Island of Fire (The Unwanteds) (34 page)

A
lex moved toward the balcony as fast as his feet would carry him, which wasn’t very fast at all. He grabbed the railing and leaned on it as he maneuvered down the steps, trying not to jolt his body any more than he had to. But he had to reach her in time.

Simber and Florence looked on in surprise at the sight of him dodging other students and residents like a decrepit grandfather on ice skates. They peppered him with questions as he reached the bottom and sped for the door, but Alex ignored them, whipping the door open and stepping outside for the first time in weeks.

He shielded his eyes from the sun and scanned the shore, spotting her.

“Sky!” he cried. He hastened toward her as she dropped the raft in the water, pushing it deeper. She placed a small satchel on top of the raft and climbed on.

“Sky!” he yelled again, and this time she turned her head. Her eyes widened in alarm.

Alex stopped at the edge of the water and stared at her. She held his gaze as the raft drifted in front of him, heading west. Where was she going? Alex didn’t know what to say, what to do. Everything inside him crumbled.

She was leaving Artimé.

She was leaving him.

And what was he supposed to do? Watch her go?

The only part of her that moved was her head, turning slowly to hold his gaze as she drifted farther away. The water reflected sunlight that shimmered on her skin, her face, in all its stillness. She was a statue of a girl on a raft, breaking a boy’s heart after he broke hers.

Waves of emotion surged through Alex. She
had
to come back! He saw her, she saw him, and now she should come back.

But she didn’t. Her raft rolled and dipped over a wave and she drifted farther out to sea. Finally she made a fist, tapped her chest, and held her hand out to Alex. And then she turned around, lying on her stomach at the corner of the raft and using her arms to paddle.

“Stop!” Alex yelled. “Don’t leave!” He couldn’t see her expression anymore. “Please!” he shouted. But she didn’t react.

Alex couldn’t stand it. She was going away. She didn’t even say good-bye. And she wouldn’t be coming back—she’d never make it. He couldn’t hesitate any longer. “Sky!” he yelled one last time. And then, despite his pain, despite his weakness, he kicked off his shoes and started running recklessly into the waves. When the water reached his chest he dove in, swimming like his life depended on it.

Onshore, he didn’t know a crowd had gathered until they began cheering. Simber and Florence had followed him outside, and now Simber growled and stood up, ready to chase after Alex and pull him from the water.

Florence held him back. “Don’t,” she said. “Not just yet.”

“He’ll drrrown. We can’t rrrisk it again.”

“He won’t drown.” Florence didn’t take her eyes off the boy. “Watch. She’s looking back.”

More and more people gathered to see what was happening, and when they found out, they began cheering Alex on too. After a minute, a chant started. “Sky, come back! Sky, come back!”

Sky stopped paddling and sat up. She stared at the crowd, and then she stared at Alex and started yelling at him. “What in the world are you
doing
? Are you insane? Go back!”

Alex couldn’t answer. It was all he could do to breathe and focus on not drowning. He plowed forward, telling himself to let the pain roll off him.

She stared, dumbfounded. “Alex, I mean it. Go home! I have to leave. I have to save my mother. I’m sorry, but I can’t just let her stay there.”

Alex was gaining on the raft, and now he heard the cheering behind him, but he couldn’t afford to look back. “What—about—Crow?” he sputtered through each knife-stabbing breath, barely getting the words out. “You said—you’d never—leave him.”

“He’ll be safe with you. I know that. I can’t take him with
me. I can’t risk his life again, now that he’s finally happy!”

Alex had to slow down to catch his breath. He flipped over onto his back and began kicking, his chest heaving, his breath coming out in gasps of air and pain. When he could speak, he said, “I can’t let you risk yours.”

“You big jerk!” she cried. “Why are you doing this to me?”

With an enormous effort, Alex flipped back onto his stomach and pushed himself forward with all he had left. “Why—are you—letting me—” He took one more gasp of air. “Drown?” he said. He fell underwater and was forced to flip to his back again. He managed a cheeky smile as he lunged through the water and reached for the corner of the raft.

The crowd on the shore cheered.

“Get off!”

Alex obeyed. He sank under the water.

The crowd gasped.

“Very funny,” she said. But her voice didn’t sound as confident as before.

Alex swam under the raft and popped up on the other side, and when Sky leaned over to see where he’d gone, he pushed up and yelled. “Bah!”

She screamed in terror and grabbed on to the edge, but the momentum was there and she fell into the water. The bag she carried plopped in after her.

That’s about when Alex remembered that people from Warbler don’t know how to swim.

S
he came back above the water sputtering and coughing. “Help!” she yelled, real fear in her voice as the raft drifted out of her reach. She was flailing so much she was dousing herself.

Alex dove back under the raft in an instant and grabbed her around the waist, pushing her up above the surface and holding her there even as she grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and yanked.

The crowd cheered.

“I hate you,” she sputtered.

“I hate you too,” he said. He watched her chest heave with
panic, felt her stomach muscles clench against his chest. He directed their bodies sideways, reaching out a long arm to catch the raft again. “Here, grab on. I’m sorry. I forgot you can’t swim.”

“You’re awful.”

“I know.”

She gripped his hair and looked him in the eye, her lips a white line. “I need to get her out of there,” she said.

Alex looked up at her face, treading water and slowly, almost unnoticeably, pulling the raft toward home. “Don’t you think you should learn how to swim first?”

