I still can’t call it my cabin. That feels wrong and scary …
I make Gem wait outside while I change into proper clothes.
Socrates has returned to his tank. He chatters at me as if to say, Hey, human, where’s my squid? I make a mental note to find him one soon.
Top stands on his hind legs and sniffs the dolphin. He doesn’t seem terribly concerned about our new room-mate, though I get the feeling he’d prefer to sniff Socrates’s tail for a formal introduction. I’m glad he can’t do that.
Once I’m dressed, we bring in Gem. We gather around the conference table.
Ester twists her fingers like she’s playing incy wincy spider. ‘I just want to point out that I am not a prefect, and neither is Nelinha. We don’t have seniority. Tia and Franklin should be here instead.’
‘It’s fine, babe,’ Nelinha says. ‘I told Tia I’d keep her in the loop. And you saw Franklin. He’s kinda busy.’
Ester doesn’t look reassured. ‘Okay … I guess that’s okay.’
Gem eyes the robot-eyeball paperweight as if it might attack us. ‘Do you know how to work that thing?’
‘Hey,’ Nelinha chides him. ‘Don’t question my friend’s abilities.’ She squints at me. ‘Do you know how?’
‘Only one way to find out.’ I grip the paperweight.
The metal is warm, like a phone that’s been recharging. I press my thumb against the impression at the top. A mild electric tingle goes up to my elbow, but I resist the urge to pull away.
The map ripples. The paperweight rises, hovering just over the grey surface, and begins to move around. I’m reminded of the time we tried a Ouija board in our dorm room. Nelinha screamed as soon as the pointer started drifting. I got an attack of the giggles. Ester launched into a long lecture about ideomotor effects and involuntary muscle impulses. We never did find out what the Ouija board predicted for our futures.
This time, nobody screams or giggles. The paperweight shifts to a point off the California coast. Our current position? How the robot-eye thing can know this, I’m not sure.
A glowing line extends from the base of the paperweight like a sunbeam, stretching across the surface of the map, past latitude and longitude lines, numbers for sounding depths, and gentle curves indicating the ocean current patterns and underwater topography. The line stops at a point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where nothing is marked, just open water.
The thumbprint reader starts to hurt. The electric charge is building.
‘Ester,’ I say with a clenched jaw, ‘can you memorize those coordinates?’
‘I ALREADY HAVE,’ she says. She’s excited. I get that.
I release the paperweight. The glowing line winks out of existence.
Nelinha whistles. ‘Okay, what we just saw? I can only guess how it might work. DNA activation releases some kind of encoded electric signal into the paper – or not-paper, whatever that material is. It shows you the encrypted route. Leaves absolutely no trace afterwards. Like, wow.’
‘Electric eels communicate with low-energy pulses,’ Ester says. ‘The parchment could be eel skin, or probably a lab-grown organic material derived from eel skin, because killing eels would be cruel. Nemo wouldn’t do that, would he?’ She looks at me for confirmation, then decides for herself. ‘No. That’s impossible.’
‘Whatever the case …’ Nelinha shakes her head in amazement. ‘My god.’
‘Please don’t blaspheme,’ Gem says.
‘Who are you, my mother?’
‘I’m just asking politely …’
‘Both of you, knock it off,’ I say.
Surprisingly, they do.
‘Ester,’ I say, ‘how far are those coordinates from our current position?’
I’m pretty sure I know the answer. Dolphins excel at navigation. I can read nautical maps just fine. But Ester’s command of hard maths is better than mine. She can juggle more variables.
‘Maintaining top cruising speed,’ she says, ‘in a straight line? Seventy-two hours. That’s assuming favourable weather, no mechanical problems and no more attacks by LI’s varsity commandos. Also, there’s nothing marked on the chart at that location. Nothing even close. If we don’t find a base, we’ll be in the middle of nowhere with no supplies. We’ll die.’
Well … no sugar-coating.
But three days is not as bad as I feared. We’re provisioned for a weekend. If we ration carefully, we might make it with the supplies we have on board. My suspicious mind wonders if Hewett planned it this way. He said he didn’t know the location of the base. Nevertheless, we have exactly three days of supplies for a three-day trip. That’s quite a coincidence.