That point in time seemed so distant. When we spoke of it, none of us had any concept of what that battle would be like. We didn't even know if it was something that the Alliance could help with, or if it was something I had to do on my own. But we could only take it one step at a time, and obtaining the Fourth Gift was the next item on the agenda. We hoped everything else would fall into place after that.

  Of course, we should have known better.

  The next morning, I sat at my favorite spot again, looking out into the great ocean from the front of the ship. We had nineteen days left now, and I couldn't believe how long that suddenly seemed. We had been at sea for weeks, even months, and now three weeks seemed like a lifetime.

  Rusty joined me after a while. Since our little spat—if you could even call it that—we had not spoken much, and I could tell by his demeanor that he was about to set things straight. Even before he began, I was ashamed that I had not initiated this talk.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “you are looking at a complete fart-for-brains.” I knew it was his bizarre way of apologizing, but I didn't let on.

  “Oh, please, Rusty, what're you talking about?”

  “I'm sorry little bro. I don't know how else to say it except I'm jealous sometimes, dude.” He put his arms over the railing, leaning his forearms against the cold metal, and folded his hands, looking out over the ocean. We were both kind of too embarrassed to look at each other.

  “I understand.”

  I understand? That was the best thing I could come up with after he'd just been man enough to apologize?

  “Look,” I tried again, “if it makes you feel any better, all this stuff gets me so scared that I constantly wish it wasn't me that had to … do it all, or whatever. I hate it sometimes, man.”

  “Really? It looks like you kind of enjoy being Superman to me.”

  “What do you mean? Am I getting cocky?”

  “Well … kind of, I don't know. Just being honest, sorry.”

  “No, it's … it's okay. I'll try to quit being a poop head.”

  He swiveled toward me and shook his head.

  “No, don't do anything different, I mean it. Geez, talk about stupid—it's about the dumbest thing in the world for me to worry about in the middle of all this garbage. You have to save the world, you little brat.”

  “Don't say that, it makes me feel like I can never do it. I'm just trying to tackle things one problem at a time. Right now, all I can think about is getting the last Gift. After that … we'll see what happens.”

  “Man, Jimmy, come on. Think about the things you can do. And didn't you say that old farmer guy told you the Fourth Gift is the most powerful or something like that?”

  I nodded.

  “Give me a break. What are you scared of? You're gonna kick some major tail when the time comes. And all of us—we'll be there, doing whatever we can to help. We're going to win, Jimmy, and get our old lives back—the good ole days, you'll see.”

  “I hope you're right, but it still scares the crud out of me.”

  “Well, ya know what? You may be my little brother, but I just want you to know that I look up to you.”

  He patted me on the shoulder, and walked away.

  I was so glad he left then, because it would've really stunk for him to see the wet thing fall out of my eye.

  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.

  Joseph and I dragged Dad back down to his bed, and with a bizarre feeling of being out of place, I pulled the covers over him. My heart hung like a stone in my chest, and I had lost all feeling. Unlike my mom, I couldn't cry, but the anguish inside of me was no less than hers. Everything else, all the worry and anticipation of the future, the quest for the remaining Gift, the battle against the Ka and the Stompers—it all sunk to the bottom of my thoughts.

  My dad was turning into a monster, and he could do nothing about it. We could do nothing about it. Any semblance of hope that had lifted within me was now gone, as sure as a feather in the midst of a hurricane.

  Mom kept trying after I'd tucked Dad in, although we all knew it was useless. She shook him, poured water on his face, tried her best to talk to him without breaking down in sobs. I couldn't bear to watch, and stumbled into the Mess Hall, slumping into the closest chair. I then put my head in my arms and wallowed in despair.

  A world without Dad suddenly didn't seem so important to save.

  Joseph made Captain Tinkles double our efforts to reach Japan. After the initial shock wore off, we were able to compose ourselves enough to discuss any possibilities for helping my dad. But there was nothing we could do, and the truth of it hurt like never before. So it was decided that our only choice was to make it back to land, and find a doctor. Surely there was some physiological explanation for how the Shadow Ka stole a human life—and maybe a doctor could somehow cure my dad.

