Max Read online

  One of the armed guards dragged in Dr. Martinez. "Ah, Dr. Martinez," Mr. Chu said pleasantly. "Thank you for joining me. I wanted you to see this. If the CSM does not curtail its activity, a similar fate awaits you."

  There was a slight vibration, and Mr. Chu's gaze sharpened. Then—there it was—a rush of bubbles, barely visible, from a torpedo hatch being opened and closed. It was the fourth-in-command's final solution. A dim, pale object in a blue suit shot out into the blackness and seemed to blossom, momentarily, in the dark water. In the next second, it was crushed and compressed into an unrecognizable blob.

  At this depth, the water pressure was equivalent to several tons of weight per square inch.

  The fourth-in-command had probably suffered for less than a second, not even having time to drown before every bone in his body was pulverized.

  Once again, Mr. Chu and his second-in-command met eyes. "Well, outside the submarine, it's a very dangerous environment."

  The second, not daring to display the shiver of distaste and fear she felt, nodded. "Yes," she said as the pale blob floated away into the dark water. "Yes, it's very dangerous out there."

  50

  I'LL BE THE first to admit that in terms of book learning, we're right up there with, like, sheep and goats. So you won't be stunned to hear how surprised I was to find out that islands don't float on top of the water. You can't go under them, even if you're in a schmancy expensive submarine.

  "Islands are formed several different ways," Brigid explained helpfully while I tried not to snarl at her. We were standing around a topographical (read: lumpy) map of Hawaii and the surrounding ocean. "Hawaii was formed by an underwater volcano spitting hot magma up from the earth's core. In fact, scientists believe that one volcano formed all the islands of Hawaii, as the hot interior core rotated beneath the earth's crust. Right now, the Big Island is being formed. In ten million years, there might be yet another island, past the Big Island."

  "Huh," I said, feeling more trapped than ever. We'd been on the sub for eight hours and had explored every last inch of it. I felt like I hardly had room to breathe. It was like, Hello, Claustrophia? It's me, Max.

  Now I was being forced to witness Dr. Amazing's brain at work, as Fang paid attention to her every word.

  "Which is why we have to go around the islands to get to the area where the fish die-off was observed," said Captain Perry. "Right now we're passing the Molokini Crater, which is a big sea-life preservation area."

  "Huh," I said. We were in a large tin can under six hundred feet of water, and I couldn't escape. I was starting to feel dizzy. Was the sub running out of air? Where did we get air from, anyway? We needed to surface. We needed to surface, and—

  Max. Go lie down. You're having a panic attack.

  What?! I thought wildly.

  You're having a panic attack, the Voice went on. Go lie down on your bunk and slowly breathe in and out.

  "Uh, I'm tired," I mumbled. "Think I'll go rest."

  I stumbled out of the situation room and staggered down the narrow corridor, squeezing past sailors. I felt like I might pass out any second. Every cell in my body wanted to get off this sub. Even knowing that it was the only way to rescue my mom didn't make it any better. I've been locked in cells and dungeons and dog crates and never panicked like this.

  You're okay, said the Voice soothingly. Go lie down. There's plenty of air.

  I fumbled my way into the small storeroom that had been turned into our bunk room. Inside, I collapsed on one of the bottom bunks, trying not to throw up. A minute later, the door pushed open.

  "Nudge?" I croaked, my hand over my mouth.

  "Nope," said Total, trotting up to my bunk. He had a cold, wet washcloth in his mouth, and he put his front paws on my bunk and dropped it on my face. It felt incredible. Then he nimbly jumped onto the narrow bunk and curled up by my feet.

  I pressed the wet cloth to my face and tried to breathe in and out slowly. Just like the Voice had told me. I moaned softly, suddenly overwhelmed by my life.

  "You'll get your sea legs soon," Total said. "Or we can rustle you up some Valium or something."

  "No!" The only time I'd had Valium was when my mom gave me some during an operation to take a chip out of my wrist (long story). In my hazy stupor, I'd said all sorts of stupid, embarrassing things. There was no way I was going to do that again.

