A great light was scanning the ocean around us, penetrating the dark and murky waters like a flashlight through smoky air. I turned to the source but stopped just in time, natural warning beacons going off in my head, just as if you accidentally looked at the sun. It was Miyoko, looking for my dad.

  My brain was growing tired as I thrashed at the waters, trying to look where the light went. I needed air. With no power to fight that urge, I broke the surface and gasped, sucking in as much water as oxygen. The taste of it, the volume of it, gagged me like someone had shoved a thick towel down my throat. Wracking coughs exploded from me, and it took every ounce of effort to tread the water.

  Then, the Shield kicked in.

  Weeks ago, when we had entered the frozen world through an iron gate in the Blackness, we had been buffeted by snow and wind. The Shield had done nothing until the cold had started to hurt me, and then it sprung into action and repelled everything, like an invisible bubble. That same sort of thing happened again. Not all things that are harmful to a person are cut and dry, immediately discernible. The Shield seemed to have its own brain. In fact, according to Farmer, the Giver who had helped me so much in this ordeal, the Shield's brain was my brain.

  Just as despair filled my heart, as I choked and sputtered and slapped at the water, a sudden and silent explosion of air shot from me in all directions, pushing the water away until a pocket of emptiness completely surrounded me. I fell a few feet and bounced on the inside bottom of the bubble until I came to a tenuous stop, still wobbling slightly. I looked up, and realized it wasn't a bubble at all. The pocket of air separated the waters at the surface in a perfect circle, so that I looked like I was standing in a glass cup, ten feet tall, floating in the ocean.

  The sensation of being surrounded by water, held back by some invisible force, as I bobbed up and down, was nauseating. But it beat choking on salty seawater and dying.

  I got down on my knees, floating and bobbing on what looked like a super-strong film of plastic wrap, or some invisible skin of ocean pudding. I crawled along, and the Shield went with me, the pocket of air going wherever I went, the invisible barrier wet but impenetrable.

  The light from Miyoko's eyes was just a few feet below me, still moving, or I would've thought her dead for sure. It had to have been a couple of minutes by then. She seemed to be struggling with something. Her head was jerking left and right, not like she was looking for something but instead trying to swim to the surface with a heavy burden. Dad. She had my dad.

  I dove for them.

  The Shield acted strangely as I descended, kind of alternating between repelling the water and letting me dive into it. Waves of water hit me then were pushed away, almost like I was swimming through soft, wet clay. It was exhausting, pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling myself toward them.

  Miyoko seemed to slow, then her movements ceased completely. She was giving up, refusing to leave Dad behind, but also refusing to save herself. Her light grew dim, then winked out.

  I screamed, and dove with a burst of effort summoned from the deepest part of my heart. I tore through the remaining distance and grabbed her. Dad was held in her weakening grip. With both arms, I hugged them to me. The Shield expanded to protect all of us, forming what was now a complete bubble, fully encased in the black waters.

  Miyoko coughed and spat, gasping for life.

  Dad did not move or make a sound.

  There wasn't enough water in the ocean to match the heaviness that gripped my heart when I saw him.

  He looked for all the world like a dead man.

  With some bizarre mixture of crying and yelling, I held on to them and kicked toward the surface. Going up was much easier than going down, the Shield almost pushing me up. We surfaced just a few feet away from the long icy landing that led back to the ship. The invisible cup of my protection kind of rolled along under my feet as I half carried, half drug Miyoko and Dad to the ice platform I had created earlier. Miyoko regained enough of her strength to help, or it would have been impossible.

  Dad wasn't showing any signs of life. We lifted him up and onto the ice, then climbed onto it ourselves. The ocean water held back by my Shield sloshed against the ice as the force of my Gift left it. The most amazing thing about the whole ordeal was that it was no longer amazing. The Shield had truly become a part of me.

  “Here, help me roll him over,” Miyoko said.

