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- Herausgeber: Knights Of
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: Zo
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The epic conclusion to the fantasy adventure that started with Zo and the Forest of Secrets. After the mysterious Council tried to wipe Zo's memory, she's been hiding her powers from them. With her friend Adri gone, she must set out to find the truth... and save who she can along the way. On a mind-bending journey that leads her to old friends and new foes, Z finds herself at a secret school for children with powers just like her. Does the Invisible Island hold the answers she needs?
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III
V
To my grandmothers, Doris and Eileen, who prayed and paved the way.
VI
CONTENTS
Chapter One
SPY
I nearly fell out of the giant tree. Snorting with laughter, I tried to keep my balance. Adri was perched on a wide branch of the samaan, cracking jokes despite everything.
“Shh,” I warned him, looking around at the listening hill.
He laughed, long legs dangling in the air. The island sky was full of colours melting into gold. I had never seen him this happy. It was almost as if he’d forgotten that we were on the run in the forest from some dinosaur-like creature, smart-mouthed spiders, and who knows what else.
Truth was, he almost made me forget.
He stopped mid-joke. “You good?” 2
“Yeah,” I said, glancing away.
His spiky hair had started growing back. He’d shaved it off with his parents, to celebrate his mum’s recovery and their trip back home to Trinidad.
His parents …
My heart sank. Where were they now and how did we find them?
A shadow crossed Adri’s face. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing.
“Hold on,” I called, “you have something by your ear.”
He was too far away for me to reach the silver thread stuck to the side of his head. He raised one hand to wipe it off. Then, I realised what it was.
“Wait!” I shouted.
Too late. Spiderwebs snaked down around us, strangely beautiful in the dying light.
I scrambled toward Adri. He stared at me wildly, terror snapping off him like lightning.
“Run, Zo!” he screamed. “Now!”
I spun around, looking for anything to fight with, but instead found myself rolling out of bed, tumbling with a hard “Thump!” to the floor.
“Oww …” 3
***
That was one way to wake up.
I lay face-down on the smooth wooden planks, trying to get my bearings. I was drenched with sweat and my legs were tangled in bedsheets.
My mind felt just as jumbled. Somehow, it was always the same dream … And I still had no clue where Adri and his family were being kept.
Over a year ago, in Samaan Bay, on the other side of the country, he and I had survived being lost in the forest for days. We’d been chased by weird creatures: the giant centipede-like X, talking spiders, and a swampy monster I’d called the Flesh-skinner until I learned what it really was.
Come to find out, they’d been working for some strange Council that experimented on animals, and kids like us.
Yet none of this was in the dream that haunted me month after month, ever since Adri had chosen to go back to the Council and their tests, for the sake of his captured parents.
No. My nightmare was always about him: the boy who, through all kinds of crazy, had become my best friend. The boy who was stuck in a trap, warning 4me to escape.
I took a deep breath and pried my legs from the bedsheets as quietly as I could.
Please let Ms. Kofi be down in the backyard, picking pomeracs from the bat-infested tree. Anyone who could face down a colony of bats was not someone to be messed with … And the bats were right to be scared. I’d learned back in Samaan Bay that the short, limping old-woman I knew as Ms. K, was really an Anansi – part woman, part spider, part trickster.
Yes. Ms. K, aka Boss of the Anansi crew, was one of the head Watchers for the Council, keeping an eye on children like me, while working secretly on her own plans to take the Council down.
She was here with me on Monos, one of a string of small islands off the northwest coast of Trinidad. We’d moved to this house miles away from Samaan Bay, for my stepdad Jake’s company ‘Lee’s Green Energy’ to build a solar plant on the island.
Now I was stuck here, on the floor of my bedroom, listening for Ms. K’s heavy tread on the stairs.
Whew. Nothing. Maybe she really was in the backyard chasing bats. I could breathe again … for now.5
As I turned, something caught my eye. A floorboard under the bed was bent to one side. It had probably come loose when I slammed onto the floor. I’d better fix it before Ms. K fixed me.
I crawled under the bed to push the board back into place. Something glinted. Wait. Was that gold? I scooted in more, heart racing like a pirate finding treasure.
Under the floorboard was a rectangular space. Inside the space was a long brassy tube. I picked it up and crawled out from under the bed, sneezing out a cobweb or two. Then I sat up and turned the tube from side to side. One end clicked open to reveal a small pane of glass. My heart jumped. This wasn’t a tube.
