Craig shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hmmm. I think I missed that event,’ he chuckled.
‘Now, now,’ said Jess. ‘Gym is cool, we did loads of it in school. It’s great for putting you in a good mood and I’m sure you’d look great in turquoise tights, Craigie…’
The rest of the class laughed, and even Craig had to smile.
‘And I think I know who Luce is talking about,’ said Ajit. ‘She was on the TV news the night she won. It was the first time anyone from our country won a gymnastics medal.’
Joe nodded too, remembering the excitement at the Olympic medal ceremony and the two days when everyone out playing on the street was a would-be gymnast. Lads borrowed their sisters’ ballet tights and swung out of tree branches, others walked around on their hands. But then someone else won a medal at show jumping and the gang all ran around slapping their backsides and leaping over the neighbours’ fences instead, and the glory of gymnastics was soon forgotten.
‘I have one other thing I need to talk to you about,’ announced Luce. ‘I appreciate that you may get bored here and may need to satisfy your spirit of adventure.’
Joe instantly blushed and looked towards the floor. He could feel Luce’s eyes burrowing through the top of his head.
‘Last night, one of you went exploring in the outer areas of the Academy. While there are very few areas of our home that remain off limits – and nobody breached them last night – I must caution you to be careful wandering around in the darkness.’
As Joe had his head down, the other four all looked at one another for clues. They weren’t long realising who had been the midnight wanderer.
‘Was it you, Joe?’ asked Kim.
Joe nodded. ‘I couldn’t sleep and went for a walk. I didn’t touch anything, honestly.’
Luce smiled. ‘I know – we monitor your sleep and activity twenty-four hours a day, and we knew exactly what you were up to. We tracked you all the way up to the viewing room, and all the way back to bed. But I don’t blame you. You all must still have lots of questions, and I will arrange for you to take another tour of the island that will show you how it works. And I will also explain to you something that Joe discovered last night.’
The four all looked again at Joe, who shrugged his shoulders.
Chapter 16
‘What Joe found out last night was that the island is moving south, and at top speed,’ started Luce, looking down at the faces which showed expressions ranging from confusion to concern.
She tapped on the whiteboard behind her, which lit up to show a map of the Atlantic Ocean.
‘You will all recall that we submerged shortly after you came aboard in Clew Bay. And that I mentioned that we noticed some strange activity there and had changed course. Well, we have decided to put some distance between us and whatever caused that, and so we have been steaming along under the Atlantic for the last two days,’ she said, trailing her index finger along the map showing the route they had travelled.
‘To save fuel, the captain decided last night to surface, which is why you were able to see the waves and the sky through the portholes, Joe,’ she explained. ‘It was a clear night and there was no shipping within eighty kilometres of us, or land within five hundred kilometres, so it was a good opportunity to rest the craft.
‘We are currently heading for the Caribbean where we will be able to surface and take our place, disguised as part of a tiny, uninhabited archipelago. We will stay there for a few weeks to allow maintenance for the island and rest for the crew – although you five will still be working and doing most of your activities inside here. We will, however, allow you out for some sunshine time,’ she smiled.
The five all began talking at once, excited at the prospect of a beach holiday in the West Indies, no matter how little time they would be allowed to enjoy it.
‘You will learn more as we reach our destination in two or three days, but in the meantime I want you to get plenty of sleep’ – she stared at Joe – ‘and throw yourselves whole-heartedly into the gymnastics tomorrow. I will organise a full tour of the moving parts of Atlantis too.’
And with that, Luce was gone, leaving the students to pile into Joe with questions about his midnight tour.
‘Where did you go, Joe?’
‘What did you see?’
‘Is it dangerous?’
Joe explained his short excursion to his classmates, telling them about the cliff-face room from where he watched the Atlantic storm.
‘It was terrifying,’ he admitted. ‘I was further up with Ajit when we went there the first day, but it was sort-of calm then. This was a raging storm and the waves were smashing into the island. I don’t know how it remains so steady – I nearly got seasick looking at it.’
‘I hope they bring us up there to see the cliffs too,’ said Jess. ‘I’d love to try out my new binoculars.’
That reminded Joe. ‘Yeah, it’s hard to work out the horizon – especially at night – but I did see a couple of red lights from a ship, or an island.’
‘Really?’ asked Kim. ‘Luce said we were hundreds of kilometres from anywhere …’
Joe shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I definitely saw lights flashing.’
‘Maybe it was a plane – or those guys from the taxi following us,’ said Craig.
‘Maybe you should let Luce know,’ suggested Ajit.
‘Yeah… maybe I should,’ replied Joe. ‘It was probably the Northern Lights or something …’
‘Off the coast of Florida?’ laughed Jess.
Joe chuckled too before setting off to find Luce.
Chapter 17
Luce was concerned after Joe had told her what he had seen.
‘You should have mentioned this before now,’ she snapped.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe replied, ‘It was only when Kim reminded me that you said we were miles from anything that I thought it might be suspicious.’
She motioned him to follow her. ‘We will see what our security officer thinks about this.’
