With Helena and Arturo headed to the local charity shop to find him some clothes, the older kids got Professor Hamid settled at the kitchen table. Giulia opened the curtains to let the morning sunshine in, and the Professor took a sketchbook and a mechanical pencil out of her bag and got to work.
Alberto sat down across from her and watched, fascinated. He'd hoped that at some point during the holiday he'd be able to watch Giulia's mother do some of her painting, but this was interesting, too. Professor Hamid was very precise about her drawing, making sure to get the shapes right and that everything was exactly life-sized. It seemed like a very slow way to go about it recording an object when there was an obvious alternative.
"We've got a camera you can borrow," he suggested, referring to Giulia's.
"No, thank you," the Professor replied. "For things like this, drawings are better. With a camera you get perspective and shadows, but in a drawing I can make sure everything is to the same scale and all the important details are clear." She used a tool to measure the thickness of the amphora fragment's handle, and marked it down on her paper. "If you want to talk, why don't you tell me some of your sea monster stories? I'm curious now."
"Oh." Luca swallowed and looked at his friends, unsure of how to answer.
"They live around the Island where our hideout is," said Alberto, who knew exactly how to answer. "And they like to steal stuff off boats. If you've got food with you, especially, they'll pop up and grab it when you're not looking, but they'll take almost anything they can carry."
Luca tried not to laugh, but couldn't hold in a small snorting sound. "Yeah, Alberto knows all about that."
Professor Hamid smiled. "That sounds mischievous, but not very monstrous. What else? Can they come out on land?"
"Yeah, but you'll never see one," Alberto told her. "When they get out of the water and dry off, they transform and look exactly like humans."
That was a bit too much for Luca. "Don't tell her that, Alberto," he protested. "It sounds sort of silly, don't you think?"
"It's not unheard of," Professor Hamid said. "In Ireland they have stories about creatures called selkies. In the water they look like seals, but on land they take off their seal skins and assume a human form."
"See?" Alberto said, and gently elbowed Luca in the ribs.
"It doesn't matter anyway," Giulia added, "because it's all make-believe. Right?"
"Right," said Luca carefully. He wondered if there were a way to ask for more information about selkies without it seeming weird. Was that just another word for sea monsters, or did the association with seals rather than fish mean they were something different? Uncle Ugo had said there were people up north who hunted seals and walruses... maybe they wore sealskin clothes, and the humans just didn't understand the difference?
The sound of a commotion downstairs made everybody look up. Voices could be heard, and then multiple sets of footsteps came up the stairs – some were heavy, some light, and some uneven and stumbling. With a worried frown, Giulia went to see who was coming, but before she could touch the door, it was opened from the outside.
There were four people crowded into the tiny hallway, only three of whom were familiar. In the back was Massimo, and in front of him were Ercole's former friends, Guido and Ciccio. These two had turned out to be fairly harmless when they weren't desperate to please an older, cooler ringleader. Ciccio's widowed father ran the Focacceria, while Guido's father was a fisherman and his mother the town's schoolteacher.
The person who'd opened the door was a stranger: a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with blue eyes and long dark hair in spiralling curls, leaning on Guido to help her stay upright. She looked very annoyed, and she was wearing a dress made of woven seagrass. While Luca, Giulia, and Alberto had never seen her out of the water before, they could make a guess who she must be.
"Giordana?" asked Luca.
"Where is Arturo?" she demanded. "I told him if he came up here again I was going to come and get him!"
The kids looked at Professor Hamid. She was still sitting there with her pencil in her hand, but rather than working on her drawing, she was blinking in confusion at their visitors.
"He's not here," said Giulia quickly. "Mamma took him to, uh, go get the laundry." She couldn't tell the truth while Professor Hamid was here. Not when Helena herself had already told a different story.
Giordana turned to her escorts. "Where's that?" she asked.
"The laundromat? Number twelve Via Casarosa," Guido replied.
"Can you show me?"
"Sure." Guido started helping her down the steps again. Giordana was unsteady on her feet, but seemed determined to get it right. Ciccio began to follow, then stopped to ask a question.
"Um," he said, and lowered his voice. "Does Giordana have a boyfriend?"
"What?" asked Alberto.
"I don't think so," said Luca, "but I've been away."
"I only see her when she's telling me I'm a bad influence," Alberto said.
"And I just met her yesterday," was all Giulia could offer.
Ciccio nodded, disappointed, and followed his friend back down to the street.
