“You think,” the low voice growled, “that you can waltz into my home, uninvited, and take what’s mine?”
“The Shard isn’t yours,” Penelope said. “It belongs in Glacier Cove.”
“The place with the turnips, right? Charming town. It’s true I had assistance from my followers. But when you consider the number of hours I logged at that horrid man’s house with the hideous sculptures—not to mention that ridiculous penguin submarine—I more than earned this piece of jewelry. Once I dispatch you, your sad little island of misery will sink into the ocean like so many others, and the natural order of the sea shall resume.”
Penelope flailed about in the darkness. “Where are you? Or are you too afraid to show yourself?”
Nyx cackled. “The question isn’t where am I? It’s what am I.”
Penelope felt something with lots of little legs scurry up her arm. She screamed and tried to swat it away. Then she felt a stab of pain in her back. She reached around and squeezed a thick and slippery creature squirming up her neck. A foul odor filled the air and Penelope felt rancid, sticky breath in her ear, but when she tried to grab it—whatever it was—she got only a fistful of air.
“Pen,” came a weak voice from behind her. “Help me.”
Penelope spun around. At the other end of the duct, bleeding and in obvious pain, was Miles. Relieved, Penelope crawled toward her brother as fast as she could, only to watch his body morph into an army of rats, screeching and scrambling in all directions. Then the tunnel went dark again, and the screeching got louder until it was upon Penelope, thousands of rats biting and scratching, crawling over her, under her, up her pant leg, in her hair, everywhere. Penelope screamed and screamed until the rats scuttled down the hall and out of earshot.
“You can give me the Shard,” Penelope snarled through her tears. “Or I can take it!”
“I must admit, I admire your spirit,” Nyx hissed. “Join me. We have much in common. I, too, lost my mother at an early age.”
“You didn’t lose her! You killed her!”
“Silence! You know nothing!”
Penelope had found her opening. “You killed your mother and your father. Your own flesh and blood! Why? For power? For—”
Penelope felt a sharp slash on her chin and tasted the metallic tang of blood. The pain struck immediately, throbbing in waves along with Penelope’s quickened pulse. The claw, she saw, belonged to a ghostly demon with a pale, repulsive face that disappeared into the darkness.
“I’m going to eviscerate your body and spit the pieces into a lava pit,” Nyx muttered. “I believe I’ll start by plucking out your eyes. But…you’ve come all this way. I shall allow you to choose the form of your executioner. Anything you wish. Use your imagination.”
Penelope’s brain spun. The throb in her chin—and the tingle in her hands—made concentration impossible.
You have to believe. If you can do that, the answer is in your hands….
“Out of time, I’m afraid,” Nyx said. “I’ll choose for you.”
A tiny stream of light illuminated a spot far down the air duct. Penelope couldn’t be certain what she saw, because it didn’t look like anything she had ever seen before. All she could make out was a giant, scaly, throbbing slab of meat with rows of suckers and razor-sharp teeth dripping blood blacker than ink. Then the light flickered out again.
When the light came back on, the beast was a foot from Penelope’s face. Two scabby limbs reached out for Penelope’s eyes.
“Ice!” Penelope screamed. “I want to freeze to death!”
Nyx pondered this for a moment. “Yes, there would be a poetry to that. Plucky girl from iceberg travels all the way to a sizzling volcano only to freeze to death? Wonderful irony. But allow me to improvise, if you will.”
Penelope watched as the creature before her changed once more. The sound alone—a cracking, splintering rumble—was gruesome enough. Features hardened, limbs thickened, eyelashes and fingernails flaked off into blue dust. Within seconds, a solid ice version of Penelope’s mother was facing her in the air duct.
It reached for Penelope’s eyes.
Then a strange thing happened. At the exact moment the bony ice fingers began to pinch the skin surrounding Penelope’s eyes, the girl reached for Nyx’s neck.
Nyx unleashed a bloodcurdling scream, and Penelope watched as the creature’s neck caught fire. The flame shot down Nyx’s arms and ignited again near her wrists, sending a flash of fire around her icy body.
