“Pull!” she ordered Teddy Bronconato.
Teddy yanked the rope as hard as he could. A few kids joined in. Then more. As they pulled, for a moment Penelope thought her leg might be separated from the rest of her body. But she did not let go of the hand clinging to her own.
Little by little, the children dragged her away from the hole, and a body emerged from the water, blue and gasping.
Miles.
He looked less distressed than disoriented and was tugging at his own leg. The children saw another hand wrapped around Miles’s skate, its sausage-like fingers clutching the blade. Burgle’s.
With a final burst of strength, the kids pulled Teddy Bronconato, who pulled Penelope, who was using every ounce of strength to pull Miles, who had somehow managed to pull Burgle.
Moments later, as Burgle and Miles lay on the sidelines, shaking and sopping wet, Penelope hugged her brother as hard as she ever had. Principal Flincher appeared with a couple of blankets and wrapped up the two shivering victims. Teddy draped his coat over Penelope’s shoulders.
While she sat waving her fingers, starting to feel hints of a tingle in her pinkie and ring finger, Penelope saw Burgle’s and Miles’s chests heaving, their desperate breath steaming the air. And she knew they’d survive.
Some kids cried. Others clapped or hugged or patted each other on the back. They had all aided in the rescue.
All except one, that is. While Glacier Cove Academy’s middle school was pulling together, and later weeping and rejoicing together, one child stood alone, her face blank and impassive, arms folded across her chest: Coral Wanamaker.
News of the daring rescue on Lake Trenchfoot spread around Glacier Cove: How Penelope March, of all people, had saved the day with her quick thinking. How the big, dumb gym teacher, despite his bravery, had been dragged from the water by Miles March rather than the other way around. And how both of them had been rescued by a bunch of middle schoolers.
Penelope was asked to retell the story so many times that she began to add little flourishes here and there. (“My fingers felt like ten baby carrots in a pot of boiling water….”) Eventually she just nodded and smiled. People could fill in the rest with their imagination.
No one knew what exactly had happened under the ice. Well, Miles and Burgle did, but neither was saying much. Anyone courageous enough to visit the gym teacher in the intensive care wing of GC General, where a team of doctors attempted to treat his severe hypothermia, was greeted with the same response: “THANK YOU FOR VISITING. CAN YOU GET ME ANOTHER BLANKET, PLEASE?”
One day, Penelope and her father went to check on Miles, who was recovering from his own hypothermia two floors below Burgle. When they walked into Miles’s room, they found him thrashing around under the bedcovers like a maniac.
“Good Lord,” Russell March gasped, and bolted from the room to fetch a nurse. He was still a bit jumpy after all his children had been through.
The moment he was gone, Penelope lifted the blanket. Underneath, Miles had handcuffed himself to a bedpost and was struggling to pick the lock.
Penelope kissed her brother’s cheek. “Feeling better, I see.”
He sank back into the wrinkled sheets. “I’ve got to do something to keep busy.”
“You that bored?”
“Well, let’s see. While the nurse was changing my bandages last night, she gave me the complete medical history of all nine of her cats. That was pretty exciting.”
Penelope laughed. “I miss you, Miles.”
Miles sank his teeth into his lower lip. His famous smile was gone. Wrinkles around his eyes made him look like a shriveled old man.
“I have a riddle,” Penelope said. “What eleven-letter word does everyone pronounce incorrectly?”
Miles stared absently out the window at a flag flapping in the wind.
“Give up?”
He went back to work on the handcuffs. It was almost as though he hadn’t heard.
“Incorrectly,” Penelope said. “Get it?”
Before he could respond, the nurse darted in with Russell. “What’s going on, child? Is everything all right?…Are those handcuffs?”
At the sight of Cat Lady Nurse, Penelope burst into laughter, which confused their father and angered the nurse, who demanded the key to the cuffs.
Penelope decided not to push Miles. He’d talk when he was ready. She stayed by her brother’s side for the rest of the day, even after their father returned to work, and she read aloud from a book about volcano eruptions. Miles remained silent, his thoughts locked in a room somewhere far away that Penelope could not locate.