Luce led Joe down another spiral staircase to a brightly lit corridor with offices on either side behind glass walls. At the very end was a red door which Luce tapped on twice.
‘Come in,’ came the reply, and Luce entered, followed by Joe.
‘Ah, this is Joe,’ said the security officer, a tall man with a bushy moustache. ‘My name is Ross. I was checking out your night-time rambles earlier. You certainly seem an adventurous chap.’
Joe smiled thinly.
‘We’re here because Joe thinks he saw something outside last night,’ started Luce.
Ross frowned. ‘We had surfaced by then, hadn’t we,’ he mused. ‘There was nothing within range that you would have been able to see.’
‘Well, I definitely saw something,’ insisted Joe. ‘I was in the room at the top of the cliffs and saw lights flashing. It was hard to tell, but they seemed like they were a good few kilometres away.’
Ross drew a circle on his writing pad and asked Joe to show exactly where the lights were in the sky as he looked out the porthole. Joe thought for a few seconds and described them to Ross as he plotted them on the paper – one big light that flickered on and off away on the horizon, with two smaller lights that stayed on for as long as he was looking at them.
‘OK, thank you for that, Joe, now please return to your quarters while I have a chat with Luce.’
Joe let himself out and wandered back along the glass corridor. He peered through into the offices, which were full of desks – maybe twenty in all – but at which only two people sat. There was a huge map of the world on one wall, with a blinking light in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean which Joe presumed was some sort of ‘You Are Here’ symbol.
He found his way back to the living quarters where Ajit and Craig were having a heated argument about who got to use the shower first.
‘I put my yellow towel on the handle and said I “bagsied” it first,’ said Ajit.
‘You snooze, you lose,’ laughed Craig. ‘I didn’t
see any towel.’
‘Come on, you’ve sneaked in first every day so far,’ complained Ajit.
‘Every day? We’ve only been here two days!’ laughed Craig. ‘If you want to get it first then get here first.’
Joe stepped between them. ‘Hang on, hang on,’ he pleaded. ‘Let’s work this out. We’ve one shower, and three sweaty future legends. How about we take it in turns to go first. Yesterday was Craig, today it’s Ajit, and I don’t mind waiting till tomorrow to go first. You fire away Ajit, and Craig can be second, but tomorrow he’s third.’
The two other boys stared at Joe, trying to work out in their heads what he had suggested.
‘Eh…. OK,’ said Ajit, slipping past Craig into the shower cubicle.
Craig shrugged and went back to his bed and picked up a magazine.
‘Four years is an awful long time Craig,’ said Joe. ‘No point picking rows over stupid things this early. We’re going to have to get to like and trust each other.’
Chapter 18
Luce and Ross spent the next hour going back over video recordings of the island’s voyage over the previous day. There were sensors, cameras, radar and other ways of keeping tabs on the journey and anything the island came into contact with. There were no cameras recording from the precise position that Joe had been standing, but higher up on the cliff was a high-definition recorder which scanned the horizon.
‘We can narrow it down to the precise two minutes Joe was in the room, and he seems to have been looking towards north-north-east that he saw these lights…’ said Ross.
He twiddled with the computer and zoomed the screen to show the narrow area Joe would have seen at that precise time.
‘Radar and sonar are clear, so there were no planes or submarines in the area….’ Ross muttered.
‘What’s that?’ asked Luce, pointing to the corner of the screen.
‘It looks like a shooting star, but it’s moving too slowly,’ he replied.
He zoomed in even closer, showing three red lights flickering in the sky in a fixed position. Just as Joe had said, one looked slightly bigger than the other.
‘Can you get a fix on it?’ asked Luce.
‘I’ll try,’ replied Ross, ‘I’ll try to blow the picture up a little more.’
He flicked a couple of keys on the keyboard and the screen filled with what appeared to be a giant flying insect.
‘Yuk,’ said Luce, ‘that’s an evil-looking creature.’
‘That’s no creature,’ said Ross. ‘It’s a drone. And from the looks of it, it’s following us.’
They spent the next couple of hours having the first of their classes in academic subjects. Their maths teacher was a tiny, bald man who was very enthusiastic about the subject and his eyes sparkled as he told them about his favourite numbers. It was like no other maths class any of them had every had and they were wide-eyed as he explained about numbers and their different uses and properties. He explained how ancient civilisations were obsessed with certain numbers and used them in building and art. He showed how certain numbers keep cropping up in nature and how some mathematicians thought each number had a personality of its own.
‘Look at yourselves, there are five of you. Five is an important number – we have five senses, there are five continents, five rings on the Olympic flag, five fingers on each hand. In some cultures the number five is revered because it symbolises the four limbs and the head the controls them.
‘Our classes will not be about ‘five multiplied by four equals twenty’. We will look at numbers and find the fun, interesting and useful things we can do with them and the magic they bring to the world.’
The five students were still buzzing about Maths when they got back to their living quarters. In the boys’ room they were starting to get on a lot better after the dispute over the shower had been solved. Craig and Ajit were watching YouTube videos of soccer bloopers together, and Joe was lying on his bed reading a novel about a schools’ rugby player.
