“It’s amazing,” he murmured. “I’ve never seen water this color before. It’s so . . . blue.”
I laughed. “Hence its name, I guess.”
A moment later, the others were climbing down the rocks.
“Emily, you made it back!” Ella called to me as she came to the edge of the pool. “You must be Aaron,” she said, smiling warmly at him. “I’m Ella, and this is Saul and Joel.”
Aaron did an awkward wave at them all. “Hi,” he mumbled.
Saul joined Ella at the side of the pool. “We cannot tell you how grateful we are for what you are doing,” he said.
Aaron shrugged modestly. “I can’t not do it,” he said. “Emily explained everything. Too many lives are at stake. It feels like — I dunno — kind of our duty, I guess.”
Ella turned to Saul. “He speaks like one of us,” she said, laughing.
Aaron’s eyes sparkled as much as the surface of the water at Ella’s words. “Well, from what Emily has told me, I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.
“It is,” Ella replied.
Joel came over to the edge of the pool and crouched down. “You both know what you have to do?”
“I’ve told Aaron everything,” I assured him.
“And we’ve been over and over it,” Aaron added. “I think we’re clear on it all.”
“Right. Well, good luck, both of you.”
Saul reached out to shake our hands. “We’re all depending on you,” he said.
“We’ll be thinking of you the whole time,” Ella added. “And we believe in you. Carry that belief in your hearts, always.”
“We will,” I said, choked.
“Thanks,” Aaron added.
“You ready?” I asked Aaron.
Aaron nodded. He looked different — I couldn’t figure out how. In charge, confident, strong. “We won’t fail,” he said to them, “I promise you.”
And then, together, we turned away from the others, flipped ourselves into a dive, and swam down to the bottom of the pool.
Our mission had truly begun.
We swam lower and lower to the bottom of Blue Pool, searching all the time for an opening in its walls. We were looking for the place where a force as strong as the massive rush of water that brought us in here would take us out in a new direction.
Down here there was barely any light, so we had to feel our way around. We were almost at the seabed when Aaron called to me.
“Emily! I think I found something!”
I swam over to him, and together we ran our hands over the wall.
My hands hit on something that felt different from the other rocks around it. Sharper, rough, with a crack big enough to slide my arm into.
“Swim lower,” I said.
Aaron followed me down. Running my hand down the crack, I felt it gradually widen into something big enough to swim into.
“This is it!” I exclaimed. “We’ve found it!”
Aaron was by my side. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
And without either of us saying another word, we kicked our tails, slipped into the hole in the rocks, and swam into the darkness.
We’d been swimming for only a moment or two when I heard the now familiar sound: rushing water. Ahead of us was the tunnel that would do the same as the one that brought us here — it would spin us around, shake us inside out, hurl us every which way — but with one difference. This one would lead us to the giant’s lair.
Two more strokes, and we were there.
I turned back. “Ready?”
Aaron gave me a thumbs-up. “See you on the other side.”
And with that, I swam into the mayhem, gave myself up to it, and prayed that we would survive it.
By now I knew what to expect, so I didn’t try to fight it. I shut my eyes and let the torrent’s rushing force carry me.
Eventually, the current began to slow. As it did, I opened my eyes.
We were coming to the end of the tunnel. Ahead, I could see an opening.
Beyond it, a shaft of light beamed down like a dusty fan, sprinkling faintly across the opening and lighting up a line of rock on the other side.
A fan of light. That had been in the Prophecy’s picture! We were in the right place!
“We made it!” I called to Aaron.
The closer we got, the brighter the light became. It was an intense spot of daylight shining into the blackness that had been surrounding us since we’d swum into the tunnel.
And then, before I could even think another thought —
Whoosh!
We were spat out of the end of the tunnel into a still, clear, wide stretch of water.
I floundered around finding my fins for a minute.
“Swim up!” Aaron was beside me, jabbing upward with his hand.
I did what he said, and we propelled ourselves upward. Soon, we reached the surface. I wiped wet hair out of my eyes and looked round, blinking in the daylight.
We were in a lake. A still, peaceful, glimmering lake, surrounded on every side by plants, trees, animal sounds, and birdcalls. Above us I could see blue sky.
“We’re on higher ground,” I said. “No one’s ever made it to this part of the island.”
“The tunnel brought us upward,” Aaron murmured.
We hovered in the center of the lake, treading water with our tails, taking it all in.
“Wow,” Aaron breathed in a whisper that was half awe, half fear as we looked around at the unexplored mass of lush, green forest.
After the darkness and the closed-in space of the tunnels, the color and brightness of the forest took some getting used to.
“I could live here,” he added.
I knew what he meant. It wasn’t just that it was beautiful. It felt peaceful, too.
As I continued to look around, I noticed something. “Aaron, look!”
Aaron looked where I was pointing. Across the other side of the lake, there was a tall, dark cliff. Running down the side of it, almost hidden in the trees, a waterfall flowed into the lake. It was not as big as the falls that we already knew of. These were more like a meandering river.
