The mer-folk pulling the boat let go, and the jolly boat drifted slightly, before settling into a gentle spiral on the water, turning on the invisible current.
A shiver ran down Flick’s spine, settling somewhere around her middle.
The air felt as though it was being held back in the lungs of the ocean.
The mer-folk had disappeared.
It occurred to Flick that, if their plan had been to bring them out here to die, she and her friends had allowed it to happen without a murmur of complaint.
A fresh wave of gooseflesh broke out over her skin. She swallowed, her ears roaring with the quiet of the ocean. The silence had weight, but it also felt empty, as though the emptiness were something Flick was carrying and couldn’t put down. She’d brought them here, after all. She’d lost the suitcase. If she’d just held on tighter, they wouldn’t be here right now, drifting on a mirror of flat water with no sign of life or land. She shut her eyes, trying to get a grip on the anxiety creeping through her veins.
Then she felt cold fingers brush against her own.
Flick opened her eyes.
Avery’s eyes met hers, and she smiled. Warmth blossomed through Flick’s bones, glowed like embers in her face. She looked away to hide the sudden blush, just as Avery did the same.
Oh.
And Flick knew Avery was thinking the same thing. And it felt wonderful and terrifying at the same time.
Wordlessly, they linked pinkie fingers and held on tight.
And then…
Then the water rose.
It looked like a duvet, shifting as a sleeping body turns beneath. The gray-blue water stretched in a dome before it broke on a rising deep gray and black surface. Water streamed down like a waterfall over a head, a flat nose with a single horizontal nostril, the thick curves of a neck and shoulders.
Flick realized in astonishment that she was looking up.
“Oh my god.”
The body continued to rise from the water, higher than a house, then three houses, wider than two buses, each roll and curve of dark skin folding into another. The face that looked down on them was impassive, with glowing yellow eyes framed by thick translucent fronds of skin, so dense that they almost passed for plaits of hair, running down from the scalp.
Flick gasped as she felt the boat rise into the air, gripped in a hand that had swept out of the water with a sort of heavy grace. The webbing between each of the four digits was as wide as Flick was, and she held on tight to the side of the boat as the Queen of the Mer-People, a giant of the water, brought their tiny boat up close, so they could look her in the eye.
The queen’s eyes glowed, like the bulb on an angler fish. Her face was almost expressionless, her jawline was soft, and her chin and neck were obscured by thick folds of fat.
Flick realized she was kneeling on the bottom of the boat. And so were Jonathan and Avery. That felt right. You knelt before a queen. And this mer-woman was undeniably royalty.
The queen smiled then. A slow drag of her lips that curved upward, before she spoke. “You are welcome in my ocean, little ones.” Her voice was a deep rumble that hurt Flick’s ears, though it was obvious the queen had tried to keep her volume down as much as possible.
“Thank you.” Jonathan spoke first. “We’re honored to meet you in person.”
The queen’s smile widened, and she nodded once. “You have lost your magical box.”
“It was taken,” Jonathan said carefully. “When our boat was capsized.”
To Flick, this sounded almost like an accusation, and she glanced up nervously.
But the queen didn’t appear ruffled by it. And why would she be? She could squash Jonathan like a soft-shelled baby crab. “Your box shall be returned to you,” she said. “But first: I understand you have offered help to my people.”
“Yes,” Flick said quickly, and the lamp-like eyes of the queen turned to her. “We can help some of your people escape this collapsing world. But—but we can’t save everyone. We can only take those who can fit through the suitcase. The box.”
The queen regarded her, unblinking, for what felt like a long time. Then she sighed, and it was like a sharp blast of wind across a harbor. “I am over a century old, little ones. My parents live still, in the dark depths of the beneath. The surface dwellers say this world is a circle, but they forget the ocean. This world, the water and the surface, was once a cylinder two-thirds filled with water. The collapse that has been happening, this disintegration of our world, affected the edges of the ocean before it reached the surface or the sky.
“Now, our world is shaped like a cone. It is wider at the brim than it is in the depths. And, once, my people were scattered all over the world. Those with fish tails lived closer to the surface. In temperate waters, the tiny ones made their homes, and my family swam in the depths, lighting our way with song and luminescence. We knew there was something wrong when Katyo’s people came to us, begging for space above our feeding grounds, that they might share this part of the ocean with us. After them came the tiny ones, afraid and weeping. The cold-water ones came last, obstinate and distressed at what was happening. And after that, we were too many in too small a space. Fighting was a regular occurrence. The ocean was ribboned with blood. And then Nyfe Shaban came, offering the chance of a solution, if we would follow her rule.”
“But you didn’t accept?”
“Some did, including my own spokesperson. The fear of the end of the world has torn our people into factions. A great many have declared they will follow the Pirate Queen rather than me. But I have never met a human I would trust to deliver on their promises,” she said. “I have seen too many of my children and subjects in their nets. And besides, they offered no real solution. Only the amassing of an army.”
“An army?” Flick frowned.
