Lauren Kate - Teardrop

So this was it:

Dusky amber sunset. Humidity tugging on lazy sky. Lone car hauling up the Seven Mile Bridge, toward the airport in Miami, toward a flight that wouldnt be caught. Rogue wave rising in the water east of the Keys, churning into a monster that would baffle oceanographers on the evening news. Traffic stopped at the mouth of the bridge by construction-suited men staging a temporary roadblock.

And him: the boy in the stolen fishing boat a hundred yards west of the bridge. His anchor was down. His gaze hung on the last car allowed to cross. He had been there for an hour, would wait only moments more to watchno, to oversee the coming tragedy, to make sure that this time everything went right.

The men posing as construction workers called themselves the Seedbearers. The boy in the boat was a Seedbearer, too, the youngest in the family line. The car on the bridge was a champagne-colored 1988 Chrysler K-car with two hundred thousand on the odometer and a duct-taped rearview mirror. The driver was an archaeologist, a redhead, a mother. The passenger was her daughter, a seventeen-year-old from New Iberia, Louisiana, and the focus of the Seedbearers plans. Girl and mother would be dead in minutes if the boy didnt mess anything up.

His name was Ander. He was sweating.

He was in love with the girl in the car. So here, now, in the soft heat of a late Florida spring, with blue herons chasing white egrets through a black opal sky, and the stillness of the water all around him, Ander had a choice: fulfill his obligations to his family, or

No.

The choice was simpler than that:

Save the world, or save the girl.

The car passed the first mile marker out of seven on the long bridge to the city of Marathon in the central Florida Keys. The Seedbearers wave was aimed at mile four, just past the midpoint of the bridge. Anything from a slight dip in temperature to the velocity of the wind to the texture of the seafloor could alter the waves dynamic. The Seedbearers had to be ready to adapt. They could do this: craft a wave out of the ocean using antediluvian breath, then drop the beast on a precise location, like a needle on a turntable, letting hellish music loose. They could even get away with it. No one could prosecute a crime he didnt know had been committed.

Wave crafting was an element of the Seedbearers cultivated power, the Zephyr. It wasnt dominance over water, but rather an ability to manipulate the wind, whose currents were a mighty force upon the ocean. Ander had been raised to revere the Zephyr as divinity, though its origins were murky: it had been born in a time and place about which the elder Seedbearers no longer spoke.

For months they had spoken only of their certainty that the right wind under the right water would be powerful enough to kill the right girl.

The speed limit was thirty-five. The Chrysler was going sixty. Ander wiped sweat from his brow.

Pale blue light shone within the car. Standing in his boat, Ander couldnt see their faces. He could see just two crowns of hair, dark orbs against the headrests. He imagined the girl on her phone, texting a friend about her vacation with her mother, making plans to see the neighbor with the splash of freckles across her cheeks, or that boy she spent time with, the one Ander could not stand.

The whole week, hed watched her reading on the beach from the same faded paperback, The Old Man and the Sea. Hed watched her turn the pages with the slow aggression of the terrifically bored. She was going to be a senior that fall. He knew shed signed up for three honors classes; hed once stood an aisle over at a grocery store and listened through the cereal as she talked about it with her father. He knew how much she dreaded calculus.

Ander didnt go to school. He studied the girl. The Seedbearers made him do it, stalk her. By now, he was an expert.

She loved pecans and clear nights when she could see the stars. She had horrible posture at the dinner table, but when she ran, she seemed to fly. She plucked her eyebrows with bejeweled tweezers; she dressed up in her mothers old Cleopatra costume every year for Halloween. She doused all her food with Tabasco, ran a mile in under six minutes, played her grandfathers Gibson guitar with no skill but plenty of soul. She painted polka dots on her fingernails and her bedroom walls. She dreamed of leaving the bayou for a big city like Dallas or Memphis, playing songs at open mikes in darkened clubs. She loved her mother with a fierce, unbreakable passion that Ander envied and struggled to understand. She wore tank tops in winter, sweatshirts to the beach, feared heights yet adored roller coasters, and planned on never getting married. She didnt cry. When she laughed, she closed her eyes.

He knew everything about her. He would ace any exam on her complexities. He had been watching her since the leap day she was born. All of the Seedbearers had. He had been watching her since before he or she could speak. They had never spoken.

She was his life.

He had to kill her.

The girl and her mother had their windows rolled down. The Seedbearers wouldnt 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 caf.

But Ander had once seen the girls mother shove a stick in the voltage regulator of a car with a dead battery and start it up again. Hed 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 daughterwrists twisting in time to 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 a blossom spilling over a fountains 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 subsequent waves that would wash mother and daughter into nonexistence. No one mentioned how slowly a corpse decomposed in cold water. But Ander had been having nightmares all week about the girls bodys afterlife.

His family said that after the wave it would be over and Ander could begin a normal life. Wasnt 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 chancehere the uncles began to bickermother 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 wouldnt 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 werent murderers. They were stewards of humanity, preventers of apocalypse. They were generating