The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

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 anything,” 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