—
Buzzardstock was putting the finishing touches on a lovely sculpture of a monkey riding a unicycle when he heard the knock at his door. He ignored it. Then another knock, louder. He groaned and put down his chain saw. If it was the mailman needing an ice pick to get the mailbox open again…
When Buzzardstock opened the front door, he found Coral Wanamaker spitting a fingernail on his porch.
The girl cleared her throat. “Do you need an assistant?”
Buzzardstock raised his green eyebrows. “Well, now, I’m not—”
“I’m stronger than I look and I don’t talk much.”
“Be that as it may, I don’t—”
“Great,” Coral said. “I’ll start tomorrow at three-thirty. We’ll discuss payment later.”
Before Buzzardstock could object, Coral turned and ran from the porch.
“What on earth was that?” Buzzardstock asked Wolfknuckle after closing the door. But the dog was far more interested in his chew toy.
—
Three days later, the hospital discharged Miles. His frostbite had been mild and would heal within two weeks. Burgle had not been so lucky; two of his toes and one of his fingers had been so severely damaged that they were infected with gangrene. They would have to be amputated.
That night, just as Penelope started to drift off in her hammock, Miles sat up in his.
“Pen. There’s something I need to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “I saw…something…under the ice. Something I can’t explain. It was our bedroom. The hammocks, the pillows, the lamp, everything. Then our house. Then the block, then the whole town. Glacier Cove was underwater, the cars and buildings, the entire library, books and all, floating underwater. People were drowning, reaching out for help. But I couldn’t help. The whole town sank farther and farther, and then…”
Miles couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud, but as he’d been underwater, gawking at the helpless people floating past him, a shadow emerged over everything. No, it was more than a shadow. It was as though someone had turned off a giant light, plunging the entire ocean into darkness so pure that Miles could not see his hand in front of his face. He’d felt a chill that went way beyond hypothermia, a dread that lodged itself in his heart and his hands and every other part of him, a low, moaning terror so deep and agonizing that all he wanted to do was sink to the bottom of the ocean and end it. That was the moment on Lake Trenchfoot when Penelope’s hand found Miles’s and pulled him from the blackness.
“Then what?” Penelope asked.
“Glacier Cove was gone.”
Penelope shuddered. The wind screeched outside their bedroom window.
“I know it sounds weird,” Miles said. “It was like a dream, but these things were right in front of me—I could touch them. Smell them. I saw the words in a book floating past! It felt so real. When you pulled me out of the water, I couldn’t believe everyone was still there.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. But I’m really scared.”
“Did Burgle see anything underwater?”
“When I asked if he saw anything strange, he said, ‘YEAH. I SAW MYSELF DROWNING.’ ”
Penelope laughed, and that made Miles laugh—with a surprised look on his face, as if he’d forgotten how good it felt. But then the laughter stopped and they fell into a thick silence. Penelope’s
mind drifted through possibilities about Glacier Cove, before landing squarely on one single, obvious thought: Buzzardstock.
When he answered the door, the old man looked as though he hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. Or maybe forty-eight years. His matted green hair poked out in every direction. Saying he looked like a vampire was an insult to vampires.
Buzzardstock waved Penelope and Miles inside the gallery, which was a mess. Papers and tools were everywhere. The half-finished pieces around them had gotten even more twisted. Penelope’s eyes landed on a sculpture of a drooling baby sleeping in a crib overflowing with scorpions. “Nightmare City, that one,” Buzzardstock said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Miles eyed Buzzardstock coldly. Penelope had dragged him back to the Ice House, and he’d only agreed to go when she threatened to go alone. He didn’t relish the thought of his sister alone with this crazy man and wanted to get in and out of the house as quickly as possible. Then he stopped.
Across the gallery was Coral, picking up tools off the floor. She nodded at Penelope.
“Coral?” Penelope said. She was somehow not surprised to see her there. The girl had a knack for showing up where you least expected it.
