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one was meant to find it—else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?”
    Captain Henders stared distractedly at his chaplain, then said, “Mister Graves, hoist the boat and make sail, due east!” Then he turned to all his officers. “Chart the island. But make no mention of water or what we have found here today. God forbid we give a soul any reason to seek this place.”
    The hideous gibberish shrieking from the crack in the island continued.
    “Aye, Captain!” his officers answered, ashen-faced.
    As the men scrambled from the boat, the captain asked, “Mister Grafton, what has become of Mister Frears?”
    “He’s been et by monsters, sor!”
    Captain Henders paled under his freckles. “Master gunner, place a full broadside on that crevice, double shot, round and grape, if you please! As you’re ready, sir!”
    The master gunner acknowledged him from the waist of the ship. “Aye, sir!”
    Retribution
fired a parting shot into the crevasse on lances of fire and smoke as she came about, blasting the cliffs like a castle’s ramparts.
9:02 P.M.
    Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders dipped a kite-feather quill into the porcelain inkwell on his desk and stared down at the blank page of his logbook. The oil lamp swung like a pendulum, moving the shadow of the quill across the paper as he paused, weighing what to write.



AUGUST 22
2:10 P.M.
    The Trident cut the deep water with her single-hulled bow and turned three wakes with her trimaran stern. She resembled a sleek spacecraft leaving three white rocket trails across a blue universe. The storm clouds that had driven her south for three weeks had vanished overnight. The sea reflected a spotless dome of scorching blue sky.
    The 182-foot exploration vessel was approaching the center of 36 million square miles of empty ocean that stretched from the equator to Antarctica—a void that globes and maps usually took advantage of to stack the words “South Pacific Ocean.”
    Chartered for the cable reality show
SeaLife
, the
Trident
comfortably quartered forty passengers. Now an “on-camera” crew of ten who pretended to run the ship, fourteen professionals who really ran the ship, six scientists, and eight production staffers, along with a handsome bull terrier named Copepod, rounded out her manifest.
    SeaLife
was chronicling the
Trident’s
yearlong around-the-world odyssey, which promised to encounter the most exotic andremote places on Earth. In its first four weekly episodes the cast of fresh young scientists and hip young crew had explored the Galapagos Islands and Easter Island, launching
SeaLife
to number two in the cable ratings. After the last three weeks at sea, however, enduring back-to-back storms, the show was foundering.
    The ship’s botanist, Nell Duckworth, glared at her reflection in the port window of the
Trident’s
bridge, repositioning her Mets cap. Like all the other scientists chosen for the show, Nell was in her late twenties. She had just turned twenty-nine seven days ago, and had celebrated over the chemical-and-mint-scented bowl of a marine toilet. She had lost weight, since she hadn’t been able to keep food down for the last ten days. Her motion sickness had subsided only when the last of the massive storms had passed last night, leaving a cleansed blue sea and sky this morning. So far, bad weather, sunblock, and her trusty Mets cap had protected her fair complexion from any radical new pigmentation events. But she was not checking her reflection for wrinkles, weight loss, or freckles. Instead, all she noticed was the look of despair glaring back at her from the glass.
    Nell wore taupe knee-length cargo jeans, a gray T-shirt, and plenty of SPF24 sunblock slathered on her bare arms and face. Her beat-up white Adidas sneakers annoyed the producers since Adidas was not one of the show’s sponsors, but she had stubbornly refused to trade them in.
    She gazed south through the window, and the crushing disappointment she was