The tide had come in. My little shelter I’d built with the Big Broadcast plane parts was a foot deep in the lagoon. I didn’t have any light. I was hungry. I stank. My feet hurt. I was marooned on an island. The island was on another planet. I had a crush on a sea monster. A balloon was mad at me.

But let me tell you: watching the Hunt frolic around those piles of metal made me feel okay. I’d helped someone. For today, anyway, I’d escaped the chancla.

So I moped a while in the jungle near the base of the Radio, where it blasted someone named Hoagie Carmichael at me, singing about a Buttermilk Sky. There, at least, was light from its speaker and tuning window.

“The Gardener wished to offer gifts.”

“No kidding?” I sat up from my itchy almost-bed of grass. “The Gardener has the right damn idea.”

Alarmingly, there it was, the blue balloon, descending from the trees. It was very delicate, but the grabby arms and huge empty mass of its body was startling. Scary, even. It was holding a mess of cords, and on the cords were strung a rainbow of glowing things.

It reached eye level and stopped descending. One of its hands held out a cord made of grass, and a large berry had been threaded onto the cord. It glowed pale blue, not like a halogen lamp or anything but bright enough to see with. Bioluminescence, or more “magic,” whatever that was.

I made a show of putting it around my neck and bowing. “Please convey my thanks to the Gardener.”

“Done,” said the Radio. “It wished to speak with you directly, as your hospitality indicated you deserved that honor.”

“I’m Owen. What should I call you?”

“Your speech is ugly,” it said through the radio. “And my name will be permanently made ugly by you speaking it.”

I stifled a smile. I thought about cartoons I’d watched as a kid, and for some reason came up with a snail, one with pink-and-blue coloration. Like this guy. “I’ll call you Gary.”

“Foolish. All wear these items. It is required.” And it handed the mass of glowing necklaces over.

I yelled for Schmendrick. She’d been asleep, curled up behind the radio, and was instantly there with us. I knelt and showed her the glowing necklaces.

In response she held out both of her monster hands and screamed. I tied one around her neck and she bolted into the jungle. Soon I was surrounded by the Hunt, and they were all screaming for the necklaces. I tied one around each. There were exactly twenty-one of them total, one for all of us.

The jungle filled with leaping, sprinting multicolored sparks. “They love it, thank you,” I said to Gary.

“In this way we can track the location of all monsters here. You will not catch us unawares in the dark and slay us.”

“That’s heartbreaking.”

“You are a fool!” And Gary rose through the trees, clambering among the branches around that big balloon body. I noticed that there were strings of the lights all over the place, all colors. The Gardeners had been renovating.

“How are they, Radio?”

“They did not require shelter. Nor did the Gardeners. Only Owen did.”

“So let me in the Observatory, you criminal.”

The Announcer voice was strained. “The rules…cannot…there is a password…” and to my shock, the glowing speaker tore. The rip was maybe a half-inch long, but red blood dripped from it, running in a swift stream down the speaker and along the Radio’s wood-and-stone exterior.

“Whoa man!” I smacked a palm over the wound. “Don’t do anything that hurts you, dummy!”

“Owen was…” it said haltingly. The speaker vibrated under my hand. “Owen knew that…his…the…”

“Stop! Change the station!”

Then a voice, familiar, cold. “Nice of you to call me, Owen.”

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I said nothing. I admit to being caught by surprise.

“Where is he?” Harrigan asked. His voice was ice. I remembered being afraid of him before, back on his island, where it had been all fun and games. No longer: he sounded tired and desperate.

I shouldn’t have, but I responded. “Where’s who?”

“Who do you think? Sean! Bring him back or I swear–”

The radio’s narration took over. “Doctor Harrigan’s eyes narrowed in contempt. His little office was a mess; furniture had been thrown, a window broken. Harrigan himself looked as if he had not slept in a long time.”

Indignation took over. “I don’t have Sean, I told you where he was! You saw me leave alone!”

“You said he was in the cage. The cage was empty, Owen. Just his clothing was in there. Did you strip him naked? Is that what you do?”

“Change the station!”

Music. The familiar, awful song that ended in ee-yaagh. Harrigan was no longer on the air. I carefully removed my palm from the Radio’s speaker. The bleeding had stopped. The tear was there, but noticeably smaller.

