by Maggie Marks
When Mason reached his brother, he leaned over, trying to catch his breath. “What is it? Are you hurt?”
Asher shook his head and pointed.
There, poking out of a smoldering burn pile, was the edge of a box. No, not a box, Mason realized. It’s a chest. A treasure chest.
But instead of brown wood, the chest had turned ash black.
Asher had finally found his buried treasure, but that treasure had been burned to a crisp.
CHAPTER 5
“Don’t touch it!” Luna cried as she skidded to a stop in the sand. “You’ll burn yourself.”
The treasure chest did look hot to the touch—and fragile, as if it would disintegrate the second someone tried to open the lid.
“Is it ruined?” Asher whimpered.
Yes. Definitely. Without a doubt, Mason wanted to say. But Asher looked as if he might fall to pieces any second now, too, so Mason stayed silent.
Together, they dribbled cool ocean water over the chest until it stopped smoking. Then they dug it out from the sand and dragged it into the open.
“Do you want to do the honors?” Luna asked Asher, nodding toward the chest.
Asher looked torn, as if half of him was dying to know what was inside the treasure chest, and the other half was dreading seeing all that glorious loot burned to a crisp.
Finally, he reached out his hand and nudged open the lid.
The smell hit Mason before anything else. Fish. Blackened fish. Asher grabbed it with his fingertips and flung it into the sand with disgust.
Below that was a leather tunic, charred and tattered. And a half melted iron sword. As Asher lifted it out of the chest, the nose of the sword pointed downward, bending into an upside-down U.
“Oh, man,” he said, glancing back into the chest. “Is that what I think it is? I can’t even look.”
So Mason looked for him. Sure enough, the last thing in the chest was a round black ball. The heart of the sea.
As Mason reached for it, the treasure disintegrated into a pile of ash.
“No!” Asher wailed. “We came all this way!”
Luna sighed. “Just be glad there wasn’t any TNT in this chest,” she said, “or we all might have been blown sky-high.”
Leave it to Luna to always look on the bright side, thought Mason. But his own spirits had sunk like an anchor to the ocean floor.
He glanced around the island, hoping there’d be something else here to make the journey worthwhile. “Look,” he said, pointing. “Should we check that out?”
A small hut stood a few yards away, a curl of smoke rising from its roof. “Maybe there’s a furnace inside,” said Mason. “Or even a supply chest with food.” His stomach rumbled at the thought. He and Asher had eaten nothing but dried kelp and fish for weeks now.
“Food?” said Asher, lifting his chin. “Like . . . bread? Or potatoes? Or mushroom stew. Ooh, mushroom stew!”
He jumped to his feet as if the heart of the sea were now a distant memory.
“Wait,” said Luna, “there could still be mobs inside.”
“Right,” said Mason. “Let’s go together.”
But Asher was always a step ahead. He got to the hut first and swung open the door, with nothing but a pickaxe at his side.
Then he took a giant step backward.
Something grunted, and groaned, and staggered out of the hut. A zombie!
Mason swung into action, raising his trident. But he couldn’t throw it—Asher was in the way.
“Run!” Mason cried.
But Asher wasn’t a runner. He was a fighter. He swung his pickaxe, knocking the zombie backward toward the hut.
Luna threw her trident, striking the mob in the chest. It tumbled downward with a groan.
But more zombies were spilling out of the hut. Two, three, four . . . How many could it hold?
Mason didn’t have time to count. He raced toward the hut, his weapon raised, until Luna held up her hand. She pointed toward the sun, and then Mason realized. They didn’t have to fight. The morning sun would do it for them.
Sure enough, the mobs began to sizzle. And moan. And burn.
“Get back!” Mason cried to Asher, who was standing too close to one of the undead mobs.
As the creature burst into flames, Asher yelped. The sleeve of his T-shirt flickered with flames.
In an instant, Mason had knocked his brother to the ground. He forced Asher to roll in the sand, trying to smother the fire. Finally, the flames were out. Asher’s sleeve had turned black and smoky.
