by Anne Ursu
Then, thrashing and writhing, with the chariot in its death grip, the Ketos sank quickly into the sea, whipping the chariot this way and that until it, too, disappeared in the watery depths.
The sea roiled for a few moments and then slowly became calm, until all in the world was quiet, the only sound the lapping of the waves against the boat.
Panting, Charlotte collapsed on the ground. The next thing she knew, Zee was crouching next to her, whispering to her. “Char, are you all right? Char?”
“Zee?” Charlotte said, rolling over to look at her cousin, who had the best sense of timing of anyone she’d ever met.
“Are you all right?” he repeated.
She wasn’t. Everything hurt. The welts from the hail were bleeding. Her wrist screamed and her head throbbed and her back felt like a bus had run over it. And Sir Laurence—Sir Laurence was not coming back. Grief rose up into her stomach and threatened to choke her.
But the ship was safe. Poseidon was gone—at least for the time being. The Ketos was gone. Her parents were safe. Zee was here.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 27
Home
OFFICIALLY, THE WORD WAS THAT THE STORM HAD caused damage to the Isis Queen, releasing a gas around the ship that caused unconsciousness and sleepwalking, though preliminary environmental tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Something had also gone awry with the ship’s navigational controls, sending it dramatically off course. Everyone seemed satisfied with this explanation, despite the fact that it was entirely impossible for the ship to travel four thousand nautical miles in one night. Because if it wasn’t something to do with the controls, what could it possibly have been?
No one onboard had any idea what had passed—at least no one who was saying. After the Siren had fled the Mariner Lounge that night, the people in the lounge regained consciousness slowly, as if they’d all awakened from a sleep of a hundred years. The first to really comprehend the situation was the captain, who stumbled toward the bridge to sound the distress call. Other officers and crew followed. It took them some time to realize that they were, in fact, where their navigational system said they were, and even more time to convince the coast guard. Eventually, after long negotiations among the ship, the coast guard, and the Italian government, it was determined that the Queen would set sail immediately for the nearest port—Catania, in Italy—accompanied by a cavalcade of smaller boats and helicopters from the Italian coast guard. Coast guard officials came in to pilot the ship as well, while the Queen’s officers went through an extremely thorough debriefing.
Everyone else on board was kept inside the Mariner Lounge all night, with the cruise director giving them periodic updates. Most people were too dazed to put up a fight, and the few unruly souls were promptly removed by the ship’s security.
The ship’s doctor began examining people immediately and discovered that everyone seemed to have survived the experience unscathed—everyone except one thirteen-year-old girl. She had suffered a concussion and a lumbar sprain in her back. She also had big black and green bruises all over her body, tiny lacerations on her face, a sprained wrist, small cuts in her hands and knees, blisters on her hands, and bruised ribs. When questioned, she said she had no memory of what had happened to her—and no one could press her, because they didn’t remember what had happened to them, either.
Charlotte spent the night lying on one of the couches, while her parents stayed as close to her as they possibly could. She did not mind at all. This way, she could keep her eye on them.
As for Zee, the cousins determined he would hide in Charlotte’s room, as of course he did not belong on the ship at all. He had no trouble getting in, even without a key, because the door had been left propped open.
When Zee first got to Charlotte’s room, he went right into the bathroom where he vomited three times. Then he sat down against the wall, buried his head in his arms, and began to shake, steadily but violently, like a man freezing to death. He stayed that way for an hour, maybe two, while the ship started up again and began making its way through the night sea, while helicopters buzzed in the sky and small ships hummed along just outside his window.
And then, finally, he stopped shaking. He pushed himself up off the ground, and took a thirty-minute shower, then he sat down on the bed and thought about all that had happened and about what must be done now.
The next morning the entire Isis Queen unloaded at Catania, where they were kept inside the large port facility while a doctor examined them all for contagions and the cruise line worked with immigration officials to get them home. Zee disembarked with them, keeping to the back, well out of sight range of the Mielswetzskis—who did not seem very inquisitive, anyway. They were too busy taking care of their daughter.
Charlotte had to spend the day on a gurney—doctor’s orders—though making various excuses, she slipped off from time to time to check on Zee, who was spending the day hiding in a bathroom in an out-of-the-way part of the terminal—not the most pleasant smelling of sanctuaries, but he had little choice. He had been through worse. He spent much of the time thinking about how he was going to get home, because it was easier than thinking about what had happened. And anyway, Zee wanted so desperately to go home.
And then, about mid-afternoon, while Zee was sitting on the floor drinking some water Charlotte had brought him, the door opened. Zee’s heart leaped in fear—he had spent the morning hiding in a stall, but after no one came in for hours he had allowed himself to come out.
But fortunately, the man who walked in was not a Mielswetzski, by any means. He was quite striking looking—very pale, with light blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white, and he wore an old-fashioned white dinner jacket and black tie. His right arm was in a sling, there was a bandage wrapped around his head and another around two of his left fingers, and he looked as if he had been submerged in water and then dried out.
