They touched the cookies together like wineglasses and took a bite.
Miles saw it first, and he didn’t like it one bit.
One by one, every sculpture in the room came alive, staggering, slithering, decaying into a disfigured ugliness, wailing in regret. The sculpture of a partially melted grizzly bear stumbled from his barber’s chair. No longer ice but rather an actual bear, he shook the water from his downy brown fur, roared, and looked around hungrily. A disoriented ostrich, looking more like a tree stump in a bow tie, began to croon an aria in a terrible squeaky moan. When a warped gumball machine opened up, sending hundreds of red, yellow, and blue spheres clattering to the floor, Miles felt strangely sick.
The scene appeared differently to Penelope. The creatures drifting around did not seem menacing at all; in fact, they had a strange beauty. She wandered the room to get a closer look. Many of the figures stepped aside, whispering to each other about this curious girl.
One of the bowling penguins, a proud, regal specimen that Penelope had noticed many times, stepped forward. Dozens of medals shone on his perfectly pressed military uniform. He saluted Penelope with a stiff wing and looked her up and down with piercing black eyes. Mostly up. He couldn’t have been more than three feet tall.
The penguin unleashed a series of high-pitched squeaks and tweets in a stern voice. He obviously meant to sound authoritative, and he would have, had he not been a penguin. Penelope stifled a giggle, which only seemed to anger the little guy. He launched another barrage of defiant squeaks.
“He says you’re smaller than he thought you’d be,” Buzzardstock said.
Penelope smiled at the absurdity of this. Wait. How did Buzzardstock—
“I speak his language,” Buzzardstock said. “Or rather, I did a long time ago. But it’s been a while. You’ll have to bear with me. My Penglish is a bit rusty.”
Buzzardstock sounded off with his own nasal honks. The penguin nodded and responded sharply, and the two of them began volleying back and forth with increasing volume. Whether they were arguing, joking, or conspiring, Penelope felt horribly left out. “What’s his name?”
“Beardbottom,” Buzzardstock said.
“Beardbottom.” Penelope smiled. “Will you tell him I’m Penelope March? And that’s my brother Miles over there?”
The old man and the penguin exchanged more squeaks. “He knows who you are,” Buzzardstock said. “Very serious penguin, this one.”
“How does he know who I am?”
Beardbottom shuffled forward. He looked Penelope in the eye and began speaking in squeaky but otherwise perfect English. “Commanding Officer Philip Ulysses Beardbottom. Aquatic flightless armed forces, twenty-third regiment, fourth division. My crew.” He gestured behind him at the gaggle of penguins, standing in formation, rigid and proud. “The finest naval birds in this hemisphere, or any other.”
“Um…pleased to meet you. I’m Penelope March.”
“We have been waiting for you, Miss March. Decker! Front and center.”
Another penguin waddled forward, his posture straight as a metal rod, and chirped something in a staccato rhythm.
“In English, Decker.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” he squeaked in an even higher-pitched tone. Then he turned to Penelope and saluted. “Executive Officer Frank Decker. Pleasure to meet you at last.”
“Decker, please escort Miss and Mr. March to the craft and get them up to speed on our mission. On the double. We’ve got no time to lose.” Beardbottom extended a flipper-like wing to Penelope, which was soft and oily when she shook it. His other wing, no more than a stub really, he kept pinned to his side. “I look forward to working with you,” he said. “Rest assured that you are in the company of well-trained sailors of the highest order. Not a single member of this crew, myself included, will settle for anything less than success in this mission.”
With that, he shuffled away, followed by two penguins.
Decker gestured to Penelope and Miles and cleared a path between the sludgy animals and objects skulking about on the Ice House floor. “I think you’ll be satisfied with our operation,” he said. “Penguins make perfect sailors. We’re smart, we’re aerodynamic, we have binocular vision, and we don’t sweat. And Commander Beardbottom is the finest flightless bird in the entire fleet. Superb tactical leader. A brilliant penguin.”