Then Mason heard a grunt from over his shoulder.
As he glanced backward, he caught the stench of the undead mob. A zombie staggered toward him. Why wasn’t it burning? As a cool shadow spilled across the sand, Mason had his answer. The sun had slipped behind a dark cloud.
Then Luna was on the mob, swinging her trident like a sword. As Mason pulled Asher out of the way, Luna knocked the zombie backward toward the waves. He took one more staggering step back, and then another, until he fell with a horrific splash.
Below him, Mason felt Asher squirm. “Get. Off. Me!” Asher grumbled. “I’m fine!” But as he sat up, he held his injured arm.
“Put some cool water on it,” called Luna, waving him toward the water—away from where the zombie had fallen.
While Asher crouched in the sand, dipping his arm in the waves, Luna dropped her trident. She pulled off her backpack and rummaged through it. “Potion of healing,” she muttered. “It’s here somewhere.”
Finally, she pulled a vial of sloshing pink liquid from the depths of her pack.
Asher reached for it, ready to take a swig, but Luna shook her head. “It’s a splash potion,” she said. She uncorked the potion and jerked the bottle forward, drenching Asher with the liquid.
“Hey!” he cried. “Watch it!” He wiped his face.
Mason laughed out loud. “You should be relieved!” he said. “At least you didn’t have to drink something nasty.”
Luna used some pretty disgusting things in her potions, like fermented spider eyes and fish oil. But her potions always worked. Asher was already moving his arm in a slow circle, as if it were feeling better.
Then he froze. And pointed.
“What?” asked Mason. He followed Asher’s gaze down into the waves, where the zombie had taken its last step. But the zombie wasn’t gone. It hovered just below the water. And it was shaking, sending ripples toward the surface above.
“What’s happening to it?” Asher cried.
“I don’t know,” said Mason. “Get back!” He pulled his brother onto the sandy shore.
But Luna stepped forward. As the zombie began to push itself out of the water, she uncorked her potion again and splashed the mob.
“What are you doing?” cried Asher. “Trying to heal it?”
“No!” cried Luna. “Potion of healing doesn’t heal zombies. It harms them.”
Sure enough, the mob fell backward, snarling.
By the time it rose again from the waves, Luna was ready. She threw her trident like a spear, knocking the zombie back underwater—for good.
As the mob disappeared, its tattered brown robes swirled round and round. “Wait, that wasn’t a zombie,” Mason cried. “That was a drowned!”
“No,” said Asher. “It was a zombie.”
Luna held out her hand, waiting for her enchanted trident to return. It snapped out of the water and back into her palm, ready for battle. “It was both,” she practically whispered.
“What?” asked Mason, wondering if he’d heard her correctly.
She faced him, her eyes wide. “That zombie just turned into a drowned.”
Mason sucked in his breath. He’d heard about things like that happening, but had he just actually seen it with his own eyes? “Well, at least you got it,” he said. “Nice job with the trident!”
But Luna didn’t look relieved. She looked horrified.
“How many more zombies from that siege have already turned?” she asked. “How many drowne
d are swimming right now, heading toward our village?”
Mason felt a trickle of dread run down his spine. He’d just built their glass house underwater. He didn’t want anything to happen to it. Or to us, he thought with a shudder.
Luna knew a thing or two about zombie sieges and drowned attacks. So when she began packing up the boat and pushing off, Mason quickly followed. “Get in,” he told Asher. “Let’s go.”
Mason paddled back in the direction they had come from, faster and faster, hoping to beat any drowned back to their underwater base.
No one said a word. In the silence, Mason heard every stroke of the paddle in the water and felt every lurch forward. He held his breath, as if a drowned might suddenly surface and reach its gnarly hand toward the boat.
At the very thought of it, Mason paddled harder. Faster. The wind picked up, carrying them forward with each gust. But when they’d reached the middle of the ocean, Mason could no longer tell where he was going.
“Asher,” he called over his shoulder. “We need the map. Which way do we go?”
