Rescue On Nim's Island (9 page)

‘So do I,’ said Tiffany. It would have been true if she hadn’t been so terrified of who might be climbing behind them.

But she couldn’t stop and look till they reached the top. It seemed to take forever – and when she was finally standing on the cliff path, the breeze was blowing the trees too hard to see into the rainforest, and the surf was thundering too hard to hear. She still couldn’t know for sure that Lance and Leonora weren’t close behind.

But ahead, leading into the hillside, was the mouth of a cave.

Tiffany breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Tris is going to be so surprised to see us!’ she said, and they walked into the darkness.

There was no one there. Tiffany turned on her torch, and shone it all around. It lit up dark stone walls, a hard stone floor, shelves of test tubes and neat stacks of canned food. They walked right around it, touching the walls, just to make sure – but there were no secret passageways or tunnels. There weren’t even any bats.

This was the Emergency Cave she’d waited outside yesterday. The bats and the fossil were in a completely different cave.

‘Where’s Tris?’ Ollie demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ said Tiff.

It was the saddest thing she’d ever said. She’d raced through the forest and climbed all the way up here with her little brother, and it was the wrong place.

‘Are we going to look for him?’ asked Ollie.

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘He can’t be far away.’

But Nim had lived on the island her whole life and she’d only found the fossil cave yesterday. Now Tiffany had to find it before the Bijous did. She stood at the cave entrance, her heart thumping.

The path above her was narrower; rainforest trees leaned over it and even dangled over the cliff. When they’d come down that way yesterday, she hadn’t seen anything that could possibly be the opening to a cave.

Maybe they’d already passed it.

She had to decide.

She leaned out over the cliff. Lance and Leonora were still nowhere in sight.

Holding Ollie tightly by the hand, Tiffany inched her way back down the way they had come. They looked into cracks that lizards couldn’t have slithered through. They poked into holes full of leaves and grit. They stared at the walls of the cliff and the mounds of boulders until their eyes watered. They went back up the path to where the trees began.

Now even the weather seemed to know her search was hopeless. The bright blue sky had turned dark; the sun was covered with threatening clouds.

Finally Tiffany went back to the Emergency Cave. There were still no mysterious tunnels; no hidden entrances to other caves. And no Tristan.

Tiffany hugged Ollie close as she slid down onto the cold stone floor. She couldn’t stop Lance and Leonora from stealing whatever they wanted to steal and hurting whoever got in their way. Her twin was in danger – and now she’d put her little brother in danger too. She tried not to cry, but once she started she couldn’t stop, no matter how much Ollie patted her face.

After a while Ollie started crying too.

S
ELKIE WAS IN
the rocky cove below the Black Rocks. It wasn’t her favourite place for fishing, but she wasn’t there for fish. She was patrolling, watching the entrance to the cave and listening for Nim’s whistle.

A boat was coming. It was the boat that had come to the island yesterday – Nim and Jack had let it land, so Selkie knew that she had to leave it alone. But she didn’t like it. She didn’t like boats with motors, and she didn’t like that it was coming into this cove when Nim didn’t know. She dived as it anchored and poked her head up again just enough to watch Leonora and Lance unload the ropes and gear into the rubber dinghy.

They paddled in to shore and pulled the dinghy up onto the rocks. ‘If those brats have truly found something worthwhile, we’ll lower it down to here, and take off,’ said Lance.

‘But before we go,’ said Leonora, ‘it’ll be goodbye to Jack’s laboratory and all those algae!’

Lance strapped the pack onto his back, and they started up the cliff.

Chapter 9

NIM, EDMUND AND
Tristan were still brushing and polishing the sea turtle fossil so the opal gleamed brighter and its fires leapt further. Fred was scrambling from one person’s shoulder to another, trying to catch glow-worms.

Suddenly Tristan froze. ‘I can hear something.’

They all stopped and listened. They could hear their own breathing; nothing else.

‘I’m going out to see,’ said Tristan.

‘I’m going on working,’ said Nim, and Edmund agreed. The turtle was so beautiful that they wanted it to be perfect, and every time they brushed one bit, another bit that needed brushing showed through.

Tristan crouched through the tunnel and crawled out the door hole. The sunshine was blinding after the hours of darkness; he leaned against the side of the hill as he waited for his eyes to work again, and listened.

He’d told Nim and Edmund that he’d heard something because he didn’t know how else to explain the feeling. It was like a warning siren inside him:
Something’s wrong!
Pay attention
. But outside, he could almost hear it with his ears. It was a very faint, gasping noise, like the sound that Ollie made when he’d cried so much he couldn’t cry any more.

The only other time Tristan had ever felt anything like this was when he and Tiff were seven. He’d been at a friend’s house when Tiff had fallen off the monkey bars and broken her arm. Tris hadn’t waited to tell his friend he was leaving: he’d just run all the way to the playground. He’d got there just as his mum’s car disappeared around the corner on the way to the hospital.

He’d never forgotten that feeling.

So he headed down the hill now, still listening. Whatever it was sounded more and more like sobbing, and by the time he got to the Emergency Cave, Tristan was running so fast he skidded right past the entrance.

