1
GABRIEL NEMO GLANCED around as he chained his bicycle to a secluded bike rack behind the Santa Marta Aquarium. No one had noticed him arrive alone. He secured the lock—a design he had worked on himself—with his thumbprint and heard a satisfying chirp as the tumblers slid into place.
The salt-sea air off the Pacific lifted the collar of his dark-green jacket as he made his way toward the front. He checked his watch. Six P.M. Right on time. He rounded the edge of the enormous glass-and-steel structure, rehearsing everything he would say about why his parents weren’t there, as the clanking sounds of the marina and the roar of the ocean gave way to the chattering of his classmates.
In his ear, a tiny radio receiver droned on with news of the sea, and he listened for a moment.
“Sqrrk. Sitrep on the container vessel?”
“Sqrrk. Still have containers floating for a quarter mile…”
As far as Gabriel could work out through the static, a container vessel had collided with a dock and capsized. The crew had already been evacuated, but the seashore and shallows there were a mess and the coast guard had been calling in help for hours.
A mess, but all in all a routine cleanup from the sounds of it. Nothing that needed Gabriel or his skills. He had decided to come here tonight instead. To fit in. To be normal.
Even so, he didn’t take the Nemotech receiver out of his ear. Just in case. With any luck, he might be needed … which was a thought he didn’t like to examine too closely, because it meant he considered the idea of something terrible happening to be lucky.
Gabriel fell in with the parade of middle school students and parents making its way through the entrance. Gabriel scanned the faces until he saw his friend Peter Kosydar and his mom. They had stopped just to the right of the double doors under a long white banner that read HARRISON STEM SEVENTH GRADE AUCTION TONIGHT!
“Gabe!” Peter waved and his mom did, too. Gabriel cut through the crowd to join his friend, mentally pushing away the radio sounds in his ear.
Peter’s mom was a hugger, so she wrapped Gabriel in a bone-crusher that left him feeling squashed, then stepped back, her arms on his shoulders. She beamed at Gabriel from under a big, floppy hat. Ms. Kosydar had freckles that reminded Gabriel of his sister, and he felt a sudden pang of sadness. He hadn’t seen anyone in his family in months, much less her.
“Are your parents here?” Ms. Kosydar asked. “I’ve been wanting to meet them.”
That was what he’d been afraid of, and it was the first thing his friend’s mom had asked: Where are your parents? The answer was A long way from here. He didn’t like to think about it and didn’t like to lie about it. The whole thing, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, made him sad. After all, It’s okay, they sent me here by myself would only raise more questions. When he had first arrived, he’d had the best time by himself. He could do anything he wanted, go to bed at any time at all, eat anything. He was king of his own life. The good time had lasted about forty-eight hours.
Still, he had his extracurricular activities. Maybe that made it worth it. Maybe.
“They might make it later.” Gabriel smiled and tried not to let his sadness leak all the way to his eyes. Instead he changed the subject. “Peter, did you hear they have a new jellyfish habitat? They use rotors to simulate ocean currents. You know, so they stay up and you can see them.”
“Oh yeah.” Peter pushed up his glasses, and the boys stepped into the enormous foyer of the aquarium. Above them, the skeleton of a whale hung suspended from a far-off ceiling through which they could see the stars. “Did you know a guy got stung last week? How stupid can you get?”
“I’m sure they’re not stupid,” Ms. Kosydar said.
“Oh, they have rules to follow. But if you don’t wear the right gloves … bzzt.” Peter imitated a guy receiving an electrical jolt, and Gabriel cracked up.
“Of course—” Ms. Kosydar interjected.
“Of course that’s not what jellyfish do.” Peter rolled his eyes as he cut his mom off. “But it’s hard to do an impression of a jellyfish sting without, you know, falling down and screaming.” Peter knew his marine biology—he wasn’t crazy for it like Gabriel was (Peter’s fascination ran to navigation, vehicles, movement), but they couldn’t spend as much time together as they did without Peter being able to run rings around your average student.
“Hello!” Mrs. Holsted, the assistant principal at Harrison, spoke into a microphone from where she stood on a stage at the back of the room. She wore a blue suit with an orchid in her lapel, and she waved a pair of reading glasses as she talked. “Good evening. I want to start off by thanking you all for being here and for your dedication…” Gabriel tuned out the rest, listening for updates on the receiver and hearing nothing.
