Intrepid by J.D. Brewer Read Free Book Online

 
    For the first time in my life, I witnessed Nobu grow impatient. How could we find Arti in the expanse of the ocean in front of us? With no land in sight, the water felt infinite and finding the whale (let alone a specific whale) felt impossible. When we explained the impossibility of it to Corbin, he replied with the message: Perspective is relative.—C.N.  
    “What the hell does that mean?” I growled and closed the screen.  
    Nobu’s cashew-colored eyes softened over hardened cheekbones. It was clear Corbin’s advice made more sense to him than it did to me. “Focus on the solution, not the problem, Liam,” Nobu was constantly telling me. “Focus on what you know and it will lead you to what you do not.”  
    Eventually, he said, “Perspective is everything, right? So the whale is comparably small to the ocean. But on the off chance we find Arti, she will overtake our perspective. Her vastness will replace the infinite ocean and become infinity herself. The closer we get to her, the larger she’ll feel until eventually she’ll end up being all we can see.”  
    “That still doesn’t help us find her,” I said and kicked my toe against the railing along the deck.  
    Nobu frowned. “Finding Arti is not the lesson the old man is trying to teach us. It’s a lesson in perspective. We can never let the whale become all we can see, because the whale is nothing in comparison to the ocean. The ocean is nothing in comparison to the world. The solar system. The galaxy. The Multiverse.”
    I still wasn’t getting it, and it annoyed me to no end. Sure, Nobu had age and experience on his side, being a whole nine years older than me, but sometimes I just wanted to understand something before him.  
    “A lesson on perspective,” I mused. We sat there and listened to the waves swish in several directions with the tide. Hours passed, and the sun fell from the sky before I finally had an idea. “If it’s a lesson on perspective, then it’s a lesson in Watching. As Watchers, we need to see the connections that lead us to the Optimal Path. If we get stuck on one idea, we cannot see how it connects to all the others! We have to keep our minds open.”
    “Exactly,” Nobu said. “Watchers are like a camera zooming in and out of the picture until we understand every component that forms the image.”  
    I nodded with a new understanding. “So, with Arti, if we focus on how impossible it is to find her, we can’t see the clues that actually lead us to her!”  
    Nobu grinned his knowing grin.  
    “Dang it. When did you figure it out?” I asked as disappointment flooded my chest.  
    “An hour ago, but you’ve got it. Like the Optimal Path, we’ll find Arti when we are meant to, but that doesn’t mean we have to rely solely on luck. What else can we rely on?”  
    “We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants,” I said, and suddenly the solution was so simple that it almost made me angry. “We can look into Geeta ’s Captain’s Logs to see what they knew about the red-whales, and build on what they knew.”
    And that was how our Arti logs began. We collected all the information we could from the Logs, and although the migration of the red-whales were not studied, the yuppy-pups were because they were an amazing source of food. Then we read in several entries that the red-whales were seen feeding on yuppy-pups, and that was our first clue. Track the yuppies, find the whales.  
    This was year seven, and we’d already gathered so much data on Arti that it filled up a couple volumes in the new Captain’s Logs.  
      I was three when Corbin brought me to Geeta , and Nobu, at the age of twelve, became my main guardian. Nobu had a Watcher before I came, but he never talked about her. I didn’t even know her name, but I did know he worked really hard to pretend he didn’t miss her. Before the accident, Corbin checked on us at least once a week, bringing us supplies and clothes and lessons, but since I was