Miles nudged Penelope. “Hey,” he whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Are you hearing talking penguins?”
“Yeah.”
“And they’re in the navy?”
“I think so.”
“Okay. Just making sure.”
Decker looked daggers at Miles. “We also have very good hearing.”
He pushed open the door to the Cold Room, and there was the submarine. But now, instead of the blue-white ice of which Penelope had memorized every inch, it was shiny and jet-black. And it was real. To Penelope’s amazement—as if she could be amazed by anything else at this point—the ice floor was gone. The submarine was floating in water.
Atop the conning tower sat two uniformed penguins chatting. When they saw Decker, they jumped to their feet to salute him.
Decker frowned. He turned to the Marches and barked, “I present the AF Delphia.”
Miles and Penelope had roughly a million questions stacked up like a skyscraper of blocks, but to take one out—any one—could bring the whole fragile thing crashing down. Safer to say nothing. Penelope spied a tiny opening on the side of the craft. Only when she saw another pair of penguins trundle out and down a gangway to a makeshift dock did she realize that it was a door. “How big is the staff?” she asked.
“The Delphia has one hundred sixty-five men. Though some of them are women. I would give you a tour, but I’m afraid the interior is a bit of a mess at the moment.”
“Oh. Right. But I mean, how big are you? You know, as, uh, penguins.”
Decker seemed offended by this line of questioning. “Yes. Well, we range in size from twenty-three inches—that’d be Twickie LaRouche—to thirty-eight inches—that’s Ernst Popper, our independent duty corpsman. He’s always been big for his age. But we don’t differentiate between any two sailors. Each crewmember must be able to operate and repair every piece of equipment on board, no matter how large or small. And each has been trained to do the other’s job in case of an emergency. Just as our missile technician knows how to make a krill omelet, our chef is fully capable of firing a long-range torpedo. Though I’m still not entirely clear on what your job will be during Operation Thunder Strike.”
Miles cleared his throat. “Excuse me, uh…Officer?”
“You may call me Decker.”
“Decker. You said Operation Thunder Strike.”
“Affirmative.”
“What is that?”
Decker shook his head in a condescending way. “You really do know nothing. Operation Thunder Strike is the code name for our mission. In twenty-four hours, at oh-three hundred sharp, we submerge. At that point, our objective is fourfold: locate the subject, engage the subject, take possession of the subject’s assets, and eliminate the subject by any means necessary. It will all be in a dossier, which our yeoman promised to have on my desk at twenty-one hundred hours. In your language.”
“Is there some kind of problem?” Miles asked.
“No problem whatsoever,” Decker snapped. “On the contrary. I’m looking forward to holding the hands of two untrained children on board.”
Miles and Penelope gave each other a look.
“Decker,” Penelope said. “Who is this subject you’re talking about here?”
“That would be Makara Nyx.”
“The subject is a giant sea monster?”
“Affirmative. She’s out there and we have some semireliable intelligence on her whereabouts. We’d urge you to keep all this under your hats. This mission is highly classified and extremely dangerous. Most likely, Nyx knows she is about to be hunted. She will no doubt respond with deadly force
. But make no mistake about it,” Decker brayed. “We will find the enemy, take her down, and recover the Shard. And you, for whatever reason, have been asked to come with us.”
“I won’t let you.” Miles pulled the clothes from Penelope’s overnight bag. “It’s as simple as that.”
Penelope stuffed the clothes back in the bag. “Have you seen my flashlight?”
“Forget the flashlight—”
“Shhh. You’ll wake up Dad.” It was 4:45 in the morning. The sky was starting to go from black to gray. Penelope knew she didn’t have much time before their father awakened, and each s from their mouths seemed to pierce the air loud enough to rouse him. Despite the fear that had seeped under her skin, she had promised Buzzardstock—and Decker—that she would return to the Ice House as soon as she had packed.
“What makes you think that submarine is even safe?” Miles whispered. “The whole thing makes no sense. How can two kids, an old man, and a bunch of penguins fight a sea monster? If there even was such a thing as sea monsters!”
