The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (3 page)

She trudged up the creaky staircase to take a shower before dinner. Max’s door, at the end of the hall, had a glossy picture of Joe Strummer on it. Jax’s, on the other end of the hall beside her own door, featured your typical Einstein-with-messy-hair photo. It was taped right on top of an older poster of fossils.

She didn’t know if Jax was a genius Einstein-style, exactly, but he definitely had some kind of photographic memory—among other things. Last year his elementary school had wanted him to skip three years, which would have put him in Cara’s grade at Nauset. Luckily her parents had said no, because even if he was a brainiac he was still just a ten-year-old at heart. Since June 20th he had been teaching himself about Great Geniuses of the Past: Mozart, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Kurt Gödel, and sometimes child prodigies like Bobby Fischer.

It hadn’t escaped Cara’s notice that a lot of the Great Geniuses of the Past hadn’t ended up too happy.

She knocked sharply on Einstein’s face.

“Enter please,” said Jax, using his most annoying robot voice.

She pushed the door open. The room smelled like a moldy sock.

“Ew,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Jax was sitting on the floor, books spread open around him, fooling with a database on his laptop.

“Did you meet the housekeeper?” she asked.

Jax nodded, intent on his database.

“So? What did you think?”

She always asked what Jax thought of new people. Jax had a way of knowing things he shouldn’t know, and if he didn’t trust someone, she’d learned from experience to steer clear of them herself. One guy who mowed their lawn last year had gotten Jax’s thumbs-down even though he seemed really friendly; then it turned out he was some kind of perv. A lady at the post office told them: outside the Stop & Shop, men in suits came and took him away.

Now Jax gave her a thumbs-up. Lolly must be OK.

Cara leaned in close to see what he was typing about.

“Watch out. Right foot,” he said, never looking away from the screen, and kept typing rapidly on the keyboard.

She glanced down and narrowly missed stepping on a big snail that had left a slimy trail on his floor.

“Jax!” she said, irritated. “You’re not supposed to do that!”

“There is a prejudice in this house against gastropod mollusks,” said Jax sternly.

He used even bigger words than her dad, the PhD. It was one reason most kids his age made fun of him and the only real friend he had was a bigger geek than he was. She was glad he was past his “citations phase,” at least. That was what her parents had called it. The citations phase was when he used to give footnotes for practically everything he said, like “
Scientific American
, September 1997, Volume 277 #3, pages 70-75.”

It had been pretty tough to talk to him during the citations. Her parents had made him get checked for Asperger syndrome, but it turned out he didn’t have it.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“And also against chelicerate arthropods and decapod crustaceans.”

“Talk normally,” said Cara, impatient.

When her dad wanted Jax to speak so that average people like her or Max could understand him, he always said
Jackson, please use the King’s English
.

“Horseshoe and hermit crabs. As you may know, neither is a true crab per se.”

She sighed.

“I could have squished it.”

“But you didn’t.”

She thought about telling him about the otter. She’d meant to when she came in. But now, somehow, she felt like letting it slide.

Because that was the other thing about Jax, the other thing that made him different from everyone else she knew. If he wanted to, Jax could suss out what she was thinking without asking her.

Jax, basically, had some form of ESP.

He didn’t like it when she called it that. He said there was nothing extrasensory about it, that it wasn’t paranormal but as scientific as anything else—just not yet understood.

Whatever it was, it made her hemmed in and claustrophobic: when Jax felt like reading her, her brain had no privacy. She’d seen him do it with Max occasionally, and even their dad—know what they thought before they said it, anyway—but the other guys didn’t seem to notice. Or if they did, at least, they didn’t say anything.

She’d told him not to do it with her, that it wasn’t his business what she was thinking unless she wanted to tell him. But sometimes she suspected he was doing it anyway. And one time, recently, he’d spied on her for sure—about a guy she liked, though only for about three seconds—and it was so embarrassing it had made her feel sick to her stomach.

He called it
pinging
. He
pinged
people.