That just left Massimo. He took in the Professor's silent bewilderment, and thought he'd better supply an explanation. "We have people in this area who live off the sea as their ancestors did. We have begun trying to bring them into the twentieth century, but many still prefer their traditional ways."
"I see," said Professor Hamid. The kids could almost hear the gears in her head turning, as she tried to reconcile this with what they'd said earlier about Arturo wearing the seagrass trousers on a bet. After a moment, she appeared to give up and returned to her drawings. "Interesting place, the Cinque Terre," she observed.
Soon after that, Massimo left to start the day's fishing. The kids hung around while the Professor worked on her drawings, and Alberto brought some pencils and paper downstairs so that he could draw, too. Before long, Professor Hamid was giving all three of them a lesson in archaeological drawing, which was apparently a very special skill.
"You have to draw what you see, not what you know," she said, placing one of the glass perfume bottles in the middle of the table for them. "One thing I find helps sometimes is if you don't look at the paper while you're drawing. Follow the edges of the bottle with your eyes, and move your hand the same way."
The idea of drawing without looking seemed very strange to the kids. Alberto frowned at his blank page... if he couldn't look at it, how was he supposed to keep the lines straight?
"You can fix it later," Professor Hamid assured him. "For now just try it."
Alberto did so, and found it surprisingly difficult. He always looked at what he was drawing, and the urge to do so now was almost impossible to ignore. He got all the way from the lip of the bottle to the broken left handle before he simply couldn't take it anymore, but when he gave up and looked, it was a bit of a pleasant surprise. He'd expected an incomprehensible scrawl, but instead it looked very much like the shape of the bottle handle. Renewing his focus, Alberto kept his eyes on the bottle and drew the rest of the shape.
His second look was not as gratifying. The drawing was bottle-shaped, but the two halves were different sizes, and the ends of the line didn't meet.
But Professor Hamid seemed very pleased. "That's great," she said. "See how you got the way one of the handles is a tighter curve than the other? Would you have noticed that if you'd been trying to draw it while looking at the paper? Or would you have just drawn what you think a bottle looks like?"
Luca and Giulia both showed their own drawings, too, and neither looked much better. Giulia's pencil had wandered off across the page to draw something as wide as it was tall, while Luca had kept sneaking peeks and had ended up with a drawing of a bottle much like he would have made from memory.
"Now you can try to fix it," Professor Hamid said, "but the point is that you only fix it to make it look more like what it really looks like. So you erase one side and re-draw it so that it's the same size as the other side," she pointed her pencil at Alberto's drawing, "but you don't fix it to be symmetrical in places where it isn't in real life. A person looking at your drawing should be able to find out as much about the artifact as they would from examining the original."
Alberto nodded and took the eraser to the half of his drawing that had turned out too small. If this were a thing other people could do, it was something Alberto could do, too.
Luca was now pondering something else, though. "So if I brought you a drawing of some ancient Egyptian picture writing, would you be able to read it from the drawing alone?" He was thinking of the inscription on the back of the little gold face Uncle Ugo had brought him.
"I might have to look a couple of things up," said Professor Hamid, "but yes, I can read hieroglyphics. Do you have some?"
"Not with me," said Luca, "but I'll see if I can draw them for you." He didn't know if his uncle's warning about taking the objects to the surface applied to both of them or just the shell, but he didn't want to take the chance.
A few minutes later, they heard the door open and close downstairs, and Helena's voice called out, "we're back!"
Again there were footsteps on the stairs – this time only one set as Arturo came charging up and burst into the room to show off his new clothes. "What do you think?" he asked, turning around to let them see his blue and green striped shirt and grey plaid pageboy hat. "Do I look like a..."
"Grownup!" Giulia finished for him, as Helena entered the room as well. "Yes, definitely! The hat looks just like Papà's!"
"Looks great!" Alberto agreed with a thumbs up. "Except for the pants." Arturo was still wearing his seaweed trousers, perhaps mindful of the story that he was doing so as part of a bet.
"Arturo," Luca added, "your sister came looking for you."
Arturo's proud smile melted away. "Giordana? She came here?"
"Yeah. We told her you and Mamma had gone to get your stuff from the laundry," Giulia explained, "so she had Guido and Ciccio show her the way to the laundromat." Lucky it was several blocks from the charity shop, or Helena and Arturo would probably have met them on the way.
