Peter smirked. “I don’t know, Gabe, but you’ve got antique globes in your study, so I’m sure we can learn from that.” Since they had started traveling together months ago—even before they had created the Nemo Institute—Peter had been a natural at navigating the Obscure. Which was pretty remarkable when you considered that on land, Peter was afraid of water. Like deathly afraid, so afraid he couldn’t even drink it. But he was at home on the bridge.
Gabriel stepped back, looking at the model. “So, walls. Is it…”
“What?” Peter was hunched over and stood up.
“I mean, is it bridgelike?”
“Bridgelike?” Peter asked. “It’s your bridge. Our bridge, if you don’t mind. We kinda get to say what’s bridgelike. Oh, and did I mention you’ve already got your own study? It looks like a Sherlock Holmes movie in there, how bridgelike is that?”
“Guys!” Misty Jensen pushed the door open, looking in. “Hey!”
“Door!” Gabriel and Peter said at the same time. Peter waved his hands wildly. “We could be changing in here.”
Misty leaned in the doorway and rolled her eyes. She was wearing her school uniform, a green tunic over black pants. She looked impatient. “Do you realize you missed—what’s that?” She ran over to the model. “This is the bridge?”
Peter nodded. “With some improvements.”
“Ooh, I have a plant,” she cooed at the little green ball. She looked at the whiteboard. “And I get a wall. You get a wall! You want to put posters on your wall. Oh, guys, I like this with the walls.” She grinned, her massive mane of curly hair bouncing.
Peter pointed. “You’ve still got your changing room, but we’ve moved it behind your station instead of mine. We made the space by moving equipment into this station the Marine figure keeps bumping into.”
Misty picked up the pink Troll doll–representing ball. “How long have you guys been at this?”
Gabriel shrugged. He looked back at the sunlight on the water outside. His wristband was in the pocket of the pants he had left draped over the leg of the bunk bed and he hadn’t bothered to retrieve it. “Since … what, four?”
“Four,” Peter said.
“So, like, I guess, three hours? It feels like nothing.”
Misty nodded. “Okay, but it wouldn’t be three hours; it’s four hours,” Misty said. “You missed yoga and breakfast.” Misty was a devoted student of exercise and health, especially now that she’d been taking an exercise science course at the Nemo Institute that would have been advanced for a high school senior, much less a middle schooler. Though it had made her prone to toss out nuggets of exercise wisdom like she was everybody’s personal trainer.
“What?” Peter asked.
“It’s eight o’clock,” Misty yelped, suddenly standing up and looking at her Nemotech wristband. “That was what I was gonna tell you.”
Argh. Gabriel turned and yanked his own wristband out of the pants. “We took the alarm apart…”
Peter fished his own band out of a jumble of tech on the other desk. “Oh, you’re right.” He looked at Misty. “Some help you are.”
Gabriel pulled on his tunic over his T-shirt and flicked his hands at Misty. “Out, out, we gotta move.”
“Wait for us,” Peter called.
“Ninety seconds,” Misty answered. “We have six minutes to get to class. I’m not gonna be late because—”
Gabriel grabbed his pants and shooed her into the hall. He pulled on the pants, asking Peter, “Are you changing?”
Peter was wearing a pair of ratty blue basketball shorts and a T-shirt that read ALTS IZ FARLOYRN. All is lost, apparently. The first line ever spoken by an actor Peter liked. He looked down and shrugged. “I’m good.” He sat and yanked on some shoes, sockless. “We can finish this later.”
Misty was waiting in the hall, and they started running together. “How could you not know the time?”
“We got distracted,” Gabriel said.
“School starts the same time every day,” she said, sounding more like her air force parents than herself. “Don’t forget we’re down in the viewing hall on Fridays.”
Gabriel winced. His mom’s marine biology class was the first class they had, and Fridays were special because class was held in a Nemoglass-encased hall below the surface. She’d be so upset if he were late. Argh. It would put her in a spot where it would look like she was playing favorites if she didn’t call him out on it. Guilt washed through him. He was usually the first person there.
