CORBAN

"Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken."

Ecclesiastes 4:12

This is the story of how Corban went from one hero to three. The Bible says God never meant for us to face the world all alone. Two are stronger than one, and three braided together are almost impossible to break.

When we left Corban at the end of the last book, he believed he was the only kid in the whole wide world with a secret like his. One boy. One suit. One ocean to look after.

He was wrong. He was wrong by exactly two.

Their names were Hudson and Jackson, and they sat three desks away from him in school the entire time without anybody knowing a thing. This is the book where Corban finds out he was never supposed to do this alone, which is wonderful news, except for one small problem.

The three of them could not stand each other.

Yet. They could not stand each other yet.

After the whole business with Doctor Undertow, life went right back to normal, which for Corban meant school, taekwondo, and pretending he had not recently saved an entire city with one kick.

But that fall, Corban started noticing things. Strange things. About two boys in his class.

The first was Hudson. Quiet, careful, always thinking. Hudson never, ever drank from the water fountain when other kids were around. And once, when a kid knocked over a whole cup of juice, Corban could have sworn he saw the puddle freeze into a little sheet of ice for half a second before melting again. Hudson had walked away very fast, looking at his own hands like they had betrayed him.

The second was Jackson. Loud, funny, the kind of kid who laughed at everything. But when Jackson got mad, things shook. A pencil would roll off a desk all by itself. A crack would appear in the sidewalk right where he was standing. Jackson always blamed it on trucks driving by. There were never any trucks.

Corban watched them both for a week, and a thought grew in his chest, right next to the little blue light.

What if I am not the only one?

It all came out one rainy Tuesday, by the worst possible water fountain, in the worst possible way.

A kid spilled a water bottle. Hudson flinched, and the whole puddle turned to ice with a crackle. At the exact same moment, Jackson jumped back in surprise and the floor cracked under his sneakers. And Corban, who had been watching them both, gasped so loud that all three boys spun around and stared at each other.

For a long, frozen second, nobody said a word.

Then all three of them said the same thing at the same time.

"You have powers too?!"

It should have been the best moment of their lives. Three kids who thought they were alone in the world, finding out they were not. You would think they would have hugged. You would think there would have been happy tears.

There were not. Because the very next thing that happened was an argument.

Here is a thing about three kids who each used to be the most special person they knew. Put them in a room together, and suddenly nobody is the most special anymore. And some kids do not handle that very well.

Corban said he should be the leader, because he had already beaten a supervillain, thank you very much. Hudson said that was silly, because ice was clearly the smartest, most useful power, and a leader should be smart. Jackson said they were both wrong, because he could literally lift a boulder, and lifting boulders was cooler than either of them.

They argued at lunch. They argued at recess. They argued so much that they forgot to be amazed that they had found each other at all.

They went home that day as three separate, very stubborn boys. Not a team. Not even friends. Just three kids who happened to share a secret and a bad attitude.

And far out under the waves, in the cold and the dark, something was already swimming toward shore.

Doctor Undertow had not forgotten about the little blue hero who wrecked his beautiful machine. Oh no. Down in his throne of junk, he had been stewing about it for months, which is a long time to stew, even for a villain.

"One hero beat me," he grumbled. "Fine. Let us see one hero beat THIS."

And from the deepest, darkest, gunkiest trench in the sea, he called up something enormous. Something made of shadow and old fishing nets and pure bad mood. It had eight long arms, two glowing yellow eyes, and a hunger that could swallow a pier.

He called it the Gloomtopus.

That very weekend, as luck would have it, the whole class took a trip to the coast. The pier, the waves, the snow cones, all of it. Corban was there. Hudson was there. Jackson was there. The three of them stood as far apart from each other as they possibly could, still sulking.

So when the water went dark, and the pier began to groan, and eight shadowy arms came rising out of the sea, all three boys were standing in exactly the right place, in exactly the wrong mood, to do something about it.

Three watches beeped. Three suits snapped on. Three heroes leaped at the Gloomtopus from three different directions, and that, right there, was the whole problem.

It was a disaster. A loud, splashy, embarrassing disaster.

Corban flew in for a kick, and Jackson's quake shook the pier so hard that Corban missed and belly-flopped into the surf. Jackson reared back to smash a tentacle, and Hudson froze that exact tentacle so it was too slippery to hit. Hudson tried to build an ice wall, and Corban accidentally flew straight through it.