"I gotta go," said Arturo. He turned and fled the room, but only made it halfway down the steps before he came running back in to pull his shirt and hat off and hand them to Helena. That done, he dashed out again. "Grazie mille, Signora Marcovaldo!" they heard him call.
Once again, a puzzled silence fell.
"Well!" Alberto clapped his hands loudly. "I think let's go to Luca's house and see that fossil thing his uncle gave him, huh?"
"Great idea!" Giulia agreed. "We'll take my bike because it's a bit out of town!" Just in case Professor Hamid thought of trying to look for them.
"Stay warm," said Helena, "and let me know if you'll be staying for dinner again."
"I will, Mamma," Giulia promised. "Can I talk to you, real quick?"
She took her mother out into the stairwell to tell her what Massimo had said about people who lived off the sea. Helena promised to remember it, and then waved as the boys piled into the cart Giulia pulled behind her bicycle.
"Santa mozzarella!" she groaned, pedalling off up the hill. "It was never this stressful at school!" They'd occasionally had to come up with excuses why Luca couldn't participate in certain activities, but they'd never had to do it as fast as they had today, and some of the teachers had proven themselves trustworthy enough to know the truth. With Professor Hamid only here for the day, they couldn't make that kind of judgment, no matter how nice she seemed.
"At school you wouldn't have had Arturo," said Alberto.
"Or Ercole," Giulia grumbled. He was going to cause problems yet, she was sure of it. "When the Professor comes back in the summer, we're gonna have to get our stories straight about the shipwreck. Alberto, you have to figure out how you're gonna say you found it, and then we'll all have to know in case anybody asks."
"At least we got some time to figure it out," Alberto said.
"And in the summer when your Mom's not here, Arturo won't keep showing up for chocolate," Luca added. That would be one less thing to worry about.
Giulia biked not quite to the top of the hill, then doubled back and went down to the little beach west of town, where Luca and Alberto had their bike crash and subsequent argument back in August. It was far enough out of the way that Professor Hamid wasn't likely to stumble upon it, while still providing safe access to the ocean. There they stashed their bicycle and warm clothes among the rocks, and waded out into the surf.
"I hope school isn't going to be start being like that," Luca groaned, as they ducked under.
Giulia shivered a little, wondering how long it would take her to get used to the weird feeling of transforming before she could just go back and forth without thinking about it like the boys did. "It won't be," she promised, putting a hand on Luca's shoulder. "It'll be just like before, only now we'll both be stuck inside when it rains... and we kind of were before, anyway." When Luca had to stay home from things like class trips, Giulia had often stayed with him, just so he wouldn't be lonely.
But the thought made her realize another of the things that probably had Helena so worried – Giulia was going to have to tell a little lie to everybody she met for the rest of her life, humans and sea monsters both. It wouldn't be intentional, but she would always know she was doing it, and that wasn't a nice idea. She tried to dismiss it, reminding herself that it didn't seem to bother Luca.
Their next encounter was not designed to improve anyone's nerves. As they passed over the fallow fields on their way to Luca's house, the three met up with Signora Trota.
Both Arturo and Giordana took after their father's green colouring. Their mother was dark pink and purple, with red eyes and a fondness for clunky jewellery made of cowrie shells and sand dollars. Her necklaces and bracelets clinked as she swam out to meet them.
"Hello!" she called out. "You three – what have you done with Arturo?"
"Nothing, Signora Trota," Luca said. "He just likes to see Giulia's Mom for hot chocolate."
Attinia Trota shook her head. "I don't like this new trend of being friendly with the land monsters!" she huffed. "It'll all end badly, you mark my words. I remember my grandmother telling me that when she was young, she used to lure them into the water and drown them. We should have just kept doing that and been rid of them!" She looked at Giulia. "What do your parents think of you being friends with these two, hmm? Up there wandering through the land monster town like you belong there?"
Giulia didn't know whether to laugh at the question or feel a little ill. There were stories about mermaids drowning sailors, weren't there? Was that really something sea monsters had actually done?
"They worry about me a bit," she managed as a reply.
"It's good to know that someone in this ocean has some sense," said Signora Trota.
"Arturo did say he had to go when he found out Giordana had come looking for him," Luca said, "so I'm sure he'll be back any time now."
"When he gets here he's going to be hearing about those chores he hasn't been doing," Signora Trota vowed, but she seemed satisfied by the news. Without a goodbye, she headed back home to wait for her children.
The three kids breathed sighs of relief. That conversation had been less funny than it had when they'd encountered Giordana while looking for shells.