Gently, I pulled it out to its full length. It was a spyglass – and a beautiful one at that, covered with carvings that looked like dragons. It was old, a relic, coated with dust from being in a hole under the floor for so long. I wiped it clean with the sheet and squinted into one side, holding it a little away from my eye, in case it wasn’t as harmless as it looked.
It seemed to work exactly as a spyglass should, magnifying things in the room, making everything 6look larger and closer.
I checked out the carvings on its side. The dragons were twisted into shapes that looked like letters, but I couldn’t make them out. Suspicion tapped on the back of my neck. This could be a trap set by Ms. K – one of the tests the Council ran on “gifted” children like me and Adri. Ms. K was supposed to have wiped my memory after Samaan Bay, but she hadn’t.
At the time, I thought she was doing me a favour, but maybe she’d had other plans for me all along.
The sweat on my skin felt cold. To my right, white curtains billowed like sails in the breeze. The entire house was like living inside of an ancient ship and my room was no different. There was a pitched roof over the wooden walls and floor, held up by thick wooden beams. The spiced smell of cedar filled the morning air: sharp as a warning.
“Why?” Mum had asked again and again, when I insisted on staying here while she, Jake and Tayo – a toddler now – went to Barbados for her new art exhibition. Her expression toggled between confusion and hurt.
“We just moved here!” I’d said, pretending to be frustrated. “I’m tired of packing and unpacking. 7Ms. K’s here too! I’ll be fine. Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course,” Mum protested. “But are you sure?”
She was still asking the morning they left, with Tayo crying in her arms. The ferryman untied his boat from the dock, getting ready to take them over to the mainland. Jake put the last bags in the boat.
“You ready Marie?” he asked my mum, looking at me with a furrowed face.
All he said was, “You know you can still change your mind … Your mum would love to have you there.” He added kindly, “We all would.”
I kissed the air near Tayo’s sweet round face.
“Doh-doh!” he begged.
I sure felt like one.
“Thanks, next time, okay?” I blurted out to Jake before rushing away, so he couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.
Mum had tried to hug me before she left, but I cringed away as always. She knew that, for some reason, in the last year, I no longer did hugs or kisses. What she didn’t know was that I couldn’t hug or kiss her, because I had no idea when my power of falling into other people’s memories by touch would kick into gear. 8
The most unwanted gift ever.
Most of all, Mum didn’t know that the same morning she’d announced the Easter trip to Barbados, I’d found a note under my pillow that said, “Stay with me.” Signed, “K.”
Even as I’d ripped the note to shreds and flushed it, I knew what I was going to do.
Ms. K was the only link I still had to Adri and his family. To have any chance of finding them, I needed to go along with whatever she had planned.
I thought about telling my family what had really happened a year ago in Samaan Bay; what was happening right now. Maybe I could call Da. But he was deep in some part of rural Guinea in West Africa on a job for his company – on the other side of the world. He still found a way to call me every time he went into town for supplies, always asking in his low but warm Jamaican voice, “Boonoonoonus, you a’right?”
I wanted to say, “No, I’m not.”
But how did I explain what had happened? It sounded totally mad.
No. Following Ms. K’s instructions was my only chance to see Adri again. And it was the only way 9to keep my family from ending up in some ‘freak accident’ designed by the Council, the way his parents had, a year ago.
So, I did it. I told my Mum I didn’t want to travel with them to her exhibition. I didn’t even hug her goodbye.
Now, here I was, trapped in our new house on Monos, Monkey Island, even though there were no monkeys left. It was a place that at any other time would have been stunningly beautiful, with green hills and sheltered bays on one side and wild open sea on the other. But I couldn’t enjoy it. I knew that this was just one more place the Council could reach me: the beginning of another crazy test.
I jumped up and went to the window, trying to see the carvings on the spyglass more clearly. I choked. As sunlight hit the dragon-letters, they morphed into fiery words:
LOOK INTO THE DRAGON’S MOUTH.
Then they disappeared like smoke.
I nearly dropped the spyglass. The Dragon’s Mouth? What did that mean? It sounded dangerous, but strangely familiar.
I turned the tube around in my hands, trying to 10remember. Ah! Of course. It was something Ms. K had said. One morning while supposedly dusting my room, she had pointed out an island even further out than this one – barely visible from my bedroom window. She’d been close enough that I could see the sharp grey hairs on her chin and smell her earthy perfume.
“Dragon Mouth Island they call it, invisible to most,” she’d said her deep, hoarse voice, “in the Bocas del Dragón … Merciless currents that can take any boat under. Strange winds too. Took down submarines in World War II; even planes.”
