SWIMMING WITH THE RIVER CURRENT, Darel spread his arms and pushed the triplets forward on a gentle wave. They hooted and giggled, and paddled clumsily with stubby legs. They were relearning how to swim, now that they'd begun their transformations from legless tadpoles into froglings.
Darel slitted his nostrils in amusement. Sure, the entire Amphibilands was going to collapse at any moment, but at least the triplets still made him smile.
Then Tipi completely forgot how to use her legs, and started wagging her butt, trying to scoot forward. Tharta bobbed along like a floating twig, swirling and dipping. Only Thuma was making any progress—except in the wrong direction.
Darel sloshed them around a turn in the river. "Use your legs! Slow and steady! Pull them toward your belly and—"
"Platypuses!" Thuma squealed.
Darel glanced downstream, where a row of creek oaks rose over the river and dozens of inviting holes—platypus burrows—lined the muddy riverbank. Furry brown platypuses flashed through the water, while more floated on the surface. A few older platypuses built furniture on the top of the riverbank, and a handful of young ones dug rocks from a steep strip of dirt beside the burrows.
Darel grinned. The young ones were making a mudslide.
The other two triplets turned. "They're everywhere!" Tipi said, her eyes bulging.
"Look at their tails!" Tharta flopped his own tail, which still hadn't completely disappeared, trying to whack the water like a platypus.
"I heard the boys have poison like us," Thuma said, gaping at all the activity.
"You don't have to be a boy to have poison," Tipi said indignantly.
"That's true," Darel told her. "Look at you, the mightiest Kulipinki."
Tipi was the smallest of the triplets, but Darel suspected that one day she'd become the most powerful. She glowed a bright pink when she got upset or excited, and she was already strong enough to lift Darel over her head—which made bedtime a challenge.
"You need to be a boy to have poison if you're a platypus," Thuma insisted.
"Who needs poison anyway?" Darel asked.
Tipi splashed him. "Easy for you to say."
"You've got other talents," Thuma said.
"Like talking to the Rainbow Serpent," Tharta added.
"And being the Blue Sky King," Gee said, splashing into the river.
"Gee!" the triplets cried, tumbling through the water toward him. "Did you bring candy?"
"Darel's not a blue anything," Thuma said as Gee handed out snacks.
"I'm also not a sky anything," Darel said. "Or a king anything. It's just a dumb nickname."
"I don't get it, either," Gee admitted, munching on a honey worm. "I also don't get"—he licked his frog fingers—"why platypus honey is so much better than frog honey."
"'Cause we're that sweet," Pippi said, her face poking up from the water beside him.
The triplets stared at her with eyes full of wonder. They'd left the nursery pool only a few days ago and had never seen a platypus up close.
"I'm Okipippi," she told them, her bill curling into a smile. "But everyone calls me Pippi."
"We've heard—" Tipi gushed.
"—so much—" Thuma gasped.
"—about you!" Tharta gurgled.
"Did Gee tell you I have a beak?" Pippi asked, eyeing Gee with pretend suspicion. "Because I don't! It's a bill."
"He says you're a hero," Thuma told her.
Pippi ducked her head in embarrassment. "Anyway, er, welcome to our new platypus village."
"We're very sorry—"
"—about what happened—"
"—to your old village," the triplets said.
"Me too," Pippi said with a brave smile. "But this is pretty amphibitastic."
Darel heard a doubtful note in her voice, and looked again at the half-built village. Burrows, river, trees—everything a platypus needed. Except it wasn't her real home, the place where she'd grown up. And how would he feel if he had to leave the Amphibilands?
Gee must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, "We can plant bamboo along the bank, build a few bridges, and it'll be platyperfect."
Darel groaned. "That's even worse than 'amphibitastic.'"
"Poison froglings!" Pirra—Pippi's older sister—squealed from the bank. "Look! They're the coolest things ever!"
Pirra splashed into the river with a bunch of her friends and swam closer. They oohed and aahed over the brightly colored triplets, and then Pirra offered to give them a chance on the mudslide. She didn't have to ask twice. The triplets happily trailed after her.
A moment later, Pippi, Gee, and Darel were alone. "Everyone loves a poison frog," Gee said with a grin.
"Yeah," Darel said. "I wish I took after my dad."
"You'd look weird in yellow and purple," Gee told him.
"Not that." Darel looked toward the triplets. "I mean, if I were a Kulipari, I wouldn't be wondering what else the Rainbow Serpent wanted. I'd know exactly what to do: tap my poison and kick some carapace."
"You'd still look weird in yellow and purple."
"The Stargazer believed," Pippi suddenly piped up.
"Believed what?" Darel asked.
"In the Blue Sky King. She told me you were coming, back when I first met Gee. If she wasn't hibernating, she could help you figure out what the Rainbow Serpent meant."
"Can we wake her up?" Gee asked.
Pippi shook her head. "We don't even know where she is. She wanders off every few years and stays with a new tribe—like possums or lizards or emus—and sleeps for like a month."
"Emus?" Gee scoffed.
Pippi nodded. "She says it takes all kinds."
"What takes all kinds?" Gee asked.
"I don't know." Pippi shrugged. "'It.'"
"'All kinds.'" Darel inflated his throat thoughtfully. "Maybe it does take all kinds."
"And maybe you can lead a horsefly to water, but you can't make it drink," Gee told him. "Or a pinworm saved is a pinworm earned."
Pippi splashed him with her tail. "You hush!"
"What?" Gee splashed back. "I thought we were reciting dumb sayings!"
Darel plunged underwater and swam to the swirling silt of the river bottom. He hadn't seen a rainbow, and he hadn't felt the Serpent's ancient gaze upon him, but the tiny seed of an idea had taken root in his mind. The current washed over him as the seed sprouted into a vague plan. Maybe that's how the Rainbow Serpent worked. Not with a sudden shout but with hints and whispers, like ripples spreading across a quiet pond. It takes all kinds, it takes all kinds …
He kicked off the river bottom and surged upward. "The Kulipari!" he gasped when he broke the surface.
"What about them?" Gee asked.
"We're going to see them."
"Right now?"
Darel nodded, then looked to Pippi. "You've got to come, too."
"Me?" Pippi asked. "Why me?"
"Because you lived your whole life outside the Veil," Darel told her. "And you're the closest thing we have to a Stargazer."
As his crocodile surged through the water on the coast of the Amphibilands, Yabber swayed in the saddle. Lulled by the motion and the spray of seawater, he closed his eyes and sent the golden glow of his dreamcasting toward the Veil.
"This is the place," he finally murmured. "The edge of the Amphibilands."
Although the Veil covered the frog lands completely, it unraveled at the ocean: Neither the scorpions nor the spiders ventured into the sea. So here, where the Veil drifted apart, Yabber could send his mind inside the great dreamcasting, and learn how to reverse it.
The croc paddled water. The sun crossed the sky. Waves splashed Yabber's shell, then flowed away as he puzzled through the old king's spell.
Finally, he told his croc, "I was right. I can't do it alone. Time to go home, to the Coves."
With a happy glint in her eyes, his croc snapped at a wave, then surged forward. Yabber almost laughed at her eagerness as they passed through the Veil completely.
Then the air shimmered around them, and a nightmare vision flashed in his mind, perhaps triggered by passing through the Veil. The frog villages lay in rubble, the streams are bone dry. The green Amphibilands are withered to a dead brown as scorpions and spiders crawl over the ruins.
Yabber gasped in fear as the vision vanished. "Is that what happens if we do lower the Veil?" he muttered. "Or if we don't lower the Veil?"