“Radio, don’t do anything that hurts you. Stick to whatever rules you have, but you’re too important to do that kind of nonsense.”

A long pause. “Yes.”

I lay in the grass, looking up at the stars. I couldn’t see the constellations; no glasses. But it was safe to assume I wasn’t on Earth; that particular puzzle had been solved by meeting three kinds of … aliens? Nonhumans.

And Sean? Sean had been what? Kidnapped? Raptured?

Maybe something in the cave had grabbed him. Just plucked him from that cage for a snack, then put his clothes back as a request for a refill.

His dad had seemed upset about it. What did that mean? If Sean had been killed and reborn as many times as the Radio had described, a dead Sean Harrigan should be no big deal to dear old dad. But it was.

I fell asleep thinking about it. Sean and Jeff Harrigan, my least favorite people.

I woke with the entire Hunt cuddled up to me, laying on top of me, inadvertently cutting off my oxygen. They snored. I had to pet all of them and tell them they were good before I could get up.

The sun was high, late-morning-early-afternoonish. I’d been exhausted last night after rescuing some dog-dinosaur murder-wizards and sassy balloon aliens, then repelling an alien invasion with what amounted to harsh language and luck.

But the sleep had really helped. Schmendrick followed me as I went about the island: first to the spring for a drink of hopefully-safe-to-drink fresh water, then to the melon patch.

The Gardeners had already been working on it. The melons gleamed with good health. There were no weeds. Somehow, I don’t think I want to know exactly how, the patch had been fertilized and smelled of it. Bees rejoiced in new flowers I hadn’t noticed the day before. Whatever these guys were doing was working out.

Schmendrick and I picked out a melon. Just as I was lifting it and twisting it free of its vine, Gary the Balloon descended from the trees like the wrath of God, snatched the melon and actually smacked my hand with one of his armored mitts.

I yelled. “Ow, dude, what’s your damage?” Schmendrick became murderously outraged and began yowling at Gary.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” I said, and scooped her into my arms. “We don’t need those nasty old things. Probably give us intestinal parasites or venereal disease.”

“Leave here!” the radio distantly boomed on behalf of Gary. “These are unripe and part of the larger agricultural program! Fools! FOOLS!” And he lowered himself to ground level, began scooping up dirt and actually flinging handfuls of it at us with all five appendages.

“Pfah,” I said, because he’d scored a direct hit and gotten some in my mouth. Fertilizer for breakfast today.

We ended up at the beach, like one tends to do on a very small island. Schmendrick and I started trying to catch fish. I was lousy at it. She called some of her posse and they were soon swarming the shallows, grabbing anything living and flipping it high in the air to flop on the sand.

I watched as Schmendrick expertly cleaned the fish on a flat rock. Her claws were perfect for it. She pointed at the raw chunks of meat. “Owen favorite fish kind.”

“My favorite? How do…oh.” The Owen she’d known. They’d gone fishing together as well. She knew what he'd liked, and she was right; the sashimi was excellent. It was full of flavor, as if the fish had spent its life seasoning itself for my benefit.

I ate and ate. So did she and her pack, and I was able to speak with them for the first time while some horrific disaster wasn’t happening. “Let me ask you something. This place, this world, has a lot of different kinds of people in it. How do you know the fish here aren’t people as well?”

“No soul,” she said. “Just meat.”

“Got it. No soul, no guts-moon. The Owen you knew didn’t have one, right?”

“No, Dead Owen just meat.”

“Would you have eaten him?”

“Yes. But gave food. Helped. Boat ride.”

“Have you ever seen any other humans? There’s an island of them that way.” I pointed.

She snarled and her ears went back. “Bad place. Human with soul, no good, kills humans.”

“But they’re just meat, no souls. So why is it bad?” Why do YOU think it’s bad, I was asking.

Those big dark eyes met mine. “Humans there hurt, always, afraid and cry. Bad is bad.”

“Do you think these fish are afraid before we kill them?”

“Yes,” she said, and that appeared to be that. Philosophy class with an apex predator.

The Radio alerted us to visitors: the Makers had returned, ten of them, and were swarming up the beach. They wanted to talk.