From above the surface, the Island appeared to stand alone in the middle of open water. From beneath, it was surrounded by steep slopes and towering rocks. During the summer these were festooned with green and purple algae. Shorter winter days meant that quite a bit of it had died back, but there were still isolated patches swaying in the current as the kids approached.
As the water grew shallower, the effect of the wind and waves on the surface grew stronger, and Luca, Alberto, and Giulia found themselves bobbing up and down as they swam. The boys had experienced this before and could handle it, but Giulia ended up falling behind, crawling across the gravelly bottom on her hands and feet as she tried not to be swept away.
"Guys! She called out again. "Wait for me!"
Luca swam back for her. "Sorry," he said, taking her hand again. "We'll go slow."
"This is the spot, right here!" Alberto said, pointing up. "Watch this." He squatted on the bottom, waiting for the right moment, then pushed off and went straight up to be caught by the current. Luca and Giulia could hear him cheering as the waves rolled him onto the beach. "Come on! You gotta try it!" he shouted from above.
"You don't have to," Luca assured Giulia.
"No, I want to," she replied, determined.
Luca pointed at one of the stones that protruded out of the water, which had a prominent stripe of white quartz running through it. "Push off right when the swell reaches that spot," he said. "I'll show you." He went and crouched where Alberto had, and watched the incoming waves carefully. "Like this!"
Alberto, who'd been swimming in the currents around the Island for as long as he could remember and new exactly how to ride each one, had landed on his feet on the beach. Luca, relatively new at it, tumbled past him and smacked into a boulder, where he lay on his back with his feet in the air. It had started raining, so both of them remained soaking wet and scaly as Alberto helped Luca up – only for Giulia to bowl them both over as she was thrown onto the shore by the next wave.
"Sorry!" she panted.
"Don't be," said Alberto. The boys each took one of her arms to put her on her feet. "Pretty fun, right?"
"Benissimo!" she agreed. Out of habit she reached behind her head to gather up her hair and wring it out, but got only a handful of soggy fins.
"Come on up to the Tower," said Alberto. "We can get dry there."
He led the way up the hill, slipping and sliding on the wet grass, towards the remains of the eighteenth-century lighthouse. As Daniela Paguro had feared, the air was icy cold, and all three were shivering. It had been relatively quiet underwater, but up on land it was windy as well as rainy, and between that and the roar of the surf below, he had to shout to be heard – but that didn't stop Alberto from talking the entire way.
"I was gonna fix the place up a little after you guys left for school!" Alberto said, "but I got kinda busy helping Massimo and didn't get much done, so it's kind of a mess. He hasn't had to cut anything out of the nets since I moved in, though!" he bragged. "I'm getting really good at untangling them, especially sine he's been teaching me different kinds of knots. I bet you're not learning that at school!"
The work Alberto had managed to get done on the Tower so far included replacing the ladder with a new one made of rope that he could let down or pull up as he pleased, and collecting most of the gunk he'd thrown out the windows after he and Luca had their argument and piling it back indoors. The Vespa poster had been replaced by a newer, larger one that did a better job of covering the tally marks on the wall, and the hammocks had been taken down because Alberto didn't sleep there anymore, but the Tower itself was still very much a ruin.
Alberto ran up the steps to the roof get the firepit he and his father had used to use. He poured some rain water out of it, then fetched wood and kindling from his stash on the Tower's ground floor to get it started.
Once indoors, all three of them were able to dry out. Alberto, who'd long ago mastered the art of shaking the water off himself like a dog, was the first to change back to human. Luca, who preferred to wipe it off with his hands, was second. Giulia took a blanket that Alberto had left draped over a broken chair and used it as a towel. This time, with her eyes open, she was able to watch her transformation as it happened and it looked as odd as it felt, as scales first lifted and then melted away into her skin.
"If you feel like your tail's still there, that's normal," said Luca, settling down close to the firepit while Alberto struck flint for sparks.
Giulia looked back over her shoulder. "I don't, actually."
