Chapter 107: Nautilus!
Night fell on the island.
The Curator was running down a muddy coastal slope, which was not an activity his body had prepared for over the preceding several decades. He ran anyway. The sound of hooves behind him — finger-sized hooves, which produced a sound that was theoretically small but was numerous enough to add up to something that communicated urgency — pushed him past the point where his cardiovascular system was comfortable.
When the sound faded into the dark, he stopped against a tree and breathed.
Princess Mary was on his shoulder, watching the direction they'd come from.
"McPhee," she said. "This isn't the time."
"I'm aware," he said, still breathing. "Give me twenty seconds."
"Edward's soldiers won't give you twenty seconds."
"Then give me fifteen." He straightened up. "A hereditary military command structure," he said, between breaths. "In a monarchy. That was always going to produce a coup eventually."
Princess Mary was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "It was."
She was looking back toward the city — the place where her parents were now prisoners of the man she'd been betrothed to at ten years old. The Curator recognized the expression. He'd seen it on the faces of people who had left something behind and were running the calculation of what that cost.
"Your father treated Edward well for years," the Curator said. "Edward needs him as a legitimate face for the coup. He won't harm him — not yet. And when we find the others, Rango will sort out the Edward situation. That's what he does."
"You keep saying that," Princess Mary said. "But they haven't come for us. They might be lost in the Dark Forest."
"Rango doesn't get lost," the Curator said.
"Or they might have left without you."
The Curator's face changed. Then settled. "No," he said, with the flat certainty of someone who has formed an assessment and is not going to be argued out of it. "He wouldn't do that."
He paused.
"My safety isn't the part I worry about," he said, more quietly. "Coming here was my choice. Whatever happens to me is a consequence of that choice and I accept it." He looked at the dark island around them. "But Rango came because of me. If something happened to him on this island because of that—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Princess Mary put her hand against his cheek — the specific warmth of a person the size of a finger making contact, which was small and somehow not small at all.
The Curator pulled himself together. Stood up. Looked around.
He'd been running along the coast, staying away from the Dark Forest that Princess Mary had described as a place that ate people. In the moonlight, the geography was a narrow coastline between a sea cliff on one side and open ocean on the other. He didn't know exactly where he was relative to the rest of the island.
He chose a direction and walked.
The soldiers found him at the base of the cliff.
He heard the hooves first — the large-scale version of the sound, the organized rhythm of a cavalry unit that had been given a specific assignment and was executing it with the coordination of people who had been training for exactly this.
He turned.
The torchlight filled the cliff base from one side to the other. Not dozens. The specific mass of a military response that had sent everything available because the General understood that a forty-something man from New York who was the size of a building to the local population was not a target you sent a patrol for.
Ropes. Cold weapons. The organizational coherence of three generations of hereditary military command manifesting in a coordinated capture operation.
The Curator did the math.
He could move through them. He was large enough and they were small enough that the physics heavily favored him in any individual interaction. But there were enough of them that individual interactions weren't the relevant category. They would wear him down by numbers and coordination.
He looked at the ocean.
At the waves, which were considerable.
He looked at Princess Mary on his shoulder.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
She looked at the soldiers. At the ocean. At him.
"I'd rather have an adventure with someone worth having one with," she said, "than go back to Edward."
The Curator laughed — a real one, the kind that arrived without being planned.
"Take a breath," he said.
He jumped.
The soldiers at the cliff edge watched the giant and the Princess go into the water. The leading officer looked at the waves.
"The surf is too heavy tonight," he said. "They won't get far. They'll wash up on shore. Wait."
In the water, the Curator was doing what the Curator could do — he was a strong swimmer, which was one of the few athletic activities his professional life had accommodated — and was moving away from the cliff with the specific focused effort of someone who had committed to a direction and was not going to reconsider it.
Princess Mary was in his collar, which was not a dignified situation for anyone involved, but was functional.
He was calculating, between strokes, where the current would take him and whether there was any geography between him and open ocean that would serve as intermediate shelter.
Then the water changed.
