by E. G. Foley
“Right. Heh heh.”
Oh, this was excruciating.
She must have thought so too. “Ahem. So, what are you going to do today?” she asked earnestly, folding her arms across her chest.
“I dunno. Try not to get killed,” he joked. “You?”
“I don’t know either.” She shrugged, lifting her dainty shoulders. “I thought I’d see what you’re doing. And then…if you’re not really doing anything…maybe we could do something together?”
“Yes!” Jake blurted out a little too forcefully.
She didn’t seem to notice, smiling with relief. “Good.”
“Oh—I almost forgot,” he said. “How are your hands? I know you scraped them up a bit, and your knees, when you fell. I could get a healing feather from Red if you—”
“No, it’s all right. Nixie already…did some sort of little tapping thing on them last night with her wand, and they seem to be all better.” She held up her hands and showed him they were smooth and healed. Only the slightest traces of her cuts and scrapes remained. “But thank you, though. It’s…really sweet of you to offer.”
“I should’ve thought of it last night.”
They stared at each other for a second, neither knowing what to say, when suddenly, a loud “Ahem” sounded from the stairs leading up from the boys’ bedchamber.
They stepped back quickly from each other, sheepish and blushing, as Maddox came marching up onto the patio.
Not that it was really a secret anymore that Jake liked her, after the way he had exploded the rock monster yesterday in front of everyone.
“What is going on here?” Maddox drawled as he walked past them to the breakfast spread already laid out on the rooftop table.
“Nothing,” they said in unison. Then they exchanged a twinkling glance and followed him, and sat down to eat.
The others soon drifted up to the patio for breakfast, as well. Red alighted from where he had been sleeping in the trees, landing in their midst with a pounce, and then eyeing the breakfast table.
“Good morning, sir. I think he missed us yesterday,” Jake remarked, helplessly aware that he was glancing and smiling at Dani much too often. But he couldn’t seem to stop.
Maddox stared at him like he was annoyed by his cheerfulness.
Then Sapphira arrived on the terrace with Liliana, coming up from their surfside pavilion to join them for breakfast. Dani glanced cautiously from Jake to the elder mermaid and back again, but he all but ignored Sapphira, merely mumbling a greeting along with the rest of them.
“How are you feeling today?” Sapphira asked Maddox as she and Lil sat down. “It looked like you got bashed pretty hard against those rocks.”
Maddox grunted wordlessly and shrugged. Apparently, he was no longer impressed by her sea magic either.
Nixie arrived looking much better than she had last night. Isabelle drifted out a few minutes later.
Archie was the last to come dragging himself out of bed. The boy genius slept poorly these days, as Jake and Maddox both knew quite well. It was hard to share a room with him, because he’d mumbled in his sleep ever since he started having his peculiar dreams.
He was prone to waking up at odd hours with a yelp.
Jake wondered about what his cousin saw in those dreams. Or visions, or nightmares, or whatever they were. No wonder he was so addicted to espresso, either to avoid falling asleep in the first place, or to manage his daytime fatigue after another night of tossing and turning.
Thankfully, everything seemed back to normal with everyone today. Isabelle reported she had asked Miss Helena, but there was still no news from Derek or Henry.
Nor had Wallace received any messages from Coral City for Sapphira and Lil. Both princesses yearned to know what was happening back home, but on the whole, Jake was grateful for how things stood at the moment.
The orb was now dented, but at least they had escaped the rock monsters alive. They had discovered the rest of the Atlantean treasure trove, and left it in a state that would be very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to get to. Neither Davy Jones nor the Dark Druids had found them. And they had learned the identity of the one who had made those rock golems: Lord Wyvern.
Jake was itching to ask Aunt Ramona if she knew this person, but he hesitated, knowing it would only rouse her suspicions, and then she’d figure out he’d lied to her. Getting in trouble with any adult was not fun, but angering an Elder witch was another matter entirely.