“Since when does the world make sense?” Penelope nosed around under her hammock. “I know I saw that flashlight somewhere.”
Miles looked out the window. “What was that?”
“What?”
“I thought I heard something outside.”
“I didn’t hear anything. Oh! There it is.” Penelope clicked on the flashlight, sending a beam directly into her brother’s eyes.
“As your only brother on earth, I’m begging you, Penelope. Don’t go.”
“You’d rather stay and sink into the ocean with the rest of Glacier Cove?”
Miles switched tacks. “What about school?”
“If someone doesn’t do something, there won’t be any school to go to.”
“Fine. I’ll tell Dad.”
“No, you won’t,” she shot back. “Even if you do, I’m going. You can’t stop me, and neither can Dad. What’s wrong with you? You saw what I saw! How can you not be packing your bags too?”
Miles began to say something, then stopped. In all honesty, the possibility of an adventure of this magnitude—and weirdness—energized him. Like everyone else on Glacier Cove, he had never left, nor had he been in the ocean, much less a mile underneath it. And all that fooling around with straitjackets and handcuffs? Those weren’t escapes. Jetting off in a submarine filled with penguins: now, that was an escape.
“I want to go,” he said. “But I’m afraid. We don’t know what’s out there.”
Penelope patted her brother’s hand. “I’m afraid, too, Miles. But I’m more afraid of what will happen if I don’t go.”
“You don’t even know Penglish.”
“I’ll learn. We’ll learn.”
Miles crumpled to the floor and lay down.
“Can I ask you something?” Penelope said. “Did you see anything else in the future that you’re not telling me?”
Miles tried to recall his nightmares and visions, but he was too tired. They had slipped away. “No,” he said. “Just…don’t leave now. They’re not submerging for like twenty-two hours.”
“Fine. I promise.”
A moment later, Miles was asleep.
Penelope continued to pack in silence, stepping over her brother. After choosing some of her favorite books—and sifting through them in the dark, losing herself in adventures far away—she narrowed it down to nine. But as she was stuffing them into her bag, she thought of Decker. “Pack lightly,” he had said. “Space is at a premium on a submarine. Take only what you need.”
Penelope didn’t know whether she was leaving for a week, a year, or a lifetime. If only she hadn’t lent Nicola Torland to Coral. Would she ever see these books again? As though betraying her dearest friends, she put them back on the shelf, zipped up the bag, and slid it into the closet. Then she placed the flashlight on top and climbed in her hammock to sleep for a couple hours before school.
Mrs. Shaw, the Marches’ next-door neighbor, happened to be rising at that moment. She liked to get in her early-morning calisthenics before Mr. Shaw awakened. Halfway through her third set of lunges, she glanced absently out her window. She wasn’t sure—because the dreary Glacier Cove dawn was known to play tricks on Mrs. Shaw’s eyes, even before cataracts had clouded her world over—but she thought she saw, scampering away from the Marches’ house, a small figure in black that looked like that strange Wanamaker girl.
—
Penelope and Miles didn’t realize how tired they were until they felt the fog roll into their heads during the walk to school with their father.
“I’ll be at work, so I can’t be here to pick you up after school,” Russell murmured as they reached the schoolhouse steps. “But this is a small town. If I hear from anyone that you two didn’t walk straight home afterward, things are gonna get real interesting.” He made a big show of not hugging them goodbye.
Miles groaned and walked inside. For some reason, Penelope stopped to watch her father walk away. Once he had crossed the street, he turned around, obviously hoping to catch a glimpse of his kids. When he saw Penelope looking back, he grimaced and gave her an embarrassed wave, as though he found this whole Being Mad thing ridiculous. Penelope waved back, feeling strangely sad.
Little of note happened at school, at least during the parts when Penelope had her eyes open. In history class, during a rip-roaring lesson on the biology of mold spores, her eyes grew so heavy that she had to prop them open with her fingers. Not even a barrage of spit wads in her hair, courtesy of more than one Funkhauser, could rouse her from her daze. Longest day ever.
