HERE’S ONLY ROOM for three,” I told Angel, who was getting that mutinous look on her face.

“I should go, because I might hear something,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

By “hear,” I knew she meant telepathically pick up on something, like the fish thinking little bubbly fish thoughts (”Ooh! Plankton!”) or whatever. “It’s too dangerous,” I said firmly, which was pretty much the lamest argument I could have come up with, given the sheer amount of completely death-defying stuff we did on a routine basis.

“Max.” She looked at me, and I remembered that she could also put thoughtsinto people’s heads.

“Don’t make me wish I was wearing a foil hat,” I warned her. “Look, the crewman has to go, because he knows how to drive the little sub, and Dr. Akana has to go because she knows what the heck we’ll be looking at, and I have to go because (a) I’m the leader, right? And (b) it’s my mom we’re looking for, and

(c) because I said so. You dig?”

I crossed my arms too and frowned down at her, something that’s always worked in the past, but I doubted it would for much longer.

“Angel, dear, you’re only six,” Dr. Akana said kindly.

“Seven,” Angel said obstinately.

“When did you turn seven? Oh, never mind,” I said, getting exasperated. None of us knows when our actual birthdays are, so we each made up one for ourselves. Years ago I’d had to put my foot down about getting only one birthday a year, because Gazzy was trying to capitalize on presents. But, actually, we don’t really keep track of them too well.

“I’m seven.” Angel looked like a bulldozer wouldn’t budge her.

“Fine, then, I’m—seventeen!” I said. “You’re not going.”

The little sub in question was a three-person thingy that looked kind of like a large pool float with a bubble on top. It could go down to one hundred meters (about three hundred feet—our Big Daddy sub could go down about one thousand meters), and I practically expected to see foot pedals sticking out the bottom.

The only reason I was willing to get in it was because of the Plexiglas dome on top that you could see out of. Our current sub hadno windows . I repeat,no windows . Zero. Zip.Nada . That was because the space between the outer hull and the inner hull was full of water when the sub submerged and full of air when it surfaced. A window would have had to have been about a foot thick. Instead, the crew viewed the outside on little TV screens, from cameras located on the sub’s exterior.

But now I had a chance to be in a big bubble and see what was going on. Anything would be better than being stuck in here.

I rubbed my hands together. “Let’s do it.”

Ten minutes later, a bottom hatch slowly opened, and we dropped down into the deep ocean. There

wasn’t much light, but because the water around Hawaii is so clear, it wasn’t totally pitch dark, even at sixty meters deep.

Then the crewman turned on the headlights. It was amazing—our own underwater show. Above us was the enormous U.S.S.Minnesota. We were chugging out from under it, thank God. But the fish! There were fish everywhere, all sizes, moving slowly through the water.

“That’s a yellowfin tuna,” said Dr. Akana. “They can grow to more than seven feet long.”

“What’s that one?!” I said, pointing to a huge silver hubcap with orange fins.

“It’s an opah,” said the crewman. “They’re good eatin.’ “

“It’s almost as big as me,” I said.

“I’m sure it weighs more,” Dr. Akana said with a smile. “Look! There’s a turtle!”

Sure enough, a turtle about the size of a standard poodle swam by, looking totally unconcerned about our sub.

“Everything moves so slowly under water,” I said. In addition to the fish that caught our attention because they were the size of sofas, we were surrounded by hundreds of thousands of smaller fish in every shape and color combination you could imagine—and some you couldn’t.

“Not everything—these fish can dart away in an instant if danger’s near,” said Dr. Akana. “Now, we’re still about six miles away from where the fish kill was first spotted, but I wanted to check out—” Her words were swallowed by a gasp. “Oh, my God! What’s that!?”

My head whipped to where she was staring, and I sucked in a fast breath.

No, I thought.Not this .