"Maybe that's 'cause you're used to not having one," Alberto suggested. The dry grass he'd put in the pot started to curl and blacken as the sparks found it, and he blew on it a couple of times to fan the flames. "Anyway – this is our hideout."
"So cool," said Giulia, looking up at the wooden ceiling as the smoke rose. "Where did you get all this stuff?" The room was full of everything from a collection of wine and soda bottles to a broken typewriter to half a dozen pieces from different boats, bicycles, and even an airplane propeller.
"Some of it I swiped from boats while the fishermen weren't looking, although I gave a lot of that back," said Alberto. "The rest of it I just found on the bottom. Humans lose a lot of stuff."
"I bet that's from the Piaggio that crashed in the bay in 1942," Giulia said, pointing to the propeller. "They've got some parts of it on display in the museum in Genova. It's too bad you can't get electricity out here, because you could string up some lights like I've got in my treehouse."
"That would be great," said Alberto, considering the possibility. "Where does electricity come from, exactly?"
"From the power lines," said Luca, "but they don't run out here. I think they're one of those things that can't get wet."
Giulia nodded. "You'd need your own little generator, and you'd have to have petrol for it. It'd be a lot of trouble to get it all out here, but we could use Dad's boat." She leaned back further to watch the smoke drift out the hole in the roof. "I used to see this place from shore, and I always wanted to come out and explore it, but I never did. I guess if I had, I would have found you and your Dad living here."
"It's probably a good thing you didn't," Alberto told her. "Dad always said that we weren't going to stay here forever and it was just until I was older." He sat back and sighed – Alberto had never realized at the time that when his father left the Island, Alberto himself would not be going with him. "If humans had found us then, we probably would have gone somewhere else."
"Then I'm glad I stayed away," said Giulia. She moved a little closer to the fire, wrapping the damp blanket around herself. "I wonder how old this tower is. I know the one on top of Mount Portorosso is from the middle ages, when Genova was a big sea empire and they needed lighthouses all over this coast. This one must be newer than that, because the wooden parts are still here, but it's old enough that nobody remembers it."
"Some of the buildings in Portorosso have those stones with dates on them," Luca suggested. "Maybe we should look for one of those here." He glanced at the rain pelting down outside. "On a nicer day, though."
Giulia held out the blanket for the boys to get under it too if they wanted. They scooted closer.
"You should have seen Luca the first time I lit a fire for him," Alberto said with a grin. "There's nothing like them underwater. Instead, people build their houses over those hot vents so they can cook. I'd stolen some sausages off one of the fishing boats and I wanted to show him how to put them on sticks and toast them, so I got it burning and his eyes went huge. He would have tried to touch it if I hadn't grabbed his wrist. You thought it was alive, didn't you, Luca?"
"Uh-huh," said Luca distantly, still gazing out the broken wall at the rain.
"Did we tell you about the time he got a sunburn?" Alberto asked Giulia. "We were outside all day and I hadn't found him a shirt that fit yet, so he got burned all over his back. I was going to warn him about it, but I forgot and he had to run home.
"I didn't see him for a couple of days after that because he was busy on the farm," Alberto continued, "but then the scales on his back started curling and falling off, so he comes rushing up here and he's terrified that he's gonna die. I saw his sunburn was peeling and I told him, you're fine, it's just your skin that's dead, but that just made him freak out all over again."
Giulia giggled. "Did he tell you about the zoo?" she asked. "We thought he wasn't going to be able to go because it was supposed to rain that day, but it stayed dry."
"His letter said he got to feed some kind of animal," said Alberto, who'd had to ask Massimo how to pronounce the word giraffe and still wasn't sure what the creature actually looked like. The drawing Luca had included did not make much sense to him.
"Yeah, they gave us some leaves to feed the giraffes," Giulia told him. "And when giraffes eat, they don't bite things. They have this really long blue tongue that they stick out to wrap around like an elephant's trunk... or I guess like an octopus tentacle," she decided, when she realized Alberto might not know what that was, either. "Luca almost passed out when he saw it. I thought I was going to have to catch him."
She looked at Luca with a grin, but found he had stopped paying attention to the conversation. His eyes were distant.