“The mountain,” I said. “That’s where we have to go.”
As we swam across the lake, I let myself believe that we were simply out swimming together in a beautiful secret forest. Just for one moment.
It was easy at first. The water was warm like a bath and so clear we could see the rocky floor as we swam. Tiny fish darted around below us. Crabs edged out from their rocky houses to observe the strangers swimming across their sky. The water welcomed us as we swam easily through it.
Too soon, we reached the other side and reality crept back in. We couldn’t afford to get distracted.
We pulled ourselves out, waiting for our tails to turn back into legs.
“Look.” Aaron pointed to a cliff face to the left-hand side of the waterfall. “Is that a path?”
I squinted to see where he was pointing. There was a break in the rocks, maybe a clearing, leading upward. “Looks like it,” I agreed. “Let’s go and see.”
Aaron led the way to the waterfall, and he was right. There was a track through the rocks and trees. It didn’t look like it had been used much in a long time. Branches and thorns stretched over it, and rubble and rocks were strewn across it. But it was something.
It was the only thing.
Either way, it was definitely our best shot of getting to the top of the mountain. According to the Prophecy, that was where we would find the giant.
So we clambered across the rocks and over to the path. And then we carefully made our way through running water and over brambles, dodging thorns, branches, and rubble, bit by bit scaling the mountain we simultaneously hoped and feared would lead us to the giant’s lair.
I sat down on a rock and looked around as I got my breath back. We’d reached the top of the mountain. The climb had been hard, and even more so for the fact that the spin wash in the tunnel on the way here had wiped out mos
t of my energy.
Aaron came over and sat down next to me.
“What a view,” he murmured. He was right. From where we were sitting, we could see out over the whole forest below us, as well as all the way across the plateau.
We could see everything. All of it.
And that was the problem.
“There’s one thing missing from the view,” I said.
Aaron lowered his head and nodded. “There’s no giant.”
“Could we have missed him?” I asked. “I mean, we took only the one path. Maybe there was another one.”
Aaron held his arms out. “Look around you. We can see everything in the forest. There’s nothing. No giant. There’s barely any sign of life.”
“You’re right,” I added, trying to stop myself from feeling utterly hopeless. “The Prophecy pictures showed him at the top of the mountain. And this is definitely the top.”
Aaron got up and held out a hand to pull me up, too. “Come on. Let’s look around,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, and we missed something. Maybe he’s here somewhere.”
“Aaron, you don’t miss a giant. That’s the whole point of a giant. He should be big enough to see from anywhere up here!”
Still, we were here now, and we had to be sure. So we walked around the top of the mountain. It wasn’t very big. We’d scaled the whole thing in less than ten minutes. There was no giant.
There was nothing.
Except . . .
“Aaron,” I said, pulling on his arm.
“What?” he replied without turning around. He was still looking around, craning his neck in every direction.
“Aaron!” I said again.
He turned around this time. “What is it? Did you see something?”
“I — I’m not sure,” I said. I pointed at something in the distance, right at the opposite end of the plateau from where we stood. It wasn’t a giant. It wasn’t even very big. But it stood out from everything else.
From where we were standing, it looked like a wall. Not a very sophisticated or high one. No neat lines of bricks. Jagged rocks of all different shapes and sizes slotted together, squeezed up and balanced precariously next to one another, building up and up in higgledy-piggledy rows.
It was the only thing we could see that had to have been built by someone. The only thing around that nature hadn’t naturally allowed to fall that way.
“Wow — is it a house?” Aaron breathed. “It looks pretty small from here, though. Not exactly a giant’s lair, is it?”
Aaron was right. It wasn’t a giant’s lair. It was probably nothing. Maybe it was just a pile of rocks after all.
But as we stared, I noticed something else. “Aaron, there!” I said. “Above the top of it.”
A line of smoke was drifting upward from the wall.
“What is that?” Aaron asked. “A forest fire? Someone sending smoke signals?”
I didn’t know what it was — but I did know one thing. I’d seen it before. I just couldn’t think where.
Wait. Yes, I could!
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the friendship pebble Shona had given me.
“Aaron,” I whispered. “Look.”
I held the pebble out in front of me, and I looked between it and the sight in front of us.
“Whoa!” Aaron exclaimed.
“I know!”
The wall, the line of smoke coming up from the other side — it looked exactly like the picture on my friendship pebble.
“It must be part of the Prophecy,” I whispered.
We knew what we had to do. It might not be a giant’s lair, but whatever was over there, it was the only thing that stood a chance of being the thing we had come up here to find.
We got up, brushed ourselves off, and nodded to each other.
And then, hand in hand, we made our way across the top of the mountain, toward the raggedy stone wall and the perfect line of smoke.
As we got closer, we could see that the wall was part of a building. A tiny building. Nowhere near a building that a giant would be able to live in. A giant would be hard-pressed to put one foot inside of it.
But a building nevertheless.