“My new assistant,” Buzzardstock said. The old man leaned in conspiratorially. “Do either of you have any idea what a fair wage is for an assistant?”
“Ore9n,” Penelope murmured. “I know you don’t believe in privacy, but…” She motioned at Coral.
Buzzardstock nodded. “Very well. You’re free to go, Miss Wanamaker, and my heartiest thanks for all your hard work today.” He surveyed the chaos of his workspace. “The place looks great.”
Coral grabbed her things and smiled her weird smile at Penelope.
Once Coral left, Penelope launched into the tale: the ice cracking, the rescue, the strange vision of Glacier Cove that Miles had seen while plunging under Lake Trenchfoot.
Buzzardstock listened in sullen silence. A black tabby house cat peeked around the pool table, fixing its almond-shaped eyes on Penelope for a moment in the judgmental way that cats do. When it slipped away, she noticed a little stump where its tail should have been.
Buzzardstock put his hand on Miles’s shoulder. “You ate the dream cookie.”
Miles looked away.
“You ate my cookie?” Penelope had assumed that she’d lost it on Lake Trenchfoot.
“I snuck it from your coat when you weren’t looking.”
“That was my cookie!”
Buzzardstock cleared his throat. “I don’t wish to split hairs here, but you were never actually offered the cookie.”
Penelope’s outrage wilted into embarrassment. “Oh. Right. About that—”
“I’m sorry, Pen,” said Miles. “Believe me, I wish I hadn’t.” His face hardened as he swiveled to face Buzzardstock. “So. Why did I see this whole town floating underwater?”
“Oh, dear. Those dream cookies—they are delectable, are they not? Something about the recipe tends to make unusual things happen. I think it’s all the nutmeg. I put in four teaspoons and then mix—”
“What unusual things?” Miles interrupted.
“Well, some who eat a dream cookie see memories of their past. Others see wishes for the present. What you experienced, I fear, was something far worse.”
“Which is?”
“A vision of the future.”
“Okay, then,” Miles said sarcastically, leaning over to Penelope. “Can we go now?”
“Tell me something,” said Buzzardstock. “Did you hear a strange sound just before the ice cracked? A loud pop?”
“Yes.”
“And a sort of fizzing?”
“We all heard it. How did you know?”
“I know ice,” Buzzardstock said. “The sound you heard is called a Bergie Seltzer. It happens when the water-ice interface reaches compressed air bubbles that have been trapped in the ice. The bubbles contain air imprisoned in snow layers from early in the ice’s history. Each bubble bursts, like a balloon. Pop! A Bergie Seltzer.”
“Why does it happen?”
“It occurs when a large body of ice melts. The density of pure ice is roughly 920 kilograms per cubic meter, but the density of sea water is 1,025 kilograms per cubic meter.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, my dear children, that something terrible is happening beneath our feet right now.” Buzzardstock pulled a metallic gizmo from his lab coat and pushed a button.
A rumble emanated from the Ice House’s walls, as if a giant machine’s clanking gears had been activated. A rectangular opening appeared on the wall, revealing a small chamber lit in an eerie red glow from a shining chandelier made of tiny golf balls, Ping-Pong balls, yarn balls, and eyeballs.
“Are you ready?” Buzzardstock asked. Neither child had the slightest idea what it was they were supposed to be ready for. “Well? What are you waiting for? Has neither of you seen an iceslidevator before?”
Miles and Penelope looked at each other. Don’t, Miles’s eyes said.
Penelope, who had never considered herself the braver of the two, stepped forward, brushing past her brother and Buzzardstock. Miles hurried into the chamber, too, as if he preferred its unknown dangers to being alone with the old man. Inside, an array of buttons, little circles of neon just begging to be pushed, covered one wall. Penelope didn’t dare.
“Hold on,” said Buzzardstock, who was suddenly inside the iceslidevator with them.
He pushed a button and the door closed. The little room began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the three of them were banging into walls like ice cubes in a blender.