“Pardon me,” he said to Zee, then stopped and looked him up and down. “Goodness, it’s nice to see someone who knows how to dress these days!”
Zee blushed. He was still wearing a tuxedo shirt and pants, for he had no other clothes and he hadn’t exactly been able to borrow any of Charlotte’s. “Oh, yeah,” he muttered.
The man’s face lit up. “You’re English!” he exclaimed. “How delightful! Where do you hail from?”
“Uh…London, originally,” Zee said. “But now I live in America.”
The man’s eyes brightened. “America?…Say, do you know a Miss Charlotte Mielswetzski?”
Zee gaped at him.
“Oh! You know her! Capital! Is she all right? Do you know where I might find her?”
“Um,” Zee said, blinking rapidly. “She’s—” Just then, there was a knock on the door—three short taps. Their signal. “—right here.” And he got up and opened the door for his cousin.
Charlotte stood in the doorway, holding herself like a two-hundred-year-old who had just been squashed by a falling piano. “I told them I had to go to the bathroom,” she said conspiratorially, her voice tight but brave. “I brought you some food—” And then her eyes fell on the man in the tuxedo, and she shot Zee a confused look.
But the man’s face turned as bright as the sun, and he smiled and said softly, “Miss Charlotte?”
Charlotte stared at him for a full second before recognition dawned on her. “Sir Laurence?” she whispered, voice trembling.
“At your service!” he proclaimed brightly.
And then the man opened his arms and Charlotte tumbled into them—and then let out a small yelp of pain as he squeezed her battered body. She backed away slightly and looked at him, tears streaming down her face, and asked, “How—how?”
“Well, funny thing, that,” Sir Laurence said. “I’m plummeting through the water, thanks to that nasty blow from that blasted Ketos fellow, and then something hits me and I feel myself begin to…change. Then, well, I don’t remember what happened then. Everything went quite bl
ack, and I thought that was it for Sir Laurence Gaumm! But next thing I know I’m inside a”—he scrunched up his face and articulated slowly—“hel-ee-cop-tor, and some man I’ve never met before is pounding on my chest and doing something quite shocking with his mouth, and so on and so forth. They thought I was on your ship and brought me here.
“I had a deuce of a time explaining who I really was, of course, then they made me get quite the working over from that doctor fellow, who seemed to think I’d sustained some kind of head injury.”
“I can’t imagine why,” said Charlotte, grinning through her tears.
“Well, the old cove prescribed bed rest for me, but Sir Laurence Gaumm was not going to go anywhere until he found his girl!”
Charlotte turned toward Zee, face bright and wet, and proclaimed, “Sir Laurence, this is my cousin Zee. Zee, this is Sir Laurence. He helped save us.”
Zee nodded. Charlotte would explain more later. “Thank you, Sir Laurence.”
“I am honored,” Sir Laurence said, bowing deeply. “So”—he turned to Charlotte, eyes lit—“tell me! How did you do it, old girl? How did you beat Poseidon?”
So Charlotte told Sir Laurence about the trident and its waning power, about her fight with Poseidon, about the Ketos’s approach, and about how Zee’s desperate launch of the trident saved the day.
Sir Laurence let out something that could only be described as a guffaw. “Brilliant!” he told Zee.
Charlotte shook her head. “I thought Poseidon would come back to get the ship! You know, once he’d…extracted himself.”
“Ha!” said Sir Laurence. “No! I think he’ll be busy for quite some time!”
Charlotte and Zee looked at him blankly.
“My dear girl,” Sir Laurence said with a grin, “he wants his trident back, yes? He might as well not be an Olympian anymore without it! But do you know how long it will take that trident to—oh, how do I say this properly—pass through the Ketos?”
“Oh,” said Charlotte.
“Oh!” said Zee.
There was really nothing to say to that, and the two cousins and the former giant squid all looked at one another. Then Charlotte asked suddenly, “Sir Laurence, I need to ask you one more favor.”
“Anything!”
“Well…do you have any money?”
“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “Well, I have a bit of dosh in the bank. Well”—he considered a moment—“quite a lot now, I suppose.”
Charlotte glanced from Sir Laurence to Zee. “Can you help get my cousin home?”
And that was that. Later in the day Charlotte smuggled in one of the travel passes the cruise line was issuing. Zee was quite impressed, but Charlotte said it was hard to deny anything to a girl who looked like she did. And when the passengers were finally let out of the facility, Charlotte hobbled her way back to give Sir Laurence a (gentle) hug.
“I shall see you again, old girl,” said Sir Laurence. “You may count on it.”
Zee got home twenty hours later, just a little bit after the Mielswetzskis. He had spent the entire day trying to think of an explanation for where he’d been—judging by when Charlotte said Proteus had arrived on the yacht, he’d been missing for at least forty-eight hours—but couldn’t come up with anything better than amnesia. But when he arrived home, instead of finding frantic parents and many, many police officers, he found that his parents were still in England and the Fornaras had never missed him. After some investigation, Zee learned that his mother—or someone who could sound just like her—had called Mrs. Fornara to say that Zee wouldn’t be coming after all. Apparently, Proteus had wanted to stay by himself as much as Zee did.
