Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [53]
Fifteen minutes later, Mandy, Aaron, and I were in the map section of the Brightport library. We had to work quickly. The library closed early on Sundays and we only had an hour to find what we needed. We’d pulled out all the sea maps they had. There weren’t many, but we figured they’d probably have the local ones at least. We were banking on the hope that the hand-drawn map would be of somewhere reasonably close. It had to be, or how would Melody have been able to swim there?
Aaron dumped a handful of maps and charts on the table in front of us. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get started.”
I pushed the hood off my head. I’d kept my face hidden in case anyone spotted me on the way over and recognized me from the newspaper. There was hardly anyone in the library, though, and no one was taking any notice of us, so I figured it was probably safe enough to show my face. And anyway, sitting in a library with a hood over my head would probably have attracted more attention, not less.
I opened up a map. It was crisscrossed with lines and numbers, yellow circles, purple blocks. And it was massive.
“What are we meant to be doing?” I asked as a feeling of hopelessness washed over me like a wave creeping high up the shore.
“Look for any similar patterns,” Aaron said as he placed the shell on the table and propped up our map in front of it. “Same groups of numbers, islands that look similar in shape, or grouped in the same kind of way — anything. We need to find a match.” He grabbed a map and started unfolding it. “OK?” he asked.
“OK,” Mandy and I replied. Then Mandy opened up a third map and the three of us got to work.
“This is hopeless.” Mandy folded up a map and threw it on the floor. The discarded pile was getting bigger and bigger, and the ones we still hadn’t looked at were dwindling rapidly. We’d nearly gone through them all. “We’re never going to find it.”
Mandy was right. We were kidding ourselves. I wasn’t ready to admit that out loud yet, though. That would mean giving up on Shona — and I would never be ready to do that. “Come on, we haven’t finished yet. We’ll find it,” I said, trying to inject some optimism that I didn’t actually feel into my voice. “We’ve got to.”
I picked up another map and passed one to Mandy. Aaron grabbed a third. “Last one,” he said.
This was it, then. If we didn’t find a match in any of these, we didn’t have anywhere else to look. We had to find it.
We studied our maps in silence. Staring in front of me at the hand-drawn map, I scoured the real map, looking for anything that seemed to match.
“Hey, I think I’ve found something!” Aaron said suddenly. He was pointing at his map, tracing around the patterns on it and glancing up every few seconds at the one from the shell. Mandy and I left our own maps and crowded around him.
“Look — see that combination there?” He pointed to the group of numbers in the middle of the map that showed the depth of the water. “The numbers are the same on this one.”
I looked up to compare it with our original map. He was right! And there was something else, too, just a little to the side. “Look — the islands!” I said. “They’re not exactly the same, but they’re a pretty good match.”
“The library map has a lot more of them,” Mandy said. “Does that matter?”
Aaron shook his head. “I doubt it. Whoever drew this wasn’t trying to reproduce the whole thing.” He pointed to the island in the middle of the map, the one with the arrow pointing toward it. “They just needed to draw enough so that someone could find this island.”
“So that Melody could find it,” I added. We might not know who drew it, or why they drew it, or even why the sirens were really trapped in their underwater prison, but at least a small piece of the jigsaw was falling into place.
“And find what she’d lost,” Mandy finished.
Aaron folded up the new map and put it beside the shell and the original map. “And now we can go and find it,” he said.
“Whatever it is,” I said. I still wasn’t sure how we were going to