“I’ll do it,” said Cyrus. “If he sinks, oh well. He wasn’t going to help us anyway.”
“That’s the spirit, lad.” The old man grinned. “Be a savage. Do it. Throw me in and I’ll help you. My word is gold.”
Cyrus stepped forward. Antigone shook her head.
“Come on now!” the old man yelped. “You can’t offer a treat like that and not follow through. We have a deal?”
Cyrus spread his legs, bent his knees, and leaned over.
“Cyrus!” Antigone blinked. “You’re not really going to—”
The fragile old man rose up in Cyrus’s arms, as light as a mannequin.
Antigone jumped forward, but Cyrus had already stepped onto the rocks. A wave washed up around his ankles.
The old man was laughing.
Cyrus heaved. The water leapt.
The blanket swirled on the surface. Llewellyn Douglas was gone.
“Mr. Cyrus! Miss Antigone!” The voice was distant. Lost in the wind.
Antigone stood, motionless, hands over her mouth, eyes on the water.
Cyrus looked back over the jetty, over the harbor, at the lawns and the underground hangars.
A boy in a bowler hat was sprinting toward them, his cape snapping in the wind.
seventeen. LILLY THE BULL
“CYRUS, YOU MURDERED him. Jump in! Find him! Pull him out!”
Cyrus stared back at the gray frothing water. The blanket was clinging to the rocks. There was no sign of Llewellyn.
“He wanted me to,” Cyrus said. “He’s a free diver. Don’t you think he’ll be fine?”
“Guys!” Dennis had crossed the airstrip. The wind softened his shouting.
“No, Cyrus. I don’t think he’ll be fine. Get in there!”
Cyrus took off his jacket, unstrapped and tugged off his boots and socks, and then edged farther down the rocks. “Give him a minute. He’ll come up.”
Antigone stepped forward and punched the heels of her hands into Cyrus’s shoulder blades. Waving his arms, he rocked forward, overbalanced, and slapped into the water, swallowed by an oncoming wave.
Antigone chewed nervously on her fingernail. She was alone in the growing wind, standing in a fading glimmer of sunlight with an empty wheelchair. Suddenly, she dug into her pocket.
Cyrus swallowed cold water. He spat cold water. He felt his muscles and joints tightening as he sank. He felt a wave carrying him back toward the rocks.
Blinking, forcing his inflated lungs to relax, he pulled himself deeper and away from the jetty.
He wasn’t going to bob right back up and yell at his sister. Let her wonder. Let her worry. She’d earned it.
Twisting, Cyrus scanned the water for any signs of the old man.
The stone jetty sloped down twenty feet or more until it reached a small, muddy, timber-dotted shelf. Beyond the shelf’s edge, deep water became dark water, which became cold, lightless nothing.
Down on the edge of blurry invisibility, Cyrus could just make out a pale shape. Letting out a little of his air, he kicked toward it.
Cyrus could swim. His parents had made sure of it. But this was deeper than he had ever tried to dive. He knew he could hold his breath for one hundred and five seconds before crazy desperation would force him to inhale, and he’d managed to hold his breath for at least that long a few weeks before while scaring a PE teacher and a school nurse.
But he didn’t know how long this would take.
As he descended, the pale shape of Llewellyn Douglas became clearer. The old man was swirling in place by the drop-off. And he’d stripped down to his bones, his skin, and a pair of baggy white skivs. He spun in two backflips as easily as a seal — a wrinkly, skeletal, furless seal — and then he shifted, gliding on his back along the shelf’s edge.
Spotting Cyrus, he straightened up, laughing bubbles. His false teeth drifted out of his mouth, but he snatched them as they sank and popped them back into his grin.
He pointed up. “Go!”
“Teach us?” Cyrus bubbled, and that was it for his air. He bit his lip and ignored the empty feeling in his chest.
A sparkle of light caught his eye and he looked down. His ball of Quick Water had almost entirely hatched through the fabric of his pocket, and it was erupting with sunlight. Cyrus grabbed at it, but his arms were too slow in the water.
The ball of daylight wobbled free and began to sink. Cyrus flailed while the old man watched. He kicked at it, but the ball parted around his toes and reunited on the other side, wobbling away as it sank like liquid steel, down toward the darkness.
Cyrus hesitated. He needed to be ascending, getting closer to a desperate, gasping breath at the surface. Instead, he dove after the ball. Before he’d gone far, the old man’s bony hand closed around his ankle and pulled him back. He poked Cyrus in the stomach and pointed up.
“Go!” he bubbled again. And then, shaking his head, the skeleton in underwear slithered down, moving through the water like an eel.
Cyrus floated up, watching the golden ball disappear beyond the shelf. A moment later, a long, bulky bullet shape with fins rose up from the dark water, cruising toward the old man with lazy tail strokes. It couldn’t be a shark. Not in Lake Michigan.
Llewellyn Douglas grabbed on to its dorsal fin and disappeared into the darkness.
Cyrus turned his face up to the surface and surged with every drop of energy he had. His legs and shoulders were out of oxygen. His head drummed, and his vision blurred. And then the surface — air, wind, sun, and gasping lungs.
Sputtering, spitting, wheezing, Cyrus worked to tread water, trying to blink his vision back to normal.
“Cyrus!” Antigone’s voice wasn’t as close as he would have hoped. “Cyrus! Get over here!”
A little more than a pool’s length away, his sister was waving at him from the jetty. Someone in a cape was bouncing beside her.
“Swim, Cyrus!”
His heart was calming. His sizzling lungs were cooling. Cyrus began crawling toward his eager sister. When he reached the stones, two sets of hands dragged him up out of the water, banging his shins, stubbing his toes, and finally trying to force him to stand.
Cyrus sat down and flopped over, blinking at the sky — the sun blinked back, sliding through the front-running storm clouds before the growing black stampede.
“Cy, stand up.” Antigone grabbed at his hands. Cyrus slapped her arms away.
“Mr. Cyrus.” Dennis Gilly, breathless, loomed into view. “Something terrible has happened. Will happen. Mr. Sterling’s been plotting. Something terrible for sure. He tried to kill me.”
Cyrus shut his eyes. “Antigone, I’m waiting for an apology.”
“Why? Because I pushed you in? I’m not apologizing. You didn’t know if he could swim. Now listen to Dennis. We need to hurry. He overheard something big.”
“There was a shark,” said Cyrus. “And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t hallucinating.”
“I know,” Antigone said. “I saw it swim by. The old guy rode it, and I’ve never seen anything more disgusting than that guy in his underwear. I was looking through my half of the Quick Water blob. If you turn it in your hand, you can look in any direction. It’s cool. I’ll show you later. Now get up. We need to run. We need to find Nolan before Rhodes and Sterling do.”
“What?” Cyrus asked, squinting. “Why do they care about Nolan?”
Dennis leaned forward, and his ribboned bowler hat blocked the sun. “Because they’re working for Phoenix, and Nolan has that horrible tooth of Mr. Skelton’s — stolen from you — and Mr. Rhodes tried to have Mr. John Horace Lawney killed, and he was there when Mrs. Eldridge was murdered, and there’s a plan for something to happen tonight, and Mr. Sterling says they have to get Nolan right away. And you two. And Mr. Greeves. Because one of you will have what they need.”