by Anne Ursu
Charlotte blinked. “It is?”
“Oh, sure,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski. “We’re going to go see her after dinner again.”
“You guys aren’t upset about missing Williamsburg?” Charlotte asked. She was so surprised she completely forgot she hated them.
“No,” said Mr. Mielswetzski. “We can always go to Williamsburg. When do we get the chance to see a singer like Thalia?”
“Tonight!” said Mrs. Mielswetzski with a giggle.
“That’s right!” exclaimed Mr. Mielswetzski. “Well, we better get to dinner, so we don’t miss her!”
“We want to get a good seat! I think the whole ship’s going tonight!”
“That’s four hundred and fifty people. Three hundred passengers and a hundred and fifty crew. We better get our seat now!” Her father winked broadly.
“Well, I don’t think all the crew is going. Someone has to pilot the ship!” her mother said with a giggle.
“Poor guy,” said Mr. Mielswetzski.
Still talking, her parents turned to go, closing the door in Charlotte’s face.
Charlotte passed a grim evening—as grim as an evening can be when your dinner is pizza, fries, and a chocolate sundae brought to your room. She half-heartedly flipped the channels on the television and tried to come up with a plan for the next day. Maybe at breakfast she would see an officer she could explain the situation to. Of course, she realized with a sinking heart, if she’d done that in the first place instead of running off half-cocked, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
That night Charlotte was awoken a few times by some violent lurchings of the ship. Once she was almost thrown out of the bed, but after that things seemed to settle down again and, despite a few loud cracklings of the ship’s intercom, which was right over her head, she was lulled quickly to sleep. When she was sleeping, she had a strange dream in which her house was picked up by a tornado and swirled inside the funnel cloud as it traveled across an open plain. Charlotte had had that dream a lot when she had seen The Wizard of Oz at an impressionable age, but this time there was a small difference. As the tornado blew the house around, Charlotte’s dream-ears filled with the sound of wind, but there was something else, too. Underneath the wind, almost in harmony with it, was the soft sound of a woman singing.
When Charlotte woke up the next morning, she opened her curtains and found the storm had quieted. The sky still looked overcast and slightly menacing, but the rain had ended and the waves had calmed somewhat. The color of the water had changed, though, from the clear blue of the sea she’d seen yesterday morning to something richer and darker, almost the color of wine. There was something else strange about the waves too, something about the appearance of the water, something Charlotte couldn’t put her finger on, but she didn’t really think about it too much. She was hungry.
It was fifteen minutes to nine—almost time to meet her parents. Charlotte was not going to let them yell at her for not being ready. So she quickly showered and dressed and waited for her parents to come fetch her for breakfast.
And waited. Nine fifteen, and then nine thirty, and her parents still weren’t there. They’d had an appointment. For breakfast! Since Charlotte couldn’t actually get back into her room without them, she was counting on them to come get her so she didn’t starve to death. (Okay, room service was twenty-four hours, but that wasn’t the point.) They’d had a plan.
Charlotte remembered yesterday’s breakfast, when her parents had stumbled up to the café at nearly ten o’clock after being up late listening to their precious singer. Maybe it had happened again. Maybe they were sleeping happily after having fun all night, while their only daughter was stuck in the room next to them without her room key, starving to death.
Grumbling, Charlotte picked up the phone and called them, but there was no answer. Could they really be sleeping that hard?
Well, there was only one thing to do. She grabbed the cruise binder and opened the door to the room, and then carefully placed the binder in the doorway as a prop. Then she went into the hallway and knocked loudly on her parents’ door. “Mom, Dad!” she called, knocking again. “Are you guys in there?”
Nothing.
They had forgotten her. They’d gone to breakfast without her. Charlotte couldn’t believe it. Could. Not. Believe. It. First they treated her like a criminal, then they abandoned her. Completely abandoned. Was she such a disaster of a child that they no longer wanted anything to do with her?
