CHAPTER 21

NOLIE WATCHED THE FOG EAT BOTH OF THE BOATS IN front of her, and for what felt like forever, could only stare at the giant . . . cloud where the boats had been.

Next to her, Bel gave a choked cry, and Bel’s mum dropped a hand to Bel’s shoulder, her own face gray, lips pressed tightly together.

“They’ll come back,” Nolie heard herself say. “They . . . they have to, they can’t just . . .”

Except they could. People disappeared in Journey’s End all the time, taken by that same fog she’d just watched swallow two boats. Suddenly Nolie thought she might throw up.

“It’s all right,” Bel’s mum said, her voice firm even though her face was still roughly the same color as that fog. “It’s all right,” she repeated.

It very clearly was not all right. There was already a hive of activity down at the harbor. Watching men in sweaters and jeans walk down to the edge of the pier, their hands shading their eyes as they peered out at the Boundary, Nolie was reminded of when there were power outages back home in Georgia. There was that same feeling of everybody wanting to see what was going on.

She almost said all of that to Bel and her mum, but the words seemed stuck in her throat as she kept staring out at the sea. Any minute now, the boats would reappear. They’d have to.

But they stood there for what felt like forever, and there was nothing. Just the fog on the water, rolling and almost pulsing, and Nolie definitely thought she was going to throw up now.

“Stop!” she heard Bel’s mum call out, and for a second, she thought it was an order not to cry. But when she looked up, Bel’s mum was waving her arms over her head at the men approaching the harbor, men who were clearly heading toward their own boats.

“Don’t!” she yelled again, and then jogged off toward them. She was too far away for Nolie or Bel to hear what she was saying, but they both watched her shake her head as she spoke to one of the men, a dark-haired guy in an olive-green jacket. Both of them kept gesturing out at the Boundary, their faces red from more than just the wind.

“Mum is right,” Bel said softly, her fingers flexing against Nolie’s. “She’s telling them not to go. And they shouldn’t. They’ll just get sucked in, too.”

Nolie gave a violent shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. “Like a horror movie,” she said, her stomach still rolling. “Everyone goes looking for the people who’ve disappeared, and then they disappear.”

Bel didn’t reply, but her grip got tighter.

Nolie watched Bel’s mum argue with the man in the jacket, wondering what the heck they could do now. This was big. Really big. If her dad didn’t come back, would they call her mom back in Georgia? Should she call her now? And say what? “Hi, Mom, this trip to Scotland hasn’t gone so well, mostly because Dad disappeared in a magical fog bank.”

“What are we going to do?” she heard herself say, her voice sounding high and thin to her own ears. The more she stared at the sea, the stranger—and worse—she felt, like everything inside of her was shaking. People didn’t come back from the Boundary. That was its whole deal.

“Al,” Bel said, giving Nolie’s hand another squeeze. “We have Al, and that . . . has to mean this time is different, right?”

Nolie looked over at Bel. “Al,” she repeated, and then nodded quickly. “Yeah, exactly. We can . . . we can fix this.”

She didn’t know how, but the words made her feel better at least, and Nolie lifted her head, her eyes searching out Albert’s dark hair or Nessie hat, but there was no sign of him.

Bel’s mum was making her way back to them now, scrubbing a hand over her hair. As she got closer, she turned toward Nolie, and Nolie noticed again just how much Bel’s mum looked like Bel, with her little nose and bright hazel eyes.

“Nolie,” she said, “is anyone else at the Institute right now?”

It was such an unexpected question that Nolie could only shake her head, confused. “N-no,” she managed to say, thinking back to a talk she and her dad had just had on their way into the village to pick up breakfast. “Dr. Burkhart is in Inverness for the next two days. It’s just Dad right now. Or it . . . it was . . .” Her voice seemed to disappear in her suddenly tightening throat, and she felt Bel squeeze her hand again, their fingers still tightly interlocked.

Bel’s mum gave a quick nod. “All right,” she said. “You can stay with us until this all gets sorted out, and . . .” Nolie could see Mrs. McKissick suck in a deep breath as she glanced back out at the harbor, then again to her. “I suspect you’ll be wanting to call your mum.”