The queen nodded again. “Captain Nyfe has not united anyone. She has driven a wedge between them. She has made enemies by deciding anyone not with her is against her. We do not care what she does, whether she rages, or pillages, or sails clean off the edge of the world. But when she creates enemies where there were none, she threatens more than battle.”
“She would declare war,” Jonathan said.
“And claim it was for the good of those on her side. No doubt, on some level, she thinks she is doing the right thing. Every villain is the hero of their own story. Nyfe is no different.”
“But you’re…” Avery gestured at the queen’s height. “You could fight her. How would Nyfe ever hurt you?”
“Can the great whales of your world not be cut down?”
Flick thought of harpoons. Of sharpness and blood. Of micro-plastics, oil, poisons, everything that could, and did, kill. Her heart sank down into her boots. “Yeah,” she said sadly. “They can be.”
“Humans have always made war,” the queen said. “That is not new. They are a warlike tribe. I believe that they will, given the chance, fight themselves into extinction. But it does not have to be now. It can be prevented.” She moved slightly in the water, her immense size utterly graceful.
Flick wondered what form of sea creature the queen might be if she lived on Earth. Katyo was clearly similar to an octopus, and Satura’s tail was like a fish’s. But the Mer-Queen was too big to be like either of them. There were barnacles on her shoulders and elbows like freckles, and seaweed growing in the cracks of her skin. She could be a blue whale, Flick thought. Or a vast shark. But one that lived in the darkness, weightless and peaceful, and undisturbed.
Flick thought of the environmental posters in the library. The plastic bags exchanged for paper in the supermarket. The images on television of the struggling sea life, tangled and dying, wrapped in mankind’s rubbish.
Save the Whales.
She was about to abandon the queen to a terrible fate, and there was nothing she could do about it. The helplessness she felt was as sharp and painful as a knife edge.
“We can’t save all of you,” Flick said softly.
“I know,�
�� the queen said. “But you can save some. Many. It will have to be enough.”
“We can try to save more,” Jonathan said. “We will try.”
“It is enough to know that some will live.”
There was a splash below and the queen raised her other hand. On the palm of it was the suitcase. It was wet through, but still shut tight.
Relief shot through Flick like wildfire, and if she hadn’t already been kneeling, her knees would have given way. They had a way out. They could go home.
Jonathan gave a sob of joy and stepped onto the mer-woman’s hand to pick the case up, hugging it like it was his firstborn. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” He looked down, realized where he stood, and blushed. “Oh. Sorry.” He stepped back into the jolly boat.
The queen smiled at him. “I am glad it has been returned to you. Now, how soon can you arrange for my people to leave?”
“We need to go home first.” Jonathan patted the case. “And find somewhere for you to live. Somewhere empty, watery, and peaceful. We shall be as quick as we can.”
“Time does not move for your world as it moves for ours, little one.”
Flick had lost count of how long they’d been at the Break. If anything slowed them down, the Break could crumble to pieces without them.
“I promise I shall be as fast as I can,” Jonathan was saying.
“That will have to be enough.”
“We’ll do our best,” Flick said. “To come up with a way to help you all, I mean.” She blushed, feeling useless.
The queen closed her eyes as she nodded. “Very well. I shall have Katyo’s people take you back to the Scattered Isles, and you may make your way to Captain Burnish’s ship from there. We will wait, little ones. And if you never return”—and now her voice became hard—“the last thing we shall remember of you will be your betrayal.” She lowered their boat gently back into the water and began to sink back down. “But if you do return and help who you can, Queen Leviatha will sings songs of you until the ending of all worlds, whensoever that will come.”
And with those words, she disappeared back under the water.
As soon as she had gone, Jonathan quickly put the suitcase on the bench and undid the catches.
“Is it all right?” Flick looked, anxiously.
“Yes. It’ll take more than water to damage this.”
Struggling slightly with his bandaged hand, he lifted the lid, and the warm scent of books and dryness and home flooded out into the freezing air. He looked at Avery. “Want to go first?”
She shook her head. “I’m not coming. Someone needs to tell Burnish where you’ve gone.”
“You can’t stay here!” Flick cried. “This isn’t your world, and you’ve been away for so long already.”
“Good incentive for you to come back for me, then.” Avery folded her arms. “Come on, think about it. If we all vanish, they’ll never trust us again.”
Flick wanted Jonathan to argue, but instead he nodded. “You’re sure about this?”
She gave a curt nod back. “Jonathan, you know very well I’m sure about this.”
Flick wanted to drag Avery into the suitcase and tell her to stop being stupid, but the fact was, she was right. If they all left, Burnish would think they had abandoned him. But if Avery stayed, she’d be all on her own, time crawling past for her as it flew by back in Strangeworlds.
They’d come back for her—of course they would—but it seemed so grossly unfair to leave her behind by herself.
“But,” Flick started to say, “but what if I stayed with—”
Avery’s eyes glittered. “Flick,” she said firmly, “look after him.”
Flick knew what she meant. Jonathan had already lost nearly everyone. Flick couldn’t ask him to go back to Strangeworlds on his own and risk losing the two people he had left.
“I will,” she said.
