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“Beats me,” said Kyle. “I vote we go find out.”
Shouldering his oar, he set off in the lead. Tara looked uneasy but followed. Jack put a hand into his remaining stash of blue-room trinkets before following them, just in case.
“This would make a great beach,” said Kyle, “if only there was an ocean.”
“I bet there is one, somewhere,” said Tara. “All the water in the storms doesn’t just vanish.”
“Maybe there’s an underground ocean.” Kyle was excited by this idea. “It’d be cold and dark, and full of eyeless dinosaurs. Maybe that’s where Lottie is, Jack, in The Land That Time Forgot.”
“That was an island,” said Jack. “You’re thinking of Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
“Am I? Did that have dinosaurs in it?”
“I think so. The movie did, anyway. But they had eyes.”
“That’s silly. There wouldn’t be any light.”
“You think that’s silly,” asked Tara, “but dinosaurs you’re okay with?”
Ahead of them, the sand exploded upward, creating a wall of billowing dust directly across their path.
“Uh-oh,” cried Kyle, raising his oar. “I don’t think this is your great-aunt, Jack.”
Jack spun around at the sound of more explosive sand and blooming dust in their wake. To the left and right it was the same. They were surrounded.
“It’s a trap!” Tara said, backing up so she, Jack, and Kyle formed a triangle with their weapons facing outward.
Out of the billowing clouds stepped strange figures, alien creatures with too many arms, legs, and heads. At the back was a human, although one that clearly wasn’t alive. The figure was composed from Evil bugs, all swarming and squirming in a horrid approximation of a person. The figures, human and alien alike, stepped forward to encircle the three children.
“Stay back!” said Tara, menacing the first to approach with her sword. “I mean it!”
The Evil alien didn’t even slow. It came for her with four arms open, and she slashed at it, cutting it in half. There was a ring of steel against bone and the creature fell apart. It was made of bugs swarming a long-dead skeleton.
Another Evil alien instantly took its place.
Jack felt cold sweat trickle down between his shoulder blades. He and the others were tired, hungry, and dehydrated. They were outnumbered many times over. There was no way they were getting out of this one.
++Take me,++ he said. ++I’ll give myself up if you let the others go.++
++Too late, troubletwister,++ said The Evil. ++There is no escape now, not for you or your friends. Not now, and not ever!++
Jack slashed his bone-scimitar at the humanoid figure approaching him and felt a sickening squish as it hit home. Two more took its place, reaching for him with squirming, grasping fingers.
Above them, Cornelia was circling and circling, squawking pointlessly. They couldn’t move. They were trapped.
Then a ghostly figure appeared in the battlefield, a young woman looking around her as though trying to see her way through a fog.
++Is that you, Jack Shield?++
++Yes!++ Jack cried, relief mingling with desperation. The Evil aliens surrounding them were really pressing in now. One hideous thing with two heads and four mouths snapped entirely too close to his face before he managed to push it away. ++We’re in trouble and we need your help!++
++I cannot help you. You must find your own way.++
++I can’t! We’re surrounded!++
++Do not be afraid. Your Gift is stronger than you think.++
How did you know that? Jack wanted to say. She knew nothing about him. But she had a point. There were very few shadows in a world with three suns, but what there were could be used against the Evil horde. He had to try.
He concentrated and felt his Gift stir in response. He ducked a swipe from a seven-toed paw and pushed up with his bone-scimitar, noting as he did so how it cast a faint shadow across the chest of the thing attacking him. The shadow flexed and darkened, then slid up to wrap itself around the Evil alien’s head, where he guessed its eyes should be.
It kept coming, presumably because it was seeing through the eyes of all the Evil bugs at once. Jack ducked another swipe and tried expanding the shadow. If he could blind all of them at once, maybe that would do the trick.
What happened startled him so much he almost lost his concentration entirely.
The shadow spread across the entire alien, which fell back with a chorus of insect squeals, bumping into the creature behind it. Like a contagion, the shadow spread to that alien, and to the next one in line, and the one behind that. Within moments, a cloud of shadow was spreading through the entire army like ink through water.
Jack gaped in amazement. He hadn’t been trying to do anything like that. But he didn’t stop to question it. He pushed harder, encouraging the spread of the shadow to Kyle and Tara’s side of the fight. They were still under attack. Kyle’s oar was broken in two, and there was only so much he could do to defend himself with the remaining splintered end.
