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I remember the last words my mother ever said to me:We’ll be back before you know it.Then she and my father disappeared forever.

‘Freshmen.’ Dr Hewett says the word like an insult.

He stands in the aisle, bracing himself with one hand on the seatback. He breathes heavily into the bus’s microphone. ‘This weekend’s trials will be very different from what you might be expecting.’

This gets our attention. Everybody fixes their eyes on Hewett.

The professor is shaped like a diving bell – narrow shoulders tapering down to a wide waist, where his rumpled dress shirt is half untucked from his slacks. His frazzled grey hair and sad, watery eyes make him look like Albert Einstein after a night of running failed calculations.

Next to me, Ester shuffles through her index cards. Top rests his head in her lap. His tail thumps softly against my thigh.

‘In thirty minutes,’ Hewett continues, ‘we will arrive in San Alejandro.’

He waits for our whispering to die down. We associate San Alejandro with shopping, movies and Saturday-night karaoke, not end-of-year trials. But I suppose it makes sense we would start there. The school’s boat is usually moored in the harbour.

‘We will proceed directly to the docks,’ Hewett continues.‘No detours, no side trips to buy refreshments. You will keep your phonesoff.’

A few kids grumble. Harding-Pencroft strictly controls all communication through the school intranet. The campus is a cellular dead zone. You want to look up the breeding habits of jellyfish? No problem. You want to watch YouTube? Good luck with that.

The teachers say this is to keep us focused on our work. I suspect it’s yet another security precaution, like the underwater grid, or the armed guards, or the drone surveillance. I don’t understand it, but it’s a fact of life.

Typically, when we get into town, we’re like dehydrated cattle at a watering hole. We stampede to the first place with free Wi-Fi and drink it in.

‘I will have further instructions once we’re at sea,’ Hewett says. ‘Suffice to say, today you’ll find out what the academy is truly about. And the academy will find out whether you can survive its requirements.’

I want to think Hewett is just trying to scare us. The problem is, he never makes idle threats. If he says we’ll have extra weekend homework, we do. If he predicts ninety percent of us will fail his next exam, we do.

Theoretical Marine Scienceshouldbe a fun fluff class. We spend most of our time contemplating what ocean technology might look like in one or two hundred years. Or if science had taken a different course, what might have happened? What if Leonardo da Vinci had done more to develop sonar when he discovered it in 1490? What if the plans for Drebbel’s ‘diving boat’ hadn’t been lost in the 1600s, or if Monturiol’s anaerobic steam-powered submarine hadn’t been scrapped for lack of funding in 1867? Would our technology today be more advanced?

It’s cool stuff to think about, but also … not so practical?Hewett acts as if his questions have right answers. Like, it’stheoretical. How can you give somebody a B minus on their essay just because their guess is different than yours?

Anyway, I wish Colonel Apesh, our military-tactics professor, were chaperoning this trip. Or Dr Kind, our physical-fitness teacher. Hewett can barely shuffle a few feet without getting winded. I don’t see how he’s going to judge what I imagine will be intensely physical underwater trials.

He turns over the microphone to Gemini Twain. Gem has made our group assignments for the weekend. We’ll be divided into five teams of four, one member from each house. But first he has a few rules to tell us about.

Of course he does. He issucha Shark. You could put him in charge of a toddler soccer team and he’d get delusions of grandeur. He’d have the kids marching in perfect unison within a week. Then he’d declare war on a neighbouring toddler team.

He rattles off a list of his favourite regulations. My attention wanders. I look out of the window.

The highway winds from switchback to switchback, hugging the cliffs. One moment, you can’t see anything but trees. The next, you can trace the entire coastline all the way back to HP. When the school is in full view, I spot something strange in the bay. A thin line of wake heads towards the base of the cliffs, just where Dev and I were diving this morning. I can’t see what’s making it. There’s no boat. It’s moving too fast and too straight to be a sea animal. Something underwater, under propulsion.

The pit of my stomach feels like I’m free-falling again.

The wake line splits into three segments. It looks like a trident, its prongs racing to jab the coastline beneath the school.

‘Hey!’ I tell my friends. ‘Hey, look!’

By the time Ester and Nelinha get to the window, the view has disappeared behind trees and cliffs.

‘What was it?’ Nelinha asks.

Then the shock wave hits us. The bus shudders. Boulders topple into the road.

‘Earthquake!’ Gem drops the mic, literally, grabbing the nearest seatback to steady himself. Dr Hewett is thrown hard against the window.

Cracks splinter the asphalt as we skid towards the guardrail. All twenty of us, well-trained freshmen, scream like kindergarteners.

Somehow, Bernie regains control of the bus.