The winged tortoise didn’t answer.
Alex moved to Florence. She was twice his height and frozen in full, glorious stride. Perhaps she had been running when it happened, making Artimé shake with her steps. She was sleek and ebony and beautiful, just as she always looked. Alex almost expected her to turn when he reached up and touched her arm. “I’m so sorry,” he said to her. “If there’s anything you can do to fix things here . . . well, just let me know.” But he didn’t expect an answer.
He turned, considering taking a walk down by the water to process his thoughts, but there were Unwanteds everywhere. There was no place as far as the eye could see to sit and think and be alone.
Then, from somewhere above his head, he heard a scraping sound.
He looked up above Florence to the roof. There sat the Silent girl. She froze when Alex saw her, as if she were caught doing something wrong.
“Hey,” Alex whispered. “How did you get up there?”
She pointed to Florence.
Alex’s eyes widened. The thought of climbing up Florence’s body freaked him out a little. It seemed so . . . so wrong. But she was just a statue now. And her bent knees and elbows did offer a lot of hand- and footholds. He considered his path, and then started climbing quickly, in case she woke up. Which he’d be thankful for, but she’d kill him anyway, probably. “I hope you have no memory of this,” he muttered. It was an easy climb, and seconds later he hoisted himself to the roof and sat next to the girl.
“Clever,” he said. “I like this. I can breathe again.”
She nodded and looked down, suddenly self-conscious.
Alex looked out over the sea and thought of Lani and Samheed again, wondering where they could be, and if they were alive. He had to believe they were okay’he couldn’t handle anything more than that right now. His throat tightened and he moved his eyes to the place where Simber had gone down, well beyond the edge of low tide. There was no way to get to him, Alex knew. And there never would be.
Alex couldn’t get the image out of his head’Simber’s downward crash into the water. The scene had been in his nightmare last night, and it lurked in the back of his brain whenever he had a few extra minutes to think. “We’ll go togetherrr, as always,” Simber had said as they’d left the silent island. “I won’t leave you.”
Alex covered his face with his hands, overcome. He didn’t know what would happen now. All he knew was that Simber was made of sand. Sand dissolved in water. Even if Alex could bring back Artimé, he didn’t think he’d ever see Simber again.
Mr. Today had once said the giant statue was “virtually” indestructible. Simber had taken many hits with bullets and other weapons, and they bounced right off of him, or at worst left a tiny mark. But “virtually”’that meant there could be a way to destroy him. And if so . . . well, he’d never seen Simber venture near the water. Alex remembered how the great statue would hover forever above the water, but was careful never to let his wings touch. And maybe now Alex knew why.
He couldn’t bear to think of it. Simber, gone forever, his body dissolved like a sugar cube in tea, sandy bits of him sloshing around at the bottom of the ocean.
And here Alex sat with nothing. Aaron was ready to pounce on them when they got desperate enough, and all of Artimé looked to Alex to fix everything, to restore the world. Alex had not one single clue how to do it. All of Mr. Today’s books were gone. When Alex failed to fix things, what would happen to them all? Would they turn to Aaron to be slaves in exchange for food and a place to sleep?
Alex had no doubt some of them would.
“Please help me,” he choked out in a whisper. “Anybody.”
When his shoulders began shaking, the Silent girl put her hand on Alex’s back to comfort him. After a while Alex sniffed and looked up, eyelashes wet.
He pulled the package from his pocket and looked at it, wondering what Aaron could have possibly found to torture Alex with. He took a deep, shuddering breath and unrolled it, reached inside, and pulled out something lightweight and soft and brightly colored.
It was Mr. Today’s robe.
In a Very Small House
Just past midnight at a table in a very small house in Quill sat Gondoleery Rattrapp, thinking for the umpteenth time about how she had once been magical, and then wasn’t for the longest time, and then was again for a few short months. And now, because the man who created the magic had died, she had lost the ability once more. And here she sat, puzzling over it, because something clearly wasn’t right.
She studied the components as she had done many times recently, and tried them out on a skinny stray dog she’d captured in a trap in her backyard.
“Die a thousand deaths!” she cried, flinging a metal clip at the dog, but the clip bounced off the dog’s back. He came up to the woman and licked her hand.
She pushed him away and picked up a clay heart. “Heart attack!” she said, throwing it at the mutt. It struck his side and did nothing, though he whimpered a bit and recoiled at the sting.
The woman scrunched her eyelids tightly together.
She scrunched her fists, too, and dragged her arthritic knuckles along her eyebrows, stopping them at her temples and pressing in hard. This wasn’t right. Not at all.
“When I was a girl,” she said softly, trying hard to remember the creakiest of thoughts from a very, very long time ago. Trying to remember how things were back then. “When I was a girl.”
She opened her eyes and looked at her hands, and at the useless components. She looked at the dog, who whined at her, and then she stood up. “Go on,” she snapped. She opened the door and shoved the dog outside. “Run off now.”
The dog stopped to lap water from the bucket that had been recently filled on the woman’s front step.
“Get!” she said, kicking at the dog, and the dog got.
And then the woman looked at the water in the light of the moon.
