Intrepid Read online

  “Right. The dance. You hate dances.” He laughed, and it wrinkled out the sour mood he was in. “Wanna talk about the weather? Would that help? What’s up with this heat wave?” The questions lacked sincerity, and I cringed.

  Sully took another sip, and I noticed the oversized watch he always wore on his right wrist was missing. In place of the thick, leather band was something else entirely.

  “What the hell is that?” I grabbed his hand and yanked it so that his palm faced up and I could see the soft part of his arm.

  “A tattoo.” His voice was flat, but it stung. How could he hide a tattoo from me? We told each other everything. Or at least I thought we did. After all, he visited Papa without telling me and got sulky when I brought it up. Now there was this ink on the patch of skin he always kept hidden. I’d watched him take pictures all afternoon… how could I have missed it? The watch was on his other arm, which was so subtle a change that it unnerved me even more.

  I reached over to touch it, and my finger traced the flat lines. It was a strange design: a small box shaded with intricate shadows. It looked like there was a variegated galaxy bubbling up from the bottom right corner into a swirling empty space. “When’d you get it?”

  “Last weekend.”

  “It looks older.”

  “It’s not. See, this is the universe… this is all we don’t know about it.” He stopped pointing at the tattoo and examined my face for traces of understanding I couldn’t give. I got the feeling I was failing a test. It was like I was playing that card came game we played as kids, Memory, where you flip a card and try to remember where the identical one was. Sully and tattoos belonged on completely different cards, and I was resisting the need to draw one picture into another.

  “Who’s Empedocles?” My nail scraped across the tiny inscription under the bottom of the box. It was so finely written in miniature cursive that I almost missed it.

  Sully raised an eyebrow as if he didn’t believe me, and I glared at him as if to ask why would I lie? We were always good at having entire conversations with our eyes, although I’d much rather be raising my brows over Ms. Mendez accidentally opening the door for a that’s-what-she-said joke than trying to decipher whatever enigmatic things his face was now saying.

  “A philosopher,” he finally answered. A look of reverence coated his expression and his voice dipped low, like he was reading from a text book, as he said, “Nothing comes to be nor perishes. There is simply continual rearrangement occurring between Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. We must find peace in that our existence will continue without our form when we are rearranged into the other. We must now hear the fourfold roots of everything… It’s a fancy, pre-scientific explanation for the Law of Conservation of Energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.”

  I tried to fit the phrasing into understanding. The poetics he spouted off were just as disturbing as the tattoo. I felt the thud-thud of change gallop through my chest, like these two things were confirmation that Sully was different. Somehow and somewhere he stopped being the same boy I grew up with. Now he was this tattooed philosopher.

  He yanked his hand away when he realized I didn’t understand a single thing he’d said. Disappointment rattled in his eyes while confusion cluttered up mine. He drained the rest of his bottle before he stepped towards the water. “Let’s go for a swim,” he said as he pulled off his shirt.

  “It’s October.” I reminded him, trying not to watch him.

  “And it’s hot.” He’d already stripped down to his boxers, and before I could reply, he jumped into the water. I blushed, even though Sully, Lindsay, and I did this all the time. But after the way he looked at me in the gym not an hour before and the strange way he kept acting towards me, my heart was beating in all kinds of directions. Things kept shifting. Things that should not have been embarrassing had suddenly become so, except I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him he was an idiot for inking up his perfect skin or that he was creeping me out with the fact he’d memorized philosophy like it was some song he heard over and over again on the radio. I was the one who was going to strip down to my underwear, climb up onto the rope swing, and do a cannon ball so things felt less awkward. But when my clothes were in a haphazard pile on the grass next to his, I caught him staring at me from the water. I tried to ignore it and told myself it was nothing, but the way he watched me sent goose-bumped shivers through me.

  And when I landed in the water, we were still swimming in nothing but awkward.