Charlotte was in a fury now. She was going to go up to breakfast and yell at them. She was going to yell at them in front of the whole café, and everyone there would know what kind of people they were. The rest of the cruise, everywhere they went, people would point and whisper, Those are the people who left their only daughter to starve.
Charlotte barely noticed that the hallway was entirely empty—no one heading to breakfast or the deck, no stewardesses on their morning rounds, no crew members in the utility closets; nor did she notice how still the ship felt, almost as if it were just bobbing in those wine-dark waves. It wasn’t until she got to Deck Seven and entered the indoor part of the café that she realized something was wrong. For there was no one in the café at all, not even any waiters. The breakfast buffet was empty and the tables weren’t even set. Charlotte ran onto the terrace, and it was empty too.
Well, she thought, maybe this café’s closed today. It was a little weird that there wasn’t a sign, but maybe she’d missed an announcement. Everyone was simply having breakfast in the main restaurant.
So Charlotte ran down there, becoming slowly aware of the extremely eerie feeling that she was the only person on the ship. She saw no one as she ran. There was obviously some great piece of entertainment or something, and a staff meeting. There was a reason no one was in the hallways or out on the deck or in the stairwell. There had to be.
It wasn’t until she got to the restaurant and found it, too, entirely empty that Charlotte realized that something was very, very wrong. As she stood, looking over the empty room with its patiently waiting tables and chairs and its undisturbed place settings, looking so vacant as to seem haunted, a great shiver washed over her. Without a thought, she ran from the restaurant right into the galley—not caring who found her in a restricted area as long as someone found her—and it was completely deserted as well.
Charlotte would never be able to say what it was that led her back up the stairs to Deck Five and to the Mariner Lounge, but something did. In a fog, she ran right up to the closed double doors of the lounge and began to pull frantically on them. They were locked. But the doors had two windows like portholes in them, and as she pulled, Charlotte peered inside and saw what looked to be hundreds of people crammed into the lounge, all facing straight ahead. She yanked on the door again and then started pounding on it, but no one turned. No one even seemed to flinch. She pounded and she screamed, but to no avail.
Quickly Charlotte grabbed a chair from the library and placed it next to one of the doors, then climbed on it to get a better view through the porthole. She scanned the room carefully until her eyes landed on her parents’ backs. Her heart leaped into her throat and tears sprang to her eyes. She pounded on the door again, calling their names, but they were completely still.
At the other end of the room, Charlotte saw movement. A head of raven-black hair swayed slowly back and forth among the heads of the crowd. The singer. Thalia. Charlotte stood on her tiptoes and peered at her, then pressed her ears against the door. Thalia was singing.
Right in front of Thalia, a row of white officers’ caps peeked out above the crowd. That’s when Charlotte realized that there was something wrong with the motion of the ship, that she couldn’t feel the sense of movement she’d become accustomed to the day before. She remembered what it was she’d seen out of her window earlier and realized what it was that had bothered her: There was no wake. The ship wasn’t moving.
After one last try of the door, Charlotte took off again, running this time toward the sliv
er of deck at the very bow of the ship. When she got there, she stared up into the bridge. She already knew what she’d see, of course, but it didn’t feel any better to have it confirmed. The bridge was totally empty. She whirled around and looked at the waves below. The ship was just floating along in the current.
She grasped the rail in horror. She was stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a cruise ship full of people in singer-induced comas. For the last month of her life, she had been feeling increasingly more alone in the world. Well, now she was truly all alone.
Charlotte sank to the floor of the deck, trying to get her breath again. There was no point in panicking, she told herself. If she was indeed all alone, it was her job to save everyone. Well, she could do that. She’d done it before. She was an old pro at saving humanity. Too bad there was no shadow army around, but you did what you could.
Closing her eyes, Charlotte calmed herself. The ship had to have a radio somewhere, right? She could find it and call someone. That wouldn’t be hard. Someone would respond to the call of an abandoned cruise ship. Surely there was some kind of distress signal. And even if there wasn’t, eventually someone would notice that the cruise ship wasn’t where it was supposed to be and they’d look for it. An entire cruise ship with four hundred and fifty people can’t just disappear. Someone would find them eventually.