As she droned on, Mrs. Holsted pointed her glasses at a long table stacked with all kinds of stuff—bike helmets, picture frames, multicolored glass lamps, and stacks and stacks of manila envelopes. The envelopes held certificates for stuff that was too big or impractical to drag inside, or services donated by local merchants.
“Let’s begin with services.” Mrs. Holsted picked up an envelope and read the front. “We have an offer of a semester of swim lessons, any level, from Emler Swim Studio of Santa Marta.”
“No, thank you,” Peter moaned next to Gabriel. Marine-navigation-mad Peter was, incredibly, afraid of actual water. He hated swimming, and his throat would close up if he even tried to drink water.
Which was kind of amazing when Gabriel considered what they regularly went through together.
Peter looked at a printout his mom had fished out of her purse. “I want to bid on the snowboard.”
“Snowboard?” Peter’s mom scrunched up her eyebrows. “We don’t have mountains.”
“A guy can dream.”
Gabriel scanned the room and the various corridors leading away to the exhibits. He saw a sign that read SHARKS off to the left. “I’m gonna go check out the sharks.”
Peter shrugged like he wanted to go with him, but the snowboard was coming up soon and so he gave him a thumbs-up instead.
“If your folks show, I want to say hi,” Ms. Kosydar whispered as Gabriel left them.
In his ear, the coast guard voices rattled on.
“Sqrrk. We’re out of warning buoys—can we call Santa Barbara and get some…”
He stopped and touched his ear to listen for a moment. Apparently the coast guard was running out of warning buoys for all the huge containers that had fallen into the water. Not something he could help with.
Gabriel paid more attention to the voices in his ear than where he was walking and collided with someone. He stepped sideways, headed for the shark exhibit, when a heavy hand on his shoulder whipped him around.
“Hey!” Larry Fife, an enormous eighth grader whose voice cracked painfully, pushed him back. Gabriel kept his balance.
“Sorry.” Gabriel backed away.
“Whatsamatter, ET, the mother ship bothering you again?” Larry put his own hand to his own ear and made his eyes wide. “What’s that? You want me to come home?”
“I said I was sorry,” Gabriel tried again.
Larry, not as stupid as he appeared, had noticed Gabriel listening to the receiver several times at school. Gabriel usually tried to be more careful around other people, but with so much activity tonight he had gotten distracted. Gabriel cursed himself and vowed to keep from putting his hand to his ear when he was listening. The gesture was automatic, but it didn’t help him blend in.
A goateed man nearby wearing a black suit cleared his throat loudly, and Larry slunk back to him. Gabriel took that opportunity to move on as he heard the man saying, “What have I told you? These people aren’t worth it.”
Nice. Listening to the coast guard drone on in his ear, Gabriel headed into the shark exhibit.
He found two great white sharks swimming in a relentless figure eight, as if patrolling the water as partners, one sweeping in right before Gabriel’s eyes only to rush away, the second arriving just as the other had left. Two inches of Plexiglas separated the domain of the sharks and the darkened room where Gabriel stood watching them.
Gabriel heard a scuffling sound behind him and turned to see a line of chairs along the black-painted wall across from the tank. After a moment his eyes adjusted and he saw her: a little girl hiding underneath one of the chairs.
“Next up, a massage, two hours, offered by…,” Mrs. Holsted said in the next room.
Gabriel approached the line of chairs and crouched, resting a hand on the front of one leather seat. “What are you doing down here?” he asked with a chuckle.
“I’m afraid of them.” The girl peered out from under the leather seat, her body pressed back against the wall.
“Afraid of what?” Gabriel stayed crouched and followed her saucer-wide eyes toward the tank, where one of the sharks circled again. “Oh, them?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Molly.”
“I’m Gabriel. Where are your parents?”
“They’re in there with my sister.” Molly nodded toward the larger room where the parents and students were gathered. He figured her for about eight.
“Do I hear seventy-five?” Gabriel heard Mrs. Holsted again. “A massage makes a fine holiday gift, and at seventy-five…”
“Oh. Well, I could stand guard while you run back, but … you don’t have to be afraid of these guys.” Gabriel stood, walking over to the tank. He put his hand on the glass. “They’re my friends.”
“They eat people.”
He smiled. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Taylor Cartwright had a sleepover and we watched Jaws.”
Ahhh. Gabriel gave her a serious look. “Yeah, I saw that, too. That was pretty scary.” A little too scary for her age, he thought, but then what did he know? His mom hadn’t really approved of scary movies, though he and his sister had been into a lot of mythology stuff, and that could get gruesome.
