“Um,” said Oliver. “What?”
“You know.” Big Bart smiled. “Because your dad and Corey are back! You don’t have to be in charge anymore.” He patted Oliver on the back. “Well done, kiddo! You kept us in ship shape!”
He led the other treacherous deckhands out into the glaring sun while Oliver started shoving snack cakes into his backpack, along with the wet suits he hoped never to have to use.
“Hey, Oliver,” Big Bart called back. Oliver froze. “Thanks for the snack cake!”
“You’re welcome,” said Oliver, too frightened to move.
“Where’s Celia?” he heard Big Bart ask.
“She’ll be back shortly,” his father said. “She had to find a cucumber.”
Oliver didn’t know what that meant or why his sister needed to find a cucumber, but at least it bought him some time to come up with a plan.
16
WE CAN’T CATCH
A CUCUMBER
“YOU MUST EMPTY YOUR LUNGS of air and then take a big breath,” Jabir explained as he handed Celia some homemade wooden goggles with scratched glass lenses. “You want to get as much new air as you can before you dive down.” Celia wrinkled her brow at him. “It would also help if you burst your eardrums,” he added.
“I am not bursting my eardrums,” said Celia.
“Suit yourself.” Jabir shrugged. “You will not be able to dive as deep. The pressure will hurt too much.”
Celia really wished she had kept her mouth shut about the whole Valerie-at-Large initiation thing. She knew that if she wanted to find out where her mother had gone, get back to the Get It Over With, and get home again, then she had to complete this challenge. She had to dive down deep into the ocean with no air tank or anything, and come back up to the surface with a sea cucumber. She didn’t even know what a sea cucumber was.
“It looks just like a big cucumber on the bottom of the ocean,” Jabir told her. “Its skin feels like leather and when you pick it up, it will throw up all its guts.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Celia.
“They are a delicacy,” he answered her.
“So people, like, eat it?” asked Celia.
“They are very good for you.” He smiled. “You might like them.”
“Do I really have to do this?” Celia looked over the edge of the small fishing boat, straight down into the sea. Dark shapes moved in the depths. The old men of the Orang Laut watched her from their boats and chuckled. “I don’t even like to swim in the swimming pool,” she whispered to Jabir.
“The elders will not tell you where your mother has gone unless you first show them that you respect our ways,” he whispered back to her. “Don’t worry. I will help you.”
“But why me?” she asked. “Why not Corey or my father? Or my brother, Oliver? He’s back on our boat. He could dive with you. It’d make him feel special if you asked for him.”
She shaded her eyes from the sun and looked over the water toward the sailboat, where her father and Corey were just climbing on board again. Big Bart had come out of the cabin to greet them. It looked like he was eating a Velma Sue’s Snack Cake. Celia wished she were over there eating one too.
“Do you know the story of our people?” Jabir asked.
“No,” said Celia. “How would I?”
“A long time ago, there was an unhappy princess who liked to watch the sea for hours and hours. One day, a great flood rose up and swept her away,” Jabir said. “Her father, the king, sent a fleet of boats out to find his daughter and ordered them not to return until she was found. And so we remain at sea, waiting for a princess to return.” Jabir smiled.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Celia. “You live on these boats because some ancient princess got lost in a flood? You know she’s not coming back, right?”
“That’s just the story,” said Jabir. “It’s the myth that we tell about how we came to live at sea. It doesn’t have to be true to be, you know, true. Maybe you are the princess?”
Celia wrinkled her brow at him. He blushed.
“Let’s get this over with.” She sighed. Then she took a deep breath and jumped into the water.
It felt good to swim in the cool ocean, rising and falling with the gentle swells. Jabir tossed a net down to Celia and then he jumped in, treading water while he held two bags of stones.
“These … will help you … get to the bottom … faster.” He kept having to spit water out of his mouth as he struggled with both bags of stones. Celia wondered why he was being so helpful.
