was finished, she probed her back, touching the wounds she’d dug. They were numb. The coral dagger still protruded from Atlas’s flesh. She pulled it out. Her new mouth screamed, but that was Atlas’s reflex, his suffering, not hers.