  “Nice splash. I’d give it a eight-point-three,” Sully said. He was just about a foot from where I landed, and there was that look hovering on his face again. I couldn’t read it, and I couldn’t put it into a place that made sense. He swam closer to me, and fear ripped through me like a hot, hot knife.

  Suddenly, the throbbing in my heart leapt to my head, and I cringed.

  “You okay?” Sully asked, cocking his head.

  I backpedaled in the water. “I’m fine,” I said between gritted teeth, feeling a strange surge of anger. I was tired of the stupid worried look he kept sending my way all day.

  I dunked my head under the surface to alleviate the pain. I blew out the air from my mouth and felt the bubbles tickle my nose before coming back up to refill my lungs. My heart was not supposed to be moving that fast, and my mind was not supposed to be racing.

  When I resurfaced, Sully was already a bobbing head in middle of the brownish river. The further he swam away from me, the further he stretched the tether that used to connect us into impossibility. I watched the muscles in his arms and shoulders ripple the way shadows do on mountains, and by the time he swam to the other edge of the river where dark, green elephant-ears bloomed like they were listening to the wind, I’d realized I’d been imagining things.

  Sully was just Sully. Goofball, best friend, idiot, Sully, and that was all he was ever going to be.

  Liam

  The Intrepid

  In the quest for progress

  We must stand on the shoulders of the Intrepid

  For we cannot stand on those of the gods.

  The Intrepid know beyond knowing

  We can only reach the stars by climbing

  Each rung of an already begun ladder

  And placing our mark just above the last.

  We can only scrape the sky

  By laying one brick on top of the other,

  And no road is paved

  Without there first being a trail

  Blazed into the horizon.

  The Intrepid understand beyond understanding

  That no victory is theirs alone,

  For we Stand on the Shoulders of Giants.

  -Madame Isaac Newtonian

  -Scientist, Poet, and Philosopher

  -S-892, V-32343-L87987, Stag.

  Chapter Six

  The ocean was the big kind of blue—the kind that only happens on extremely sunny days.

  “What do we know?” Nobu leaned out of the open window of the bridge of the boat and screamed the question out to the entire world. He couldn’t get enough of the hunt. We were so close, and it made the adrenaline pump haphazard currents through our veins.

  “We know west!” I screamed.

  “And what’s west?”

  “That damn island.”

  “And if we turn south? What’s south?” These were the questions that filled us with bulbous laughter because they were questions we used to not have the answers to. Now these answers belonged to us and to those who came after us.

  “Those damn yuppy-pups!” I yelled.

  The wind became less aggressive against my hair as I reduced Geeta’s speed and adjusted her course. She was a big beast of a house boat. She was more like a layered, floating city. But she moved faster than anyone would ever think just by looking at her.

  Nobu let out a whooping laugh as the Franco Islands moved to our left. Green bloomed out of the blue. It was the alive kind of green, full of n
oises and leaves that moved in the softest of winds. There were concrete ruins on some of the islands, grey against emerald vines, and sometimes we stopped to explore them. Not this time. We had too much on our plates this year.

  The yuppy-pups headed south this time of year from the Franco Islands, and where there were yuppy-pups, there were red-whales. It was a yearly ritual for us to search for the same red-whale—the one with the weird birthmark in the shape of an artichoke on the backside of her tail. The first time we saw her, I was ten, and Nobu named her Arti (because Choke sounded too crude). This was before Corbin had his accident, and the old man was still able to visit. He sat us on the deck with pen and paper and had us log every observation: size, shades of color, markings, exact location of the sighting, and habits in movement. We followed Arti for three days, tracking her just south of the Franco Islands until we got too close to the Swirl and had to backpedal. How Arti navigated the Swirl was still a mystery, one we never had time to figure out. Corbin called it an exercise in data collection, and that next October, he sent us the message: Peel back the layers of the sea, boys. Find that artichoke.—C.N.