Kim knocked on the door and popped her head inside. ‘Hello, boys, me and Jess were thinking of asking Luce could we see the cliff room that Joe was in. I miss seeing the sun, it’s like being in prison.’
Joe laughed. ‘Well, she did offer to give us a tour of the off-limits areas so it’s worth asking. You two want to come along?’
Ajit grunted, engrossed in the video clips. Craig shook his head too, afraid he’d miss another hilarious own goal.
Joe joined the girls in the corridor. ‘I wonder where Luce is now?’ he wondered. ‘I was with her in the security office a while ago.’
‘She told us to push this button if we needed her,’ suggested Jess, pointing at her watch.
‘I thought that was in case of emergency only,’ frowned Kim.
‘Well…’ grinned Joe. ‘I could say I needed to see the windows room again to help me remember what I saw.’
Jess pushed the button, and Luce’s face instantly appeared on the screen.
‘What can I do for you, Jess?’ she asked.
‘Kim and I would like to see the windows room – we haven’t seen sunlight for days,’ she explained.
‘I understand,’ Luce replied. ‘Stay where you are and I’ll be down to you in two minutes.’
‘Hmmm, impressive,’ said Kim. ‘Don’t tell the other lads or they’ll be getting her to go out for pizza.’
Luce arrived and showed them to an elevator, which whisked them high into the cliffs that lay on the island’s north face. She stepped out and ushered them along to the room that Joe had visited the previous night.
‘It’s still bright now,’ he explained. ‘All I could see last night was darkness and the waves crashing below. And, of course, the lights from whatever that was.’
Luce smiled weakly. The girls peered out the windows at the vast ocean that stretched out as far as they could see.
‘It’s so big, isn’t it,’ said Jess. ‘You just can’t see anything else except the sea and the sky.’
Joe screwed up his eyes, trying to focus on the corner of the sky where he had seen the lights, but there was nothing to be seen.
‘How long has this island been in existence?’ Kim asked Luce.
‘Well, I am the second manager of Atlantis,’ she started. ‘I’ve been here seventeen years now, and my predecessor was here for seven. The first of our intake are coming up to retirement age now, in most sports, although our chess player could keep going for many years yet.’
‘Chess?’ asked Jess. ‘That’s not very sporty…’
‘You would be surprised,’ replied Luce. ‘You need to be physically fit to maintain that level of concentration for so long. And the training your brain receives in playing chess can be of great benefit for those sports where tactics are important. Chess is on the curriculum in Atlantis Academy – one of our second-intake students learned to play here, and he’s now a grandmaster. That’s a very big deal in chess.’
Joe studied the horizon, scanning back and forth trying to see something out of place. It was impossible to pick out anything in the rough ocean swell, but he had the same uneasy feeling he had the night before and was sure those lights would reappear as soon as night fell.
‘It’s starting to get dark,’ said Kim. ‘If there’s any lights out there we’ll be able to see them better in the darkness.’
Luce looked concerned at this observation and decided to end the visit.
‘All right now, we’ve seen enough here, time to get back for your evening meal.’
‘But that’s not for another half-hour!’ said Jess.
‘Yes, but you’ll need to wash, and … and maybe change. Yes, that’s it… change. You’re meeting the captain tonight, so you’ll need to wear something more suitable than your tracksuits.’
Chapter 19
Joe was annoyed that Luce had cut their visit short, but he decided not to mention it again. When they got back to their rooms they found an envelope on each pillow containing an invitation to dine with the captain th
at evening.
‘She works quickly,’ thought Joe.
Craig and Ajit had tired of the stream of bloopers and were each stretched out on their beds reading magazines.
‘Do you really think you could be the best tennis player your age in the world when we’re finished here?’ asked Ajit.
‘No, but I think we’ve a great chance to improve ourselves here. I know how good, or bad, I am, and can’t imagine being even the best in my club. But I suppose they’ve been doing this for years and have had some amazing players here, so they must have good coaches.’
‘I suppose so,’ agreed Ajit, ‘it’s just so hard to get your head around it. Like, they’ve brought me here just because I hit one amazing shot – a total fluke. I’d love to be half-good at one sport, let alone the best at two.’
Joe chipped in. ‘I think we have to trust that they know what they’re doing. They’ve spent millions, maybe billions on this place and you just have to look at the wall of fame to see what the results are.’
The dinner turned out to be pretty boring – the captain spent most of the time explaining how the giant submarine-disguised-as-an-island worked, which went way over the heads of most of the students. As far as Joe understood, the whole manmade island was a giant solar panel, and the power it gathered was stored in huge batteries. They needed to surface every few days to soak up more of the sun’s rays, but he promised there would be no shortage of that in their next stop.
Later, in bed, Joe tossed and turned, thinking about the mysterious lights he had seen the night before, but not keen to get into any more trouble with Luce. He had been so excited and overawed by his first impressions of the island he had forgotten all about his old life and the family he had left behind. But as the novelty wore off, and his room-mates started squabbling and Luce started laying down the law, he suddenly started feeling homesick.
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