She looked at me with sharp black eyes. “Nothing that flies or sails there ever comes back. So, people stopped trying a long time ago.”
Now, alone at the window, I took a deep breath.
LOOK INTO THE DRAGON’S MOUTH, the spyglass had said.
My heart pounded in my ears. It sounded simple, but nothing was ever that easy … Still, this might be my ticket to see Adri again. It might be the chance to free my friend.
I lifted the spyglass and zoned in on Dragon Mouth Island as fast as I could. With my bare eyes it was 11nothing more than a speck on the horizon, one that most people couldn’t even see, but this spyglass was the most powerful I had ever used. I bit my lip in surprise. I could see the distant island as if it were right there.
In the center of the island, on top of a green hill, was an old colonial mansion. My heart pounded in my ears. What was this? Despite Ms. K’s story about no boats or planes making it over, there were people living on Dragon Mouth Island!
Children, they looked like, hurrying in and out of the building and rushing in groups across the wide grounds.
I leaned forward on the windowsill, adjusting the spyglass, trying to see more. But the lens got blurry, swirling like a whirlpool. I felt dizzy. Time to put this thing down.
But I couldn’t. It was stuck to me, sucking me in. With a loud rush, everything tilted … a kaleidoscope of shifting colours and shapes.
Then, with a snap, I was gone.
Chapter Two
CRASH
I lay curled up on the floor like a battered seashell, gripping the spyglass with one hand.
“They’re going to need that back,” a dry voice said.
I opened my eyes to see an old man in a dapper suit and straw fedora, reaching down toward me. Golden eyes shone brightly in his lined, ebony face. I pulled back, but all he did was take the spyglass from my hand.
“Hello Zo,” he said gently, peering out from the shadows under his hat.
It was Mr. Yancy, the man who’d first tried to warn me about the Council back in Samaan Bay. I looked for his magic, shape-changing, multicoloured coat, but it was nowhere to be found. The last time 13I’d seen it, it was being captured by the Council. It seemed that, despite his best efforts, Old Man Yancy had been caught too.
“Get her up please,” a melodious voice cut in.
I jumped. It couldn’t be, but I could never forget that voice.
Mr. Yancy reached out a hand to help me, but I scrambled to my feet myself.
“Yara!” I shouted.
He shook his head at me quickly.
“Ahh, so you remember me,” Yara purred. “Well then,” she smiled meanly, “Ms. Kofi will have to be reported, won’t she?”
Oh no. I’d instantly forgotten that Ms. K was supposed to have wiped my memory of the forest and everyone I’d met there, including Yara.
It was too late now. Here she was, standing right in front of me. Yara … the woman who had captured Adri and I back in Samaan Bay, then shockingly, helped us to escape the Council.
What was she doing here?
My heart sank as I took in her tall elegance, her hawk-like face that seemed young and old at the same time, and the micro-braids that hung all the 14way down her back.
Somehow, despite Yara’s fierceness, she looked like a trapped bird of prey. She wore a dress with a harness over it that seemed as uncomfortable as a corset, with floor-length, layered cotton skirts that swished each time she moved. Around her neck was a tight golden choker. She kept scratching at it with long, purple nails.
My stomach turned. I thought she’d escaped. But if Yara were here, it meant that she was back in the power of the Council … and so was I.
“Not to worry,” she trilled in her birdsong voice, with that cross between a Spanish and French accent.
I wondered again where she was from.
“You are just in time Zo. Class is in session,” she smiled, revealing sharp white teeth.
Class? I looked around me. We were in a round, luxurious, panelled room. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves, lined with books and antiques that looked like they had come from colonial times. There was a massive, carved mahogany desk and high-backed chair lined with plush red velvet like a throne.
To my right, Mr. Yancy leaned against a wall, 15hands in his pockets, hat pulled low, chewing a piece of grass. His face was unreadable.
“Where am I?” I demanded, making my voice sound way bolder than I felt.
Yara’s sweet laugh didn’t meet her eyes. “Why, you silly girl, Dragon Mouth Island of course.”
What? Clearly the spyglass had dragged me here. At least now, I could ask the question that burned a hole in my mind.
“Where’s Adri?” I trembled.
She waved one hand around the room, “Not here, as you can see.”
Rage boiled in my chest, “So that’s it? You’re just back working for them? The Council! After everything they took from you!”
In a second, Yara was in my face, even though I hadn’t seen her move. The fingers of her right hand pinched my cheeks, pointed nails just inches from my eyes. She smelled of cinnamon, cloves, and something else that I couldn’t pin down.