"What swam up her butt and died?" Alberto grumbled.
"We're definitely not telling her who I am," Giulia said. She would just have to hope that Alberto didn't mention it. "I'm not interested in getting drowned."
"You can't drown," Luca reminded her. "If you put your face in the water you'll Change and be able to breathe just fine."
That was reassuring, but the whole encounter had left Giulia so uncomfortable that she almost wanted to go home. That wouldn't be any better, though, because Professor Hamid would still be there – and anyway, Giulia Marcovaldo was not a quitter. She'd raced in the Portorosso Cup year after year until she won. Even the year she threw up, she'd wanted to continue but the priest and the volunteers had made her stop and lie down. She definitely wasn't going to quit this. She'd made that wish and even if she could have thought it through a little better, she'd been having a great time and so had Luca and Alberto. Grumpy Signora Trota was definitely not going to be the one who spoiled it for them!
Anyway, even if the other sea monsters wouldn't like her, as Luca's grandmother had pointed out, Giulia knew where her friends were. That was where they headed now, back to Luca's house. They arrived to find the surprising sight of Uncle Ugo helping Grandma to repair a trellis.
"Hi, kids," said Grandma.
"Hello, children," Uncle Ugo said. "When I was your age I would do things like this around the farm. I remember teaching Lorenzo the different kinds of knots! I wanted to see if I still remembered them. You don't need a lot of knots in the Deep. Just patience. You sit there, the whale carcass just drifts by on the current. Delicious." He licked his lips. "What are you up to today?"
"I brought my friends to see the stuff you gave me," Luca explained. "One of Giulia's books said it was an ammonite, and it looked sort of like a squid. How old did you say it was?" he asked her.
"A hundred and eighty-five million years," Giulia remembered.
"It takes a very long time for things to turn to stone," said Uncle Ugo. "In the Deep there is all the time in the world."
Before going indoors, the kids stopped to check on the two-day-old fry. The baby fish were still in their pen, which had been moved to a different set of rocks so they would have fresh algae to graze on. As young as they were, they already seemed bigger and less transparent.
"Are baby sea monsters see-through like that?" Giulia wanted to know.
"Yeah, the first few months," Luca replied. "Once they're about a year old their colour comes in. I've heard people say it's faster if they get more sunshine. I guess that's what happened to Uncle Ugo. There's no sun in the Deep."
Giulia stuck a finger through the mesh as far as her webbing would allow, and the curious little fish swam over and tried to nibble on it. Their tiny jaws weren't strong enough to hurt, but it did tickle enough to make her giggle.
"Oh, don't do that," said Luca. "If they learn it's okay to bite people, they'll keep doing it, and when they're bigger it'll be a problem."
"Sorry." Giulia pulled her finger back, much to the disappointment of the fry. She could have sworn she saw them pouting at her. Was she starting to learn how to communicate with fish?
"Enrico used to bite if he got mad," Luca said. "I was trying to train him out of it. I wish he hadn't run away."
Alberto leaned to whisper to Giulia. "Between you and me, I'm pretty sure they ate Enrico and nobody had the heart to tell him."
When the kids entered the house a couple of minutes later, they found Daniela inside repairing one of the sponge mats. "Morning!" she said to them. "Did you have a good sleepover? You didn't stay up too late, did you? Children your age need your sleep."
"No, Mom, we went to bed on time," Luca promised.
"Good, good. Giulia, are you feeling better today? No more of that genie putting awful ideas in your head?"
"I'm fine, Signora Paguro," Giulia promised, although what Signora Trota had said was still weighing on her.
As if she'd read Giulia's mind, Daniela said, "you should have heard the earful Attinia Trota gave me this morning. Apparently Arturo's taken to wandering into town for sweets and she thinks it's all my fault. I tried to tell her he's perfectly safe with Giulia's family, but to hear her talk you'd think he'd just wrapped himself up in a net and climbed into the back of a fishing boat!"
"He's probably home by now. He ran off in a big hurry," Luca said.
Daniela nodded. "By the way, did you happen to see Chiara Zigrino this morning? I've been meaning to ask her for some cuttings of that stuff she plants to keep the starfish out of her urchin beds."
"Not today, but we'll probably run into her on the way back to town later," said Luca. He swam up to take his fossil and the golden face down from the shelf, carrying them as if they were made of glass. The yellow minerals gleamed in the morning sunshine as he set them on the table.
"Wow," said Giulia. "The ones at the museum weren't that shiny."
