Two days later, I was sitting next to Dad, watching him as he continued his endless sleep. His chest rose and fell like normal, but he showed no other signs of life. It had been so long now, we'd kind of gotten used to it, but seeing him like that still ate at my insides. I just knew that everything would be a little better if Dad was up and about to lead us.

I didn't know what to do for him, but I tried to sit with him several times a day. In the back of my mind I hoped that he would wake up on my watch, because it would be so cool to go upstairs with him and show everyone who'd woken up.

Mom never tired in her efforts to clean and feed him—we left all that up to her. Sometimes when I watched her help him, she would check his pulse, look under his eyelids, listen to his heartbeat, and stuff like that. I thought I would do the same and see if I could figure out anything useful.

I put my ear to his chest and listened. Bum-bump, bum-bump, bum-bump. I put my two fingers here and there on his neck until I felt his pulse. I started to feel dumb, like I was trying to be a TV doctor or something.

I reached up to his right eye. I placed the edge of my thumb on his eyelid, and gently raised it up.

I yelled out in shock and stumbled off the bed onto the floor. My back crashed into a metal trash can, its edge digging into my spine. The sound of the can falling over and spilling its contents killed the silence like water on a flame.

I scrambled up and ran out the door, screaming for anyone who could hear me.

No one was around down in the cabin area. I shot up the stairs and stumbled through the door, frantic and wild.

“Mom! Joseph! Rayna!” I was yelling and running around like I'd finally lost it in the head.

Everyone had been chit-chatting in the lounge chairs, but they all sprang up and ran toward me.

“Jimmy,” Mom said, her eyes afire, “what's wrong?”

“Dad! It's Dad!”

Joseph grabbed me by the shoulders, trying his best to calm me.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

I just could not make the panic subside, and found it hard to breathe.

“Dad … Dad … his eyes … his eyes.”

Joseph was already leading us toward the door downstairs. “What? What's wrong with his eyes?”

My next words were hampered by sobs.

“His eyes are completely black—pitch black.”

The next thing I knew, Joseph was dragging Dad up the stairs and out onto the deck, laying him on his back. He lifted both of Dad's eyelids, and everyone saw my words confirmed.

Black. His eyes were pockets of emptiness, sucking in and devouring all light.

“No, no, no …” Joseph groaned over and over as he shook my dad, slapped him, trying once again to wake him after days and days of such efforts. He pulled back Dad's sleeve, where the strange scratches were now healed but still visible. Branching out from the scars were the beginnings of spidery, black veins.

“No!” he screamed. “No!”

Mom was crying beside them, weeping like a lost child. The rest of us looked on in stunned silence, not quite grasping, or more accurately, not quite accepting what we were seeing. But the truth lay before us, cold and silent on the deck of the ship.

Dad was turning into a Shadow Ka.