Anyway, if he really wanted to know about the otter, she figured, he probably already would.

“I’m taking a shower,” she said, “so don’t flush the toilet,” and she went out and closed his door behind her.

Their house had eccentric plumbing; sometimes the shower water turned scalding hot if someone turned on the cold water in another room.

It was only while she was standing under the shower nozzle, feeling the warm water fall on her face, that it occurred to her: Jax and the otter—the otter who had spoken into her mind—might have more than a little bit in common.

“Pleash pash the rollsh,” said Max over dinner, his mouth so full of corn on the cob that Cara could barely understand him.

They were all sitting in the dining room, at the same oval wooden table they’d always sat at for dinner, with the same striped cotton napkins and polished wooden napkin rings. Above them was a dusty chandelier, and alongside the wall was a wooden sideboard beneath a large painting of the ocean with soaring white birds.

They’d taken one of the chairs away from the table a few weeks ago so they didn’t have to look at it, standing there empty, while they ate.

Max—still talking with his mouth full about something she couldn’t quite make out—was pretty much the opposite of Jax: girls loved him, and, being good at running and basketball, he was popular with boys too. He was smart enough, but he put his energy into other things, so he barely squeaked by at school. This summer he’d been using his money from the restaurant job to buy boards and board stuff, and hanging out a lot at the skatepark. And it was even harder than usual to get his attention. When he wasn’t at the restaurant, the park, or in his bedroom with the stereo volume turned way up, he was plugged into his iPod.

She had to admit, Lolly was a way better cook than their dad, whose range was limited to soup from a can and frozen pizzas that he took out of the oven when they were still cold in the middle. Tonight they were having baked macaroni, roasted corn on the cob, fresh rolls, salad, and for dessert a homemade strawberry rhubarb pie cooling on the sideboard.

“So,” said their dad, holding a newspaper open, “we may have to rush when we’re finished eating. Playing at the right time: a cartoon, an historical epic that involves cutlasses and ships, and a thriller that’s probably too scary for Jax.”

“I want to see the thriller that’s probably too scary for Jax,” said Jax.

“R rating,” said their dad.

“The cutlashes,” said Max, still chewing.

“The ships,” agreed Cara.

“The cutlasses used in films,” intoned Jax, “are often historically inaccurate, nineteenth-century weapons.”

“That is correct, Jackson,” said their dad.

Just then rain started beating down on the roof. Cara loved that pattering sound.

“Everyone’s bedroom windows closed?” asked their dad.

But the next moment Jax was staring into the front hall. Cara followed his gaze and saw only the closed screen door and the dimness of the unlit porch beyond.

“Jax?” asked Max.

Jax didn’t break his stare. Rufus, lying on the floor beside him with his chin on his paws, stood up and looked in the same direction, his tail held low.

“Jax,” urged Cara. “What is it?”

Slowly, still not blinking or looking at them, Jax raised one hand and pointed at the front door.

Their dad scraped his own chair back and walked to the door; Cara watched as he pushed it open.

“Hello?” he called, into the dark. “Anyone there?”

They waited silently. Cara’s stomach flipped. What if—what if … could it be
her?

Jax’s finger still hovered in the air, pointing.

Their dad flicked on the outside light. The rain picked up.

“No one,” he said breezily, closing the outside door behind him. He sat down at his place again.

“What
was
that, Jax?” asked Cara. “Huh? Did you see something?”

Jax finally dropped his finger. After a moment he shrugged and shook his head, smiling at Lolly, who’d come in to cut the pie.

“He was playing with us,” said Max under his breath. “He’s just looking for attention.”

That made Cara feel bad for Jax. He was never nasty on purpose.

Still, she felt a hole in the pit of her stomach. He’d gotten her hopes up, even if he didn’t mean to.

In some ways he was still a baby, boy telepath or not. Before their mother left, he still slept in their parents’ bed when he got scared at night. Now he crept into her own room sometimes, because he had nowhere else to go. Their dad had taken to working late most nights since their mother had left and usually fell asleep on the couch in his study, his desk light still on, a thin blanket hastily pulled over his legs. So Jax couldn’t curl up with him.