His mom would be furious.
No—disappointed. And that was worse.
They ran down the Nemo Institute’s main tower.
It wasn’t just any tower, either. Rising two hundred feet above the surface of the Pacific, the Manta II tower swirled with blue glass from its base up to a seventy-foot-wide, three-story house of crystal and blue in the shape of a manta ray. It was very similar to the tower it was named after, the one at Nemolab. The crystal was Nemoglass, the unique, incredibly strong transparent material the family used for the windows of Nemotech ships and the massive domes of the lab. At the surface and below, the tower was surrounded by a tight cluster of twenty-foot-wide tubes gathered close together, resembling a great coral pipe cluster stretching to the sky. It also, to Gabriel’s eye, looked like a pipe organ, the kind that once rested (or so he was told) in the stateroom of the original Captain Nemo aboard the original Nemoship, Nautilus. Fittingly the building was called the Pipes.
They reached the end of the hall and entered a large stairwell that ran along a great glass wall, and Gabriel brought them all to a halt. He craned his neck to look out. Peter and Misty pressed their foreheads to the glass. In the distance he could see the shadow of a metal latticework covered in seaweed, intended to one day become a new coral reef. Already it was a feeding ground for countless kinds of fish and crabs.
Just barely, Gabriel could see down to the corner of a great white building at the bottom of the tower. An enormous glass dome showed itself at the corner, the rest of it underwater. He could make out the shapes of the students already gathered, below the waterline in the dome. Against the wall, his mother consulted her notes on a tablet. Class was about to start.
He tapped the glass as they kept moving. “Time?”
“Got about three minutes,” Misty said.
Gabriel hopped on a long silver handrail and slid down to the next landing. Outside, the surface of the water cut across the glass.
When they hit the next level, Peter held up a hand. “Wait, left, left.” And he and Gabriel were gone through a pair of double swinging doors. The cafeteria.
“There’s no time,” Misty growled. But she ran after them.
“It’s a shortcut,” Gabriel shouted back.
“It’s true,” Peter said as he shot through the double doors. “Through the kitchen there’s a hallway that leads to the lecture hall. Plus I’m famished.”
The cafeteria was quiet as a tomb, the lights flickering on to reveal a wide room of long silver tables. The floor-to-ceiling windows revealed pylons of concrete where schools of fish shot by in streams of color. Gabriel and Peter raced to the back, near the kitchen, where a tray of forlorn breakfast rolls had still not been taken in. Peter grabbed three and tossed one over his shoulder to Gabriel.
Misty pointed out the window on the right—beyond the thick glass and the water they could see the classroom dome.
They burst into the kitchen, and Gabriel waved at Mr. Francesco, the head cook, who was going over something on a clipboard with two of his staff. All of them wore white. Mr. Francesco looked at the three students in surprise and barely had a moment to speak before they were gone again, out the door in the back of the kitchen.
As they poured into the hallway, Peter pitched Gabriel a little bottle of orange juice.
“Where’d you get this?”
“It was on the table next to Mr. Francesco.”
Down corridors of black marble, they slid to the next stairwell and down s
ilvery guardrails. Finally, they reached the bottom and a pair of double doors that read SEA OBSERVATION.
Gabriel, Peter, and Misty breathed for a second, and then Misty pushed on in.
They entered a dome thirty feet wide and mostly underwater, with black tiles on the floor and a world of sea life teeming all around. The three careened to a halt at the back of the students, who were all standing, waiting for Mom to look up. The doors clicked shut behind them.
“And that’s time,” Misty said.
“Shortcuts.” Gabriel and Peter shared a fist bump as Gabriel’s mom looked up and rose, smiling at the class.
“Good morning,” she said, her voice a gorgeous lilt of Hindi- and French-tinged English. She swept her bright eyes over the crowd, briefly connecting with Gabriel’s. “The reason we’re meeting in this hall today is because I wanted us to have a view of the sea life just outside. Today we’re going to talk about changing mammal behavior due to global shifts in temperature.”
