If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (5 page)

Half laughing, half crying with relief, Cass and Max-Ernest each shook the man’s hand and then scrambled onto the boat.

They were safe!

H
ard alee!”

The ship tacked to the left and leaned precipitously.

Cass and Max-Ernest grabbed each other, laughing, as a spray of water hit them in the face.

Around them, the crew hoisted and foisted. Sails whipped in the wind — until they caught and went taut. And everywhere the ship’s brass fittings flared in the sun.

“Don’t worry, this ship is sound!” shouted their host, leading them onto a wooden deck so swabbed and polished that it shined like glass. “She may be two hundred years old, but she’s armed with all the latest technology!”

“We’re not worried!” Cass shouted back. How could they be? The ship was glorious to behold.

And yet, she couldn’t help noticing, she couldn’t help feeling, this man so closely resembled Dr. L it was unnerving. He had the same perfect silver hair that seemed frozen in some kind of eternal wind. The same perfect tan skin and perfect white teeth that made him look more like a photograph than a person. The same distinctively indistinctive accent.

How was it that in Cass’s imagination Pietro hadn’t resembled his brother in the least? Usually, she’d pictured a long, snowy beard, twinkling eyes, and a wizard’s cloak — or, sometimes, a tuxedo and a top hat. Occasionally, she’d imagined an old adventurer in a pith helmet. But never
him.
Never
this.

She shook off the thought. Here at last was
her
adventure. The one she’d been waiting for for so long. Enjoy it, she told herself.

“Cassandra, Max-Ernest — can you tighten this line for me?” their host asked. “That’s a winch. You crank it this way —”

He started the job for them. Then said, “I’ve got to get something below. Back in a minute,” and he headed away.

Thrilled to be given a task, Cass tossed her backpack aside and joined hands with Max-Ernest. Together they began to tighten a line to the ship’s rearmost sail.

And then, suddenly, the line went slack.

Before they knew what was happening, the rope was looped around them and they were pulled off their feet. They fell together onto the hardwood deck and slid across the polished surface.

“Hey!” said Cass.

“Ow!” said Max-Ernest.

Roughly, a deckhand began to tie Cass and Max-Ernest to each other back-to-back.

“What are you doing?!” Cass cried. “Pietro! Where are you?”

“Stop that! That hurts!” protested Max-Ernest.

“You won’t struggle if you know what’s good for you!” threatened the deckhand. He tied their hands together for good measure, then left them lying in shock on the deck.

“You think this is like a test — to see how we would act if we were captured?” asked Cass, fighting back tears.

“Maybe, unless — oh no! Look —” Max-Ernest nodded upward with his nose.

From their new vantage point, they could see for the first time the flag flapping in the wind on top of the boat’s tallest mast.

I wish I could tell you it was the flag of the Terces Society. Or, for that matter, the flag of the Royal Navy or the merchant marine. Or even that it was a skull and crossbones — surely a pirate ship would have been preferable to the reality.

Alas, the flag was none of those things.

Rather, it showed a white sun emblazoned on a black background.

The flag of the Midnight Sun.

Although tied back-to-back and unable to see each other, Cass and Max-Ernest shared the same expression of despair.

They were prisoners. Again.

And nobody — not even the Terces Society — knew.

“What are
those
?”

A minute later, two skeletally skinny girls — twins — hovered over Cass and Max-Ernest, eyeing the ship’s new captives with lazy curiosity.

Aside from their differently colored hair (one was blonde with pink streaks, the other brown with purple streaks) and differently colored bikinis (one was pink with purple polka dots, the other purple with pink polka dots), they looked nearly identical.

Judging by their faces, they might have been about sixteen or seventeen, but I wouldn’t try to guess their real ages. They were, after all, part of the Midnight Sun. As Cass and Max-Ernest could tell immediately by the gloves on their hands.

“Those what?” asked the purple-er one.

“Them,”
said the pinker one, pointing with a curl of her toe. She moved with an odd jerkiness — as if she were a marionette on a string.

“Oh,
those,
” said the purple-er one.

