The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (7 page)

“You got your kids with you?” Roger was asking her dad in the hall, friendly. “The boy genius?”

“Jax is over at the Aquarium,” answered her dad.

There were the framed pictures of all of them on the desk, which seemed pretty neat and well-organized considering how many stacks of reports there were. Her mother wasn’t in any of the pictures, Cara realized, because she had always been the one taking them.

She was just killing time; Jax had given her a thumb drive to show their dad, pretending she’d found it when she was ready to go. Through the open office door she could hear him saying hello to Roger. Roger was one of her mother’s colleagues—an older biologist type who was more or less the boss, as far as Cara could tell.

She opened and closed drawers, then took a tour of the keepsakes on the edges of the bookshelves. Miniature seals and sea lions, dolphins and walruses carved out of bone … Out in the hall, her dad and Roger were getting closer and harder and harder to ignore.

“This kind of occurrence is unprecedented here,” Roger was saying, sounding worried. “To actually have data stolen—I mean her drive was wiped clean.”

“And this was the, what—this was the work on ocean acidification? Effects on shellfish, trophic ramifications?” asked her dad.

“She was slated to testify before Congress,” said Roger. “Of course, that was before … but this break-in only happened two days ago. I was going to call you. Only reason it was discovered was one of her grad students was working late, saw her door open, went in, and found the hard drive busy erasing itself. Someone had programmed it to do so, obviously. Every printout that was back from peer review was gone too, but copies of the article are still floating around. It’s the original dataset that’s missing. And without it…”

“But why would anyone
do that
?” asked her dad.

The two of them were at the door now, her dad shaking his head.

“The research is important,” said Roger. “It has major political impact, potentially. This was the first data to show conclusively that the ocean food chain is beginning to collapse from higher acidity and will crash completely if CO2 emissions aren’t curbed. First the calcium-carbonate forming organisms will die off, plankton, pteropods, shellfish of all kinds, every species of coral. Her sample showed actual evidence of that beginning to happen. Then the species that depend on
those
organisms for food will start to crash, and of course that’s where her interest originated: marine mammals.”

“Yes I know, we talked about it,” said Cara’s dad. “She was deeply concerned.”

“Fish stocks will collapse. Macroalgae could force out what’s left of the coral reefs, already bleaching and stressed. Cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates could rise. The oceans as we know them could virtually die off….”

The men were silent for a long moment. Then Roger cleared his throat.

“My point is, if she hadn’t—disappeared, for lack of a better term—she was going to Washington, DC to testify on this.”

“So you’re saying, with this break-in—you think maybe someone actually might have—
taken
her?”

His tone made Cara’s pulse quicken, so she moved away from the door, picking up a small box from the desk, mostly to occupy her shaking hands. It was decorated with spiral designs and made of a white, pearly material. Idly, trying not to hear the conversation, she slid the top open.

“… can’t believe anyone would go to those lengths,” came Roger’s voice. “It’s not like she’s the only one studying this. New data are being gathered constantly.”

“Then what happened, Roger?” asked Cara’s dad in an urgent tone. “Where
is
she?”

Inside the box, Cara saw, was a small piece of rolled-up paper. She uncurled it.

What had he meant, “taken”?

There was some kind of poem on the paper, though she couldn’t focus on it at the moment.

The night of fires beneath the sea …

“Cara? You ready, honey?” came her dad’s voice.

“Sure,” she said hastily, and stuffed paper and box into her shoulder bag. “Coming.”

“Find what you were looking for?” he asked.

They were walking together to the elevator over the slick linoleum.

But he was distracted and not really listening.

“Dad,” she said slowly. “I heard what you guys were saying. Someone hacked into Mom’s computer, right? When you said maybe she was ‘taken,’ did you mean kidnapped?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” said her dad. “No, no. Look. I was just throwing out ideas. The truth is, that’s preposterous. We don’t live inside a great conspiracy theory, after all. I’m just—just trying to figure out our situation. And you’re helping me. Right?”