Zee called his parents and explained that the Mielswetzskis were back early and he’d be staying with them. He had an urge to ask them to come home, because after you have been turned into an automaton and made into a living doll by your mortal enemy, you really need some parental support. But they were going to be home soon, and Zee knew if he asked, they would be alarmed. They might think that something had happened to him.
So Zee went over to the Mielswetzskis. He did not particularly want to be alone, and he wanted time with Charlotte, who had been confined to her bed for a few days so her back could heal.
When he saw her, his chest tightened. His cousin looked wracked with exhaustion and pain. He knew she had gotten through the whole experience through adrenaline and sheer will (a powerful force in Charlotte indeed). He also knew that if she had not been leaping out of her gurney in the port terminal to check on him, bring him food, and help him get home, she might not be in as much pain today. But that was Charlotte for you.
When Zee sat down, Mew burst out from under the bed with a loud squawk and jumped immediately onto his lap. Zee felt a lump rise in his throat and whispered, “I missed you, cat.”
As for Charlotte, she eyed her cousin carefully. There was something she needed to say to him, something there had been no time to say, something important. And even lying there, watching him out of the corner of her eye, she could barely find the words.
“Zee,” she said finally. “Um…I’m sorry.”
Zee blinked at her. “What?”
“About…um…controlling you with the trident. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think of what else to do, and—”
Zee closed his eyes and then opened them again. “It’s all right. You didn’t have a choice.”
“No, but…”
“It’s okay, Charlotte,” Zee said softly. “It’s okay. Just”—he grinned slightly—“never do it again.”
Charlotte let out a gasp of laughter, which caused pain to sear through her ribs. She could not even move without pain searing through some part of her or another. That, she thought, is what you get when you go up against the second most powerful god in the whole universe.
The cousins sat in silence for a while. They had not had any chance to talk about what had happened, and now that the chance had come, neither knew where to begin. Finally Charlotte said, “You know, I had a bad feeling. The day you disappeared. I was just standing outside school and I had this horrible feeling. And then I saw Proteus, but I didn’t know. Zee, I should have known.”
“I had a dream!” Zee said. “Of you in danger. And I didn’t figure it out until it was too late.”
And then Zee told Charlotte everything—from his prophetic dream of her on the small boat in the middle of the sea to his abduction and the old man’s transformation. And he told her about waking up on a speedboat with his cousin by his side, about how the speedboat took him out of danger but couldn’t keep him out, about how he climbed onto the ship and found his way to Charlotte as if by instinct, because it was his turn to save her.
Silence for a few moments, while Charlotte pondered his story. “The dream,” she said finally. “That’s so strange. Do you think someone sent it to you from the Underworld?”
“I don’t know,” Zee said. “There was a little girl in it. She was…showing me everything. I don’t know what to make of her. But if somebody sent it—I mean, it was a warning, not a trap. But who would have done that?”
Charlotte shook her head, and then winced. “I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “But it wasn’t quite true, you know. I was never on a boat alone. On the way back there was you. And on the way over, there was Jason.”
Zee frowned. “Jason who?”
Charlotte sighed. “Jason Hart. He’s Proteus’s son. He was spying on you to collect information for his dad.”
A moment of silence. “Wow,” Zee said flatly. “And here I thought he just liked me.”
“Yeah,” Charlotte said. “Me too.”
Then she told him everything, from Jason Hart to the storm and the Siren, to her encounter with Sir Laurence Gaumm, to Poseidon and the trident, to running through the halls and finding herself face to face with her cousin, whom she had missed so desperately, who needed saving.
And the cousins sat in silence some more, each thinking of the other’s stories and gettin
g angrier and angrier. After some time, Charlotte asked, “Zee? When you were with Philonecron…do you remember?”
Zee glanced over at her and nodded slowly. “Yes…vaguely. It was sort of like a dream you can’t wake up from.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. Mostly he played the violin, dressed me in weird outfits, and talked about taking over the universe.”
Charlotte’s eyes blazed. “We have to do something,” she said darkly. “Philonecron. We have to get him.”
Zee paused. “No,” he said. “No. Not Philonecron.”
“But Zee! After what he did to you? He can’t do that to you!”
“No,” Zee said firmly. “That’s just me. Look what Poseidon did to you and all those people. And all those gods on the yacht, who were going to watch the ship get eaten for entertainment. They were going to kill all those people, for fun.”
Charlotte nodded. “Poseidon…you should have heard the things he said about mortals. It’s awful. You know, we were so worried about the Dead we didn’t really understand that that was just part of it. It wasn’t that Hades doesn’t care about the Dead, it’s that the gods don’t care about people at all.”
“And I was worried about Philonecron,” Zee said in a low voice. “I wanted to get him before I helped the Dead. Even my grandmum…”
“I don’t blame you,” Charlotte muttered. “But—it’s like Mr. Metos said, before all this happened. They don’t deserve to be gods.”
“No,” Zee said, “no, they don’t.”
“The question is,” Charlotte said, “what can we do about it?”