  We did so with a grunt, and his arm flopped over and slapped the ice as he settled onto his back. His skin was pale and wet, his hair matted to his head like seaweed. I realized I was sobbing, trying to tell myself that he couldn't be dead.

  Miyoko looked at me, her eyes back to normal again.

  “Jimmy,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “He is not dead.” She pointed at his chest. “Look.”

  I blinked the tears away and followed her gaze.

  Dad was breathing.

  I could never explain the feeling that came over me at that moment. Dad meant more to me than any words in any language could ever begin to describe. He was my father, my hero, my friend, my everything. For a full minute, as we had struggled to get out of the ocean and onto the ice, my brain told me that he was dead. To see that proven false, to see his chest rising and falling in a regular pattern, was like the universe itself exploding within me, life and love and happiness washing over me like dawn finally breaking on a thousand years of darkness.

  The strength of angels and soldiers filled me, and I stood up.

  “Come on,” I said, bending over and reaching out my hand. “Let's get rid of those dang Shadow Ka.”

  We grabbed my dad and lifted, each putting a shoulder under one of his arms, and headed down the ice, back to our ship. Dad's dragging feet left shallow trenches in the frosty path.

  The flat iceberg was a lot longer than I remembered. My family could've filled a book with all the jokes we'd come up with over the years about my dad's ever increasing pant size, but right then it didn't seem so funny. It felt like he weighed a ton, and the occasional grunt that escaped his lips now and then only made it worse, like he was having a hoot seeing us struggle to carry and drag him. I promised myself to buy him a treadmill with Joseph's new money when all this was over.

  Halfway there, we took a small break, dropping Dad like a sack of potatoes.

  It was then that I realized the sky had grown considerably lighter. Miyoko's eye-lights had long been extinguished, yet we could see pretty well. I looked up and saw that the clouds were dissipating a bit, and the full moon shone through a break in the sky, although a strange haze seemed to filter it, like a thick screen on a window. There was something odd about it, but I was too tired to sort it out. I pushed the thought aside, and looked toward our destination.

  The yacht waited for us, the dark shapes of the Shadow Ka still scattered all over it, still standing at their posts, wings folded. A few still flew around the ship, but most were on the boat itself, chains tied to something, waiting. There had to be at least fifty of them. I saw no sign of my family, the Alliance, or the crew, and hoped against hope that they were safe, locked inside.

  I motioned to Miyoko and we picked Dad up and headed once again down the iceberg.

  “What exactly are we going to do when we get back up there?” she asked. “We're heavily outnumbered, and all I can do is blind a few of them.”

  Panting from the effort of dragging my dad's gargantuan body, I looked over at her and tried to smile.

  “I fully intend on ice-blasting me some Shadow Ka tonight.”

  Her half-hearted laugh cut short when her gaze shifted back to the waiting ship. The look on her face stopped my heart, and I turned to look as well. We stood and watched as a sound filled the air like a thousand bed sheets, hung to dry on a clothesline, flapping in the wind.

  The yacht was lifting out of the water. Our ship, our boat, was taking flight.

  The Shadow Ka were flying away, taking the yacht, and everyone on board, with them.

  At first, what we were seeing did not register properly, the impossibility of it overwhelming our own sense of sight. Large ocean-going sea vessels do not fly. They float. Yet the yacht we had called home for over a month was rising, already five or six feet, the dark waters of the ocean streaming down its sides in sheets and rivulets. A hundred black wings beat against the night air.

  Miyoko and I could not speak. Stunned, we quickened our pace, our adrenaline seeming to shed pounds from my dad's weight. I scanned the length of the ship, once more taking in the surreal sight of winged beasts carrying a huge boat. The purpose of the chains was no longer in doubt, nor was the strength of the Ka.

  We were only feet away, the beginnings of the inward curving slope from the side of the ship, indicating the bottom, breaking the surface behind a curtain of cascading water. The weight of such a ship must be staggering, and I could not believe these things could just tie up some chains and fly off with it. But it appeared to be working just fine.

