The rigging rattled, metal on metal. The wind whipped my skin. I was cold, so cold—me, who’d never been cold in my life. I needed the waves to warm me. Why couldn’t I hear the waves?
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” cried a voice behind me. “This is Nancy Belle, Nancy Belle, Nancy Belle. We’ve picked up a—”
A gentle warmth brushed over my face. Breath. “It’s not too late,” said a determined voice. Hands pressed down on my chest. Air forced its way into my lungs. A shudder ran through me and my eyes flew open—a blinding light—and then I was coughing and gasping and spitting up water. Hands clutched me from every side.
Men were crouched around me in a tight circle, chests heaving, eyes wide.
A hand curved around my shoulder. “Can you talk?”
But I wouldn’t speak. I wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t be.
A distant voice crackled, “Vessel Nancy Belle, this is the Coast Guard station.”
Now they were all talking at once. “What happened to—”
“How’d you get way out here? Did your boat—”
“Who are you?”
The railing glinted in the distance, taunting me. I couldn’t even hold up my head, let alone break free and dive over.
“That’s strange,” said a man. “Look at his eyes. One’s brown and one’s blue. I never saw that before.”
“Let me see!” A man with white whiskers leaned over. His eyes stared right into mine. Then he sat back with a brisk nod. “It’s him, all right.”
“Him?”
“The boy from Spindle Island. The one they were searching for. The one they never found.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
The White Room
I struggled to rise through the darkness. The air smelled strange, like Maggie’s cleaning soap, but harsher. A sound pulsed, high and sharp: beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .
I dragged my eyes open. A dim room. A dot of red light throbbed in time to the beeping. Where was I?
I struggled to sit up but something bit at my wrist. My heart started racing and the red light quickened. The room swirled back to black.
I wove between unconsciousness and waking—or was it dreams? Faces stared down at me. Bright bursts of pain seared my arms. I couldn’t feel the Moon or the tides, and the walls pressed closer, and a smothering weight lay on my chest.
Then I woke and saw the weight was blankets. I was in a white room, in a bed. But it wasn’t a bed because there were bars on both sides. Metal bars.
My head pounded, and the beeping got faster again. I was burning up. I reached for the bar and a sharp pain stabbed my wrist. I looked and gasped in horror. Something was biting into my arm. It was attached to a thin, clear tube full of liquid.
The tube led through the bars and up to a bag. There was another sound now, a throbbing—or was it sucking? Was the thing drinking from me?
I pulled myself to sitting. That’s when I saw the cords dangling from my chest. Each was attached to a small round mouth—a colony, growing on me! I ripped one off with a popping sound. It left a pink circle on my skin. I tore off the rest and stared at them, panting.
I grasped the strap holding the tube onto my wrist and ripped it off in a flash of pain. Drops of blood splattered the sheets. The room was spinning. Somehow I clambered over the metal bars and half fell to the ground. I clutched a bar and pulled myself upright.
The room was strange and terrible, with pillars and posts and blinking lights. My eyes darted around and found the door. I stumbled over and jerked it open.
Before me stretched an endless hallway lined with doors. A cluster of people stood talking at the other end of the hall. A woman looked up from a table. She saw me and started to stand.
I staggered to an open door. “Who are you?” rasped an old woman, staring at me from a bed-cage. She lifted an arm and tubes trailed after. “Who are you?”
“You shouldn’t be up,” said a voice. The woman from the table was walking toward me in a swirl of colors and light. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
No! Panic gave me strength and I stumbled into a run. A man in loose blue clothes loomed before me. I sped up, arms outstretched, and shoved him aside. I ran faster. I was on fire. I needed the sea to cool me. Where was the sea? Windows looked out over treetops so I was upstairs—I needed stairs down.
A voice started chanting from the ceiling, “Code gray. Code gray. Code gray.”
I swerved around a corner. At the end of the hall a man was coming out of a door with a little window in it, and behind him was a flight of stairs. I shoved past chairs and rolling carts in a desperate rush—
Strong arms wrapped around me from the back. “Got him,” said a voice. “Steady, there.” Faces and arms and doors whirled into black.
When I woke, I was back in the bed-cage. Tubes dangled from my arms. I tried to lift my hand but it stopped with a jerk. A strap circled my wrist, tying it to the bars. I drew in a sharp breath.
A woman rose from a chair and walked over.
“How are you feeling?” she said. “Would you like a sip of water?”
She was trying to get me to talk. I wouldn’t talk to her. I wouldn’t talk to any of them. I stared at the window and acted like I didn’t understand. She finally left me alone.
I tried to string thoughts together. The men on the boat must have brought me here. I couldn’t feel the pulse of the waves, so I was inland, farther than I’d ever been before. But once in a while a whiff of fresh air brought a hint of salt. The ocean couldn’t be too far away.
The men on the boat had said something about my eyes and Spindle Island, and that someone was looking for me. Did Jack tell them what I’d done to Maggie? That I’d—I gulped, blinking back tears—that I’d made her die?
I had to escape. I had to get back to the sea.
Across from the bed was a high, narrow sliver of window, too small to squeeze through. Outside I could see the tip of a fir tree and a taunting strip of sky. Clouds rushed by on a wild, changing wind. A gull soared into view.
