Race to the Bottom of the Sea

by Lindsay Eagar

  “Stop!” Fidelia yanked free of Cheapshot Charlie’s hold and rushed over to Merrick — too late.

  Merrick threw the captain of the Rasculat overboard, and from the deck of the Jewel, Fidelia could see a ring of white where Niccu splashed into the water — and then disappeared.

  Cheapshot Charlie turned toward the rest of the Molvanian pirates. He removed the tangled ropes, but before he could lay hands on them, the pirates rushed to the rail and, one by one, jumped. Over the side and into the blue.

  Fidelia scanned the water, but the Jewel moved so quickly — she couldn’t see whether the pirates were still bobbing at the surface or if they had already sunk to the bottom like stones.

  Merrick nonchalantly checked the time on his pocket watch. “The Jewel’s aching to stretch her legs, mates. Let’s let her run.”

  Churning, white-hot with fury, Fidelia bubbled over. “You — you killed them!”

  “I did not kill them,” Merrick corrected. “Notice how there’s no Molvanian blood on my deck?”

  “No,” Fidelia seethed, “you didn’t slit their throats, but they’re as good as dead.”

  “Glassport is within range.” Merrick pointed back at the mainland. “They managed to survive their shipwreck in Molvania. They’re obviously strong swimmers.”

  “But their ship didn’t go down during the Undertow. Even the strongest swimmers don’t stand a chance!” The sea was too choppy today — the Molvanians were probably already on the ocean floor.

  Fidelia slumped at the railing, watching the morning sun hit the waves. “You murdered them.”

  “Quite the moralizing, coming from a scientist,” Merrick said. “Tell me again about your starfish dissections? About how you bleed fish to make shark chum? And tell me again what happened with the silver seal cub?”

  Fidelia stood straight up. She knew exactly what Merrick was referencing: Exploring an Underwater Fairyland. Her parents’ book.

  A thousand counterarguments darted through her head at once. The starfish limbs they had dissected to better understand their suction capabilities in tropical waters.

  The blood they harvested for chum was from tuna, which they used only because populations were oversaturated near the island.

  And the silver seal cub, well …

  “That cub —” she started.

  “Was dying,” Merrick said, “and you and your parents did nothing to interfere.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. What could she even say?

  If she reached into her bag for her observation book, she would find the exact entry that described that day — with far more detail than the chapter from her parents’ book:

  February 11

  Today was a sad day.

  Yesterday we found a colony of silver seals migrating east for what Mom calls the “family reunion.” Every clan of silver seals from all over the region meet. Mating happens. Babies are taught to hunt for fish under the ice. They stay until spring, and then hightail it back to the glacier fronts to eat the new green shoots and fatten up for the next family reunion.

  One seal cub wouldn’t leave his mother’s side. She barked at him; he cuddled closer. She nipped at him; he tried to nurse. When we finally got a good look at him; we saw why: the cub was blind. Milky-white eyes, a thick film over the pupils. No wonder he acted like the umbilical cord was still attached.

  But then the pod started to move. The mother pushed the seal away from the group, off to his own patch of arctic gnome grass. He munched a few blades, and then cried out for her. But she ignored him, flopping along on her belly with the rest of the clan.

  “She’s abandoning him!” I cried, but Dad shushed me.

  When the pod was out of range, the cub stopped his wailing. Maybe he ran out of strength, I don’t know — or maybe he sensed what had happened. He sniffed around the gnome grass for a few minutes, and then shuffled off into the wilderness.

  “We can’t just let him go!” I told Mom and Dad. “He’ll die out there!” I grabbed a rope and said, “I’ll go after him and —”

  “No, Fidelia,” Mom said quietly. Like the funeral for the little cub had already started.

  This morning, when we were near the penguin burrows, we found the cub’s body, frozen solid in the snow, his white eyes staring up at the sky.

  I know all about the ethics of observation. I know about the principle of study — that we can’t watch nature without affecting it somehow. But I see that silver seal cub every time I close my eyes, and probably will for a long, long time.

  Sometimes it’s hard to be a Quail.