Penelope screamed. Miles screamed.
But they were spiraling so fast it was impossible to tell whose screams were whose, so it all sounded like one terrible AIIIEEOOOOGG!! Just when Penelope thought she might pass out, the floor disappeared, sending the three of them tumbling down into darkness.
Even in the dark, Penelope could make out the shape of the slide, which corkscrewed and doubled back on itself with geometric precision. At some point, even as her body picked up speed and hurtled forward with no clear destination, she got used to the ride. Just when she was starting to enjoy it—THOOMP!—Penelope dropped into a giant, dim chamber filled with sponge balls. Two more thoomps followed.
“Miles?” Penelope called. “You all right?”
Twenty feet away, Miles’s body popped up over the surface of the sponge balls. “That was kind of fun.”
“I trust everyone still has all their arms and legs?” Buzzardstock asked, jumping to his feet with surprising agility. “Actually, at this point all you need are legs. Follow me.”
The three of them entered a narrow tunnel, its walls lit by tiny lightbulbs encased in different-colored ice blocks. Penelope felt like she was walking on the inside of a kaleidoscope. A very, very cold kaleidoscope.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Fifteen stories beneath my home,” Buzzardstock murmured. “Inside the iceberg. The inner sanctum, as it were. This ridiculous hunk of frozen water upon which we reside is much deeper than you think. Glacier Cove is about five hundred feet above the ocean, but the ice beneath it descends nearly a mile underwater.” Then he turned to the children, as if to emphasize the point he was about to make. “You’ve heard the phrase ‘tip of the iceberg’? I’m afraid that’s all our hometown is.”
The tunnel led to an enormous purple room with a high ceiling. The room, a massive circle carved out of the ice, was empty but for one thing: a small marble slab resting on a pedestal in the center of the room.
“You go on ahead,” said Buzzardstock. The old man’s brow furrowed into an apprehensive expression that Penelope hadn’t seen before. His feet made it clear that they would carry him no closer.
As Miles and Penelope studied the strange slab, both felt a new fear wash over them. Each knew, somehow, that something terrible had happened in this very spot, and not so long ago. Yet both we
re drawn to the slab, approaching it as if pulled by an imaginary force. Their hands found each other and gripped tight as they crept closer.
“Want to hear something funny?” Miles mumbled. “The cookie wasn’t even that good.”
“Go ahead, touch it,” Buzzardstock whispered. “Really, it’s harmless.”
“Then why aren’t you coming?”
Miles and Penelope gaped at the slab. She squeezed his hand. “You first.”
“No, you.”
“How about together?”
“No. You.”
Penelope let go of her brother’s hand and ran her fingers along the slab’s surface. It felt like ordinary marble, cold and smooth and vaguely otherworldly.
When Miles saw that nothing catastrophic had befallen his sister, he touched the slab, too, which made his cold fingers tingle. Then he noticed a strange slot on its side. “What’s this?”
“Smart boy,” Buzzardstock said. From the across the room, the old man pulled the metallic gizmo from his pocket, inserted a key, and turned it.
The slab slid open, revealing a curved compartment in the center scarcely large enough to slide a hand into. “That, my children, is where I keep…the Shard,” Buzzardstock said. “The last remaining piece of Makara Nyx’s fortress. The only thing that keeps her from withering away and dying. Passed down from my father, tracing back through seven generations of Buzzardstock guardians. And just maybe the reason Glacier Cove has survived all these years.”
“But it’s empty,” said Miles.
“Yes, there’s the dilemma. It wasn’t empty two days ago.”
“So where is it?”
Buzzardstock rubbed his mole and looked at the floor. He had no idea.
“Wait,” Penelope said, her blood running cold. “Makara Nyx was here?”
“Until yesterday, I had my doubts. But now…” His voice trailed off. “Frankly, I’m not sure how she got in or how she knew it was here. But unless someone finds this evil beast and gets the Shard back, the ice that broke on Lake Trenchfoot is only the beginning.”
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