Race to the Bottom of the Sea Read online




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  Acknowledgments

  Two scoops of mashed fish guts. Four gallons of blood. Mix together in a barrel, then pour into the ocean.

  The recipe in Fidelia Quail’s observation book was for chum, and at eleven years old, she could recite it by heart.

  This smelly pink slick took to the waves, spreading half a mile in the seawater. Sharks in the bay would take it as the perfect invitation to swim past the research boat, the ancient brown-and-beige refashioned trawler appropriately named the Platypus.

  Measure the regulars, tag the newcomers, and hopefully find out which ravenous shark had been munching through entire schools of halibut … Fidelia’s favorite days were shark days.

  A spray of seawater hit her face, rinsing off the homemade sunblock she’d just applied to her fair skin and peppering her square-framed glasses with briny speckles. She smeared another layer of the sea slug slime–based mixture over her face, then wiped the lenses on the hem of her pinafore and quickly replaced them; without her glasses, she was as good as blind.

  One time she’d dropped her glasses during a routine reef check. In the underwater haze, she’d reached out to find them and accidentally grabbed the snout of an ill-tempered gator fish.

  “Holy hammerhead,” she muttered now, catching sight of the bib of her once-white pinafore. It was an abstract masterpiece of pink and brown splotches: faded bloodstains, the juice of fish innards, a spot of engine oil, and other fluids from various sea creatures.

  An entire summer of research, displayed in a collage on her clothes.

  Leaning over the port side, she dumped a sticky scoop of chum into the water. “Calling all sharks! I made chum with tuna, your favorite. Come and get it!”

  A frozen mackerel stared at her from inside an icy cooler. She looped a rope through its gill and threw it overboard as extra incentive. Now the sharks could have hors d’oeuvres and dessert, if only they’d hurry up. Right now the sky was striped in the fuzzy, lazy blues of late afternoon, but once the Undertow hit, all would be gray.

  Arborley Sea’s frigid waters teemed with sharks, large and small, during the summer months. Schools of fleshy white cod bred and swam in a ring around Arborley Island, drawing the hungry predators in. Usually checking the sharks’ tags was easier than milking a sea snake, but today, she couldn’t tempt the sharks with any of the usual bait.

  Fidelia knew the culprit — the Undertow. It always gave the marine life a bit of stage fright.

  She tapped the Hydro-Scanner. The silver circular radar detector was a Fidelia original; the university didn’t have an accurate fish-finding device, so Fidelia had built one herself last spring.

  Fidelia had taken her invention to the patent office on the mainland, but the clerks hadn’t even been subtle when they rejected it. “A child’s contraption,” they called it, right to her face. “We’re not in the business of patenting homemade doodads. This is nothing more than a toy for bored schoolgirls who like to play at science.”

  Play at science … as if Fidelia’s whole life were nothing more than a tea party.

  Ridiculous. She couldn’t help being eleven years old, could she? Child or not, her Hydro-Scanner had never missed a fish.

  Its red needle quivered, swept across the screen, then dropped. Not a fish in the vicinity — not so much as a sea horse. Fidelia gave the Hydro-Scanner a dirty look, then pushed the sleeves of her dove-gray frock above her scabby elbows.

  She moved the mackerel line to the starboard side and looked down into the water. The chum spun and frothed in the chop, making salty, fish-flavored bubbles.

  “Hurry your gills up,” she called to the sharks. Before the Undertow hits, she added silently. Hands curled around the Platypus’s railing, her eyes peeled the surface for any telltale dorsal fins, or boils in the water, or strange blue shadows.

  But she was alone.

  Until the radio buzzed.

  “Quail? Quail, do you copy?” Her mom’s chipper voice crackled on the speaker.

  “Quail here,” Fidelia said. “Any sharks in sight?”

  “Nothing from our position,” her mom answered.

  “Not nothing!” her dad said. “The mermaid’s wineglass is blooming. Steer us a bit closer there, dear. See if you can snag a bouquet to take home.” Mermaid’s wineglass, a marine plant with delicate green tops shaped like little cups, would be displayed not in a floral vase on the mantel but in the terrarium on the Quails’ dining-room table.

