Twenty minutes later, Jonathan gunned the JetSki southward through the waves. The grumble of the engine softened every time he checked his cellphone reception, until finally the emergency number connected.

Jonathan started talking. Not mentioning the Rock--the less scrutiny we got, the better--but saying he’d heard gunshots at Fort Dolores.

He repeated himself twice, then cut the connection when the lights of the shoreline winked into view. Slicing an arc through the waves, he opened the throttle until, though the dirty moonlight, he saw a distant boxy silhouette.

Fort Dolores: Built after the War of 1812, on a rock that jutted from Casco Bay. Three stories of granite slabs with narrow damp stairways and arrow-slit windows around a central courtyard overrun with weeds and the ashes of dead campfires.

The fort rose in a looming black square on an island that, at high tide, was only ten feet wider than the walls. The front entry was a dark archway wide enough to accommodate a horse-drawn canon. Waves settled in brackish pools at the base of granite slabs.

And while Jonathan opened the throttle, the mercenary who called himself Ed stood with his back to the rough stone wall, watching the bay. Watching the distant lights, feeling the mist of the surf on his cheeks, his vision blurred.

He wiped his face with a gloved palm and realized: that wasn’t mist, that was tears.

Standing there crying. Thinking about Sam, about the crack of vertebrae. The sensation of bones snapping still tingled in Ed’s fingers, in his forearms.

The things they made you do. Ed rubbed his face. They could’ve lured the target--Dewitt Dougherty--from the island and taken him without any fuss, but PJ wanted to run an extraction exercise. Test the team before the main event. And what PJ wanted, PJ got.

Ed didn’t even know if Carson Boone was in charge anymore, or if they all answered to PJ now. He suppressed the thought and watched the waves until he heard an engine in the distance.

He murmured into his throat-mic, "Craft approaching."

"I don’t hear anything," Mrs. Spandle replied. "What is it?"

"Sounds like a motorboat, ma’am."

"Keep watch. Where's the helicopter?"

"On schedule."

"So we’re stuck here for another thirty minutes?"

"That’s protocol, ma’am. Move in stages."

"Mm." A brief pause. "Oh! I hear it now. Coming closer."

"Yes. A … " Ed raised his night scope. "A JetSki."

Then PJ’s voice came. "Just one man?"

"One man. Quan’s on the roof with his rifle, sir. Should we put him down?"

"No, let him come. I’ll greet him."

And that was that.

Ed watched, invisible in the shadows. "The JetSki’s heading around the fort. Circumnavigating. There. He’s gone."

"Soon we'll be gone, too," Mrs. Spandle said. "With the cargo."

And where was I, while they were talking?

I was a shrink-wrapped mummy, layered with half the waterproof gear in the General Store over my jeans and hoodie, lying on my back, watching the bleak sky. Jolted by waves, numb fingers clutching a paddle, tucked in a kayak towed behind the JetSki.

Icy seawater sprayed my face and I breathed deep and slow until I faded into an exhausted daze, daydreaming of Maddie.

She had a mole two inches south-west of her left hipbone that broke my heart ...

The whole thing started ten years earlier, when my parents sent me to live on Little Big Rock with my sister Simone. Don’t get any ideas about island living, though; there were no sandy beaches, no tropical drinks, no volleyball. No bikinis. The island was exactly like every other backwater town in Mayne, with extra servings of isolation.

When I got there, looking over the cliff-bound coast, I'd asked the obvious question, "Which one is Big Rock?"

Simone had rolled her eyes. "There is no Big Rock."

She'd been a weaver, making lumpy scarves that looked like rejects from a Renaissance Fair. She lived in a little farmhouse surrounded by acres of pasture, with twelve sheep and three llamas who'd never liked me. Simone was fourteen years older than I was, and not really a hippie even though she looked like one. It was more that she'd been born in the wrong century. Well, she chose to leave New Park, the city that never sleeps, for remotest Mayne. That tells you everything you need to know.

For me, living on a backwoods island wasn’t a choice. My mom lost her job, my dad lost his retirement, then they moved in with my grandfather in Enid, Oklahoma. I got shipped to Simone because my grandfather didn’t want a kid in the house. Fair enough, I guess.

The morning after I arrived at Little Big Rock, Simone had made blueberry pancakes and told me I had two options. "There’s a home school on the island with the local kids," she'd said. "Or you can go to public school in Portland."

"Um, I want to go to regular school."

She tossed a folded sheet of paper at me. "That’s the boat schedule."

"The what?"

"Set your alarm for four," she said.

