Waterfall by Lauren Kate Read Free Book Online

cloudy light. Slowly, a more regular geometry emerged. Man-made shapes sagged in the deluge. Rooftops. The ghost of the city that had been washed away.
    She imagined people beneath those roofs, drowned in her pain. She had floated underneath her devastation in the thunderstone shield, but now Eureka saw it. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to disintegrate in the rain. She wanted to make everything right, right now.
    “You know,” Ander said, “you’re going to make things better.”
    Eureka tried to let his support make her stronger, like a buttress on a cathedral, but she wondered from where Ander drew his faith in her. He seemed to truly believe that she could fix things, but was it simply because he liked her—or wasthere more to it? He kept saying Solon would answer all their questions … if they ever found him.
    The path widened into two forked trails. An instinct she couldn’t explain told her to go left. “Which way?” she asked Ander.
    He pivoted right. “We go east. Or—north? We need to go up into the mountains so I can see more clearly where we are.”
    Ander had seemed so confident a moment before, when he was believing in her. “Do you have a map?” she asked.
    He stopped walking and faced Eureka with such sad eyes that she took his hand. She marveled at the way it fit in hers, like no one else’s ever had. He looked down and caressed her fingertips.
    “I see,” she said. “No map.”
    “The map is in my memory, drawn with lines muttered by my aunts and uncles when I was very young. I don’t know why I memorized their words, maybe because talk of the lost Seedbearer sounded strange and romantic, and there was so little excitement in my life.”
    Eureka dropped his hand. She imagined Cat’s reaction upon learning Ander had led them to the other side of the world based on an imaginary map. She didn’t want to blame Ander. They were here now. They needed to support each other. But she couldn’t help thinking about the way that Brooks, though he couldn’t read a map even if you held a gun to his head, always wound up in the right place. He’d wound up in her imaginationearlier, skimming dark water with his arms. What shore had he landed on when she’d blinked and made him disappear?
    Ander chose the path’s steep right fork. “Solon made plans before he escaped. He was headed for a cave in western Turkey, which he called the Bitter Cloud.”
    The path widened. Eureka sped into a jog. Her right wrist throbbed with every impact of her shoes against the earth, but running lent something familiar to the alien landscape. Her body found a gear she understood.
    Ander kept up. When he glanced at her, an agreement flashed between them. They began to race. Eureka pumped her legs. Wind whistled at her back. The salt in the rain stung her eyes and the pain in her wrist was excruciating, but the faster she ran, the less she felt it.
    She didn’t think she could ever slow down. They were lost and she knew it, entering a tight passage only a few feet wide, bordered on either side by sharply sloping stone. It was like running through a very narrow hallway in the dark. Every step carried them deeper into goneness, but Eureka had to run until this burning was out of her system, until this fever had subsided. Sometime, later, they would catch their breath and figure out what to do.
    “Eureka!”
    Ander stopped ahead of her. She skidded into his back. Her cheekbone slammed into his shoulder blade. She felt his muscles stiffen, like he was trying to shield her from something. She stood on her toes to see past him.
    A dead girl lay at the edge of the stream. She looked about twelve. Leaves clung to her hair. She was on her side, straddling a long, twisted log. Eureka stared at her white blouse, her pale pink pleated skirt stained with blood. Ebony bangs were matted to her cheeks. Her long ponytail was tied with a cheerful yellow ribbon.
    Eureka thought about who she’d been when she herself was