Penelope tugged the necklace from Nyx’s black and bubbly neck. The Shard clattered to the ground.
She reached between the flames and screamed as the Shard seared her fingers. Somehow, she managed to stuff it in her pocket. It was still so hot that she thought it might burn a hole through the fabric.
By now, the blaze had lit the entire tunnel in a bluish orange glow. Black smoke filled the air. Penelope coughed as the heat reached her lungs, and she crawled as fast as she could through the corridor in search of an exit. She stayed just ahead of the dancing flames while the metal scorched her hands.
The duct was melting. Just before Penelope felt it about to collapse, she turned to see what Nyx had become.
In the midst of the violent inferno, she spied a small puddle of water.
Then the duct collapsed and Penelope crashed through the ceiling of the white room. She landed with a sickening thud next to the remains of the rocking chair.
The room was no longer white. Fire shot so high it caked the ceiling and rushed down the walls. Though she had to crawl between the flames, Penelope had no trouble getting out of the room: the door was gone.
As she sprinted through the corridor, the ceiling crashed down behind her. Beyond the far wall of the corridor—which was now no more than burning planks of wood—she saw that the volcano was erupting. Explosions of lava shot high into the air.
“Miles!” she called. “Where are you?”
Then Penelope saw her brother sitting on the ground in the last spot the blaze had not consumed, holding his shoulder. Next to him, laid out like folded laundry, were their two dry suits. And on top of each lay a cookie.
Atop a table in the mess hall, Miles hoisted his chocolate milk. Everyone was there: Omar, Martin, Lucas, Pooley, and Sparks. Twickie and Coral Wanamaker, who had become friends. The technicians and engineers and machinists. Officers and enlisted penguins. Even Decker was there, almost laughing as Miles held court.
“Anyway, after Penelope and I got out of there,” Miles said, “she basically had to drag me and swim as fast as she could—”
“In other words, painfully slow human speed,” Pooley hooted, and everyone cracked up.
Miles grinned and adjusted the sling on his shoulder. “So we heard this rumble behind us that sent shock waves through the water and Penelope gave me a serious look, like Don’t look back.”
“What exactly happened up on the surface?” one lieutenant asked, turning to Martin. “I heard you guys were all over it.”
Martin blushed. “Well now, I don’t like to brag.”
“I do,” said Omar. He proceeded to tell them how the SEAL team had surfaced, intending to catch their breath for a moment, and found dozens of penguins injured from stepping on land mines; how they’d managed to fight off a pack of hungry leopard seals that jumped out of the water in search of weak prey; how Lucas had harpooned the largest seal between the eyes; how Sparks carried two wounded privates on her back for a mile to get them out of harm’s way; how Martin had radioed to Pooley for help, who radioed to the Delphia, who sent a rescue party to evacuate the troops before the volcano erupted; how everyone assumed Penelope and Miles had burned up in the eruption, along with Makara Nyx, the Shard, and the rest of Brimstone Peak.
“I found them wandering four miles from the strike zone,” Pooley said. “And wouldn’t you know it: Penelope March had the Shard! She was swimming with one hand and pulling her brother and somehow managed to keep the Shard from falling out of her pocket. Ama
zing. I still can’t believe she did it.”
“I can,” said Sparks. “The girl is incredible.”
“I underestimated her,” Decker admitted.
Sparks lifted her cup. “To Penelope March.”
“To Penelope March!”
—
Penelope lay in her bunk, curtain closed. The experience had drained her, mentally and physically, and she didn’t much feel like talking about it. After surviving the ordeal, she had survived devastating leg hugs from Omar and a trip to the infirmary to get her chin and hand bandaged by the duty corpsman. Then she had gone to tell Coral—who was now bunking on the lower level—that everything was fine.
Somehow the metal that had sunk its teeth into Miles’s shoulder had missed every tendon and nerve. They counted forty-two stitches in his shoulder, which would come out in a few days. He’d heal just fine. It appeared he would also have a crazy scar that one penguin noted was shaped an awful lot like a turnip.