She glared at him.

“I could find someone to teach you,” he offered. “I am the leader of Artimé, you know.”

“You are insufferable.”

“Only around you.”

“How would you know?” she spat back at him. “You never are.” She clenched her legs around his back and squeezed.

He grimaced and his hand slipped from the raft. Her weight on him forced him underwater, where he screamed out in pain. He pushed his hands upward and lunged for the raft once
again, grabbing it with the tips of his fingers. He blew out a wet, staggered breath and readjusted his grip on her. His lungs burned.

She looked away. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you were still hurt. All this time I thought you were a jerk instead of merely inconsiderate.” She let go of his hair and reached out for the raft, just barely grasping it, and pulled it closer, pushing herself up on her elbow to help. “I’ll climb back on here—”

“No,” he said. “Stay here in the water. Please. I’m sorry—you’re right. I was a jerk.”

She looked into his eyes, so brown and earnest. “You’re just being like this to get me to come back with you,” she said, setting her jaw.

Alex tilted his head, about to protest, but then he changed his mind. “You know what?” he asked. “So what if I am? I’m not afraid to say that I care about you and I don’t want you to die, and yes, I want you to come back to Artimé with me. So I’m not just ‘being like’ anything but me. But the truth right here, just you and me and no hiding on top of roofs or in pirate ship stairwells, and no giant cat hovering overhead—the truth,
Sky, is that I think about you all the time. And when I’m not with you I miss you, and I feel like we have this, I don’t know, connection or whatever, and maybe that’s because of all we went through restoring Artimé. But I don’t know, you know? You’re the one I broke down in front of that first night on the roof, and I hardly even knew you. You’re the one I went to when I needed somebody smart to help me solve things.”

He was out of breath. He winced and pulled himself up, lurching to get a new grip on the raft. “The problem is, I just don’t know what to do. Because there will be a lot of times where I’m plastered with all the messes this magical world makes. And I guess that’s a lot—I don’t know. All I have is what I’ve experienced so far, and this job about killed me. So I don’t know . . . exactly what, or how much, I’d have left . . . over . . . for someone.”

He swallowed hard, and his foot brushed the sandy bottom. “But the one thing I do know, and I’m not just saying this to get you to come home, is that I told you on the ship that I would help you get your mother out of there. And I meant it. I meant it then, and I mean it now. And I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get healthy, and I’m fifty times sorrier I didn’t let you know I was thinking about it . . . and you. But if we do this Pirate Island
rescue, we need to do it right. And there’s no way I’m going to break into an underwater pirate island with a team of people who can’t swim, because that would be stupid, and we are not stupid.”

Sky was quiet. And then she gently draped her arms around his neck and hugged him.

He closed his eyes, digging his foot into the sandy floor of the sea.

When he turned to see just how many witnesses he’d had to his latest spectacle, the beach was strangely empty.

“You can touch the bottom here,” Alex said, loosening his grip so she could slide down to her feet. “Come home with me?”

Sky nodded.

“Stay until we’re ready to crush the pirates
and
live to tell about it?”

“Okay,” she said.

He cast a sidelong glance at her as they slugged through the shallow waves in their wet clothes. “Promise?”

She grabbed his forearm and almost tripped over her own feet. “Promise,” she said, laughing.

Alex caught her and laughed. “Ow. You’re seriously killing me now.”

A
lex’s ribs slowly knit back together over the next months, and Artimé resumed its normal routine. Alex began wearing one of Mr. Today’s robes all the time, knowing that if the world disappeared and he didn’t have one, they’d be in another mess. After tripping a few times on the long hem, Sky took the robes and tailored them to fit him.

All the various classes, Beginning and Advanced Magical Warrior Training, and picnics on the lawn began again.

And so did Alex’s plan for Pirate Island. With Artimé situated on the sea, most Unwanteds learned how to swim whenever
they felt like going into the water—there was always somebody older willing to teach a new Unwanted how to hold his breath underwater and how to move through it safely using arm strokes and leg kicks. But now Alex asked Ms. Octavia, in addition to her art classes, to begin teaching an extensive swimming course for those who wanted to volunteer to help rescue Sky and Crow’s mother. Dozens of people signed up. After the initial lessons, when some naturally dropped out upon realizing they were not suited for this quest, and only the strongest swimmers plus Sky and Crow remained, Ms. Octavia began to share the secrets of sea breathing with the determined ones who remained.

She began to teach them little tricks and helps that would allow them to eventually hold their breath for an extraordinarily long time by utilizing the oxygen that was stored in their blood, not just in their lungs.

It was the most strenuous, exhausting exercise Alex and the others had ever tried, and the progress was slow. But it was necessary if they were going to succeed.

In the evenings, when Alex wasn’t spending time in the lounge with Lani, Sam, Meghan, and Sky; strategizing about Pirate Island; or training his lungs and muscles for the rescue, he went to the
Museum of Large to clean up the mess of whale bones in there. Claire, Gunnar, and Octavia all offered to help, but he declined. It was something very soothing for Alex—an enjoyable, creative task he could do alone. It gave him the opportunity to decompress from his day and think up new ideas for Artimé. Now he understood exactly why Mr. Today had spent so much time fixing up the pirate ship. It was a relief to realize that not every day as mage of Artimé would require him to work at a breakneck pace.