  For the first time in my life, I witnessed Nobu grow impatient. How could we find Arti in the expanse of the ocean in front of us? With no land in sight, the water felt infinite and finding the whale (let alone a specific whale) felt impossible. When we explained the impossibility of it to Corbin, he replied with the message: Perspective is relative.—C.N.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I growled and closed the screen.

  Nobu’s cashew-colored eyes softened over hardened cheekbones. It was clear Corbin’s advice made more sense to him than it did to me. “Focus on the solution, not the problem, Liam,” Nobu was constantly telling me. “Focus on what you know and it will lead you to what you do not.”

  Eventually, he said, “Perspective is everything, right? So the whale is comparably small to the ocean. But on the off chance we find Arti, she will overtake our perspective. Her vastness will replace the infinite ocean and become infinity herself. The closer we get to her, the larger she’ll feel until eventually she’ll end up being all we can see.”

  “That still doesn’t help us find her,” I said and kicked my toe against the railing along the deck.

  Nobu frowned. “Finding Arti is not the lesson the old man is trying to teach us. It’s a lesson in perspective. We can never let the whale become all we can see, because the whale is nothing in comparison to the ocean. The ocean is nothing in comparison to the world. The solar system. The galaxy. The Multiverse.”

  I still wasn’t getting it, and it annoyed me to no end. Sure, Nobu had age and experience on his side, being a whole nine years older than me, but sometimes I just wanted to understand something before him.

  “A lesson on perspective,” I mused. We sat there and listened to the waves swish in several directions with the tide. Hours passed, and the sun fell from the sky before I finally had an idea. “If it’s a lesson on perspective, then it’s a lesson in Watching. As Watchers, we need to see the connections that lead us to the Optimal Path. If we get stuck on one idea, we cannot see how it connects to all the others! We have to keep our minds open.”

  “Exactly,” Nobu said. “Watchers are like a camera zooming in and out of the picture until we understand every component that forms the image.”

  I nodded with a new understanding. “So, with Arti, if we focus on how impossible it is to find her, we can’t see the clues that actually lead us to her!”

  Nobu grinned his knowing grin.

  “Dang it. When did you figure it out?” I asked as disappointment flooded my chest.

  “An hour ago, but you’ve got it. Like the Optimal Path, we’ll find Arti when we are meant to, but that doesn’t mean we have to rely solely on luck. What else can we rely on?”

  “We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants,” I said, and suddenly the solution was so simple that it almost made me angry. “We can look into Geeta’s Captain’s Logs to see what they knew about the red-whales, and build on what they knew.”

  And that was how our Arti logs began. We collected all the information we could from the Logs, and although the migration of the red-whales were not studied, the yuppy-pups were because they were an amazing source of food. Then we read in several entries that the red-whales were seen feeding on yuppy-pups, and that was our first clue. Track the yuppies, find the whales.

  This was year seven, and we’d already gathered so much data on Arti that it filled up a couple volumes in the new Captain’s Logs.

  I was three when Corbin brought me to Geeta, and Nobu, at the age of twelve, became my main guardian. Nobu had a Watcher before I came, but he never talked about her. I didn’t even know her name, but I did know he worked really hard to pretend he didn’t miss her. Before the accident, Corbin checked on us at least once a week, bringing us supplies and clothes and lessons, but since I was fourteen, it’d just been Nobu and me. I think these past three years, we searched for Arti more to honor Corbin than to learn anything new.

  Nobu pressed his hands into the windowsill. “Whoever sees Arti first gets out of gardening maintenance for the entire month,” he said. As much as Nobu loved being in the gardens on the top deck, he hated cleaning the mold off the automated maintenance machines and sprinklers.

  “Deal, and the loser also has to—” but I didn’t get to finish the sentence. There was a buzzing on my wrist, and I looked at my Planck Activation Bracelet. Nobu felt the same buzzing and pulled up the message.