Despite all the high-stakes danger of what they were involved in, though, Jake felt ridiculously happy, unbothered by it all for some reason. He didn’t care what he had to face as long as Dani was nearby. Even better, he could feel it in her smile that she felt the same. He didn’t care how Maddox rolled his eyes or Nixie smirked at them.
Of course, he had not dared hold Dani’s hand again, but at least she graciously spared him any mention of his foolish disappearing act yesterday, after he had spilled his guts.
“Could someone pass the jam?” Isabelle asked over breakfast.
Jake levitated it over to her with a smile.
“Thanks, coz.” She smiled, then glanced around and lowered her head. “I want to ask you all, has anyone else noticed Aunt Ramona acting a bit strange?”
“No. Strange how?” Jake asked.
Isabelle shrugged. “I could swear she’s avoiding me.”
“I doubt it.” Archie snorted. “You’re her favorite.”
“That’s what makes it even odder. I wonder if she’s cross at me for something?”
“Maybe she knows we lied about what we were doing yesterday,” Nixie said with a furtive glance around.
“Oh, believe me, if the ol’ girl were angry at us, she wouldn’t be shy about letting us know it,” Jake said. “We would’ve already been called in to the carpet, trust me. We’re fine.”
“So what’s everyone doing today?” Maddox asked.
Jake and Dani exchanged a smile, having already decided to pal around together for the day. The others more or less shrugged—except for Archie, who cleared his throat.
“Well, Nix and I have discussed it, and we’ve decided that the time has come for us to begin a more active study of the orb. It’s time to run some tests.”
Several of them protested.
“Is that wise?” Jake asked. “That thing is supposed to be able to create a huge flood.”
“Now that it’s damaged, it may not work at all anymore,” Archie countered. “But we need to find out what we’re really dealing with here.”
Maddox frowned, but Nixie backed up her partner with a nod.
“Archie thinks it’s important, and so do I. And let’s be honest, neither of us is usually wrong,” she added bluntly.
“Sapphira, we’d ask that you show us what you basically did to get it working the first time. Will you do that?” Archie asked.
She eyed them warily, but nodded. “I agree with you. The artifact is too important to just let it sit there. In the wrong hands, of course, it could bring disaster, but if it were in the right ones, who knows? It might be a great boon to your world, if not ours. Perhaps it could help end droughts for the landers.”
“It’s a big risk,” Dani said with a troubled frown.
“I was able to turn it off,” the mermaid reminded them. “I’m not really sure how, but it wasn’t that hard.”
“You see?” Nixie said to the others. “We’re doing this.”
“It’s dented, anyway.” Archie shrugged and buttered his toast. “Part of it cracked when Jake unfortunately dropped it. But, you know, make lemonade from lemons and all that. If we can’t get it working, then at least I can now more easily pry open its innards and see what’s inside. Figure out how she works. Who knows? Maybe I can build some sort of Atlantean replica of my own. Show that at the next Invention Convention. Ha!”
“Archimedes,” said his sister.
“Here’s a thought,” Archie said with a grin. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can stay in
the schoolroom today and work on your assignments. Hmm?” He peered over his spectacles at them all. “Wouldn’t want anyone falling behind in their studies by the time Henry gets back, now, would we?”
No one offered any further protests.
Still, Jake frowned at his cousin. “You sure about this?” he murmured.
“Absolutely! Don’t worry, coz. I’ll wear my lucky bowtie,” Archie said cheerfully, then took a large bite of toast.
After breakfast, Jake and Dani started to go off by themselves, as planned, but a mix of embarrassment at their friends’ nosy glances in their direction, along with their curiosity about Archie’s experiments on the orb, soon had them hurrying back to join the others.
Before long, they all gathered down on the beach to watch the orb demonstration.
Dr. Bradford had donned goggles and white lab coat, as had his official assistant, Isabelle. Izzy stood by with a pencil and notebook, keeping an eye on the instruments and ready to jot down her genius brother’s observations as he called them out.