With a beating heart and a burning stomach, Charlotte went back inside and tried every single restricted door there was. But nothing opened. She couldn’t get in—there would be no radio, no distress signal. She’d just have to wait.
But she didn’t want to wait. This had happened for a reason, and Charlotte really didn’t want to find out why. She had to contact someone.
The Internet! The ship had a computer center, and Charlotte could go e-mail someone. But who? Who would believe her? Her cousin, Mr. Can’t-We-Just-Get-Over-That himself? Well, she could e-mail the police or the coast guard or something. They’d be able to help. But first she needed to know roughly where they were.
That, she could find out. Quickly she dashed up the stairs to the Observation Lounge. She headed right to the monitor to look for the flashing white light of the ship next to the eastern seaboard. But when she looked at the monitor, she did not see the coastline of the United States at all. There was a coast, yes, but Charlotte couldn’t place it.
Charlotte peered at the screen more closely. At the bottom were some latitude and longitude numbers that meant nothing to her, and then her eyes landed on some words right below those numbers. She took them in just as the map she was seeing registered in her mind, and she suddenly understood what she was looking at. It was entirely obvious, if you were expecting it, which Charlotte most certainly was not. The coastline she was looking at was the outline of Italy and Greece, and the words on the screen said, quite calmly:
LOCATION: MEDITERRANEAN SEA.
“Surprise!” said a voice behind her.
Charlotte whirled around to behold Jason Hart.
CHAPTER 18
Fish Boy Explains It All
AS SOON AS SHE SAW JASON STANDING THERE, smiling at her, Charlotte stumbled backward into the monitor, hitting her back on one of the corners—which, by the way, hurt. A lot.
“Get away from me,” she said. The words came out in a rush and sounded something like “Geddoffamah!” She hoped the effect was clear enough.
Jason threw up his hands. “No, Charlotte, it’s okay,” he said, his green eyes wide like two verdant pools. “I’m on your side.”
Right, Charlotte thought. “On my side? On my side? How do you explain all this, then?” She motioned wildly at the monitor.
“I didn’t do it!” Jason exclaimed. “I’m here to help.”
“Who are you?” she hissed.
He blinked. “I’m Jason.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “I know that,” she said in her best duh! voice, “but”—she leaned forward—“who are you?”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I’m the son of a sea god.”
“Right,” said Charlotte, folding her arms around her chest. A sea god. What did that make Jason—Fish Boy?
“My mom’s mortal, though, and I am too. I’m not a god or anything.”
“I see,” said Charlotte through clenched teeth.
“My dad’s a big jerk,” he said. “He abandoned my mother. He would have abandoned me if he hadn’t decided I was useful. All he cares about is work.”
“Work,” Charlotte repeated flatly.
“Being a sea god.”
“Right,” said Charlotte.
“Anyway, he made me come with him. Said I couldn’t be trusted on my own. I’m thirteen! And he made me spy on you. He wants me to be just like him. It’s awful.” He scowled. “I can’t be my own person, you know?”
“This is all great, Jason,” she said, spitting out the words. “But if you’re on my side, can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. You’re in the Mediterranean.”
“I gathered that,” snapped Charlotte. “Why?”
“Poseidon,” Jason said simply.
Charlotte straightened. “What?”
She listened, dumbfounded, as Jason explained that Philonecron had some powerful relatives indeed.
“But—but—” Charlotte sputtered. “But Philonecron was trying to overthrow Hades! Hades is Poseidon’s brother!”
Jason shrugged. “That’s different. Philonecron’s a god. You’re a mortal. The gods don’t like it when mortals interfere with them. Especially Poseidon.” He went behind the bar and started rummaging around.
“What is he going to do?” Charlotte whispered.
