I smiled despite the gravity of the situation. Just call you Hermione, oh brilliant one?
Exactly.
We went back through the passage, swam over the death and destruction in the city, and out to the open ocean through the trench.
Mahina headed right, but I stopped her. We need to go this way.
You’re turned around, Tempest. Australia is in the opposite direction.
Yes, but there’s something we need to do first. You said Tiamat had taken away my every source of advice.
Well, yeah. She pretty much did, didn’t she?
There’s one left. I dived deeper. It was easier to travel fast the closer to the ocean floor I was.
Who? Mahina demanded.
My mother.
I sped toward Cecily’s cave, blind and deaf to anything but getting to those pearls. They were her regrets and memories, yes, but I didn’t believe they existed only to torture me, physically and emotionally. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but maybe, just maybe, there was advice in that cavern that would help me do what my mother had. That would help me defeat Tiamat—if not forever, then at least until the clans could grow strong again.
Three hours later, we hit the cavern fast, so fast that I nearly slammed right into the rock formations that decorated the first room.
Where are we? Mahina asked her first question in hours.
This cave was my mother’s, I told her. She left memories for me here.
Mahina caught on quickly. So, if we’re lucky, there will be some kind of how-to-take-down-Tiamat instruction manual?
If we’re very, very lucky.
We coasted through the passages, avoiding the fire coral, and within minutes ended up in the pearl-lined chamber.
Holy crap, breathed Mahina as soon as she saw them. That’s a lot of memories.
Tell me about it.
Now that I was here again, staring at all those pearls, what I had planned seemed like a daunting task. Or, to be honest, more like an impossible one. How was I supposed to find the right memory among all of these? If each of them hurt as much as the other two had, I wouldn’t survive long enough to die at Tiamat’s hands. My mother would take care of me for her.
Still, I’d come all this way in a last-ditch attempt to find something. I had to try.
Swimming forward, I zipped around the circle, coasting by the pearls, waiting for something, anything. A sign, maybe, or an electric current like the one that had pulled me here to begin with. But there was nothing. Finally I gave up and just grabbed a pearl.
I braced myself for the pain, and it didn’t disappoint—fire licked through me. But I didn’t fight it this time. Instead, I let it take me over in one incendiary rush. It was intense, but before the pain had even begun to dissipate, the memory started playing before my eyes.
This time my mother was with Hailana above water, and it only took a minute for me to realize that she was making a deal with the devil. Or pretty close to it. They were arguing over something, someone, with my mother asserting that it wasn’t time, that she wasn’t old enough yet while Hailana insisted that she was. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out they were talking about me, any more than it took one to realize my mother had completely sold me out by the end of the conversation.
I couldn’t say how it still managed to surprise me, but it did.
I dropped that pearl, reached for another. This one was Cecily as a young mother, completely overwhelmed. I was sitting in my high chair screaming while she tried everything to comfort me. I didn’t stop until my father came home and swept me into his arms. We went down to the beach and he held my hands while I toddled along the water, my face still stained with tears.
I threw the pearl down in disgust. On another day, at another time, this would all be completely illuminating. For now, however, none of these memories were getting me any closer to finding Kona than I currently was. I stepped back, looked around the chamber, hoping for some kind of inspiration.
My eyes fell on the sea glass and I remembered that first one I’d looked at, of my surfing competition. I felt like an idiot—wouldn’t the information about what I needed to do to defeat Tiamat be in the sea glass, not the pearls? Good things, not regrets?
I reached for the closest piece, a red one, but something stopped me. Instead, I picked up a shard of purple sea glass—rare and beautiful, it called to me in a way the others didn’t.
The second my hand closed around it, memories bombarded me from all sides. My mother locked in bloody battle with Tiamat. They fought viciously, horribly, using whatever weapons they had at their disposal. My mother blasted Tiamat with all the power she had, but the witch only laughed—until that power reached through her defenses to slam against her tender underbelly.
Then she retreated.
I dropped the sea glass, picked up another purple one. Saw Tiamat wound my mother this time. She fooled her, feinted, got her from behind. And once her scaly tentacles were wrapped around Cecily, there was no getting out. My mother would have died if Hailana hadn’t managed to cause some damage of her own.
On and on I went, pulling one piece of purple sea glass off the shelf after another. I was focused, in a frenzy, determined to learn everything I could about this monster who had taken so much from me. I could sense Mahina behind me, and though she couldn’t do anything, her presence comforted me. Even though I would never let her get close enough to fight Tiamat, the fact that I wasn’t alone now—that I wouldn’t be alone during that long swim to Australia—meant more than I could ever tell her.
Memory after memory poured through me and out into the chamber, showing Mahina and me Tiamat’s strengths and weaknesses. Showing us how she fought and the best way to counter her. Some of the battles my mother and Hailana lost, some they won. Sometimes Malakai was there and in some of the most recent, so was Kona’s mother. I absorbed as much knowledge from the battles as I could, but in none of them was Tiamat actually vanquished. Much like my own battle with her, there were setbacks—on both sides—even a desertion of the field. But in the end, she always rose stronger than ever.
I watched the last memory—of Malakai, Hailani, Cecily, and a couple of other people trying unsuccessfully to end Tiamat—and felt my hopes dissipate. It wasn’t here.
I looked around the chamber. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the answer wasn’t necessarily in the purple pieces. But there were so many others. There was no time to look at all of them.
Still, it wasn’t like I had a better idea. I reached for a green piece of glass and found one last purple one hiding behind it. My heart jumped and I reached for it, then hesitated at the last minute. This was it. My last chance at figuring out how to defeat Tiamat. If the secret wasn’t here, then it didn’t exist and I would have made this trip in vain. While the other battles had been interesting to watch and had given me glimpses of Tiamat’s fighting style, none had been the advice—the road map to taking her on—that I’d been hoping for. If this one was just more of the same, then I didn’t know what I would do. How I would beat her and get Kona back.
With a deep breath and a silent prayer that this was somehow everything that I was looking for, I closed my fingers tightly around the glass. It bit into my hand, even drew blood despite the worn-down edges, and I knew it was because I was squeezing it so hard.
Behind me, Mahina gasped in alarm, and when I didn’t respond, she tried to pry my fingers from around it. I held on even more tightly, refusing to budge, and was rewarded with a memory unlike any other I had experienced.