Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun (13 page)

PLINK!

Another drip, just like the first, landing on the ground and trickling away as quickly as it had come.

“Hey, I think we should —”

PLINK!

Aaron gritted his teeth. “Come on, we need to catch one of these,” he said. Kind of stating the obvious.

I tried reaching out to catch the drips, but kept missing them. They didn’t drop in the exact same spot each time, so it was hard to judge where the next one was going to fall.

Aaron stepped into the center of the light and held out both hands.

I held my breath and waited. The next drip landed right in his outstretched palms!

“Yes!” he yelled. And then a split second later, he leaped out of the light, clutching his hand, doubled over. “Argghh! It’s burning me!” He was jumping around, waving his hand about. “It’s burning! It’s burning!”

“Quick, over here.” I dragged him to a narrow part of the cave that I’d discovered earlier where there was a small rock pool in the middle of a few boulders. Aaron shoved his hand in the water and instantly calmed down.

After a few moments, he took his hand out. It was red and raw, skin peeling off his palm, blisters already forming.

“What happened?” I asked.

Aaron shook his head. “It’s not just ordinary water. It’s got some kind of magic in it. Remember that memory we saw in the lake? That servant telling Neptune he’d tried to catch the water and burned himself?”

I pulled the water bottle out of my pocket. “Let’s try catching it in this,” I suggested.

“Neptune told the servant he had to catch it in his hands.”

“But we can’t,” I insisted. “So this has got to be worth a try.”

“OK. But let me do it.” Before I could argue, Aaron took the bottle and stood in the center of the shaft of light again. Within seconds, a drip came. He caught it in the bottle on his first attempt.

“Did it!” he said, smiling as he held the bottle out to show me.

His smile faded as we both looked at the bottle. The water had burned all the way through the plastic, scorching a hole in it.

Aaron’s face looked as ragged as his fingers. I wanted to take his hand in mine. I wanted to make it better. I quickly moved away, before I was too tempted.

And then it hit me. The thing about taking Aaron’s hand in mine — and about the magic. Of
course
! How could we have been so stupid?

“Aaron! We have to do it together!”

“No way!” Aaron said straightaway. “I’m not letting you go through this. It’s awful!” Maybe he did care about me, after all. Just a bit.

I brushed the thought away. “We have to do it while holding hands,” I said. “It’s magic, isn’t it? Neptune’s magic. If we hold hands, maybe we can catch the water safely.”

Aaron thought for a moment. “I don’t know. This is really, really painful. If anything like this happened to you, I’d —”

“Aaron, we haven’t got any choice,” I said. “
You
haven’t got any choice. I’m doing it. Come on.”

He followed me back to the light. The drips had slowed. “We’ll have to be quick,” I said. “We don’t know how long it’s going to keep going.”

I gently held his burned hand. “Hold the other one out,” I said. “Come on, we can do it together. You know we can.”

Eventually, he nodded reluctantly. “OK,” he said.

We both took a breath, then we stepped into the light, held out our hands, and waited.

I
looked up through the mountain’s vertical tunnel. Above me, the sky was a dusty blue, the sun’s light dancing around the edges of the hole, burning through the ice, making the hole bigger and bigger. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that it was midnight and the sun was shining.

And then, almost in slow motion, I saw it — the drop of water falling toward us. I tightened my grip on Aaron’s hand. “It’s coming,” I said. He looked up and tightened his grip, too. Between us, our outstretched hands made one big cup.

The drip fell directly into our palms.

I took a sharp breath, waiting for the searing pain. But it didn’t come. Instead, the drip of water rolled around in our hands, hardening, turning back into ice, then crystallizing into something more beautiful. It finally came to rest on my palm.

“Wow, it looks like a diamond or something,” Aaron said.

I stared at the crystal, entranced by its beauty.

“Look — another one!”

I glanced up just in time to see the second drip land in our palms. This time it rolled into Aaron’s hand, crystallizing and sparkling just as mine had done.

It happened once more, until we ended up holding three small crystals. We waited another few minutes, but no more drips came.

“I guess that must be it,” Aaron said. “It’s past midnight now.”

“Should we try letting go?” I asked.

Aaron nervously bit his lip. “I suppose we’ll have to at some point,” he said.

“Let’s put the crystals away somewhere first,” I said. “At least, that way if the magic dissolves as soon as we let go, they won’t burn our hands. I’ll take them.” Aaron gave me his crystal and I zipped the three of them into my coat pocket. I turned to him. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Aaron said.

I held my breath as we dropped each other’s hands.

Nothing happened. I patted my pocket to see if the crystals were still there, and they were. They were safe and, more to the point, so were we.

“Right, let’s get out of here,” Aaron said.

“Good idea.” I looked around. Looked left, looked right, straight ahead, behind us. It all looked the same. There were tunnels everywhere. Identical routes — each one leading in a different direction.

