Teardrop

Prologue - part 2 of 3

The girl and her mother had their windows rolled down. The Seedbearers wouldn't like that. He was certain one of his uncles had been charged with jamming their windows while mother and daughter played gin rummy at a blue-awninged cafe.

But Ander had once seen the girl's mother shove a stick in the voltage regulator of a car with a dead battery and start it up again. He'd seen the girl change a tire at the side of the road in hundred-degree weather and barely break a sweat. They could do things, these women. More reason to kill her, his uncles would say, shepherding him always toward defending his Seedbearer line. But nothing Ander saw in the girl frightened him; everything deepened his fascination.

Tan forearms dangled out both car windows as they passed mile marker two. Like mother, like daughter - wrists twisting in time to hear something on the radio that Ander wished he could hear.

He wondered how the salt would smell on her skin. The idea of being close enough to breathe her in gripped him in a wave of dizzy pleasure that crested into nausea.

One thing was certain: he would never have her.

He sank to his knees on the bench. The boat rocked under his weight, shattering the reflection of the rising moon. Then it rocked again, harder, signaling a disturbance somewhere in the water.

The wave was building.

All he had to do was watch. His family had made that very clear. The wave would strike; the car would flow with it over the bridge like blosson spilling over a fountain's rim. They would be swept to the depths of the sea. That was all.

When his family had schemed in their shabby Key West vacation rental with the "garden view" of a weedy alley, no one had spoken of the subsequent waves that would wash mother and daughter into non-existence. No one mentioned how slowly a corpse decomposed in cold water. But Ander had been having nightmares all week about the girl's body's afterlife.

His family said that after the wave it would be over and Ander could begin a normal life. Wasn't that what he said he wanted?

He simply had to ensure that the car stayed under the sea long enough for the girl to die. If by some chance - here the uncles began to bicker - mother and daughter somehow freed themselves and rose to the surface, then Ander would have to-

No, his aunt Chora said loudly enough to silence the roomful of men. She was the closest thing Ander had to a mother. He loved her, but he did not like her. It wouldn't happen, she said. The wave Chora would produce would be strong enough. Ander would not have to drown the girl with his hands. The Seedbearers weren't murderers. They were stewards of humanity, preventers of apocalypse. They were generating an act of God.

But it was murder. At this moment the girl was alive. She had friends and a family who loved her. She had a life before her, possibilities fanning out like oak branches into infinite sky. She had a way of making everything around her seem spectacular.

Whether she might someday do what the Seedbearers feared she would do was not something Ander liked thinking about. Doubt consumed him. As the wave rolled closer, he considered letting it take him, too.

If he wanted to die, he would have to get out of the boat. He would have to let go of the handles at the end of the chain welded to his anchor. No matter how strong the wave was, Ander's chain would not break; his anchor would not be wrested from the sea floor. They were made from orichalcum, an ancient metal considered mythological by modern archaeologists. The anchor on its chain was one of five relics made of the substance that the Seedbearers preserved. The girl's mother - a rare scientist who believed in things she could not prove existed - would have traded her entire career to uncover just one.

Anchor, spear and atlatl, lachrymatory vial and the small carved chest that glowed unnatural green - these were what remained of his lineage, of the world no one spoke of, of the past the Seedbearers made it their sole mission to repress.

The girl knew nothing of the Seedbearers. But did she know where she had come from? Could she trace her line backward as swiftly as he could trace his, to the world lost in the flood, to the secret to which both he and she were inextricably linked?

It was time.

Copyright Lauren Kate. All Rights Reserved.