  But it was only a flippant hope, something to keep us from going completely insane. If we threw our efforts into running the ship around the clock, and keeping the boat in good shape, there was less time to sit and groan and weep and whine.

  In the movies, they always have that cheesy line about how things could not possibly get worse, and then it starts to rain or something. I can honestly say that looking at my dad, miserable and silent in his bed, you could never have convinced me that circumstances would worsen.

  But one day before we reached Japan, two things happened that made us long for the good ole days when Dad only had black orbs in his eye sockets.

  That morning I was helping Rayna clean the decks up above. It was baffling to me how quickly dirt and greenish grime could build up on the surfaces of the ship, but it was good to have something to do. Rusty was fascinated with driving the ship itself, and he mainly helped in that regard. The captain had really taken him under his wing, and kept telling us that one day Rusty would make a fine skipper. Everyone else found their own ways to help, and we had stayed very busy for several days, trying our best not to think of our ship as a Shadow Ka incubator.

  I was on my knees, scrubbing a spot that was determined to remain filthy, when Mom burst through the door from the cabins below. The look on her face was all we needed.

  Something was wrong—more wrong—with Dad.

  “What is it, Mom?” I asked, even as I was running past her to go downstairs.

  She turned and followed me down, with Rayna right behind us.

  “His skin,” she said, “his skin is … changing.”

  Her words made my stomach turn, and I knew what I was going to see before we even got there. I reached their room and moved through the open door. By that time, Joseph had noticed the commotion and joined us.

  “What's wrong?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  I ignored him and ran to Dad's side. Something was wrong with the skin on his face. I pulled back the covers, grabbed his right arm, and pulled up his sleeve.

  “Turn the light on!” I yelled.

  My fears were realized. It still hit me with a sickening punch.

  A spider web of black lines infiltrated his skin like a nightmarish tattoo. It was still faint, nowhere near what we had seen on the other Shadow Ka, but it had begun to spread over his whole body.

  And then a thought of horror flashed in my mind. I didn't want to do it; I didn't want to see if I was right. But it had to be done, and even as I did it, I knew there was no way that I could be wrong.

  With a grunt of effort, I pushed Dad over onto his side and felt around the back of his shirt, damp from sweat.

  There were two large bumps on the upper middle part of his back.

  They were not shoulder blades.

  Dad already had eyes of black emptiness, was lost in an endless sleep, and had black lines invading his skin.

  Now he was growing wings.

  The human being can only take so much pain and distress. When we saw that Dad's entire body was turning into a monster—that we were losing our own father, husband, and friend, something clicked, and we became numb to the increasing horrors. We left him there, transforming in his own bed, and went about our duties, knowing that there was nothing to do for him but reach land and hope and pray.

  Every time the thought of what was happening to Dad crept into the hallways of my mind, I did everything I could to think about Japan, and the hope that some person, or some thing, or some miracle waited there that would heal my dad.

  It would turn out there was such a beacon of hope awaiting us on the island for which we were headed. But if someone had frozen time, given me a pen full of endless ink, and provided a million sheets of paper, I could have never guessed what it would be.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The day in which we discovered the budding wings on my dad was far from over.

  “To think that one year ago,” Joseph said as we stood at the railing, looking out at the wavy ocean, “I was working, living in the mountains of Utah, just beginning to enjoy life again and think that our troubles with the Union of Knights had finally come to an end.” He sighed. “Now I'm on a big boat in the middle of the ocean with my best friend turning into a monster right below me.”

  “Our lives are definitely a little strange,” I said.

  A big wave splashed against the yacht below us, throwing a fine spray up to where we stood.

  “Just imagine,” Joseph said, “if we could go back to normal life, and snap our fingers so that none of this would have ever happened. We would never take anything about our ordinary, boring lives for granted, would we?”

  I shook my head. Rayna walked up from behind and joined us.

  “I hope that Geezer,” she said with a slight tap on my shoulder, “as Jimmy here has so eloquently named him, has fulfilled his duty and gathered the Alliance—or at least as many as possible. We could use their help.”

  “How many are there?” I asked. “How many members of the Alliance?”

  “There are many and there are few.”

  I let out a fake laugh. “That sounds just about right—like most of the answers I get to my questions. Yet another riddle.”