  Fidelia’s parents were the internationally acclaimed biologists Dr. and Dr. Quail. They were currently hovering fifty feet below the Platypus in the miniature aqua-blue research submarine, the Egg (another Fidelia creation).

  Arthur Quail was a marine botanist, easily excited by the colorful flora of the watery deep, and Ida was a gill-, fang-, and fur-loving marine zoologist. Fidelia, their only loin fruit, was the perfect blend of both — with a knack for inventing that was entirely her own.

  The Platypus rode a wave high, then bounced down with a thwack.

  “How’s topside?” Fidelia’s mother asked.

  “Nothing yet — oh, wait! Stand by.” Fidelia tracked a flurry of bubbles through the blood-slicked water. Bubbles could mean sharks.

  But a party of seagulls landed in the water and picked at the chum.

  Birds wouldn’t land if they sensed sharks nearby. “False alarm,” Fidelia sighed.

  “How close is the storm?” Ida Quail asked.

  Fidelia wiped a smear of sweat from her neck. “Oh, we have … a while.” Luckily, her parents were down in the Egg and couldn’t see the swirl of black clouds inking the otherwise pastel horizon. Dr. and Dr. Quail would be zooming to the docks if they knew how dark the sky had dimmed.

  But it was the last day of September, the last day of summer. The last day to tag sharks. Their last chance to collect data before the Undertow left them stuck on the island for the long, cold winter. Nothing to do except write up their summer notes and wait for the Undertow madness to end.

  Fidelia wanted to make sure they used every last available second before they were landlocked.

  “Maybe I should put out another mackerel?” Fidelia asked. “Or take the Platypus farther out to sea?”

  “Relax,” her father said jovially. “Let the chum do its job.”

  Fidelia begrudgingly sat on the Platypus’s bench and leaned back, stretching her legs. She was shaped like a broomstick, tall and thin, which made for knee cramps and back pain aboard the puny, fourteen-foot trawler. On especially long days like this one, when they left the house before dawn and worked in the bay until suppertime, she felt like a sardine in a tin.

  “Ten more minutes,” her mom said. “Then we reel everything in.”

  “But we haven’t tagged a single shark!” Fidelia said. “We haven’t done our final fin count for the university. And we still don’t know who’s been eating the halibut —”

  “Fidelia,” her mother said, as tenderly as she could through the radio. “We’ve knocked on their door. All we can do now is wait.”

  Fidelia pulled a wrinkly issue of Adventures in Science Engineering from her bag. “I know,” she gr
umbled.

  “Plus, think of all the data we did gather this summer,” Ida said. “Two new subspecies of red seaweed! The crab migration! The puffin dives! Remember?”

  As if Fidelia could forget. All the beautiful things she’d seen in the last three months wove together in a tapestry in her mind — the vivid purple of marine ferns in the seabeds of Bleu Island, where they spent a blissful three days diving off cliffs into clear water. The scarlet of thorny oyster shells in the eastern lagoons — an unplanned detour on their way back from Canquillas. The shocking yellow of a ribbon eel’s tail from their week in the tropics. The dusty white of glaciers up north.

  And the shades of home, of Arborley Bay — the olive green of the algae covering the rocks on the shore; the soft pink of the stingrays; the dappled brown wings of Arborley ducks as they waddled along the docks. Yes, it had been quite the busy summer.

  “If you’re worried about our grant renewal,” her mother said, “don’t be. We’ve had a spectacular year.”

  “It’s not that,” Fidelia said. Dr. and Dr. Quail’s contributions to the scientific community more than guaranteed a long industrious future of study. The university would approve any funding they required, for any project they wanted to undertake.

  She watched the blue water break white against the boat. “It’s our last day together,” she said. “Us and them. I just wanted it to be special.”

  “I know they’re your favorite,” her mother said, and even with fifty feet of seawater between them, Fidelia could feel her mother’s beaming approval.

  Yes, sharks were Fidelia’s favorites.

