And that was when I saw it.
In the center of the room, a huge tree stump acted as a table. The tree stump had all sorts of things piled on it. But it wasn’t the objects on top of the stump that I was concerned with. It was a picture carved into the tree stump itself. Low down, near the ground.
I leaned forward to study it. “Jeras,” I said. “What’s this?”
Jeras got up, rubbing his legs as he slowly straightened them, and hobbled over. Aaron came with him. “What’s what?” he asked.
I pointed at the picture. “This,” I said.
Jeras peered down at it. “I can’t even see anything,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to bend down that low to the ground and hope to get back up again. Why don’t you describe it to me?”
Aaron had sat down next to me. “Em, it’s . . .” he began.
“I know,” I said.
I looked up at Jeras and told him what we saw. “It’s a mermaid,” I said. “Swimming in the sea, a dolphin alongside her. And in front of her . . .”
“In front of her, what?” Jeras asked impatiently.
“In front of her is Neptune.”
“Neptune is part of the Prophecy!” Aaron breathed.
As he spoke, something clicked in my mind. The one remaining question that Ella said they had never managed to answer. Why the falls kept going.
It was magic.
It was part of a curse.
It was Neptune. And now the Prophecy showed him with a mermaid.
“You’ve found the answer!” Aaron went on. “The Prophecy’s answer! Emily — you have to get Neptune!”
Aaron was practically jumping with excitement. It was almost infectious. Apart from one thing.
He was wrong.
“Aaron, look at it again,” I said. “Look more closely.”
He bent down to squint at the picture. “What am I looking at?” he asked.
“The mermaid. Look. Her tail is different from mine. Her eyes are bigger. Her hair is longer.” I looked at him. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“I . . . yes, I think I do,” he said.
“What?” Jeras asked from above us. “What does it mean?”
I stood and met his eyes. “It means that it isn’t me who has to get Neptune,” I told him. “It’s my best friend, Shona. And the problem is, we’re in a fight, so the last thing she’s likely to do right now is anything that I ask her.”
“In other words, we’re back to square one,” Aaron said flatly. “The earthquake is coming, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
Jeras instructed us to go back to our seats. “Now listen here,” he said in a voice that sounded much more firm and strong than earlier. “You cannot give up on your best friend, on your mission, or on the thousands of people whose lives depend on you.” He pointed a spindly finger at me. “Emily, you go back to that friend of yours, and you do whatever it takes to fix your friendship. You understand?”
I nodded.
“Why did you fight?” he asked.
I lifted my shoulders in a sad shrug. “I let her down,” I said. “I made promises, and I guess I broke them. She can’t trust me anymore. And how can she be my best friend without that trust?”
Jeras sighed. “Emily, if anyone knows about this kind of thing, it is me. So listen. I’m going to give you the benefit of my mistakes, and then you can do something about yours before it’s too late.”
“OK,” I agreed. “That sounds good.”
“Don’t let your friendship fester and die. Don’t let your argument slide into a rift. Do not accept her anger as the final word. If Shona matters to you —”
“She does,” I broke in, tears stinging the edges of my eyes. “She really does.”
“Well, then, learn from me. Don’t waste your time trying to explain why you did what you did.”
That was exactly what I’d done. How did he know?
“I am old and wise,” Jeras said, replying to my thoughts as though he’d heard them. “Let your friend be right. Your friendship is more important than your insistence that she understand you. Understand her. You hear me?”
“I . . .” I was fairly certain I had the gist of what he was saying. I didn’t have to keep explaining to Shona why I’d done what I did. All I had to do was see her side of it. I’d hurt her — and I needed to fix the hurt. That was all that mattered.
I held his eyes. I felt as if I was holding his heart, protecting it and healing it with my own. “Yes,” I told him. “I hear you.”
We worked quickly after that. Jeras scrabbled around in his house, talking to himself, pulling on shoes and a coat.
“I’m ready,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“You’re coming with us?” I asked.
“I am.”
“But the tunnel —”
“I’ll come as far as I can,” he said. “I know the quickest way down the mountain.”
So we started out together, Aaron and I following Jeras down tracks we would never have noticed, along winding paths hidden between rocks, and alongside rivers trickling down the mountain.
We rounded a clump of trees, and I was looking at the ground, watching my feet to make sure I didn’t stumble, when it happened.
Jeras was quite a bit ahead of me. Aaron was behind me. Suddenly, without warning, Aaron screamed, “Emily!” and grabbed me around the middle, pulling me toward him so we fell backward together, and I landed awkwardly on his legs.
“What are you —” I began. I didn’t finish my sentence. I didn’t need to.
I stared in silence as a massive boulder tumbled down the cliff face, smashing into the path — exactly where I would have been if Aaron hadn’t grabbed me — and hurtling down into the valley below.
The sound made Jeras spin around. “Are you OK?” he yelled back to us.
“We’re fine,” I called back. I pulled myself up and dusted my legs down. “Thanks,” I mumbled to Aaron, still in shock at what had happened. “I think you might have just saved my life.”