He clapped her reassuringly on the shoulder, but he seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

Her dad took a walk around the village harbor while she went to find Max and Jax. She went by the Aquarium’s outdoor tank with the seals and through the front doors, stopping only to sign in. She passed the row of tanks holding blue lobsters, the ugly, snaggle-toothed wolffish and the conger eels; the place was practically empty today.

Her brothers were probably upstairs, she thought, where the holding tanks were—the part of the Aquarium the management called “behind the scenes,” though it was open to the public like the rest and really just rougher and messier looking, with more cement and metal and exposed pipes and stuff. She took the stairs up and then stopped.

A few feet away, near the long, shallow tray table that held the animals kids were allowed to touch, stood Jax, gazing into a tank that held a massive turtle.

The leatherback, she guessed.

Opposite him the turtle floated in the tank’s brackish-looking water with its beak almost up to the glass and its large flippers moving slowly. It was huge—almost as big as a person. Cara couldn’t see its eyes; they seemed to blend into its black-and-white-spotted body. It was a strange-looking sea turtle, not like others she’d seen—streamlined and more graceful. It didn’t seem to have a real shell on its back at all, only the dark hide with ridges in it.

It was quiet in the room. All she could hear was the buzzing and bubbling of the tanks’ filters and the constant soft trickling of their water.

A sign on the tank said LEATHERBACK SEA TURTLE. RESCUE ANIMAL BEING REHABILITATED FOR RE-RELEASE. THIS SPECIES IS ROUGHLY 110 MILLION YEARS OLD.

Jax and the sea turtle were face-to-face.

That in itself wasn’t so unbelievable. What was harder to fathom—and Cara was used to mysterious events occurring when Jax was around—was the stream that seemed to flow between them, like a turbulence in the air. If you weren’t watching closely you might not see it, or if you did see it you might just assume it was an optical illusion or some kind of minor air disturbance, an interruption in the atmosphere. It reminded her of heat waves hovering over a long road in the desert—the rippling transparency some people called a mirage.

Cara had caught sight of it once or twice before, when Jax was reading someone and there was an especially strong connection. At first she’d thought it was some kind of mirage herself, until Jax explained it had to do with the signal and was a “thermal perturbation.”

But she’d never seen it between Jax and an animal.

And never this visible or this clear.

As far as she knew, Jax had only ever been able to read people. He didn’t, for instance, have a clue what Rufus was thinking—ever. Or identify too strongly with the frogs and crabs he brought into his room. That was obvious.

It was something about the human cerebral cortex, he had suggested once to her, maybe its size or thickness—about the structure of the brain or language, she thought she remembered him saying.

But here he was, talking to a turtle.

Good thing the Aquarium was so empty, she thought, looking around at the room’s leaking, rusty pipes and concrete walkways with the rubber mats on them. She wondered what the general public would think of the scene: a blond boy with dirty fingernails, his phone clutched in one hand, leaning his small face toward the beaked, hooded face of a turtle that hovered a couple of feet away from him and was contained behind glass.

Around the turtle, in its watery enclosure, dark reddish seaweed waved.

And a few feet behind Jax—one of his hands dragging unnoticed in the touching tank near a baby octopus, where he seemed to have forgotten it—was Max.

Looking thunderstruck. Staring.

Max had always dismissed the idea that Jax could read people. “No offense,” he liked to say, “but I’m a skeptic.”

“What the hell,” he said now to Cara, his voice lowered. He snatched his hand out of the tank. “Is he—like, OK?”

“Jax?” said Cara. “
What is it
?”

“I don’t know,” said Jax uncertainly. “It’s—the turtle’s talking to me.”

“Yeah, right,” said Max sarcastically in the background.

“He’s—it’s not like the Pouring Man, is he?” asked Cara. “Where he’s all blank? But he can get into your head?”

Jax shook his head.

