The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook by Lydia Millet Read Free Book Online Page A

As in, ancient Greek element? Air, earth, water, or fire? Not as in the Periodic Table.”
    She wasn’t certain what he meant but nodded anyway. If you stopped Jax every time you weren’t quite sure what he was talking about, you’d never finish a conversation.
    “Water is his element and night’s his best time, probably because it tends to be more humid then. Who knows what he can do with water? A lot, I suspect. And we don’t want any part of him in our house, that’s for sure. Water is his power and his constraint.”
    “Talk normally.”
    “His limit. He can only move freely where there’s a certain amount of water present, and it’s easier for him at night. It’s how he is.”
    “But if there’s no signal to read, how do you know all this?”
    “That’s actually a good question,” said Jax in a know-it-all way, as though he were her teacher.
    As he talked, he was lifting a frog out of his terrarium, one finger on each of its sides, its thin back legs dangling.
    “He sends me messages, right? Last night, he wanted us to see him. He wanted us to hear the question. The question Where is she . And if we’d known the answer, trust me, he’d know it now, too. So it’s just as well that we didn’t.”
    “Wait. You mean he can know what we’re thinking? Like—he can ping us?”
    Jax opened his window and set the frog out on the roof, where it hopped away toward a tree branch.
    “Is that a tree frog?” asked Cara. “Because—”
    “He can read me, at least,” said Jax, turning back to her. “I’m not sure if he can read you or not.”
    “How about—the stuff about the water? He told you that too?”
    “No. That stuff—I just knew it. The way you know what up or down means, but it’s hard to describe them without using the words up or down . See what I’m saying?”
    “Kind of,” said Cara uncertainly.
    She half wished Max or Hayley were here, to make Jax explain things in a more basic way. Or just so she didn’t feel like she was the only one whose head was spinning.
    “It doesn’t seem empirically verifiable,” said Jax. “Any of it. I realize that.”
    “Uh, yeah,” said Cara.
    “But Car, I promise you. It’s real.”
    He said this softly. He’d sat back down on his bed, opposite her, and his scrawny legs were crossed in front of him. Jax always managed to have scabs on his knees and bruises on his shins.
    “I guess, if I’m gonna go with this,” she said slowly, “I have to stop second-guessing you. It’s kind of like I have to either believe it all or believe none of it. Otherwise I’ll just keep feeling like my head is going to explode.”
    “Like the posters from that old TV show,” said Jax, and nodded solemnly. “Remember? I Want to Believe. ”
    “Mmm,” murmured Cara. Actually it was more like she had to suspend disbelief—a term from English class. “But what does he have to do with her? I mean, how could Mom be connected to a scary—whatever he is? And why is he looking for her?”
    “I don’t have those answers yet,” said Jax, and shook his head. “But I did remember something. The leatherback? In the writing on your driftwood?”
    “Yeah? What about it?”
    “They have one at Woods Hole—at the Aquarium. They got it recently. It hasn’t been there for long. Mom was telling me about it though, how she wanted me to come see it. But then she….”
    He trailed off. Then she vanished .
    After a second Cara spoke.
    “You think that could be the one in the message?”
    “I don’t have any other ideas,” said Jax. “I mean, how many leatherbacks can there be on the Cape? Unless we want to head for the open ocean, that is.”
    “Then we need to come up with an excuse to get Dad to drive us there,” she said.
    It was Jax who invented the pretext: a flash drive he claimed must have been left in their mother’s desk, with some of his data. Their dad wasn’t happy about it, but Jax played on his heartstrings. Cara suggested they could combine it