So why couldn’t Penelope enjoy the moment like everyone else? The images of her mother and Makara Nyx did not help, nor did the constant throb of pain. Mostly, she just wanted to go home. But it would be three days until the Delphia reached Glacier Cove, and Penelope didn’t know what she would find when she returned.
—
The party had spilled over into the navigation room, where sonar technicians were dancing a jig and warbling a sea shanty.
A lone sailor sat at his console, trying to ignore the merriment. “Cut it out, guys!” he hollered. “If you spill booze on the sonar, I’m not taking the blame.”
“Come on, Higgins,” one of the singers said. “Blow off some steam!”
Higgins put his headphones back on. Almost immediately, he picked up a sound on the sonar unlike any he had heard before. He pressed the headphones tighter to his ears. There it was again, from roughly two hundred miles to the west.
An eerie, high-pitched hiss.
It was not another warship, which he could have easily identified by the sound of its propellers. Nor did it sound like a merchant ship. He wasn’t certain it was a ship at all. It could have been a whale, he supposed, but judging from the unusual tone and frequency, it would have to be an enormous one.
“Guys,” he called. “You gotta hear this. I don’t know what to make of it.”
One of the other penguins put on the headphones and listened. A few moments later, he took them off. “I don’t hear anything.”
Higgins put the headphones back on. Nothing. As quickly as it had arrived, the strange hiss, whatever it was, had disappeared back into the ocean’s shadows.
That night, Penelope couldn’t sleep. Again. She traced the lines of her envelope-sized pillow with her fingertips. The rough edges felt like sandpaper.
Every time she nodded off, Miles woke her by hopping down from his adjacent bunk to go to the penguin bathroom—all that chocolate milk—and groaning about his shoulder.
By the time her brother climbed back into his bunk for the fourth time, Penelope’d had enough. “Why don’t you just go sleep in the bathroom?”
“I tried,” he said. “But every time I rolled over, I accidentally flushed the toilet.”
“Miles,” Penelope said a minute later. “Have you ever wondered what happened to Mom?”
“Sure. Every day, for a while. Dad always told me to mind my own business, so I gave up. I always assumed it was…I don’t know…All I know is Mom died and Dad survived.”
“You blame him?”
“Why has he never said a word about her death? Or her life?”
“Well then,” Penelope said. “I guess we have no way of knowing.”
The mattress under Miles squeaked as he rearranged his body. “Maybe we do have a way.” A hand poked into Penelope’s bunk space. In it was a cookie. “Last one.”
A lump clotted Penelope’s throat and a shudder of unease rippled through her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe some things are better left unknown.”
“And some things aren’t.”
—
The last bite had just dissolved on Penelope’s tongue when her sore eyelids began sailing into space. Soon they left her face completely. Then so did her eyes, her tongue, her ears, and the rest of her head. Not wishing to be left out, her body quickly followed.
Penelope landed in a homey little cottage. Flickering candles lent the room a warm glow, and smiling family photos lined the walls. The modest home almost seemed cheerful enough to withstand the punishing blizzard roiling outside. The storm’s noise did not simply whistle; it roared in hatred. Windows rattled, the ground shook, and the flimsy walls of the house seemed to push in on themselves, the photos inhaling and exhaling with every gust of wind.
In one corner, a toddler sprawled on the floor, sucking her thumb and flipping through a book. In the opposite corner, a young couple huddled over a crib. The woman pulled a thermometer from the baby’s mouth, triggering a high-pitched wail that rivaled the cacophony swirling outside.
“One hundred and five,” said the woman over the noise. “We need a doctor.”
The man looked out the window. Night had fallen. He couldn’t see much in the blizzard, and what he could see didn’t look good. Snowdrifts were already so high that he couldn’t even spot the houses across the street. Snow continued to punish the landscape, not just from above, but from below and the side as well.