"Luca?" asked Giulia. "What are you thinking?"
"Oh." Luca brought himself back to the present. "I was just wondering. Long ago when Genova was so important, what do you think we were doing? The sea monsters. We must have been here."
"I dunno," said Giulia. "You were probably doing the same things you've always done. Humans are like that, too. You get kings and scientists who go around fighting wars and discovering things, but most people are just doing their jobs."
"Yeah, but... the genie called us children of Oannes and said we had kingdoms," Luca recalled. "I never heard of that before."
"Do you have a king?" Giulia asked. "We used to, until the end of the war. Now we have a Prime Minister. Who's in charge under the sea?"
"Nobody, really," Luca replied. "If somebody has a problem we all get together and sort it out. I've been wondering about this for a while now, ever since I read Professor Pastorino's book," he admitted. "If humans have been living here for six thousand years, what about us?"
Giulia thought about it. "Remember that poster in the history classroom, with the mosaics from the Terme di Caracalla in Roma? I'm pretty sure some of those are meant to be sea monsters, so you've been around at least since Roman times. Maybe we talked more back then."
"That's another thing," said Luca. "Up here there's all the ruins, like the ancient walls in Genova and that whole town that got buried by the volcano near Napoli. We haven't got anything like that in the ocean."
"Maybe nobody's looked for it," Giulia suggested.
"What about Arturo's house?" Alberto asked.
The other two looked at him in confusion.
"Arturo's house?" asked Luca.
"Yeah, the roof's got all that writing on it," Alberto said. "You've never seen it?"
"I never looked that close."
"I noticed it when your Mom sent me over to see if I could borrow some oysters." Alberto stood up and grabbed the lid for the firepit to extinguish it. "I'll show you."
The weather had gotten even worse, with rain now pelting down so that all three kids had turned back into sea monsters within seconds of leaving the shelter of the tower. The surf on the beach was rough enough to start dragging them out as soon as they stepped into it. Giulia yelped as it pulled her feet out from under her, and had a moment of panic when she went under, until she remembered that she could breathe the water now.
Once they got under the waves, though, the water became warm and calm again, and Giulia followed the boys back to where the Trota family lived. Where the Paguro house had a lot of tall green seaweed growing on top of it, the roof of Arturo's home bore a shorter coat of yellow-green bladderwrack. When they arrived, it also bore Arturo himself, who was sitting on the edge plaiting seaweed stems into straps for bags or belts.
"Hi, Arturo," said Alberto. "I just wanna show Luca and Giulia the writing on your roof."
"Sure." Arturo wound his half-finished strap into a coil and got up. "It shows up best if you scrape the algae off with a flat rock so it stays in the grooves. I'll show you."
He found a suitable stone, and they saw that there did indeed seem to be some kind of inscription on the slab that formed the roof. It didn't look anything like the alphabet the children were familiar with. Instead, it was made of short vertical and horizontal lines, sometimes connecting up little squares and diamonds, interspersed with larger circles and triangles carefully engraved deep into the granite. It must clearly have meant something to whoever had made it, though whether it was writing or some kind of diagram was impossible to say. Whatever it was, it covered the entire small area Arturo scraped for them, and might easily extend over the whole surface area of the slab, some six metres long.
"Has this always been here?" asked Luca.
Arturo shrugged. "We didn't put it there," he said. "I found it by accident when the wrack clogged the chimney and Mom sent me up to clear it away. Wanna see something else cool?"
"Yes!"
"Over here." Alberto swam down to the seafloor at the back of the house, below where the shimmering hot kitchen water was rising out of the chimney hole. "Look," he said, and began brushing silt away from the base of the wall. This raised a cloud of dirt that lingered in the water and made it difficult to see anything for a few seconds. Once it settled, Luca, Alberto, and Giulia gathered around to find three stone slabs, each about forty centimetres square, in a line leading away from the wall. They were clearly very old, with their edges chipped and their corners rounded off, and a black crack running diagonally across the furthest one.
Arturo put his hand on the middle slab. "Feel that?" he asked.
The older kids followed his example. The stone was warm from the hot water flowing underneath.