“Yeah, Elf Ears and Electro Hair,” said the pinker one.

Only now did Cass and Max-Ernest realize that it was they who were being spoken about. In the third person.

“I’m Cass. This is Max-Ernest,” said Cass, forcing herself to speak boldly. “There was a terrible mistake. Please, could you —”

“Elf is a Cass. Electro is a Max-Ernest,” said the purple-er one, ignoring Cass.

“Oh. Well, what’s that, then?”

“I just told you — it’s a Cass.”

“No,
that —
that
thing
!” said the pinker one. She pointed her toe at Cass’s sock-monster, hanging from Cass’s backpack — a few feet out of Cass’s reach.

“Oh,
that.
That is so cute. I so want it!”

“Well, I so want it more!”

“But you said you don’t know what it is. . . .”

“Neither do you!”

“So?”

“So there.”

“Hey, that’s my sock-monster, and you can both have him —
if
you untie us,” said Cass, desperate. “I’ll even make you another one.”

The girls stared at Cass as if she had just levitated or turned into a frog.

“No way! I think it just told us to do something!” said the purple-er one.

“No way! I’m taking that thing. Just to show it a lesson.”

“No way!
I’m
taking it —”

They both lunged for Cass’s sock-monster — and slammed into each other. Their bony bodies toppled to the ground, right on top of Cass and Max-Ernest. Their suntanned skin was unexpectedly clammy and cold — and made Cass and Max-Ernest’s skin grow cold in turn.

“It’s mine!”

“No, it’s mine!”

The ghoulish girls each pulled on one of the sock-monster’s tennis shoe tongue ears trying to tear the sock-monster away from the other.

“Hey, leave us — I mean them, I mean
it
— alone!” said Max-Ernest, sounding unusually brave and force-ful, if a little confused.

“Having fun, children?” asked an icy voice that will be unmistakable to readers of my first book, but that would, I think, send chills down the spines of anyone unlucky enough to hear it.

Even the two sisters seemed to feel it; they shrank away from Cass and Max-Ernest, leaving the sock-monster lying on the deck.

Yes, I’m afraid the voice belonged to Ms. Mauvais.

In contrast to the loud, clacking sisters, she walked toward Cass and Max-Ernest with an almost preternatural calm.

Although dressed for the sea in gleaming white, Ms. Mauvais seemed to carry with her a kind of darkness. No friend of the sun, she exposed hardly a speck of skin to the elements. To shade her face, she wore a hat with a brim so broad she appeared to be sprouting wings. To shield her eyes, she wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses so enormous they gave her head the look of a space alien or maybe a gigantic fly. And to cover her ancient clawlike hands, the sight of which Cass and Max-Ernest remembered with such horror, she wore long white gloves that made her arms look like the limbs of an albino praying mantis.

Of Ms. Mauvais herself, you could see only a mouth — admittedly an exquisitely beautiful and evermore youthful-looking mouth — and even that she’d covered with a frosty white lipstick that glittered with an unnatural phosphorescence.

“Ah, Max-Ernest, darling! And my dear Cassandra,” cried Ms. Mauvais, circling her captives so she could get a good look at both of them. “To happy reunions!” She raised her cocktail glass, ice tinkling in tune with her voice.

I wouldn’t call it that, Cass thought grimly.

“I see you’ve met Romi and Montana Skelton.”

So these were the famous Skelton Sisters? Cass marveled. What a sick joke! Max-Ernest had been right months ago when he mistakenly referred to them as the
Skeleton
Sisters. Had Cass not been tied up on an enemy ship far out at sea and been certain to die any moment, she might have laughed.

“I’m afraid I still don’t see the family resemblance.” Ms. Mauvais chuckled drily.
^*

“Well, have they told you where he is?” asked Dr. L, emerging from belowdecks — for of course it had been he, not Pietro, who’d welcomed them onto the ship.

“Not yet, darling. I was just getting to it,” Ms. Mauvais answered.

How could she have let this awful, plastic man convince her he was Pietro? Cass wondered.

