Gordon Korman: The Danger

Clinging to the bed rail with her left hand, she swung over and balanced herself on the right side with a death grip on the nightstand. Her feet touched the floor. The contact felt normal, familiar.

So far, so good. She let go.

The collapse was total. Both legs buckled. In the nick of time, she flung her arms wide and broke her fall.

A second later, Dante’s excited voice was heard from the doorway. “I think she’s getting better. She’s doing push-ups!”

“Tell me you’re not as dumb as the things you say,” Star pleaded breathlessly.

Dante and Adriana picked her up off the floor and helped her back into bed.

Adriana was sympathetic. “Still no good, huh?”

Star grimaced in disgust. “I’m lucky I didn’t break both my wrists when I went down.” She spied the duffel slung over Dante’s shoulder. “Hey, thanks — you brought my stuff.”

“Not only that,” said Adriana with a grin. She unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a paper bag soaked through with grease. From it she took a dripping sandwich on a once-crusty bun. “It got a little soggy,” she said apologetically. “We had to wait over an hour for the motor launch to come out to the rig.”

Star’s eyes shone. “A conch burger! You guys are awesome. The food on the oil rig is just a notch above poison. No wonder English is so crabby all the time. He probably eats his meals here.” She attacked the sandwich with gusto while sifting through her belongings with her free hand.

“My dive log,” she exclaimed, holding up a well-thumbed diary. Her face fell. “Oh, yeah. Ancient history.” She shook out some articles of clothing, a toiletry bag, a Walkman, and a stack of dive magazines.

An ivory-white object about a foot long fell out onto the blanket beside her. “Hey. What’d you bring this for?”

It was a carved whalebone handle that Star herself had found in the 340-year-old wreckage of Nuestra Señora de la Luz . The initials J.B. were etched above a large dark stone that was obscured by coral growth. Adriana had e-mailed a photograph of the piece to her uncle, an antiquities expert with the British Museum. He had identified it as the handle of a walking stick or whip, definitely English in origin. This was puzzling, because Nuestra Señora was a Spanish galleon. Every other artifact brought up by either Cutter or the four interns had been of Spanish origin.

“It’s safer here than it is at the Institute,” Adriana reasoned. “Remember — Cutter searched our cabins. This could be the one thing he doesn’t know about yet.”

“Good point,” said Star. “On the other hand, who cares? We’re out of the treasure business. We’re probably kicked off the island, right? What did Gallagher say?”

“That’s the weirdest part,” said Dante. “We can stay. We can even dive if we want to — fat chance! Doesn’t it figure? Now that our summer’s in ruins, Poseidon remembers we exist!”

“They just don’t want to be sued, that’s all,” said Star. She indicated a bouquet of flowers on her nightstand. “You’ll never guess who these are from. Gallagher! And he’s flying my dad down here, all expenses paid. If I was home, I’d get him to clean my room, too. Jerk!”

“You should sue,” put in Dante. “That way at least something good would come out of all this.”

“I hope you’re kidding,” said Star darkly. “No one should make money off what happened to the captain.”

“I miss him,” Adriana said quietly. “It’s weird being at Poseidon. I keep expecting to walk around a corner, and there he’ll be.”

There was a melancholy silence.

Star finished her lunch. “Well, I appreciate you guys coming by. Hey, where’s Kaz?”

Menasce Gérard loaded the last of the tanks onto the deck of the Francisco Pizarro and hopped on board. He checked the labels again. Deep diving with scuba gear was a complicated affair. Several different breathing gas mixtures were required, and the slightest error would scrap the dive. Alors, this was the last realistic chance to find the captain’s body. So one checked, and checked again.

Captain Janet Torrington looked down from her position in the Pizarro ’s wheelhouse. “All set, English?”

Before he could reply, running footsteps sounded on the dock, and a frantic voice called, “Hey! Wait up!” Kaz pounded onto the scene, his dive bag bouncing wildly against his shoulder.

He leaped aboard. “I’m going with you!”

English was furious. “You! You are going nowhere! Get off the boat, or I throw you off!”

“Captain Vanover was my friend, too!” Kaz exclaimed.

“ Vraiment? Is this so? Then I wish he chooses his friends more carefully! Do you American teenagers think this is some Hollywood scenario , and you are John Wayne leading the pony soldiers? This is not an adventure, silly child! And when you return to your shopping malls and MTV, Braden will still be dead!”

Kaz matched him glare for glare, and said the only thing that came to his mind: “I’m Canadian.”

“Je m’excuse if I do not stamp your passport!”

“Look, you need me,” Kaz argued. “I was there when the captain died. I might recognize something.”

“Such as what, monsieur? That there was the water all around, and it was very deep? Pah!” The guide dismissed this with a sweep of his hand. “This detective work I do not need.”

“You can’t know that,” Kaz persisted. “If you come back without the body, you’ll never know if I might have seen it. And today has to be the last day because he’s been down there forty-eight hours already and…”

The sentence was too awful for him to finish aloud. At the bottom of the ocean, the captain’s body would join the ocean’s ecosystem. It would soon be disfigured by the feeding of sea life.

“Do you understand this job you volunteer for?” English demanded angrily. “This is not a fun swim for looking at the fishies! Three hundred feet of water is between us and what we seek. Do you not know that you must wear the equipment that weighs more than you? Do you not know that you must breathe the special gases because air is poison at such pressure? Do you not know that every minute on the bottom means four minutes of decompression, if you do not want to end up like your friend Star, or worse?” He snorted in disgust. “What you do not know about this dive would fill the set of encyclopedias!”

Kaz did not back down. “I’ll stick with you every step of the way. I’ll do whatever you do. Come on, you’ve got to let me try.”

Captain Torrington raised an eyebrow at the hulking guide. “I don’t think he’s going to leave.”

Kaz played his trump card. “You blame us for what happened to the captain. Fine. If I get into trouble down there, it’s exactly what I deserve.”

English harrumphed. “I will instruct you how to do this thing. But I hope you pay attention like your life depends on it. Because it does, monsieur.”

As the Pizarro cut through the chop on an uncharacteristically hazy and unsettled day, Kaz did his best to squeeze years of training into a single thirty-minute boat ride. He thought the parade of equipment would never end. He would be carrying three regulators, five tanks of different breathing mixtures, three lights — one in his hood, one on his wrist, and a backup in the pocket of his buoyancy compensator, or B.C.

“You think this is daytime?” asked English. “At three hundred feet, it is always night.”

Kaz soon learned that a mixed-gas dive had as much in common with recreational scuba as a polar expedition had with a walk in the park. Even his wet suit would be inadequate. The lightweight rubber was fine protection from the scrapes and stings of a coral reef. But only a thick neoprene shell would insulate him from the bone-chilling cold of the depths.