Asher sat up, as if coming out of a deep sleep. “Right,” he said. “Let me grab it.” He dug deep into his pocket, and then into the other one. As his hands came up empty, fear flickered across his face.
“I don’t have the map,” he said. “I must have lost it—back on the island!”
Mason groaned. “Do we need to go back for it?” he asked Luna.
She heaved a great sigh. “Back where?” she asked.
As Mason spun around, his stomach sunk. The island had disappeared. They were surrounded by a sea of blue, without a map.
A thick layer of dark clouds hung overhead, which meant there was no sun to guide them. And as a droplet of water splashed onto his cheek, and then another, Mason realized something else.
A storm was brewing.
CHAPTER 6
The raindrops turned into sheets of wind and water. As the boat rocked side to side, Mason’s stomach tossed and turned with it.
“Hang on!” he hollered to Asher. But his voice was instantly sucked up by the wind.
Asher clung to the edge of the boat, his eyes wide.
Is he remembering what I’m remembering? Mason wondered. That horrible night on the ship, when Uncle Bart had ordered them below deck. But how could we go? thought Mason. He needed our help! So the brothers had stayed on deck and seen Uncle Bart’s last moments, when the ship had lurched sideways and sent their uncle toppling into the waters below.
Mason squeezed his eyes shut, trying to forget.
Then he forced them back open. We need to stay strong, he reminded himself. We can’t freak out!
Luna had kicked into action, too. She’d pulled a compass from her backpack and was holding it up toward the dark sky. “That way!” she hollered, pointing. “We need to paddle west. No, southwest.”
But she was pointing directly into a storm cloud! And now the wind was circling around, pulling the boat backward instead of forward.
“Help me paddle!” Mason cried to Asher.
Together, they took one long, strong stroke. But as Mason pulled the paddle up out of the water—just a few inches to give Asher more to grab—the wind took it right out of his hands.
The paddle tumbled backward off the boat and into the raging water.
Asher went after it. By the time Mason reached his brother, all he could grab were his sneakers. The rest of his body hovered just above the churning waves.
“Hang on!” cried Mason.
With Luna’s help, he pulled Asher back in. But the boat shook violently now, with no one at the oar. With no oar at all. And water had begun to slosh around Mason’s feet.
“What do we do?” he cried. His teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Luna held her voice steady. “We dive,” she said solemnly.
“Into the water?” asked Asher, voicing the question Mason had wanted to ask.
She nodded. “It’s calmer down below than it is up here. We have no choice.”
As she pulled a potion from her soaking-wet backpack, Mason recognized the blue liquid: potion of night vision. The world underwater would be dark and shadowy. Luna struggled to pull the cork from the slippery-wet bottle, and then she handed it to Mason. As the boat lurched, he got a double dose of the carrot-flavored liquid. He coughed and handed the bottle to Asher.
The next potion—the sweet, sugary potion of swiftness—was easy to drink. But the last one, potion of water breathing, was not. The fish-flavored liquid tasted nasty, but Mason held his nose and forced it down. His new worst fear wasn’t the boat sinking. It was running out of air underwater. He made sure Asher got a solid drink, too, before handing the bottle back to Luna.
Please let us get home safely, Mason whispered to the stormy skies. No zombies. No drowned. And plenty of potion to get us there.
He strapped on his turtle shell helmet and stepped to the side of the boat. The wind nearly knocked him off his feet, but he hung on—waiting until Luna had jumped into the stormy sea.
“Your turn!” Mason hollered to Asher. “I’ll go last.”
Asher plugged his nose, as if he could keep the water out, and jumped.
Here goes nothing, thought Mason. As a crack of lightning lit up the sky, he followed his brother off the side of the boat.
After being soaked with cold rain, Mason welcomed the warmth of the water. And Luna was right—the water under the surface was much calmer. Down, down, down he dove, quick as a dolphin chasing its pod. The potion of swiftness had kicked in. Mason could feel it coursing through his limbs.