  "Suit yourself," said Total, pushing my legs over to give himself more room. "Listen, Max, while I have you here—"

  "Trapped in my bunk with a panic attack?" I said.

  "Yeah. Anyway, I've been meaning to talk to you," he went on.

  Oh, this was gonna be good. What would it be now? Sub chow not up to snuff? Lattes not available? Had he encountered more discrimination against Canine Americans?

  "It's about Akila."

  I lowered the washcloth and peeked at Total with one eye. "Yeah? You miss her, huh?"

  "It's more than that." Total licked one paw, collecting his thoughts. "It's—you know I'm nuts about her."

  "Uh-huh." Nuts being the operative word here.

  "Amazingly, she feels the same way about a mutt like me," Total said. "Well, now we're thinking about… marriage." He sort of mumbled the last word.

  I sat up, eyes wide, swallowing my shocked laughter. This wasn't funny. It was cute but not funny. Total's feelings were real, even though he was a—Canine American.

  "Marriage?" I said.

  "Yeah." Total flopped down and draped his head over my ankles. "I know we're just two crazy kids—how can we possibly make it work? She's a dedicated career dog. How could I ever expect her to settle down, raise a few litters? And me? I'm a flying, talking dog. I'll only make her life more difficult, no matter where we go or what we do."

  I knew how he felt. Only too well. Reaching out, I scratched his head between his ears, the way he likes.

  "Also, how could I ever leave you guys?" he said, his black eyes sad. "I know how much you depend on me. How could I leave you to fend for yourselves?"

  "Um," I said, but he interrupted me.

  "But Akila can't fly! How can she come with us? She's eighty pounds of gorgeous, long-legged purebred, but she can't fly." His voice broke. "I tell you, Max—this has been keeping me up at night. I haven't been able to eat for days."

  I'd heard him snoring just yesterday, when we'd been waiting for the sub, and I've never known him to miss a meal. But I knew what he meant.

  For once, I didn't have any answers. I was having a hard enough time with my own ridiculous romantic life, much less being able to worry about anyone else's. "Total—if you decide you need to stay with Akila—well, you saw how Nudge made that hard decision. I saw something written on a T-shirt once—it went: 'If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours.' If we, the flock, have to let you go, we'll somehow make that sacrifice."

  "No, no, Max, I couldn't ask that of you," he said. "I wouldn't leave you in the lurch like that. I just wish—well, I wish life was perfect and love was easy." He sighed.

  "Me too, Total. Me too." I was already old enough to know that neither option was possible. Not for Total and not for me.

  51

  IT TOOK TWELVE hours to go a distance that we could have flown in about six minutes. Let's stop for a second and give thanks that the mad scientists decided to graft us with bird DNA instead of, say, the DNA of a clam or a squid.

  Our sub went between the islands of Maui and Hawaii and then surfaced, right offshore from the Haleakala National Park. Of course, as soon as I heard the sub-wide command of "Surfacing!" I dashed up to the ladder that led to the upper hatch. I was the second one out, gulping in lungfuls of fresh, balmy salt air.

  I turned to Captain Perry, who had joined me up on deck, along with John Abate and Brigid Dwyer. "So how come we're here?" I asked him.

  "We're picking up a marine biologist," Captain Perry explained.

  "A colleague of ours," said John. "She specializes in bony fish, which are mostly what the dead gr
oups have consisted of. Ah, here she comes now."

  A short, tan woman with gray hair in a long braid came hurrying down the dock. In the distance, I could see a bunch of kids, who'd just disembarked from a school bus with FREMONT MIDDLE SCHOOL on the side, gaping at the nuclear sub that had suddenly surfaced so near the entrance to a national park.

  "Hello!" the woman called cheerfully. "Aloha!"

  "Aloha," said Captain Perry respectfully.

  "Noelani! It's good to see you again," said John, giving her a hug. He turned to me. "Max, this is Doctor Noelani Akana. She knows these waters like you know junk food, and she can help us."

  "Hi," I said, deciding whether to be offended by the junk-food comment.

  "Ah, Max," she said, in a pretty, singsong voice. I guessed she was a native Hawaiian. Her bright, black eyes looked me over shrewdly but not in an unfriendly way. "Max, the miracle bird girl."

