Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  I take it from him. It’s the right size—and I know I’ll have enough leverage to loosen the bolt . . . but I hesitate.

  If I do this, what will happen? Tearing her from the ship could condemn her to a watery grave. She’s made of copper, which means she might sink like a penny in a fountain. But what if she doesn’t sink? What if she swims? If I free her from the ship now, will she take me with her? Can I continue this voyage without her?

  “Hurry, Caden,” says Carlyle. “Before you’re too late.”

  With the sound of crestmares above and the raging sea below, I hold the wrench on the bolt, struggling to set Calliope free. I put my full weight behind the wrench, and the bolt begins to turn. I jerk harder until it’s loose, then work the wrench until the bolt falls free.

  As soon as it plunks into the dark water of the flooded forecastle, Calliope begins to wriggle in the tightly cinched hole, pulling herself forward. I can imagine her straining her arms, pushing against the ship as if birthing herself from the bow. She frees her hips, her legs follow, and in an instant she’s gone, leaving only a porthole-sized gap where she had been.

  I look out through the hole to see that she has not sunk—but neither does she swim. Instead, she runs, her spirit lighter than air, lighter than the copper of her flesh, more willful than gravity. She runs on the surface of the waves! A single ray of sunlight pierces the clouds like a spotlight to follow her, and her corroded, oxidized shell peels away, revealing shining copper from head to toe. I want to cry for joy, but a dark shape falls from the ship up above into the waves, then another then another. The crestmares! In a moment the sea is infested with them, racing like a cavalry charge toward a single shining figure in the distance.

  It’s not you we want, but we’ll go through you if we have to.

  It wasn’t the captain they were after—it was Calliope! The captain must have known! That’s why he turned to face her away from them.

  “Run!” I scream, even though I know she can’t hear me. “Run and don’t ever stop running!”

  In a moment she is like a tiny flame on the horizon chased by the surge of crestmares, then I can’t see her anymore, and I pray that she has the strength to run for as long as she has to.

  When I climb out of the forecastle, the storm has ended, as if a switch has been thrown. The waves subside; the clouds begin to break apart. The captain stands midship with arms crossed, his good eye fixed on me. His dead socket is bare and dark, but somehow staring as well.

  “Am I to be keelhauled?” I ask. “Or worse?”

  “You had the gall to steal something from me,” he says.

  Around him the crew tenses in anticipation of what he might do.

  “You had the gall to steal from me—and by doing so, you saved us all.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Heroism amidst panic.”

  The navigator comes to him with his peach pit. “I found this. Does that make me a hero, too?” The captain takes it from him without answering. He pops it back in place, but somewhere in the storm, the eye patch was lost. There is nothing to hide the awfulness of his peach-pit eye.

  “Bring us around,” the captain says. “A westerly heading once more, Master Caden.”

  “Master?”

  “I’ve just promoted you to Master of the Helm. The wind no longer guides us,” he says. “You do.”

  134. On the Other Side of the Glass

  I hear from Skye that Callie is leaving.

  “She’s in our room, packing right now,” Skye tells me as she works on the same puzzle she’s been working on forever. I wonder if she remembers giving me a piece, and if she’ll ever ask for it back. “You’ll never see Callie again. Poor you.” Skye seems to take both delight and misery from the fact. “Life is about suffering. Deal with it.”

  I don’t dignify her with a response. Instead I go to Callie’s room. On the way I run into Carlyle, and I can tell by the sympathetic look on his face that it’s true. Callie is leaving.

  “You may want this,” he says, and reaching over the nurses’ station, he pulls a rose from a flower arrangement. He hands me the rose.

  “Hurry, Caden,” he says. “Before you’re too late.”

  Callie is in her room with her parents, packing up what few belongings she has. I have never met her parents. On the days they’ve come during visiting hour, the three of them retreated to a corner of the Vista Lounge and talked in hushed tones, letting no one in their little circle of three.

  When Callie sees me, she doesn’t smile. In fact, she seems almost in pain. “Mom, Dad, this is Caden,” she tells them. Was she going to leave without saying good-bye? Or was it so painful she just didn’t want to think about it?

  The rose in my hand seems such an awkward gesture now, I lay it down on her bed rather than handing it to her.

  “Hello, Caden,” says her father in an accent much stronger than hers.

  “Hi,” I say, and turn back to Callie. “So, it’s true—you’re leaving.”

  Her father speaks instead. “Discharge papers are already signed. Our daughter comes home today.”

  In spite of his attempt to speak for her, I direct my words at Callie. “You could have told me.”

  “I wasn’t sure until this morning. Then it happened so fast . . .”

  Skye’s words are still in my head. You’ll never see Callie again. I am determined to prove her wrong. I pull a crumpled piece of paper out of the trash, then ask her parents for a pen, because I know I won’t exactly find one lying around.

  Her mother hands me a pen from her purse, and I write on the scrap of paper as legibly as I can.

  “Here’s my email address, so you can write to me,” I say. We’re not allowed email here, but my in-box will still be there if and when I get out of this place.

  She takes the paper and holds it tightly in her fist, treasuring it. I can see tears in her eyes. “Thank you, Caden.”

