When Matt stepped up three steps to the porch, a disconcerting groan made him freeze. When he didn’t fall through, he gingerly walked to the front door. He ignored the doorbell—the chances were low of it actually working—and rapped sharply on the door.
It took a full minute and two more knocks before the door squealed open. Matt waited patiently and did his best to look unthreatening, a difficult proposition with his chiseled Nordic features and well-muscled shoulders. He hoped this was the right house. He wanted to get this over with and get back home to Bianca.
This is for Bianca, he reminded himself. When the money starts rolling in, she’ll be happy as a clam. Man up, Matt, and do the deal.
A short, wiry man peered out at Matt with bleary eyes. He was in his thirties, with a few days’ worth of stubble on his chin and a potent scent of alcohol that Matt could smell from his vantage point. His nose threatened to wrinkle again. He quashed the urge.
“Kiefer Nolan?” Matt said pleasantly.
The man looked him up and down, and a tinge of wariness entered his bloodshot eyes.
“Yeah? What?” Kiefer said in a high-pitched voice. Matt took a deep breath and then wished he hadn’t.
“I was told you were the man to talk to, if I have product I want to push. I know you know people, know where to go.”
“Who sent you?” Kiefer demanded. He planted his feet squarely, whether to fight or run, Matt wasn’t sure.
“Tom Banks told me,” Matt said quickly. Kiefer relaxed and let the door swing open more. A musty smell wafted from the dim hallway beyond.
“You should have started with that. Come in, come in.”
Matt stepped over the threshold after a moment’s hesitation. For Bianca, he reminded himself firmly. That engagement ring she’d been hinting about wasn’t going to buy itself. Matt was lucky to have his beautiful girlfriend, and a pretty ring to commemorate their commitment to each other shouldn’t be too big of an ask. Even if the requested rock was the size of the Hope diamond.
Kiefer led the way to a small kitchen in the back. Matt didn’t bother to remove his shoes. Dishes were piled in the sink and the table was covered in a miasma of plates and old newspapers, but Kiefer pushed the detritus to one side and motioned Matt to sit.
“So, what do you got?” Kiefer said when they were seated. “Don’t say you’ve started growing weed in your basement. I used to get that all the time. Stuff was always crap. That shit’s legal now, though.”
“No, not marijuana. This is entirely new.” Matt pulled out a plastic self-sealing baggie with a tiny amount of white powder in it. “It’s derived from an ocean product, but I don’t want to say more.”
“Yeah, yeah, trade secrets. I got it.” Kiefer took the bag from Matt and held it up to examine it. “What does it do?”
“Hallucinations. Really wild visions. No side effects in any of the test subjects so far.” Only he, his cousin Pete, and Larry and his friends had tested it, and everyone seemed fine. That was test enough for Matt.
“Nice. Do you have a name for it?”
“Uh…” Should Matt have a name handy? He hadn’t thought that far ahead. This was the first product he had developed, after all. He suppressed the urge to laugh wildly.
“How about Sea Salt?” Kiefer said. “Makes sense for looks and origin. Plus, it’s catchy. Is this a dose? Do you eat it or snort it?”
“Eat it, and that dose will last for about half an hour.”
“I’ll have to put it on something edible,” Kiefer mused. “No one will know what to do with a powder. What do you want to sell it for?”
Matt shrugged helplessly. He really was out of his depth here. Kiefer leaned forward.
“Look, here’s what we’ll do,” he said, all business. “Sell it cheap at first, get the word out. Not too cheap, you still want to make a profit, but as low as you can manage. Then we jack up the price. You got lots?”
“I can get it,” said Matt. The weird fish with the horns always came for his bait. They hadn’t failed him yet.
“Awesome. Leave me with a couple of testers and I’ll buy five doses for sale. If I like it, I’ll start selling it. Give me your number and I’ll call you when I need more.”
Matt walked out of the ramshackle bungalow a few baggies lighter and with an uncertain hope in his chest. His plan might just work. It was too late to back out now, anyway. It had been too late when he had bought all that equipment for Pete, his pharmacist cousin, to prepare the product. It was money or bust, now.