Instinctively I called out in birdtalk, “Where does the wind carry you?”
The gull banked and wheeled back in a wide circle.
Did it hear me? My heart started racing. “Me selkie!” I cried in birdtalk. “Trap! Human trap!” With each word I screamed louder, trying to force my voice through walls and glass, until the room was ringing with shrieks and caws and screeches. “ME SELKIE! BRING SELKIES!”
The door flew open and people burst in. They reached at me from every side.
“SELKIES!” I kept shrieking. “FIND! FIND!”
But when I looked up at the window again, the gull was gone.
A tall woman strode in. She took the metal ear that hung around her neck and put it on my chest. She urged me to make the sounds again. The others tried to describe it. One of them squawked, but it wasn’t even a word, just a scrape of sound.
A man stuck a sharp silver stick in my arm. Blood flowed into a tube, and I fainted.
When I woke again, the room had stopped spinning.
“You need to eat,” they said, showing me plates with mounds of mush. I gagged and turned away.
There was a woman with hair like Nellie’s. She noticed more than the others. She took the straps off my wrists. “I don’t think we need these anymore,” she said. Then she brought a tray piled with lots of kinds of food. There was a bowl of cornflakes, and I gulped it down. She saw me gazing at the window; she walked over and slid it open three fingers wide. That was as far as it would go. She looked back to see my face, nodded, and then left, closing the door behind her.
I breathed in, long and deep. The fresh air brought a hint of pine. A breeze came from the west, carrying the salt of the sea. If I ever got out, I’d follow that scent to the shore.
A man came in and closed the window.
Twice that day I climbed out of the bed-cage and snuck out the door, trying to find my way to the stairs. Both times they led me back to the room and put the tubes back
in my arms, talking about blood counts and oxygen levels, looking at each other and shaking their heads. The second time a woman sat in a chair beside me and stayed there the rest of the day.
Night fell. I forced myself to close my eyes and make my breathing slow and steady. Finally the chair scraped back. I felt her standing over me, and then her footsteps walked to the door and she was gone.
I sat up and quietly lowered the bed bars, like the humans had done. My arm was still attached by tubes to a rolling stand. I pulled it beside me over to the window, reached up—I could barely grasp the bottom—and slid the window open. Then I crept back to bed and lay there, trying to smell the sea.
The Moon traced a slow arc across the sky. Somewhere she was shining on the white tips of waves, on the swirling foam of the shoreline. Somewhere, she was shining on my clan.
There was a fluttering at the window, and then—thump!
I sat up with a gasp. There, on the ledge, perched a round-bellied bird. A puffin. My puffin.
“Aran,” she grunted.
It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
The puffin pecked at the window frame. “Trap,” she said. She tried to squeeze through, but the slit was too small. “Bad trap.”
I stood at the end of the bed so we were at the same level, as close to her as I could get.
“How . . .” I gulped, blinking back tears. “How find?”
“Gull tell flock. Gulls!” She shook her head to show what she thought of them. “Talk talk talk.”
A whisper of hope floated into my chest. The puffin was the smartest bird I’d ever met. If she could spread word far enough, maybe my clan would hear. Maybe they’d come rescue me.
“Find flock. Selkie flock,” I said, searching for words she’d know. “Here, me lost. Here, me . . .” A hot tear escaped and ran down my cheek. “Here, me gone.”
In birdtalk, the same word means gone and dead.
The puffin’s head jerked back in alarm.
I nodded to show it was true. “Selkie flock. North. Far north.” My voice cracked. “Find? Bring?”
The puffin stamped her small, orange foot. “Aran no gone,” she said firmly, and then she flew off into the night.
The next morning the tall woman brought in a man wearing a blue jacket.
“Hello, Aran,” he said in a fake, cheery voice.
How did he know my name? It took all my willpower not to react.
“I’m Mr. Crane from the Department of Social Services. You won’t be here much longer, Aran. Dr. Donahoe is coming to get you. And Penelope Donahoe, she’s coming, too. You’ll be going with them.”
My blood was pounding so hard, it drowned out his next words. This was it, then. They were coming to take me away. Social Services—that was what Maggie called foster care. They were going to take me inland and keep me there forever. I’d never find my way back to the sea. I’d lose any chance of seeing my clan again.
I realized they’d stopped talking. The woman murmured, “I told you. No response.”
She cocked her head toward the door and they left. But their muffled voices came through from the other side. I eased out of bed and crept closer, listening.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea.” All the man’s false cheeriness was gone. “No speech. Hysterical screaming. You don’t know how the fever or the ordeal might have affected his brain. And you still don’t know what’s causing those astronomical oxygen levels in his blood. We should reevaluate.”
The woman’s voice was firm. “We can’t keep him here much longer. And in spite of the blood work, he seems healthy enough.”
“But the challenges facing . . .”
Their voices faded.
When was this Donahoe coming to take me away? And where, oh, where was the puffin?
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The Puffin’s Plan
Outside the slit of a window, the sky turned gray, then black. The Moon rose huge and bright. Tomorrow she’d be full. She was pulling me like she pulled the tides.