"It's like undersea plumbing," Giulia realized. "To keep the hot water from mixing with the cold, so you can use it. Do you have this at your house, Luca?"
"I don't know. I never knew to look," Luca said. "We'll have to check it out."
"We should show it to the professor from Napoli when he arrives, too!" Giulia suggested.
"We can't," Alberto reminded them. "He can't come down here."
"Oh, right," said Giulia, and smiled sheepishly. "Should have wished for the camera after all," she joked.
"Nah, this is much better," Luca assured her.
There was a window next to the chimney, and Arturo's older sister Giordana appeared in it. "Arturo, there you are," she said, leaning out to see what he was doing. "Mom says your friends have to go home. We need you to come inside and help with supper."
"Okay," said Arturo. He looked at Giulia. "Do you think if I go back to your house tomorrow, your Mom will give me some more chocolate?" he asked hopefully.
"Santo pecorino!" Giulia exclaimed, turning to the boys. "I still need to ask my parents if I can stay for dinner!"
"I haven't showed you the shipwreck yet, either!" Alberto realized.
"We can do that tomorrow. We've got the whole holiday," Luca reminded him.
"I'm sure Mamma would be happy to make you more cioccolata if you ask," Giulia told Arturo.
"Thanks for showing us the roof," Luca added. "See you later!"
By now the weather had become downright foul. It was still raining fat, icy drops that stung the skin, and even in the relative calm of Portorosso's harbour there were swells more than a foot high. Mindful of Giulia's inexperience, Luca and Alberto didn't even try to climb back onto the stone quay. Instead, they went up the gentle slope of the main beach, and even then, Alberto hit his shoulder when a wave knocked him against the edge of the culvert, and Giulia scraped her palms and knees on the gravel.
"There they are!" exclaimed Helena Marcovaldo.
She came running down the steps to the beach, wearing big rubber boots but without a jacket or hat, and carrying a stack of towels to wrap the kids up in. Massimo was right behind her to help them out of the roaring water. He checked Alberto's shoulder and determined he was only bruised, then shooed him up the steps to the piazza before grabbing Giulia by the arm.
"Giulietta?" he asked, as if not sure he recognized this scaly creature as his daughter.
"It's me, Papà!" she said. "Am I in trouble?" A wish didn't seem like the kind of thing people ought to get in trouble for, especially one that hadn't caused any problems, but her parents were definitely upset.
Helena draped a towel around her shoulders. "We're not angry, Passerota," she said, "but we were worried about you! Look how miserable it is out here."
"Oh," said Giulia sheepishly. "Sorry. There's not really any weather at the bottom of the ocean, so we didn't notice." They'd noticed on the Island, of course, but it hadn't been as bad then.
Massimo helped her climb onto the ledge above the beach. Luca and Alberto were at the top to take her hands and pull her up, and the whole group hurried across the piazza to the Pescheria. Inside, the kids were able to dry off, change back, and get into warm clothes. Giulia put bandages on her knees and on Alberto's scraped shoulder. Then Helena heated up some milk for them, while Massimo got them all settled around the kitchen table.
He sat down in his own chair and sighed. "Giulia," he said, "can you tell me about this genie?"
"I told him what you said," Helena added, "but you ran off before I could ask any questions."
The kids glanced at each other. Even though Helena had said they weren't in trouble, this sort of felt like trouble. Since it was Giulia who'd made the wish, she took the lead.
"You know those bottles Alberto found in the shipwreck?" she said. "One of them fell off the shelf and the stopper came out, and there was a genie inside." Her parents didn't need to know about Alberto's wet shoes on the bed. If they weren't in trouble now then they didn't need to be.
"He looked like a little man made out of sand," Luca added. "That's why there's sand all over, I guess."
"He said he would grant me a wish," Giulia went on. "I've read stories about stuff like that so I asked him if there was a catch and he said there wasn't. He said none of us would get hurt."
"I told her to wish for that camera I asked you about," Alberto put in. "Signorina Repetto said she could get us one from Roma but it was way too expensive."