  Their bodies — marvels of evolutionary design. Some the glorious, elongated silhouette with perfectly cut fins and glossed skin. Some the flattened, ornate, ray-like carpets of the seafloor, masters of disguise. Some only the size of a human finger, but with eyes large and dark as blackberries. A variation for every ecosystem.

  Their grace — the way they cruised through the water, stoic and effortless.

  Their danger.

  Sometimes in bed, when the clouds blew over the face of the moon and the light in her room was muted, Fidelia would remember the first time she’d seen a great white shark breach the surface to feed on a sea lion. From the hidden depths came the shark, launching its thousand-pound body up and out of the water in a flash, with the still-wriggling sea lion powerless in its jaws. Then it disappeared as quickly as it arrived, the only evidence of the attack a smear of oily blood, crimson against the wake.

  Fidelia would think of that moment and grin, and shiver, and pull her bedsheets up over her head, grateful to be a clumsy, clomping land animal.

  How could sharks not be her favorite?

  The radio crackled.

  “Come in.” Fidelia switched the radio on and off. “Come in, Mom and Dad. Do you copy?”

  Hum, hum, click. The Egg’s reception always got spotty past descents of fifty feet.

  Fidelia took her seat and flipped through her gazette, Adventures in Science Engineering — the premiere publication for scientific advancements and inventions. She scanned the pages advertising helmet vales and hemp ropes. “New! New! New!” boasted an ad. “Double-barreled flank tube allows for collection and transport of two specimens at once!”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Fidelia had made her own double-barreled flank tube … when she was six. The flank tubes she was currently experimenting with had multiple interchangeable compartments, with space for a dozen samples at a time. Adventures in Science Engineering, the periodical was called — and yet, Fidelia was always an adventure ahead.

  The water was flat, steady, empty. Where were those sharks?

  She tucked the gazette in her bag and opened her observation book — a simple red leather notebook that went everywhere with her. Her parents had wisely taught her, “Always be armed with something to write with,” and she followed this philosophy like it was law.

  Uncapping her pen, she jotted down:

  September 30

  First day of autumn storms. Last day of shark season. Starting tomorrow, they’ll swim to warmer waters until springtime. I won’t see them for months. I hate winter. I always miss my sharks — Bluetail, Gumbo, Prudence, Spotty … even Bluntnose, the old grouch.

  The end of summer on Arborley Island meant nautilus shells washing among the pebbles of Stony Beach. Sea sponges in the cold-water reefs turning blue. The arrival of firefly squids in moonlit October evenings.

  But it also meant the Undertow.

  And, of course, the end of summer meant the end of sharks.

  The sleek sharks left Arborley Sea in big-fanged fleets, chasing their last bites of rubbery cod before escaping to the tropics for winter’s cold stretch. The final day of shark season was as celebrated in the Quail family as any other holiday, albeit a bittersweet one. The end of summer was always a good-bye.

  This year alone Fidelia had seen a hundred sharks at least — jumping makos, beady-eyed lemons, twitchy blues, matronly nurses scrounging the bay floor for shellfish. They’d even glimpsed a whale shark, that rare leviathan, a gentle giant passing serenely through a red cloud of krill.

  Eleven years of studying sharks with her parents, and the sight of these creatures still made her gooey. Scared and quiet and fizzing with joy, right under her ribs.

  In her observation book, she wrote:

  Some shark’s been gobbling all the halibut. The fishermen have complained about holes being chewed through their nets, all their halibut chomped to bones. Our locals here just eat cod and mussels — so we must have an out-of-towner. Mom was hoping we’d get a glimpse of the visitor before the Undertow hits, but here it is, the eleventh hour, and not a fin in sight.

  Something burst from the sea depths — a common white surf clam, sent up from the Egg. Fidelia reached down with her forever-long arms, plucked the clam from the water, and held it in a stream of sunlight.

  The clam yawned its shell open. Inside, right on its fat pink tongue, was a scroll of paper. Fidelia giggled at the soggy cartoon her father had scribbled, depicting all three Quails devouring a tureen of soup. “Shipwreck Stew at the Book and Bottle for dinner?” was written beneath the picture.