“Okay,” she said, taking one of the bags of stones from him. “Let’s—” Before she could finish her sentence she sank straight down like a … well, like a stone.
Underneath the surface, another world blossomed. Celia looked up and saw the waves above from their undersides; she saw the sun high above, bent and shimmering like seeing it through a stained-glass window. She looked down and saw the sandy bottom racing up toward her. Coral reefs burst from the ocean floor. Some were round and grooved and looked like pictures she had seen of human brains; others were like giant leaves, waving in an underwater breeze. Colorful fish swamped between the clusters of coral, nibbling at the sand or vanishing between the spongy fingers of colorful sea anemones.
She looked at Jabir, who was sinking right beside her. He smiled widely and shook his head back and forth so his hair waved just like the sea anemones. That made Celia laugh in a hail of bubbles. She’d lost a lot of air with that laugh.
Jabir grabbed her hand and pulled her to the ocean floor. They began scouring through the sand, kicking and swimming. As Celia approached one large beige rock, it suddenly turned purple, unfurled eight legs from its underside and swam away as fast as lightning. She hadn’t realized that an octopus could camouflage itself so well. That made her think again of the kraken, the giant squid with razor-sharp fangs.
She turned her head around in a panic, imagining squid tentacles reaching for her, pulling her deeper into the endless blue of the ocean. She looked up to the surface, feeling a tightness in her lungs. She was running out of breath and hadn’t really even looked for a sea cucumber. On a reef not even twenty feet away, a sleek shark cruised by, eyeing her with steely calm.
She looked around her and saw nothing but the sandy ocean floor. Jabir was gone. Celia was alone on the bottom of the ocean.
She did, of course, what came naturally to a tween alone on the seafloor without so much as an air tank or spear gun as hungry sharks circled.
She freaked.
She dropped her bag of stones and kicked madly toward the surface. As she rose, she felt a tug on her leg. Something had her, gripping her tightly, pulling her down. The kraken! The kraken was taking her! She let out a scream of bubbles, the last of her air, when suddenly she was face-to-face with Jabir. He shook her to make her calm down. It was he who had grabbed her leg, he who slowed her mad dash to the surface, and he was now putting a large, spiny, slimy tube into her hands. He’d gotten the sea cucumber for her. He looked at her and smiled.
Celia blushed. The moment was almost like something out of one of her soap operas and Celia felt her heart racing. That, of course, had more to do with the fact that she was about to drown than with Jabir’s kindness. As she squeezed the sea cucumber in her grip, it let out of splurt of blackish, greenish gritty liquid all over her hands.
“Blech!” she cried as she broke the surface of the water, gasping for air, and dropping the sea cucumber by accident. “Its guts!” she cried out. “It spat its guts on me!”
“You …” Jabir panted. “You dropped it?”
“Oops,” said Celia.
She looked up at the sun and breathed in deep. It felt wonderful to be back on the surface again, alive, even if she had totally failed to bring back a sea cucumber. One of the lepa lepa, the small fishing boats, eased up beside them. The old woman on board wagged her finger and yelled at Jabir. He said something back, but the woman wouldn’t let him finish.
Celia couldn’t understand the words, but scolding sounded the same in any language.
Jabir climbed aboard the boat and helped Celia out of the water.
“My mother says I have to take you back to your boat now.” Jabir sighed.
“But can’t I try again?” Celia felt like a failure. What were they supposed to do now? “I just dropped the cucumber straight down. It’s right below us. We can go get it!”
“I’m sorry,” said Jabir. “I lied to you. There is no initiation with shark teeth and sea cucumbers. I made that up so you would stay a little longer.”
“You made that up?” Celia’s face turned red with rage.
“It gets so boring out here,” said Jabir. “And I thought, maybe if you stayed longer, we’d be friends. You’d be my very own princess.” Jabir looked down at his feet. His mother was still scolding him as she rowed back toward the Get It Over With. “Don’t tell Mr. Corey Brandt, please? I don’t want him to think I’m a liar.”