She dipped her hand into the water and lifted it up, watching it drip from her fingers to the dusty step. “When I was a girl,” she whispered, staring as the water made a stain in the dirt.
She looked up into the sky at the thousands of stars that twinkled above. She hadn’t noticed them in years. All she knew is that there were no clouds’there were almost never clouds in Quill.
She looked at the water in the bucket again, and the element seemed to whisper to her. “When I was a girl,” it said.
The old woman looked around, but there was no one anywhere to be seen at this late hour. She cupped her hand and dipped it into the water to take a drink of it. It was warm. Warm, like the rain had been on a hot summer day on Warbler Island, more than fifty years ago. She’d been on the jutting rocks, on a plateau halfway up to the peak, playing with her friends who were magical too, but there was no Marcus Today there. She was sure of that. She remembered the fun of it, standing on the slick stone as rain poured in sheets around her and her friends. How they’d shrieked and danced in it.
She took another scoop of water in her hand and stepped into the yard, the water carelessly dripping from her fingers. She was wasting it, by Quill’s standards.
In the dark of the night and the light of the moon, she held her hand to the sky and watched the shimmering droplets cling and quiver on the back of her hand, then fall to the parched earth. And she remembered.
Finally. She remembered.
She brought her hand down, and then flung the water that remained into the sky with all her might. As the drops flew through the air, she envisioned the scene and the words she’d abandoned for more than fifty years.
She cried out to the water, “Make it rain!”
A moment passed, and the cloudless sky above the little house rumbled and sparked with light and life. The woman stood in the dirt yard in the center of the desert island of Quill, hands raised to the sky, eyes closed.
The sky opened up above her tiny house, like that day on the rocks when she was happy and young and with friends. A triumphant cackle built and gr
ew in her throat, filling the air. For now, pouring down on her and her small plot of land and her bucket of water on the front step of her little house in Quill, was all the rain of half a hundred years.
In a Dark Cave
Weak and blind, Samheed sat in total deafening silence. He pounded his hands on the dirt floor of the cave, scratched his fingernails on his pants, kicked his feet against the wall. There was no sound at all. He felt like he didn’t exist, except for the constant waves of pain around his neck.
Now and then he’d open his mouth to yell for Lani and Meghan, but no noise left him, no matter how hard he tried. He felt utterly helpless. He couldn’t see, couldn’t make a sound, and his friends were gone.
Every now and then he could feel a small breeze, as if someone walked past him, but he could never catch that person in time. There was no way to tell when the breeze was coming, no way to tell how many minutes or hours or days were passing. After the second breeze Samheed crawled around and touched a tray of food quite by accident. Next to it was a cup of water. He ate and drank, and then stayed exactly there so that when the breeze came, he’d be able to reach out and grab it.
But the breeze brought the next food and water to a different spot.
By the fourth time, Samheed had determined that the breeze could see him, and would only go where he wasn’t.
His entire existence was pointless.
All he could think of now was that Lani and Meghan had gotten away. And deep down, beneath the pain of abandonment, he hoped for it, he really did. Not just for their sakes, but for his’if they’d escaped, maybe they’d get Mr. Today to come and rescue him . . . and he could take this pain away. It was so hard to bear when there were no distractions anywhere.
“Please, please, please,” he said from silent lips, over and over again. “Is anybody there? Can anybody help me?”
Time passed, and nothing changed.
When he drifted off into a hard sleep, he dreamed he was lying in the sun on the beach in Artimé, listening to the creatures singing softly on the lawn and the murmurs from conversations nearby while he dozed. He was free from the dark and silent cave, free from the painful thorny collar around his neck. In his dream a cool hand touched his cheek, and he smiled, realizing he wasn’t alone. He reached for the hand, traced his fingers up the arm, and touched the face of the girl who was touching his. It was the most comfort he’d had since the piercing sleep arrow embedded in his back.
But then something bumped his foot, jarring him from the dream. Someone was shaking him awake, grasping and pulling his shirt, almost ripping it. He sat up, alarmed, plunged once again into the darkness and silence and pain of the cave. He pulled his hand back to throw a punch, but the person pushed him down to the floor on his back once more, pinning him. He struggled to get free.
Even when he felt her fingers touch his cheek, his lips, he fought her, though he was weak. She pushed mightily to keep him on his back, then sat down hard on his chest, knocking the wind from him, and pinned one of his arms to the floor with her foot. With both hands she grabbed his other arm and pulled it close to her body. She brought his hand up to her head and squeezed his fingers around her hair. She forced his hand to travel down the length of it, and held it there. Then she touched his lips and felt his chest heave a sigh of relief.
“Lani.” His lips moved against her finger, and he was overcome.
She scrambled off of him. He rose up to his elbow and grabbed blindly for her hand, trying to let her know that he understood now. He held her fingers to his cheek and nodded, then put his hand on her face as well. She did the same. He could feel her relax next to him, both of them exhausted and aching. Breathing hard, not making a sound.
And then she started to shake. Samheed reached out and wrapped his arms gently around her shoulders, and she slid closer to him, gripping his shirt and burying her face in it. They held on to each other, trying to survive a minute at a time, until somebody . . . anybody . . . came to rescue them.