“Have you heard of a place called Ouanaminthe?” she whispered. She pronounced it like “Wanna mint”, eyes piercing mine.
“On the border,” she pinched my face tighter, 16“between Ayiti, what you call Haiti … and the Dominican Republic?”
“No,” I choked.
Were those tears in her eyes or mine?
“Then please do not pretend to know who I am,” Yara hissed softly.
I felt a hand lightly brush the side of my jeans. Did Yara just slip something into my pocket? If so, she gave no sign.
“Hm,” Mr. Yancy chimed in, with his scratchy, half-laughing voice. “So, how much time is this going to take?”
Yara snapped at him, “Insolence will not be tolerated old man!”
“Eh? My two-cents? Not at all your Eminenceness,” he detached from the wall with an innocent face. “I was only saying that I, for one, have all day, as required … At your disposal, Mad-dahm,” he added with a bow and an irreverent grin.
Mr. Yancy leaned his frame back slowly against the wall like an ancient staff, unfazed by Yara’s angry glare.
She released me suddenly: “What are you waiting for? Take her away. Hurry. The test has already begun.” 17
I staggered backward.
“W-what test?” I stammered as Mr. Yancy, with strange swiftness for such an old man, grabbed my sleeve.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Yara said in a low voice, turning away with a shake of her skirts, “If you survive …”
“No. Wait!” I yelled.
Despite my kicking and struggling, Mr. Yancy began to pull me out of the room, a pained but resigned look on his gnarled face.
Yara’s back was to us, shielded by her braided hair. One hand gripped the top of her throne-like seat. The room, luxurious as it was, looked like a cage.
She murmured over one shoulder. “They do say knowledge is power.”
“And time waits for no man,” Mr. Yancy hurried me toward the door.
Yara turned toward us slowly, her eyes like sparks of flame. “Wait, Miss A Thousand and One questions. You want to know what the Council is doing?”
Mr. Yancy froze, clearing his throat uneasily. I wasn’t sure if he was warning Yara or me.
With one long, perfectly painted fingernail, Yara 18pressed the knob of an old-fashioned microphone on top of her desk.
“Alice-Ann!” she announced smoothly, “Alice-Ann to my office … Now. Merci!”
Her skirts rustled like dried leaves as she swung back to face me. Mr. Yancy stood next to the door, tense as a bow.
“My dear Zo,” Yara dropped her voice. “The Council is in the business of power. Gifted children, such as yourself, are the source of that power. As such, you are in high demand by wealthy and influential people around the world. The Council exists to find gifted children like yourself. They train them, test them, and once they’ve passed these tests, ship them off to certain families and organisations in need of their unique powers. In return, of course, the Council is paid generously for these services.”
“So, you steal kids, then sell us.” I stated as matter-of-factly as I could.
A sharp pain flashed across Yara’s eyes.
“Me?” she snapped, then softened her voice. “This is a school,” she gestured around her with one graceful hand, “a training facility if you will. A way-station before children who pass the tests are 19shipped off. I try to make sure that the children who leave here have all the skills they need to survive their new masters.”
Mr. Yancy broke through in his mocking voice, “Eh heh? I thought they say, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’?”
“Of course. Not masters. Families.” Yara smiled at him dryly.
“Everyone needs a family – right Zo?” Yara looked at me with a mixture of grief and rage.
I thought about the sister she had lost forever, back in Samaan Bay. Did she still blame Adri and I, or the Council? It was their fault, not ours!
How could she work for them after everything they’d taken from her?
It hit me that maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe I didn’t either.
“You always ‘ave a choice,” I heard my Da say.
But where was he now? He didn’t even know where I was.
“Cat got your tongue?” Yara purred, her eyes flashing like warning signs.
“Okay, great talk! Time to go …” Mr. Yancy broke in, reaching for my sleeve. 20
“Not yet, old man,” Yara ordered, looking at a weathered brass clock on the wall that I could swear chimed in agreement.
My mind whirled. So, this was the Council’s big scheme: finding, training, and testing gifted children, to sell them off to the highest bidder. Was this what they had done with Adri – what they were about to do to me? In a daze, I turned to run, but Mr. Yancy was there, blocking my path, with an unusually sad look on his face.
“What happens if we fail the tests?” I asked numbly.
Yara’s long nails tapped the surface of her desk.
The door behind us inched open.
“Ah!” she sighed, as Mr. Yancy twitched uneasily. “Let us see, shall we?”
