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

on the twenty-minute drive to the ferry dock and would bring the car back. Then they’d headed out on their morning dogwalk, toward the general store that was beside the small post office. The store carried donuts sometimes, which were baked fresh at the beginning of the day. Jax had a thing for their bear claws.

“… basically, a whole bunch of microorganisms thrown together,” said Jax, in lecture mode. “And the phytoplankton that make up these kind of blooms are often dinoflagellates. One species in particular has been noted for its bioluminescence: Lingulodinium polyedrum.”

Dino-whatever-it-was rang a bell—she’d heard the word recently. Maybe at her mother’s office—Roger talking about her mother’s research. Which meant this obscure—algae?—had cropped up twice in just a couple of days. That seemed like a strange coincidence.

“So, once we know where to look,” said Jax, “that’s what we’ll be looking for. A kind of light on the waves.”

“You think that’s really it? The fires beneath the sea?”

“I do,” said Jax. “You saw it, Cara. You really did.”

She felt a small surge of satisfaction.

“You know,” she said slowly, as they waited to cross Route 6, “I didn’t tell you what I heard Dad and Roger talking about when I went into Mom’s office.”

“What?” said Jax quickly.

She saw his look and winced. That was why she hadn’t told him—he was ten, and he missed their mother, and maybe, just maybe, their mother was missing because she’d been … what had their dad said?

Taken.

But she should have told him before. She had to tell him things, even if he was young—even if, sometimes, he looked into her brain when he wasn’t supposed to.

“There was a break-in at her office,” she said haltingly. She found she was still pretty reluctant to talk about it. “And Roger, you know, her boss?—he was telling Dad that they stole her work off her computer.”

“Stole it?” asked Jax.

“The data, he said? Or dataset, something like that.”

The light had changed, but Jax was just standing still, holding onto Rufus’s leash, looking up at her.

“They took her data?” he asked.

Cara nodded. She felt guilty: she really should have told him, and Max, too.

There was just something about all of them, at the moment, that had made her not want to say it out loud … life in their house seemed so delicately balanced lately, as though—even before the Pouring Man—things were barely holding together, a kind of imitation of their old life. They kept to the same routine, her dad doing his research, Max working his job at the restaurant and hanging out at the courts or the skatepark, Jax trekking off to daycamp or doing his databases … but through it all they were just going through the motions.

And waiting.

They were on hold until real life began again.

Her mother was real life, she thought.

Also, if you didn’t let yourself talk about something, it stayed a little unreal. It stayed an arm’s length away. Once it was mentioned, there was a kind of concreteness to it.

“This was the numbers on ocean pH and shellfish?” prodded Jax.

“I don’t—it kind of went over my head. They said ‘CO2’ a lot, but that’s all I know.”

“Dad was talking to me about that project on the drive home that day,” said Jax, nodding as he made the connection. “But he didn’t say anything about information theft or hackers….”

“Let’s go,” said Cara, because the light was blinking DON’T WALK already.

“I’m tired of being treated like an infant,” said Jax suddenly, more loudly than usual. “I don’t deserve it. Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t you?”

She looked at him, then at the DON’T WALK sign again. Jax wasn’t budging.

The sign froze, and cars started speeding by them again.

“I guess—”

“What? You have to tell me everything. We’re in this together!”

“Then you have to promise not to ping me again without asking. Ever,” she said, with a loudness that matched his own. “Or else I can’t trust you, either!”

They looked at each other.

“OK,” said Jax, more quietly. “I promise if you do. I’ll always ask before I read you.”

“And I’ll tell you what I know,” she said.

They stood there for another minute, waiting for the light to change back, and finally crossed, a little awkward, with Rufus loping beside them.

“She was supposed to go to Washington and tell Congress what her study said,” she added when they reached the opposite sidewalk. “Maybe so they could pass a new law about it or something? And then …” She trailed off. “And then she disappeared, Jaxy.”

“But ocean acidification is common knowledge,” said Jax. “At least, in the scientific community. I mean, it’s not like she’s cornered the market on marine pH dropping. Lots of people are studying it.”

There was the general store, with a bakery beside it and the small post office. A few feet behind the row of shops, past a thin screen of trees, the bike path ran almost the whole length of the Outer Cape—along the edge of the strip of forest that gave way to cliffs and dune grass and sand, and then the surging Atlantic.

She wished she could just ride again, the way she used to—coast along the smooth path, warmed by the sun.… It was what she’d always loved to do, every summer since she first started taking off by herself. She coasted with her hands free, the seashore on her right with its pine and oak-tree woods, creeks with frogs splashing and silver fish flashing through them, marshes with herons, ponds with water lilies. There were the soft-looking deer that ambled through the patchwork shade of the trees, where the old dirt roads wound through the cool forest and came out on the bright cliffs in the sun with their wild roses trembling as the breeze swept over them … on her left side were the distant sounds of a steady river of traffic, the long row of shabby, cozy motels on Route 6. There were the seafood restaurants with their ocean themes, round windows like portholes, and old