True, he and Pietro were twins. But, as Cass and Max-Ernest well knew, Dr. L had gone to great, even murderous lengths to stay so young, so handsome. Even if he wasn’t the bearded wizard of her fantasies, Pietro would have looked much older by now. Older and wiser. Older and kinder.

Come to think of it, would a Terces Society boat look anything like this shiny ship? A Terces vessel, Cass suddenly felt sure, would be smaller and scrappier, fit for stealthy missions and dangerous adventures. This Midnight Sun ship was better fit for a pleasure cruise.

Or maybe a television ad.

She’d been so desperate to join the Terces Society that she’d been willing to believe anything.

Ms. Mauvais turned back to Cass and Max-Ernest. “Well?”

“Well . . . w-w-what?” stammered Max-Ernest.

“Where. Is. He?” asked Ms. Mauvais, stone- faced.

“Where is who?” asked Cass, confused. “Pietro?”

“The homunculus, fool!”

“The hom —
what
?” asked Max-Ernest.

“THE HOMUNCULUS! I’m warning you, don’t play with me.”

“Believe me, we would never play with you,” said Cass.

“We don’t even know what a homunculus is,” said Max-Ernest. “Well, I don’t know what it is. And if I don’t know, I doubt she knows. Not that she doesn’t know things that I don’t know, but this kind of —”

“Silence!”

Ms. Mauvais picked up Cass’s battered sock-monster and dangled it in front of them as if it were a dead mouse. “What, pray tell, is this?!”

“My sock-monster — I made it.”

“I see. And
whom
was it modeled after? Tell me that!”

“Nobody. He’s just made from a sock.” Cass certainly wasn’t about to say he was modeled after a creature in her dreams.

“You expect me to believe this thing isn’t supposed to be a homunculus? You must think me very dumb.”

“Hey, give that to us!” / “Yeah, give it to us!” said Romi and Montana, who’d perked up as soon as the sock-monster was mentioned.

Ms. Mauvais eyed them in irritation. “Don’t you girls have a concert to prepare for?”

She tossed the sock-monster to them, and they chased after it like two ungainly puppies after a ball. Cass watched sadly — now she’d never get her sock-monster back.

“You needn’t bother pretending,” said Dr. L. “We know you’re members of the Terces Society now. Or have you forgotten how we got you here?”

“But we’re not pretending!” cried Cass.

“If you tell us where the homunculus is, we’ll give you a life preserver when we toss you over, and there’s a chance — a small chance — that someone will save you. Otherwise —”

“Otherwise, our chef is very eager to make shark fin soup, but so far all we’ve been able to catch is tuna,” said Ms. Mauvais.
^*

She gestured toward three deckhands who were wrestling with an enormous tuna. It thrashed wildly until one of the men slit its belly with a knife. Guts spilled onto the deck.

“We’ve been looking for the right bait,” said Dr. L. “If you don’t tell us, we’ll make sure you’re both dripping plenty of blood before we drop you in the ocean.”

Cass and Max-Ernest gripped each other’s hands.

“Did you know sharks smell blood from over a mile away?” continued Dr. L. “It’s a unique evolutionary feature.”

“They also sense electricity and movement,” said Max-Ernest, unable to stop himself. “They call it shark sense. How ’bout that?”

“Very good,” said Dr. L, not looking like he particularly meant it. “So try not to splash when you hit the water.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have time for marine biology lessons,” said Ms. Mauvais. “The Midnight Sun has been waiting five hundred years for the homunculus to rise. We will not wait any longer.”

She waved to one of the deckhands chopping up the tuna. “You there — take these kids below!”

Then she turned back to Cass and Max-Ernest. “You destroyed our lives once,” she said with a voice as cold and smoky and unnatural as dry ice. “But with your help we’re going to live forever.”

Not bothering to wipe the fish guts off his hands, the deckhand grabbed Cass and Max-Ernest by their ears and dragged them away — right past the Skelton Sisters, who were lying on deck chairs in the sun, Cass’s sock-monster perched between them.