Secrets of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

Simon spun the wheel just in time for the Pamela Jane to narrowly miss grazing the toothy ledge of another boiler reef. He broke out in a sweat.

  “I need more control!” he called. “We can’t handle more sail yet! We have to get into open water first!”

  Stay calm, he told himself. The Red Coral boat would hit the reefs if it kept going at that speed. Open water was still a quarter of a mile away, but the motorboat was drawing closer and closer. Simon could now see the silhouettes of the two figures in it. He looked back at the floundering rowboat, half-filled with water from the mounting seas. It was slowing them down and making it difficult to steer. The Red Coral boat would reach them within a minute or two. Simon agonized, then he took a deep breath.

  “Cut the rowboat free!” he shouted.

  “But—” yelled Maya, taking her eyes off the water to look back at her brother, “that means…”

  “There’s no time!” Simon shouted. “We have to!”

  Maya ran in a crouch to the stern cleat and unknotted the rowboat and cast it loose. Free of its drag, the Pamela Jane surged forward in the water. They were so close to the end of the reefs. They only had to make it a little farther.

  But their pursuers showed no sign of slowing. For a terrifying moment Simon thought that they would be caught after all. But the motorboat dropped suddenly into idle and began nosing slowly through the water. Simon heaved a sigh of relief.

  “They’ve reached the high reefs!” he called. “They don’t know the way!”

  Simon looked behind him and saw Granny Pearl’s cottage. In terms of distance it was still close, but from the other side of the torturous path through the reefs it felt immeasurably far away.

  At that moment the Pamela Jane passed between the last of the reefs and the seafloor dropped off suddenly as the boat entered open water.

  “More speed!” shouted Simon. “Hoist the mainsail!” Pulling with all their strength, Maya and Helix hoisted the sail. The mainsail gave a mighty shudder and bellowed in the wind. When it reached its full height it fell suddenly silent, shining like a great white wing, majestic in flight over the dark sea.

  A thrill went through each of them.

  “We’re free!” cried Maya gleefully.

  “Barely,” said Helix. “That was close.” But he was smiling.

  Euphoric, they turned to look behind them. The motorboat had become hopelessly lost in the maze of reefs. The lights from the shore danced between the swells, already getting farther away. The wind was in their favor and the Pamela Jane was making good speed. She had shaken the mustiness out of her sails—spiders and long streamers of cobwebs had blown away wildly into the night—and the salt spray struck her sides and washed her clean.

  “The rowboat!” cried Maya suddenly. “Penny! What are we going to do with her?”

  They looked behind them but the rowboat had disappeared quickly in the darkness.

  Simon knew that to head back to shore against the wind would be tricky. The waves were rising and the lights from the shore were lost each time the boat dipped down into a trough. It was dark, the winds were blowing twenty knots, and every now and then waves broke on the tops of the swells. It would be easy to run aground on a night like this. It would also give the Red Coral men time to find their way through the reefs or to turn back and find a safer channel out to sea. The Pamela Jane’s motor no longer worked, and even if they had a good head start, once out in the open water a faster boat would catch them easily.

  But it was more than that. Now that they were out there on the open sea with the wind at their backs it seemed harder and harder to imagine returning. The pull of the ocean was strong. Simon already felt closer to Tamarind than to home.

  Penny had crept back onto the deck without the others seeing her.

  “I want to go with you,” she said. She stood there stoutly, still in her pajamas. Her orange life jacket dwarfed her. “I want to go to Tamarind.”

  They looked down at her.

  “No way,” said Helix. “Your parents are already going to kill me. We’re going to head back to shore farther down and you’re going back to Granny Pearl’s.”

  “Helix is right,” said Maya reluctantly. “I have to take you home.”

  Penny looked crestfallen for a moment, but then the familiar obstinate thrust returned to her chin. “I’ve been to Tamarind before, you know,” she said indignantly.

  The truth was that none of them wanted to go home.

  “If we try to head back in to drop Penny and me off we’ll give them time to catch us,” said Maya. “And then all this will be for nothing—we’ll have lost our chance.”

