Chapter Fifty-Six

The White Room

I struggled to rise through the darkness. The air smelled strange, like Maggie’s cleaning soap, but harsher. A sound pulsed, high and sharp: beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

I dragged my eyes open. A dim room. A dot of red light throbbed in time to the beeping. Where was I?

I struggled to sit up but something bit at my wrist. My heart started racing and the red light quickened. The room swirled back to black.

I wove between unconsciousness and waking—or was it dreams? Faces stared down at me. Bright bursts of pain seared my arms. I couldn’t feel the Moon or the tides, and the walls pressed closer, and a smothering weight lay on my chest.

Then I woke and saw the weight was blankets. I was in a white room, in a bed. But it wasn’t a bed because there were bars on both sides. Metal bars.

My head pounded, and the beeping got faster again. I was burning up. I reached for the bar and a sharp pain stabbed my wrist. I looked and gasped in horror. Something was biting into my arm. It was attached to a thin, clear tube full of liquid.

The tube led through the bars and up to a bag. There was another sound now, a throbbing—or was it sucking? Was the thing drinking from me?

I pulled myself to sitting. That’s when I saw the cords dangling from my chest. Each was attached to a small round mouth—a colony, growing on me! I ripped one off with a popping sound. It left a pink circle on my skin. I tore off the rest and stared at them, panting.

I grasped the strap holding the tube onto my wrist and ripped it off in a flash of pain. Drops of blood splattered the sheets. The room was spinning. Somehow I clambered over the metal bars and half fell to the ground. I clutched a bar and pulled myself upright.

The room was strange and terrible, with pillars and posts and blinking lights. My eyes darted around and found the door. I stumbled over and jerked it open.

Before me stretched an endless hallway lined with doors. A cluster of people stood talking at the other end of the hall. A woman looked up from a table. She saw me and started to stand.

I staggered to an open door. “Who are you?” rasped an old woman, staring at me from a bed-cage. She lifted an arm and tubes trailed after. “Who are you?”

“You shouldn’t be up,” said a voice. The woman from the table was walking toward me in a swirl of colors and light. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

No! Panic gave me strength and I stumbled into a run. A man in loose blue clothes loomed before me. I sped up, arms outstretched, and shoved him aside. I ran faster. I was on fire. I needed the sea to cool me. Where was the sea? Windows looked out over treetops so I was upstairs—I needed stairs down.

A voice started chanting from the ceiling, “Code gray. Code gray. Code gray.”

I swerved around a corner. At the end of the hall a man was coming out of a door with a little window in it, and behind him was a flight of stairs. I shoved past chairs and rolling carts in a desperate rush—

Strong arms wrapped around me from the back. “Got him,” said a voice. “Steady, there.” Faces and arms and doors whirled into black.

When I woke, I was back in the bed-cage. Tubes dangled from my arms. I tried to lift my hand but it stopped with a jerk. A strap circled my wrist, tying it to the bars. I drew in a sharp breath.

A woman rose from a chair and walked over.

“How are you feeling?” she said. “Would you like a sip of water?”

She was trying to get me to talk. I wouldn’t talk to her. I wouldn’t talk to any of them. I stared at the window and acted like I didn’t understand. She finally left me alone.

I tried to string thoughts together. The men on the boat must have brought me here. I couldn’t feel the pulse of the waves, so I was inland, farther than I’d ever been before. But once in a while a whiff of fresh air brought a hint of salt. The ocean couldn’t be too far away.

The men on the boat had said something about my eyes and Spindle Island, and that someone was looking for me. Did Jack tell them what I’d done to Maggie? That I’d—I gulped, blinking back tears—that I’d made her die?

I had to escape. I had to get back to the sea.

Across from the bed was a high, narrow sliver of window, too small to squeeze through. Outside I could see the tip of a fir tree and a taunting strip of sky. Clouds rushed by on a wild, changing wind. A gull soared into view.

Instinctively I called out in birdtalk, “Where does the wind carry you?”

The gull banked and wheeled back in a wide circle.

Did it hear me? My heart started racing. “Me selkie!” I cried in birdtalk. “Trap! Human trap!” With each word I screamed louder, trying to force my voice through walls and glass, until the room was ringing with shrieks and caws and screeches. “ME SELKIE! BRING SELKIES!”

The door flew open and people burst in. They reached at me from every side.

“SELKIES!” I kept shrieking. “FIND! FIND!”

