“See you in a few,” said Max, and he and Jax split off toward the Aquarium entrance.
Cara hadn’t thought it would affect her the way it did, being inside her mother’s office. But as soon as her dad unlocked the door and opened it for her (“Take your time, honey, I’m going to step down the hall and talk to Roger”) she felt overwhelmed. The feeling washed over her that her mother had been with them a long, long time ago.
And that long-ago time might never be coming back.
Her knees went weak and she had to sit down in her mother’s desk chair.
As she sat there, a strange feeling of mixed dread and anticipation trilling though her, she looked around slowly. The office wasn’t much different from how she remembered it; the only sign of anything out of the ordinary was a dried-out plant that had dropped some dead leaves. No one had bothered to water it.
“You got your kids with you?” Roger was asking her dad in the hall, friendly. “The boy genius?”
“Jax is over at the Aquarium,” answered her dad.
There were the framed pictures of all of them on the desk, which seemed pretty neat and well-organized considering how many stacks of reports there were. Her mother wasn’t in any of the pictures, Cara realized, because she had always been the one taking them.
She was just killing time; Jax had given her a thumb drive to show their dad, pretending she’d found it when she was ready to go. Through the open office door she could hear him saying hello to Roger. Roger was one of her mother’s colleagues—an older biologist type who was more or less the boss, as far as Cara could tell.
She opened and closed drawers, then took a tour of the keepsakes on the edges of the bookshelves. Miniature seals and sea lions, dolphins and walruses carved out of bone … Out in the hall, her dad and Roger were getting closer and harder and harder to ignore.
“This kind of occurrence is unprecedented here,” Roger was saying, sounding worried. “To actually have data stolen—I mean her drive was wiped clean.”
“And this was the, what—this was the work on ocean acidification? Effects on shellfish, trophic ramifications?” asked her dad.
“She was slated to testify before Congress,” said Roger. “Of course, that was before … but this break-in only happened two days ago. I was going to call you. Only reason it was discovered was one of her grad students was working late, saw her door open, went in, and found the hard drive busy erasing itself. Someone had programmed it to do so, obviously. Every printout that was back from peer review was gone too, but copies of the article are still floating around. It’s the original dataset that’s missing. And without it…”
“But why would anyone do that?” asked her dad.
The two of them were at the door now, her dad shaking his head.
“The research is important,” said Roger. “It has major political impact, potentially. This was the first data to show conclusively that the ocean food chain is beginning to collapse from higher acidity and will crash completely if CO2 emissions aren’t curbed. First the calcium-carbonate forming organisms will die off, plankton, pteropods, shellfish of all kinds, every species of coral. Her sample showed actual evidence of that beginning to happen. Then the species that depend on those organisms for food will start to crash, and of course that’s where her interest originated: marine mammals.”
“Yes I know, we talked about it,” said Cara’s dad. “She was deeply concerned.”
“Fish stocks will collapse. Macroalgae could force out what’s left of the coral reefs, already bleaching and stressed. Cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates could rise. The oceans as we know them could virtually die off….”
The men were silent for a long moment. Then Roger cleared his throat.
“My point is, if she hadn’t—disappeared, for lack of a better term—she was going to Washington, DC to testify on this.”
“So you’re saying, with this break-in—you think maybe someone actually might have—taken her?”
His tone made Cara’s pulse quicken, so she moved away from the door, picking up a small box from the desk, mostly to occupy her shaking hands. It was decorated with spiral designs and made of a white, pearly material. Idly, trying not to hear the conversation, she slid the top open.
“… can’t believe anyone would go to those lengths,” came Roger’s voice. “It’s not like she’s the only one studying this. New data are being gathered constantly.”
“Then what happened, Roger?” asked Cara’s dad in an urgent tone. “Where is she?”
Inside the box, Cara saw, was a small piece of rolled-up paper. She uncurled it.
What had he meant, “taken”?
There was some kind of poem on the paper, though she couldn’t focus on it at the moment.
The night of fires beneath the sea …
“Cara? You ready, honey?” came her dad’s voice.
“Sure,” she said hastily, and stuffed paper and box into her shoulder bag. “Coming.”
“Find what you were looking for?” he asked.
They were walking together to the elevator over the slick linoleum.
But he was distracted and not really listening.
“Dad,” she said slowly. “I heard what you guys were saying. Someone hacked into Mom’s computer, right? When you said maybe she was ‘taken,’ did you mean kidnapped?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” said her dad. “No, no. Look. I was just throwing out ideas. The truth is, that’s preposterous. We don’t live inside a great conspiracy theory, after all. I’m just—just trying to figure out our situation. And you’re helping me. Right?”
He clapped her reassuringly on the shoulder, but he seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
Her dad took a walk around the village harbor while she went to find Max and Jax. She went by the Aquarium’s outdoor tank with the seals and through the front doors, stopping only to sign in. She passed the row of tanks holding blue lobsters, the ugly, snaggle-toothed wolffish and the conger