Apparently attending public school involved waking at dawn and hitching a ride with Arthur and Richard Bankhead to the next island, then catching the first mail boat--yes, mail boat--to the city. Then the bus. To join in the middle of the school year, where I didn’t know anyone.

Hello home schooling.

With me living on Little Big Rock, the population had soared to twenty-four.

I met Dewitt my second day on the island, and we'd clicked. We did everything together, from setting off firecrackers to running errands. Dr. Wainwright, a retired plastic surgeon, took care of any medical needs not cured by the marijuana that Dewitt’s folks grew. Trish and Gustav ran the General Store. They all pitched in to teach school, with Patty covering art, the Reuters nattering about history and literature, and Bernard handing PE.

They'd kept us busy despite the interruptions: Big Molly left the island for seven months a year to work the oil rigs; Bernard headed for the border of Afghanistan; and Patty married Steve Kryzan, who farmed the north fields.

Y’know. Normal life.

By the time the Storm came, you’d have sworn that I’d been raised from birth on Little Big Rock. You’d have sworn that me and Dewitt were brothers.

Because we were.

The Storm hit the island long after the Seventeen Seconds. Even so, we knew it was somehow caused by the Seventeen Seconds. Like an aftershock following an earthquake or an echo following a scream, they were two phases of the same event.

I remember standing alone on the old quarry pier, watching the black clouds and choppy waves, thrilling to the electricity in the air. Then squinting toward the ocean as a thirty-foot wave rose like a glass skyscraper, bearing down on me with stately grace.

Things get a little blurry after that.

But across the island, the wind flung lobster traps around before ripping a bumper from the Emerson’s battered green pickup and sending it tumbling along the island’s single paved road.

And my sister Simone had struggled down the middle of the street, fighting the whiplash rain. She'd pounded on the door of the General Store but nobody heard. Then the truck’s bumper smashed the wall beside her.

A bearish man opened the door, his brow creased with worry.

"Simone?" Gustav gathered her dripping inside. "What’re you doing out--"

"Lark’s trapped. At the quarry pier."

"What do you mean, trapped?"

"Something's got him," Simone said.

She grabbed a shovel and slammed back into the deluge.

Ten minutes later, Trish blinked and squinted, driving her tractor--the heaviest on the island--toward the quarry. A flurry of tarpaulins wheeled past her; then one of the Reuter’s goats bolted alongside, eyes white with terror.

Trish felt the treads slip and clutched the gearshift, her knuckles straining. A muffled crash sounded through the storm, a tree ripping from the sodden earth. She stopped in the rain-ravaged road near the old propane tanks, as close to the shore as she dared get.

"You stay," her husband Gustav told her.

"I’m coming."

"A hundred pounds, soaking wet, I ain’t gonna lose you."

"Nobody else--"

"Nobody else can handle the tractor like you. We need you here, to mind the ropes."

Because if they lost someone to the ocean, Trish and her tractor would pull them back by a rope tied around their middle.

"You bring that boy home," she told him.

Gustav nodded once and led the Bankhead brothers, and Big Molly, and Steve Kryzan, and the two homosexual fellows whose names he hadn't caught, into the fury.

At the edge of the gravel pits, the ocean lashed at a breakwater of granite rocks, the remnants of a long-abandoned pier. A towering wave slapped the shore and broke into a thousand shards. A flash of lightning revealed a shivering kid--me--in the middle of the pier, caught at the seam between two slabs of rock.

A pathetic sodden figure, half-drowned and defeated.

My sister crawled toward me, the shovel dangling from her wrist by a strap. She kept coming, inch by inch, her knees bleeding on the rough stone, every wave slamming her closer to the heaving sea.

And I guess I should say this: Simone and I never really got along. The gap in our ages made things tough, and we weren't very much alike. But when I was in trouble, that didn't matter. When I needed her, she was there. Without question, without hesitation, without any regard for her own safety.

She showed me what bravery was. She taught me lessons that I will never forget.

The Bankhead brothers struggled forward on the granite pier, with the others farther back. Simone reached me first, and chopped wildly with the shovel while the Bankheads pressed closer, fighting for every foot. Then Richard Bankhead grabbed Simone and told her to get to shore: she wasn't tied down, the ocean could sweep her away at any moment.

Arthur grabbed my arm and tugged hard, but I didn’t come free.

"He’s caught!" he shouted through the downpour. "Look!"

He pointed to a shiny black cable wrapped around my leg, thick and muscled as an anaconda.

Through the downpour, Gustav yelled, "Use my knife!"

"We can’t cut through that," Richard shouted back.

