Island of Fire (The Unwanteds) (13 page)

“Ms. Octavia,” he said, breathless as he reached her, and then he stopped short. Her glasses were askew, eyes red. She’d been crying into the water as gentle waves licked her tentacles, and Alex remembered how Mr. Today had created her—she came from the sea, he’d said. Alex’s heart surged, knowing
what loss she was feeling. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?” he said.

“Indeed it is,” the octogator said, drawing a dry tentacle across her snout to catch the tears. “It feels a bit like my soul has been torn away. Like perhaps I shouldn’t exist without him.”

Alex remained quiet. Nothing he could say was important enough to stand next to her words, for she, like all creatures and statues, had something from Mr. Today that he did not, and that was life itself. Instead of trying to pretend that he knew how she felt, he peered out over the waves and waited.

After a time, Ms. Octavia cleared her throat and inhaled a large, reverberating sniff. She turned to Alex. “Now then,” she said, not quite in her regular, stern voice, but almost. “How can I help you, my dear boy?”

Alex regarded her with a solemn look, wondering if she were up to the task but knowing it would take him days, even weeks, and they couldn’t afford that kind of time. He had no choice but to ask. “Ms. Octavia, for reasons I don’t have time to explain right now, there are upward of fifty Unwanteds trapped in Mr. Today’s secret hallway, and they can’t get out. How quickly can you make a 3-D door?”

A
s it turned out, Ms. Octavia had a stash of 3-D doors in her classroom that she employed for various purposes throughout the years. She grabbed the theater door drawing, which she used fairly often to get Simber and Florence in and out of the theater for assemblies. She and Alex brought it upstairs to the secret hallway, where people were beginning to get anxious.

Alex cleared a space. Ms. Octavia unrolled the large drawing and pasted it to the wall between the museum and the kitchenette.

The door wavered and then pushed out from the wall: wooden slats, hinges, and all.

“Now then,” Ms. Octavia said as she reached for the protruding handle and pulled open the enormous, creaking door that led to Mr. Appleblossom’s sanctuary, “head through the theater to the tubes and be on your way.”

The Artiméans cheered and pressed forward through the door. In no time, the hallway was clear once again, except for Simber, Ms. Octavia, and Alex.

Ms. Octavia swished over to peek into Mr. Today’s office and the kitchenette. “Is that everyone?”

“Seems to be.” Alex frowned. “Wait—not quite. I almost forgot! I’ll be right back.” He rushed over to the Museum of Large, where the door was still open a crack. He went in and looked around, spying Meghan sitting near the enormous restored pirate ship, surrounded by stacks of books. Alex walked over to her and looked at them. The book closest to him looked quite new, though some of its pages were wavy, as if they’d gotten wet. It was the strangest title he’d seen yet:
Yodeling Groceries: 100 Awesome Slang Words for Vomit.

“Any luck?” Alex leaned against the bow of the ship. It whispered unintelligibly as it had done in the past.

Meghan looked up and smiled sadly. Then shook her head.

“Well,” Alex said with a grin, “the good news is that we’ve found another way out. Come on.”

Meghan’s eyes lit up.

Alex pulled her to her feet. Meghan grabbed the vomit book, grinned, and showed Alex a page, making him laugh out loud for the first time in a long time. “What are groceries, anyway?” he asked.

Meghan shrugged. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter. She tucked the book inside her vest to read later.

As they walked out of the museum, Alex grew serious again. “So, um, do you want us to try to get that thing off your neck? I mean, if the medical people think it’s safe to do?”

Meghan looked at him. She nodded and her mouth opened to say a silent yes. Her face was desperate.

“Even if there’s a chance your voice never comes back?”

Meghan hesitated, closing her eyes for a second and taking a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, she nodded again.

“You go it,” Alex said. “I promise we’ll do everything we can to hear you sing again.”

Meghan teared up and grabbed Alex’s arm. Together they
left the museum, Alex sealing it magically once again. They moved down the hallway.

“I’ll walk with Meg through the door,” Alex said to his instructor, who waited patiently to take the door down and store it away safely once again.

Ms. Octavia, who hadn’t seen Meghan since before Artimé disappeared, startled at the sight of the girl’s necklace of thorns. “Oh dear,” she said, reaching out to give Meghan a hug, while looking vastly puzzled all the same. “I can’t begin to imagine the depths of heartache I missed.”

Alex gave her and Simber a grim smile.
I can’t begin to tell you,
he thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead he said, “Now that everything seems to have settled, I’d like to meet with you two and Florence as soon as possible.” He looked down at his clothes, still partially covered by Mr. Today’s oversized robe. “But I have a feeling I should probably clean up first,” he said, realizing he must smell pretty bad by now. He looked from Ms. Octavia to Simber. “Mr. Today’s office in an hour, then?”

