Last Day of Love (3 page)

I hover ten, then twenty feet above the campfire and try not to think of Shiloh. The exaltation is undeserved, out of place. My family stands and applauds. The unprecedented joy on their faces renders them indistinguishable in the firelight. In their eyes glistens a pride I’ve never seen before.

I watch my shadow on the ground beside the fire. The control of my aunts’ and uncles’ breaths is infinitely more precise than mine. I envy and hate them.

They exhale and lower me softly to the ground. My boots touch earth and the weight of my body returns. My eyelids are too heavy for me to look at anyone.

Albion motions for the others to sit down and comes to stand beside me. He and I are the same height, but tonight he towers over me.

“Your Passage was successful,” he says.

It is not a question.

“You feel lighter now,” he tells me. “Freer.”

I am heavier, enslaved.

“You are confident of your role and identity in the universe.”

I’ve never been more lost or alone.

“You have questions.”

Now I meet his eyes. “Yes.”

“Take your time. You may ask anything. Our secrets are yours.”

I set my backpack down. It sags with gloomy lightness. I reach inside my coat and pull out the first card, which I lay on the ground before the fire.

“I want to know the significance of the number six.”

Albion nods. “When our forefather—”

“Leander,” I say. I’m named after him. He’s the original Seedbearer, the ancestor from whom we all descend.

“—when Leander escaped the confines of Atlantis,” Albion continues, “he made landfall in the Waking World and sired six children with six women. These children are the original six Seedbearers. They found each other after Leander’s death and vowed to carry the lessons of Atlantis into perpetuity. From that moment on, there have always been six living Seedbearers, and there must always be six living Seedbearers. It is essential to our strength.”

I look at him, then across the fire at my two aunts and two uncles. Chora, Starling, Critias, Albion … and me. That’s only five. “Someone is missing,” I say.

I expect them to mock me or change the subject, but things are different than they were yesterday.

“His name is Solon.” Albion’s jaw tightens. “He is a disgrace and was banished.”

So this is
the last one
Albion said I am not like.

“What did he do?” I ask.

“It was what he would not do that exiled him,” Chora says.

Albion waves her off. “He went through the same Passage that you completed, that all of us completed. But Solon could never truly free himself. A passion enslaved him, and probably still does.”

My face reddens. “Where is he now?”

Albion looks far to the west, as if his gaze could see across an ocean. “Do not fear him; he is no threat. His is a meaningless life, but he must live it to ensure our meaningful ones. Do you understand?”

“I think so.” In the hazy way I have come to understand so much about my family, I have a sense of how each Seedbearer is linked inextricably to the others. Our breath connects us. We live as one organism—which means that we die as one, as well. “If one of us dies—”

Albion nods. “All of us die.”

“How long has Solon been gone?” I ask.

“We have lived almost seventy-five years without him. His punishment is
permanent, his exile absolute.”

“But he won’t die?”

My aunts laugh their cruel laughs.

“He does not have the means,” Albion says. “Do you understand?”

My hands are stiff when I draw the second card from the envelope. My aunts and uncles nod as I place it on the ground. The black crown and the tombstone look ghostly in the dancing firelight.

“Yes,” Albion says. “Power and death derive from breath.”

I wait for him to continue.

“Many times you have seen us employ the Zephyr—the name for the power of our collective breath. It is our weapon and our shield. It can influence the tides, the weather. It is a power unmatched in this world. You have it in you, too.” He raises an eyebrow. “You may have experimented with it?”

I repress thoughts of Shiloh. “I have.”

“You will improve. The Zephyr derived from Leander. It intertwines our lives. It is also our weakness. Only one substance can kill us, but a single breath of it is death. This poison is a rare strain of the plant known as artemisia. It killed Leander and each of the eleven Seedbearers who have died—always voluntarily, always in the first moment of a new and stronger Seedbearer’s life.”

“Is that how my mother died?” I ask.

My family’s shared glances answer yes, but I can’t let myself care. “Where do you get artemisia?”

“We possess the only remaining quantity in the Waking World,” says Chora. He holds up a small metal chest. I’ve seen it before. It is one of five orichalcum relics salvaged before the flood. As her fingers trace the clasp, Albion walks over to her and places his hands on hers.

“Simply know that it is here, Ander, and well protected. Your life is never in danger as long as this chest remains with us.”

“If it’s so deadly, why not destroy it?” I say. “Why do we keep it?”

“We keep it to help one Seedbearer pass out of this world when a new and stronger one enters—like you. We keep it because we may perhaps one day be forced to
choose death over life. But enough poisonous talk. There is another card.”

I place the last card next to the others. It looks faded, as if its red pigment rubbed off in my pocket.

Albion waits.

“Love drains life,” I whisper.

My family leans forward, watching me.

“Love is important,” Albion says. “Love brought you up to be a man. Love versed you in loss and sorrow, which leads to strength, which is detachment from these self-imposed vulnerabilities. Yes, love has served you well. But listen closely, Ander: love is child’s play. To assume your place among your people, you must prove you can grow out of love, and shed it like a snake loses its skin. Only then can you live forever, like us.”