  “Then there’s only one thing to do,” said Simon. He pulled his gaze away from land and kneeled down and took Penny’s hands firmly.

  “We’re in charge,” he said. “You have to do everything we say, the second we say it. It’s very, very important. And you can’t change your mind and decide you want to go home in a little while. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone. Do you understand?”

  Penny nodded fervently, her cheeks flushed. “I understand,” she said.

  “You have to wear a life jacket all the time,” said Simon. “And if anyone ever yells, ‘Come about!’ it means the boat is going to tack or jibe and you have to duck immediately because the boom will come cracking around. It’s very dangerous. Got that?”

  Penny nodded.

  “Now go down to the cabin and stay there,” said Maya. “The ocean’s too rough for you to be on deck tonight!”

  Beaming, Penny hurried below. A moment later she was kneeling on a bunk with her face pressed to a porthole, looking out in wonder as the foaming black sea slid past and the tiny boat headed into ever greater darkness.

  “We all need to be on the lookout,” called Simon. “Maya at the helm. Helix, take starboard, and I’ll take port and the wheel for now.”

  It was astonishing how swiftly Bermuda dwindled to a tiny pinprick of light in the distance and then was lost to sight. After that they weren’t so afraid of being caught. Even if the Red Coral men made it past the reefs they wouldn’t be able to find the children out in the middle of the immense night ocean.

  Chapter Four

  The Storm

  Though it had been a long time since Simon and Maya had worked as a team on the boat, the memory of how came back to them and they worked in harmony, adjusting the sails to marshal the power of the wind, waiting for a glimpse of the North Star through the clouds, and righting the boat’s course to sail directly south. They ran the sails full—it was almost dangerous to have that much canvas up on such a night—but the Pamela Jane plowed gallantly through the darkness. It’s lucky Helix isn’t on his own out here, thought Simon, the seas are too rough for one person to handle.

  They were out in deep water now. In the inky fathoms below them were whales so large they dwarfed the little ship; nighttime hunters like tiger sharks; and deeper yet, where the ocean floor was cold and still, eerie creatures that were little more than filaments of light blinking on and off. But here, on the surface, the winter night was wild. After a while, Maya and Helix joined Penny in the cabin to warm up, but Simon put a safety harness on and stayed on deck, keeping a watchful eye for other boats’ lights. He was wet and cold but he didn’t care. The past months and years seemed to fall away, and he felt somehow alive again, as if he had woken from a long sleep. This morning he had dragged his heels to school, yawned, and doodled through classes, and now here he was out on the open ocean, salt spray dousing him, rinsing off the tedium of life on land. Nervously, he wondered if they really would find the Blue Line.

  The wind dropped out after a few hours and Maya joined him in the cockpit.

  “I just remembered that my note said Penny and I would be back,” she said unhappily. “Mami and Papi and Granny Pearl will wake up and find us gone…”

  Simon felt a twinge of guilt but he quashed it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re smart. They’ll figure out what happened. An
d when we come home and tell them we stopped the Red Coral Project, think how happy they’ll be.”

  Helix appeared and sat down with them. He seemed more relaxed now and he looked at them both properly for the first time.

  “Hey,” he said to Simon. “You grew.”

  Simon was just about to say he’d grown three inches when Helix grinned and said, “Had to happen some time, shrimp.”

  * * *

  Simon was alone at the wheel on the second night when he first heard the storm in the distance. He stood still, listening. Excitement made his hands prickle. Oily black waves slithered over the hull. At first it was just a light show on the horizon, miles away, illuminating only a tiny fraction of the great darkness that surrounded them. Clouds sat heavy on the fields of black water. Then in seconds, the storm began moving toward them. A great flash lit the sea all around and Simon saw something that made his heart skip a beat.

  For a moment he was rooted to the spot, staring at it in awe, then he ran to the hatch to call Maya and Helix.

  Shaking off sleep, they appeared on deck and joined him at the stern. They had to wait until the next flash of lightning to see the strange, deep turquoise band.