The cat regarded the dirty, disheveled new leader of Artimé, who had grown considerably more confident and decisive in the time Simber had been at the bottom of the ocean. He
tipped his head in solemn agreement. “An hourrr,” he agreed. “But it’s
yourrr
office now.”

At those words, Alex felt his lungs turn to ice. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to comprehend it. When he looked up once more, he gave Simber and Ms. Octavia a grim nod. He turned to Meghan, who gave him a reassuring smile as they stepped through the door to the theater.

After Ms. Octavia had closed the door and pulled the 3-D drawing from the wall, she rolled it up and tucked it under an appendage. She and Simber left to check on tasks below, while Charlie the gargoyle wandered into the secret hallway unnoticed. He tottered to the end and peered into the office, then turned, crossed the hallway, and peeked into the kitchenette. A moment later he retreated from there as well and went back down the hallway the way he’d come, a puzzled look on his face. He stopped at the door of Mr. Today’s private living quarters and pressed his ear against it. And then he knocked.

When no one answered, Charlie turned around and sat down in front of the door, drew his knees close to his chest, tilted his head to lean it against the molding, and waited for his master to return.

L
ani kicked and wriggled until she was exhausted, but the large man carrying her only squeezed the breath out of her. She stopped fighting and started trying to focus her limited sight on where they were going, but she was soon totally turned around in the maze of tunnels, all lit by candle sconces attached to the walls. Every now and then, when the man walked close enough to the wall, Lani kicked out, hoping she was making a mark of some sort. Her sight wasn’t quite good enough to tell at this point, but the low lighting certainly helped her see a little bit better.

After a ten-minute walk through a warren of underground
passageways, the man finally ducked into a room with elaborate decorations. At the far end was a low, round platform upon which a jeweled gold throne stood. Sitting on the throne was a stately woman with long silver hair and thin, wrinkled lips. She wore a cloth band around her head, from which strings of tiny, bright sparkling stones fell all around her shoulders. She had a stern look on her face.

The man carrying Lani flipped the girl around, setting her on her feet. He pulled a chain from his pocket and clipped one end to her thorny necklace and locked it in place. The other end had a clasp, which he snapped onto to a thin wire above their heads, well out of Lani’s reach. He locked that end as well.

Lani squinted at the woman sitting on the throne. Her clothes were simple enough—light-colored linen, like the clothes worn by the other people Lani had seen before they put the painful acid in her eyes. But the one thing that was different about this woman was that she didn’t wear a necklace of thorns like nearly everyone else.

“Still causing trouble, I see.”

Lani almost fell over—there was no other sound anywhere
on this strange, creepy island, and she hadn’t heard a single thing in weeks. It was almost with relief that she discovered she wasn’t deaf. So it took her a few moments to recover enough to realize that the woman’s voice seemed eerily familiar.

Squinting even more as her eyes adjusted to the light, Lani took in the woman’s features. Her erect stature, her long silver hair, her pale, wrinkled skin . . . and that voice. It gave Lani chills, and not the good kind.

“I wonder where you came from.” The queen, or whoever she was, tapped her lips with her forefinger. Her fingernails were several inches long, and they curled around in various fascinating ways.

Lani’s eyes widened.

“
Tch
. Shame you can’t speak. You’ll learn the sign language soon enough, and then we’ll have a chat about your friend who got away. Guards!” she called.

Lani sucked in a gasp, but it made no sound.
Meghan got away!
As two more hulking men came out of nowhere to grab her by the elbows, she realized this queen bore a striking resemblance to the woman Lani had destroyed—the High Priest Justine.

» » « «

Back in the cave, Samheed lay still for a long time. When he awoke, he was alone and his hands were empty. He blinked a few times before he remembered what had happened. His head pounded and ached, and when he reached back to the source of the pain, his fingers came away sticky with blood.

But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about the blood, or about his aching head, or about his sore body from being slammed to the ground. All he cared about was Lani, and Lani was gone.

He covered his face. His hand felt so empty without hers. And for the first time in Samheed’s life, he felt like giving up. He’d faced death before, twice. But this abandonment felt worse somehow. Maybe it was because at the Purge he wasn’t alone, and when his father had tried to kill him during the battle, he wasn’t alone then, either, and he was able to use his anger to stand up against fear. As long as he had people on his side, he gathered strength and courage from them.

But the people of this island had apparently found Samheed’s ultimate weakness. He rolled to his side and curled up, hoping to become small enough to disappear. As he lay there, a very subtle change began to take place. It was so slight that he didn’t notice
it at first, but after a time, he blinked. And then he sat up. He craned his neck and squinted. And then he crawled on his hands and knees in a straight line and reached out.

His fingers grasped the water bucket on the first try.

Samheed could see.

A
lex took the theater tube directly to his room, avoiding the excited Artiméans who roamed the hallways and staircase. He put his hand up to shush Clive and went straight into his private quarters, drew a steamy, soapy bath, and scrubbed and soaked in it. He even had to drain it once and refill it because he was so dirty after weeks of not showering at all.