The Edge of the Ocean

by L. D. Lapinski

  She dropped spaghetti into a bubbling saucepan and scowled as she stirred it rather more violently than she probably should have. Boiling water splashed over the side and hissed as it hit the top of the stove, and Flick felt like something inside her was hissing as well.

  Jonathan had no right to be cross with her. Just because his entire world was the agency didn’t mean she should feel bad about having real-life commitments.

  All the same, her stomach clenched at the thought of the pirates. She pictured Jonathan, alone in the travel agency, surrounded by suitcases and memories and nothing else. And her heart sank. She had promised Avery she would look after Jonathan, and she had left him all on his own. She could have invited him around, or something. Her parents wouldn’t have minded, she was sure. He would have refused, though.

  What was he doing right now? Going through the suitcases, probably, in search of a water world. He’d said there were seven hundred of them in the Back Room, so that wasn’t going to be a quick task.

  Flick checked that her mom wasn’t looking and took out her phone. Phones were banned in the kitchen in the Hudson household after a memorable soup incident.

  You ok?

  The reply came back a minute later.

  Perfectly amenable, thank you.

  I didn’t want to go home, you know.

  I know. I apologize for not taking your commitments into account. You have been entirely accommodating of mine, after all. I appreciate you saying you will attempt to come back tonight. However, I will not be upset if you cannot. Your family being important to you is something I should more than understand.

  I’ll do my best. See you later. I hope.

  I hope so too. For all our sakes.

  26

  Flick dreamed she was on an island.

  It was an island she’d been to before, but it wasn’t the Break. It was somewhere she’d been to before that. Somewhere that had frightened her and stayed in her heart for longer than it was welcome.

  She knew it was a dream because she wasn’t struggling to walk up the sand dunes. She felt her feet glide over the sand (though not really, because you can never really feel your feet in dreams), until she reached the clifftop.

  The lighthouse at the top was bigger that she remembered, though dream structures tend not to be entirely accurate. This being a dream, there was no time at all between her reaching the clifftop and her hand pushing open the door.

  It was as she remembered—as good a replica as her dream could create, anyway, having only been in the space once. But some places require only half a visit to be imprinted on our minds. The lighthouse was one such place.

  Flick walked over to the desk on the opposite side of the room. The photographs pinned around the desk showed colorful swirls. Flick knew they should have been photos of people, but as that fact wasn’t important to the plot of her dream, her brain had lazily decided not to illustrate them properly. She wasn’t here for the photographs on the wall, anyway.

  She was here for the—

  “What are you doing here?”

  Flick jumped and turned around. Her dream splintered, jarring as it was derailed, sent somewhere it hadn’t planned to go.

  A man with long graying hair and pointed ears, a brown apron over his clothes, sat in the middle of the wrought-iron staircase.

  “Tristyan?” She stepped closer, confused about what the apothecary from another world was doing in her dream.

  “Felicity.” He smiled, and just like when they first met, Flick knew she had seen that smile somewhere before. Then he stood up and walked down the iron steps to the ground. “Is this your dream?”

  “I think so.” Flick was trying to keep hold of her dream, but she could feel her grasp on it starting to slip. “What are you doing in it?”

  “Now, there’s a question. How’s Jonathan?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a while.” That’s not right, Flick thought. I saw him today.

  Tristyan nodded. “Ah. So, why are you here?”

  “I was…” She looked back at the desk. The photographs were gone, and all that remained was the wooden box she’d knocked to the floor the time she’d been here before. There was a dent on the side, and Flick felt guilty about it.

  Was the box what she’d come here for? She couldn’t remember. She tried to reach for it, but her dream-arms wouldn’t do as they were told.

  She looked back at Tristyan. “How can you be here?”

  “Perhaps I was dreaming of this place too.” He came over and lifted the box in his hands. Flick wished she had been able to pick it up. It looked smaller in his spidery grip, and his thumb tapped on the latch as if impatient. The box was here for him, then, not for her. Then why had she come here?

