This goes on and on. Quince easily remembers one, then two, then five glows in sequence. And the fact that each chain only builds on the last makes things easier.

When it gets up to eight, he starts to slow down. I can see his forehead scrunching as he tries to remember the last couple of links in the chain.

By twelve, he’s starting to look mentally exhausted. And physically, too, since each chain requires him to swim around the garden path more and more.

At fifteen, he’s barely floating from glow to glow. He’s been doing this for hours now. It takes him a solid three minutes—I know, because I started counting seconds—to remember the last link.

But he finally does, and I cheer.

“Good job!” I shout. “One more to go!”

He looks up and gives me a weary smile. Then he turns his attention back to the garden as the final chain starts glowing.

I follow the pattern with my eyes, anticipating the first several I have memorized, and then catching up with the glow of the rest. When the fifteenth glows, I scan the garden eagerly for the sixteenth and final glow in the final chain.

I wait and wait and wait and . . . nothing.

“Did I miss it?” I whisper to Daddy. “Where was the last glow?”

He holds a finger to his mouth in response.

I look at Quince, hoping he saw what I didn’t, but he looks just as lost.

After studying the garden, waiting for a glow, he finally starts the last chain. I watch, nervous, as he touches the fifteen glows in order. Then, after the fifteenth, I hold my breath.

Where was the sixteenth glow? I didn’t see it, and I have a clear view of the entire garden. How could Quince have seen it from down on garden level?

“There was no glow,” I say to Daddy, who ignores me. “This isn’t fair!” I shout down at the garden, getting Quince’s attention. “The sixteenth object never—”

I gasp as Quince pushes off from the seafloor, jetting straight toward me.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I demand. “You can’t just give up, you have to—”

Quince reaches me, and instead of wrapping me in a hug like I expect, he reaches for my hair. I try to swim back, away from the near-desperate look in his eyes, afraid that he’s going to fail the test.

He tugs something from my hair.

I look down and see a Padina antillarum—a beautiful little seaweed shaped like ginkgo leaves—in his hand. And it’s glowing.

“You,” he says with an explosive grin. “You are the sixteenth object.”

I look nervously at Daddy, afraid that Quince might be wrong, that maybe it’s just coincidence that there’s a glowing Padina antillarum in my hair at just the right moment—and not long after Calliope patted my head.

When Daddy nods, I release a huge sigh of relief.

Calliope winks at me, then goes back to making notes on her clipboard.

I attack Quince with a massive hug.

“You did it!” I shout, pressing kisses all over his handsome face.

“I told you I would,” he says.

“I never doubted you,” I reply.

He leans back and gives me a skeptical look.

“Well, not really.”

“Congratulations,” Calliope says, holding her clipboard against her chest. “Two tests successfully completed, only one more to go.”

“I don’t suppose he can do that test right now?” I ask. “Get it all over with at once.”

“Unfortunately not.” Calliope shakes her head. “But never fear. The third test is not as physically demanding as the first two.”

She swims off, making more notes as she goes.

“Well, that’s a reassurance,” I mutter.

“No worries,” Quince says. “After those first two tests, anything else they throw at me has to be cake.”

“Lily?” Daddy floats into my line of sight, reminding me that I have other obligations here tonight.

“Right,” I say. Then, to Quince: “Why don’t you go get some rest and something to eat? I have to talk with Daddy about my meeting with King Zostero.”

Quince gives me a questioning look, but when I shake my head, he smiles. “Okay. Come find me when you’re done?”

“Definitely.”

I watch as Quince heads toward the palace, and the royal kitchen. Laver is going to have a heart attack.

“Let’s talk in my office,” Daddy says.

“Yes,” I say. “Let’s.”

Chapter 18

“What are we going to do?” I ask Daddy after I tell him what I learned from King Zostero. “He’s not the only one planning sabotage attacks against humans. We don’t even know what other kingdoms are involved. It could be all of them, for all we know.”

“That is unlikely,” he says. “But you are correct that this is far more unsettling than we imagined. Lily, I am so sorry I doubted you.”

“I know you are, Daddy.”

“If I could go back—”

“But you can’t. And now we have an even bigger problem. How do we stop them?” I ask. “If this week’s oil rig accident was just the first of many, things are only going to get worse.”

“Honestly, Lily,” he says, his shoulders drooping a bit, “I am not yet sure how to approach this. While I do not agree with their methods, I understand their motivations. It is hard to reason with the righteous.”

Daddy starts shuffling papers on his desk, and I can tell he’s at a loss. We don’t have time to be at a loss. Human lives are at stake.