He pointed up at the cliff face. “Look. There are more.”
The rock had started some kind of landslide. A trail of smaller rocks snaked down the cliff in its wake.
“Stay where you are for a moment,” Jeras called.
We pressed ourselves against the mountainside and waited till the landslide was over.
Once it was safe again, I looked at the ground around me. It was covered in rubble. A stone larger than the others had fallen right in front of me. As I lifted my foot to move away, I noticed it had something on it. It looked like a sketch.
I picked up the stone — and clasped my hand over my mouth.
“Aaron — look!”
Aaron joined me, and I held the stone out so he could see it.
“Wow, that looks exactly like she said,” Aaron breathed.
Jeras had come back to see if we were all right. “What is it?” he asked. “What did you find?”
“It’s another part of the Prophecy,” I said. “It fell at my feet.”
Jeras narrowed his eyes to squint at the picture. “What is it?”
The picture showed a mermaid, swimming with an arm outstretched. Ahead of her, there was a fan of light, and two stones were falling into her hand.
“It’s Shona,” I told Jeras. “It’s something that’s already happened.” I pulled out my friendship pebble and held it out. “This is one of the pebbles in the picture,” I said. “And it led us to you.”
Jeras breathed out so hard his breath whistled through his teeth. “We must be quick now. Small landslides like this — they are rare. This isn’t good. Come. Follow me — and hurry.”
We did what Jeras said and followed him along the track, picking our way along it even faster now.
As we rounded the next corner, Jeras stopped and looked up at the sky. “See that.” He pointed above us. It was the middle of the day, but the sky was darkening.
“What is it?” Aaron asked
.
“Something is changing. The sky, the air . . . listen.”
We listened.
“I can’t hear anything,” I said after a while.
“Exactly,” said Jeras. “Where are the birds? Where are the daytime feeders? The insects even?”
Why was he asking us where the animals were? He was the one who lived here. Surely he would know better than we did.
“They should be here. Calling to one another in the trees,” he said.
The silence felt eerie. “Where are they?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“It’s started, right?” Aaron asked. “The landslide, the animals disappearing. That’s what they do, don’t they?” His words came out fast and high-pitched. “I’ve read about it. When some kind of disaster is approaching, the animals always know before the humans.”
“They do,” Jeras agreed. “And yes, you’re right. We are running out of time.”
I stared at them both. I didn’t have any words. My stomach felt as if it had fallen down the valley along with the rocks.
Jeras spoke quickly. “We need to speed up,” he said. “You have to get back before the landslides get worse. First will be the small foreshocks. Sharp, but brief, and very localized. But they’ll get stronger and longer, and they’ll spread out more and more. Come. Hurry.”
Together, we battled through undergrowth and over rubble, and eventually we arrived at the lake we’d come through from the tunnel.
The lake had a tree lying across it. It must have fallen with the shaking from the foreshocks. It was edging toward the far side of the lake, floating through the water like a canoe.
As we watched, the ground began to shake.
“That’s it! You have to go — now!” Jeras yelled. “The tunnel is your only way. If that gets cut off . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.
“But — but what about you?” I asked. “What will you do when the earthquake hits?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Thanks to Terra, I can’t die.” He smiled at Aaron. “And for the first time in many, many years, I have something to live for. I have family.”
Aaron turned to Jeras. “I don’t want to leave you,” he said.
Jeras reached out and touched Aaron’s cheek. “I know. I don’t want you to go, either. But you must. Far too many people are depending on the pair of you and on your friend Shona. It’s up to the three of you to fix things.”
“I want to fix you,” Aaron said.
Jeras laughed softly. “I am beyond repair,” he said. “Take that intention and put it into the world out there.”
Aaron threw himself into Jeras’s arms. “We won’t forget you,” he croaked.
Jeras wrapped his bony arms around Aaron. “I won’t forget you, either. I will live my days more happily for having met you,” he said. “Both of you.”
After pressing me into a bony hug, he held me tightly for a moment. As he did, the shaking under my feet seemed to have stopped.
“It’s subsided,” he said. “Just a tremor. Early warning. There’ll be more of those before it starts in earnest. But it’s coming closer — it could happen anytime.”
Jeras moved to the side and waved us ahead of him. “Now go,” he said. “And don’t look back. You know what you have to do. I’ll be willing you on with every nerve in my broken old body.”
“Thank you,” I called to him. “For everything.”
And then we did what he’d told us. We dived into the lake and didn’t look back.
As the water folded around me, I kicked my legs until I could no longer feel them. Pausing mid-lake, I waited for my legs to disappear completely.
Come on. Come on.
I was impatient for my tail to form.
Finally, the familiar feeling spread through my body as my tail stretched out and wriggled.
I glanced across at Aaron through the water. It was cloudy and bubbling with sediment, no doubt stirred up by the ground’s shaking.
His tail had formed, too. We flicked our tails and swam to the far side of the lake. Feeling our way along the rocks in the murky, watery darkness, we searched for the tunnel’s opening.