We walked around it. It had four ramshackle walls. Three of them had holes for windows. The fourth had a door made from logs tied together with twigs woven around them.
The smoke continued to rise from inside the building.
“What should we do?” Aaron whispered as we stood outside the house.
“I don’t know!” I whispered back. “Knock?”
And yes, part of me knew that this was the obvious answer. In normal circumstances, if you want to find out who lives in a house, and you’re standing outside it, you’d knock on the door.
But here — it just felt so incongruous. Here we were in the middle of an expanse of land at the top of a deserted mountain. The only sign of human life was this dilapidated building. Whoever lived inside was clearly not someone who was used to visitors. It wasn’t as if they’d be expecting the morning paper.
“What if they don’t take kindly to strangers turning up at their door?” Aaron asked, thinking along the same lines as me.
I shrugged. “What choice do we have?”
And with that, I raised my fist, paused for two seconds — and knocked.
Nothing.
I waited a little then knocked again, harder this time.
“Go away, scrounging vermin!” The voice was deep, rough, and gravelly. And it didn’t exactly sound welcoming.
I looked at Aaron. “Now what?”
Aaron grimaced back at me. “I don’t know! Try one more time?”
“Really?” I whispered back at him. “You heard him, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but he thinks we’re some kind of wild animal. He wasn’t telling us to go away.”
Aaron shuffled forward. This time, he was the one to knock. Three sharp raps.
“I told you!” the voice inside boomed. He sounded even angrier. “Scram!”
Next thing we heard was a shuffling sound on the other side of the door.
“He’s getting up!” Aaron whispered.
Half of me wanted to run away, get as far from this angry recluse as possible before he saw us. Let him think it was a wild animal. Go back down. Pretend none of this was happening.
The other half was stronger. The half that knew how many people’s lives were depending on us. We couldn’t run away.
Forcing my breath to keep going in and out of my body, and begging my legs to stop wobbling for long enough to keep me upright, I stood next to Aaron, waiting as the shuffling came closer and closer.
I gripped Aaron’s hand as the shuffling stopped on the other side of the door.
I swallowed hard and willed myself not to faint as, with a creak and a squeak straight out of a horror movie, the door slowly opened, and a face appeared behind it.
Everything stopped.
I didn’t move a muscle, nor did Aaron. The air froze around us, the trees below us stopped waving, and the sea stopped moving. We were caught in a moment, as if time itself had stopped.
And then he spoke.
“Who. On. Earth. Are. You.” Those were his words. One at a time. Spoken like a statement.
I stared at the man — what I could see of him — as he hovered in his doorway. He was old. Really old. He wore ragged clothes that looked as if they hadn’t seen a washing machine in, well, ever. He wasn’t very tall — or he might have been, but he was bent over so much his face was at the same level as mine.
Stretching from his face down to his chest, his long, gray beard was as straggly as the twigs on the ground. His eyes were so dark and so deep-set in his face I couldn’t even see what color they were. They looked like black holes — and they were pinned on me.
His thick gray eyebrows almost joined as the man frowned.
Looking between me and Aaron, he spoke again. “I said. Who are you?”
Aaron was first to recover. I say recover. T
hat might be an overstatement.
“I — I — we . . .” was pretty much as far as he got.
“We’ve come to find the giant,” I said.
I mean, what else could I say? Oh, hi there. I’m Emily, and this is my boyfriend, Aaron, and we were just out walking when we saw your sweet little house, and thought we’d stop by and say hello.
No, the truth was a better idea. At least, I hoped it was.
The old man’s eyebrows knitted even farther together as he frowned harder. “The what?” he asked.
“The, um, the giant?” I repeated less confidently. “We were told he lives up here, and we need him because the island is in danger of —”
“There is no giant here!” The man cut me off. He waved a spindly arm out through the door to indicate the surroundings. “I think you can see that quite clearly for yourselves. Now I don’t know who you are or how you got here, but as I’m sure you’ve realized, I like my own company, so if you don’t mind . . .”
“No!” I yelled as the man started to close the door in our faces.
He stopped, midmovement. “No?” he said, raising one of his huge, gray, bushy eyebrows.
“You can’t go. Not after we’ve come all this way.” My words tumbled out of me. “The island is in trouble. We all are — even you are.”
At this, the man burst out laughing. Bending over even farther, he leaned on his knee as he guffawed.
“It’s not a joke,” Aaron said, in a voice that sounded like a kid trying to convince someone that he felt braver than he really did.
Still grinning, the man looked up. His mouth was missing about half its teeth. The ones that remained were yellow and crooked.
“Not a joke. Oh, you’re funny,” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “As if I care. As if it matters to me.”
“It doesn’t matter to you that hundreds of people on these islands and thousands more across the other side of the ocean are in trouble?” I asked.
The man cocked his head, as if to think about a puzzle that made no sense to him. “Why would that matter to me?”
“Or that your own life could be in danger?” Aaron added.
The man burst out laughing again, even harder this time. “That would be the best news of all!” he said.