by Liz Kessler
“Thunder?” Millie suggested. We all looked at the sky. There wasn’t a single cloud. But the sky had darkened. It was weird — it was still clear and blue, just a darker, deeper shade.
Then it happened again. This time, it was accompanied by a massive wave that came from behind Aaron and me and almost swept us onto the balcony. Water spilled over the floor, and Mom almost went flying.
“It’s not thunder,” Aaron said darkly.
Grabbing onto the railing at the end of the balcony, Mom froze. “What’s going on?” she asked.
My breathing was ragged. “Mom, we don’t have time to explain. Where’s Shona?”
Just then, the sky darkened another shade, and I felt something happening below us. The water was starting to bubble again. The balcony was shaking. Mom’s face had turned whiter than the railings.
“If it’s not thunder,” she said, her voice coming out as if it was being squeezed through a tiny pipe, “then what is it?”
I looked at Aaron. He gave me a quick nod, and I turned back to Mom and Millie. “It’s an earthquake,” I said. “And it’s going to get worse.”
The balcony was shaking so much I wasn’t sure it was going to last much longer before it collapsed completely.
“Mom, I need to find Shona. Have you seen her?” I asked desperately.
“She — she was here a while ago,” Mom said. “She went back to her room. Then she came back and told us she had something to do.”
“Where did she go?”
“I — I don’t know,” Mom confessed.
“Look after them,” I urged Aaron. “I need to find her.” I turned back to Mom and Millie. “Go inside, both of you,” I urged them. “Aaron will come with you.”
“What about you, Emily?” Mom called.
“I’ll be fine. I need to find Shona.”
Aaron pulled himself onto the balcony. Before either of us could say or do anything else, Mom spun back around.
“Wait!” she said. “How could I forget? Shona gave me something for you. She asked for an envelope, and she put something in it. Said to make sure you saw it.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I put it in your room. She said it was important.”
My tail flapped nervously with indecision. See what Shona had left me in my room or look for her in hers? Either way, we were running out of time. Once we found her, I still had to beg her to forgive me, and I still had to send her away to find Neptune. All before the earthquake destroyed everything.
It felt hopeless.
Aaron’s tail had melted away, and his legs had returned. He reached down to me from the balcony. “Em, come inside with us. Let’s check your room first. See what Shona left for you.”
Aaron was right. I clasped his hand, heaved myself up onto the deck, and waited for my tail to transform.
Come on! Come on!
It seemed to take forever.
Eventually, my legs returned, and I jumped up and ran inside.
Mom opened her arms and pulled me toward her. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she mumbled into my hair.
The room was shaking.
“We need to get somewhere safer,” Millie urged. Her face was white, and her arms were wrapped tightly around her body as the nightstand began to shake. A hairbrush fell to the floor.
“We took too long,” Aaron muttered. “We’re too late to do anything. It’s all our fault.”
“Aaron, it’s not our fault,” I began. “We didn’t make the earthquake happen.”
Mom turned to Aaron. “What are you saying? What’s your fault?”
“Mom,” I began. “We have to tell you —”
The rest of my sentence was snatched away by a loud crash as a glass of water fell from Mom’s bedside table and smashed on the floor. Chairs were crashing around on the balcony.
I pulled myself out of Mom’s arms and spoke quickly.
“We knew this was coming,” I began. “We heard about it, and we were coming back to warn —”
“Heard about it?” Millie interrupted. “What do you mean, you heard about it? Heard from who? From where?”
“From . . .”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Aaron jumped in. “What matters is that it’s happening, and it’s going to get worse.”
“A lot worse,” I added.
For a second, no one spoke. Mom and Millie were staring at us, equal looks of shock, disbelief, and fear on their faces. The floor shook beneath our feet.
“Maybe it’s not going to be as bad as —” Mom began.
And then the dresser toppled over and broke into pieces.
“Mom, Millie, you have to get out of here!” I yelled. “And I need to see what Shona left for me.”
“Emily’s right,” Millie yelled as she leaped into action. As she stumbled toward the door, she called over her shoulder. “Main building. Get to the lobby. Run!”
With that, she flung the door open, and the four of us ran out into the corridor.
It seemed others must have had the same idea, as there were people darting out of their cottages and into the corridor, all heading the same way. Clinging to anything they could, they stumbled and bounced from wall to wall as they picked their way along the corridor.
“You go on ahead,” I instructed the others. “I’ll join you as soon as I see what Shona left for me.”
Mom turned around. “Emily, it’s too late for that now. It’s not safe in your room.”
“Mom, I don’t have time to explain everything, but if Shona said it was important, then I have to look.”
Mom clung to the wall as the building shook. “All right,” she agreed. “But be quick. We’ll wait.”
“Don’t wait!”
“I am not leaving you,” Mom said fiercely. “Now go. And hurry.”
“Be careful,” Aaron said, grabbing my arm as I turned. “If anything happened to you, I don’t think I could —”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, closing my hand over his.