  Fidelia gritted her teeth, willing herself to stay where she was and not charge at Merrick with fists swinging. She hated him for bringing up that day. That was a terrible day.

  “It’s not the same thing,” she managed to say, shaking. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

  The Quails’ work wasn’t about death. It was about life — and, yes, sometimes that included death.

  And was Merrick forgetting how the chapter about the silver seals ended in Exploring an Underwater Fairyland? The last words Ida Quail wrote in that chapter were: “The circle of life, the food chain, the give and take of nature — however it is phrased, life always ends in death. Death, yes, that terrifying ending that every living thing is plummeting to, yes — but how wonderful life is, while it endures… .”

  Merrick’s smirk was unbearable. “You’re alive for today, aren’t you? And I believe you have a set of gills to finish — assuming you are as good as your word.”

  Fidelia felt his mismatched eyes on her as she left the railing, sat on the bench next to her Water-Eater, and listlessly opened her observation book. How on earth was she supposed to concentrate on work right now?

  Bloody Elle picked up the ropes that had bound Merrick. “Charlie,” she murmured, “come here.”

  She showed him a length of the rope; Fidelia leaned forward to eavesdrop.

  “He didn’t cut it,” Bloody Elle whispered.

  “Then how … ?” Cheapshot Charlie said, his eyebrows furrowed.

  Both of them looked across the ship at Merrick, his skinny forearms poking out of the sleeves of his peacoat as he checked the tackle.

  “His wrists,” Bloody Elle said. She held her hand to her mouth. “Look at them.”

  Fidelia marveled with them — Merrick’s wrists had absolutely wasted away since last night, the bones jutting from the pale skin like knobs on a pine trunk. Was he disintegrating so quickly?

  “Charlie.” Bloody Elle’s voice was small and scared.

  Cheapshot Charlie studied her face, then approached Merrick slowly, as if approaching a wild animal.

  “Captain,” Cheapshot Charlie said. Merrick said nothing.

  Cheapshot Charlie nervously scratched the back off his bald head. “That Niccu … he said he put his cousin out of his misery… .” Cheapshot Charlie hesitated, still watching his captain with something akin to compassion softening his features.

  Merrick stared at Cheapshot Charlie, his face as still as chiseled marble. “You have no idea what misery is. Don’t speak to me of it ever again.” The captain’s black-and-red eye throbbed in its socket.

  Then Merrick struck.

  He stood tall and backhanded his boatswain with his gaunt hand — a wallop that must have stung horribly since Merrick’s knucklebones poked out like the tines of a rake.

  Cheapshot Charlie staggered back, hand on his cheek.

  “Now, set our course south,” Merrick said calmly.

  Cheapshot Charlie straightened. “Aye, Captain.” He headed to the helm, refusing to look up at Bloody Elle as he passed her.

  Merrick spotted Fidelia watching, and so she quickly buried her head into the observation book and pretended to work.

  Merrick the Monstrous. Not a shred of mercy in his bones.

  Not even for himself.

  Their good fortune managed to hold out for a few more hours.

  Merrick put some
space between them and the mainland, and then let the Jewel fly. She eased along the breaks at a steady fourteen knots an hour. Fidelia wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen the rope herself, dangling over the stern. An impressive speed for a top-notch naval galleon; a scientific anomaly for a schooner in such poor condition.

  “She used to go twenty, on a good day,” Bloody Elle bragged, spotting Fidelia watching the knots.

  Fidelia tried to imagine the Jewel as she used to be — her decks scrubbed, the scum scoured from the masts, the beams straightened, the bubbled wood reset and sanded.

  She tried to imagine its captain in his heyday, too — and then he bent over the helm and coughed, and the image she’d conjured of him, hale and hearty, vanished into the breeze. He looked like something that had been plucked from a drain and wrung out — had he really once been the terror of the nine seas?

  Cheapshot Charlie went up in the cherry picker to mend a few holes in a sail — a job that would have been handled by a rigger if Merrick had a proper crew. But the canvas was patched quickly, a slapdash job, and the sails billowed like strange patchwork blankets.