“Which way?” I asked, trying not to panic.

Aaron pointed down a tunnel. “That way,” he said confidently. Then he added, a bit less certainly, “I think.”

I set off in the direction he’d suggested. “We might as well try it,” I said. “If it’s wrong, we can always come back and try one of the others.”

Aaron followed me. Soon we were back in total darkness. How we were ever going to know if this was the right direction was anyone’s guess.

But then something weird happened. There was a faint glow coming from somewhere nearby. Was there another hole above us?

I looked up. Nothing.

Then, looking down, I saw it. It was my pocket — it was glowing with light. The crystals!

I pulled one of them out, and it was as though I’d lit a candle. It gave us enough light to see a little ways ahead. We carefully made our way through the tunnel as I held the crystal in front of me like an old-fashioned lamp.

We’d been walking for quite a while when Aaron stopped. “I don’t think this is right,” he said. “We had more twists and turns than this on the way in.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, not sure.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I suppose it’s a bit of a waste to have come all this way and then turn back — especially if we’re not sure it’s the wrong path,” Aaron agreed. “Let’s try going a bit farther.”

We walked on in silence for a while. But the more we walked, the more I began to think that Aaron was right. This felt wrong. It wasn’t just that it didn’t feel like the same route we’d taken coming in, there was more to it than that: a sense that we were moving deeper into the mountain instead of finding our way out of it. I didn’t like it.

Another thing I didn’t like — it was getting cold.
Really
cold. It was only when I tried to call to Aaron and my teeth were chattering so much I could hardly move my mouth that I realized
quite
how cold it was.

Finally, I called out to him. “A-Aaron!”

He stopped and turned. Behind the glowing light of my crystal, his face was as white as ice. “What?” he asked. His lips looked blue.

“It’s f-f-freezing!” I said.

“I know. I think we definitely need to turn back.”

“I agree.” I held my crystal up and we turned back the way we’d come. Just ahead of us, I noticed something I hadn’t seen on the way here. A fork in the tunnel. I didn’t know which one we had come from. A prickle of fear that felt like an icy spear ran through my chest.

“It’s that way,” Aaron said, pointing down the opposite fork from the one I would have chosen.

“I think it’s that way,” I said, pointing down the other one.

The icy spear grew branches and spread out along my arms and legs, filling me with dread. We were lost. Trapped in a cold, damp, dark place inside a mountain covered in a glacier — and no one had the slightest idea we were even here.

Aaron was fumbling in a pocket.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling Neptune,” he said. “He told us to get in touch if we had anything to tell him.”

“He told us to get in touch with information, not to call him if we completely messed up the whole mission and got ourselves lost in the process.”

Aaron stopped rummaging for a moment. Then he brightened, and he began groping around in his pocket again. “Mr. Beeston, then,” he said. “He
definitely
told us to call if we got into trouble. He’ll help us.”

I didn’t want to dampen Aaron’s enthusiasm by telling him that I could probably count the number of times Mr. Beeston had been helpful on the fingers of one hand. And, to be fair, I didn’t have any better ideas.

“Where is it?” Aaron mumbled. “I had it. I’m sure I brought it with me. I must have.”

“You’ve lost your shell phone?”

“It looks like it,” he said hopelessly. “I must have dropped it somewhere.”

The tiny moment of optimism fell away, just like the drops of water earlier — out of reach and dispersing into nothingness. “Great!”

Aaron glared at me. “Well, at least I didn’t give it away before we even got here!” he snapped.

A moment later, he took a step toward me. “Emily, I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, you’re right. It was a stupid thing to do.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll just have to keep trying different routes till we find our way out of here — which we will do. OK?”

“Mmm,” I mumbled.

Aaron lifted my chin. “OK?” he repeated more firmly.

“OK,” I agreed.

“Which one?” he said. “You pick.”

I pointed halfheartedly down the tunnel I’d thought we’d taken to get here. “Let’s try this one first.”

“OK, here’s what we’re going to do,” Aaron said, taking charge and making me wish he was still my boyfriend again for about the twentieth time since we’d agreed how great it was to be friends. “We give it a hundred paces, and if nothing looks familiar by then, we turn back and try the other one.”

It was about as good a plan as we were likely to make, so I agreed, and we set off into the darkness once again.

Eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six
. . . I counted to myself as we walked, almost positive we were going in the wrong direction and about to say so, when we turned a corner and saw something just ahead. It looked like a sculpture. A house made of ice.

Aaron must have seen it at the same moment, as he stopped in his tracks. “What the —”

“It looks like a guard’s hut or something,” I said. It had a pointed top, three solid walls, and the third had an arched opening.

Aaron was saying something, but I didn’t hear it. I was looking beyond the ice house — at a scene I had no words to describe.