Gordon Korman: The Discovery

“I’m sorry, okay?” Kaz said defensively. “I’m sorry I interrupted everybody. Let’s go back and finish the dive.”

“ Oui, bien sûr! ” the guide agreed. “A wonderful idea! After you, monsieur.”

Kaz frowned. “What’s the problem?” But then he saw it, boiling up from the ocean where they had been diving only minutes before — churning white water around a mass of flailing fins, tails, and sleek bodies. A feeding frenzy — dozens of sharks going after the carcass of the dead one, creating even more carnage with a barrage of snapping jaws.

“Blood in the water, kid,” the captain said mildly. “It’s like ringing the dinner bell.”

All of Kaz’s heroic exhilaration morphed into a wave of queasiness. If it hadn’t been for English, they would all be in the middle of that, being torn to pieces, thanks to Kaz’s mistake.

Now the guide turned on Vanover. “I have not nine lives, me! Why do you send me down with babies? Except the girl.” He indicated Star. “She is good. But these three — pah!” And he picked up his equipment, hopped onto the deck, and stormed below.

The four teens remained rooted to the dive platform, unsure of what their next move should be.

The captain couldn’t help but notice their intimidation. “Would it make you feel better if I told you he has a heart of gold?”

“He’s okay,” Star conceded.

“That’s because he said you’re good,” Dante accused.

“I am good,” she retorted.

The stocky man reached over and began helping them up to the deck. “I could throttle those pinheads in Hollywood for getting the whole world so hung up on sharks. There’s nothing on that reef for a diver to be afraid of. You run into a shark down there, rest assured he’s more scared of you than you are of him. Except maybe old Clarence.”

Four pairs of ears perked up.

“Clarence?” Kaz echoed, pulling off his dripping flippers.

“Five or six years back,” Vanover related, “we had a rush of marlin. You couldn’t put a foot in the water without stepping on a fin. The sharks came a few days later. Tiger sharks. Big. They shut this place down for two weeks. Nobody dove, nobody swam, nobody even fished. One pigheaded scientist took a sonar tow out. It came back chicken wire. When the marlin moved on, the sharks followed. No one knows why Clarence didn’t go with them. Maybe he was too old to keep up.”

“You mean he’s still here?” Adriana asked timidly.

“Every few months or so somebody spots him,” the captain replied. “He never hurts anyone. Still, you don’t fool around with an eighteen-foot tiger shark. But these other reef rats around here — they’re harmless.”

The teen divers gazed out over the water to where the feeding frenzy was in full swing.

“Oh, well,” Vanover conceded, “if you’re going to put blood in the water, all bets are off. Sharks are only human, you know. Your dive knife isn’t supposed to be a weapon. It’s for cutting your way out of fouled lines and hoses in an emergency. You use it as a last resort. And don’t ever pull it on a barracuda. All he’ll see is a flash of silver, just like half the fish he eats. He’ll take a bite — don’t think he won’t.” Vanover smiled at them benignly. “Now, get out of those wet suits before you roast.”

It was a very chastened dive team that sat in a row along the starboard gunwale as the Hernando Cortés carried them back to Côte Saint-Luc harbor.

“I knew all that stuff about sharks and barracudas,” Star commented. “I just didn’t want to be a brownnose.”

“Me neither,” put in Kaz. “That’s why I got the Furious Frenchman mad at me.”

“He’s scary,” Adriana agreed fervently. “Given a choice between him and the sharks, I’ll take my chances with the sharks.”

“Not me,” Dante said feelingly. “Did you catch that story about the tiger shark? They attack humans, don’t they?”

Star snorted. “There’s a lot of nasty stuff in the ocean. But if you let it spook you, it’s like never leaving the house because you never know when a bear is going to wander out of the woods. People dive their whole lives with no problem. So there’s a tiger shark somewhere. Big deal. The ocean’s full of animals. That’s why we take the plunge.”

Kaz’s eyes fell on an odd piece of equipment mounted on the bulkhead at the base of the Cortés ’s flying bridge, behind a stack of orange life vests. It looked like a baby’s crib that had been taken apart, only the slatted panels were larger, and made of titanium. He had noticed it before, and reflected that the thing was kind of familiar. Now he recognized it — an antishark cage, complete with ballast tanks and control panel.

If sharks are so harmless, why do they need an antishark cage?

Dante interrupted his reverie. “Speaking of animals…”

Kaz followed his pointing finger to a large metal bucket sitting just astern of the cockpit. It was filled to the brim with water that kept spilling out with the movement of the boat. They watched, fascinated, as a slate-gray tentacle that matched the galvanized metal of the pail probed tentatively over the rim. A moment later, the octopus hoisted itself up to the edge of the bucket and dropped to the deck. Immediately, it began a quick, amoebalike oozing motion toward the nearest exit. When it spied the four teenagers, it froze for a moment, eyes fixed on them as its body assumed the olive-drab color of the planks.

“Go for it, dude,” whispered Dante. “He’s going to cook you.”

The octopus apparently took that advice to heart. It slithered to the gunwale and promptly disappeared over the side.

As they were unloading equipment on the dock at Côte Saint-Luc harbor, Menasce Gérard had his first look into the empty bucket that had once held his dinner. His frown was a thunderhead.

Adriana read his mind and saw accusation in it. “I swear we didn’t do it, Mr. English! He climbed out, ran across the deck, and jumped in the ocean. Honest!”

But once again, the dive guide had retreated into a series of grunts — grunts of suspicion.

At thirteen years old, Samuel Higgins remembered his mother, but the mental image was fading.

He’d been only six, after all, when Sewell’s men had come for him — small enough to be carried off, kicking and howling, in a burlap sack. It was a kidnapping, to be sure, but no constable or sheriff ever came to far-off Liverpool to search for him. What reward might there have been? Samuel’s family had nothing. And now six-year-old Samuel had no family.

He would not have been hard to find, if anyone had been looking. Sewell, the chimney sweep, had many climbing boys working for him — all undersized and underfed, abandoned or kidnapped. Samuel, it turned out, excelled at the dirty work. He could scamper up a chimney as easily as walking down the cobblestone alleyways of the port city. And, unlike the boys who worked alongside him, he did not grow long of limb or broad of shoulder as he reached his adolescence.

“Don’t worry, lad,” laughed old Mr. Sewell over and over, “I’ve seen a hundred like you. You’ll be dead of a fall long before you’re too big to climb one of those chimneys.”

The man was as sharp as he was heartless, but he turned out to be wrong about that. Samuel never succumbed to the terrible accidents that extinguished the short, unhappy lives of the other boys. And the day did finally come when young Samuel Higgins could no longer fit into the narrow sooty tunnels where he’d earned his keep since he was only six.

“Sorry, lad,” Mr. Sewell had told him. “If you do no work, I can’t be keeping and feeding you.”