“You may slip from time to time.” Starling, raises her frail shoulders. “It is only natural. But soon you will be a master. You will observe the passing parade of life for ages to come. You will understand far more than any mortal. You will recognize patterns and cycles that the greatest geniuses among them never can.”

“It’s astonishing, how their little life spans keep them sprinting on their various hamster wheels,” Critias says. His eyes close halfway in revulsion, so that only the whites are visible.

Albion studies me. “You should already sense a difference.”

I can’t be so unusual—but can the rest of them be this skilled at lying? Or is it that they’ve simply forgotten what it’s like to feel? Are they hypocrites, or insane? I take comfort in thinking of Solon, the exiled uncle I’ve never heard about before tonight. Did his failure look anything like mine?

“When Solon failed,” I ask, “why didn’t you replace him with a new Seedbearer, the way I replaced my mother when she died? Why didn’t you kill him instead of exiling him?”

“You tell me,” Albion replies.

I think; then I know. “He is too strong.”

My family closes in a tight circle around me.

“Prove to us you’ve changed,” Chora says. She looks at Starling, who steps forward holding something wrapped in foil. When she pulls the foil back, steam rises and
a wonderful aroma fills the air. Keeping her eyes on my lips, Starling dips a spoon into the dark dish and says, “Open.”

I close my mouth around the spoon. The substance is sweet, buttery, crisp, and warm. Something deep and strong takes hold of me. The food is so delicious I can barely swallow.

Suddenly, I remember Starling feeding me this dish on cold mornings of my childhood. I remember her soft cooing as she wiped the corners of my mouth.

Blueberry cobbler. The words fill me with a mighty nostalgia.

But I must stifle everything I feel.

“What do you think?” Starling’s eyes betray none of the compassion I remember. This is the test. Years ago they planted this memory inside me. They fed me cobbler and feigned love, and now they want to know if I can conquer the only memory of comfort and safety I have.

“What is it?” I ask as blandly as I can.

“Leftovers,” Chora says slowly. “We thought you might be hungry.”

“We’d like you to listen to something.” Albion nods at Critias, who presses Play on an old tape recorder. The quiet night bursts into music.

“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” Critias used to take me to St. John’s to listen to Eureka sing. This song often made the worshippers in the pews around me cry. It is unspeakably beautiful, and I can make out twelve-year-old Eureka’s voice perfectly, hear how her words are affected by her braces. I want to swoon, to fall down to the ground and scream.

“Tell us what you feel,” Albion says.

Eureka’s voice is so steady. I’m about to lose it. It takes all my strength to adopt a monotone. “I’m very tired. Is it a lullaby?”

I do not want to know the person I sound like.

“You’re doing fine,” Albion says. “You’re nearly done. We want to show you one more thing.”

I know what he’s holding before he turns the photograph around. I try to look at it without seeing it. It’s a close-up of Eureka smiling on a beach. She’s wearing an orange tank top and her hair has been lightened by the sun. Her eyes are more alive than mine
will ever be.

It’s obvious I’ve failed. I will never give her up, never grow out of love. Why can’t my family see that love is the start and end of me?

“Well, Ander?” Albion says. “Tell us what comes to mind.”

“Demise,” I nearly choke.

Around me, my family smiles.

“Indeed, she has it coming,” Chora says. “We accept that you are ready.”

“Are you ready, Ander?” my aunts and uncles ask in unison.

“Yes,” I gasp.

“Good.” Albion claps my shoulder, radiating emptiness into me. “It is time to kill Eureka.”

If you enjoyed this special TEARDROP story, look for Lauren Kate’s new series, TEARDROP, the epic saga of Eureka Boudreaux, a seventeen-year-old girl whose tears have the power to raise the lost continent of Atlantis.

Here’s a sneak peek at the first novel in the series.

Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Lauren Kate. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York.

1

I
n the stillness of the small beige waiting room, Eureka’s bad ear rang. She massaged it—a habit since the accident, which had left her half deaf. It didn’t help. Across the room, a doorknob turned. Then a woman with a gauzy white blouse, olive-green skirt, and very fine, upswept blond hair appeared in the lamplit space.

“Eureka?” Her low voice competed with the burbling of a fish tank that featured a neon plastic scuba diver buried to his knees in sand but showed no sign of containing fish.

Eureka looked around the vacant lobby, wishing to invoke some other, invisible Eureka to take her place for the hour.

“I’m Dr. Landry. Please come in.”

Since Dad’s remarriage four years ago, Eureka had
survived an armada of therapists. A life ruled by three adults who couldn’t agree on anything proved far messier than one ruled by just two. Dad had doubted the first analyst, an old-school Freudian, almost as much as Mom had hated the second, a heavy-lidded psychiatrist who doled out numbness in pills. Then Rhoda, Dad’s new wife, came onto the scene, game to try the school counselor, and the acupuncturist, and the anger manager. But Eureka had put her foot down at the patronizing family therapist, in whose office Dad had never felt less like family. She’d actually half liked the last shrink, who’d touted a faraway Swiss boarding school—until her mother caught wind of it and threatened to take Dad to court.