  "Uh, that's one name for me," I said awkwardly.

  Dr. Akana broke into a sunny smile. "I can't wait to see the others! All right, Captain, let's get this ship under water!" With quick, efficient movements, she tossed her duffel bag down the hatch, then slid down the ladder rails. John, grinning, followed her. Captain Perry looked at me and motioned at the hatch.

  "How about I just fly overhead and meet you there?" I said.

  "Okay," the captain said easily, surprising me. "How long can you hover without landing on anything?"

  "Uh, I guess about eight hours," I said, knowing it would be a stretch and that I'd be totally starving and exhausted by the end of it.

  Captain Perry waited.

  "Okay, fine," I said, heading toward the hatch. I hate it when a grown-up actually calls my bluff. Of course, this was pretty much the first time, so I don't have to deal with it too often.

  "You know, we can get you some Valium or something," he offered, following me.

  "No!" I gritted my teeth and began to climb down the ladder. "Why does everyone keep wanting to drug a child?"

  Dr. Akana was waiting at the bottom of the ladder, and she clapped her hands as if organizing a party game. "Okay! We're going closer to where the attacks took place, then stop at about sixty meters deep. Then we'll go on a field trip. Let me put my stuff down, and I'll get ready." She headed off to the quarters she'd share with the female crew members.

  I felt a surge of excitement. At last, we were on our way. I had to get into battle mode, make sure the others were ready for the traditional fight-to-the-death scenario. The navy wanted to make sure we could defend ourselves, but they'd never really seen us in action.

  For the first time ever, I wondered if we had what it would take—Mr. Chu and his dumb-bots I was pretty sure we could handle. But sea monsters? Mountains that came out of the water to kill a hundred thousand fish? That was a completely different picture. I needed a plan B.

  Frowning, I made my way into the belly of the ship to find Gazzy.

  52

  THERE'S ONLY ROOM for three," I told Angel, who was getting that mutinous look on her face.

  "I should go, because I might hear something," she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  By "hear," I knew she meant telepathically pick up on something, like the fish thinking little bubbly fish thoughts ("Ooh! Plankton!") or whatever. "It's too dangerous," I said firmly, which was pretty much the lamest argument I could have come up with, given the sheer amount of completely death-defying stuff we did on a routine basis.

  "Max." She looked at me, and I remembered that she could also put thoughts into people's heads.

  "Don't make me wish I was wearing a foil hat," I warned her. "Look, the crewman has to go, because he knows how to drive the little sub, and Dr. Akana has to go because she knows what the heck we'll be looking at, and I have to go because (a) I'm the leader, right? And (b) it's my mom we're looking for, and (c) because I said so. You dig?"

  I crossed my arms too and frowned down at her, something that's always worked in the past, but I doubted it would for much longer.

  "Angel, dear, you're only six," Dr. Akana said kindly.

  "Seven," Angel said obstinately.

  "When did you turn seven? Oh, never mind," I said, getting exasperated. None of us knows when our actual birthdays are, so we each made up one for ourselves. Years ago I'd had to put my foot down about getting only one birthday a year, because Gazzy was trying to capitalize on presents. But, actually, we don't really keep track of them too well.

  "I'm seven." Angel looked like a bulldozer wouldn't budge her.

  "Fine, then, I'm—seventeen!" I said. "You're not going."

  The little sub in question was a three-person thingy that looked kind of like a large pool float with a bubble on top. It could go down to one hundred meters (about three hundred feet—our Big Daddy sub could go down about one thousand meters), and I practically expected to see foot pedals sticking out the bottom.

  The only reason I was willing to get in it was because of the Plexiglas dome on top that you could see out of. Our current sub had no windows. I repeat, no windows. Zero. Zip. Nada. That was because the space between the outer hull and the inner hull was full of water when the sub submerged and full of air when it surfaced. A window would have had to have been about a foot thick. Instead, the crew viewed the outside on little TV screens, from cameras located on the sub's exterior.

  But now I had a chance to be in a big bubble and see what was going on. Anything would be better than being stuck in here.