  Without a word, Miyoko and I knew that we had to get on that ship or risk never seeing it again.

  “Here,” I yelled, “Help me get Dad in an upright position!”

  We pushed under his armpits until he was almost standing, and then I put one hand under each of his arms while Miyoko strained with all her effort to keep him from falling down. Then I called upon the Ice.

  Beams of it shot from my hands into his armpits, lifting him up toward the boat. The railing was a good twenty or thirty feet above us now, but I just didn't know what else to do. Every part of my brain riveted on the Gift, concentrating on the Ice gripping Dad and carrying him upward, shooting him toward the decks of the boat. The two beams expanded as he rose, defying gravity, pushing him, catapulting him.

  When he rose above the railings, I twisted my thoughts and the Ice bent and careened forward, throwing my dad onto the ship. A sick thud sounded from above. He'd landed somewhere, hopefully not too hard.

  Clear of the sucking waters of the ocean, the boat seemed to take off just after Dad landed, drastically increasing the speed of its ascent. In seconds the bottom of the yacht was above our heads and soaring upward.

  “Miyoko,” I yelled again, “grab onto me and hang on!”

  She put her arms around my neck, and I motioned for her to swing around to my back, as if I were giving her a piggyback ride. She squeezed her arms and jumped onto me, placing her legs over my hips. Or, where a person should have hips. My skin and bones body had about as much hips as it did muscle, which ain't much. Her legs slipped to the ground.

  “Try again,” I said, frantic as I saw the ship getting higher and higher. It was now forty feet above us, twisting to take off in another direction. The few Shadow Ka not chained to the boat were barking their strange commands, guiding the others where to go.

  Miyoko jumped up again, and this time I froze her legs to my hips with Ice, then froze her hands together so they could not slip from her grip around my neck.

  I looked up, then closed my eyes for the briefest of moments while I imagined what I wanted the Ice to do. I looked up again, and concentrated my vision on the ladder that was attached to the very back of the yacht, put there for people to climb down in case something went wrong with the rudders or engines.

  It was fifty feet above us.

  A blasting stream of Ice shot from both my hands, clasped tightly together, wispy frost and mist swirling in a great tornado, barreling forward until its end reached the ladder. It expanded and covered several rungs of the ladder in a swath of solid Ice, keeping its hold on me at the other end of the cold rope, down below, fraught with anxiety, hoping it worked.

  It ripped us into the air with a jerk, taking my breath away, the force of it making Miyoko's ice-bound hands slam against my throat. The Shield kicked in just enough to stop it from hurting.

  The ship headed for the clouds, a long pillar of Ice hanging from its rear, a cold string of hope to the two people dangling from its end.

  The Shadow Ka flapped their wings with a strained urgency, appearing to bear a burden like never before in their evil lives. I thought it interesting that they flew the boat front-first, like it actually mattered once it was in the air. Once out of the water, they could have flown sideways or backward just as easily. But the ship tore through the wet air with purpose and direction, like the waters of the sea had merely risen in a great wave, carrying the yacht forward on a final and great voyage. We looked like the trailing anchor, no use at all, dragging against nothing but clouds.

  I got my senses in order and started the shrinking process.

  The fifty-foot-long rope of Ice shortened, slowly at first, then quickening its pace. White, swirling air cycloned off the beam as it shrank, its moisture disappearing back into the atmosphere. The rush from the shrinking frozen water combined with the ascending ship itself to make it seem as if we were a fighter jet, rocketing toward the edges of space and sound.

  Forty feet, thirty, twenty, the backside of the ship suddenly loomed before us. I slowed the pace of shrinking, worried that if we hit it too hard, the Shield would tilt the ship as it rebounded to protect me.

  The beam of Ice had shortened to about ten feet. The rungs of the ladder were right there, so close, the distance now less than the height of a basketball hoop.