Nixie had brought along her wand but waited patiently, having agreed to go second with whatever magical experiments she had in mind for the orb, in case Archie’s scientific tests yielded no useful results.
Jake and Maddox carried an outdoor table from the terrace down to the beach. On it, Archie set up all his instruments in a tidy row: weather vane, barometer, thermometer, compass, a beaker to be used as a rain gauge if the orb indeed generated precipitation, and a homemade cup anemometer that he had fashioned to measure the wind speed after Sapphira described the whirling vortex the orb had created.
He gave Maddox a yardstick to go and shove down into the sand in the shallows so they could easily measure if the wave heights changed.
Last, he entrusted Jake with his subcompact camera, with orders to snap a few photographs of whatever happened.
Dani stood near him, holding Teddy in her arms, as she always did when she was nervous. The carrot-head was the only one who’d brought an umbrella.
“Just in case,” she had said, and Lil stood under it with her, wide-eyed.
Red sat on the beach, wings folded, his golden eyes observing all with placid interest, while his long, tufted tail slowly swished back and forth across the sand.
“For the record, I don’t like it,” Maddox said, hands on hips.
“You don’t like anything,” Isabelle said under her breath, pushing the goggles up higher onto her nose.
Archie turned to her, the ends of his lab coat flapping a bit in the light breeze as the surf rolled on just a few yards away. Farther out from the shore, the Turtle dozed on her moorings, with only the upper curve of her hull visible above the waves.
“Let’s be sure and take down baseline readings on all the instruments,” said Archie.
“Done,” Isabelle reported.
“Good! Then we’re ready?”
“Ready, Doctor.”
“Sapphira, please come forward.” He beckoned her over and lifted the orb. “Try to remember exactly what you did to activate it.”
The elder mermaid reached for it. “Well, I started twisting it—”
“Ah, ah!” Archie stopped her. “I’ll do it. Just tell me. Did you begin by turning it on the horizontal or vertical planes?”
Sapphira looked at him, then gazed at the orb and shrugged. “I don’t know. I was just playing with it…at random.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Very well. Please watch carefully in case it does anything you remember.” Archie then made the first cautious twist of the orb’s segments, but he didn’t get far. They all waited silently while he struggled to get the segments to twist, to no avail. “The dented side is blocking parts of it from turning.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Jake suggested, glancing over at Dani.
“Humph. You would say that, coz. Thing survives unscathed for thousands of years, then you get your hands on it, and look what happens.”
“Ha ha,” Jake retorted.
“Here.” Nixie picked up the hammer she had seen fit to contribute—she did like bashing things, after all—and handed it to Archie.
“Oh, very well. So much for finesse!” He set the orb on the table and gave it a few cautious taps around the edges of the dent. “That should at least loosen it up a bit.”
Isabelle diligently recorded the changes made to the surface of the orb.
Then he tried again, and gasped. “It went! Izzy: center section, one hundred eighty degrees positive rotation on the X plane. Next, let’s try the vertical. Ninety degrees positive rotation of the right-hand section on the Y plane. Now the top section on the X plane. Let’s go ninety degrees negative turn this time.”
Izzy made a note, then looked up attentively. Still nothing happened.
“Two hundred seventy degrees negative rotation of the bottom section now. X plane.”
“Very good,” said his assistant.
Sapphira folded her arms across her chest, peering at his progress. “I thought you didn’t like random.”
“This isn’t random, Your Highness. I’m trying to line up these squiggly hieroglyphs here, with the triangle on the end.”
“Aha.” The mermaid took a cautious step backward.
“Ninety degrees negative rotations now of the left-hand section, Y plane…”
They looked on as this process was repeated again and again, Archie choosing his twists of the orb segments carefully, trying to line up the symbols that had struck him as important. Occasionally, he had to give sections of the orb a gentle tap of the hammer to persuade them to turn.
Maddox sat down cross-legged on the sand, bored.