He pulled on his gloves. “Doc Engleterra is a mile and a half away. He’ll be able to help.”
The woman bit her lip. She didn’t want her husband to go out in this weather. But what choice did they have? Their boy—their beautiful boy.
The man leaned over the crib to kiss the delirious baby and caress his wet cheek. “My sweet Miles,” he cooed. Then he kissed his daughter, who barely looked up from her book.
“I love you,” his wife said. She kissed him and held him longer than either of them expected.
The man trudged into the snow and was immediately hit by a wall of white. He couldn’t see. With every step he sank farther into a snowbank, while the storm kept coming harder and harder until it stung the parts of his face that his beard didn’t protect. He was a strong man, but he might as well have been made out of paper.
In all honesty, he couldn’t tell what direction he was going. But he pushed on as best he could, thinking of the little boy in the crib. He’d walk for hours—or crawl if he had to.
The man didn’t see the avalanche coming. It hit him with the force of a train, lifting his body off the ground and hurling it through the air. Before he had a chance to scream, it had deposited him underneath a continent of white.
His mouth was full of snow, and he knew it was bad. Any attempt to move sent a jolt up his spine. He started scooping snow, hopefully enough to create an air pocket, and tried to swim his way out. But while thrashing his arms and kicking his legs—groaning at the white-hot agony spreading over his back—it occurred to the man that he didn’t know which way was up.
Feverish with pain, the man tunneled through the powdery snow. Through some miracle, he was able to drag his broken body to the top of a steep snowbank. When he poked his head through, he screamed in relief. He’d never been so happy to see a blizzard in his life.
Two hours later—frostbitten, delirious, spine shattered, gloves worn through, and hands crusted with blood—he crawled back in his front door and landed in a crumpled heap at the woman’s feet. He had not made it more than fifteen feet from their door.
The woman cleaned him up and wrapped a sheet tight around his broken torso while balancing the baby on her hip. Then she placed the writhing baby in the crib and put on her coat, her hat, her scarf, and every pair of socks she had.
“What are you doing?” the man wheezed through his pain.
“I’m going out there.”
“You’re crazy! You have no idea how bad it is.”
“Russell, if we don’t get help, he’ll die.”
“You’ll never make it! Are you insane?”
“No.” She buckled her boot. “I’m a mother.”
“Angela,” he pleaded. “I love these children as much as you do, but I can’t let you go out there! I’d rather die.”
“Of course you would.” She smiled a crooked smile and kissed her husband on the lips. “You’re a good man.”
By now he was crying as hard as the baby. “Don’t! Please!”
“Penelope’s asleep in her room. Milk’s in the fridge. Remember to keep pressure on the back.”
“Angela. No!”
The woman forced her way out into the blizzard and was gone.
The Delphia surfaced in the Ice House on a Tuesday morning, but it might as well have been Saturday night for all Penelope knew. She ducked out the hatch and onto the dock.
Penelope hadn’t gotten two steps before she heard Wolfknuckle barking. The dog pounced on her with such glee that he bowled over three penguins and nearly knocked Penelope back into the water. Which was the last place she wanted to go.
Once the lickfest ended, Ore9n Buzzardstock held out his arms and Penelope folded herself into them. They hugged for so long, a bottleneck of penguins formed behind them on the gangway. One of the penguins began hollering to hurry up already, but another guy smacked him and told him to shut his krill hole. Penelope and Buzzardstock stepped aside.
“How’s my father?” she asked.
Buzzardstock sighed. “The search party gave up the hunt, but last I heard, Russell was still out there every afternoon looking for you. For a while, he had people convinced that I had killed you. Police were involved. Lawyers. It was not a pleasant week for anyone.”
“I feel terrible.”
“Terrible? No, no, no, my dear. But it’s safe to say he’ll be happy to have his children back.”
“I have something for you.” Penelope unzipped her bag—heavy with books that Floyd had let her keep—and pulled out the same box that Buzzardstock had given her before the voyage. It was stained and shredded and looked like someone had sat on it.
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