“OK, moviegoers,” said her dad, and laid down his napkin. “We have six minutes for pie-eating. Then on to swashbuckling. No disrespect to your baking skills, Lolly, but eat fast, kids.”

“Underappreciated,” said Lolly. “That’s my lot in life.”

By the time they drove home from the movie, it was raining hard, and trees were whipping around in the wind. They’d all raced to the car from the shelter of the theater lobby but got drenched anyway, and now Cara and Jax sat shivering in the back with a fleece blanket pulled over them. The wipers made a rapid
thwock, thwock
across the cracked windshield of their beat-up wagon as Max and their dad, in the front, argued about the star of the movie.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” said Max. “He was supposed to be what—a French naval officer? He sounded like he was from New Jersey.”

“I didn’t think the accent was so New Jersey,” said her dad. “Maybe Normandy coast. The peasantry, of course.”

“Get out,” said Max, and cuffed him on the shoulder.

Then he put his iPod buds in his ears, sank down in the passenger seat, and turned to gaze out the window, beating the rhythm of his music on the seat cushion with one hand.

“Gimme that,” said Cara to Jax. “Hey! You stole, like, the whole blanket.”

Jax said nothing, only shivered, so she let it go. Water coursed down the glass, and for the hundredth time she ran through the brief words of the note in her head.
Have to go. Danger.
What could it mean? Her mother didn’t exactly live on the edge; she was a biologist, after all, not a James Bond type. She worked at the far end of the Cape, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she studied seals and other marine mammals. Her mother was beautiful and generous and everyone loved her. What danger could there possibly be?

Cara felt a flush of fear.

She’s totally OK, she thought. She’s fine.

But if she was fine, why wasn’t she back by now?

Their dad spun the wheel, and they turned and headed up their own street, which sloped toward the water’s edge. Suddenly their headlights swept over something out of place, and she stared out her window as they passed.

It was a tall, blurred figure, hooded. Maybe wearing a dark coat or a cape; she thought it must be a man, from the size, but she couldn’t see the face.

The figure was just standing there, facing them, arms hanging down at his sides. He didn’t move a muscle. In the night, in the rain.

But stranger than that, the strangest part of all, was that it looked like he was
floating in water
.

It looked like he was surrounded by it—not by raindrops but by solid water, suspended in it. Hanging.

She felt the tiny hairs on her arms prickle.

“Jax! Did you see that guy?”

Jax, teeth chattering, swiveled to look out the rear window.

“A person in a hood or something, just standing stock-still in—in the rain,” she said. “Did you see him?”

Jax turned back to face forward, his eyes glazed over and slightly dull.

“That wasn’t a person,” he said.

A few minutes later she tucked him in, as she often did after he finished reading (at the moment it was
A Brief History of Time
). She pulled the curtains and checked the floor for snails, frogs, and lizards. One disgusting experience involving her bare feet and a cicada had made her extra careful.

“They’re all in the tanks,” said Jax sleepily, rubbing his eyes.

She turned out every light but his favorite lamp, a scale model of the moon. Impact craters and all.

“So Jax,” she said as she sat down on the bed and pulled the blanket up to his chin, “what did you mean, that wasn’t a person? You kind of creeped me out tonight.”

Jax turned over, his eyelids heavy.

“He was the one who came to dinner. The one who was at our front door,” he murmured.

She felt a chill come over her.

“So …,” she said slowly, “what did you mean by
not a person
?”

“He didn’t have a signal,” Jax said, and burrowed into his pillow.

He’d tried to explain to her once, the time when she got mad at him for pinging her, that pinging was like reading the patterns of energy in people’s brains—not the kind of passive, low-level sensing he did when he first met people and decided whether he could trust them, but a more intense kind of interpreting. A kind of decoding. Jax wasn’t proud of himself when he pinged, but sometimes he couldn’t resist.