“I told you to stay on the ship.” Merrick’s voice crackled from the corner of the library.
Fidelia found him in a dirty, worn-out plush armchair, a mostly empty rum bottle balanced at his side. “Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie are looking for you.”
Merrick’s head lolled back. “Those two … best mates I ever ran with, really.” He took a drink.
“You look … awful.” It was an understatement — his mismatched eyes were sunken, creating dark hollows beneath them; his face was pallid, the skin stretching thin over his cheekbones.
He snorted. “I’m dying. Isn’t that to be expected?” He lifted the bottle to his mouth, straining with the effort required to hold it there so he could drink.
Fidelia stepped over a puddle of seawater. A stale sea bird’s nest, long ago forsaken, rested on the shelf next to her like a bookend.
“Go ahead,” Merrick said. “I can see your head swimming with questions. Let’s have it.”
“Just one,” Fidelia said. “What is this place?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Merrick waved his arms. “Look. Books.”
“I’ve just never heard of a vicious pirate having his own private library.” She pulled a volume from the shelf. “What are these, treasure maps? Encyclopedias of foreign weapons?” She opened the book, only to find a soggy, blotted mess of unreadable pages.
She tried a different book, a fat red one, and found a familiar title looking back at her: Exploring an Underwater Fairyland by Dr. and Dr. Quail.
Her heart stopped. She ran her fingers along the spine’s gilded lettering and opened the front cover.
“Hey!” she said. Property of Arborley Library — there was the telltale stamp, right on the inside flap. “This is a library book.”
“And I’m a pirate.” Merrick coughed, staring at the cavern walls.
Fidelia swallowed, pulling the book tight to her chest. “I’ve been thinking. My father, he is — or, was — a botanist. The greatest marine botanist to ever live, actually, and he won awards to back it up —”
“The point, Quail. Get to it.”
“Maybe — maybe he knew the cure.” Fidelia pushed the words out in nervous, excited exclamations. “Maybe there’s an antidote written down in his observation book somewhere, and I’ve just never noticed it —”
“Oh, you sweet, stupid girl.” Merrick’s bottle slipped from his fingers, leaking the last drops of sticky rum onto the library’s floor. “There is no cure for the red daisies.” He looked up at her, his blue eye catching the candlelight, burning past her spectacles and into her brain. “There is no cure for a black heart.”
“I want to help,” she whispered.
He took hold of her chin, his rough, skeletal hand as gentle as he could manage. “You want to help?” he said. “Get that treasure. Don’t let me lose it before I go.” He dropped his gaze. “Now get out.”
Fidelia backed away from the pirate, Exploring an Underwater Fairyland still tucked under her arm. A lone tear tickled as it traced down her cheek. “Charlie!” she managed to call. “Elle! I found him!”
A pirate dying — why did it matter? Not just any pirate, but Merrick the Monstrous. Wanted for robbery, burglary, arson, murder — and now kidnapping.
So why did it matter?
She leaned against a tunnel wall, sliding down until she was sitting. Why did it matter to her?
Because every rattling breath Merrick took reminded her of her parents. Because she looked at his sapphire eye, wide and searching, and saw a fear, so out of place with the rest of him, and she thought of her parents —
No, that wasn’t it.
She thought of herself. The before and the after. Fidelia, before her parents died, unafraid and busy and bold, and the Fidelia after — just a shell, hiding in a library.
Because losing Merrick reminded her of what it was like to lose her parents. The awful before and after, all over again.
Watching Merrick die was like looking into a mirror — watching her lose herself.
“Where is he?” Bloody Elle slid to a halt in front of Fidelia, scanning the tunnel. Cheapshot Charlie was three seconds behind her.
“Down there.” Fidelia pointed toward the candlelight, which glowed even brighter, battling the grotto’s darkness. “In the library, drinking.” She laughed, once, and it came out tasting like bitter sea melon. “If the red daisies weren’t already killing him,” she said, “coming back to Medusa’s might have —”
“Do you smell smoke?” Bloody Elle interrupted.
