Free Waterfall by Lauren Kate

life the way she’d taken Eureka’s words?
    “I think that boy wanted us for his friends,” William said.
    “I think we have our first fan.” Cat handed the torch back to Eureka. “Now we need a band name. And a drummer.” Cat brainstormed band names as they continued more cautiously down the narrow passage. Her rambling was comforting, even if Eureka couldn’t afford the energy to attend to every manic idea darting catlike through her friend’s mind.
    White and dark blue tiles now paved the floor beneath their feet. Mounted on the wall was a marble plaque, into which were chiseled the words
Memento mori.
    “Thanks for the reminder,” Cat quipped, and Eureka loved that Cat knew the sign meant “Remember that you must die” even though she hadn’t been in the Latin class where Eureka had learned the phrase the year before.
    “What does it mean?” William asked.
    “A slave called it out to a Roman general who was going into battle,” Eureka said, hearing her Latin teacher Mr. Piscadia’s drawl in her mind. She wondered how he and his family had weathered her flood. Once she’d seen him and his son at a park walking a pair of brindle boxers. In her imagination, a giant wave washed away the memory. “It meant ‘You are mighty today, but you’re just a man, and you will fall.’ When we studied it in Latin class, everyone got hung up on how it was about vanity and pride.” Eureka sighed. “I remember thinking the words were comforting. Like, someday, all this will end.”
    She looked at the others, their surprised faces. Cat’s sarcasm was a cover for her genuinely sunny disposition. Dad didn’t want to consider that his daughter felt so much pain. The twins were too young to understand. That left Ander. She met his eyes and she knew he understood. He gazed at her and didn’t have to say a word.
    Ten steps later, the path dead-ended. They stopped before a crooked wooden door with brass hinges, an antique bell, and a second, silver plaque:
    Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.
    “Abandon all hope, ye who enter,” Ander translated.
    Cat stepped closer to the plaque. “This I like. Talk about a killer tramp stamp.”
    “What’s a tramp stamp?” Claire asked.
    Eureka was surprised. Ander had told her he had never gone to school, that Eureka herself was the only subject he’d ever studied. She wondered how he’d learned Italian. She imagined him sitting at a computer in a dark bedroom, practicing romantic phrases from an online course he listened to through his earbuds.
    “It’s from Dante’s
Inferno,
” he said.
    Eureka wanted to know more. When had he read the
Inferno
? What had made him pick it up? Had he liked it, made his own lists of who belonged in which circle of hell the way Eureka had?
    But this wasn’t Neptune’s Diner in Lafayette, where you hunkered down in a red vinyl booth with your crush andflirted your way into each other’s secrets over cheese fries and chicken gumbo. She sensed that, like Mr. Piscadia’s leisurely walks in the park, those kinds of dates now lay at the bottom of the sea.
    She reached for the bell and rang.



8
TRIAL BY ORCHID
    A panel in the door slid open.
    Eureka’s reflection greeted her. Her ombré hair was soaked and tangled. Her face was swollen and her lips were cracked. Her blue irises looked dull from exhaustion, but she couldn’t tell if crying had made her eyes something they hadn’t been before.
    Cat pursed her lips at her mirror face. Her fingers scrambled to rebraid her pigtails. “I’ve looked worse. Usually in the context of more … pleasant circumstances, but I have looked worse.”
    Eureka watched Ander avert his eyes from the mirror. He was jiggling the doorknob, trying to get in.
    “What’s a mirror doing on a door in the middle of a cave?” Claire asked.
    William raised a finger to the glass. A magician had visited his preschool a few months ago, and Eureka remembered that one of the things William had learned was how to