Before the Dawn by E. C. Myers

Author:E. C. Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

When you grew up in a port city like Argus, you had to know how to swim, especially if you lived along the coast like the Vasilias family did. By the time little Neptune was four years old, his parents and siblings had had it with his aversion to water: He literally could not get wet.

Baths had always been a difficult time. No sooner would they drop him into the tub than all of the water would be displaced out of it—sometimes explosively. It seemed that at a young age Neptune already had a strong water-related Semblance, like the rest of his family, but he didn’t know how to use it. And because he was afraid to get into water, even to touch it, he never learned to control his power over it. Which gave the water power over him.

Neptune’s older brother, Jupiter, thought he had the solution. He had learned to swim by being pushed into the ocean and figuring it out fast. Swimming was a matter of instinct, after all, especially for a Vasilias. If it had worked for him and their other siblings, it would work for Neptune, he figured. They had to stop coddling him. So Jupiter dragged Neptune to the beach, kicking and screaming all the way, and he threw him off a pier.

That’s when they discovered that Neptune’s Semblance had another aspect. Not only could he push water away from his body, he could also pull it to him. And he could manipulate the water’s cohesion with other things. But four-year-old Neptune knew none of this. All he knew was his brother had tossed him into the ocean, and when he came bursting out of it and scrambled back onto shore, he had brought some of the ocean with him.

Neptune was caught in a bubble of water, which was growing by the second. He couldn’t see because it was stuck to his eyes, he couldn’t hear because it filled his ears—and he couldn’t scream because he couldn’t breathe. And then, in his panic, he sent the water away from him, so it gathered around the closest thing nearby: his brother.

Jupiter had been startled to find himself enclosed in water that seemed stuck to his skin. Fortunately, he was comfortable in water and had mastered his own Semblance, so he turned the water into vapor instantly. Then he had comforted his brother, who thought he had nearly killed him, but the damage was already done. Neptune wanted nothing to do with water, and he lived in constant fear that he would accidentally touch it, becoming unable to shake it off. He certainly did not want to swim.

Neptune’s parents bought him goggles just to get him to go outside, but eventually the Vasilias family was forced to move farther inland. As a student at Haven Academy, under close supervision from his professors, Neptune gradually came to terms with his Semblance, which he called Water Attraction. Once he made contact with water, he could force it to

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