When the final bell took pity on her at last, Penelope grabbed her things and sprinted for her locker.
“You going to the Shelf?” she overheard Ernest Kernwinkel ask Teddy Bronconato a few lockers over.
Teddy shrugged. “What’s the point? The hills are all slush. That’s not sledding. It’s sitting in a bunch of puddles.”
Penelope stopped. All she could think about was crawling into her hammock and drifting into delicious sleep so she would be on board and wide awake when the AF Delphia submerged at 3:00 a.m. But a new thought popped into her head. She decided to make a stop on her way home.
—
“Hello?” As the door slammed shut behind her, Penelope’s voice faded into the thick silence of Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium.
The place was a mess—candles and papers scattered everywhere, dirty dishes stacked in the sink, a thick layer of dust coating the tapestries. From its sad little cage, the bird eyed Penelope as if to say, Get me out of here. Please.
“Coral? Are you here?” Penelope called out. Creeping through the wreckage, she felt better about her own little house. Then she felt a pang of sadness. How could a twelve-year-old exist in such a place? “I just came to get my book back.”
A strange voice came from somewhere in back. Then again, louder. The purple bead curtains that led to the Wanamaker apartment waved ever so slightly. It wasn’t a scream, exactly, nor was it ordinary conversation. It was a marble-mouthed growl, punctuated by odd shrieks. It might not have even been human.
Every instinct told Penelope to turn and run. But what if Coral was in danger? What kind of friend would walk away from that?
Penelope took a deep breath and crept toward the bead curtain. Through her coat, she could feel the hair on her arms standing up.
The bird chirped and flapped its wings furiously from its cage.
The voice grew louder.
When Penelope pushed through the beads, it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. Other than flickering candles, the room was dark. A figure dressed in a red hooded robe, its back turned to Penelope, huddled over some kind of altar. Strange shapes had been carved into a table. Thick wax drippings pointed to a silver cup in the center.
Between the shrieks and moans, the figure chanted in a low voice.
“Ri ni bocaj ello ulee, kee ba ri ni llaj en gou holo viz baraj vinye…Ri ni bocaj ello ulee, kee ba ri ni ll
aj en gou holo viz baraj vinye…Ri ni bocaj…”
As the figure reached for the cup with a wrinkled, splotchy hand, Penelope drew a sharp breath.
At the sound, the figure spun around, its hood falling to its shoulders.
It was Stella Wanamaker. But her lips had curled into a grotesque wave of chapped flesh, and her eyes had rolled back in their sockets to reveal only bloodshot slits.
Then she lunged at Penelope.
Penelope fell backward through the curtain, pulling the beads down with her until they skittered across the floor in all directions. She screamed and scrambled to her feet, banging her head against the birdcage and overturning a table.
Stella kept coming, eyes rolled back, arms stiff and outstretched like a blind sleepwalker. “Ri ni bocaj ello ulee…Penelope March…Ri ni bocaj ello ulee…”
Penelope turned and ran, screaming with each step until she was out the door.
By the time Stella reached the door, Penelope was halfway down Watermill Boulevard. In her wake, she left Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium with a demented old lady, a squawking bird, and an even worse mess than before.
—
Penelope probably should’ve run all the way home and locked the door behind her. But as she trudged over the crunchy landscape, the thoughts in her head bounced off each other so fast that she didn’t know what to do.
How can I let Coral live with that maniac?
Should I tell my father?
Should I tell Buzzardstock?
How is it possible that Buzzardstock has created life from ice?
How can anyone find a shape-shifting sea monster in an enormous ocean?
How did penguins learn to speak English?
How do I fit into all this?
Will I even survive?
Beardbottom had made it clear that this mission could not succeed without her. But she kept thinking maybe Decker was right. What value could a twelve-year-old girl possibly offer on a submarine built for penguins traveling through an ocean into which she’d never ventured?
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