Gabriel nodded. His mother had been talking to him for as long as he could remember about how tiny rises in average temperature could damage sea life. It was one of her regular topics (he would almost call them sermons) when he and his sister were younger.
On cue, a great white shark, taller than Gabriel, whisked by the window, whipping its tail and curling away. “Oh, well, there,” Mom said. For a moment her eyes took on a sad, faraway look that automatically made Gabriel’s eyes water. He could handle the idea that Earth was in danger, but he couldn’t stand her to be sad. “That shark’s not really strange to see. But at this time of year, with the water cooling in the fall, I’d expect most of these sharks to have moved south to Baja. The waters off Southern California are a sort of nursery for sharks, and we’ve seen increasing shark presence in the shallow waters as the water has stayed warmer, longer.” She turned back. “Now, sharks don’t really like attacking people, but if it happens at all, it will happen more as the water warms.”
“Well that’s a great message to kick off the day with,” Peter whispered.
“Shh,” Misty said.
“But sharks are survivors,” Mom said. “The coral reefs, on the other hand—” Mom looked up as she was cut off by a blaring alarm Klaxon that Gabriel felt in his bones.
What the heck was that? Gabriel barely recalled that there even were Klaxons at the school, though of course there were. But he couldn’t imagine why someone would trigger it unless something huge had happened, like a pleasure boat crashing into the side of the school.
“What on Earth?” Mom yelled over the alarm sound. She went to the lectern and touched a button. “This is Dr. Nemo! What’s happening?”
A voice came on that Gabriel recognized as one of the security personnel in the control room of the Manta II tower. “Perimeter alarm!” he shouted. “Dr. Nemo, there’s something big coming toward us. Or at least it was coming toward us. Now it’s stopped. We’re picking up a faint SOS. Did you copy that?”
“It’s sending an emergency signal?” Mom asked. SOS was universal code for help us. No one really knew what SOS stood for. There was a lot of talk that it stood for Save Our Ship, but like a lot of things about the sea, that probably wasn’t true. “What is it?”
“It’s a submarine,” the voice replied. “And they’ve stopped six miles off.”
“A submarine? And you said it was a big one?” The word could mean anything, but for submarines, big would mean enormous, several hundred feet in length. Gabriel instantly thought of his sister—she had a big submarine. Mom had the same thought, apparently: “Is it the Nebula?”
“No.” The voice sounded confused. “It’s not one of ours.” Not a Nemo submarine, he meant. Not sending out any of the familiar Nemo codes or showing a Nemotech profile, visually or even in how the hull reflected the pings of sonar. Anyway, as far as Gabriel knew, there were currently only two Nemo submarines, and one of them was docked below the Institute.
Gabriel turned to Peter and Misty. “SOS,” he whispered.
“Everyone, take a moment.” Mom held up her hands as if she could calm the class with her palms.
“Dr. Nemo, if you could have a look at this,” the voice said.
Mom shook her head slightly. “Of course. Class? I expect you to read the articles I’ve posted on your class pages, and if you were wise, you’d take the rest of the period to do that. I’m sorry to leave you. We’ll continue Monday!”
Mom tucked her tablet under her arm and hurried through the room, her dark blue flats clicking on the black tile. She passed Gabriel and squeezed his shoulder as she went. Then the class was alone.
“So, are we going to read?” someone asked, but even a bunch of STEM geeks were still human. They stampeded out of the room like cattle, intent on being anywhere but a classroom if they had the chance.
“What do you think?” Peter whispered as they moved with the crowd. He, Gabriel, and Misty kept their heads close together.
“An SOS?” Misty answered. “I want to have a look.”
“Absolutely,” Gabriel said. “Let’s just make sure we can lose the crowd.”
It was time to go Obscure.
2
THEY NEEDED TO get to the Obscure, but they were on the wrong side of the building. The Nemo Institute had a hangar at the water level for docking boats and even the small submarines that the Institute sometimes used for moving about, including the one Gabriel’s mom used when she needed to travel back to Nemobase. Every one of the eighty students and myriad staff knew and used that dock.