Faster, Jack told the shadow. Keep going!
And that was when it happened. The shadow filled the Evil horde and began spreading across the desert, from grain of sand to grain of sand, until everything was black. The sky turned purple, and one by one the suns flickered and went out.
It was suddenly dark, so dark even Jack had trouble seeing.
“What happened?” asked Kyle. “Did we go blind?”
“That was me,” said Jack. “I don’t know how, but my Gift did that.”
“This is our chance,” said Tara. She had her owl’s eyes again, thanks to the glass rod. “Come on!”
She took Kyle’s hand, and Kyle took Jack’s. They ducked low under the clutching hands of the alien horde, which was blinded but still trying to attack. Jack kept his Gift working hard to maintain the shadow as they brushed by protesting Evil bug flesh, but really it wasn’t that hard at all. All he had to do was keep concentrating and the whole world, it seemed, remained dark.
His head was feeling light when they reached the edge of the horde. Tara seemed to know where she was going, and after a moment Jack realized how. She was following Cornelia’s cries. They stumbled across the sand, leaving The Evil horde behind, and ignoring its angry roars.
++Nearly there,++ said Lottie into Jack’s mind, her voice little more than a whisper. ++Not much farther. A few more steps. You can do it.++
Jack didn’t know what she was talking about. The desert ahead appeared to be as empty as it always was. Just bones and sand all the way to the empty horizon.
But then, without warning, there was suddenly something else.
Jack blinked, not believing his eyes. There was a three-masted ship with ragged sails sitting up proudly in the sand, with trees branching from its decks, hanging low with fruit. Letters carved on its bow declared its name to be Omega. Vines crept down its hull to a mat of thick greenery that spread out across the soil. Jack’s feet tangled in thick grass, and he almost fell. Kyle pulled him on.
Cornelia swooped down to guide them to the starboard side of the boat, where a ramp led up to the deck. It was steep, and Jack was dizzy. Everything had a strange, dreamlike quality, as though he wasn’t quite there. The light was fading in and out, and the shifting shadows made him feel faintly sick. Was the deck moving underneath him, or could that just be his mind playing tricks?
Still holding hands, they came to a large cabin that might once have been the m
ess. Vegetation crowded the room. They had to push through a wall of foliage just to see what lay at its heart. There, on a bier made from many mattresses sewn together, rested a figure so tiny she looked like a child. She had wispy gray hair and wrinkled features that had collapsed in on themselves, so although it was possible to tell that she had once been beautiful, those days were long behind her. If Jack had had to guess how old she was, he would have said at least a hundred.
“I can’t see a thing,” said Kyle. “Can you bring the light back, Jack?”
Jack nodded, and the sun returned. White light flooded the cabin, and the old woman blinked up at them.
“Is that really you, Jack Shield?” she said, her voice a rusty wheeze. “You’re a little young to be a rescue party. What took you so long?”
“Lottie,” said Jack. But it couldn’t be her, surely. She was far too old to be Grandma X’s sister.
Before the old woman could say a single word, a sudden dizziness rose up in him even more powerfully than before. He clutched at Kyle’s shoulder, but missed, and went down on one knee.
“Jack?” called Tara in alarm. “Jack, what’s wrong?”
He shook his head, unable to speak. His knee folded beneath him. By the time he hit the floor, he had fainted clean away.
* * *
Much later, or so it seemed, the sound of voices drew him slowly back to consciousness.
“It’s all about the Gifts,” an old woman was saying. “Mine are of growing and concealing. That’s how I’ve been able to survive here so long. They keep my oasis secure and self-sustaining. Once upon a time, there was room here for many people, not just one. But over the years I’ve grown weaker, and this is all I can manage now.”
“Are you the last one?” Jack recognized Kyle’s voice. He was talking around something he had in his mouth. It sounded like a bite of apple.
“I am, yes. The others … gave much of themselves to call for help, and when the call wasn’t answered their spirits broke and one by one they died.”
“What do you mean they gave of themselves?” asked Tara.
“Our life force, our vitality … we used some to escape The Evil when we arrived, and the rest to strengthen our living message. It took its toll. They died before their time. Finally, I was the only one left. But I refused to give up. I knew someone would come for me eventually. We gave half our lives to send that message. Our cry for help had to arrive, one day. We knew it would not be ignored.”