Aaron pulled me toward him, and for just a moment, I let myself take comfort from his hug. Then he turned back to the others as I turned to run into my room.
I didn’t need to worry about a key; the door had been shaken open and was half hanging off its hinges, swinging and flapping as I ran through it.
My room looked as if the messiest burglars in the world had been through it. The mattress was half off the bed. Clothes strewn across the floor. Closet open. Chair upside down. Objects everywhere.
I scanned the room. Where is it? Where is it?
And then my eyes fell on something.
An envelope. With my name on it. It had fallen on the floor.
In two paces, I was across the room and grabbing the envelope. There were two things inside it.
The first thing to fall out was a stone. A pebble — and not just any pebble. It was the other friendship pebble that Shona had found.
I turned it over and clapped a hand over my mouth as I realized what I was looking at.
A drawing was scratched onto its side.
It was a picture of Neptune’s trident.
My throat constricted so much I wasn’t sure how to keep on breathing through it. I reached back into the envelope and pulled out the other thing that had been in there with the pebble.
A thin, white film of seaweed, on which something had been written in squid ink, in Shona’s writing. Three simple words.
I believe you.
I put the stone in my pocket and turned to run out of my bedroom.
I was approaching the door when —
Boom!
I was hurled backward. Flung across the room.
I stood up and looked around. My bedroom was collapsing! The dresser had fallen across the doorway. I’d never get out.
“Emily!” Mom was screaming from the corridor.
“Mom, go to the hotel lobby. I’m getting in the sea!” I yelled back. “I’ll be safer there!”
“I’m not leaving —”<
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“Mom, please! Just go! I’ll be safe. I promise!”
Without waiting for her to reply, I picked my way through the debris to the other side of my bedroom.
My balcony door was still intact. After fumbling with the lock, I managed to get it open and burst out onto the balcony. Without stopping to think, I jumped off and back into the water. My legs fizzed and tingled before stretching out and melting into my tail.
Even then, even among everything that was happening, the feeling of my tail forming gave me a split second of comfort. It was as if part of me believed that being a mermaid made everything OK.
Well, this time it didn’t. Nothing was going to make this OK.
I dived down and swam away from the huts and the jetties, out into the bay.
Pounding through the water as fast as I could, I tried hard not to think about Mom and Aaron and Millie. I desperately hoped they’d made it to the hotel’s main building.
Because as I looked behind me, I saw our line of cottages quiver, shake, and collapse into the sea.
I swam harder. Harder than I’d ever swum in my life. Harder than I would ever have known it was possible to swim.
Yes! The main part of the hotel was still standing. Should I swim there or farther out to sea?
There was nothing I could do for them now. My best hope was to get as far as I could from the buildings.
So I swam on. And then —
“Emily!”
Dad! He was in the water beside me. He grabbed me and pulled me into a big hug. “Thank goodness you’re safe,” he whispered into my hair.
The water was bubbling feverishly around us. Behind us, I could see our hotel. Ahead, in the distance, I could just about see Forgotten Island. Jeras was up there somewhere. And Ella and Saul and Joel and all of them.
Please let them be OK.
“Dad,” I said as a lull calmed the water for a moment. I needed to tell him.
“What is it, little ’un?” he asked.
I was about to tell him. But two things happened that stopped me in my tracks.
The first was that the sea suddenly erupted. It was different from the frantic bubbling from moments ago. This was more like a dark, huge swell coming into the bay. It lifted us so high I was airborne for a second, and then it dropped us.
Dad grabbed me. “It’s OK. I’ve got you,” he said.
And that was when the second thing happened.
I thought I was imagining it at first. I rubbed my eyes and squinted into the strange, semidark sky. A shape on the horizon.
As it came closer, I knew I wasn’t imagining anything.
I knew this angry swell. I knew the sight on the horizon.
And I knew my best friend, who I spotted swimming toward us, ahead of a school of dolphins and a golden chariot.
I knew what it meant.
Neptune was here.
Neptune rode into the bay on his chariot, pulled by his trusted team of dolphins. As he did, the water in the bay calmed a little. Enough that the buildings stopped shaking.
Shona was ahead of them.
I looked at Dad. “I’m going to go and check on the others while it’s calm,” he said. “Stay with Shona, OK?”
“I will,” I said as Shona swam over to me. I swam to join her. As I flung my arms around her, I nearly cried.
Before she had the chance to say a word, I remembered what Jeras had told me.
“Shona, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about everything. It doesn’t matter why I did what I did; all that matters is that I hurt you. I let you down. I lost your trust. And I will do anything I can to get it back.”
Shona pulled away to look at me. She was smiling. “What are you talking about, you silly sand eel? I’m the one who should be apologizing! I’ve been a terrible friend. Sulking and being moody and stopping you from doing what you want.”
“You didn’t stop me from —” I began.
“I did,” Shona said firmly. “Look. I should never have made you agree to that silly deal. It was what I wanted, not what you wanted. You’re who you are. You love adventures and mysteries and —”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I do,” I interrupted.
