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Eva Fathom and Liam Healy talked long into the night, Eva filling him in on the original plan she’d had with Marcus and how everything had gone wrong. Liam was brimming with questions, but there were two that pestered him most, and finally he asked, “How do you know so much about what’s happening in Artimé? Don’t you have a daughter there?”
Eva shook her head. “That’s one secret I need to keep for now.”
Liam nodded and was silent, too scared to ask the question that had plagued him all the time he’d languished in the Ancients Sector. He was well aware that he didn’t deserve to know the answer. But the guilt never let up, and his mind never let go. Is Claire okay?
A Sighting
By morning, word spread that Florence had been seen but no one had been able to tell if she was alive or dead. All the Artiméans could do while the island was underwater was go over their newly revised plan and wait for the volcano to surface again.
Alex laid down the logic. “We can’t release the creatures and rescue Florence until after we have Sky and Crow’s mother, or else the pirates will know we’re here and it’ll ruin everything. So we’ve got to get Copper first, and then immediately be ready to break into the aquarium and get Florence. Simber,” Alex said, not looking at him, “I may need you to break the glass skylight. We’ll try the route through the fishing hatch first, of course. Obviously, we don’t want the whole population to drown if the volcano sinks and water starts pouring in the hole, but hopefully I’d have time to repair it with a glass spell before they’d go down again.”
“I can brrreak glass, as you well know.”
Alex frowned. He knew, all right. Simber had had to shatter a glass wall spell in Justine’s palace once, long ago. “Well, good. Is everybody clear on the plan?”
They were clear.
“Let’s take the ship out a little farther, Captain,” Alex said. “And batten down the hatches, or whatever. We’re going to have another giant wave when the island comes up.”
The Captain gave the order to nobody in particular. Sean and Lani took over the battening, and soon everyone was making sure their things were secure. “At least this time we can all swim,” Sean said.
“I’m still climbing up the ropes,” Sky muttered. She was a bit on edge due to all the waiting. It was hard, wondering whether her mother was even alive, not to mention where she could possibly be in that . . . that giant terrarium. Add in Alex’s recent weird behavior, and it was enough to unsettle anybody.
She stood with Crow at the back of the ship, staring in the direction of where the island should be, as Ahab maneuvered the ship away. Alex joined them.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m just checking in. Are you guys doing all right?” He kept his eyes trained on Crow, only flitting to Sky for a split second now and then.
Crow shrugged. “Yeah.”
Sky gave Alex a grim smile and lied. “I guess.” They were quiet for a moment. “What if she never passes underneath that skylight again?”
There were so many what-ifs. Alex had a lot of ideas about what to do. Dangerous ones. He didn’t want to have to carry any of them out. Now he met Sky’s gaze. “We’ll find her,” he said, and he meant it. “We’ll man the other skylights too, now that we know where they are. We’re not leaving here until we have your mother with us.”
Sky looked up at Alex, her eyes glistening. Maybe she had imagined the growing distance between them. She popped up on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on Alex’s cheek.
He closed his eyes briefly, as if in pain, and then smiled, but when he lifted his lids again, the distance was back in his eyes.
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They slept in shifts throughout the day, watching. Waiting. Talking. Playing games to pass the time. Sleeping some more. Henry taught Crow, Sean, and Fox about the different ingredients he used in his medicines. Lani pulled the wrinkled, ragged-edged paper from her bag once more, smoothed it, and studied it for hours before she got tired of it and put it away. Sky kept to herself.
It wasn’t long before every one of them went from eager to on edge. They tried not to let the close quarters and anxiety lead to arguing and short tempers, but it didn’t always work. Alex and Simber’s short bits of communication remained strained. And during the quiet times when Alex allowed himself to get lost in his thoughts, he worried quite a bit that things would never be the same between him and the stone cheetah, and that their relationship was permanently damaged. It was painful, but it also made him mad, like he wanted to punch somebody in the face. Worse, he didn’t know how to fix it, and that scared him. A lot.
And then there was Sky. Alex kept having to push her face from his mind. He couldn’t deal with those feelings on top of everything else. And he couldn’t mess this up. He wouldn’t. Being mage, performing a successful mission—it was way more important than anything.
When Pirate Island finally came shooting up out of the water and it blew its stack, everyone jumped into action. The wave came on strong, and Captain Ahab steered the ship into it. The wall of water hit them, washing a few of them overboard despite their preparations, but Simber plucked them out of the water as usual, and other than a few bumps and bruises, everyone was all right. Even Captain Ahab managed to keep his wooden leg, which gave the statue nothing to moan about afterward, so the entire course of events went along rather ho-hummedly.