As if on cue, black smoke curled down the tunnel, searching for a release. The light intensified, orange as the morning horizon.
The three of them hurried back to Merrick, the tunnel walls suddenly warm to the touch. When they reached the cavern, Fidelia threw the hem of her dress up over her mouth to block the smoke.
The library was on fire.
The flames devoured the books as heavy smoke billowed up into the stalactites. Fidelia blinked, her eyes peppery hot.
“Where is he?” Bloody Elle yelled.
“He was in an armchair!” Fidelia squinted, trying to see through the smoke to the corner where Merrick had slumped in his chair moments ago.
Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle dashed through the flames, into the smoky black belly of the fire.
This could be it, Fidelia thought. Merrick, taken by fire and smoke before he could cough himself to death.
The fire raged higher, kissing the cavern ceiling. Every book, every shelf, gone. Rendered to ash by the flames. Fidelia sputtered and paced, counting the seconds — any moment she’d hear the screams as Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle succumbed to the fire.
Just before Fidelia gave up hope and ran out of the library to save herself, all three pirates staggered out of the fire. Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle carried Merrick between them, whose head lolled against his chest, his legs dragging along the floor behind him. They raced him out of the tunnels, and Fidelia followed behind, her eyes stinging.
“What happened?” she cried when they finally collapsed on the dock.
Merrick lay on his side, limbs splayed like a broken marionette doll. “Alcohol,” he rasped, “is very flammable.”
A typically vague Merrick answer — she stared at him, her eyes leaking. Did he trip over the candelabra? Had it fallen?
Or was this one of Merrick the Monstrous’s violent acts of arson?
An accidental fire or a deliberate one?
Why did it matter?
He coughed, Fidelia coughed — all four of them coughed now, a regular symphony of burnt throats and lost breaths.
“Come on,” Bloody Elle croaked, pulling herself to standing. “The fire’s spreading.” She and Cheapshot Charlie took their captain into his quarters on the Jewel.
Fidelia checked the hull as she boarded the sloop — the starfish had eaten away most of the barnacles, leaving the water-warped beams of the Jewel clean — as clean as a lake-scuttled, dilapidated old lucky ship could be.
The pirates worked to cast off the Jewel.
This time, Fidelia pitched in. The grotto was quickly filling up with clouds of the black smoke, and the tunnels all glowed the same white-orange — the fire was moving down the tributaries and would soon make ash of the grotto’s dock. Amber light shone above the water, neon blue light in the water.
By the time the fire finally burned out, Fidelia realized, nothing would be left in Medusa’s Grotto but black marks on the walls and a pile of fat, happy orange starfish.
And the medusas, pulsing eternally through the water.
The medusas, who had seen all the grotto’s secrets.
Through the secret waterfall the Jewel sailed, back into the open sea. Fidelia let Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle give her orders, and they sent her scrambling to the yards to fix the rigging or had her hold the wheel while they tightened lines. The work of a cabin boy, yes — but she was grateful to keep her hands busy.
Hands busy, mind busy.<
br />
Merrick stumbled out of his quarters to watch the cliffs vanish in the distance. Medusa’s Grotto faded out of reality and into memory.
“Good riddance,” he grumbled. But Fidelia could see his sad blue eye. How it aches to say good-bye is what he really meant.
Fidelia stood behind him, clutching Exploring an Underwater Fairyland to her chest, listening to his coughs until all they could see of the grotto was the pillar of smoke on the horizon, white against the star-speckled sky.
“Sir!” A naval officer burst into the admiral’s quarters without knocking, his face flushed and sweating.
“What is it?” Admiral Bridgewater had just poured himself a third glass of spirits, which meant his jaw had loosened and his skin was as pink as a boiled ham.
“The horizon, sir. You’ll want to see!”
Admiral Bridgewater pushed himself in front of the officer and dashed up to the deckhouse. The night air was cold, the wind putting up a fair fight.
“There.” Another officer pointed. “Ten o’clock. It’s smoke, sir.”
The admiral took the officer’s spyglass and squinted his tiny eye. Just southwest of their bearings, wisps of smoke, billowing into the night sky — faint, but undeniably there.