CORRIE
Corrie finally finished her last sample prep in the lab and let out a huge sigh. Dinner had been a hurried affair during a quick incubation break. She hoped Jules hadn’t been too offended when she scarfed down the herb-crusted halibut. She had tried to tell him how delicious it was, but she wasn’t sure that he had understood her through her mouthful as she bolted back to the lab to the incessant beeping of her timer. Luckily, she got the impression that he didn’t offend easily.
She stripped off her gloves with relief and rubbed her clammy hands together. She was toast. Time to check her email and head to bed. Jules and Zeb were playing cards in the galley and Krista was reading in their shared cabin, so Corrie pulled out her laptop from a drawer and connected it to her phone to access the Internet.
First, she wanted to write a quick blog post. There was so much to say, but she kept it brief.
Everyone, I might be onto something big. I’m on the ocean right now, and we’ve sighted a creature that is not known to exist. It looks like a rainbow-colored salmon with a horn, and we saw a whole school of them. We’re calling them unicorn fish, for lack of a better term. They’re unreal. I’ll update you when I find out more. Has anyone heard of a legend like this? Reply in the comments!
There were a few emails from the university, nothing earth-shattering, and an email from Adrianna. Corrie smiled and opened it.
Hi Corrie, we miss you already! Check out Koni’s picture he drew for you. It’s on our living room wall now. Pizza night when you get back? Adrianna
The picture was a black and white cartoon of a plumose anemone sporting a goofy grin and a pair of sunglasses. Corrie snorted out loud. Her roommates were ridiculous, and she loved them.
YES! to pizza. And I love the picture. That one looks much happier than the ones I’m snipping bits off, though. Corrie
The last message was from her supervisor. Corrie’s stomach dropped. Jonathan didn’t email her often, but she never liked it when he checked up on her. She always felt that she should have been doing more between meetings, collecting more data, producing more figures. This email was no different.
Corrie, Congrats on your first day at sea. Send me a progress update as soon as you can. Jonathan
Corrie sighed and pulled up some numbers from her first bits of data that she had measured today. There wasn’t much—most of her work would be done in the lab when she got home—but she had some information. She cobbled together a quick bar graph of temperatures and salinity profiles, dashed off some notes about diving conditions, and pressed send.
Not two minutes later, she received a reply.
That’s a good start. I’d like to see some preliminary data from your anemone collections, to see if we’re on the right path. Run a gel to make sure you’re getting the DNA you expect. If it’s not there, we might have to re-think your collection methods on the fly. Jonathan
Corrie’s heart sank. That sort of analysis wasn’t trivial, and there were only so many hours in the day. Sampling took up most of her time.
Then she remembered that she had found time to run a gel today, to check for genetic material in the unicorn fish’s seawater. She slumped in defeat. Was her hunt for the unicorn fish already getting in the way of her real science collection?
Finding the unicorn fish was the chance of a lifetime and had huge potential repercussions for both her and the world. But, this week of cruising was also an incredible opportunity for
her science career, one she didn’t want to squander. Her work on the anemones was important and had a more likely payoff for her career and for society. She couldn’t afford to waste this time.
She would simply have to do both. She could work longer and harder. It was only a week, after all. She could sleep when she got home.
Reluctantly, but with more resolve, she took some samples out of her tiny bar fridge and got to work.
ZEBALLOS
Zeb lay awake on his bunk long after Jules’ breathing grew even and deep. The waters of the calm bay they were anchored in hadn’t soothed him with their gentle rocking. He flipped over in his bunk with a frustrated sigh. Searching for strolias had awakened in him so many buried memories. His mother, with her gray eyes so like his, in a pale face so unlike, had understood him in ways no one else seemed to. If she had still been alive, Zeb could have simply asked her for the truth. Instead, he was relegated to scratching for clues in silt while blindfolded. Anger bubbled up inside him at his father for hoarding secrets like a miser.