"I asked him where he got it," Luca said, "and he told me there was a big cliff at the bottom of the ocean that was just full of them, hundreds and hundreds! I wonder how they all died. Do you think there was a landslide or something that buried them all at once? And then they stayed there for a hundred and eighty-five million years."
"How does anybody know these things are that old?" Alberto asked. "Some of the buildings in Portorosso might have years on them, but these sure don't."
"I don't know," Giulia admitted. "I know there's something they can do with measuring how much carbon is in things, but I don't know if that works on fossils. I think it's got something to do with which rocks they were found in." It had never occurred to her to wonder about that, but now that it did, it seemed like a very good question. She looked at Luca, who'd been reading every book he could find since September, to see if he knew, but he was waiting to show them the second object.
"This one," he said, "Uncle Ugo said was probably Egyptian. It's got writing on the back, so I thought we could draw it so Professor Hamid can tell us what it says."
Alberto took an interest immediately. "I'll do it," he volunteered. "I'm the best at drawing." And he wanted a chance to see if he could get it exactly right, the way the Professor had instructed.
Luca got him a pencil, and turned one of his shorter letters from school over to the blank side. The boys had discovered over the past few months that pencils would write underwater, though erasing mistakes was pretty much impossible. Alberto did his first drawing while staring only at the amulet, and it came out wobbly and lopsided. Once he had that, though, he started on a second version, which would include all the details he'd noticed the first time, but now at the right sizes.
Giulia floated just above the table, watching. She didn't consider herself very good at drawing even though her mother had tried to teach her, telling her to try drawing the space around things instead of the things themselves. Such advice had never made much sense to her, but Alberto seemed to have picked up on the 'draw without looking' idea right away. He was very focused on what he was doing, almost not even noticing Giulia was there.
Something moved in the corner of Giulia's eye, and she looked to see what it was. Luca had picked up his fossil and was passing his hand over it, watching the shadow it cast.
"Luca?" she asked.
He blinked and then smiled sheepishly. "Sorry. I was thinking about eclipses again. You can see an eclipse of the moon from anywhere on earth as long as it's night, but you can only see an eclipse of the sun from certain places."
"That's because the moon is smaller than earth, so its shadow only covers part of us," Giulia told him. "There was something about it in another one of my schoolbooks... not the one I gave you. I don't know where I put it." She didn't remember seeing it when they'd been cleaning up last night. It must be at her mother's apartment in Genova. "I can draw you a diagram, though." She took one of the pages Luca had offered for Alberto to draw on the back of, and tried to reproduce the diagram as she remembered it, with the moon's two shadows.
"Careful, don't push too hard," Luca cautioned her.
"Got it." Like so many other things, drawing underwater was different than on land. "So if you're standing over here," she said, pointing to one side of the big circle that represented the earth, "you can see right past the moon and the sun looks normal. If you're here, at the edge of the shadow, you see the sun partly covered, and if you're here with the moon exactly in between you and the sun, you see the entire eclipse."
"I get it," Luca nodded.
"You think that's what's on Arturo's roof?" asked Alberto.
Luca and Giulia both stared at him for a moment.
"No?" he asked. "I just thought the triangles..."
"Yes!" Luca exclaimed. "Yes, I bet that is what's on Arturo's roof! Come on, let's go check, right now!" He grabbed Alberto's hand and took off out the door, only moments later remembering to turn around and make sure Giulia was coming. "Come on!" he urged her. "Andiamo!"
Giulia swam as hard as she could to try to catch up with them. It was a good thing she was getting better at it.
"Children?" asked Uncle Ugo, as they dashed past him and Grandma.
"We're gonna go see something!" Giulia called back to them. "We'll be back!"
They darted over the fallow farmland, frightening schools of fish and startling Luca's father, who was letting his crabs pick at the stubble in one of the fields.
"Sorry, Dad!" Luca shouted.
By the time they reached the Trota house, Giulia was breathing so hard she could feel the cool water rushing through her overheated gills – now that was a strange sensation. She and Alberto paused to catch their breath, while Luca went to the door of the house and called out for the occupants.
"Signora Trota!" he said. "Giordana! Arturo? Anybody home?"
There was no reply. Luca poked his head inside for a look around, then swam back to his friends, frustrated. "They're not there," he said.
"Arturo left before we did," said Giulia. "He should have gotten back already."
"He probably did," said Alberto, "and his Mom dragged him out to do those chores she mentioned. Giordana's probably distracted by Ciccio trying to romance her," he snickered.