Jake waited with the camera. Red lay down under the table with the instruments, napping in the shade.
“Science is boring,” Jake mouthed silently at Dani a few minutes later.
She grinned.
But it didn’t stay boring very long. After all, the boy genius never took no for an answer when it came to his unending quest for knowledge. Obviously, he possessed more patience than the rest of them put together, and, Archie being Archie, he eventually got his result.
“Hullo,” he murmured as the little chips of glasslike rocks around the rim of the orb suddenly started flickering. “Sapphira?”
“Yes?” She rushed over to him. “Yes, that’s what it did for me!”
“Isabelle: notate lights flashing around the edges in a definite pattern, but it’s too quick for me to follow.”
“Lights,” she echoed. “Noted.”
Jake stepped forward with the camera. Rather fascinated now, he snapped a picture of the lights dancing around the orb, then moved back again, quickly sliding out the plate and replacing it with a fresh one to be ready for the next shot.
“Did it vibrate first before the lights started, sort of like a shiver?” Sapphira asked Archie, wide-eyed as she watched.
“Er, no,” he said while the colored crystal chips flickered all around the edges of the orb.
Sapphira gestured at it. “Give it one more turn, then.”
“Which way?”
“I don’t know! Any way. But you’re close. There should be a shiver and a hum, then it will…sort of unfold.”
“Unfold?”
“I don’t know! It’s hard to explain!” she said.
Archie cast his sister a disapproving glance at such unspecific language; Izzy shook her head, frowning discreetly.
“Very well,” the young scientist conceded, and gave the orb’s segments one last twist. “Negative one hundred eighty degrees of the center section on the X plane.” A small yelp escaped him just then.
“What happened?” Nixie demanded.
“I warned you it would vibrate.”
“Still, I wasn’t expecting that.”
Suddenly, Teddy growled, staring at the orb. Red, too, picked up his head and looked at it, his tufted ears flattened.
“The animals hear something,” Isabelle said.
“Ow! So do I,” Maddox said, clap
ping his hands over his ears. Guardians did possess supernaturally heightened senses, after all. He rose to his feet. “Turn it off!”
Still in Dani’s arms, Teddy started barking at the orb. She tried to quiet him, but a moment later, they all could hear the sound already assaulting the more sensitive ears of the animals and Maddox: a low-frequency hum pulsating out of the orb.
It was swiftly growing into a loud, horrendous whine.
Teddy was wriggling in Dani’s arms. As soon as she put him down, both he and Red ran up the beach stairs to escape the sound.
Maddox followed in obvious pain. He kept his hands over his ears. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Jake looked at him in concern, but Archie was still concentrating on his experiment.
“Isabelle, note the time the hum started.”
“Yes, doctor. Um…” She leaned closer to instruments on the table. “We’ve got a change in the barometer reading. The pressure’s dropping.”
“Is it now?” Archie murmured.
“Two point nine zero inches,” she replied.
“I don’t like that sound. It buzzes in my middle,” Lil complained, clutching her stomach.
“It’s all right.” Sapphira went and put her arm around her little sister, then glanced at Jake. “Be ready to take another picture,” she warned. “The unfolding comes next.”
Dani turned and looked after Maddox uncertainly as he ran up the beach stairs, still holding his ears, but Jake aimed the camera’s lens at the orb, ready.
“Wind speed’s picking up, nearing twenty knots,” Isabelle informed her brother as the cup anemometer began to turn faster in the rising wind.
Click! went the orb.
“Would you look at that!” Archie murmured.
Jake snapped another picture just as the segments of the orb began flipping down one by one and snapping into place, transforming the artifact from a round sphere into a flattened disk shape.
He quickly changed out the film plate again and took another shot of the now-exposed inside portion of the object, where a whole new array of buttons and hieroglyphs had become visible.
“Well, it certainly seems to know what it’s doing,” the genius mused aloud, while Isabelle was struggling to keep up with jotting down all the changes in the orb and the instrument readings.
