Zo and The Invisible Island (eBook)

Alake Pilgrim (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Knights Of (Verlag)
978-1-913311-20-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The epic conclusion to the fantasy adventure that started with Zo and the Forest of Secrets. After the mysterious Council tried to wipe Zo's memory, she's been hiding her powers from them. With her friend Adri gone, she must set out to find the truth... and save who she can along the way. On a mind-bending journey that leads her to old friends and new foes, Z finds herself at a secret school for children with powers just like her. Does the Invisible Island hold the answers she needs?

Alake Pilgrim writes from the uncanny islands of Trinidad & Tobago in the Caribbean, where people are connected to Africa, India, China, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, thanks to the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship, and an MA in Latin American & Caribbean Studies from New York University. Her stories have twice won the regional prize for the Americas in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. They have been published by The Center for Fiction in New York, the Small Axe Journal, and in the groundbreaking international anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby (Myriad Editions and HarperCollins).

Textauszug

Chapter One

SPY

I nearly fell out of the giant tree. Snorting with laughter, I tried to keep my balance. Adri was perched on a wide branch of the samaan, cracking jokes despite everything.

“Shh,” I warned him, looking around at the listening hill.

He laughed, long legs dangling in the air. The island sky was full of colours melting into gold. I had never seen him this happy. It was almost as if he’d forgotten that we were on the run in the forest from some dinosaur-like creature, smart-mouthed spiders, and who knows what else.

Truth was, he almost made me forget.

He stopped mid-joke. “You good?”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing away.

His spiky hair had started growing back. He’d shaved it off with his parents, to celebrate his mum’s recovery and their trip back home to Trinidad.

His parents …

My heart sank. Where were they now and how did we find them?

A shadow crossed Adri’s face. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing.

“Hold on,” I called, “you have something by your ear.”

He was too far away for me to reach the silver thread stuck to the side of his head. He raised one hand to wipe it off. Then, I realised what it was.

“Wait!” I shouted.

Too late. Spiderwebs snaked down around us, strangely beautiful in the dying light.

I scrambled toward Adri. He stared at me wildly, terror snapping off him like lightning.

“Run, Zo!” he screamed. “Now!”

I spun around, looking for anything to fight with, but instead found myself rolling out of bed, tumbling with a hard “Thump!” to the floor.

“Oww …”

***

That was one way to wake up.

I lay face-down on the smooth wooden planks, trying to get my bearings. I was drenched with sweat and my legs were tangled in bedsheets.

My mind felt just as jumbled. Somehow, it was always the same dream … And I still had no clue where Adri and his family were being kept.

Over a year ago, in Samaan Bay, on the other side of the country, he and I had survived being lost in the forest for days. We’d been chased by weird creatures: the giant centipede-like X, talking spiders, and a swampy monster I’d called the Flesh-skinner until I learned what it really was.

Come to find out, they’d been working for some strange Council that experimented on animals, and kids like us.

Yet none of this was in the dream that haunted me month after month, ever since Adri had chosen to go back to the Council and their tests, for the sake of his captured parents.

No. My nightmare was always about him: the boy who, through all kinds of crazy, had become my best friend. The boy who was stuck in a trap, warning me to escape.

I took a deep breath and pried my legs from the bedsheets as quietly as I could.

Please let Ms. Kofi be down in the backyard, picking pomeracs from the bat-infested tree. Anyone who could face down a colony of bats was not someone to be messed with … And the bats were right to be scared. I’d learned back in Samaan Bay that the short, limping old-woman I knew as Ms. K, was really an Anansi – part woman, part spider, part trickster.

Yes. Ms. K, aka Boss of the Anansi crew, was one of the head Watchers for the Council, keeping an eye on children like me, while working secretly on her own plans to take the Council down.

She was here with me on Monos, one of a string of small islands off the northwest coast of Trinidad. We’d moved to this house miles away from Samaan Bay, for my stepdad Jake’s company ‘Lee’s Green Energy’ to build a solar plant on the island.

Now I was stuck here, on the floor of my bedroom, listening for Ms. K’s heavy tread on the stairs.

Whew. Nothing. Maybe she really was in the backyard chasing bats. I could breathe again … for now.

As I turned, something caught my eye. A floorboard under the bed was bent to one side. It had probably come loose when I slammed onto the floor. I’d better fix it before Ms. K fixed me.