“Fire. On the jack-tree cliffs.” Admiral Bridgewater stretched his face into a grin, a rare and somewhat unsettling sight to the rest of the silver-buttons.
“Merrick.” He chortled. “At last, I’ll have you.”
“Sir?” an officer timidly asked. “Are we certain it’s him?”
“Without a doubt,” Admiral Bridgewater said. “Merrick’s the only one crazy enough to brave the Undertow.”
The officers glanced at each other, the obvious follow-up to this statement dancing between them. Neither would say it.
“Shall we steer toward the smoke, sir?” an officer asked.
“No,” Admiral Bridgewater said. “Merrick never stays in one place for long.” Especially the last few months — something had Merrick scared, darting from hiding place to hiding place like a mouse running from a hawk.
“Make for the cocoa route,” Admiral Bridgewater ordered, “but luff the sails when you come within range of the tropics. We have the element of surprise — don’t lose it.” He collapsed the spyglass and shoved it into an officer’s chest. He suddenly surged with new energy.
He could take on a hundred Merricks tonight, if he had to. “We’ve got him now.”
When Fidelia woke, the Jewel was back on open water. The mainland was nowhere in sight — every direction was just flat and blue. Medusa’s Grotto was behind them, a blackened stain in a corner of nature no one would ever find.
She stood and stretched her arms, and waved good morning to the pirates. Bloody Elle nodded back, but Cheapshot Charlie blinked at her and went back to the rigging.
She watched the boatswain work for another moment. She saw the extra force he used to tie his knots — the punches and swings of a man angry because his captain was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Death affected everyone — the ones who left, and the ones who were left behind. No one knew this better than Fidelia.
She walked down the deck to where the candy pile was stashed, then chose an astrobloomer and a kaleidorainbow fig and munched on them for breakfast. The Jewel’s sails caught the wind and billowed, mirroring the fat, puffy white clouds in the sky above. She ran her hands along a railing; the wood was rough, dinged from when the mast split and fell in the Undertow.
“You know,” Fidelia said, “if I squint, it is a pretty ship.”
Cheapshot Charlie looked at her, then puffed up with pride. “Back in its heyday, any sailor would have given his right arm to sail the Jewel,” he said. “Even Admiral Bridgewater’s probably tempted to clean it up and add it to his fleet. That is, if he doesn’t bury Captain in it.”
That name again. This time, Fidelia gave in to the curiosity. “Who is this admiral?”
Cheapshot Charlie tightened a sheet. “Admiral Percival J. Bridgewater,” he finally said, surprising them both. “Top wig in the Queen’s Own Navy. Royally bestowed with the task of catching pirates along the cocoa route and bringing them to trial. But he’s made a special mission out of the captain.”
“What kind of mission?”
Cheapshot Charlie pulled a slack line. “His only mission. Bridgewater won’t rest until the captain’s hanged.”
Fidelia thought about this as the Jewel hit a gentle bump. “But Bridgewater’s already brought the Jewel in once, hasn’t he? And he’s caught Merrick how many times?”
“At least a dozen. What’s your point?”
Fidelia tried to say this delicately. “So why isn’t Merrick … you know?” How hard is it to kill a pirate? she wondered.
Cheapshot Charlie narrowed his eyes. “You’re a smart enough girl — you can figure it out.”
Astern, at the wheel, Merrick coughed, and Fidelia could hear his insides rattle.
“The treasure,” she realized.
“Bridgewater wants the captain dead,” Cheapshot Charlie said, “but not until he’s got his hands on that treasure.”
Fidelia’s jaw dropped. “An admiral in the Queen’s Own Navy shouldn’t be drooling over treasure.”
Cheapshot Charlie raised his eyebrow. “People aren’t like your infernal sea creatures. You can chart their behaviors, observe their habitats, make predictions, but …” His gaze suddenly left Fidelia; she followed it behind her to the stern, where Merrick stood at the helm.
“But people don’t always act the way you expect them to,” Fidelia finished for him.
