It was no use. The tube was broken beyond repair.
He kept trying, barely noticing the worsening storm until the sky grew too dark for him to see clearly. He looked up just in time to see a big scrubby bush flying through the air straight at him. Alex covered his face and let out a gasp as it slammed into the side of the tube, then bounced around it, out of sight.
Alex opened his eyes. He had to get to the shelter. He took one last look at the control panel, which now resembled something Carina’s young son Seth might create—a pile of junk all stuck together—and shook his head. This tube would never work again. Eyeing the storm, he hoisted the bag to his shoulder, took a breath, and dashed out into it. The wind nearly took him away, so he bent down and pressed forward, shielding his face from the blowing bits of dirt and brush and the thick waves of rain, until finally he made it back to the shelter. He staggered past Florence and ducked inside, the wind howling behind him.
When he lifted his head, he saw the Artiméans awaiting him with hopeful faces. Alex, streaming wet, took one look at them, sighed, and shook his head. “There’s no fixing it,” he said. “Maybe Ms. Morning or Mr. Appleblossom would know what to do if they were here, but they’re not. I tried everything I could think of.”
Fear returned to their eyes. Another hope dashed.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said.
“But what—” Crow began.
Alex interrupted. “We keep working on the ship until Simber comes,” he said. He looked from one dejected face to the next. “Please, just focus on the ship, and find useful things to do during the times we’re stuck inside. Got it?” His words came out sharper than he intended, but he couldn’t stand to hear another person ask what they’d do if Simber didn’t come back. He wiped the rain and dirt from his eyes, and added with false surety, “He’s coming back.”
The murmurs began anew.
Something about this situation reminded Alex of when Artimé was lost, and people were getting restless and angry. Only back then he’d had his silent partner to lean on. She was here now, but there was no leaning. She was among the first to turn away.
One by one his friends walked off, leaving Alex to brood alone.
The Art of Rebuilding
With such a limited amount of time each day to scavenge the other wrecks, shipbuilding was slow. Florence could work longer than the others in the gale-force winds each day, but not much—it didn’t take very many minutes for the wind to be so furious that it would rip material and tools right out of her hands and carry them skittering across the rocky ground, no matter how hard she tried to hold on.
After the first few days of waiting just a little too long to pack up the excess material only to lose it to the wind, Florence, Copper, and Sky began to pay careful attention to the storm’s warning signs. Florence and Copper instructed the scavengers to gather up the extra material before it was too late and carry into the shelter each day when the hurricane returned. And they used the time in the shelter to construct the necessary pieces for the next day.
The scavengers had a variety of other things to keep them busy as well when they were forced inside the stone structure. Captain Ahab needed attention after his injuries, so Ms. Octavia did what she could to help him hear once more, going so far as to take his head apart and clean it out to see if that would help him make a bit more sense. Inside she found quite a lot of cobwebs, a tiny mouse that was slightly larger than Kitten, three honeybees, and a rather delicate butterfly cocoon attached to a twig. Everyone was quite sure these items must have contributed to the statue’s increasing dementia. Ms. Octavia also found some pieces of Ahab’s broken ear inside, which was definitely causing the rattling sound.
They placed the cocoon in a jar in the greenhouse where Ishibashi, Ito, and Sato could watch for the butterfly to appear, and they shooed the honeybees in that direction as well, to the scientists’ great delight. They let the mouse run about through the cave, where it chased Kitten and pounced on her a little too rambunctiously, causing Kitten’s porcelain tail to get a chip in it. Luckily, Ms. Octavia fixed Kitten immediately, and then she herded the little mouse into one of the unused nooks and gave it some food and materials for nest making, which kept it busy from that point on.
Once Ahab’s head was put back together and reattached, he felt better than he had in a long time, and he began to help with the ship’s reconstruction, choosing the grand task of making a new helm from chunks of driftwood. Fox delivered some giant auger shells to the shelter, courtesy of Spike, who had batted them ashore with her tail. Ahab used the shells for the wheel’s spindles, which gave it an exotic look.
Henry and Crow spent part of their indoor time helping Alex with spell components and assisting Copper with ship parts. But Henry often snuck away from the others and tagged along after Ishibashi, learning about the greenhouse that Mr. Today had helped create, and talking to the little man about scientific things.
Samheed, Lani, and Alex collected moss and pebbles every chance they could get to try to create new magical spells. Ishibashi was gracious enough to let them go through the storage room as well as his personal collection of strange items that he’d picked up from wreckages over the years. There they found a large bucket of something called rubber cement, which Alex determined was perfect to help seal and preserve the ship—once he added a little magic, of course. He and the others went to work rolling bits of the rubber cement into tiny component-size balls so they’d be ready as soon as Florence and Copper finished the repairs. And while he worked, Alex thought and thought about how to construct the flying carpet component. After a few failed attempts at creating something viable with the moss he’d collected, he came to the conclusion that there was no way to make the moss dense enough without a loom to weave it. And that was definitely one thing Ishibashi didn’t have.