The Obscure dock was hidden and unknown to all but a few people. Gabriel and his crew needed to get there without being noticed.
They were still surrounded by students as Gabriel flipped a panel on the side of his wristband, pulled out a small earpiece, and slipped it into his ear. “Mr. Dorn?” He tried not to raise his voice, but the still-ringing alarms made it hard for him to hear.
“Gabriel?” A deep voice, the same one that had called out to Mom from the control room, responded. Mr. Dorn—a muscular, ex–Navy SEAL giant—was the most physically imposing man Gabriel had ever seen, and even his voice was a little scary.
“You’re about to have a minor glitch with the security systems where it will look like a hangar door opened, but, uh, it didn’t, and you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Hear what from you?”
“Perfect,” Gabriel said. He gave the thumbs-up to Misty and Peter. They kept time with the other students, who were moving in pairs and threes through a door at the end of the corridor. “Library,” he said.
They went through the doors and climbed a flight of stairs, still surrounded by students. They stopped at the first landing, letting a bunch of their classmates pass them. They needed a lull before any more students came. Gabriel didn’t want anyone seeing which way he and his crew went. When they had the stairs to themselves, they dashed through a door marked LEVEL 1. All the students’ rooms were higher up, but no one paid attention to the three of them disappearing here.
They came out in another corridor with glass on one side, looking out from about twelve feet above the water. Misty ran ahead, hitting the double glass doors to a room with huge stacks of books inside. The word library was etched into the glass of the door.
The library of the Nemo Institute was practically empty at this time of day, save for the Library Sisters, a pair of seventy-something women in matching berets who, as far as Gabriel knew, had been installed with the library itself. Apparently, they were old friends of the family. They barely looked up at Misty, Gabriel, and Peter as the students ran past the counter. The three zipped around couches and tables and countless little green lamps before making their way to a shelf in the back labeled OCEANIC HISTORY.
They gathered behind the history shelf, dwarfed by eleven feet of ancient books. On the other side were shorter shelves and a glass wall. Misty touched the glass and whispered, as she always did, “Hi, Mom,” because from here you could see all the way to California.
&nb
sp; “Can I do it?” Peter asked. “I never get to do it.”
“Be my guest,” Gabriel said.
They stopped for a moment, a narrow shelf in front of them, the glass wall on one side and the tall shelf on the other. In front of the shelf, on a three-foot pedestal, sat a model of Granite House, a cliffside home once inhabited by friends of the Nemos on a faraway South Pacific island. Tiny windows were cut into the stone, and at the mouth of a cave near the top of the cliff was a tiny model campfire. Waves crashed against the foot of the cliff, and a beach grew along the sides, with a tiny drawbridge over a little river that flowed off and disappeared from the sculpture.
Peter reached out, touched a hidden button under the pedestal, and then put two fingers under the drawbridge, flipping it up. He stepped back, as did Gabriel and Misty.
With a mechanical whine, the section of the floor below the pedestal dropped away, the pedestal becoming the topmost part of the center column of a spiral staircase.
Lights sprang on as they descended into the staircase, stepping hurriedly past concrete pillars and countless pipes sending water and power to the school. They emerged onto a landing at the bottom and stood before a door bearing a large circular wheel. Misty touched her palm to a glass reader at the center of the wheel, and after a few chirps, it began to spin.
The metal door suddenly flew up, disappearing into the ceiling. Gabriel felt his heart leap, even though he knew what he would see. There, beyond a concrete walkway, floated the Obscure.
The Nemoship glistened in the dim light with black plates inlaid with stripes of mother-of-pearl. At first all Gabriel could see in the dark hangar were faint reflections from the stripes on the hull. Gabriel hopped onto the platform on the nose of the submarine. He used his handprint to open the hatch. Gabriel climbed down, his friends following quickly after, lights flickering on as they hopped to the floor. Less than five minutes after hearing the alarms, they were inside the bridge.
Quest for the Nautilus Page 2