  This was the standard Quail-to-Quail message delivery system — inserting notes into clams — and it was a symbiotic win-win. Just like the birds that eat ticks off rhinos, or the bees that pollinate flowers, the clam brought the message from sea bottom to surface, and so Fidelia let it photosynthesize the algae that grew on its tongue before she dropped it back into the steely blue fathoms.

  Fidelia laid the cartoon flat on the railing to dry. Shipwreck Stew, yum. Her tummy rumbled.

  Or was that thunder?

  If the Undertow was close enough to hear, it was definitely time to dock, sharks or no sharks.

  “Platypus to Egg, come in. The clouds are growling at us. We better head to shore. Do you copy?” She held the radio receiver with one hand and grabbed the mop with the other, cleaning a few splatters of fish blood from the deck of the trawler.

  The radio fizzled. “Fidel —” (static, click) “Platypus —” (click, click, static) “go ahead and dock her —” (hum, static, hum) “meet us at the Book and Bottle —” (hum, static, click). With a pop, the speaker dissolved into silence. Fidelia turned the radio off — the system probably needed to cool down. Not a problem. She had brought the Platypus to harbor alone dozens of time.

  Shrimp, garlic, cubes of buttery lobster, a few cockles in clear broth with bay leaves and saffron … A nice hot bowl of Shipwreck Stew would be a fair consolation for her long, fruitless — sharkless — day.

  No. Not fruitless. That wouldn’t be fair to the hagfish they’d found, tying itself into knots. Or to the translucent ghost crabs, patrolling the seafloor. Or to the kaleidoscope of seaweed clippings Dr. Quail had collected for his samples.

  But the sharks were the big hitters, and they hadn’t bothered to show up.

  Yes, Shipwreck Stew to drown her sorrows in and a coup
le of baguettes. That’s what she needed. Maybe even a trip to her favorite sweets shop, BonBon Voyage, for a choco-glomp and a plum-milk float.

  Mmm, chocolate …

  More seagulls came. They plopped their ragged-feathered selves in the chum and plucked out chunks of rotting fish to gulp down their beaks.

  “Shoo! Shoo!” Fidelia waved her arms. “Get out of here, you sea rats.” Two gulls bobbed their heads, peering at her, but she wasn’t threatening enough for them to abandon their stolen meal.

  She went back to mopping. Behind the wall of dark clouds, the sun shifted, pulsing its peachy-white rays across the water. The Platypus held still. Everything was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  The seagulls were beelining it back to the island, leaving ripple rings in the water. Suddenly the mackerel line spun out and cast itself to maximum length, the spool of rope smoking with the speed.

  Fidelia dropped the mop with a clatter.

  The Hydro-Scanner pinged, red needle bouncing.

  She glanced at the water and squealed. Shipwreck Stew would have to wait.

  Fish, the Hydro-Scanner announced. Big fish.

  Shark.

  A dark blue shadow cruised along the side of the Platypus. The mackerel line tugged down into the sea, then snapped clean off.

  The triangular fin of a shark sliced through the water. Fidelia reached for her Track-Gaff — a one-motion, trigger-and-release tagging pole that sank tags into even the slipperiest of sharks. She loaded a tag into its chamber and held it over the water.

  “Oh, my sea stars!” she whispered. This definitely wasn’t one of their regulars. He was twenty feet long at least — when the creature aligned himself with the Platypus, his nose jutted out past the propellers.

  Fidelia’s chest bristled, a thousand itty-bitty stingrays swimming and flapping their wings, all at once. She had hoped this day would be special — now it was quickly rivaling the most exciting day of her life.

  The shark made another rotation around the boat. A jagged scar wrapped around his dorsal fin, a constellation of pink-white tissue. The sight made her burn with rage. She had seen these battle scars on loads of creatures. Cause of injury? Barbed fishing lines. They were illegal here in Arborley, but the law didn’t extend to other parts of the world. Greedy industrial fishermen spread these death traps around the tropical seas as if the sharks were monsters, deserving only of slaughter. They were lucky this beast got untangled; he was big enough to take any standard-size fishing boat down with him, if he was angry enough.