One Last Message
n the roof of the gray shack Alex gripped the colorful cloth like it was a lifeline. “This is his robe,” he whispered to the girl.
She nodded, pushed her fingers through her hair, and lifted them, making her hair stand up.
“Yes,” Alex said, laughing a little. “Yes, the man with the hair. Mr. Today.” He paused and grew somber again. “He’s dead now.”
The girl put a finger to her eye and traced an invisible tear down it.
“Yeah,” Alex said. He was a little embarrassed now that he’d cried so hard in front of a stranger. Not because he was male, since men and women in Artimé cried freely whenever they felt like crying, but because unexpected sobbing might make a stranger feel awkward. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“And Simber,” he said. “You probably never saw him. He’s huge and scary-looking, so I’m sure they kept him away from you once you woke up. But he was really nice, deep down.”
He looked sidelong at her now, remembering their first meeting face-to-face. “You totally spit all over me,” he reminded her, trying not to smile.
She raised her hand to her mouth, eyes wide and mischievous. Then she acted out the scene from her perspective. Alex tried to narrate’it was like doing pantomimes in Actors’ Studio.
“You were scared,” he guessed. “Everyone was staring at you.”
She nodded. She looked around, forlorn.
“You didn’t know where you were,” he said. “And the boy’is he your brother?”
She nodded.
“Ah, okay, that’s what I thought. Anyway, you’re saying he was sleeping and wouldn’t wake up, and you didn’t know what was happening.”
The Silent girl nodded again.
“And so you spit water on me. Makes perfect sense.”
She laughed a silent laugh. Then she made a sorry face.
Alex smiled sadly. “Aw. It’s okay. It was just a little spit.” He reached out absentmindedly and touched the metal thorns around her neck. She shrank back slightly and Alex looked up. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry.” He pulled his hand away. “You saw my friend Meghan inside, right?” he asked.
She nodded, her face turning serious again.
“I guess that’s your island, huh. Did you and your brother escape?”
She narrowed her eyes and looked away quickly, focusing on the ocean.
“What’did I say something bad?”
She didn’t respond or react in any way.
“Okay, sorry,” he said. “You don’t want to talk about it.”
She gave him a measured sidelong glance, and then rolled her eyes.
“Oops,” he said. He was quiet for a moment. “But don’t you want that neck thing taken off? I’m just worried what will happen’like, to your neck, and your voice and stuff if it comes off. Plus, we don’t exactly have the right tools here.”
The girl raised her hands and put them in front of Alex’s face, pushing him away. He took her wrists and gently moved them apart so he could see her face. “I don’t understand,” he said.
She bit her lip and turned her face away, and now it was her turn to cry.
“Dang it,” he said under his breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
He dropped her wrists and scrambled to his knees, sinking his hands deep into his pockets to see if he had a hankie, forgetting that all of his clothes had been soaked in the ocean, along with everything in his pockets. He pulled out a few bits of wadded-up tissue, some useless scatterclips, and a marble from one pocket. From the other he pulled out something he didn’t recognize at first. It was a folded piece of paper.
And then he gasped, his heart thudding in his chest. He recognized the colorful border design.
It had to be a spell from Mr. Today.
Why hadn’t he thought to check his pockets earlier? His hands shook violently as he tried to unfold it, begging to catch a break’pleading that the ocean water hadn’t washed the magical words away. br />
He didn’t notice the Silent girl watching him, startled from her tears by his sudden strange behavior. Finally he got the paper open and he smoothed it carefully. The words were there. They’d not been washed away at all. Each letter was bright and clear as the morning sky.
He held the note up to the light of the moon and read:
To whom it may concern:
Follow the dots as the traveling sun,
Magnify, focus, every one.
Stand enrobed where you first saw me,
Utter in order; repeat times three.
I apologize for the cryptic nature of this note, but I know you’ll understand. I’m sorry, my boy’so very sorry. I’ve left you what you need in my chambers, but if something unexpected happens, follow the above.
Yours,
Marcus Today
P.S. Five heart attack components, what a waste! He could’ve done the deed with three. Ha-ha! Ouch.
P.P.S. In case you’re curious, he’s got two left on the desk. Remember for later.
Farewell. I do believe in you.
Alex stared at the note. He read it once, and a second time. His heart ached, remembering the amazing Mr. Today, and it made him feel a little bit better to know that the old mage was jolly enough to make a joke, even at the end.
But Alex’s eyes kept going back to the spell, which made almost no sense at all.
The only word that stuck out was “enrobed.” He knew what that meant. He clutched Mr. Today’s robe like it was a gift made of gold, and he delighted in the ease of its acquisition. “Ha!” he said aloud, looking up. Aaron had given him something invaluable and he hadn’t even meant to!
All Alex had to do was figure out what the rest of it meant, then wear the robe, and ta-da’Artimé would be back.
Alex’s blood surged. To have such a valuable clue put him about a hundred times closer to saving Artimé than he’d been five minutes ago. He was so excited that he nearly lost his balance and fell off the roof, but the Silent girl grabbed his shirt just in time. He steadied himself, sat back down, and squeezed her hand, thanking her.