  The sea gusts blew harder and stronger, but the horizon was a bleached blue in all directions. Fidelia breathed easily at the unexpected peace — and then she thought guiltily of the Molvanian pirates. Were they still treading water? Or had the waves already claimed them?

  A fighting chance, Merrick had essentially proclaimed it — but Fidelia still couldn’t think of it as anything but cold-blooded murder. And she didn’t care what Merrick said. Throwing Niccu overboard wasn’t the same as the Quails leaving the silver seal cub alone to succumb to nature’s grand plan. Not at all.

  Why was she surprised? Merrick the Monstrous was a known killer.

  But last night, with the fire burning in the sandpit, and the stars above, the look on Merrick’s face when Niccu spoke of the red daisies had seemed so —

  Well, whatever she’d seen in Merrick’s sapphire eye last night — grace, or fear, or some sort of change of heart — it had clearly been imagined. She’d seen his cruelty in action, and she wouldn’t underestimate him again.

  She opened her mother’s observation book to the diagram of the fish’s gills and unscrewed the filtration system from the cylinder. She peered at the tiny holes of the filter, which she had sized out according to this very calculation, here, in her mother’s hand.

  Well-oxygenated ocean water contains approximately 6 mg of oxygen per cubic foot. Shallow-water fish require 10–14 mg/L per hour; cold-water fish are in the 4–9 mg per hour range.

  The idea for the Water-Eater was born of frustration. It was squid-mating season, and Fidelia and her father had just hauled Ida back into the Platypus for the third time that morning. The diving suit kept springing leaks. They had to keep patching and reinflating the canvas, and so the hose kept getting tangled, and Ida was exhausted from climbing in and out of the suit. “A pair of gills would sure come in handy,” Dr. Quail had said, wiping her sweaty forehead with the back of her ink-stained hand.

  A pair of gills … The words had burrowed into Fidelia’s mind like worms, and while Dr. and Dr. Quail had reeled in the bait lines, Fidelia had scribbled the first spark of the Water-Eater in her observation book.

  Dr. and Dr. Quail had listened and smiled encouragingly when she showed them her plans, but had they done so out of parental obligation or because they truly believed it was a good idea?

  Now she’d never know.

  If your average shallow-water fish needs 14 mg of oxygen per hour, Fidelia figured, her pen scrawling the figures in her observation book, and ocean water has 6 mg of oxygen per cubic foot, then …

  She doodled a few scraggly sea plants while her brain ran the numbers.

  Then a fish would need to process two and a third cubic feet of water per hour in order to be fully oxygenated.

  Yes, that calculation was right … for a fish.

  The wind swirled Fidelia’s hair into her face, again and again. Finally, she slammed her observation book closed; maybe Merrick would have an extra handkerchief to tie back her scraggly strands.

  She walked across the empty deck and knocked on the door to the captain’s quarters.

  “What?” Merrick called.

  She opened the door, completely unprepared to see a pale, shirtless, strung-out Merrick lying on his rolltop desk, Bloody Elle at his side.

  “Ah, perfect timing!” Bloody Elle said. “We could use your scientific eye.” She stepped aside — and Fidelia nearly fainted at the sight of a bullet lodged in Merrick’s shoulder, the skin around it shattered like a frozen pond.

  Bloody Elle pressed a knife into Fidelia’s hands. “Try to pop it out in one piece, okay?”

  “What?” Fidelia said. “No, I’m not a surgeon!” She dropped the knife on the desk.

  Bloody Elle sighed and picked up the blade, then prodded at a flap of Merrick’s flesh. “I can’t tell if it hit bone,” she analyzed.

  “So what if it did?” Merrick grunted.

  “If we don’t set a broken bone, it won’t heal properly,” Bloody Elle said. “Your whole arm will be useless.”

  “Considering that very soon I won’t be in need of my arms, broken or otherwise,” Merrick cut in, “do get on with it.”

  Fidelia had never seen a gunshot wound before. She stared at the bullet, how wrong it looked, the way it surfaced out of the flesh like a seal breaching for air. Her eyes couldn’t let it go.

  Bloody Elle gingerly pressed into the wound — it instantly surged with blood. “You need Lynch for this kind of job,” she told Merrick. “This is beyond what I know how to do.”