  “Maybe you can give me yours, too?”

  Callie hesitates, and looks to her parents. She’s so different around them—so subdued that I don’t know what to think.

  Her parents look to each other, as if I’ve asked something unthinkable.

  And that’s when I realize that I can’t take her email address. Not because of her parents, but because of her. Because I promised I’d set her free.

  “Forget it,” I say like it’s nothing, even though it’s everything. “You can write to me first. And if you do, I’ll write back.”

  Callie nods, and gives me a pained but sincere smile. “Thank you, Caden.”

  Her father tries to take the slip of paper from her, but she clutches it to her chest, as if she’s still holding me.

  I think about how Callie was when I first met her. She is now clearer. It’s in the way she holds herself, the way she speaks. It’s in her eyes. She is on the other side of the glass now. Part of the outside world she so needed to observe.

  I want to hug her, but I know I can’t in the presence of her parents. Their boundary of appropriateness is a no-fly zone miles wide. I shake her hand instead, and she meets my gaze, surprised by the gesture, and maybe a little disappointed, but she understands the necessity. Strange, but shaking her hand feels much more awkward than keeping her warm in my bed.

  We must be holding each other’s hands for too long, because her father finally says, “Say good-bye to him, Callie.”

  But in subtle defiance of him, she doesn’t actually say good-bye. Instead she says, “I will miss you very, very much, Caden.”

  “I will always be there on the horizon,” I tell her.

  And with infinite sorrow, she says, “I believe that. But sadly I am no longer looking out of that window.”

  135. Which Is More Horrifying?

  “I want to leave,” I tell Poirot at my next assessment.

  “You will, you will. I assure you that you will.”

  But his assurances mean nothing to me. “What do I have to do to get out of here?”

  Instead of answering me, he pulls
out one of my recent works of art from his drawer. He uses them against me like bullets to the brain.

  “Why all the eyes?” he asks. “It’s fascinating, but why all the eyes?”

  “I draw what I feel.”

  “And you feel this?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “I’m concerned about you, Caden. Deeply concerned.” He bobs his head a bit in thought. “Maybe we need to adjust your medications.”

  “Adjust my medications, adjust my medications, that’s all you ever want to do is adjust my medications!”

  He maintains his composure as he looks at me. I see his eyes—both the live one and the dead one—in the numbers of the ticking clock, in the motivational posters on the walls. Everywhere. I can’t escape.

  “This is the way it’s done, Caden. This is what works. It’s not as fast as you would like, I know. But give it time, and it will get you where you need to be. Where you want to be.” He begins to write a new prescription. “I’d like to try you on Geodon.”

  I slam my fists against the arm of my chair. “I’m angry! Why can’t you let me be angry? Why do you have to medicate away everything I feel?”

  He doesn’t even look up at me. “Anger isn’t a productive emotion right now.”

  “But it’s real, isn’t it? It’s normal, isn’t it? Look at where I am and what’s happened to me! I have a right to be angry!”

  He stops writing and finally looks at me with his one good eye, and I think, how can this man possibly have perspective on me when he has no depth perception? I expect him to call for Angry Arms of Death to restrain me. Maybe order me up a shot of Haldol to send me to the White Plastic Kitchen. But he does neither of those things. He taps his pen. Considers. Then says, “That’s a reasonable argument. It’s a sign that you’re getting better.” He puts away his prescription pad. “We’ll stay the course for one more week, and then reassess.”

  I am escorted back to my room, feeling much worse than I did before my evaluation. I don’t know which is more horrifying—the thought of being here for another week, or the thought that maybe the medication that I so despise might actually be working.

  136. Becoming a Constellation

  Something’s up with the navigator. He’s more into himself, more lost in his charts than ever before. He refuses to look at my drawings, and now that my gut has gone silent, he refuses to take guidance from it. He’s in a mood, but it’s more than that. His skin is paler, and there’s a rash on his arms that’s beginning to peel.

  “Accompany me to the crow’s nest,” he says in one of his rare social moments. “I’m in need of a view.”

  We climb to the little barrel atop the central mast. As always, what appears to be only a yard in diameter is dozens of yards across once we climb inside. It’s an off hour. Just a few other sailors sit alone watching the jumpers, or just watching the olives in their drinks wink at them. The navigator gets his cocktail from the bartender. It’s not time for mine yet. I’ll have to come back later.

  His drink swirls with blue sparkles in a cloudy orange brine. “I am far too numb,” he tells me. Then he slowly pours his cocktail on the ground. Radioactive liquid pools in a depression in the copperized wood, but as I watch, it’s sucked in by the black pitch between the metallic planks. The pitch appears to writhe and squirm, but I know it must just be a trick of the light. The bartender is at the far end of the bar, serving someone else, and doesn’t see what the navigator has done.

  “It’s our secret,” he says. “If I am to navigate us to the dive point, I need my brilliance to be untainted. I must calculate our journey without any outside interference. Interference, perseverance, persecution, evolution. I’m evolving, is the thing; I’m a god becoming a constellation.”

  “The constellations are mostly demigods,” I point out. “And they didn’t get to be constellations until after they died.”