Luca swam back and forth distractedly, like he was pacing. "We can't just scrape off their whole roof without their permission."
"Arturo seemed fine with doing it earlier," said Alberto with a shrug.
"Maybe we can just look at what's already uncovered," Giulia suggested. "We'll uncover a little more around the edges if we have to, just to make it clear, but we'll wait to ask before we do a whole lot more."
That seemed like a reasonable compromise, so they set to work clearing away plankton and sand that had settled on the part Arturo had cleared for them the other day. The inscription appeared in a series of triangles and circles with lines through the middle, which did indeed look very much like the diagrams of the earth, moon, and sun that Giulia remembered from her book. Since they were close to the edge, they removed a little more of the bladderwracke there, and found more carvings. None of it was readable, and when they reached the eaves, they realized that part of the slab had broken away.
"This isn't even all of it!" Luca exclaimed. Where had this stone come from and what had it once been for?
Giulia had scraped a little further into the other end of the cleared area, and found another diagram that seemed to show the moon circling the earth. On this one, however, the triangles that ought to have shown where the shadows went were pointed in the wrong directions. She puzzled over that for a moment, then realized what it meant. "Ragazzi! Look here! This one isn't about eclipses. This one is about tides. They knew that the moon causes the tides!"
Luca scraped some algae out of the grooves with a finger, his eyes wide. "They did! Look, the moon is just ahead of the triangle. That's what Signor Bruzzone in astronomy said, was that the tides are behind the moon a little."
"How does the moon cause the tides?" asked Alberto.
"Because of gravity again," Luca replied. "The moon pulls on the ocean and raises it."
"Does that mean if I jump towards the moon, I'll float away?" Alberto's expression was somewhere between skeptical and hopeful.
"Of course not," said Luca. "I think we'd know if people could do that."
"Why not?" Alberto insisted. "If the moon can lift the whole ocean, why can't it lift me?"
Luca's knowledge ran out at that point. He looked at Giulia.
"Because the earth has more gravity than the moon. It pulls on you harder," she said.
"Then it should pull harder on the ocean, too," Alberto pointed out.
"I don't know the whole reason, I just know it doesn't work that way," Giulia said.
Alberto looked up at the surface high above them, narrowing his eyes, and Luca guessed that the next time he saw the moon he was going to take a running leap for it.
They continued working at the roof, their earlier agreement not to uncover too much of it now totally forgotten. What they were finding was far too interesting to just leave it buried, no matter what Signora Trota might think. As the cleared area got bigger, more diagrams appeared, suggesting not just tides and eclipses but maybe also the phases of the moon. Further still, there was some sort of table, with rows and columns of indecipherable writing.
"It's a calendar!" Luca said suddenly, grabbing the back strap of Giulia's bathing suit. "Remember in the encyclopedia in the school library, we found that perpetual calendar where you could look up the day of the week for any date you wanted?"
"Yes!" she said. "I was born on a Saturday, and you and Alberto were both born on Tuesdays."
"Right," Luca nodded. "What if this is like that, except what you can look up is the phase of the moon and what the tide will be?"
"And whether there'll be an eclipse!" Giulia agreed, delighted.
"So a long time ago, sea monsters were astronomers!" Luca was thrilled.
"And builders," Alberto put in. "Don't forget about all the water conduits."
"Can't forget those," said Luca. Now this was the sort of thing he'd hoped to find out – that his ancestors had been scientists and engineers. Maybe they and the humans had shared their discoveries! Or... maybe they hadn't. Maybe the ancient sea monsters had jealously guarded what they learned, like Oannes refusing to tell the humans about his magic. Or like the genie had suggested, when he'd thought they'd hurt Giulia for wanting to learn from them. That was what he'd expected her to do, wasn't it? He'd mentioned learning sorcery from Scylla and alchemy from Charybdis. Who had those people been?
"We've got to find some more of this stuff," said Giulia. "I bet nobody knows about it. Humans definitely don't, and if sea monsters did we wouldn't be having to figure it out for ourselves. This can be what we write our book about, sea monster astronomers!"
"You two can write it, and I'll draw the pictures," Alberto agreed. "If I get it right, maybe we'll even find somebody who can read this."
"Guys!" shouted Arturo. "Guys!"
All three of them looked up to find the younger boy swimming towards them, waving his arms.
"Guys!" he panted. "Have you seen Mom or Giordana?"