Then, the anger melted away when he realized that they were both gone now. There was no one to look up to, and no one to blame. There was only him and the two-dimensional memories of his parents in his mind. Despite Jules’ soft breathing above him, he felt more profoundly alone than he’d ever had.
Zeb cursed softly under his breath and rolled out of bed. There was no point lying here, sleepless and with no hope of reaching that state. He pulled open a drawer, took out his whistle, and gently slid the drawer closed. He crept outside in loose shorts, with no shirt and bare feet.
Moonlight caught the whistle in its beam, and the instrument gleamed a luminescent white. It was made from the rib bone of a callo, his mother had told him, accompanied by her chortling laugh. It was the length of Zeb’s forearm, thin and curved, with carved swirls and lines on the surface. Zeb ran his fingers over the markings with familiarity. His mother had taught him to play the whistle when he was three, and its haunting notes had often been the last sound he’d heard at night. His father had refused to hear it after she had died, so Zeb had made a habit of swimming out to an isolated outcrop on Quadra Island to play when he needed to hear his mother’s voice.
Zeb walked to the bow and sat on the windlass. He brought the whistle to his lips and began to play.
Echoing notes bounced off the nearby forest and drifted over shallow waves. The sound the whistle made was breathy and soft, more haunting than piercing. Almost, if someone were listening from afar, they might mistake it for a keening wind or the far-off cry of a gray whale. Like his mother had taught him, Zeb didn’t play any recognizable tune. Notes floated past each other, up and down, long and short, with no discernable rhythm, yet the whole evoked a sense of melancholy that suited Zeb’s mood perfectly.
He played for longer than he had planned to. The music calmed him and allowed his mind to drift peacefully instead of thrashing around in the storm. When he finally put the whistle down, lapping waves played a different music. Zeb closed his eyes, trying and failing to ignore the call of the sea. When he couldn’t resist any longer—didn’t want to resist—he stripped off his shorts and dived overboard.
The water washed away the last lingering tension that his music hadn’t removed. Currents swept over him, around him, and he finally relaxed. His fingers dragged through the water and a million points of light sparkled like fairy dust over his skin from phosphorescent plankton. His mouth widened in a true smile, one that he rarely showed above the waves. Then he spun around in the water for the sheer joy of it, watching the bioluminescence swirl in his wake.
JULES
Jules woke to the familiar sound of Zeb’s whistle. If he hadn’t known what it was, he might have slept through it or thought it was the wind, although the night was still. The unearthly music flowed into the cabin, faint and ghostly.
Zeb had been more serious than usual the past few months, ever since he had blown up at his father about keeping secrets. If Zeb had been a loose cannon, Jules might have worried that he would have punched a wall. As it was, Zeb had swum away for three days, long enough for even the laid-back Jules to think about calling the coast guard. When Zeb finally emerged, dripping wet at Jules’ trailer door, Jules had let him in, and he’d slept for twenty-four hours straight.
Zeb, in his typical fashion, had only outlined the bare bones of his fight with his father, but Jules was adept enough at reading between Zeb’s lines to hear the whole story. George Artino wasn’t an easy man to live with and was closed-mouthed at the best of times, let alone about the kind of things Zeb wanted him to talk about.
Now, months later, the strain of finding answers was still eating Zeb up. Jules didn’t know how to help, beside coming on this trip.
The music would help. It always did. Jules turned on his side and waited for it to stop, for Zeb to come back to bed.
Twenty minutes later, the echoing notes faded. When no Zeb darkened the doorway, Jules climbed off the top bunk and threw on a thick sweater. The spring night air was cold on the water, despite warm days. Not all of them were lucky enough to be impervious to the cold. If Jules were a jealous man, he would have said goodbye to Zeb long ago.
The bow was empty, but Jules found a comfortable spot leaning against the wheelhouse and waited. Sure enough, after a half hour, the clink of metal ladder on hull sounded from the starboard side, and Zeb wandered to the bow to find his discarded shorts. He jumped when Jules gave a quiet wolf-whistle.
