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matter what time of day or night.”
    “How do we use them?” I asked, turning my shell over in my hands.
    “You say out loud the color of the phone you want to speak to — purple, silver, or gold — and that person’s shell phone will light up. When they pick it up, speak into your shell. They will hear you. Are we clear?”
    We nodded.
    “I need you to keep me up-to-date with any important information.”
    I opened my mouth to ask a question. He answered it before I had the chance.
    “If you don’t know whether something is important or not, assume it is and contact me. Understand?”
    “We understand,” we said together.
    “Good. Now — take these as well.” He reached back into the drawer and pulled out two small bottles. He handed us one each.
    “What are these?” I asked, studying my bottle. It looked like the kind of thing Millie kept her herbs and potions in — a tiny glass bottle with a cork in the top and a bright-orange liquid inside that shimmered and glowed like smoke from a flare.
    “The sea where you are going is far, far colder than anything you have swum in before,” Neptune said. “Full merfolk can adapt to all waters, but you are semi-mers and do not have that power. The first time you enter the water, you must put this on your scales. It will protect you. Use the whole bottle and it will let you swim in these waters for a week. That should be plenty of time.”
    Should
be? What if it
wasn’t
? What if the mission took longer than that? I didn’t ask out loud. If Neptune thought a week was long enough for this mission, I didn’t want to argue for us to take longer.
    “Next,” Neptune said briskly, “I will arrange a cover for you.”
    “A cover?” I asked.
    “No one is to know where you are going, or why.”
    I considered pointing out that seeing as, strictly speaking,
we
didn’t actually know where we were going, he was pretty safe on this one.
    “Mr. Beeston will escort you,” Neptune went on. “He will be told that this is a special secret task for me — but he will not be told about the nightmares, or the extent of the threat.”
    “Why Mr. Beeston?” I asked. “Why not our parents?”
    “Beeston can live on land and in the sea,” Neptune explained. “Both may be needed. And for all his faults, he can be trusted.”
    I swallowed any reply to
that.
    “I will arrange all the details and send Beeston to see you when it is done,” Neptune continued. “Are we clear?”
    Were we clear? I held back a nervous laugh.
    “Listen,” Neptune said. “This is all you need to know: there is a threat; it is big; it will come from the Land of the Midnight Sun; you are to stop it and find out who stole my memory. It’s as simple as that.”
    The nervous laugh I was holding back froze in my stomach as the extent of our task really began to sink in.
    “I will always be grateful to you,” he added. “When this is over, there will be rewards.”
    “We understand,” Aaron said.
    Finally finding my voice, I added, “We’ll do everything we can. We won’t let you down.”
    Neptune looked at us both and smiled. “I know you won’t,” he said. “That is why I chose you.”

    Neptune was true to his word in getting things organized.
    The next morning, Aaron was over at my place. Aaron’s mom and Millie were around, too. Millie was reading Mom’s tarot while Aaron and I looked on and tried not to burst out laughing every time she said things like “The empress next to the four of cups — very auspicious,” in a deep, meaningful voice.
    Dad turned up halfway through the reading, poking his face through the trapdoor in the floor and leaning his arms over the side as he blew a kiss to Mom.
    “Shhhhh!” Millie hissed. “I’m fully attuned and I don’t want you disturbing the spiritual essence of the tarot.”
    Which made me want to laugh even more.
    Just as Millie was finishing the reading and had begun to shuffle her cards, there was a sharp rap on the door.
    “Only