"But I thought if we could have absolutely anything then wishing for something we could just buy was kind of a waste," Giulia said. "So I wished I could be a sea monster, so Luca and Alberto could show me all the stuff they'd been talking about."
Massimo nodded slowly. "And is this... for the rest of your life?"
Giulia hadn't thought about that. "I... guess so? The genie didn't say there was a time limit."
"He called us children of Oannes," Luca put in. "Do you know what that means?"
"No," said Massimo. "I don't."
Helena gave Giulia a cup of warm milk. "You realize that when you go back to school, you're going to have to be careful the same way Luca is, right? You're not going to be able to go swimming, or play in the snow, if there are strangers who might see you."
"You might not be allowed to do the swimming race next summer, either," said Massimo. "Signora Marsigliese was talking with people about new rules for sea monster children who want to participate."
"We're not angry," Helena repeated. "We just want to be sure you understand what you've wished for."
"She understands," said Alberto.
"We're going to help her with it," Luca agreed. "We taught her to swim."
"And how to get onto the beach in stormy weather," Alberto said.
"Anything else she needs to know, we can teach her that, too," said Luca. "She helped us learn a lot about how to be humans, so we can definitely teach her how to be a sea monster."
"See?" Giulia asked. "I'm gonna be fine!"
"Okay," said Massimo gravely. Helena looked like she was going to protest, but Massimo took her hand. "I trust Alberto and Luca," he said. "If they say they'll look after her and teach her what she needs to know, then they will."
"Here's something," said Alberto, eager to be helpful. "If you're gonna pick up snail shells you can take the round ones, but the triangle ones you gotta poke first to make sure they're empty, because those ones can sting."
Luca joined in. "Dogfish like to be petted, but always do it snout-to-tail because it's sharp in the other direction."
Massimo chuckled in spite of himself. "Starting with the essentials, are we?" The tension had eased now, and he gave Helena's hand another squeeze. "I remember you telling me when Giulia was little that someday she would be her own person, and we would have to let her do whatever made her happy."
"I was talkinga bout her wanting to get tattoos, or date somebody we didn't approve of," Helena replied dryly, but she returned his smile.
"Anyway," said Giulia, seeing an opening. "I know you told me to be home for dinner, but Signora Paguro asked me if I wanted to eat with them tonight."
"I don't know about that," Helena said. "Did you see how high the waves are? I know the boys will be with you, but I don't think it's safe coming and going in that."
"The weather's supposed to be nicer tomorrow," said Luca. "She could stay over, and come back when it's calm."
"It's always more dangerous getting out of the water than going in," Alberto agreed. "On land you hit stuff harder."
"Please?" asked Giulia.
"Will that be alright with Luca's parents?" asked Massimo.
"Sure," said Luca. "They already said Alberto and I could stay over here sometime!"
"And you're sure this is permanent?" Helena put in. "You're not going to change back in the middle of the night and drown?"
"He said there wasn't a catch," Giulia insisted.
"We're gonna make an underwater Christmas tree," Luca said. "Out of a sponge, with shells for decorations."
"And I still have to show them my shipwreck," said Alberto.
"Please?" Giulia repeated.
Massimo sighed. "It's all right with me," he decided.
"Grazie, Papà!" Giulia bounced to her feet to give her father a hug, then followed with a hug and a kiss on the cheek for her mother.
"Come and check in right after breakfast," said Helena, "so we'll know you're all right."
"I will," Giulia promised. "Let me get my toothbrush!" She ran up the steps to her room.
Massimo sighed and looked at Helena. "If we're worried she'll be sorry later, we might as well let her enjoy herself now," he said.
"She won't be sorry," Luca promised.
"We're not sorry we're sea monsters," Alberto agreed.
"We're not sorry you are, either," said Helena, "but if one day you suddenly became human permanently, your parents would be worried, right? And you'd probably find you couldn't do some of the things you enjoyed anymore. We're not angry," she said for a third time. "We just aren't sure she thought through this."
"There wasn't time to think about it," said Alberto with a shrug. "The genie was right there."
"We'll look after her," Luca repeated, "we promise."