Luna led the way with her compass, past the remains of an underwater village. Here, every moss-covered building was graced with a sandstone arch. The edges of the huts were rounded, smoothed by years of ocean waves. Tropical fish darted in and out of windows, flicking their tails at Mason as if telling him to move on, that this village belonged to them.
He studied their tiny faces and fins, lit by potion of night vision. That means the potion of water breathing must have kicked in, too, Mason realized. He stopped holding his breath and inhaled deeply, letting the water cool his lungs.
As he followed Asher toward the glow of a sea lantern, Mason felt his body relax. His worries began to wash away. Sea grass tickled his arms and legs as he hugged the ocean floor.
When a squid lifted its lazy head, Mason didn’t even flinch. This little guy looked just like Edward, Luna’s pet squid. Mason patted the creature on the head, gently so that it wouldn’t squirt him with black ink, and then swam onward.
But as they neared the ocean monument, Mason sensed a change in the world around him. The water felt cooler in the shadows of the humongous structure, and darker, even with potion of night vision.
Luna kept checking over her shoulder, a sure sign that there was potential danger ahead. So Mason swam faster, matching strokes with Asher, until they were side by side.
Stay close, Mason told Asher with a look.
As they approached the prismarine pillars, Mason glanced up, wondering if he could see the top. But the monument was endless—it seemed to stretch to the sky itself.
Faster and faster Luna swam, as if she were in a hurry to pass by the structure. Mason was, too. But Asher reached out his hand, letting it glide along the smooth turquoise-colored blocks of each pillar.
Stay away from those! Mason wanted to holler. He waved to get Asher’s attention.
Guardians could be hiding behind the pillars: hostile fishlike mobs with orange spikes and thrashing tails, mobs that could blast Asher with a laser before he even knew what had hit him.
When Asher suddenly stopped swimming, Mason sucked in a mouthful of saltwater, wondering what his brother had seen.
Then he saw it, too—a menacing shadow.
Something lurked behind one of the pillars. A guardian? No, this wasn’t a fish mob. This mob had a torso and legs.
Mason watched in horror as the drowned stepped out from behind the pillar. It staggered forward like a zomb
ie, then turned and stared, its tattered brown robes rippling in the water.
Mason hung suspended, unable to look away. The mob’s eyes were so blue and so cold.
Then in an instant, those eyes flashed and the mob lunged forward.
Protect Asher! thought Mason. He grabbed his trident and stepped in front of his brother.
The drowned was close now—mere feet away. With every ounce of strength Mason could muster, he swung his trident.
Whack!
It knocked the drowned backward. But it slowly crawled to its feet.
Whack!
The drowned hit the stony ground again with a grunt.
As Mason stood over the undead mob, waiting for the slightest movement, something flickered in the corner of his eye.
Asher? No, his brother was on his other side.
Mason whirled to his right, ready to take on another drowned. But . . . which one?
The prismarine pillars of the ocean monument had come to life, wriggling and writhing with mottle-skinned mobs.
Mason wasn’t facing another drowned.
He was facing a whole army of them.
CHAPTER 7
The drowned spilled out of the ocean monument, climbing over one another to get to their prey.
To get to us, Mason realized.
“Swim!” he hollered to Asher, bubbles gushing from his mouth.
He wanted his brother to get a head start, to swim away while Mason fended off the first few drowned. But Mason knew better—Asher wouldn’t leave him behind.
So together they fought.
Mason swung his trident against the first drowned. Whack! The drowned staggered backward as if in slow motion.
Asher darted toward the next drowned and then away, as if taunting the mob. When it followed, Asher swung his pickaxe. Thwack!
Then Luna was beside the brothers, too, launching her trident like a spear against the wave of drowned.
The first few mobs grunted and groaned, falling one by one. Their drops littered the ocean floor. When a pile of hot rotten flesh rose toward Mason, he swiped it away with his arm.
Luna was behind him now—he saw the flash of her trident. Wait, no . . . He glanced again.
