CORBAN

"If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine and go look for the one that wandered off?"

Matthew 18:12

In this book, the Tide Trio learn that real warriors protect the small and the weak. Jesus said that is exactly how God treats every single one of us. Not one little one is ever too small for Him to chase down.

Up until now, every adventure the Tide Trio had was on the land or right at the edge of the water. The beach. The pier. The shallow waves where your toes can still touch the sand.

This book is different. This book goes down. Way down, past where the light reaches, to a place most people never even dream is real. There is a whole kingdom under the sea, full of creatures who have been there since long before there were cities, and right now that kingdom is in terrible trouble.

Its colors are going out. One reef at a time, the bright is turning to gray.

And the little creatures who live there have done the bravest thing a small creature can do when something big and scary is happening.

They asked for help.

The Tide Trio were in the Sandcastle, arguing about snacks, when something tapped on the great glass wall that looked out into the sea.

It was a fish. A small orange-and-white fish, no bigger than Corban's hand, and he was knocking on the glass with one little fin as hard as he could, his eyes huge and frightened.

Pip flew over and pressed a button, and a tiny door in the glass let the fish swim through into the air pocket. His name, he told them in a high bubbly voice, was Fin. He came from the Reef Kingdom, far out and far down, and he had swum for two whole days without resting to find them.

"Please," Fin gasped. "The reef is dying. A witch came, a great eel witch, and she is pulling the color out of everything. The coral, the fish, the light. Where she passes, the world goes gray and cold and still. The big creatures already ran away. There is no one left to help us but the small ones. And the small ones cannot fight a witch."

Corban looked at his two best friends. Nobody argued about snacks anymore.

"Then we'd better go be the big ones," he said.

They dove from the Sandcastle's launch bay straight into the cold open sea, and the change came over them at once. Scales, tails, armor of coral and pearl. Three boys became three warriors of the deep.

Fin led them down, and down, past schools of silver fish and forests of waving kelp, until the sunlight overhead faded to a soft blue glow. And then they saw it. The Reef Kingdom, rising out of the dark like a city made of jewels, towers of pink and gold and purple coral stretching up taller than buildings.

But half of it was gray. A creeping, colorless gray, spreading out from somewhere deep in the heart of the reef, swallowing the jewels one by one.

The creatures of the reef gathered around the three warriors, and oh, what creatures they were. Little merfolk no taller than Pip. Crabs in armor. Seahorses with kind eyes. Octopuses that changed color when they were nervous, which was often.

An old merwoman with white hair floating around her like a cloud came forward. She was the keeper of the reef, and she told them the whole sad story.

"Her name is the Brinewitch," the old keeper said. "An eel sorceress from the cold trenches. She has learned a terrible spell. She drains the color and the warmth and the life out of living things and pours it into herself, to make herself stronger and stronger. She has already grayed half our home. Soon there will be nothing left of us but stone."

"Where is she?" Corban asked.

The keeper pointed one trembling hand toward the heart of the gray, where a black cave yawned open like a mouth. "There. But please. You are only children."

"Ma'am," said Jackson, hefting his stone hammer, "you have clearly never seen us fight."

Here is something nobody tells you about getting a magic spear. Having it and knowing how to use it are two completely different things.

On the way to the witch's cave, the Tide Trio practiced. And they were, to put it kindly, a mess. Corban kept zooming too fast and overshooting. Hudson's frozen trident was so cold it stuck to his own hand. Jackson swung his hammer so hard he spun himself in three full circles and got dizzy.

But Pip, riding along on Corban's shoulder, coached them the whole way. "The weapon is not the power," she said. "You are the power. The spear is just where the courage comes out. Stop fighting the water. Move WITH it."

And slowly, stroke by stroke, they got it. Corban learned to ride the currents. Hudson learned to shape his ice into shields and walls. Jackson learned that a hammer in the water moves slow but lands like a thunderclap. By the time they reached the black cave, they were not three clumsy boys with borrowed weapons anymore.

They were starting to fight like a team that belonged down there.

Which was good. Because the thing waiting in that cave had been practicing her terrible spell for a hundred years.

She was enormous. Half woman, half eel, twenty feet long, with skin that shimmered sick green and eyes that glowed poison yellow. All around her floated the stolen colors of the reef, swirling in a sad gray cloud, and she was beautiful and horrible at the same time.