I crawled under the bed to push the board back into place. Something glinted. Wait. Was that gold? I scooted in more, heart racing like a pirate finding treasure.

Under the floorboard was a rectangular space. Inside the space was a long brassy tube. I picked it up and crawled out from under the bed, sneezing out a cobweb or two. Then I sat up and turned the tube from side to side. One end clicked open to reveal a small pane of glass. My heart jumped. This wasn’t a tube.

Gently, I pulled it out to its full length. It was a spyglass – and a beautiful one at that, covered with carvings that looked like dragons. It was old, a relic, coated with dust from being in a hole under the floor for so long. I wiped it clean with the sheet and squinted into one side, holding it a little away from my eye, in case it wasn’t as harmless as it looked.

It seemed to work exactly as a spyglass should, magnifying things in the room, making everything look larger and closer.

I checked out the carvings on its side. The dragons were twisted into shapes that looked like letters, but I couldn’t make them out. Suspicion tapped on the back of my neck. This could be a trap set by Ms. K – one of the tests the Council ran on “gifted” children like me and Adri. Ms. K was supposed to have wiped my memory after Samaan Bay, but she hadn’t.

At the time, I thought she was doing me a favour, but maybe she’d had other plans for me all along.

The sweat on my skin felt cold. To my right, white curtains billowed like sails in the breeze. The entire house was like living inside of an ancient ship and my room was no different. There was a pitched roof over the wooden walls and floor, held up by thick wooden beams. The spiced smell of cedar filled the morning air: sharp as a warning.

“Why?” Mum had asked again and again, when I insisted on staying here while she, Jake and Tayo – a toddler now – went to Barbados for her new art exhibition. Her expression toggled between confusion and hurt.

“We just moved here!” I’d said, pretending to be frustrated. “I’m tired of packing and unpacking. Ms. K’s here too! I’ll be fine. Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course,” Mum protested. “But are you sure?”

She was still asking the morning they left, with Tayo crying in her arms. The ferryman untied his boat from the dock, getting ready to take them over to the mainland. Jake put the last bags in the boat.

“You ready Marie?” he asked my mum, looking at me with a furrowed face.

All he said was, “You know you can still change your mind … Your mum would love to have you there.” He added kindly, “We all would.”

I kissed the air near Tayo’s sweet round face.

“Doh-doh!” he begged.

I sure felt like one.

“Thanks, next time, okay?” I blurted out to Jake before rushing away, so he couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

Mum had tried to hug me before she left, but I cringed away as always. She knew that, for some reason, in the last year, I no longer did hugs or kisses. What she didn’t know was that I couldn’t hug or kiss her, because I had no idea when my power of falling into other people’s memories by touch would kick into gear.

The most unwanted gift ever.

Most of all, Mum didn’t know that the same morning she’d announced the Easter trip to Barbados, I’d found a note under my pillow that said, “Stay with me.” Signed, “K.”

Even as I’d ripped the note to shreds and flushed it, I knew what I was going to do.

Ms. K was the only link I still had to Adri and his family. To have any chance of finding them, I needed to go along with whatever she had planned.

I thought about telling my family what had really happened a year ago in Samaan Bay; what was happening right now. Maybe I could call Da. But he was deep in some part of rural Guinea in West Africa on a job for his company – on the other side of the world. He still found a way to call me every time he went into town for supplies, always asking in his low but warm Jamaican voice, “Boonoonoonus, you a’right?”

I wanted to say, “No, I’m not.”

But how did I explain what had happened? It sounded totally mad.

No. Following Ms. K’s instructions was my only chance to see Adri again. And it was the only way to keep my family from ending up in some ‘freak accident’ designed by the Council, the way his parents had, a year ago.

So, I did it. I told my Mum I didn’t want to travel with them to her exhibition. I...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.3.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Zo
• Illustrationen: Tasia Graham
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Jugendbücher ab 12 Jahre
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Spielen / Lernen ► Abenteuer / Spielgeschichten
• Schlagworte: Fantasy adventure for children • Fantasy Adventure for Young Adults • Fantasy Fiction About Wizards & Witches for Young Adults • Magical Realist Fiction for Young Adults
• ISBN-10: 1-913311-20-1 / 1913311201
• ISBN-13: 978-1-913311-20-9 / 9781913311209