“What do you mean they’re your friends?”
Gabriel stepped back and scanned the tank until he saw a gold plaque that read: DINO AND GRACIE, RESCUED AND TEMPORARILY HOUSED THANKS TO THE SUPPORT OF ANONYMOUS DONORS.
Anonymous. He thought about the morning he’d had to sneak away from school to untangle Dino and Gracie from a tuna net then hand them off to someone who could see to it that they’d be taken care of. That was a good day, the kind of day that made him forget that he was here alone. Because how could you feel alone when there was a mission to complete? When it was done, Gabriel had swum away and returned to school. It was all …
Anonymous. No one.
There was another, older word for no one.
Nemo.
Gabriel gestured to Molly to come out. The smaller shark—only by a few inches—swam by. “Well, that one, the smaller one? That’s Dino. There he goes. And this … is Gracie.”
Molly crawled out from under the bank of chairs and came a few steps closer.
He continued, “These two sharks are rescues. That means they were injured in the ocean and the aquarium is giving them a place to live until they’re better. And in the meantime you get to see them.”
“But in Jaws…” Molly had stepped out to stand next to Gabriel.
“Do you eat fish?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what sharks eat. Mostly. Fish. Dolphins. They’re not much interested in people.” That wasn’t entirely true, not if people got unlucky or stupid, but generally sharks were more interested in things that didn’t intimidate them, and a human could be pretty intimidating.
Molly stared at him. “But they could, you mean. You’re not sure.”
She had him there. “Nothing’s ever sure.” Gabriel sighed. “I wouldn’t want to lie to you.”
“Molly!” A high voice called from the entrance to the shark exhibit. Gabriel turned to see Misty Jensen hurrying toward them, relief showing across her face.
He smiled wide. He had basically one other friend besides Peter, and that was Misty. “This is your sister?”
“We had no idea where you were!” Misty looked stern for a second and then melted as she hugged Molly. Then she addressed Gabriel, and her expression hardened ever so slightly again. “You couldn’t bring her back where everyone else is?” She pushed back the bushy brown curls that insisted on falling over her face even when she tied them all back.
Gabriel spread his hands. “Well, she was asking about sharks.”
Misty winced. “She’s afraid of sharks, Gabe.”
“Gabriel says sometimes they eat people. Like in Jaws!”
Misty’s wince turned into a glare. “Did you tell her that sharks eat people?”
“No … maybe?” Gabriel blinked. “I was just standing here.”
“There you are!” A woman spoke, and now two adults that Gabriel took to be Misty and Molly’s parents came in. Both were dressed smartly in casual slacks and short-sleeved shirts that showed off what Gabriel had to admit were some pretty impressive physiques. He had only heard about them before. He had spent countless hours with Misty, but she had somehow maneuvered things so that he had never actually met her parents.
But oh, she worshipped them. Misty had told him that her parents were both retired from the air force. She said they lived with purpose, getting up at five in the morning to run and working out every afternoon. Truthfully, except for her longer hair, Misty was a dead ringer for her mom, down to the tan slacks.
“I was hiding from the sharks,” Molly told her mom.
“Yeah.” Misty jerked her thumb at Gabriel. “And then Bill Nye here started lecturing to her about how they eat people, apparently.”
“She asked me…” Gabriel turned to her parents. “I’m Gabriel. And really, I don’t lecture.”
“He lectures all the time.”
Gabriel turned to his friend. “No, no, see, this is a cool thing. It’s really important to answer people when they ask questions, because that’s when the brain is most engaged. All the neurons start lighting up. It’s amazing! Actual physical changes occur, just because of a question.”
She waved her arm. “See?”
Misty’s parents extended their hands one at a time, and Gabriel shook them awkwardly. All these rituals. They’d rarely had visitors at home before his folks had sent him here. He always felt like he was pretending to know how to act. He was sure his hands were clammy.
Misty’s mom looked him up and down. “We’ve heard of you. You’re in the…”
“Marine research club?” Mr. Jensen tried to remember. “You do a lot of group excursions, right?”
Misty shot Gabriel a look that told him to go with it, and Gabriel obeyed. “Yep.”
“Are your parents here?” Ms. Jensen asked. “We’d love to meet them.”
“They’re around somewhere.” Which was true if you figured somewhere wasn’t necessarily close by and included the bottom of the ocean.