‘Tris?’

He spun around. His sister and brother were huddled on the floor.

‘How come you weren’t here before?’ Ollie demanded. ‘We were going to give you a big surprise!’

‘You did,’ said Tristan.

Tiffany sniffed, wiped her nose on the back of her arm, and stood up. ‘Something terrible’s happened. Lance and Leonora want whatever it is you’ve found, and they say nothing’s going to stop them.’

T
RISTAN LED THE
way back up the path, faster than they’d ever thought they could walk at the top of a cliff. He turned where two sticks lay crossed in front of a tree, and disappeared through the hole in the rock.

‘I thought I’d looked everywhere,’ Tiffany said bitterly. ‘But I went right past it!’ She boosted Ollie in through the hole, and slid in after him.

There was a boom of thunder. The first fat raindrops chased her through the hole into suffocating darkness. If she hadn’t been tied to her little brother Tiff would have climbed right back out again. She’d rather be wet than cramped in a low, dank tunnel.

Tristan turned on his torch. ‘The fossil is on the other side of the wall, right about here.’

‘But we’ve got to go down the tunnel to get there?’ Tiffany asked, pulling her own torch out of her pocket.

Before she’d had time to switch it on, Tris and his light turned into the side tunnel. Ollie followed close to his brother, and for a second, as Tiff stepped into the vast, eerily glimmering cavern, she was alone. She forgot the bats, she forgot Lance and Leonora, she forgot to be afraid. She felt as if she’d stepped into an enchanted world, and she didn’t know yet if it was good or evil.

Then the sheet around her waist tugged her along, and she hurried around the bend.

Nim and Edmund stepped back in surprise as Tristan appeared with Ollie. Their lights shone on the huge opal turtle, and when Tristan added his, the blues and greens gleamed as if the sea was caught in the rock, with hints of fire flashing from the heart of Fire Mountain itself.

Nim prickled. She didn’t want Tiffany here. This was the most special thing she’d ever discovered. Every time she rubbed another little bit clear – another vertebra in the turtle’s neck, or a deeper patch of colour on the shell, excitement bubbled up in her all over again. Now Tiffany was going to say something sarcastic and wreck that feeling.

‘Wow,’ Tiffany breathed, exactly like Tristan had. ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.’

Nim waited. ‘Really?’ she asked at last.

‘Totally,’ said Tiffany. She touched the turtle’s shell with a careful finger, as if she were stroking a butterfly – and the coldness of the touch seemed to wake her up.

‘This is terrible!’ she said urgently.

Nim bristled again.

‘It’s so amazing, the Bijous are going to want it for sure. They’re coming to find it.’

‘The crossed sticks!’ Tristan interrupted. He was sure they hadn’t been at the entrance this morning. Lance and Leonora must have marked it. He raced back down the tunnel.

‘They know you’ve found something,’ Tiffany went on. ‘They’re coming back with gear so they can take it.’

‘They wouldn’t do that!’ Nim exclaimed. ‘They know the island’s protected.’

‘I heard them when they came back to the camp,’ Tiffany said desperately. ‘They want to destroy Jack’s research, too. You’ve got to believe me, Nim.’

‘But …’ Nim began.

‘I’ve just worked something else out,’ said Edmund. ‘When we were on our way to the boat yesterday, Lance said,
Let’s hope the cake was worth it
. Leonora told him to be quiet and changed the subject really fast – I think he’d forgotten I was in the back seat. But they must have been the scientist friends who gave Dr Ashburn and Professor Hunterstone a celebration dinner. What if they poisoned the cake?’

That’s why Alex said, ‘Ah!’ like that when I said the
Bijous were the same kinds of scientists,
Nim thought.
She
meant it reminded her of a plot for a mystery story!

‘That makes sense,’ said Tiffany. ‘They said all our parents were sweet and stupid.’

‘Jack too?’ asked Nim.

‘They said he was so simple it was as if he wanted his research destroyed.’

Nim knew that Tiffany was telling the truth.

Tristan rushed back in. ‘Lance and Leonora have stolen the boat! It’s down in that little cove below us – and they’re climbing the cliff. I was too late to move the sticks, they’d have seen me for sure.’

‘We’ll guard the tunnel,’ Nim said fiercely. ‘We’re not letting them in!’

‘We’ll have to come out some time – and they’ve just hauled a big pack up here in pouring rain,’ said Tristan. ‘They’re not going to go away just because we ask them to.’

‘The way they said that nothing was going to stop them …’ Tiffany shivered.

Ollie stared from one face to the other, and started to whimper. Fred scuttled back to Nim’s shoulder.

Nim felt as if she’d swallowed a hurricane. Her thoughts whirled: she had to stop the Bijous, but she couldn’t put everyone in danger; she had to stop them destroying Jack’s research, but she had to guard the cave and the bats’ nursery.

‘We can’t fight them while we’ve got Ollie,’ said Tiffany, as if she’d read Nim’s mind.

‘But it’s too late to run away,’ said Tristan.