A pale girl with reddish-blond hair in two pigtails, an apple-green t-shirt and ragged shorts, crept in through the door. She looked from one of us to the other, then at Yara, like a mouse watching a cat.
“Hello Alice-Ann. So glad you could join us,” Yara’s red lips parted in a smile.
“Headmistress?” Alice squeaked, then cleared her throat.
“Would you be so kind,” Yara continued, “as to 21show our new friend here your gift?”
Despite her trembling, Alice stubbornly shook her head.
I was impressed. She was braver than she looked.
Yara curled out from behind the desk like a mountain lion, her voice rising to a growl.
“No? Shall we invite your entire class then – put them to the test? Some of them might not be ready.”
Alice’s chin dropped. “No,” she shook her head. “I’ll do it.”
I jumped. Suddenly, she was gone. Well … most of her. I could still see her pigtails and her mismatched socks, ending in once-white sneakers. They went dashing for the door of the room.
I got ready to push Mr. Yancy out of the way to help her escape. But before I could move, a net dropped onto the pigtails with a “Whoosh!” and froze them into place.
This was more than an ordinary net, it seemed to be some kind of immobilizer. Yara had moved so fast that I hadn’t seen her throw it.
“Hey! Let her go!” My t-shirt struggled uselessly against Mr. Yancy’s iron grip.
“Not now, Little One,” he warned me hoarsely. 22
Yara’s voice dropped to a whisper that was somehow more terrifying than a roar.
“Alice-Ann Poucault. Since you have consistently failed your tests here at school and despite every advantage, have not learned to master …” here she gave Mr. Yancy a scathing look, “the art of making yourself invisible, I’m afraid you will have to exit the programme. Forthwith.”
“You crusty-face old biddy, I ain’t fraid you!” Alice burst out, to my surprise.
She re-appeared fully under the net – her defiant face red enough to match her pigtails. Her limbs and head might be locked in place, but she could still talk!
“Oh, my sweet dear.” Yara’s face was ablaze. “I am not the one to be feared.”
She reached out and released one drop from a vial held gingerly in her gloved hand, onto the girl’s stuck head.
My heart pounded. What was in the vial? When had Yara put on gloves?
“This is one of the Council’s most treasured inventions,” she explained softly.
A sense of dread filled me as she carefully corked the vial and put it away in the massive desk. 23
Meanwhile, Alice was having her say: calling Yara all kinds of creative names. I grinned. At least she still had her voice.
Then with a squeak, in front of my eyes, Alice began to shrink.
I pulled back in horror. Pale hair grew on her arms and legs. White hair. No … Fur. Her ears grew narrower and longer, covered in the same white fur. Her face, already round, became shockingly so, highlighted by two sets of long silvery whiskers on either side of her shrinking nose.
She grew smaller, until there was nothing but a pile of clothes under the net.
“Where is she?” I whispered, too shocked to move. “What did you do to her?”
“Darling,” Yara said in a smooth voice. “She is right there!”
She pressed something and the net disappeared. The pile of clothes started wriggling. I shrieked and nearly jumped into Mr. Yancy’s arms. Now, he was staring at the clothes on the floor with his fists clenched and a steely look on his face.
Something crawled out slowly from the pile of clothing: a snuffling little … white rabbit. 24
I stared at its round pink eyes. They looked as though they were trying to tell me something.
“W-what?” I stammered.
“My dear Zo, meet Alice.” Yara said in cautionary tones. “The newest addition to our school’s working farm.”
“You’re going to eat her?” I groaned, about to be sick.
Mr. Yancy choked back a laugh.
“Of course not, you foolish girl!” Yara snapped. “This rabbit will help keep the grass low and remove the weeds from our grounds.”
She pinned me with her blazing stare. “This is the fate that awaits anyone who doesn’t pass the Council’s tests. Now, you understand the importance of doing your best. Don’t you, Zo?”
I couldn’t stop staring at Alice the Rabbit, snuffling around her own clothes. My eyes were as round as teacups.
“Good,” Yara nodded, coming in close.
Her skirts rustled like the wings of a bird.
“Remember,” she said pointedly, grabbing me with her eyes, “the key is to use all the gifts you’ve been given.” 25
It felt like I was floating outside of my body – hearing Yara from some faraway place. She scratched at the choker around her neck, then signalled Mr. Yancy to take me away.
He led me gently out of the room and down a windowless corridor lined with shining marble floors. At first, I went along blindly, stunned by everything I’d just seen and heard.
Then something inside of me clicked back into place. I couldn’t just go along with this madness. I dragged my feet and let my body go limp, hoping it would slow us down.
