Free Deep Deception by Z.A. Maxfield Page A

burn off.” Adin had been more interested in the coffee his father bought him, even though he’d filled it with cream and sugar so he could drink it without making faces, than the photography part of the outing. “What is it with you and that boat? We’ve been here every weekend this summer and you still don’t have the picture you want.”
    “Mind your manners, Adin. The lady is a ship,” Keene Tredeger teased. “I freely admit I’m obsessed by it.”
    The Tredegers, father and son, peered through the fog at the Balclutha, the three-masted, full-rigged beauty that was part of the Maritime Museum’s collection. If the moisture burned off enough, his father would try to get a picture of her, caressed just so by the early morning sunlight. As if the sun would ever shine over San Francisco Bay in the morning. He said he knew what that picture would look like when he got it and until that day, their Saturday mornings would be spent in the aquatic park trying. Adin went with him, mostly for the coffee.
    Adin shivered from what seemed like glacially cold, damp air that lay on them like a blanket. San Francisco was like London, only without the charm of age and the patina of empire to hold his interest and get him past it.
    “I do not know what you see in this place.”
    “That’s because you’re a snob, Adin.” Keene’s voice was amused. The elder Tredeger practically threw Adin a treat whenever he exhibited his disdain for the commonplace, so naturally, he’d grown to be a quirky little thing. “Your mother loves it here. I’ve never seen her so happy. It makes me a spectacular hero in her eyes to have brought her home to stay. Your sister loves her new school, you are doing well, given that you’re unhappy to be here, and I have the Balclutha, 301 feet, 2,650 tons of emotional satisfaction. I have never loved anything non-human this way. It’s positively obscene. I’m assuming it’s a midlife crisis and someday soon we’ll grow apart.”
    Adin said nothing.
    “You do like your school, don’t you?” When Adin grimaced, his father’s eyes twinkled. “Middle school has to be one of Dante’s levels of hell. Level 8, I think, the Malebolgia. You seem to have achieved a singular level of mediocrity in your first semester grades. Perfectly suitable for a boy in the pit of despair.”
    “Actually, middle school is more like Delacroix’s painting The Barque of Dante, a horrible boat, ferrying you between elementary and high school,” Adin muttered. “Complete with shit that tries to drown you, and the floating bloated corpses of those who have gone before.”
    Keene frowned. “Adin.”
    “It’s not that it’s not a good school,” Adin muttered. “I get okay grades. People are nice.”
    “But you don’t fit in?”
    Adin closed his eyes and shook his head. “Not really.”
    “You miss Edward?” Keene asked. “You two were thick in London. It’s hard to leave your best mate when you move.”
    “I know. We e-mail. We wouldn’t have gone to the same school anyway, he would have been sent to prep school and I…”
    “You are an American boy whose mother wants him by her side until he’s ninety.”
    Adin bit his lip and rolled his eyes. “I get that, yes.”
    “I needed to bring her home, Adin. It was my responsibility. She was afraid.”
    “I know.”
    “The world is changing.” Keene took a sip of his own coffee. “Sometimes I think it gets smaller and angrier every day. Can you imagine the nineteenth century when that ship was built? Just think, you’re a young man, barely more than a child, and you step aboard the Balclutha with nothing more than a canvas sack with a change of clothes, a pocket knife, maybe a tin whistle. Everything you know about where you’re headed comes from the images you hold in your imagination and what you can see off her bow: the horizon, in all directions, limitless space, endless possibility, and the great unknown.”
    “Mother says you grow more and more