  Flick tried to stay in the dream, though already the walls of the lighthouse felt shadowy, and she could almost feel the pillow under her head. There was a buzzing sensation in her body—the vibration of her alarm trying to wake her up. “Tristyan, was this your home?”

  “No.” He raised the lid of the box. “But I remember it.”

  Flick had the sensation that she was falling. She wanted to stay, to see what was inside the box, but… Tristyan closed the lid. “I fear your dream is ending, Felicity, as mine is merely beginning.”

  “How come we can talk?” Flick whispered. “You’re not a dream. Am I a dream?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tristyan said. “I think we simply have a lot in common.” His face suddenly misted over, and Flick knew she was barely asleep at all anymore. “Perhaps we shall meet again.”

  Flick could feel herself dissolving, the world around her melting into consciousness. “I’ll—I’ll come and see you!”

  Tristyan turned to her, looking pleased at the idea. “I hope you will. Both of you.”

  And then Flick opened her eyes and the man, the lighthouse, and the world of her dream all disappeared.

  Flick turned off her alarm and stared at the ceiling for a moment. It was one in the morning, and the world felt heavy and still. Her dream was very loud in her head.

  Whatever that had been… she didn’t have time to worry about it. She had to get back to Strangeworlds.

  * * *

  She ran through Little Wyverns and was gasping for breath by the time she got to the Strangeworlds Travel Agency. She crashed through the door.

  “Here,” she panted, bent double and holding her chest. She looked up and gaped. It looked as though a herd of wildebeest had stampeded through the travel agency, followed by a small hurricane and a tsunami. There were always suitcases stacked around, but this was an explosion of luggage. Jonathan had clearly been thorough in his search for a new watery world.

  There was a smashing noise from the kitchen area.

  “Bit tense, are you?” Flick asked, picking up some of the suitcases and putting them into the bay window to make a path through the shop.

  “I am not tense!” came a shouted reply. There was another smash that sounded like the teapot. Flick stacked some more of the suitcases away, and after a moment, Jonathan came through from the kitchen area, looking mildly harassed.

  “You made it, then?” he clipped. “Good. Another six days have gone by in the Break, and I don’t feel easy about it at all. And searching for a new world hasn’t been quite as simple as I’d hoped. Nothing’s been totally right yet—more of the worlds are inhabited than I’d anticipated. But there are a handful left still to check.” He gestured to a fairly small pile heaped onto his armchair.

  “Should be a cinch,” Flick said, rolling her eyes. “Right, then. Which case is next?”

  Despite the time pressure and the worry, Flick’s skin now prickled with excitement. This was what the Strangeworlds Travel Agency was about—hopping into different worlds as easily as stepping from one room into another. This was what she loved.

  Jonathan passed her the top suitcase, and as she popped the catches, a grin escaped from her mouth. This was serious—of course it was—but it was still ma
gical. A warmth spilled out from the suitcase, along with the rushing sound of waves. Flick looked at Jonathan. “Ready?”

  He cricked his neck. “Of course.”

  They stepped inside. And immediately plummeted straight down into water, dropping like stones. Jonathan yelled as he smacked into the water like a starfish, somehow managing to keep the suitcase handle in his hand.

  Flick kicked hard, pushing with her arms, and broke the surface, gasping. Jonathan paddled over, the suitcase floating helpfully. The water was calm. Flick looked around them. There was nothing but the flat shine of water, mirroring an orange-pink sky, as far as she could see.

  Jonathan spat water out of his mouth and tried to wipe the splashes from his lenses. “Well, this is bleak,” he said. “And damp. I had just dried out.”

  Flick spun around. “I can’t see any land. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any, I guess.” She looked down at the reddish water, wondering how deep down it went and what might be lurking within. Her stomach swooped as her brain conjured up ideas about sharks and monsters.

