“Debatable,” Locke grumbles.
“What about a smooth one?” I ask. “Colorful one?”
I pick up a handful of pebbles and flick off the brown ones until I have a pretty blue pebble, smooth and perfect. Locke picks up the boulder he’d been talking about.
“We both have to offer one,” Locke says.
I grimace. “I don’t think that’s going to work, Locke.”
“One minute!” the Emperor declares. “Please me with your pebble selection promptly.”
I give up looking and reason that the small blue pebble in my hand is the prettiest one around that I can find. I move over to the Emperor penguin and hold out my hand.
“My offering,” I say.
He waddles close and picks up the pebble, testing it between his beak. Seemingly satisfied, he moves over to the female penguin and sets it at her feet. She flutters unnaturally long eyelashes and blows him a kiss.
“Accepted,” the Emperor declares. “Next!”
Svetland drops her pebble onto the ground for the Emperor and watches at he picks it up again, chews it for a moment, and then carries it over to the hen. She bends down, touches it with her beak and then makes a soft noise of appreciation.
“Accepted,” the Emperor declares and then looks at Locke expectantly where he holds the large rock.
I can see the moment Locke doubts his selection now that he’s watched how our pebbles were handled, but he’s stubborn. He heaves the boulder in front of the female penguin, knowing the Emperor would never be able to lift it. When it lands with a thud, she squawks and stumbles backward, distraught.
The Emperor’s eyes narrow. “Is this your offering, player?”
“Yeah,” Locke says. “This pebble is clearly the largest and most pleasing to the eye.” He taps the top of it. “You could stand on it and be taller than even us.”
The Emperor looks at his female who squawks and shakes her head, moving away from the boulder uneasily. He turns back to Locke. “This pebble . . . does not pass,” he says. “My hen cannot use it to build a nest.”
I shoot Locke a look. The pebbles were for her nest! A fucking boulder would never work for that. We didn’t know but . . . shit. This is going to be bad.
My shoulders tense as the penguin Emperor waddles up to us both, his tiny golden crown shaking back and forth as he towers to his full height.
“Now . . .” he says, eyeing the three of us with disgust. “You all die.”
CHAPTER29
VESPER
For about five seconds, nothing happens. We stare at the penguin Emperor. He stares back at us. The rest of the penguin colony around us doesn’t move. And then, the emperor tips his head into the air and lets out an awful squawk that makes me clamp my hands around my ears and grimace.
Locke has his hammer in his hand immediately, his stance dropping as he prepares to fight. It takes me longer to accept that these cute creatures are going to cause me any harm. The first little penguin that comes up to me is barely half a meter tall. It’s short and fat and has little tufts of yellow feathers on the sides of its face. It shrieks and pecks at my shin. It hurts enough for me to jump back and say, “Hey!” but not enough to actually wound me. It’s more like a pinch.
That’s what lulls me into a false sense of complacency.
They can’t hurt me. They’re small and relatively slow as they waddle around. Their beaks are the only weapon they have.
“What are you doing?” Svetlana asks. “We should ready for battle!”
“They’re just little birds,” I answer. “They can’t even fly.”
“Umnitsa,” she says touching her arms to my face and looking me in the eyes. “These flightless birds are the most disturbing, most disgusting, most evil creatures. They will not give you the same gentleness you’re attempting to give them.”
I narrow my eyes on her and then shoot a look over at Locke where he’s swinging a hammer at the mass of penguins waddling toward him.
“Are you sure?” I ask, confused. “They don’t look like?—”