  “Jimmy, the day comes that you will know everything. Even after everything you know now, you are not ready for the entire truth. But when that day arrives, you will understand what I mean that there are many and there are few.” She paused for a minute, and I couldn't think of anything to say to urge more out of her, and wondered if she was finished.

  “But suffice it to say,” she continued, finally, “that on this world, at this time, there are few, I am afraid.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten and a half.”

  “Um, a half?”

  “Yes, you will understand when you meet him. He is a Half.”

  I had some absurd vision in my head of a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged man hopping in circles, and a giggle slipped out of my mouth.

  “Don't laugh, Jimmy,” Joseph said.

  “What, do you know about this half-person?”

  “Yes, I learned almost everything there is to know about the Alliance while in the Blackness. I have never met the Half, but I can't wait until I do.”

  “Well, whatever it is, nothing could top Tanaka on the weirdness scale.”

  Rayna surprised me when she laughed.

  “Yes,” she said through her chuckle, “Tanaka is the strangest of our lot—that I cannot argue.” She sobered up and continued: “But he is the bravest, most compassionate man you will ever meet, Jimmy. I promise you that.”

  A noise from behind startled us. It was Tanaka, and the noise had been something bodily, which I didn't want to figure out.

  “My lips are burning,” he said. “Someone talk about me, neh?”

  I looked into Tanaka's bushy hair-lined eyes, gazed at his greasy mane and scraggly beard, and felt the same admiration for him as Rayna. He was definitely a good man, despite, and sometimes because of, his quirkiness.

  “Uh, Tanaka, old man,” I said, “that's your ears that were burning, and yes, Rayna here was telling us about the time you lost to her in arm wrestling.”

  “What!” he roared. “Never!”

  “Calm down, tiger, I'm just kidding. Where's Miyoko?”

  “I'm right here.” She was coming down the steps from the front part of the ship.

  “So let's see,” I said. “So far I know about Hood, Tanaka, Miyoko, Rayna, and Geezer. Oh, and the Half, whatever that is. That's six—I mean, five and a half. Who and where are the others?”

  “You will meet them soon enough,” Rayna said. “Geezer will have them gathered. By the way, his real name is George.”

  “Geezer's name is George? I think I did him a favor, then.”

  For some reason, at that moment I thought of chasing Geezer in the train with my dad, and the pain of what was happening downstairs returned. In order to ward it off, I quickly thought of something else.

  “Tanaka,” I asked, “when are you going to fess up and tell us what the deal is with the big monkey?”

  “Big monkey?” he asked. “You talking about Jimmy-san, or do you mean the okisaru?”

  “Funny. Seriously, what was that thing, and why did it touch you on the head?”

  Tanaka did not answer, and our brief moment of levity evaporated like mist in the desert.

  His eyes closed, and he sat down on the deck. Then he slumped over and collapsed onto his side.

  “Father!” Miyoko yelled, running up to him.

  A groan escaped from him as she shook him gently. Then his eyes popped open, full of alarm.

  He jumped back to his feet, and looked around like a wild animal seeking its prey. His head darted back and forth, his eyes searching for something unknown to any of us.

  “Tanaka, what's wrong with you?” Joseph asked.

  “I must, I must, I must,” Tanaka said over and over, looking about. He acted like we were not there, and that he had gone batty.

  “Father, please,” Miyoko said, trying to grab him and make him look at her. “Talk to me!”

  Tanaka froze. He shook the cobwebs out of his mind, and then everything changed. The wildness, the lunacy, left him in an instant, and the old Tanaka—the normal crazy Tanaka—stood before us once again. He looked around, taking in each of us.

  “I very sorry that it take me so long to realize what I must do.”

  He turned to Miyoko, and put his hand on her cheek.

  “I love you, sweet daughter. You trust your father, neh?”

  “What are you talking about? Of course I do—what is going on?”

  “I cannot tell you now. Trust your father is all I say, neh?”

  He turned and walked to me. “Jimmy-san, you are funny looking boy, and you throw up on me all the time. But I love you, and put my daughter in your care.”

  He stepped back, and once again took us all in his bushy-browed gaze.

  “I go now, and prepare okisaru for the great battle.”