“Hey!” Old Man Yancy warned me in his quick voice, “You better keep moving. Resist the training and they have no more use for you. At least in there, you still have a chance. And remember …”
He looked at me closely, thick grey eyebrows sticking like bushes from the cliff of his brow, “The strongest rope is made of many strands.”
I snorted in anger. “Thanks.”
After giving me up to Yara and watching a girl be turned into a rabbit, now he was dropping proverbs? This man had some nerve.
But he was right about one thing. I was in the 26Council’s power. If I fought them now, I might never see my family again. I stopped struggling, stood up and pulled myself loose from his grip.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded.
“Here.” He turned a sharp corner on the left.
I went with him and stopped in my tracks.
We were in a seemingly endless corridor, lined on either side with golden doors.
“Come,” Mr. Yancy said.
I forced myself to move. As I followed him down the long, narrow hallway, I could see that each door was different in shape and design – some looked ancient, some modern, some ornate, others sleek. We passed what looked like the door of an Aztec temple, then another like a submarine hatch. There was even one shaped like the airlock on a spaceship. But they all seemed made of solid gold.
When I looked closely, I could see another thing that they had in common. They were all covered with dragons. Each door had a different style of dragon in its design: as door knockers, frames, handles, hieroglyphs, and decorative carvings. Each door’s dragons seemed to come from a different era and civilization in the world. 27
As Mr. Yancy walked ahead of me, I quietly dipped my hand into the pocket Yara had touched. There was something in there. I pulled it out slowly and saw that it was a key, small and exquisite, made of gold, with one end shaped like a dragon’s head and wings.
Yara had mentioned something about a key. Yes, she’d said that the key was to use all the gifts I’d been given. Clearly, she’d been trying to send me a message. Had Yara given me a key to one of these doors? If so, which one? There were so many of them.
I remembered her freeing me and Adri from the Council’s clutches, back at their lab in the Samaan Bay forest. Maybe Yara was trying to help me again without them knowing. Either way, I’d better hold on to this key if I ever hoped to make it out of here alive.
I slipped the key back into my pocket just as Mr. Yancy stopped suddenly in front of me.
“What is this place?” I whispered, looking at the rows of what looked like hundreds of doors stretching past us on either side; each one different from the other.
Mr. Yancy gave me a look that bordered on pity.
“They call this Dragon Hall.” 28
Well, that was an obvious name.
“What’s inside the doors?” I asked quietly.
Somehow, this didn’t feel like a place where you raised your voice.
“Be careful Zo,” Mr. Yancy cautioned, looking at me with piercing eyes. “Remember your gift.”
Before I could move, he held my shirt as tight as the pincer of a crab, opened the nearest door, and shoved me in.
Chapter Three
SURPRISE
Oof. I landed on my hands and knees in a pile of sand. Someone rushed past me, almost knocking me flat.
“Hey!” I protested, struggling to my feet.
The person had their back to me. They were tall with wavy black hair, wearing muddy cargo pants and a grubby t-shirt that might once have been forest green, with a mottled brown rucksack on their shoulders, like the one on the sand by my feet.
Mr. Yancy must have tossed this pack in with me. I ground my teeth. How could he abandon me without so much as a heads up? Most importantly, where was I and how did I get out?
The person in front of me was banging and 30pushing on the door I’d just come through, but it was already shut tight.
“H-how …?” I stammered, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
The door stood in the middle of a pile of sand, without a wall or other support to hold it up. I tried to catch my breath as the person in front of me kept fighting to break it open.
The door, double doors in fact, stood inside of an arched frame covered in an intricate pattern of circles and stars. At the front of each door was a golden handle shaped like a dragon from Persian stories: a curling, snake-like creature with many legs and wings, a fierce face with curved horns, flaming eyes and a wide-open mouth filled with sharp teeth.
But that wasn’t all.
I looked around in shock. Somehow, we were on a long stretch of deserted beach. To my right was the sea, wild and windswept, stretching out to a distant horizon. To my left was yellow-brown sand, lined with what seemed like an old coconut plantation running the length of the beach, as far as the eye could see.
The plantation seemed to be abandoned. I couldn’t see any houses or buildings; just rows and 31rows of coconut trees that had seen better days. Mangrove and forest had probably been cleared to make this plantation. Now the sea was eroding the land at top-speed. Some trees had fallen across the beach, left with only their leafless trunks and tangled roots sticking into the air. Those that were still standing were bent and twisted by the wind into painful shapes.