  “The Blue Line!” said Maya in amazement. “I don’t believe it—we found it!”

  The lightning illuminated the sea and sky as bright as false day, and lit the line an unearthly, mesmerizing aqua, distinct from the rest of the sea. It looked like a second horizon tracking toward them. Rain began to stab the deck and blur the seas rising around the Pamela Jane.

  “Furl the sails,” said Simon. “We don’t have long!” The wind snatched his words and ferried them into the night.

  An instant later rain was drumming deafeningly on the deck. The world around them shrank to the boat herself—Simon could barely see past her railings. Thunder boomed overhead and immense banks of clouds massed and multiplied, hurling javelins of lightning. When he had tied the wheel securely, he rushed to help Maya and Helix, who were struggling with the mainsail. Great sheets of salt spray and foam drove through the air, knocking their feet out from under them.

  “This is it!” Simon bellowed when everything was finally battened down. “Get belowdecks!”

  Maya slid down the hatch first, followed by Helix, and with a last look at the Blue Line—they were nearly upon it now—Simon ducked and pulled the hatch down over his head and slid the lock across it. Within moments the storm had swallowed them whole. The boat lurched as if she had run aground and the three of them pitched forward, tumbling into one another. Penny woke sobbing and Maya crawled over to her. The four of them huddled where they could, bracing themselves against the bunks to keep from being tossed around.

  Waves struck the Pamela Jane broadside and spun her around. At first the children tried to shout to one another, but they couldn’t hear over the wind and waves. The ophalla in the captain’s quarters had started to glow furiously, casting a weird light that turned their faces ghostly blue. Waves crashed on the deck and Simon watched water creeping in through the hatch. Through the porthole he glimpsed cliffs of black water. The boat’s timbers groaned and sometimes it sounded as if she was splitting into pieces. The children couldn’t have said how many times the boat rose dizzyingly on crests of waves and plunged into cold dark troughs, but it began to seem as if they had been in the storm their whole lives and there was nothing in the world beyond the howling void.

  Gradually Simon realized that the winds had started to subside and the boat was no longer at the mercy of the mountains of waves. A current caught the Pamela Jane and bore her swiftly away from the foul weather. Through the portholes the children watched the dark water rushing past. Simon climbed the companionway and opened the hatch to look out at the black cluster of clouds, buzzing with lightning, receding farther and farther into the distance.

  “The Pamela Jane made it through,” he said. “Brave ship,” he whispered, patting her deck.

  Maya put Penny back to bed, and exhausted by her ordeal, the little girl fell asleep at once. Maya and Simon and Helix left the cabin. They stood on the deck, bending their knees in the gentle swells, and looked around them in wonder. It was as if they had passed some invisible shield and sailed on into warm, calm seas beneath a sky that had suddenly cleared to reveal a brilliant husk of moon and thousands of stars. Around them the sea spread silver with moonlight. The air itself smelled different—the pungent odor of strange seaweeds reached their noses and the faint rustle of it could be heard somewhere in the distance. A shiver passed through Simon. They had crossed the line once again. Tamarind lay ahead.

  They examined their bruises, coming up black in the moonlight, but were relieved to see that the Pamela Jane was undamaged. They checked and retightened the stays, then they hoisted the sails and were soon sailing along quickly.

  “I’ll stay on watch,” Simon said to Maya and Helix. Helix still looked a bit green-faced.

  “Are you sure?” asked Maya.

  Simon nodded. “I don’t think I could sleep now anyway,” he said.

  The others headed for bed. Simon wasn’t alone for long before he heard Maya’s footsteps in the cabin and a moment later she emerged on the deck. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and had brought another for him.

  “Penny’s asleep,” she whispered. “Helix, too. I’d rather sleep out here, anyway.” She sat down next to Simon, pulling her blanket tightly around her. Above them thousands of stars glittered in the clear crystal sky. “Remember last time we did this?” she asked.