The specific change of a surface disturbed from below — not weather, not current, the displacement of something very large moving upward from depth.
The waves spread outward in a circular pattern.
Two lights appeared in the water.
Green. Large. Rising.
Eyes.
The Curator stopped swimming.
In the Dark Forest, the bonfire camp had the specific atmosphere of people who had survived something significant and were allowing themselves to decompress.
Jones and Lara were going through their photographs with the focused joy of people reviewing documentation of something unprecedented. Annabeth and Mavis had found common ground over food and were sharing a rabbit and a conversation that appeared, from the outside, to involve genuine mutual interest. Ted was asleep on Toothless, which was the sleep of something that had been managing angles all day and had earned the rest. Toothless himself was doing the specific low-level monitoring of a creature that was resting but not fully offline.
Victor was there.
He had reappeared after the xenomorph cave without comment or explanation, falling back into the group's orbit with the specific ease of something that had been doing this — disappearing and reappearing without accounting for the interval — for two hundred years and had found that most situations eventually normalized around it.
Rango was studying the map.
Tyson had drawn it — rough, the strokes of someone who had navigated the island's geography by experience rather than surveying it, the territories labeled in the broad strokes of a Cyclops who had been coming here long enough to know the major features.
"Little People Country," Rango said, tracing the relevant section. "Two kingdoms."
"They fight each other regularly," Tyson said. "It's a whole situation."
"The coastal area — surrounded on three sides by cliff geography?"
"Yes. Waves wash things up there. If Mr. McPhee came down the cliff at any point, that's where he'd end up."
Rango nodded. He moved his finger to the northern section of the map.
"Giant Country."
"Teacher Bacchus took us once," Tyson said. "Normal-sized people are finger-height there. Very different experience."
Rango's finger moved to the unmarked southern section.
He knew what was there. Hotel Transylvania's territory. Tyson had grown up being told it was a forbidden zone for the living and had left it appropriately unmarked.
"We rest," Rango said. "Then we go to the Little People Country coastline. The Curator is there — I'm confident enough in that to act on it."
He put the map away.
He looked at the group around the fire.
Then at Victor, who was at the edge of the firelight doing what Victor did — watching, in the patient way of something that operated on a different timescale than everyone else present.
Rango was going to address the matter of Victor's disappearance during the cave's critical moments at some point. That conversation was filed and would happen. Tonight was not the night.
He shifted his attention to Mavis, who had taken human form and was working through a rabbit leg with the focused contentment of someone who had recently discovered that being genuinely hungry and having food available was a different experience than eating on a schedule in a hotel dining room.
"I thought you said your stomach was cold," Rango said.
She looked up. A faint color came to her face. "I feel much better now."
"Good," he said.
Jones appeared at his shoulder.
He was holding a piece of paper — coordinates, handwritten, the notation system of someone who had been calculating position from incomplete information.
"Before you tell me this is another detour," Jones said, "let me explain."
"I'm listening," Rango said.
"These coordinates are from the companion I mentioned," Jones said. "The one who sent the signal that confirmed the island's location. He's been on this island for some time — I don't know how long exactly, but long enough that his messages have gaps." He pointed to a location on the map. "He's in the Little People Country territory. Which is where you're already going."
Rango looked at the coordinates.
At Jones.
"What did he find?" Rango said. "Your companion. You've been worried about him since before the expedition. Not the academic kind of worried — the other kind. What did he tell you before the signal went dark?"
Jones was quiet for a moment.
The specific quiet of someone deciding how much to say and arriving at the conclusion that the situation had passed the point where partial disclosure was useful.
"Have you ever heard of the Nautilus?" he said.
Rango looked at him.
The submarine. Jules Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Captain Nemo. The vessel that the Director had spent forty years believing was real because Verne had been right about the island and Verne had written about the Nautilus in connection with the same geography.
The vessel that, if the island was real and Verne's accounts were accurate, should be somewhere in these waters.
"Your companion found it," Rango said.
Jones met his eyes.
"He found it," Jones confirmed.
The bonfire crackled.
In the water off the Little People Country coast, something very large was still rising.
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