“No, not at all,” he whispered. “Not at all. There’s a signal, like with a person. And it’s not a he, it’s a she.”

“What did you say? The
foreign man
?” asked Max.

“Kids!” called their dad, coming up the stairs behind Cara. “Time to get going.”

Max insisted that Cara share the backseat with him on the way home. She hadn’t had a chance yet to ask Jax what had happened—for instance, why on earth a turtle whose ancestors had been around for about 110 million years would want to shoot the breeze with a ten-year-old kid whose worn-out stegosaurus pajamas had gaping crotch holes.

Or whether the turtle had anything to say about their mother.

But Max was getting his chance to grill
her
.

“First off,” said Max into her ear, so her dad couldn’t hear him, “what was that—what was that, like,
stream
moving through the air? You know what I’m talking about.”

“I thought you were a skeptic,” she muttered.

“I’m totally a skeptic,” he hissed. “But I have eyes. I saw something. So what the hell was it?”

“Jax once said it was a thermal perturbation,” she said. “Don’t ask me what that means. But it’s what happens when he reads a signal. With people. And he can tell, more or less, what they’re …”

“… thinking,” finished Max.

“Basically.”

“OK, so let’s just say I believe Jax can—well, that Jax has some way of knowing what people are thinking, sometimes. Let’s just say, hypothetically, I may have suspected something like that once or twice. Still: this was a
turtle
. And a big mofo, too.”

“I noticed.”

“So, you’re trying to tell me he was reading the turtle’s mind? My little brother was hanging out doing some kind of ESP action on a reptile. That’s what you want me to believe.”

“I don’t want you to believe
any
thing,” whispered Cara fiercely. “But it’d be nice if you could be more open-minded, I guess.”

“One man’s open-minded is another man’s crazy as a bedbug,” said Max.

Cara shook her head and held up her phone, erasing old texts for something to do. It was no use talking to people who didn’t want to hear.

After a few minutes Max relented.

“Hey, I know something was really going on back there,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just hard to…”

“Suspend disbelief,” said Cara.

He nodded.

“And what about this—what did you call him? Foreign man?—”

“Pouring man,” said Cara.

“—who you said could get into Jax’s head? What was that all about?”

She hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. In the front seat, Jax and her dad were talking about “carbon storage” and “echinoderms”—nothing she really understood. She loved Jax and she loved her dad, but sometimes she felt like their smartclub only had room for two members. In a way she had more in common with Max, who was at least down to earth. Unlike Jax or her dad, both she and Max would rather go for a walk on the beach or to a party than, say, find a nice empty room and get cozy with a copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
or
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
.

She might as well give it a shot. Even if he didn’t believe her about the Pouring Man, what did she have to lose? This whole summer, when she needed him most, he’d barely been able to spare her the time of day.

So it couldn’t get much worse than it already was.

“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you,” she said.

“Yeah,” allowed Max, “you’re probably right. But tell me anyway.”

So she did.

She and Jax didn’t have any time alone during the afternoon, since her dad was taking the day to spend “quality time” with his younger son; then, right after dinner, Hayley showed up with a cake her mother had baked for them. Hayley’s mother was divorced and clearly believed that that was what was happening in Cara’s family, too.

It was annoying to Cara that Hayley’s mom thought she knew more about Cara’s own family than they did. But at least there was an upside: homemade desserts, once every week since June.

So they all hung out on the porch, Cara sitting with Hayley on the swing, the others in lawn chairs and on the front steps, eating their pieces of cake as dark descended. They talked about normal stuff—the guys fighting at the skatepark, school starting up again.

The guys went inside one by one as they finished their cake, first her dad, then Max, and finally Jax, till she and Hayley were just going back and forth slowly, listening to the swing creak. Cara figured she was stuck there, for a few minutes at least—she needed to debrief Jax, but she couldn’t just dump Hayley. She thought about telling her friend about the Pouring Man, the turtle, all of it, but she couldn’t decide.