"How sweet," the Brinewitch purred, circling them. "Three little warriors with three little toys. Do you know how many heroes have come to stop me? Neither do I. I gray them too."

She struck fast as lightning. Her tail wrapped around all three of them at once, squeezing, and where she touched, the boys felt the cold creeping in, felt their own colors start to dim, felt the gray reaching for the light in their chests.

"Hold still, little lights," she hissed. "This only hurts until you fade."

It was Fin who saved them. Not by fighting. Fin could not fight. He did the only thing he could do, which was the bravest thing in the whole book.

He swam right up into the Brinewitch's poison-yellow face, this tiny orange fish against a twenty-foot witch, and he shouted, "Let them GO!"

The Brinewitch laughed, and she turned her terrible draining magic away from the boys and toward little Fin instead. The gray reached out for him. In one more second it would swallow him whole.

And Corban, half-frozen, his light flickering, made a choice without even stopping to think about it. He tore one arm free, threw himself between the witch's magic and the little fish, and took the gray cold meant for Fin full in the chest.

It should have put his light out for good.

Instead, the strangest thing happened. The instant Corban chose to shield someone smaller than himself, someone who could never pay him back, his light did not dim.

It roared.

It blazed up brighter than the witch had ever seen, so bright it lit the whole black cave like noon, because there is a kind of courage that the gray can never, ever touch. The courage of a strong one protecting a small one. It is the oldest light there is.

Corban's blaze burned away the cold around all three of them. Hudson's light came roaring back. So did Jackson's. And the witch's tail, which had been squeezing them tight, was suddenly holding three of the brightest, angriest, most wide-awake warriors in the entire sea.

"Now!" Corban shouted. "Together! For Fin! For all of them!"

Three wrist-shells touched. The Triple Tide exploded out of them, but down here in the deep it was something even greater, water and ice and stone and pure protecting courage braided into a single spinning blue-green star.

It struck the Brinewitch head on. It cracked her terrible spell right down the middle. And all the stolen colors she had been hoarding burst free at once and went rushing home, pink and gold and purple and green, pouring back into the coral, back into the fish, back into the whole gray dying reef.

The Reef Kingdom lit up like a sunrise.

The Brinewitch shrieked, thin and furious, and shrank back into her cold black trench, swearing she would return. Villains always do. But the reef behind her was already blazing with color again, more alive than it had been in a hundred years.

The reef folk threw the biggest party the deep had seen in a lifetime. There was music made of whale song and bubbles, and the little merfolk wove crowns of living coral for the three warriors who had saved their home.

Fin, the smallest fish in the whole kingdom, was made the guest of honor, because everyone agreed that none of it would have happened if one tiny creature had not been brave enough to knock on a window two days' swim away.

Corban sat at the edge of it all with Pip on his shoulder, watching the colors dance.

"You felt it, didn't you," Pip said quietly. "Back in the cave. When you covered the little one."

"My light got brighter," Corban said. "Not dimmer. When I should have been most scared."

"That is the secret the witch never learned," said Pip. "She spent a hundred years taking, to make herself big. And you got the brightest you have ever been the moment you gave everything to protect someone who had nothing. That is what the strong are FOR, Corban. Not to win. To cover the small."

Corban thought about his dad, who was big and strong and gentle, who had spent his whole life covering people smaller than himself. And he understood, for the first time, that this was the strongest thing a person could ever be.

Far away, in a cold place where no color ever reached, something older and hungrier than the Brinewitch felt the reef light up, and slowly opened one enormous eye.

But that is a story for Book Five.

Super Corban is a made-up adventure. But the truth hidden inside this one comes from a real story Jesus told, in the Bible, in Matthew chapter 18.

Jesus told about a shepherd with one hundred sheep. One night, one little sheep wandered off and got lost in the dark. The shepherd did not shrug and say, well, I still have ninety-nine. He left all ninety-nine safe and went out into the night to find the one.

And when he finally found that one lost, shivering, frightened little sheep, he was happier about it than about all the others who had never strayed at all. Jesus said God is just exactly like that shepherd, and that God does not want even a single little one to be lost.

That is why the Tide Trio always protect the smallest creature first. They are doing what God Himself does. To Him, the small ones and the lost ones are never unimportant. They are worth going out into the dark to find.