The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 7

7.

They decided to take shifts in front of Jax’s laptop, and because she had the first shift she also had the difficult task of waking her little brother at midnight.

Lolly was asleep upstairs with the baby, in their parents’ room, and Cara had drunk some of her dad’s coffee to stay up, so now she was wired and couldn’t get to sleep.

Jax, on the other hand, was crabby about being woken and then all but nodded off at the console, so she made him drink coffee too. She found some old instant in the cupboard and added plenty of milk.

“Putrid,” he said, and stuck his tongue out, eyes squeezed shut in revulsion. “I can’t believe anyone drinks this stuff on purpose.”

“I think there’s Coke in the fridge,” she said. “I’ll get you that instead.”

Soon Jax was wide awake and had his screen set up with two windows, one showing the webcam view, the other displaying one of his databases.

“Why don’t you try to sleep,” he said. “You need it.”

But it was no good. She sat up in her bed, the bedside light on, and kept getting up to do things—first to make herself a pb&j, then to pace the kitchen worrying about Max, and what other things the pouring man could do to them. If he could do that, was there a limit?

She still felt mad at her mother sometimes—at moments like this when she was stressed out. She was just a kid; they all were, even Max. It wasn’t fair they had to save her. She should be saving them. Their mother should be here, and she should protect them from the so-called man whose name was fear, for God’s sake.

Then she felt bad for thinking that way. They weren’t really kids, after all—or barely, anymore, except for Jax who was a freak of nature in any case and had a mental age of 90—and their mother had always looked after everything, and now it was their turn.

But still, as she paced, she went back and forth between feeling sorry for herself and Max and Jax and her mother and feeling angry. She couldn’t seem to help it.

“Max could have been killed,” she said aloud, standing still in the middle of the kitchen. It was like she was accusing someone.

She was alone, of course.

Ω

She must have fallen asleep because the next thing she knew Jax was standing over her, where she was curled in her dad’s favorite armchair, and he had his laptop open.

“Do you see something?” he asked, and crouched down beside her to show her the display.

She rubbed her eyes and looked at the screen, which was basically a rectangle of black. In the middle of the black she saw a faint lightness, but she wasn’t sure if it was anything—it might just be the reflection of a passing plane on the waves, or a faraway boat. It might be anything, in fact.

“I don’t know,” she said, doubtful.

“What if it is?” said Jax.

“I mean, it could be,” said Cara. She tried to look more closely, but the light was so faint, so characterless, that she couldn’t decide. “Or it could be nothing.”