Free Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman Page B

why she had chosen this. I never even liked Moby Dick.
    “Ready to lower the boats!” Captain Ahab shouted. “Today we take the great blue whale!”
    “Uh . . . don’t you mean great white whale?”
    “Nay, boy. The blue whale be our quarry on this cursed voyage. The greatest creature on land or sea. She has no teeth to tear a man to shreds like the white whale of which you speak, but she is awesome and daunting prey, nonetheless.”
    A loud hiss, and I turned to see the great blue whale surface again, spouting spray from its blowhole. Its huge eye was somehow familiar. Its shape, its color. Itwasn’t the strange blue of Cassandra’s eyes; this eye was speckled brown. I knew if I had time to think, I’d be able to place where I’d seen such an eye before.
    I watched as the whale opened its tremendous mouth and drew in water. I could see tiny shrimp writhing against the bony lattice in its mouth.
    “See how she opens her mouth to filter life from the sea!” said the captain. “I’d hate to be a krill caught in her baleen.”
    And all at once it clicked.
    Krill. . . Baleen . . . This was a thought tugged right out of my mind. I took a good, hard look at the maniacal captain, trying to pick the shape of his face out from beneath his heavy beard. “Carl?” Then I looked to the sea, at the submerging whale. “Mom?”
    Carl put his hand on my shoulder. “Keep your wits about you, boy.”
    “You can’t really be here, right? You’re just some figment of my imagination. Just a part of the ride, right? Right?”
    He just ignored me, looking out to sea for a sign of the whale. “I struck my first whale as a boy harpooner of eighteen. But this one here is the great prize, and beyond her there will be no other. Will you help me, boy?”
    “No! I mean, yes! I mean, I don’t know!”
    The bow crashed down again, and as we rose and crested the next swell I saw a reef off the starboard bow—jagged granite rocks that thrust up through the churning sea like teeth. I could see bits and pieces of other ships in the crevices of the stone monoliths.
    “Follow her into the reef!” shouted mad Captain Carl. A sailor at the helm wildly spun the tiller, and the ship turned toward the rocks.
    Up above me the riders still wailed with joy as they swung from the ratlines. One of those voices sounded familiar. It was a shrill whoop that I’d heard so many times, I could place it a mile away. I looked up. In a flash of lightning across the mottled yellow sky, I saw Quinn clinging to the highest of the ratlines, right beneath the crow’s nest. He screamed in defiance of the crashing waves, daring them to shake him loose.
    Fighting the violent pitching of the ship, I climbed the ratlines toward him. I was almost thrown from the ropes, but I held on with what little strength my fingers had left, until I finally reached him high up where the ratlines met the mast.
    “Toward thee I roll,” the mad captain shouted at the whale with my mother’s eyes. “To the last, I grapple with thee!”
    “Quinn!” I could barely hear my own voice over the thunder and wind. I was right next to him now, and still he didn’t know I was there. He just kept whooping as the boat pitched up and down, the motion intensified by the height of the mast. He was oblivious to Carl, our mother the whale, or anything else outside the rush of the ride.
    “Quinn!”
    Finally he turned to me, blinking like he had just come out of a trance. His eyes were wide and wet from the cold wind. “Blake? When did you get here?”
    There was a deafening blast, and a surge of electricitymade my arm hairs tingle. A kid on the foremast had been struck by lightning. His smoking body tumbled limply, missing the deck and plunging into the sea. Then I caught sight of one of the passing spires of rock. Part of the stone seemed to melt away, forming a face. In fact, all over the reef, I could swear I saw giant faces in the stone, the wailing mouths and hopeless eyes of those