“Oh, you know,” Jason shrugged, “strand you at sea, I imagine. It’s his standard MO, really. Get someone blown off course and have them float around for a dozen years or so…. Unless some sea monster gets them first.” He pulled out a soda from behind the counter. “Want one?”
“Sea monster,” repeated Charlotte.
“Or whirlpool or storm. There’s really a lot of ways the sea can kill you.” He shrugged and took a gulp of soda.
“I see,” said Charlotte, voice shaking. “Poseidon’s mad at me, so he strands this whole boatload full of more than four hundred people, putting them all at risk for attack by a cruise-ship-eating sea monster, all so he can get revenge on me?”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “He’s a big jerk. They’re all big jerks.”
But Charlotte wasn’t listening. The force of his words had hit her, and she half walked, half stumbled her way to one of the couches and promptly slumped into one, putting her head in her hands.
If Jason was telling the truth, which it seemed he was, she was adrift on the open sea in a large cruise ship with Poseidon, the Lord of the Seas, after her. The last Big Three god she met was scary enough, and he’d been on her side. She and Zee had escaped from Philonecron, thanks to a shadow army and a lot of luck, but Poseidon?
There was a plopping sound on the sofa, and Charlotte looked up to see that Jason had sat down next to her. He really did have very nice eyes, even if there was something fishy about him.
Charlotte tried to gather herself. She couldn’t freak out, not yet. “Well, okay,” she said slowly, “what about my parents? What about everyone on board? What’s happening to them? They’re all locked in the lounge with that singer.”
“Oh, she’s a Siren,” Jason said offhandedly.
Oh. Charlotte put her head in her hands again. She should have known. Sirens mesmerized people with their singing; in the myths, their voices led sailors to their doom. And in real life, apparently, they could paralyze a whole cruise ship. Charlotte shook her head slowly, back and forth.
“She’s been seducing everyone since she got onboard. She sang to the staff last night, then she went onto the bridge and got the captain and everyone, and then any holdouts she lured into the lounge by singing over the intercom while they were sleeping. Everyone was lured into the lounge, and they’re all complete
ly entranced.”
“Oh.” Charlotte remembered the voice in her dream. “But what about me?”
“It doesn’t work on kids. Never has. I mean, you heard it over the intercom, right? It’s like easy listening.” He wrinkled up his nose.
“Okay,” Charlotte said, exhaling. “So. Poseidon has it in for me, so he magically blows the whole ship into the Mediterranean, sends a Siren onboard to enchant everyone, and leaves me stranded and alone. That’s the plan?”
“Yup,” said Jason, taking another swig of his soda. “As far as I know. So I came to help you.”
Charlotte stood up. She had heard enough. “Fine,” she said. “Help me. We have to contact someone so we can get away from Poseidon, and then we can deal with Enchanto-Babe. I was going to go down to the computer center, but maybe we can break into the radio room—”
But Jason was shaking his head. “That won’t work. There’s no communication working on this ship, I can guarantee that. The Internet’s not going to work, the transponder is off, the radar is off. The Siren would have seen to that. She can make people do what she wants.”
“Fine,” Charlotte said, “then you can help me break into the lounge. We have to get in there and wake everyone up somehow. Make Thalia stop singing!”
He shook his head. “That’s not going to work. She’s a three-millennia-old witch. There’s only one thing that can stop her.”
“Well?” Charlotte said. “What is that?”
“Poseidon’s trident.”
Charlotte gaped at Jason. Right. Poseidon’s trident. When Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon tried to overthrow Cronus, the Cyclopses gave them each an incredibly powerful object: Zeus a thunder bolt, Hades an invisible helmet, and Poseidon a three-pronged spear. His trident was one of the three most powerful objects in the universe, and Charlotte seriously doubted he wanted to give it up.
“Oh, really?” she said. “Is that all? Well, you don’t happen to have it on you, do you?”
“No,” he said. “But I can take you to him. I know where he is, and it’s not far. We’ll steal the trident, come back here, and use it on the Siren.”
