Kendra and the fool's treasure

She looked down into the hole at everyone splashing around, scooping up more water than sand at this point. They were going to fail. She knew it. This was what everyone in the past had tried. Halo’s map had been used many times. People had dug at this spot. And everyone had always failed.

Glancing back at the masts projecting from the sand, and thinking about the poem, Kendra had an idea. It might be ridiculous, but not much sillier than chasing a stone treasure box as it sank ever deeper into a watery pit.

“Guys,” Kendra declared. “I want to try something.”

"The ship has a wheel,” Kendra said. “What if the treasure is by the wheel of the petrifies ship?”

Still digging, Hako grunted out the poem:

Sift deeply through the golden sand

If you by chance should come to stand

Beside the wheel with bold command

You’ll hold the treasure in your hand

“The map and the poem are as old as the treasure,” Halo said. “The map shows that this is the correct place to dig. The treasure has been seen here, including by us.”

“It’s called the fool’s treasure for a reason,” Kendra said. “It has remained elusive because everyone has missed something. It’s slipping away for a reason. The poem mentions a wheel. Have you seen one?”

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They had cleared several feet in all directions around the ship’s wheel without revealing anything of note.

Except for the oddly placed sandstone block. Could it secretly be a box? Was it there by accident? It looked very plain.

“Here come the eels in force,” Halo said. “Time’s up. I’ll run left, try to misdirect them. Give me a moment and then run right. It’s now or never, people.”

Hako moved out of view. Newel, Doren, and Knox started clambering out of the hole.

“If you by chance should come to stand,” Kendra whispered, “beside the wheel with bold command.”

She went right up to the wheel and laid a hand on it.

“Show me the treasure,” she whispered, hoping nobody heard her. It was a long shot but seemed worth trying.

Her words had no discernible impact.

There had to be some trick to this. The poem asked for a wheel. They had found one. She was beside it. How was she supposed to make a bold command? According to the poem, that was the key to holding the treasure. Would a commander stand at the wheel? Or by the wheel? Where did she need to stand?

Vanessa and Warren climbed out of the hole.

“We’re in trouble,” Warren called down. “Hako wasn’t kidding. Hurry.”

“We better go,” Tanu said.

“Wait,” Kendra said, stepping onto the sandstone block and placing both hands on the stone wheel.

Something was suddenly different.

No, everything was different.

She could feel the waves beneath the beach. Feel the ships buried in the sand.

The experience reminded her of the time she had touched the Oculus. She was perceiving more than her senses ordinarily allowed. Much more.

“No joke,” Warren said. “They’re swarming. Hundreds of them.”

Kendra could feel the eels slithering over the sand, their numberless feet scrambling.

“Come on,” Tanu said, grabbing her arm.

She jerked out of his grasp. “No. This is it. Something is happening.”

“We’re out of time,” Tanu said.

“We can go gaseous,” Kendra said.

Tanu held up two flasks. “We might be cutting it close even for that.”

While talking to Tanu, Kendra continued her extrasensory experience. It was like the beach had become part of her. She could feel how deep the sand went, perceive the encroaching sea, distinguish where shells were buried. She could sense the hole filled with water left by their digging, the mounds of sand around it, the location of the petrified chest. She felt the footfalls of her feeling friends. The hoofs of the satyrs.

And the spider eels. So many spider eels.

She and her friends were in serious trouble.

Kendra brought her focus to the hole where she and Tanu were standing. She could feel the contours of the ship in the sand. Dozens of eels were squirming toward the ship. They would reach it momentarily. She reflexively wanted to raise the ship out of the way.

And suddenly the entire ship was thrust up by the sand. Kendra not only felt the motion through her sand senses but perceived it happening around her. The sand shoved the ship upward, and suddenly she and Tanu were no longer in a hole. Tons of grainy particles cascaded off the deck to either side. Kendra helped will the sand off the deck, pushing with her mind, and the particles went flying.

The petrified ship now rested as high on the beach as it would upon water, leaving much of the vessel submerged in sand. The deck was now well beyond reach of the eels. Kendra could feel that if she used the sand to push the boat too high, it would tip.

“Did you do that?” Tanu asked, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” Kendra said. “I can feel the sand. I can sense the whole beach. But I don’t just feel it. I’m somehow connected to it. I can control the sand, almost like how I can control my hand.”

“You’re commanding it,” Tanu said. “You were right about the poem. Can you help the others?”

From her new, higher vantage point, Kendra could see her friends fleeing to the left and Hako running to the right, all retreating away from the water toward the palm trees. The seaward half of the beach now teemed with eels. Kendra saw Hako stab one in the eye with a knife after dodging its strike. He was about to be overwhelmed.

Besides seeing Hako with her eyes, Kendra could feel his steps on the sand. She forced a wall of sand up around him, the beach immediately responding to her desire. She found that by compacting the sand, she could make it hold its shape nicely, protecting Hako within a tall, open-topped cylinder. Several eels flailed against the base of the cylinder, but none made a serious attempt to scale it.

Turning her attention to Knox, Warren, Vanessa, Newel, and Doren, Kendra envisioned the beach forming an enormous sand castle around them. The creation was simple in shape but massive in scale, with an outer wall more than twenty feet above the beach and a main tower nearly twice that height.

With her friends safely behind sandy barriers, Kendra focused on the top layer of sand beneath the eels and curled it up and away toward the sea, catapulting hundreds of eels into the air over the water. As the layer of sand flung outward into a cloud, Kendra could still feel every grain, and she pulled them back in, returning them to the beach.

“Whoa,” Tanu said. “That was amazing.”

“It isn’t hard,” Kendra said. The beach had somehow become an extension of herself. Controlling it seemed perfectly natural.

A few eels wormed back onto the beach, and Kendra raised a twelve-foot wall just shy of where the sea had encroached, compacting the grains of sand so tightly that no water could leak through. Then she bowed the center of the wall outward, pushing back the tide until there was more beac exposed than when they had first arrived, leaving the ends of the wall curved inland so the water couldn’t slip around the sides.

“I can feel the treasure box under the original hole we dug,” Kendra said.

“Can you raise it to the surface?” Tanu asked.

Kendra found it was a simple matter of pushing up the sand beneath the chest while gently squeezing the sand around it. A moment later the petrified treasure box erupted from the beach and rested in plain sight. Kendra reached out to the sand cylinder and created an archway for Hako to escape, then created a similar archway in the castle wall.

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The instant Kendra moved off the sandstone, she lost all connection to the beach. Even after such a short time in sync with the sand, it felt a little like losing a limb. The sand was now separate and inert, no longer hers to command.

Chapters 23-Shipwreck Key and 24-Desperation Beach