  “What do we do?” she asked. “Try to swim for land? We can’t stay here.”

  Jonathan was about to answer when there was a great mass of bubbles from around thirty feet away. The bubbles rose in the way they do when you blow into a milkshake through a straw, clinging to one another and growing rather than just popping at the surface. In the middle of the bubbling mass, something glass-like and shining rose up, like a great ceramic and glass egg.

  Flick didn’t know whether to scream or not.

  The top of the egg suddenly split away, lifting up like a lid. And a person—if that was the right word—stood up and raised a crooked arm.

  Jonathan raised an arm back. “Seems to be a multiversal gesture, waving,” he said under his breath. He waved cheerily, giving the same false smile he’d given Flick’s mom in the supermarket only two days ago.

  The person standing in the glassy egg looked somewhat like a frog, if frogs could grow to be five feet in height. Their head was sunken into their neck, their arms crooked as though they were unable to straighten them completely, and their eyes—all four of them—bulged. They croaked something at the two humans in the water.

  “We’re friends,” Flick called, not sure whether they could understand her, but making an effort to at least sound innocent and calm. “We were looking for land?”

  The frog-like person croaked again, putting their squat head to one side as if asking a question. Their egg-pod gave a soft beep.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get very far,” Jonathan said to Flick. “Language barrier.” He pulled the suitcase close. “Maybe we should just go. This world is clearly occupied. I doubt they’ll welcome several boatloads of pirates turning up.”

  Getting back into the suitcase was difficult. In the end, they shoved it open beneath the water and hoisted themselves into it.

  The result was a lot of water all over the travel agency. Flick skidded across the floorboards in a torrent of it, almost crashing into the desk as Jonathan tumbled out, wet through and furious. The ocean of the other world continued to pour in, covering the whole room in seconds.

  “Oh, for the love of…” Jonathan yanked the suitcase shut to stem the tidal wave and pulled a blanket off one of the armchairs. “We need to clean this up. Grab anything you can!”

  Working fast, Flick and Jonathan covered the floor of Strangeworlds with old cloths and towels and blankets until the water was absorbed and the shop looked like it had been attacked by an angry washing machine.

  “We’ll just have to leave it like this for now.” Jonathan sighed. “Ready for the next world?”

  He selected another of his suitcases at random.

  This time, thankfully, they stepped out onto what seemed to be a large wooden walkway.

  Flick wobbled uncertainly, trying to find her balance on the uneven wood. As Jonathan pulled the suitcase through behind them, she realized it wasn’t a walkway she was standing on at all—it was the branch of a massive tree.

  Flick went as still as a statue. A terrified statue. A terrified statue that has just realized it is standing at the top of a massive tree that’s moving about in the wind.

  She’d thought the trees of the Crystal Forest were huge. But compared to what she stood on now, they were tiny bonsai trees. These trees were impossible.

  The tree was growing straight up out of the ocean. Flick dropped down onto her hands and knees, frightened she would be blown away like a dry leaf. She dug her fingernails into the bark, hanging on in terror. She could only see Jonathan’s ankles, but by the way he was standing, he seemed rooted to the spot in fear too. She hoped to goodness he still had a hold of the suitcase.

  They were at least one hundred stories up, maybe more. Flick had never been in a skyscraper, but this tree was taller than any building she had been at the top of. The water below glittered in the glow of a pale blue sun overhead.

  The giant trees were everywhere. They twisted upward, rising up out of the sea like tower blocks. Each tree had huge flat leaves that were aimed directly at the blue sun. The size and number of the plants was boggling Flick’s mind. It was as though she and Jonathan had shrunk as they’d stepped out of the suitcase.

  Gritting her teeth, she lifted herself up slightly to see the view again. The water and the trees seemed to go on forever, nothing else in sight. An enormous forest of impossible scale. It would have been beautiful, if they hadn’t been stuck at the top of it.