“Hiya, handsome,” he said in a falsetto voice. In his normal pitch he said, “But please, pants on.”
“I was alone,” Zeb grumbled. He wriggled his shorts over wet legs then sat down next to Jules. “What are you doing up?”
“Someone was moaning like a beached whale out here. I came to investigate.”
Zeb huffed.
“Luckily, I play for myself, not for my adoring audience.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” Jules said. He glanced sideways at Zeb. “You figure anything out?”
Zeb shrugged. He looked calmer than this afternoon. He always seemed to after swimming. Jules wondered what he did down there. He had no interest in joining Zeb on his little expeditions—it was cold enough on land without jumping in an ice bath like the ocean in spring—but he was curious all the same. Not curious enough to find out, though. Jules had limits, and comfort usually took priority over curiosity.
“We’ll keep at it,” Jules said, leaving Zeb to figure out whether he meant finding the strolias, helping Corrie, or life in general. He wasn’t sure himself. “But stressing over something you can’t control doesn’t help.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Yeah, true.” Jules was struck by a brilliant idea. “You know what, we all need to unwind. You’re stressed about the strolias, Corrie’s stressed about her science stuff, and Krista always has something stuck up her ass. After our last station tomorrow, we’ll be really close to Lasqueti Island. I say we go to the pub there tomorrow night.”
Zeb looked unimpressed.
“I guess we could.”
“Yeah, it’ll be great! It’s just what you need. First drinks are on me.” Zeb looked at him with incredulity. Jules amended his statement. “After you give me an advance on my pay, of course.”
Finally, a grin cracked Zeb’s face.
“Yeah, you’re on.”
CORRIE
Corrie was dragged out of a dead sleep by the sound of Krista banging drawers closed in their shared cabin.
“Izzit morning already?” she croaked. She hadn’t made it to bed until late, then she had woken at three in the morning to check on a sample run. Hopefully she would survive this week. If every day was like yesterday, it would be a very long week indeed. She wondered if Jules had packed enough coffee in the galley.
Krista pulled on a sweater and ran a wet comb over her short hair.
“We’re pulling up anchor in a minute, and we’ll be at the station in half
an hour. So, get dressed, get breakfast, and be ready to dive. Chop chop.”
With those soft words of encouragement, Krista left the cabin. Corrie groaned and rubbed her aching eyes. She could do this. She was strong. She was tough. Nothing could get in between her and her science.
No one was in the galley when she emerged from her cabin, although shouts and clanking from the deck told her where the rest of the crew was. She moaned in ecstasy at the sight of a large pot of hot coffee.
“I think I might be falling in love with Jules,” she murmured. “Or at least his cooking.”
She shoved a plateful of prepared toast and eggs in her mouth, appreciating the delicate fluffiness of the eggs as she did so. Finally, fortified with breakfast and two cups of strong coffee, she walked outside to the aft deck.
The boat was already underway, and trees slid by on the shore as they passed. Jules was in the hold, lifting out diving gear.
“Your talents are wasted here,” Corrie called down. “Those eggs were amazing.”
Jules looked up with a grin.
“Good eggs are too easy to make. It’s criminal to rubberize an egg. Think of all the work the poor chicken had to do for it.”
“True.” Corrie yawned then squatted down to attach her diving vest to one of the tanks. “When did you get up to make breakfast? I probably would have slept forever if Krista hadn’t woken me.”
Jules shrugged and hauled a weight belt out of the hold.
“Dunno. Early. That’s the schedule on the boat. Zeb’s dad always ran it like that, and I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He looked past Corrie with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he spoke, and Corrie looked around. Zeb stood there with a disgruntled look on his face. He huffed.
“That’s a low blow, Jules.” He looked at Corrie. His eyes were tired and a little sad around the edges, but he seemed calmer than yesterday, less on edge. “We’re up early because you have a lot of places you want to go, and it takes time to travel between them. And we only have a week, right? Make hay while the sun shines.”
Free Dive Page 9
