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

it’s a line from a game. I thought it sounded good. But the deal with him is, he hates the full moon, because it sheds light. It sort of turns night into day.”

“So then when’s this new moon coming?” asked Cara, going over to her closet, opening it, and staring in at the rack of empty hangers. Clean clothes were often hard to find since her mother had left.

“Problem is, it’s tonight.”

“What can we do?”

“Just be careful, I guess,” said Jax, but his small face was tight with concern.

“Like for instance don’t say ‘Come in’ to the bad guy, you mean?”

Jax sat down by Rufus, rubbing between the floppy ears.

“I’m not even happy about you and Max being out at night, with him there. But I guess you have to be. Right?”

“Well, there’s no other way to see the ocean,” said Cara.

“Actually,” said Jax thoughtfully, “there just might be. You can pull down satellite images—there’s a famous one of a red tide in California, so I know those phytoplankton can show up in the dark. In the picture I’m thinking of, you can see this bright turquoise color and the red, too, from way up in the stratosphere. Or thermosphere, technically. Or exosphere…”

“Talk normally.”

“In low-earth orbit the satellites are still above the stratosphere, 200 kilometers up at a minimum … or else you get this rapid orbital decay—”

“Jax. Stop already.”

“Anyway, I’ll check it out.”

“You’re telling me we can look at Marconi from, like, outer space?”

“Maybe not us, not in real time,” said Jax. “We don’t exactly have top-level access. Google, for example, uses old satellite photos. But I might be able to get in using Mom’s account. Let me check, anyway.”

“I’m not going out there tonight unless I have to,” said Cara and turned from Jax to pull on a tank top. “Max should go again. Nothing ever happens to him. He’s lucky.”

“I’m amazed Max is even going along with all this,” said Jax. “For that reason if nothing else: things don’t seem to happen to him. It’s like he’s outside it….”

“He saw you with the leatherback,” said Cara. “That’s the only thing he’s ever witnessed that makes him think we’re not just playing.”

“And then the pirate ship,” said Jax. “He’s probably doing it just because of that, at this point.”

“Would you two stop ragging on him?” said Hayley, stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed and with her trademark shiny lip gloss and eyeliner already applied.

“We’re not ragging at all,” objected Cara.

“You are, too,” argued Hayley, flipping her hair. “You act like it’s you two against him.”

Cara and Jax looked at each other—Cara, at least, registering that maybe what she said was true.

“He’s a skeptic,” said Jax.

“And we know that what we’ve seen is real,” said Cara. “That’s all.”

“Huh,” said Hayley. “Well, I’m going down to hang with the guys.”

“Go for it,” said Cara. “Just give me a minute.”

Hayley went out, taking the staircase two steps at a time.

“She is way too young for him,” said Jax severely.

Jax was still trying to get satellite feed from Marconi Beach up on his laptop in the late afternoon when Max left to get Zee’s father’s scuba stuff ready. He had all the gear—masks and fins, tanks and wet suits—so Max just had to get it prepped and ready for them to use.

And Hayley had long since gone home. As far as Cara could tell, she was more focused on Max and whether or not he might like her than the fact that they’d looked at a mirror and seen something supernatural that Jax said “practically defied the laws of physics and turned all of reality on its head.”

Cara went into Jax’s room and looked over his shoulder as he pulled up aerial photos of the Cape. Brown and green splotches that were treetops flashed across his screen, the black of rooftops and blue and brighter green of the water.

“You know what?” he exclaimed suddenly. “I got it! We should use the webcam! There’s a webcam at Marconi. Surfers use it to check on the waves. The problem is, it hasn’t been good surf conditions lately, so right now it’s pointing in the wrong direction.”

Onto his screen flashed a scene of the beach—not a satellite photo, from above, but a regular beach webcam. It was a view of the cliffs that rose over Marconi, to be exact. She saw the long flight of wooden stairs that went up from the water to the parking lot that overlooked it, on the clifftop.

“But it’s pointing inland,” said Cara.

“Right.”

“But how can we—do we even know where it is? The actual camera?”

“I do. It’s on the lifeguard station,” said Jax. “I’ve seen it there. Halfway down the beach between the cliffs and the waterline, on that high platform where they sit. All we need to do is turn it around so it faces out to sea. Chances are no one would even notice till morning. Surfers don’t care how the waves are doing in the middle of the night.” He glanced fleetingly at the time readout on the upper corner of his display. “Shoot. It’s getting late. I don’t know if there’s still time before dark.”

Cara thought for a second. Max had taken the car, so he couldn’t drive them. The bike ride took at least twenty minutes. She looked at her watch.

“We’d get there before sunset, definitely,” she said.

“But on the way back…,” said Jax, and trailed off.

“We have to risk it,” she said. “Better than spending all night out there.”

“Even if it was Max?”

If she and Jax went out now, and took the chance of riding home in the dark, Max wouldn’t have to be out later, vulnerable.

“We need to do it,” she said firmly. “You and me. Listen, Jax. Just because nothing has happened to him yet doesn’t mean it couldn’t.”

Jax nodded, but she could tell he was nervous.

“Come on,” she said. “We can do this.”

They practically jumped their bikes off the front porch, pedaling swiftly up the road toward