Celia felt bad for Jabir. She knew what it was like to be bored; she knew what it was like to want to make a new friend.
“I won’t tell,” she said. “And we can still be friends.”
“We can?” Jabir looked up at her.
“Yeah, I mean, you never know. We’re always going on all these stupid adventures. Maybe we’ll be back again.”
“I hope you will,” said Jabir. “I hope you find this island and your mother and come back to see me!”
“I guess I hope so too,” said Celia as they reached the sailboat.
“Ahoy!” Dr. Navel called. “How was your first dive in the ocean?”
Celia didn’t have a chance to answer because Jabir’s mother started yelling at Dr. Navel right away.
Celia reached for the ladder to climb back aboard her boat.
“You take this.” Jabir grabbed her hand while his mother was still shouting. He pressed a small brass compass into her hand. He smiled at her. The compass needle didn’t point to the N for north. It pointed to a symbol, one Celia knew all too well: an old key—the symbol of the Mnemones. “You follow.” Jabir winked at her, then turned away to try to calm his mother down.
Celia climbed aboard the Get It Over With and watched as Jabir’s mother rowed back toward the other boats, still scolding her son.
Celia looked down at the compass in her hand and saw that it was engraved with two initials, P.F.
She slipped it into her pocket just as Oliver rushed over to her, looking very, very alarmed.
“We’re in trouble,” he whispered. “Big trouble.”
17
WE ARE HARDLY SERENE
THE RESEARCH VESSEL SERENITY was neither a research vessel nor was it serene. It had been, until recently, one of three harpoon ships in a whaling fleet. Sir Edmund had purchased it on behalf of the Gentlemen’s Adventuring Society and quickly renamed and renovated it.
He painted the word RESEARCH on the side in bright yellow paint, although he left the large harpoon gun on the bow just in case. A harpoon gun could come in handy when chasing sea monsters. Or the Navel family.
He appointed the officers’ quarters in dark wood and soft leather, working to make his time on the ocean as comfortable as possible. He filled the bookshelves with rare manuscripts by the world’s greatest Atlantologists—which is what experts in the lost civilization of Atlantis are called.
Atlantology is an obscure field of study, filled with crackpots and lunatics and nonsense theories. In the seventeenth century, a Swedish count was convinced that Atlantis lay somewhere near the Arctic Circle—in Swedish territory, of course. Others had proposed islands in the Mediterranean or the Azores off the Atlantic coast of Africa. One of the experts even believed that Atlantis was somewhere in the deserts of Egypt. Another claimed to have found it off the coast of Spain. Sir Edmund found the books useless, as he found most books. He was not what one might consider “a reader.”
Sir Edmund had come to realize that his only hope of finding Atlantis—and with it, the Lost Library of Alexandria—would be to follow the Navel twins and to find their mother. And then they would all be his prisoners. Then, Sir Edmund would find Atlantis and Sir Edmund would control the Lost Library. Well, Sir Edmund and his Council would control the Lost Library … if he told them about it at all.
He smirked at the thought.
He twirled his fingers through his mustache and looked at the large painting behind his desk. He kept a surprise hidden in a chamber behind that painting, a nasty surprise for anyone who tried to stop him. He listened closely, pressing his ear against the wall to try to hear any noises coming through. He wouldn’t want the prize to get out too early. That would be a disaster. Just capturing it had cost the lives of three of his ichthyologists. Zookeepers is what they really were, even if they liked to call themselves scientists.
Well, he chuckled, they weren’t even zookeepers anymore. Squid food. That’s what they were now.
He heard a bang and nearly fell backward off his chair.
“Ah!” he yelled, afraid his surprise was escaping.
“Sir!” Someone knocked on his cabin door. Sir Edmund caught his breath and glanced around, glad no one was in his office to see him startle. It wouldn’t do to show fear in front of his crew. They were afraid enough of the cargo they were carrying.
“What?” he bellowed, angry to be interrupted.