But when I looked up at the window again, the gull was gone.

A tall woman strode in. She took the metal ear that hung around her neck and put it on my chest. She urged me to make the sounds again. The others tried to describe it. One of them squawked, but it wasn’t even a word, just a scrape of sound.

A man stuck a sharp silver stick in my arm. Blood flowed into a tube, and I fainted.

When I woke again, the room had stopped spinning.

“You need to eat,” they said, showing me plates with mounds of mush. I gagged and turned away.

There was a woman with hair like Nellie’s. She noticed more than the others. She took the straps off my wrists. “I don’t think we need these anymore,” she said. Then she brought a tray piled with lots of kinds of food. There was a bowl of cornflakes, and I gulped it down. She saw me gazing at the window; she walked over and slid it open three fingers wide. That was as far as it would go. She looked back to see my face, nodded, and then left, closing the door behind her.

I breathed in, long and deep. The fresh air brought a hint of pine. A breeze came from the west, carrying the salt of the sea. If I ever got out, I’d follow that scent to the shore.

A man came in and closed the window.

Twice that day I climbed out of the bed-cage and snuck out the door, trying to find my way to the stairs. Both times they led me back to the room and put the tubes back in my arms, talking about blood counts and oxygen levels, looking at each other and shaking their heads. The second time a woman sat in a chair beside me and stayed there the rest of the day.

Night fell. I forced myself to close my eyes and make my breathing slow and steady. Finally the chair scraped back. I felt her standing over me, and then her footsteps walked to the door and she was gone.

I sat up and quietly lowered the bed bars, like the humans had done. My arm was still attached by tubes to a rolling stand. I pulled it beside me over to the window, reached up—I could barely grasp the bottom—and slid the window open. Then I crept back to bed and lay there, trying to smell the sea.

The Moon traced a slow arc across the sky. Somewhere she was shining on the white tips of waves, on the swirling foam of the shoreline. Somewhere, she was shining on my clan.

There was a fluttering at the window, and then—thump!

I sat up with a gasp. There, on the ledge, perched a round-bellied bird. A puffin. My puffin.

“Aran,” she grunted.

It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

The puffin pecked at the window frame. “Trap,” she said. She tried to squeeze through, but the slit was too small. “Bad trap.”

I stood at the end of the bed so we were at the same level, as close to her as I could get.

“How . . .” I gulped, blinking back tears. “How find?”

“Gull tell flock. Gulls!” She shook her head to show what she thought of them. “Talk talk talk.”

A whisper of hope floated into my chest. The puffin was the smartest bird I’d ever met. If she could spread word far enough, maybe my clan would hear. Maybe they’d come rescue me.

“Find flock. Selkie flock,” I said, searching for words she’d know. “Here, me lost. Here, me . . .” A hot tear escaped and ran down my cheek. “Here, me gone.”

In birdtalk, the same word means gone and dead.

The puffin’s head jerked back in alarm.

I nodded to show it was true. “Selkie flock. North. Far north.” My voice cracked. “Find? Bring?”

The puffin stamped her small, orange foot. “Aran no gone,” she said firmly, and then she flew off into the night.

The next morning the tall woman brought in a man wearing a blue jacket.

“Hello, Aran,” he said in a fake, cheery voice.

How did he know my name? It took all my willpower not to react.

“I’m Mr. Crane from the Department of Social Services. You won’t be here much longer, Aran. Dr. Donahoe is coming to get you. And Penelope Donahoe, she’s coming, too. You’ll be going with them.”

My blood was pounding so hard, it drowned out his next words. This was it, then. They were coming to take me away. Social Services—that was what Maggie called foster care. They were going to take me inland and keep me there forever. I’d never find my way back to the sea. I’d lose any chance of seeing my clan again.

I realized they’d stopped talking. The woman murmured, “I told you. No response.”

She cocked her head toward the door and they left. But their muffled voices came through from the other side. I eased out of bed and crept closer, listening.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea.” All the man’s false cheeriness was gone. “No speech. Hysterical screaming. You don’t know how the fever or the ordeal might have affected his brain. And you still don’t know what’s causing those astronomical oxygen levels in his blood. We should reevaluate.”

The woman’s voice was firm. “We can’t keep him here much longer. And in spite of the blood work, he seems healthy enough.”

“But the challenges facing . . .”

Their voices faded.

When was this Donahoe coming to take me away? And where, oh, where was the puffin?