  “Yes, well, Lynch is dead, isn’t he?” Merrick’s blue eye flashed with pain. “Oh, damn it, Elle, I’ll do it myself.” He seized the knife from her; she threw her hands in the air and stomped out of his quarters.

  “Charlie!” Merrick shouted. “Bring me a drink!”

  “We’re dry, Captain!” Cheapshot Charlie called, and then, after a moment, “Do you want the candy?”

  Merrick cursed.

  Fidelia told herself to look away, but she didn’t. She saw every second of it — Merrick gritting his teeth, digging into his shoulder with the knife, popping out the bullet, his forehead damp as a toad’s backside.

  Then the blood really flowed. Merrick ripped some lining from his peacoat and dabbed at the wound until it stopped its waterfall. He pulled out a sewing kit and threaded a large needle with thick black floss.

  “Aren’t you going to sterilize that?” Fidelia asked.

  He snorted. “Hardly any point, is there?”

  Fidelia nervously picked at a strip of paint on the windowsill, then cleared her throat. “I suppose I should thank you.”

  “What for?” Merrick bit off the thread and wiped the sharp end of the needle clean on his coat.

  She forced herself to meet his mismatched eyes. “I know that bullet would have gone right into my heart if you hadn’t stepped in front of me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Merrick said. “I’ll sacrifice a lot more than a shoulder, if you can get my treasure.”

  A set of lungs, a chest, a throat.

  A life.

  It was becoming quite a list, the things Merrick was forfeiting in the name of this magnificent fortune.

  “How are they coming?” Merrick used one hand to close the flopping, oozing flesh so he could make a clean stitch. “Your wonder-gills?”

  A tiny flicker of fear sparked in Fidelia’s chest, but she merely shrugged. “Fine,” she said. Fine if I was an actual fish, she finished in her head.

  “Good.” He grunted. “You’ve got less than a week to get them up and running, or else —” He stuck the needle through his flesh and slapped the desk with the pain.

  Before she could witness any more carnage, Fidelia charged out of his quarters, taking in gulps of fresh air. Tuna guts and critter blood she could handle, but not the sight of a pirate sewing himself together like a grandmoth
er’s quilt.

  “Oy, pip-squeak!” Cheapshot Charlie motioned to a puddle of seawater that had sprayed along the lower deck. “Get the mop. Make yourself useful.”

  Her cheeks burned. “If you wanted a cabin boy, you should have kidnapped one.” She marched back to the bench and picked up her Water-Eater’s disassembled filtration system, inspecting the holes again with the new numbers in her head. Two and a third cubic feet of water, she thought, and it’s been processing way more than that. But how could she possibly make the holes in the filter smaller? Try to plug them with tar? Find a new filter altogether?

  No answers. Not even a whiff of an idea.

  She slammed her filtration system back into the box, satisfied when it made a loud noise.

  There was no way she could possibly do this. She needed her parents there, needed their guiding comments and their probing questions.

  When Merrick found out she couldn’t make the Water-Eater work, what would happen? Niccu’s face appeared in her mind, then faded — would that be Fidelia’s fate?

  She had to try something. Anything.

  Slumping over to the tar bucket, she coated the Water-Eater’s filter with the gooey, smelly black stuff, spreading it as thick as frosting across all the holes. She’d let it dry until it was tacky. With luck, she’d be able to pierce the tar and make smaller holes. Maybe then the whole system wouldn’t flood.

  Or maybe she was dead wrong — but she had to try something.

  Cheapshot Charlie saw what Fidelia was doing and groaned. “Elle, get her away from the tar.” He spoke about her like she was an unleashed puppy. “She’s making a mess.”

  Fidelia dabbed a second layer of gloppy tar over the holes in her filter, making defiant eye contact with Cheapshot Charlie as she did so. “If you don’t like my methods, take it up with your captain.”

  She focused her attention back on the tar — all her attention, except a tiny corner of her brain, which replayed a memory of when she had been working on the Hydro-Scanner.

  “It’s useless!” she’d growled, shoving the pieces of her invention across the table as if they were radioactive. “Stupid thing — I’ll never figure it out!”