  “No land I can see,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “I wonder how deep this water is,” Jonathan said, looking nervously over the edge of the branch. He held his arms out to the side, like a child walking on a wall. “Assuming these trees have roots like the ones on our world, they’d need some sort of soil for nutrients. They don’t feel as though they’re simply floating.” He bounced slightly on the branch. The bough moved minutely, but it was enough to make Flick shut her eyes and send a silent prayer to whoever might be listening. Jonathan hummed. “There’s no dramatic movement of the branch, even at this height.”

  “Wobble this branch again and you’ll be finding out how deep that water really is,” Flick hissed. “Do you mind? I’m trying not to fall to my death here.”

  “Sorry. Would this world work, do you think? There’s water, and wood…”

  “What bothers me is the tree roots,” Flick said. “Would the ships get stuck in them?”

  Jonathan pulled a face. “I didn’t think of that.”

  Flick sat up slightly. She wouldn’t fall off if she sat still, she told herself. “I don’t think this is the one. The lack of land is the one problem, the tree roots is another. And the size of the place! If these are the trees, imagine how big the fish might be!”

  Jonathan nodded. “We aren’t getting anywhere. We need an island, an ocean, some greenery… Earth would be ideal, but there’s no way I’m unleashing Nyfe onto our oceans.”

  Something stirred in the back of Flick’s mind. A huge body of water, so still it looked like a mirror. A beach, covered with scattered debris of a life that had vanished. A lighthouse.

  “I… I know one,” she said. Even as she said it, she felt strange. As if she’d told a secret. She wanted to take it back, but it was too late. It was that weird dream that had made her think of the place at all.

  Jonathan frowned at her, oblivious to her discomfort. “What do you mean?”

  “You remember that time I had a—a sneaky look in a case?” She blushed.

  “You mean when you entered one without my permission?” Jonathan corrected, raising an eyebrow.

  Flick shrugged. “Whatever. Well, there was ocean. And a bit of land. I don’t know how much water there was, but it was a lot.” Flick swallowed, thinking of the flat water, how utterly undisturbed it was, the waves barely even lapping at the sand. The emptiness of the world had been so vast that even remembering it felt like standing at the mouth of a great dark cavern, the darkness inside too t
hick to see within.

  Jonathan rubbed his chin, where a faint shadow of stubble had started to grow through. “I know you didn’t exactly linger, but was there any life?”

  “None,” Flick said. “None on the dry land, anyway. Not even a spider. Maybe there were fish in the water.”

  “It does sound ideal, I must admit—”

  “But there was the lighthouse,” Flick said quickly.

  Jonathan’s hand dropped from his chin. “Ah. Yes. You thought it was a bit… creepy?”

  She swallowed. “I can’t think how to describe it to you. It was completely dead. It felt wrong. The only thing not creepy about it was your dad’s notebook.”

  “You saw no people?”

  “There were photos, but no one alive. It was like it had been abandoned,” Flick said. “Maybe there’s somewhere better.”

  Jonathan pulled an uneasy face. “I don’t like the idea of this abandoned lighthouse. Particularly since Dad seems to have been there and left too quickly to remember to take his notebook with him.” He frowned. “You said there were photographs there too?”

  “Mm. But your dad wasn’t in any of the pictures. They were of a family from another world.” Flick remembered something else. “And didn’t you say that the case I went through to get there was locked?”

  “I thought it was, but it can’t have been.” Jonathan shrugged. “Otherwise you would never have gotten in.”

  “I’ve broken out of locked places before,” Flick pointed out. “Maybe it was locked for a good reason, and I shouldn’t have broken into it at all.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Jonathan looked at his watch. “Let’s go back to Strangeworlds and find that suitcase. You can investigate that world, and I’ll check the remaining water world suitcases. I don’t like the idea of us splitting up, but time is of the essence here.”

  Flick felt a fresh drop of sour nausea fall down into her stomach.

  * * *