“You lost many friends today, didn’t you?”

The boy nodded.

“I want you to close your eyes, make a wish for them . . . and once you’ve made your wish, kiss the bank, and hand it to me.”

Little Richard did as he was told. He made a silent wish, kissed the bank, and put it in Mary’s hands.

Then she cast the piggybank full of all the Greensouls’ coins into the sea.

CHAPTER 33
Creature Discomforts

Jix had plunged to the bottom of the bay. He had seen the others helplessly disappear into the ocean floor beneath him. There was nothing he could do to save them, but he knew he might be able to save himself. It would take split-second timing, the sum of his skills as a skinjacker and the largest amount of luck he had known. He knew it was his only chance. As he fell, nearing the ocean floor, he spread out his arms wide and kept his eyes open for something alive, but there was nothing.

Then, just at the moment of impact on the ocean floor, he felt it: a sea slug not much larger than his finger, squirming in the mud. He leaped toward it, bringing his arms together and squeezing his spirit in upon itself like a collapsing sun, until he found the primitive nervous system of the slug and invaded it, flooding its tiny consciousness with his soul.

Darkness. Numbness, an emptiness of all thought and feeling, and absolutely no sense of time. It was the hardest thing he ever had to bear, to hold his full consciousness in the primitive flesh of a tiny spineless creature. But he did it. He did it long enough to sense a passing crab and he quickly leaped into that. Jix’s consciousness was so great that he killed the sea slug the moment he left it.

Now he was held in the exoskeleton of the crab and it felt no better than the slug. But he had some sensory awareness now. There was a fish swimming by him. He could feel it on his antennae. And so he leaped to that. Again, the crab died from the weight and loss of his consciousness.

Now inside the fish, he swam away from the school and, seeing a large shape moving in front of him, he leaped directly inside its mouth and found himself inhabiting a harbor seal. The seal was able to hold his spirit without dying, and at last, he had enough familiar senses to navigate his way to the surface.

When he broke surface, he looked around with the eyes of the seal. Mary and all her children were long gone, as he suspected. This desperate journey through small creatures had taken him much longer than it seemed, for those creatures were unable to comprehend something as complex as time. He had no clue if this was even the same day.