  “Update on the most intractable girl in all the Multiverse.—S.O.” Nobu read out every word, mimicking the voice of the person who wrote it.

  “That’s it. Who gave the Stupid Ox a dictionary?” I asked.

  “Liam…” Nobu warned. “Be nice. He’s trying to be more serious in his correspondence. At least he didn’t say, ‘Update on the mutant,’ like last time.”

  “So, you get to mock him, but I can’t?”

  Nobu grinned. “I’m older, wiser, and more handsome. I can do what I want.”

  “So. No Arti today?” I asked, already knowing the answer as I slowed the boat to a stop. I didn’t want to let on how much it disappointed me, but I knew soon the headaches would prevent us from continuing the search for the year. Instead of voicing this, I placed a new wager. “Whoever condenses the data first gets out of dishes for a week.”

  “Deal,” Nobu said, and he raced out the door towards his office, leaving me to secure Geeta.

  “Cheaters never win!” I yelled and pressed the button to release the anchor.

  Chapter Seven

  The screen was bright where it spread out on the wall. Every time I zoomed in and out of the picture, I thanked whoever invented the projector codes that allowed the data-feed from my bracelet to turn into any sized computer I wanted on any surface I had available. I didn’t even need the Planck Activation Bracelet to stay in one place to project. The data simply traveled to where it needed to be.

  I couldn’t imagine being one of the original Watchers, tied to the default screen that hovered above the Planck Activation Bracelets. It was a good thing our kind had superior vision, or when my ancestors pulled their noses out of their work, they would have looked like cross-eyed, squinting moles from all the staring they had to do at the tiny, tiny screens. Technological advancement let me see more than my predecessors, but that didn’t mean it altered the level of respect I felt towards them. I knew beyond knowing that I stood on the Shoulders of Giants, and it was my predecessors that allowed me to move past them. So when I thanked the inventor of the projector, I thanked those who suffered through earlier models at the same time. They made my job easier.

  I had a good life on Geeta, and living in isolation on the boat made it so I’ve always known who I was and what I was created to do.

  Always.

  I was destined to be the greatest Watcher in my generation because I had an abnormal gift of connection. This was paired with the honor of being trained in this task from
the very beginning. My entire life was about sharpening my skills on perspective, and I knew it would lead me to great discoveries.

  I felt bad for the Explorers like the ones in Geronimo. They didn’t find out who they were until they were old enough to handle secrets. That’s the curse of being raised in a highly populated culture. But Nobu and I had always been old enough to know the truth because there was no one on Geeta to share our secrets with.

  As I watched Texi year after year, I grew up alongside her. Lately, I wondered if carrying the weight of truth is just as difficult as carrying the weight of lies. She had to know something was off about her, and it must be disconcerting not being able to pinpoint just what it was that made her feel different. I knew more about the girl than she knew about herself, but that was my job. As a Watcher, I was trained to sift through data until my eyes burned from forcing my inadequate brain to process what was gathered by the Explorers.

  There were so many differences between the lives of Explorers and Watchers, but both jobs are equally important. Some might argue the Explorers have a more exciting time, but I disagree. Watchers? We find the connections Explorers miss because they are too close to the problem, and we help give meaning to a system that otherwise appears to be random and haphazard. To me, that’s far more exciting.

  I sat in my chair that used to be plush but now was worn from the hours I sat in it, and I replayed the feed. I ignored the snarky message that came with it, and wondered what was so important about it. The scene in this feed didn’t seem special. Texi leaned on a wall between the gym doors, clearly not partaking in all the cheer.

  I’d always wondered what a pep rally would be like, and I wished I could experience Collective Energy for myself, especially when it was so young and contagious. Young Energy inspired the inert into motion and had its own gravitational pull like a current in the tide. Yet this current bounced off Texi. Even if she wanted to be pulled into it, there was something beyond herself holding her back, like when a baseball player revs his arm back before the pitch releases a flurry of movement.