"Not through the cable," Gustav said. "Through his leg."

He passed his knife to Arthur Bankhead, who crouched beside me, his eyes slitted against the rain. He brought the blade close to my knee and the cable pulsed, then writhed.

Alive.

In a flash of lightning, I saw suckers ringed with razor teeth and needle spikes.

It wasn't a cable, it was a tentacle.

I screamed. Terror tightened my throat and an electric tingling shot through the air. The cable--the tentacle--heaved from the pier and looped around my chest. Four spikes pierced my skin and drilled into bone. The tentacle lifted me twenty feet above the pier, throbbing with the beat of my heart, then swept me past Gustav and the Bankheads and into the gravel pits, writhing and thrashing, still impossibly rising from the water.

A fork of lightning sliced through the rain--

When the lightning struck, the old propane tanks exploded. The tentacled thing vaporized in the blast, and a stinging smoke blanketed Little Big Rock for days. Trish suffered third degree burns, and the next morning Shandra woke with a fever that spiked to 108 degrees and a rash that turned her face crimson.

The Storm passed.

The rain scoured the island clean.

The broken bones healed, the bruises faded.

I lived--obviously. My sister didn’t. She'd died that day, killed when an impossible beast from the depths slammed her into the sea.

For years, Dr. Wainwright and Dewitt researched the possibilities: primeval squids and mutant jellyfish, cryptozoological freaks of nature. They found one marine species--Turritopsis nutricula--which was biologically immortal, and another in which four individual brains vied for dominance. They found an octopus that produced a cocktail of neurotoxins for which there was no antidote. They found a 80-foot-long prehistoric squid whose hundred-meter tentacles bristled with spherical suckers ringed by serrated rings.

In other words, they found nothing.

A tentacle rose from the waves, drained my blood, injected venom into the husk of my body, and exploded.

When Dewitt failed to identify the sea monster, he'd started researching the global trainwreck instead, the Seventeen Seconds. You've heard about the Seconds. Everyone has. The long pause, the indrawn breath when the whole planet went haywire: an underwater eruption near the Azores, blackouts from Athens to St. Petersburg, bizarre sinkholes in the Rockies, a mass religious epiphany in Finland. Algae blooms in the deep ocean, millions of people fainting. MRI scans spiking, strange signals appearing in white noise--even crop circles.

For seventeen seconds, the world freaked out.

Then everything returned to normal, at least on the surface. The Seventeen Seconds didn't leave much of a mark at first, but they trigged the Storm, somehow--they gave birth to that tentacled thing. And to other aberrations.

The government claimed that the rolling catastrophes were caused by sunspots, and everyone sensible moved onto the next celebrity divorce.

I spent a year in a coma, my body adjusting to the toxins and recuperating from the injection wounds. Like an infant, I learned all over again how to feed myself and stand without help.

Months later, I said my first words since the Storm. "More hot fudge."

What can I say? I had a sweet tooth.

The kayak jerked when Jonathan stuttered the JetSki--telling me to get my ass in gear. I blinked myself into alertness, fake-yawned to get the blood flowing, then cut the tow-rope from the grab handle.

I drifted for a time, letting the tide carry me until I heard the JetSki complete a full circle of Fort Dolores. Then I started paddling. My arms began aching halfway to the fort, and my headache returned despite the aspirin I'd swallowed. My breath turned harsh and my heart pounded. Maybe that's why I didn't hear the engine until it was almost on top of me.

Then a boat roared past in the dark, and a minute later the wake tossed me like a toy in a toddler’s bathtub.

Looked like Coast Guard or marine rescue. Thank God. Jonathan’s distress call had worked.

Still, I paddled onward, because they didn't know Dewitt was being held hostage. Plus, I had nowhere else to go.

Twenty feet from the fort I sent the orbs to lodge among the slabs of granite, and towed myself in. I secured the kayak, peeled off my outer layers, and said a little prayer.

I’m an apprentice handyman, not a marine assault force. Still, someone had kidnapped Dewitt. Why they wanted him, I didn’t know. Why they’d sent armed men to grab him when a chubby girl in a short skirt could’ve led Dewey anywhere she chose, I also didn’t know.

Didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting him back. I took a breath, and followed the orbs around the corner of the hulking fort.

And one of the orbs tugged my attention to a blinking light in the sky: a helicopter swooping through dark clouds.

Who were these people? They used yachts and soldiers and helicopters to kidnap a handyman with a knack for sleep-memorization? They couldn’t want his power, anyway; outsiders didn’t know about us. Nobody knew about us but us.