  Simon nodded. They had been younger then, and shocked and afraid after their parents had been lost overboard. Maya had had first watch but Simon had come up and slept on deck near her so she wouldn’t be alone. “Thank you,” he said.

  “No problem,” she murmured, lying down and drawing the blanket up to her shoulders. “Good night.”

  She didn’t sleep, though, because a moment later she said, “I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to do when we get there. I think we should find Isabella. I bet she’d help—I’m sure she doesn’t want the Red Coral in Tamarind, either. She’d probably be exactly the kind of person who could do something. Look what she managed last time.”

  Isabella Obrado, the young girl at the head of the Sisters for the Peaceful Revolution, had planned the Great Peace March that ended many long decades of war. Maya was right—if anyone could help them, Isabella could.

  “That’s a really good idea,” said Simon hopefully.

  Maya’s breathing grew deep and even, and Simon knew she had fallen asleep. He was alone with his thoughts. The warm breeze blew over the deck. Strong currents propelled them forward and miles of sea passed beneath them. Hearing a soft splashing, he looked to starboard, where dozens of turtles heading to shore lifted their heads, their ancient carapaces catching the moonlight. Their quiet gasps sounded like the wind through trees that they were still many miles from. Simon was tired and his thoughts wandered and ran into each other.

  A memory returned to him: He was eight or nine and the family had still lived on the boat. They were out at sea and he was standing at the helm with Papi, who had one hand around Simon’s shoulder and with the other was pointing at a giant blue marlin leaping through the air like a missile, the wind strong in the sails, the day hot and the sea a deep, brilliant purple-blue so beautiful that Papi said it could knock you over. Simon had been purely happy in that moment. Then he remembered the day before, standing in the doorway to his father’s office. All he had wanted was to talk to him. He didn’t know why everything was so different now.

  The sea murmured softly on the Pamela Jane’s hull. It felt good to have made it through the storm. Bioluminescent creatures glowed in the waters around the boat and Simon could see their lights off the port and starboard, mysterious and strange. Every now and then something glided through the water, leaving a fizz of blue-green bubbles.

  He wondered what they would find when they got to Tamarind.

  Helix said the Red Coral
were desperate to find Faustina’s Gate.

  Faustina’s Gate.

  What was it?

  Why did the Red Coral Project want to know?

  And if Simon and the children found it first, could it help stop the Red Coral?

  Chapter Five

  Trouble in Tamarind • An Overburdened City • “Madam President!” • The Red Man • Bird of Milagros • A Bolt of Green

  The following morning dawned blue and clear. The children ate breakfast on the deck—apples and bread that Maya had packed—and enjoyed the sun on their shoulders. There was a brisk but gentle breeze and miles of ocean sparkling all around them with not another ship in sight. To everyone’s relief, Penny had not cried since the storm or asked for their parents, and seemed pleased simply to be included on an adventure with the older children. Since they hadn’t brought spare clothes for her, she was still wearing her pink pajamas, which Maya had rolled over her knees and elbows.

  Simon chewed on a hunk of bread. Even stale bread tasted delicious out on the water. He tossed his apple core overboard, where electric green fish lifted their gleaming scales into the sun as they nibbled it to its seeds. His skin was salty, his hair was stiff with salt, his feet were bare, and after years of waking up in the same place each morning, in a home rooted solidly to the ground, he had woken in the cabin of their beloved boat as she rushed through the dawn waters. Except for the occasional twinge of guilt about his parents, he was happy. Tamarind lay up ahead and there they would be able to confront the Red Coral Project—Simon would finally be able to do something.

  “Land!” Maya shouted suddenly.

  Simon leaped to his feet and for a brief second he caught sight of a brilliant green speck on the horizon before the boat dipped back down and he lost sight of it.

  “Is this it?” Maya asked excitedly. “Are we there?”

  Helix ran to the bow to look out, hand shading his eyes. A moment later he turned back to them, smiling from ear to ear. His shark’s tooth necklace gleamed on his dark chest. “We made it!” he shouted. “Tamarind!”