The receiver in his ear burst to life with a woman’s voice: “Mayday! Mayday! Pleasure vessel Dandelion requesting assistance. We have had a fire and are taking on water, requesting assistance at—” followed by a stream of numbers that were the coordinates for the woman’s location.
Gabriel froze. Misty’s mom was saying something, but he wasn’t hearing it. He stared into space as he listened for a response.
Come on, guys, he thought. Answer.
“Excuse me.” Gabriel took out his phone and started a note to himself. “I have to…” He stopped talking and typed the coordinates before he forgot them. Gabriel glanced up at Misty and her parents. “I was supposed to text … them. My parents. They may have gone to the wrong place.” He babbled nonsense as he backed out of the exhibit. “I just realized. Uh, thanks.”
As he hurried into the main room, he realized he never ended the conversation with the usual “nice to meet you.” Whoops.
In the main room he tried his best to stick to the wall as he listened intently again.
“Come on, guys,” he whispered.
The coast guard did not answer. Gabriel waited for the Mayday to come again.
Instead another voice came back: “Sqrrk. Can someone tell Santa Barbara we know they have at least thirty buoys? I mean, I’ll get in a pickup and go get three of them right now.”
This was followed by a lot of cross-traffic and laughing. It was as if the other call, the distress call, had never gone through.
Gabriel stared at the crowd and kept listening as the reality sank in. Incredible. The droning about the mess with the container vessel went on, and no one mentioned or responded to the call for help. The Mayday did not come again, and it was as if it had never happened.
There was a distress call, and the coast guard had missed it. No one knew that somewhere out there, someone was in trouble.
Except him. Gabriel Nemo had heard it.
When Gabriel was nine years old, his mother had taught him about cascading events, how tiny decisions and accidents can lead to large results, even catastrophes. Somewhere out there, at the spot described by the numbers Gabriel had just tapped out, a ship was in an emergency.
He had gotten his wish. Something terrible had happened.
Gabriel opened a new text on his phone and tapped a message to a group called CREW. He heard it whoosh away as he scanned the room for Peter.
Peter was standing with his mom right where Gabriel had left them, and Gabriel did his best to look only mildly excited as he tapped Peter on the shoulder.
“Hang on, the snowboard is next.” Peter waved him off. Just then Peter’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. Knowing it was the same text he had sent to Misty, Gabriel peered over Peter’s shoulder to see the one-word message flash as a notification: OBSCURE.
Peter looked back furtively. “Are you sure—now?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t there anybody…”
“There isn’t. I’ll fill you in once we get out of here.”
“But I’ve got my mom. And what about Misty?”
“She’s surrounded.” Gabriel put on what he sincerely hoped was his best smile. “Ms. Kosydar? I’m totally sorry, but my dad just texted me to remind me that he’s preparing this amazing, uh, kelp … dish.” This wasn’t far from likely. The Nemos were all about kelp. “Anyway, I have to go, but Peter is invited.” He pointed at Peter as though she might not be sure who that was. “Dad, uh, said we could watch some movies and, you know, stay up late.” He laid it on thick, knowing the clock was ticking.
They both waited expectantly.
“Well, I guess we don’t both have to be here,” she said.
“Great!” Having been given an out, Peter seemed determined not to wait around. He urged Gabriel on and they started running.
“But how will you get there?” she asked.
“We’ll order a car!” Gabriel shouted, waving his phone. He brought up the app as they ran.
“Be very polite!” Ms. Kosydar called, but by that time they were out the door.
“How did you get here earlier?” Peter asked as they ran down the front steps to the curb.
“My bike, but it’ll be fine.” This was true. Anyone tampering with a Nemotech lock was going to get a zap a lot like that of Peter’s imaginary jellyfish.
For a moment they stood at the edge of Ocean Highway, which was still thick with traffic at 7 P.M. Gabriel’s address, a tiny wooden house on the cliffs of Santa Marta, was just a few miles up the highway.
“How long till your mom gets suspicious, do you think?” Gabriel asked.
“Could be a while.”
Their driver was just pulling up as they heard another voice from behind them.
“You two could’ve waited for me,” came the voice of Misty Jensen. Peter opened the car door and Misty slid in.
Peter laughed. “You got away! Gabe said you were surrounded.”
She smirked. “What? You didn’t think I was gonna miss this.”
Copyright © 2019 by Jason Henderson