I was still awake, sunk in despair, when dawn broke. There was a flutter of wings. I sat up as the puffin landed on the sill.
“You find—?” I gulped, unable to say the rest.
The puffin nodded. “Find. Fly far, far, far.” She tucked her head to her shoulder, shy and proud. “Big Moon, selkies here.”
The full Moon—that was tonight! Energy surged through me. My clan was coming! They were coming back for me!
The puffin tossed her beak to the west. “You go, cliff-foot, there.”
I pointed to the door. In the simplest words I could find, I told the puffin about the twisting halls, and how the people kept bringing me back, and I’d need time to find the stairs.
We talked and talked. The sun was rising. Footsteps passed outside the door. They’d be bringing in the breakfast tray soon and we still didn’t have a plan. If only I could just walk out the door!
My shoulders slumped. “They chase me,” I said again.
But this time the puffin lifted her head, an idea sparking in her eyes. “No,” she said. “They chase me.”
She told me what she was going to do. I didn’t want her to take such a risk. But she smoothed her feathers with her beak, gathering herself, and then she flapped away.
It felt like a lifetime until she landed back on the sill.
“Me find,” she said. “Big hole. Good big. Now?”
But in the daytime, the halls were full of people. To have any chance, we’d need to wait until dark.
“No. Night,” I said. I prayed no one would come to take me away before then.
The door began to open and the puffin flew off, bravely carrying all my hopes with her.
Now everything depended on timing. There was a whole day to get through. I startled whenever footsteps passed the door. The lower the sun sank in the sky, the tighter my chest grew.
They brought dinner. I forced myself to take a bite and pushed the rest around on the plate. The sun went down. The sky turned deep blue, then black. The stars came out.
I’d already crawled under the covers, eyes shut tight, when two men came in to fix the sheets and tubes. They left, shutting the door behind them.
A moment later there was a rustling at my window. “Now?” asked the puffin.
I sat up. “No. Wait.”
We waited until the bustle in the halls quieted and the footsteps stopped. I carefully tugged off the tape and pulled the tube from my arm. Then I crept to the door and opened it a crack, peering out. The hall was empty.
I turned to the puffin. “Now!”
She flew off. I heard her grunt; she must be squeezing through the bigger window she’d found. I watched, my heart pounding, as she came strutting down the hall. I poked my head out the door and waved to show her which room was mine.
The puffin stopped and nodded. She took a few running steps, flapped her wings—and then she was flying! She buzzed up and down the hall, squawking and grunting so loudly, her cries rang off the walls.
A woman poked her head around the corner. Her eyes widened in surprise. “A puffin!” she exclaimed.
The puffin flapped down to a counter and pretended to preen. The woman came sneaking up—and the puffin flew off in a wild zigzag. She careened onto tables, scattering papers and boxes and pens across the floor.
“Help me!” called the woman, laughing. Other people came running and then they stopped, pointing in amazement.
The puffin landed on a cart. A man grabbed a sheet and crept over. The puffin waited until he was close—so close!—and then she took off again. She flew right by my door, glancing at me with what I could have sworn was a smile. Then she turned and went zooming back over their heads and down the hall. A ribbon of people ran after her, arms outstretched, laughing and calling.
The hall was empty.
I stepped out quietly and closed the door behind me. Then I ran in the opposite direction, searching for the stairs.
Halls branched off halls, lik
e colonies of coral, and every hall was lined with doors, but none of them looked right. I turned corner after corner. The sounds of the puffin’s call and running feet faded, and then they began to grow louder again. “Catch it!” they were crying, and the puffin was squawking in birdtalk, “Aran! Go! Fast!”—and then there was the door with the little window, and I ripped it open and there were the stairs.
I ran down two steps at a time. At the bottom was another door. I cracked it open—
“Welcome!” boomed a deep voice. “We weren’t expecting you yet.”
I almost leaped out of my skin.
The voice kept booming, “Yes, yes, come in, Dr. Donahoe. And you must be Penelope.” I shrank back against the wall. Footsteps, and then, “Normally we’d wait until morning, but in this situation we can make an exception. The elevator is this way.”
I held my breath. I heard a door open and close.
I flung the door open and flew across the spare, echoing room. Bam! My outstretched hands struck the metal bar and the glass door flew open into the night. Fresh air hit my face and my feet were pounding down a walkway, and then down the middle of a road.
Buildings crammed tight on both sides, their windows dark. Another road crossed the first and I skidded to a stop, looking for the puffin.
She wasn’t there.
She was supposed to come show me the way! I whirled around. She was flying out from behind the building, flapping with all her might. But as I watched, she slowed, fluttering. Did she hear something?
“Come!” I called in birdtalk, as loudly as I dared.
She turned and flew back in the other direction, disappearing around the corner.
Light was blazing from the windows. People were running into the big room and toward the glass doors. I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d have to find my own way to the cliff.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
In This Skin
I ran down the black line of pavement, past looming houses and the empty hulls of cars. The houses thinned and night deepened. The hard road gave way to dirt. Then the breeze shifted and there it was: the thick, salty smell of the sea.
The Turning Page 20