Every single thing each of them did got in the way of the other two. The Gloomtopus did not even have to try. It just sat there in the waves while three of the most powerful kids on Earth tripped over each other like puppies on a slippery floor.

And one by one, the Gloomtopus scooped them up in its long shadowy arms and held them high above the water, squeezing tighter and tighter.

Trapped in a giant slimy arm, dangling over the cold sea, Corban looked down at his own chest and noticed something that scared him more than the monster did.

His light was dim.

Not from fear. He knew what fear felt like by now, and this was different. He glanced over at Hudson, squeezed in another arm. Hudson's teal light was dim too. So was Jackson's green one. All three of them, flickering and faint, right when they needed them most.

And Corban remembered the rule. The suit ran on courage. But there was a second half to that rule he had never needed before, because in the last book he had been all by himself. Here it was, learned the hard way:

The light cannot shine through a heart that is too busy being proud.

All three of them had spent the whole fight trying to win alone. Trying to be the most special. Trying to prove they did not need the other two. And every time they did, their lights had gone a little dimmer, because you cannot be brave and full of yourself at the very same moment. There is only room for one.

Corban looked across at the other two boys, really looked at them, and for the first time he did not see two kids trying to take his spot. He saw two kids exactly as scared, exactly as stuck, and exactly as alone as he used to be.

"Guys," he called out. "I'm sorry. I can't do this without you. I don't WANT to do this without you. Trust me. On three."

Something funny happens to the word "sorry." When you really mean it, it works like a key. And three boys hanging over the ocean were about to unlock something nobody had ever seen before.

"Okay," Hudson said. "Okay, fine, together," said Jackson. They stopped struggling against the arms, and they stopped struggling against each other, and they each reached out one hand until their three wrist-shells were almost touching.

"THREE!" they shouted.

The instant their three shells touched, all three lights blazed back to life at once, brighter together than any of them had ever been alone. Water and ice and earth and courage all braided into a single beam of blue and teal and green, spinning like a hurricane made of friendship.

The beam tore the Gloomtopus loose. It blasted every shadowy arm wide open. The boys dropped free, caught each other in the air, and sent the whole roaring wave of light crashing into the monster.

The Gloomtopus shrieked, curled up small, and shot backward into the deep dark trench it came from, all the way down to where Doctor Undertow was waiting, who got a very large, very wet surprise dumped right on his throne.

"THREE of them now?!"

They floated down onto the wet sand, all three of them, soaked and laughing and completely out of breath. For a minute, nobody could even talk. They just sat there in the foam, grinning like fools.

"That," Jackson finally said, "was the coolest thing that has ever happened to anybody, ever."

"We were terrible at first," Hudson said.

"We were SO terrible," Corban agreed, and all three of them cracked up again.

And sitting there, Corban understood the thing the whole day had been trying to teach him. By himself, he was strong. But three friends who trust each other are not just three times as strong. They are a whole new thing entirely, something that does not even exist until they stop trying to be special on their own and decide to be a team instead.

He remembered what his dad always said about the brave being put there by God. And he thought, quietly, that maybe friends were a little like that too. A gift you did not earn and did not expect, that turns out to be exactly the thing you needed all along.

"We need a name," Jackson said.

They thought about it. They looked out at the calm water, three lights glowing steady in three chests, finally pointed the same direction.

"The Tide Trio," said Corban. And it stuck.

What they did not notice, as they walked home that evening, was a small lopsided sandcastle near the dunes. A sandcastle that had not been there that morning. A sandcastle with a single seashell on its highest turret, glowing very faintly, as if it were waiting for someone to press it.

But that is a story for Book Three.

Super Corban is a made-up adventure. But the truth hidden inside this one comes from a real book of the Bible called Ecclesiastes, in chapter 4.

It holds one of the best pieces of advice ever written down: do not try to do life all by yourself. It says two are better than one, because if one of them falls down, the other can reach out and help him back up. But it feels sad and lonely to fall and have no one there to lift you.

Then it paints a picture you can almost hold in your hands. One single string is easy to snap in two. But braid three strings together into one cord, and you can pull and pull and barely break it at all.

That is exactly what happened to Corban, Hudson, and Jackson. Alone, each one was just a single strand. Braided together as the Triple Tide, they were nearly unbreakable. God gives us friends and family so we can hold each other up.