“We have a report from your spies following the Navels.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Are you going to let me in, sir?”
“No, I am not!” Sir Edmund said. “There is nothing you need to say that you can’t say through a door.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sailor on the other side of the door. “Janice and Ernest continue to follow them, sir. They report that the Navels and Corey Brandt spent the afternoon with the Orang Laut and that the daughter, Celia, went for a swim. They have now all returned to their vessel.”
“And what is their course? Give me coordinates, you fool! They will lead us right to Plato’s map!”
“Your spies say that the ship is behaving oddly, sir.”
“Oddly?”
“They are sailing around in tiny circles,” said the sailor. “They don’t appear to be going anywhere.”
Sir Edmund leaned back in his chair and twirled his mustache absentmindedly. “What new devilry are the Navels up to?” he said to himself.
“And they are all fighting with each other,” the man called. “Even the children. They say it has gotten … well, rather violent on board the Get It Over With.”
18
WE DO NOT SAY ARRR
OLIVER STILL HADN’T COME UP with a plan to stop Big Bart and the others from hijacking the Get It Over With when his sister got back from her swim with the Orang Laut. Celia was the one who was good at plans. She never should have gone off to the Orang Laut to begin with.
The moment she set foot on board, Oliver raced over to her, giving her a big hug just so he could whisper in her ear. She was soaking wet, so it was kind of gross to hug her, but he needed her help right away.
“We’re in trouble,” he whispered. “Big trouble.”
“Oliver.” Celia shoved him away. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Shh,” he snapped, glancing quickly at Big Bart, who was helping the other two deckhands raise the anchor. The mutineers had said they would take over the boat once they were away from the Orang Laut. The anchor was up and the Orang Laut were already paddling off in the opposite direction. There wasn’t even time to tell his sister what was going on.
“Why did you take so long to find a cucumber?” He complained and decided he would do the only thing he could think of. They had to stay close to the fishermen. He turned his back on Celia and rushed to the big captain’s wheel. He nearly knocked his father over diving for it.
“Wow, Oliver.” Dr. Navel smiled. “I’ve never seen you so eager to do anything! You’ve found your sea legs, I guess?”
“These are m
y normal legs,” said Oliver. “I’m just, you know, um, bored. I want to steer, okay?”
“All right, but be careful,” his father told him. He dropped his voice. “We don’t want any repeats of our practice run, do we?”
“I learned how to sail, Dad, jeez,” Oliver groaned.
“Celia,” Dr. Navel called out to her. She was still looking very puzzled. “Did the Orang Laut give you a direction we should follow? I couldn’t tell from what that lady was yelling.”
“Um, yeah, Dad.” Celia reached into her pocket for the compass, but before she could even pull it out, Oliver grabbed the big steering wheel with both hands and spun it with all his strength, letting it twirl free. The boat heaved to the left and the boom—the heavy pole that holds the bottom of the mainsail—swung across the deck with ferocious speed.
Celia and Dr. Navel were knocked off their feet.
“Coming about!” Corey yelled, so Bonnie hit the deck just in time as the boom swept above her.
“Darn,” Oliver muttered under his breath.
“Oliver!” Dr. Navel shouted. “Catch the wheel! Try to straighten us out! You could have knocked Bonnie overboard!”
Oliver caught the wheel, but only long enough to give it another spin to keep them going in circles. In the distance, the Orang Laut had stopped to watch the strange sailboat spinning around, going nowhere. Oliver didn’t have much more of a plan than circles.
“Whoa!” Twitchy Bart nearly lost his grip climbing up the mast, but he clung tightly and didn’t fall.
“Coming back about!” Corey warned as the boom swung across the deck the other way. Everyone ducked again as it swept over them. The sails flared and fluttered and ropes slashed about in the air like live wires, pinning everyone where they’d ducked.
“He’s trying to sabotage us again!” Celia yelled. “Just because I went to meet the Orang Laut with Corey!”
We Give a Squid a Wedgie Page 9