“It’s here!” I called. Aaron swam over, and together we inched closer to the tunnel’s entrance. But there was a problem.
The tree we’d seen floating across the lake had made it all the way to the end. And one of its branches was completely covering the hole.
There was no way out.
We worked and worked at the tunnel’s entrance, but it was useless. We couldn’t move the branch away from it.
I tried to squeeze past it but the shaking must have loosened some rocks because just beyond the entrance, the cave itself was blocked up. The tunnel was no longer an option.
We were stuck.
“Aaron.”
He didn’t reply. He was too busy scrabbling at the rocks and the tree, trying to get past them.
I swam to his side and touched his arm. “Aaron, we can’t get through,” I said.
“But the Prophecy . . . all the people! Jeras said — we have to get back there,” he cried.
“We can’t get through the tunnel,” I repeated.
“We have to!” Aaron protested. “It’s the only way out of here.”
“I know,” I agreed. But as I spoke, I realized I was wrong. I grabbed his hand. “Aaron, it’s not the only way,” I said. “We have another chance. Our only chance.”
“What is it?”
“The falls,” I said. “We’ll have to swim down the falls themselves.”
The current in the lake was so strong, something had to be pulling it down. Surely the only thing strong enough to pull with such force was the falls.
So all we had to do was stop trying to fight it. Stop struggling. Go with the current, and let it take us.
We were putting all our bets on one possibility. It had to be the right one. Whether we would survive it in one piece, I honestly didn’t know for sure. But I knew one thing: we literally had no other option.
So we did it. We let go of the tree, stopped scrabbling against the cave, and let the flow carry us away.
The current grew faster, harder. Soon it was flinging us, tail over head, around and around, lifting us up, hurling us around like a fallen tree being lifted and spun around and around in a typhoon.
Across the lake.
Down the mountain.
Toward the edge where the mighty falls hurled themselves over the jagged cliffs.
And then . . .
It threw us — together with however many hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per minute it was — into the falls, and down, down, down into the ocean itself. And all that was left to do was pray that we would still be intact when we reached the bottom.
I landed with an enormous splash and was instantly propelled down almost to the seafloor.
I paddled frantically around, trying to get my bearings.
“Aaron!” I called.
“Emily!” I heard him call back to me — but I couldn’t see him through the mass of bubbles and froth. “Swim up!” he called.
Once I’d figured out which way was up and which was down, I did what he said. Eventually, both of us made it to the surface.
“You OK?” Aaron asked.
“I — I think so,” I replied, panting. I looked around. The falls were behind us.
We’d done it. We’d really done it!
I didn’t get the chance to celebrate for very long.
“Aaron, look.” I waved a hand around us. The sea was starting to bubble. It looked like a pan of water coming to a boil.
Aaron’s face had drained of color. “The earthquake,” he said. “It’s happening.”
“Maybe it’s just another of those foreshocks,” I replied, my voice coming out in a squeak.
“Let’s hope so,” Aaron replied. “Come on. Let’s get back to Majesty Island and find Shona. Whether it’s foreshocks or the real thing, one thing??
?s for sure — we don’t have time to waste. She needs to get Neptune.”
Aaron was right. So we swam as hard as we could, ignoring the bubbling on the surface around us that matched the gurgling tremor in our stomachs.
As we swam away from Forgotten Island, the water gradually started to settle. The frothing and bubbling calmed; the current slowed.
Together, we swam into the bay. It looked just as idyllic as ever. As if nothing had happened. The afternoon sun was beating down on the sea, sprinkling it with glinting lights like little diamonds dancing on the water’s surface.
We swam toward the hotel. In the distance, people were playing on the beach. We could hear the sounds of laughter and conversation.
It seemed so incongruous.
How could they be laughing? How could they be playing? Did they have no idea what was going on?
I didn’t say my questions out loud, but I guess Aaron heard them anyway.
“It didn’t get this far yet,” he said.
“Which means we might still have time to save everyone,” I said.
“If we hurry,” Aaron agreed.
We swam on, till we arrived at the hotel. As we approached, I could see Mom and Millie on their balcony.
We swam over to them. They were both lying on deck chairs. Millie was reading a magazine; Mom looked like she was asleep, her hat tipped over her eyes, a book open on her stomach.
As we approached, Millie glanced up. She put her magazine down and sat up. “There you are!” she exclaimed. Then she shook Mom.
Immediately Mom was awake and bolted upright. “What is it, Millie?” she burst out. “What happened? What’s up?”
“Nothing’s up,” Millie said.
How wrong she was.
Mom spotted us as we reached the deck. “Oh, there you are!” she said, smiling broadly at us both. “Did you have fun with your friends?”
How were we supposed to answer that? There wasn’t time to go into it. We had to find Shona.
“Mom, have you seen Shona?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.
Mom opened her mouth to reply. She was about to speak when it happened.
A rumble.
“What’s that?” Mom asked.