“And I wouldn’t have you any other way,” Shona finished.
“Shona, I feel exactly the same way about you. I drag you into things because I want to do them. I won’t do it again. I promise.”
Shona shushed me with a finger over her mouth. “Here’s the only deal I’m going to make with you. I promise to accept you for who you are and never again try to make you be someone different.”
I grinned at my best friend — at the bestest best friend in the entire world — and said, “And I promise exactly the same thing back at you!”
Shona held a palm out in front of her. “Deal,” she said.
I slapped my palm against hers. “Deal.”
I looked toward the chariot, coming closer and closer. “How did you find him?” I asked.
“The weirdest thing happened,” she said. “I was swimming out to sea, wondering where to go, when this dolphin appeared.”
A dolphin! Just like in the picture!
“It swam right over to me, then started swimming away again. It kept looking back at me, then moving on, as if it wanted me to follow. So I did. It led me right out to sea — and guess where to?”
“Halflight Castle?” I suggested.
“Yes! How did you — ? Oh, look, it doesn’t matter. But yes, he was out there, near the castle. I found him! Begged him to come. And eventually, he did!”
I smiled at my best friend. “Shona, you are amazing,” I said.
“You have brought me here for nothing!”
Neptune’s voice boomed across to us. Conversation over for now.
“I see no emergency!” Neptune bellowed.
Shona and I swam over to Neptune’s chariot together.
He looked down at me. “You!” he said. “I might have known.”
“There is an emergency,” I called up to him. “There’s an earthquake. It keeps starting and stopping. I think the worst of it hasn’t even happened yet.”
Neptune glowered at me. “And this is my problem how, exactly?”
Before I could answer him, a sound like a clap of thunder erupted — only it came from below us, not above. The sea began to quiver, whitecaps breaking out all around us, a swell lifting us high before crashing back down again. It felt like being caught in the most enormous sea storm ever.
“You have to help!” I cried as a section of headland started to crack. “Forgotten Island is going to get torn in half !”
“I can do nothing about it,” Neptune replied. “I am the king of the oceans. I cannot control the land!”
Neptune was right. He had no power over land. But he had to be able to do something. Why else did the Prophecy bring him here?
“Please, please, Your Majesty,” I begged him. “Take us to the island. There must be something you can do. There has to be.”
“I have told you. There is nothing I can do. And I have no need or desire to discuss it any further. Do you think I have nothing better to do than waste my time on you? Do you not know how big I am? How important I am?”
Something about Neptune’s words were jarring a corner of my mind.
Big.
Important.
What was it about those words? Where had I heard them?
Wait! It was Jeras! He had used them — that’s what he’d told the land gods he wanted to be!
An idea was forming in my head.
“Neptune, please, take us to the island. I’m begging you. Your Majesty. Stop the water. Please. Just for a moment.”
“I cannot stop it. The sea is boiling and raging like this because of the earthquake, which I have no —”
“Not the sea! The falls. Stop the falls!”
Neptune stared at me as if I’d asked him to fly me to the moon for a cup of tea and a piece of cake.
“Stop the falls?” he asked i
n a calm, deep voice that made me quake even more than his angry tirades. “And why would I do that?”
“So . . .” I hesitated. No, this was no time for hesitation. The idea in my mind was getting stronger. I knew I was clutching at straws, but right now, it was all I had — and was possibly the only thing that could save thousands of lives. “So the man can get down,” I finished weakly.
Neptune’s face turned even darker than the sky. “The man?” he growled. “What man?”
And then it happened. I saw it dawn on him. He looked around, his eyes taking in the surroundings. Maybe his ears processed my words, and the two things met up in a part of his brain that I guessed he didn’t visit very often.
“Jeras?” he asked in a tone that I had never heard from Neptune. Quiet, almost scared, almost reverent. “Jeras is still up there?”
I nodded, biting my lip so hard I tasted blood.
Neptune leaned down so far he almost fell out of his chariot. “And why in the name of all the oceans do you think I would let that man come down here?” he growled.
I held my nerve.
“B-because we’re in great danger — Your Majesty,” I stammered. “And because I think he might be the only one who can save us.”
Neptune stared at me, holding my eyes with his as though he were pinning me on the end of a spear, ready to throw me to the sharks.
“Well then,” he said, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I liked the snarl in his voice. “It seems I have unfinished business after all.”
He waved his trident again. “Jump on board, both of you,” he bellowed to me and Shona.
We didn’t stop to question him. Together, we scrambled to perch on the back of his chariot.
Neptune called down to the dolphins. “Take us to the falls of Forgotten Island!”
As we sped off through the bay, Neptune called back to us. “I’ll stop the water flowing for one hour,” he said. “And let’s see what crawls down the mountain.”
Approaching the falls in the middle of an earthquake that was tearing up the land and whipping the sea into a tidal wave should have been one of the scariest things I’d ever done in my life.
And yes, it was definitely up there.
But we weren’t approaching the falls in any old boat. We were in Neptune’s own chariot. The king of all the oceans.