  Then the Shadow Ka attacked us in a rage of furious hate.

  It appeared that most of the Ka were occupied with the task of hauling the boat, hoisting their share of the burden with their individual chains. But the horde that attacked us at that moment was like a storm of shadows, more than we could count. The ship tilted slightly, as if some of the Ka had indeed let go to help in the fight.

  They came from all directions, and soon our vision was filled with flashing images of black and gray. The beating of their wings and the sound of their screeching howls contended with each other to dominate the air. The thin membrane of their wings flexed and pulled, glistening with moisture. My stomach turned. The dark chasms that were their eyes stared at us with a ferocious loathing.

  Yet they did nothing to us.

  They couldn't. The power of the Shield was no longer a secret to them, and they didn't even try, didn't even approach our immediate vicinity. But they swarmed around us, creating a swirling cloud of darkness, like a tornado of maddened black butterflies.

  Miyoko held on, her hands bound in Ice, legs frozen to my sides. There was nothing she could do but watch. There was nothing I could do but watch. There were so many of them that I just felt overwhelmed, not knowing what good it would do to start shooting beams of Ice.

  Distracted by their vicious appearance, I had stopped shrinking our rope, fooled once again by illusion, thinking that I could not get past them to the boat. I had to remind myself for the millionth time that the Shield pretty much allowed me to do whatever I wanted.

  With a deep effort of thought, I willed the Ice to shrink the remaining ten feet, to take us straight through the writhing crowd of Ka.

  We had gone about two feet when I fell asleep.

  We've all had that feeling before. So many times I can remember being in school the day after staying up late to watch a football game or a movie, and just being exhausted. Class would be miserable, no matter the topic, and beckoning strings of sleep would pull at your eyelids all day. Every second you imagine how nice it would be just to curl up on the ground and take a power nap. Then it hits you.

  Your head jerks, the world seems to bend in on itself for a split second, and you realize that you just fell asleep for an instant. It's a peculiar feeling, almost like you'd just served a secret mission for the government and had your memory erased.

  Except for the slow building up of exhaustion, that moment of instantaneous falling asleep and jerking awake again is exactly what it felt like as we closed the final gap between the boat and us. Something inexplicable, in the middle of all that insanity, made me fall asleep. It could not have been more than a second before my head snapped up from its descent to my chest in its quest for peaceful slumber.

  But we were already falling—small, sparkling jewels of shattered Ice our only company. The Ka had shattered the rope during my very brief and very unexplainable nap.

  Falling was no new thing for me. The absence of fear was like a vacuum—I knew that I should be scared, and yet that feeling didn't even register in my mind. The only thing that kicked in was an immediate sense of calculation. The methods, the inner workings of my mind had changed so much since that fateful day in the woods. It didn't seem possible that it had only been a matter of months since it all began. It felt like years.

  The oddest thing was that I was having these thoughts while plummeting toward the ocean with a girl frozen to my back, my friends and family growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

  I shook myself mentally.

  The chance of shooting Ice at the ship to reestablish a connection had come and gone before I could react. Gravity is a powerful thing. The distance between the ship and us had increased at a mind-numbing pace, and the boat already had grown small and insubstantial in the clouds.

  Wind and rain whipped at us as we fell, our backs pointing down, our eyes facing the departing ship. I didn't know how high up we had gone, but I could feel the ocean below, coming to meet us at a blistering speed. There was not much time before we would burst into the waters like a stone bubble, protected but lost to the sea forever. I had two wonderful Gifts, but flying or radio communication was not one of them. I had two …

  Then it came to me as an image, a vision in my mind. A plan.

  It just might work …

  The Shield deflected harmful things, be it a flying rock coming at me, or whatever surface awaited when I flew toward it. In recent weeks I had learned how to harness that rebounding power, and actually manipulate it. My entire plan revolved around controlling the Shield like never before.