A few minutes later, Giulia's parents waved goodbye as the three kids splashed back into the surf. All of them were nearly bowled over by a particularly big wave, but soon they were safely below where the wind could reach them and on their way back out across the fields of seagrass. When they reached the Paguro family's home, the first person they saw was Luca's grandmother, who was floating by the front door, working on some knitting.
"Daniela!" she called when she saw them. "The kids are back!"
"Hi, Grandma!" said Luca, and darted past her indoors to tell his parents about their plans.
"And you too, Small Fry," said Grandma fondly, as Giulia joined them. "Faster at swimming already, I see."
"It's like riding a bike, Signora Paguro: once you get the hang of it, it's easy," Giulia replied.
Grandma smiled. "I'm Daniela's mother, not Lorenzo's, so I'm actually Signora Gambero," she said. "But you can call me Nonna Francesca. That's what Trouble calls me," she pointed a thumb at Alberto.
"And she calls me a lot of things," Alberto said with a grin. "Depends on what I'm up to."
"Trouble covers most of 'em," said Grandma.
Luca came outside again with a smile on his face. "We're having mussels and kelp dumplings tonight," he said. The dumplings were another one of his favourites. It seemed like his mother had been very eager to cook for him again. "And Mom's okay with you staying over, Giulia. Let's see if we've got the same stones Arturo's house does."
"What mischief are you three plotting?" Grandma asked, as the kids swam around behind the house.
"We're looking for history!" Luca told her. He found the spot next to the chimney, and started digging.
The stones turned out to be a lot harder to find than they'd been at Arturo's. The kitchen of the Paguro house was at the east end of the building, facing the current, which meant that silt and sand had piled up deep against the outside wall. Trying to dig through it threw up clouds of sediment that was washed back in the kids' faces, leaving them gagging and shaking their heads as they tried to clear it from their gills.
But they persevered. Luca and Alberto made the digging look easy, but Giulia had considerable trouble with it. Despite what Alberto said there was gravity underwater, but the neutral buoyancy of a sea monster's body counteracted it almost entirely. Giulia could not use the ground as leverage the way she would have when digging on land, and the current she was making as she moved the sand and water kept threatening to knock her over. Eventually she ended up working upside-down, with her feet braced against the wall of the house, in order to make progress.
At the Trota house the stones had only been a few centimetres down. Here they were nearly half a metre deep, and the kids had to open quite a wide hole to keep the sides from collapsing before they got to the bottom. Then at last, there it was, a slab of smooth whitish stone with a couple of long-disused barnacle shells clinging to it. Luca put a hand on it. The other two did likewise, and found it warm to the touch.
"So we don't build our houses over the vents," said Luca. "We built these conduits to bring the hot water into the houses. It must've been a long time ago for it to get buried so deep."
"And if nobody remembers who built it," Giulia agreed. "The tower on Mount Portorosso is from the fifteenth century and we still know about that."
"You said the tower on the Island is newer, though," Alberto pointed out. "And you didn't know who built that."
"That's because we don't have any records of it," said Giulia. "Sea monsters don't write a lot of stuff down, do they?"
"I guess we don't," Luca said, discouraged. He tried to think how else they could investigate this. "If we could dig them all up and follow them, we could find out where the hot water originally comes from. Maybe there's a clue there."
"I dunno, Luca," said Giulia. "That could be an awful lot of work when we don't know how far they go. The source might be kilometres away." She thought about it. "Hot water coming up from under the ocean floor probably has to do with a volcano somewhere. There are lots of volcanoes in Italia..."
"Because we're near a fault line," Luca agreed, remember that from geography class.
"Maybe to start with we should go to the Libreria and find a book about volcanoes," Giulia suggested. "That'll give us an idea where to start looking."
"Kids!" Daniela called from inside. "Suppertime!"
"Coming, Mom!" Luca replied. He moved a few handfuls of mud back over the stones to cover them again.
"Hey," Alberto elbowed Giulia gently. "You wanna know the best thing about sea monster food?"
"Let me guess," she said. "No forks?"
"Not even a spoon!" he agreed, delighted. "You eat it all with your hands."