Nolie did want to call her mom. A lot. But she also knew that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to lie to her about what was happening out here. Nolie had always been a terrible liar, never really needing to lie about anything. And if she told Mom what had happened . . .

Still, she shook her head no, and Bel’s mum gave her a tight, forced smile in reply.

“They’ll probably be back soon anyway,” Mrs. McKissick said. “Just . . . sailed into the fog a bit, and she’ll chug right back out again. We’re all going to feel right silly in a few minutes, I’d reckon.”

Nolie really hoped that was true, but they stood there for nearly an hour, and nothing happened. And the longer they waited, the more Nolie thought about her dad, about how much she’d missed him just over these past six months. What if she never saw him again at all?

After a long, long while, Bel’s mum looked back at the two of them and said, “I have to get Jack from nursery. Bel, can you go close up the shop? And then we’ll . . .”

She didn’t bother finishing the sentence, and Nolie didn’t really blame her. What was there to say, after all? We’ll figure out some way to save everyone from the fog that just ate two boats right in front of our faces?

She headed off toward the little daycare Jack went to, and Nolie and Bel headed for the shop, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

When they opened the door, Nolie was surprised to see Albert peeking out from behind the rack of silly hats.

“How did you get in here?” Nolie asked, and Albert shrugged, pointing at the door.

“It was open,” he said, “and I wanted a new pair of trousers.” Nolie noticed that he was still wearing the jersey Bel had given him, but now he wore black track pants with an outline of Scotland in white down one leg. “I’ll pay you back for them,” he told Bel, who just waved a hand at him.

“Are you both all right?” he asked, stepping out into the store. “I saw what happened,” he continued, nodding at the window and the Boundary beyond. “I wanted to go out, but—”

“No,” Bel said quickly. “It’s better that you didn’t.” Then she glanced around, and gestured both Nolie and Al to the back of the store and into the big storage room where all the extra stuff was kept.

While the front of the store was cozy and lamp-lit, this room had concrete floors, lots of metal shelving, and fluorescent lights. Nolie grimaced as she looked for a place to sit.

Albert dumped a crate of stuffed sheep onto the floor, flipping it over so he could sit on it, and while Nolie wanted to tell him to be nicer to Sir Woolington’s siblings, she just gathered them up in her arms and put them on a shelf behind her.

Bel was still standing in the middle of the room, chewing on her thumbnail, her eyes focused somewhere just over Nolie’s shoulder.

Nolie didn’t think she was actually looking at anything, though.

It was Albert who spoke first. “D’ye see now?” he asked. “Why they kept it secret? It’ll start up here, too, just like it did in my time. They’ll send a few more boats, and when those go missing and the fog comes closer, they’ll start talking about the legends. About the lighthouse.”

“Then what?” Nolie asked, her sneakers squeaking on the floor. “Even if someone did go out there to light it, that person would get stuck, too. Like you did, all . . . preserved, like a fossil.”

“S’pose fossil is better than zombie,” Albert muttered.

Ignoring that, Nolie folded her arms and said, “Wait. But when you lit the light, did those people who’d gone missing come back?”

“He wouldn’t know,” Bel interjected. “He was being a fossil.”

“Oh, right,” Nolie mused, and from his place on the crate, Albert threw up his hands.

“I wasna a fossil,” he said, but then his expression changed.

“They could have,” he said. “They might have. That tearoom you took me to. I told you there’d been a building there, but the fog took it. I can’t be sure that’s the same building, but it . . . it could be?”

“But the pictures,” Bel countered, chewing on her thumbnail. “On the back wall of the shop. Those people were always missing. They didn’t come back.”

“Or they did, and the village never talked about it,” Nolie answered, her heart pounding faster now. “You heard Albert; they’ve always kept things to do with the Boundary a secret. Maybe he lit that light back in 1918, and everything just . . . went back to how it was, but no one talked about it.”

“So what?” Bel asked, dropping her hand. “You think if we lit the light, we could get our dads out?”

It was almost too scary to hope, but Nolie nodded anyway. “I think we could.”

And then Bel sighed, crossing her arms. “In that case,” she said, “I think there’s something we need to do.”