Cheapshot Charlie snapped his attention back to her, glaring at her as if she were a seagull who had stolen his meal. “Stop pestering me and get back to your ridiculous contraption. We’ll be there by morning.”
Fidelia’s stomach plummeted. That meant she had less than twenty-four hours to figure out how to make her Water-Eater work.
Or else she’d be diving down to the bottom of the sea with nothing but her lung capacity and her courage.
The Jewel moved for hours, flying through the water so smoothly, someone could have composed a watercolor masterpiece while standing on its decks. The nervous, bustling energy that had defined the voyage so far was gone — now everyone stayed mostly quiet, concentrating on their tasks.
Fidelia could feel the air shift warmer, the sun beating down on her skin. The Undertow had left the forefront of her mind; instead she pored over her parents’ observation books, searching for answers. Any answers.
“Mind the sails,” Merrick announced at noon. “Keep her steady. We’re nearly there.” A charred bit of paper untangled itself from his hair and blew past Fidelia — a remnant of the fire. She studied him, searching his good eye for that flicker of sadness she’d seen the night before. Medusa’s Grotto was probably the closest thing Merrick had to a home, besides the Jewel. Fidelia had already said good-bye to her own house, but she still had Arborley Island, still had the sailors, still had the Book and Bottle, and the beach — at least for now. And when she moved away to the mainland, she would still have Aunt Julia. Home wasn’t a place, she realized; it was a feeling. Right here in her observation books, right here in her memories.
What did Merrick have, though — besides this dilapidated ship? He had his mates. His own name. And he had his treasure. All that was left to say good-bye to.
And it was up to her to help him find it.
That was how they remained as the day shifted into night — solemn and steadfast and mostly silent. Fidelia unwrapped candies from BonBon Voyage without complaint and nibbled her sugary meals — astrobloomers for lunch, kaleidorainbow figs for dinner, choco-glomps for dessert.
Her test run in the grotto had failed, terribly — the Water-Eater didn’t give her enough oxygen to dive twenty feet, let alone dig through the sands of an entire tropical stretch to find a lost treasure.
She twisted the filter out of its chamber and ran her fingers along
the rough tar. It had been a good idea, creating new, tinier holes — a good idea in theory.
Now she had to try something else.
A shadow loomed over her. “Finished yet?” Merrick asked.
Fidelia curled herself over her dismantled invention, protective. “You still haven’t told me anything about where we’re going,” she said in defense of her poor progress.
“So?”
“So if my Water-Eater is going to work, I need more information about the type of environment I’ll be diving in. The water temperature, the region, the climate, the plant life —”
“Hot.” Merrick looked up at the west star.
“Hot.” Fidelia scoffed. “Really? That’s your idea of a climate description?”
“I already told you, we’re sailing to the tropics,” Merrick said. “Tropics are hot.”
“Not all of them,” Fidelia argued. “Three of the major islands are mediterranean, technically, and only one of them has mangroves —”
Merrick glanced down at her again, one of his gold teeth blazing in the bleak illumination of the lamplight. “We are traveling to the most beautiful stretch of ocean you or your brilliant Doctors Quail have ever seen. The water is clear and turquoise. The ocean floor is the color of cherry blossoms in spring. Black trees grow from the islands and snake their roots down into the water like sea serpents. I have no idea the type of flora or fauna that thrives in such waters; suffice it to say it’s a paradise on earth.” He stopped. “Descriptive enough for you?”
Fidelia blinked, then pushed her glasses up on her nose. Sea serpents … a pink seabed … turquoise water. He could certainly be poetic when he wanted to. Her earlier conversation with Cheapshot Charlie flashed through her mind — people don’t always act the way you expect them to. “Yes.” She flipped through her father’s observation book, a memory niggling. “Reef territory, do you think?”
But Merrick was done talking climate. He vanished from her side, and moments later Fidelia heard his dry, grisly cough as he concentrated on navigating.
Fidelia turned the pages more rapidly, searching for March 16, a day the Quails worked in a tropical sea-grass meadow and found a whole colony of silky reef sharks.
Race to the Bottom of the Sea Page 16