  He laughs at that, and says, “Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal.”

  137. Lost Horizon

  Without Calliope on our bow, I feel a profound loneliness that nothing can penetrate.

  “Take it day by day,” Carlyle tells me, “and each morning you’ll feel a little bit better.”

  But I don’t. The captain acts as if Calliope never existed. For the captain there is no history, no yesterday, no memory. “Live for the moment and the moment after,” he once told me. “Never for the moment before.” It’s a creed that defines him.

  Calliope was our eyes on the horizon, and without her, it seems the horizon is gone. The sea fades into a haze that blends into the sky. There is no telling where one ends, and the other begins. Now the heavens are unpredictable and the sea fickle. Up above, clouds will billow out of nowhere into dark monstrosities, pregnant with malevolent intent, and a clear blue sky is like a magnifying glass for a punishing sun. As for the sea, there is no rhythm to the waves anymore; no reason to the ocean’s temperament. One moment the sea is as smooth and tranquil as a mountain lake, the next, it’s roiling with rogue waves.

  “We have crossed the point of no return,” the captain tells me as I struggle at the tiller to keep the ship zigzagging like a cargo ship in wartime. Traveling a straight line would be suicide now. The best chance of avoiding and confounding the beasts that lie below is to be as unpredictable as the sea and sky.

  My hands are rough and calloused from manning the tiller. My palms are faintly green, for like everything else on the ship, the tiller wheel has turned to copper and has oxidized green in the salt sea air.

  “Was there ever a point of return?” I wonder out loud.

  “Pardon?” says the captain.

  “You said we crossed the point of no return, so does that mean there was a time we could have gone back?”

  There is little warmth to the captain’s grin. “Well, now we’ll never know, will we?”

  I suspect there was never a returning point. This journey was destined for me before I set foot on deck. Destined from the moment I was born.

  The navigator races up from below, waving a brand-new navigational chart in his hands. His scribbled knots of lines are measured in leagues and compass degrees with painstaking detail. The captain looks it over, nods, and hands the chart to me. My zigzags are not random at all. Or at least it’s not my randomness that we follow, it’s the navigator’s.

  The captain slaps him on the back with pride. “This will most certainly get us to where we are going.”

  The navigator beams with the captain’s attention. “I’m plugged into the power now—deeply connected to the deep,” the navigator says. “Connected, infected, ingested, digested—I can feel our destination in my gut. It’s the only nourishment I need!”

  The captain knows that the navigator hasn’t been drinking his cocktail. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the captain is so proud of him. The captain turns to me. “You should follow his lead, Master Caden. Our navigator’s vision is clear. Is yours?”

  But there are other things that come with this “clarity of vision,” as the captain calls it. The navigator’s charts are more convoluted than ever, and yet he is adamant that they are the key to getting us where we’re going. And the scary thing is that I believe him.

  “Shun the crow’s nest and your enlightenment will be sweeter than its poison intoxication,” the captain tells me. “Look at the navigator!”

  I worry, though, that the navigator’s enlightenment is as dangerous as fireworks in the hands of a child. If he’s tuned into the deep, what is the deep telling him? The depths certainly do not mean us well. Now, when the navigator walks, I notice that the pitchy ooze that fills the crevices of the ship sticks to his heels. When he touches a wall the ooze grows thicker, drawn to his hand as if he’s become a gravity well for the darkness—and it occurs to me that the dark must be in love with the light. Yet one must always kill the other.

  138. Marksman on the Fields of Color

  In a moment when the sea is calm and the sky clear, the cap
tain pulls out a pistol. An old-fashioned one. A flintlock, I think it’s called. The kind of weapon that Aaron Burr used to kill Alexander Hamilton in their infamous duel.

  “I hear you are an expert shot,” the captain says. This strikes me as odd, because I’ve never fired a gun in my life.

  “Who told you that?” I ask, not wanting to deny it.

  “Word gets around,” he says. “It’s well known that you’ve dispatched many an adversary on the fields of color.”

  “Oh. You mean paintball.”

  “A marksman is a marksman in any medium, and the time of action is upon us.” Then he puts the gun in my hand, also giving me a small pouch of gunpowder, and a single lead shot. “One shot is all you’ll need to do away with the bird.”

  I look at the gun, trying to appear less frightened of it than I am. It’s a heavy thing. Much heavier than it looks. I turn my eyes up to the sails, but can’t find the parrot. He has made himself scarce since baring his intent to kill the captain. Now he perches high in the ratlines and the high beams of the masts. The time of action is upon us, but I remain ambivalent as to what action I should take. It does feel good, though, to be at the wheel, and in the captain’s good graces.

  “Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to do it yourself?” I suggest.

  The captain shakes his head. “Even with one eye, that plumed serpent of a bird is too shrewd to be caught unawares. The deed must be done by someone he trusts, and who I trust to do it.” He grasps me by the shoulder with something resembling pride. “Lure him into a liaison. Keep the weapon concealed until the last moment.”

  I slip the pistol into my belt and cover it with my shirt. The captain nods his approval. “When we are free of the parrot, then we shall truly be free.”

  I realize that my choices are impossible, and I have no idea what I’m going to do.