Max

The glass is way too thick to break, I thought, and Angel nodded.

If we use a torpedo, it would probably kill my mom. Angel nodded again.

Maybe I could borrow some kind of big drill from the sub? Maybe we could storm in through an air lock? Angel frowned, unsure.

Then I noticed something weird. Okay, I mean, something weirder. There were no fish anywhere close to the dome. No nothing. This deep, it isn’t exactly teeming with the circle of sea life anyway, but there were still plenty of freakish, scary things swimming around, not necessarily related to the oozing radiation. But none would come close to the dome, and no barnacles, sea stars, or tube worms attached themselves to it either.

Almost as soon as I realized that, the mystery was solved for us: an eel-like thing swam close and passed us. Then, zap! Some sort of invisible force field suddenly electrified it, killing it instantly. It sparked, twitched, then sank silently down into the depths to the ocean bottom.

Angel and I backed up several yards.

So much for attacking through the sub’s air locks, I thought. My mom was right there! But I couldn’t get to her. She was lying there so limp, unmoving – surely she was still alive. They couldn’t have killed her yet, could they?

Angel looked perplexed, then turned her head and peered out into the darkness. Way off, using raptor vision, I could just barely make out the looming dark pickle shapes of the Krelp. Angel stared at them, cocking her head, as if she were listening. After a minute, she nodded.

The Krelp say they want to help, she thought at me.

But how? I asked.

I don’t know, she answered.

I felt a swell of icy water push against me, and then the largest Krelp, the one Angel called Gor, surged past us, almost tumbling us head over heels. It neared the dome, got zapped over and over again, but steamrollered right through the force field.

Follow it! Angel commanded. It’s shorted out the electric net!

We rushed after it, trying to trace its exact path. I braced myself for a horrible electrocution, but nothing happened. I swam as fast as I could to the window leading into my mom’s cell. I rapped on it hard, but she didn’t move.

Gor pressed itself against the glass, and I could only imagine what it looked like from the inside. Someone inside the dome noticed it and started screaming. I saw people starting to race around, saw someone outside the room that housed all the sleeping ’bots. Still, my mom lay motionless.

My stomach got a cold, clenched feeling. Maybe, after all this, we were too late.

People were still staring up at the enormous creature pressed against the glass, and now I noticed a thick slime seeping out from under its body. This thing was the size of a 747. I mean, the word eew doesn’t even come close.

“Watch,” Angel said out loud.

Where the slime was touching the glass, wisps of smoke were twisting away into the water.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “It’s melting the glass with its… uh, body snot.”

“Gazzy will be so jealous,” Angel bubbled. “He’d give anything to be able to do that.”

“Please do not tell him about it.”

The glass continued to melt, and then something clicked in my brain, and I realized what would happen once the glass failed: water would seep in, then it would flood in, then it would crush the dome, and everything inside with its unimaginable weight.

If my mom wasn’t dead now, she would be, really soon.

75

“ANGEL!” I yelled. Her head whipped around, floating gold curls wreathing her face. “We need the sub here, now! With its air lock open!”

Looking scared, Angel nodded. Her eyes unfocused as she compelled the crew back on the sub to come get us. I could almost feel its superquiet engines as they powered up.

Angel pressed her fingers to her temples as if she had a headache. Just as the first small trickle of ocean water began to seep into the dome, I was suddenly surrounded by Krelp.

Inside the dome, people were ru

The Krelp, ranging in sizes from baby whale to semitrailer to jet plane, pressed closer to me. I hoped they had a plan. I hoped they could see me. I hoped they liked me as much as they liked Angel.

The dome cracked. The freezing ocean water rushed in in torrents, quickly filling one room after another. Just as someone activated the M-Geeks, readying them for battle, their quarters were flooded, water smashing them against the ceiling and sweeping them down hallways.

The section of dome over my mom’s room started to split. I tensed, not really having a plan beyond “Get Mom, dead or alive.” Water splashed in, dousing my mom’s body. She moved.

She was alive!

The next moment, the ceiling above her broke open, and her room was instantly flooded. She got swept up against what was left of the ceiling, smashing against it hard. I heard her cry out with pain as I rushed in with the water, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her free. She was unconscious.

The Krelp hovered over us, and I realized they were creating a really big… snot bubble, sort of attached to several of them. Almost as if several kids were blowing bubbles, and the bubbles touched and poofed into a bigger, combined bubble. But with snot. Angel grabbed on to me, and before I had time to think, Oh, man, I’m go

Yes. I owed my life, Angel’s life, and my mother’s life to a mutant’s ability to create industrial-strength snot.

The Krelp floated upward to where our sub was waiting, its air-lock doors open, and gently pushed us in. Immediately alarms sounded, the hatch doors started to close, and I felt pressurized air being pumped into the room.

Thirty seconds later, the air popped the bubble, the hatches were shut, and the i

“Help my mom!” I cried to the medic who was already rushing in.

Fang ran in and knelt next to me, and then I was surrounded by the flock.

A few more seconds, and my mom started coughing and gagging, spitting salt water out. I patted her hand, praying that she would be all right. She looked thin, pale, weak, and beaten up, and a wildfire of rage swept through me as I thought of what they had put her through.

“Mom! It’s me!” I said. “You’re safe now. You’re on a sub, and we’re headed back to Hawaii.” I couldn’t believe we were together again at last, that she was alive, that we had reached her before it was too late.

Her brown eyes blinked groggily several times, and she winced as the medic started an IV in her arm. “Max?” she croaked.

“I’m right here,” I said, holding her hand. My eyes felt hot, and I blinked several times.

Blearily, she looked up at me, tried to focus. “I knew… you’d come,” she said.

My throat threatened to close, but I managed to say, “I’ll always, always come, Mom. You can count on it.”

My mom smiled faintly, then closed her eyes again.

Fang put his arm around me. “You did it. You saved her.”

That was when I should have jumped up and done a victory dance, whooping my way down the corridor to the bathroom, where I could change into dry clothes.

Instead, I burst into unexpected tears, covering my eyes and gulping in breaths like a big baby. Fang put his arms around me.

Sometimes I just don’t understand myself.