Flick watched Jonathan clamber into the suitcase and disappear and, with a final look back at Avery, she climbed over the edge of the case and caught hold of the handle, pulling it back through with her, into a familiar world.
25
We haven’t got a lot of time,” Jonathan said, as they tumbled back into the travel agency. “If my math is correct, and it usually is, we’ve got just less than fifteen hours here to get back to the Break before it’s a mere quarter of the size it is now. And that’s assuming it continues to crumble at the same rate it has been.…”
He went over to the mantelpiece, and picked up one of the clocks, setting it down on the desk.
The hands of the clock were moving swiftly, turning smoothly around the face much faster than they ought to. “This is the time Avery is running on in the Break.”
The sheer magnitude of the task ahead of them suddenly seemed to have physical weight, and Flick wanted to put her head down on the fireside rag-rug and fall asleep. She blinked hard to clear the mist from her eyes. “What’s the plan?”
“Let’s start with finding them a safe world, one with water,” Jonathan said, flinging his jacket in the direction of the sink in the kitchen. “We’ll go through all the cases now. If you can take down any from the wall that look suitable, I’ll head down to the Back Room.”
Flick nodded, then looked at the mantelpiece, at the clocks.
And froze.
“Jonathan.”
“Of course they’ll need some land as well,” Jonathan said, dragging the huge trunk out from the disused fireplace. “But that should be simple enough.…”
“Jonathan.”
“And we need to take waterproof trousers with us this time. I’m sure I have some around here somewhere. For Avery, too. I’m sure she can suspend her sense of style for a few hours for the sake of keeping dry—”
“Jonathan!”
“What?”
Flick pointed at the clock, the one that showed the time at Strangeworlds. “It’s after five.”
He looked at the clock, then stared at her blankly. “And?”
She lowered her hand. It felt so trivial compared to the task at hand. But she had to. She had to say it. “I need to go home.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Jonathan scoffed. “How can you possibly want to go home at a time like this?”
“I don’t want to. But I promised my parents I’d be home by six,” Flick said, her voice very small. “If I stay now, I can promise you I won’t be allowed back ever again. I’ve only just earned back their trust. My parents will never let me out of my room—let alone the house—if I roll in after six again.”
He stared at her as if she were speaking Martian. “But—but this is important. We—we only have fifteen hours!”
“I know,” she said. “But I need to go home. I can’t do this to them again.”
Jonathan’s mouth opened and then shut again. His hands flexed on the desk as if he was trying not to tear something in half. He genuinely looked as if he couldn’t get his head around what Flick was saying. “If anyone can save them—all of them,” he said, “it’s you. You know it is. I can search for the right world to send them to, but I can’t affect a schism any more than I can breathe underwater.”
“You don’t know that I can do anything to help,” Flick said.
“You could stay here and try,” he said. “Not run away.”
“I am not running away!”
He glared at her. “Yes, you are.”
“I’ll come back as soon as I can.” She brightened. “I can even try to come back tonight, when they’re asleep! But I can’t promise anything,” she added.
Jonathan pinched between his eyes under his glasses. He was taking very deep breaths. “Every hour that passes here, eighteen pass in the world of the Break. Eighteen. They have less than three weeks left, which means they have fifteen of our hours left before they’ll be sailing around a puddle—at most. If you’re gone until nine tomorrow morning, that’s… that’s sixteen hours from now. It’s going to be too late.” He leaned heavily on the desk as though his strings had been cut. �
�We’ve left my cousin there by herself. She’ll think we’ve deserted her. Think of her parents!”
“Avery’s brave,” Flick said, believing it but wishing she didn’t have to say it. “She’ll have had time to tell Captain Burnish our plan by now. She won’t think we’ve deserted her,” Flick said, her voice shaking with emotion. She took a deep breath. “I have to make a choice here, Jonathan. If I go back to the Break without going home first, I will never be able to come back here, to Strangeworlds. They won’t let me, if I frighten them like I did with staying too long in Five Lights. You have to understand that.”
He stared at her. “You’re really choosing them over all this. Over Avery. Over the Strangeworlds Society.”
“You know full well that’s not what I’m doing,” Flick said, heading for the door. “You know I’m not. I don’t want to leave you, but—”
“But you might as well,” he said bitterly. “Everyone does.”
She paused at the door, her heart hammering in her ears. She knew it was the grief talking, but that didn’t mean his words didn’t hurt her. She gripped the door handle. “I’ll be back once my parents are asleep tonight, if I can manage to sneak out,” she said. “But you should start looking for a world to take the pirates to. In case I don’t make it back in time.”
* * *
It was a terrible walk home. All the way, she worried. She worried about Captain Burnish, and Katyo, and the Mer-Queen, and Edony and everyone on those massive ships, each one of them hoping for a miracle.
Her mom was in when she got home, and she looked pleased and relieved that Flick had stuck to her curfew. She handed Flick a frying pan and told her to start browning some ground beef for dinner.
Flick worked mechanically, feeling like a robot whose joints needed oiling. Guilt weighed on her, turning her bones into lead piping, poisoning her every movement. She shouldn’t have come home. But she’d had to. She’d had to.
The Edge of the Ocean Page 15