The helicopter dipped into the fort’s courtyard, and I started to run. If they got Dewitt onto a helicopter, he was gone forever.

I skidded on a clump of wet seaweed and would’ve fallen if an orb hadn’t shoved me back on my feet. I paused at the front archway of the fort, and felt a wash of relief from the forward orb.

Peeking quickly around the corner, I saw why: five guys in uniform, with sidearms holstered, posted along the twenty-foot tunnel into which the arch opened. Park rangers or Coast Guard first responders.

"Hey!" I stepped into the archway. "Did you hear that?"

When they turned toward me, my relief soured into fear. They looked hostile and edgy, and two of them touched their holsters. Who were these guys? They must've been local, but they weren't acting normal.

An older man said, "What're you doing here?"

"Um," I said, "was that a helicopter?"

"This area is restricted."

"I thought I heard gunshots," I lied.

"Training exercise."

"Oh," I said, turning away. "Sorry."

"Let’s see some ID," the man said.

I stopped turning. "I don’t have any."

"You don’t have any?"

"I didn’t think I’d need my driver’s license for kayaking."

Also, I didn’t have a driver’s license. I didn't need one, on the Rock. The only ID I ever used was the fake Dewitt bought me for pub crawls in downtown Portland.

"No ID," the man said, "but he’s still got his sense of humor."

I smiled and backed away and two of them drew their guns.

"You’re going nowhere," the older man said.

"Now you sound like my guidance counselor," I told him, and spun the orbs into the tunnel.

One hammered a pile of rubble, sending snail shells and granite chips skittering, while a second smashed both flashlights and punched the portable lamp into the wall. With the third orb keeping me balanced, I darted outside and around the corner.

Harsh voices called orders, and I drew all three orbs to me and tried to steady my trembling. Why were they so hostile? Why were they so wrong? Then I shut down the questions. I didn't have time for that, I needed to find Dewitt before the helicopter carried him off.

I wedged one orb into a crack in the craggy granite slab and used the others as a handhold--then a foothold--then a handhold--and climbed the exterior wall of the fort until I made my way to an arrow-slit window so eroded by wind and water that I could squeeze inside.

The pitch of the helicopter’s engine rose, its whap-whap-whap coming faster, preparing for takeoff. I scraped through the window and sprawled inside a damp stone chamber with an open door leading toward the fort's courtyard. I crept through a broad open arch. The hallway outside was ten feet wide and ended in a sudden drop, two stories to the courtyard below.

No railing, no nothing. I crept to the edge and looked down.

The helicopter’s rotors spun a dust storm into the yard. A half-dozen dark archways opened in the opposite wall, and weathered stone stairs clung to the granite walls. In the courtyard, three guys with assault rifles shoved a stretcher toward the helicopter.

A stretcher with a body strapped underneath a sheet. But alive. Writhing and struggling. Probably swearing, if I knew Dewitt.

The guys started loading the stretcher, and the whap-whap-whap turned into whapwhapwhap.

So I called the smallest orb into my left hand, ran to the edge of the hallway, and stepped into space.

I hung there a moment, my left arm stretched overhead, holding tight to the smallest orb as the other two lodged against the hallway floor, giving me purchase. Then I lowered myself. Controlled descent, but not graceful.

And at least nobody saw me. I was quick as a snake and silent as an owl. I was sneaking up on them and they--

One of the mercenaries spotted me. He shouted and raised his assault rifle and started firing. So I did what came naturally, and panicked.

I opened my hand and fell the final ten feet, and only avoided braining myself on the stone when an orb reflexively cushioned my head.

I cursed and rolled behind what looked like a granite grill. Twenty feet from the helicopter.

That’s inside my range, twenty feet. Barely.

I sent the orbs rocketing forward. One snapped into a soldier’s knee, and he shrieked and fell and released the stretcher, and another orb shot toward the guy firing at me and lost him in the dust but hit something and the third orb lodged under the stretcher and started dragging it closer to me.

I cowered behind the granite grill as bullets ricocheted everywhere, and sent the two free orbs in a frenzy of destruction. At least that was my plan. But at the limits of my range, they mostly whizzed through the dust and dinged the helicopter’s underbelly as it rose.

Still, that was enough. They didn’t send anyone to retrieve the stretcher. The helicopter rose and pivoted and flew away.

I ran coughing through the dust to the stretcher. "Dewey! Dewey, hold on, I’m here! I got you."

With trembling fingers, I threw back the sheet to reveal the prisoner’s face.

Then I stared in shock.

I said: "Shandra?"