“Minnow is staying next to the Kiawe, so you’ll need to pick her up and drop her off there, or vice versa. I expect you to help her out while I’m gone and give her whatever she needs,” Joe said.
Nalu raised an eyebrow. “Roger that.”
Even with the harbor’s strong smell of salty air and fish, he reeked of marijuana, as though he had walked through a cloud of burning buds.
Minnow offered, “I’m happy to drop you back at the hotel and take the truck.”
“Nah, I’ll drive you. Make sure you make it to your place okay.”
She wanted the truck. And her freedom. “I have directions, I should be fine.”
Nalu slung his backpack into the back of the truck. “Those roads in the lava are pretty heavy, and camouflaged. Not a good idea to go alone.”
Joe nodded. “Better to go with a local.”
So, her fate was sealed. Ride with the stoned intern and be stranded until morning.
Five minutes after she and Nalu had dropped Joe at the airport, Minnow rode with the window open and hot wind blowing in her face. The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” played on the radio, fading in and out of static, and Nalu moved his head forward and back along with the music. For some reason it made her smile. On one side Hualalai rose up, green and sloped and shrouded in clouds. The volcano’s gentle girth appeared to take up the wholeisland until they crested a hill where the gentle slopes of another shield volcano came into view and two more in the distance off to the right. These were even more substantial. Across the channel a fifth peeked above the clouds.
“Haleakala,” Nalu said. “Maui.”
“Which one is the tallest?”
He pointed, his tan arm remarkably well designed. “Mauna Kea. Almost fourteen thousand feet. Mother of the?aina—the land.”
“I didn’t realize they’re that high.”
“Taller than Everest when measured from the sea floor.”
“So it gets deep out there. How far out?” she asked.
“Not very. The seafloor drops away pretty quick on this whole island. Aside from a few seamounts southwest of us, and Lo?ihi, our youngest volcano off the east side, we are surrounded by midnight and abyss. We even have our own trench, and trough.”
The trench she had heard of but not the trough.
“Trough?”
“Kind of like our own moat. The weight of our islands depresses the lithosphere, which is already fragile from the hotspot below. We’re living dangerously out here,” he said.
“How deep is the trough?”
“About eighteen thousand feet at her deepest. And in her shallows, we have mesophytic coral ecosystems inhabited by many of our own Hawaiian brands of fish.”
Nalu flipped seamlessly between surfer dude and science nerd.
“So what’s your take on the attacks?” she asked.
The sky had darkened even more, and a fat drop of rain plopped on the windshield.
“I think it’s the same one,” he said, “because our concentration of white sharks is low and all reports mention the extreme size of this thing. What are the odds of there being two massive white sharks here?”
“Low to none.”
He took off his shades and set them on the dashboard as they drove into a sheet of rain. “You’re the expert. What do you think after talking with Dr. Joe?”
The way he said it made her wonder how he felt about her being here. The pecking order of scientists was a real thing, and as an intern he was bottom of the rung.
“I would have to agree, and yet I don’t believe we have some man-eating monster here. There has to be a reason the shark is hanging around,” she said.