  I rubbed my hands together. "Let's do it."

  Ten minutes later, a bottom hatch slowly opened, and we dropped down into the deep ocean. There wasn't much light, but because the water around Hawaii is so clear, it wasn't totally pitch dark, even at sixty meters deep.

  Then the crewman turned on the headlights. It was amazing—our own underwater show. Above us was the enormous U.S.S. Minnesota. We were chugging out from under it, thank God. But the fish! There were fish everywhere, all sizes, moving slowly through the water.

  "That's a yellowfin tuna," said Dr. Akana. "They can grow to more than seven feet long."

  "What's that one?!" I said, pointing to a huge silver hubcap with orange fins.

  "It's an opah," said the crewman. "They're good eatin.' "

  "It's almost as big as me," I said.

  "I'm sure it weighs more," Dr. Akana said with a smile. "Look! There's a turtle!"

  Sure enough, a turtle about the size of a standard poodle swam by, looking totally unconcerned about our sub.

  "Everything moves so slowly under water," I said. In addition to the fish that caught our attention because they were the size of sofas, we were surrounded by hundreds of thousands of smaller fish in every shape and color combination you could imagine—and some you couldn't.

  "Not everything—these fish can dart away in an instant if danger's near," said Dr. Akana. "Now, we're still about six miles away from where the fish kill was first spotted, but I wanted to check out—" Her words were swallowed by a gasp. "Oh, my God! What's that!?"

  My head whipped to where she was staring, and I sucked in a fast breath.

  No, I thought. Not this.

  53

  CONTACT THE SUB!" Dr. Akana commanded the crewman urgently. "Issue a Mayday!"

  "Hang on," I said, still staring out the Plexiglas dome. Thirty feet away, and swimming closer to us, was something I never expected to see but should have.

  "Contact the sub!" the doctor cried.

  "Nah, don't bother," I said, narrowing my eyes. "I'll deal with her myself."

  "Max! She's drowning!"

  "She's swimming," I corrected her. "And being obnoxious. And getting into major trouble." I frowned at Angel, who was maybe ten feet away now, smiling and waving at us. You are in deep sneakers, I thought hard at her, and her smile faltered.

  Then she grinned again, swimming loop-de-loops in front of us.

  "She has no gear," said Dr. Akana weakly. "She'll run out of air."

  "She has gills," I admitted, still glaring
at Angel. Sure, she didn't have to worry about air, but there were a million other dangerous things in the ocean, including some huge, catastrophic mystery that might have something to do with my mom being kidnapped. And here Angel was, swimming around like she was bulletproof and sharkproof and man-of-war proof!

  "Gi—"

  "Gills," I repeated, as Angel merrily caught a ride on a manta ray the size of a mattress. "We've all got other special skills and stuff. Angel can breathe under water. Also, she can communicate with fish and read people's thoughts. Don't play poker with her."

  The crewman swore softly under his breath. "She took me for forty bucks!"

  Angel came back and clung to our clear dome. While I gave her every fierce look in my repertoire, she pressed her mouth against the Plexiglas and blew her cheeks out. Then she pulled off and laughed hard, doubling over and emitting a stream of bubbles.

  "Is she not affected by water pressure?" Dr. Akana asked. "We're sixty meters deep! A scuba diver would have to be very cautious about getting the bends."

  "She'll get the bends all right," I muttered. "I'm gonna bend her over my knee!"

  Staying in our headlights, Angel performed an underwater ballet, first following a turtle, then another ray, then a mahimahi. She imitated their swimming styles, embellishing them with flourishes, spins, and somersaults. She kept her wings tight against her back, as we all did when we swam. She was having a super time. I was going to kill her.

  "Besides the swimming child with gills, I'm not seeing anything unusual here," said Dr. Akana humorously. "The marine life looks healthy and undisturbed. I see no evidence of algae blooms or coral reef die-off. I don't see huge amounts of dead fish."

  "But we're still far away, right?" I asked.

  "Yes. I thought we should start taking stock of things this far away and continue to check periodically as we get closer to the site," she explained.