Stingray City - Ellen Prager Tristan Hunt and the Sea Guardians

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nettles. Rosina came up for a breath and then leaned back in. Soon the massive snarl was undone, and all the jellies were once again drifting freely about the tank.

      The other teens stood stunned in front of the exhibit. Deep in thought, Hugh pondered the scene. “It must be the mucus.”

      “What must be the mucus?” Sam asked.

      “It’s like how clownfish coat themselves in mucus so they don’t get stung by the anemones they live in.”

      “Oh, I get it,” Tristan said. “It’s her slime. It’s protecting her from the stinging.”

      Sam smiled. “Sweet!”

      “Like, she can have it,” Ryder said.

      Rosina popped up from the water grinning. She reached back into the tank and stroked one of the jellyfish like it was a cuddly pet. She looked up and waved with a slow-motion, I’m-the-queen wave. Tristan swore she was looking and smiling specifically at him. It was a bit disturbing. Rosina was usually not the most pleasant of people, and she rarely smiled. But then again, ever since he’d saved her from drowning in the boulder pool and helped her escape from the psycho spa in the British Virgin Islands, she’d been acting strangely nice to him.

      A little while later, Rosina rejoined the group. Hugh and Sam high-fived her. Ryder gave her a cool head nod. Rosina then stepped toward Tristan as if she was about to hug him. He shuffled backward awkwardly, nearly tripped, and held out a fist. Rosina fist-bumped Tristan, all the while staring kind of dopily at him. Sam rolled her eyes and Hugh grinned knowingly.

      The jellyfish curator joined the group and gave Rosina a hearty pat on the back. “Well done, young lady. That was quite impressive.”

      The trip to Monterey and its world-famous aquarium had come as a complete surprise to Tristan and his friends. Just over a week ago, they’d been at Sea Camp in the Florida Keys, waiting alongside the other campers for a ride home. They were leaving several weeks earlier than normal. All of the teens were disappointed; some were ready to revolt. They loved their summers spent training at Sea Camp. At the age of twelve, each had been invited to the camp housed at the Florida Keys Sea Park. The teens all had rare, but very cool, genetic abnormalities. Their bodies contained traces of the ancient genes that have allowed animals to adapt to life in the sea. This gave the teens some truly unusual and amazing abilities in the ocean. At Sea Camp, they learned how to use their special talents and trained for missions to help the ocean and marine life.

      Thirteen-year-olds Tristan, Sam, Hugh, Rosina, and Ryder were second-year campers, or Snappers. For them, the early end of camp that summer was doubly crappy. Like the other teens, camp was the best part of their year. They didn’t want to leave early. Even worse, they were the ones being blamed for the early departure. Earlier that summer, they’d helped to expose creepy wackjob Hugo Marsh as the person responsible for a series of fish kills in the British Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, along the way, the teens had also revealed their secret ocean talents to Marsh and one of his partners—the shark-killing, kidnapping billionaire J.P. Rickerton. Tristan and his camp mates had run into that evil nutcase before. With the campers’ help, Marsh had been captured and taken into custody, but Rickerton had escaped. Sea Camp’s director, Mike Davis, said Rickerton was on the run. But just to be safe, the camp was temporarily shut down and the teens sent home early—except for the Snappers. Rickerton knew about them and what they looked like, so the camp leaders decided it would be best if the Snappers went somewhere to hide for a little while . . . just to be safe.

      Monterey Bay Aquarium was a perfect hiding place. During the summer, the place was swarming with visitors and teen volunteers. Tristan and the other young campers would blend right in. They could hide in plain sight.

      By day, the teens were regular volunteers helping to direct people to different exhibits and working at the aquarium’s touch tanks. As volunteers, the teens told people how to handle the sea creatures properly and explained their biology. The big pink sea stars were everyone’s favorites. Tristan and the others happily explained how the sea stars walked on hundreds of suction-cupped tube feet, that they could survive out of the ocean for hours by pumping themselves full of seawater, and about their amazing powers of regeneration. If a sea star lost an arm, it could grow another one. Of course, the teens didn’t tell onlookers about their own special healing capabilities in the ocean. Once regular visitor hours were over, the campers were assigned somewhat more unusual tasks.

      Rosina’s detangling duty was the teens’ last job of the night. On their way out of the aquarium, they passed the enormous Open Sea tank. Swimming within the more than one million gallons of water were hammerhead sharks, sandbar sharks, a school of fast and beefy tuna, and a few extremely large stingrays. Also in the tank was a small bat ray. Tristan stopped and waved to the bat ray. It was about a foot and a half across, black on top, white underneath, with a short whip for a tail and a large, bat-like head.

      “Hey, isn’t that the ray you got moved from the touch tank?” Hugh asked.

      Tristan smiled. “Yeah, looks pretty happy now that there’s no touching going on.” He thought back to the campers’ first night at the aquarium. He’d been asked to find out what was wrong with a small ray in one of the touch tanks. Most of the skates, small bamboo sharks, and bat rays in the shallow outdoor pool swam happily around, letting people feel their soft, velvety skin. But one bat ray stayed in a corner and refused to go anywhere near human hands. To get it to talk, Tristan had to climb into the pool and sit next to the reclusive bat ray. At first, the ray simply ignored Tristan. But when it realized he wasn’t going away, the creature finally opened up for a heart-to-heart, bat ray-to-teen talk. The creature spilled its guts, luckily not literally. It proceeded to explain in agonizing detail why it didn’t like being touched by humans: germs. The bat ray was a serious germophobe. Tristan had tried to convince it that human hands didn’t carry any germs that would harm the ray (as far as he knew). But no matter what he said, the bat ray was convinced human hands were laced with germs that would make it deathly ill. Tristan eventually concluded that the ray was totally neurotic, bordering on having OCD, and would never make a good touch-tank occupant. He convinced the aquarist in charge to move the bat ray into the big non-touching Open Sea exhibit.

      As Tristan watched the bat ray swim alongside one of the big stingrays, a hammerhead shark swam across the tank right next to the viewing window. Then it did a U-turn and swam back.

      “What’s it doing?” Sam asked.

      “That’s the shark with the weak left eye that kept swimming in circles. Remember, the other night when you guys were with Hugh at the giant octopus tank, I was here helping the hammerhead learn how to swim straight. It’s just showing off now.”

      “Speaking of the giant octopus,” Hugh said. “I better go by the tank and check things out.”

      The teens took a short detour to the giant Pacific octopus exhibit.

      “Looks okay to me, dude,” Ryder noted.

      Hugh pointed to a large pink sea star at the base of the rocks in the display. “Yeah, except I think that’s one of the sea stars from the touch tank.”

      The teens looked closer at the five-armed crawler. Suddenly, a large red arm with giant white suckers slithered to the sea star and lovingly caressed it.

      “Oh boy, that guy’s a real monster, all right,” Rosina snickered.

      “What can I say, he’s a friendly giant octopus,” Hugh said.

      “Yeah, and still a kleptomaniac,” Tristan laughed. The octopus was infamous for its after-hours thieving. At night, when all the visitors and staff had gone home, the huge red octopus liked to slither out of its tank and take things. In the morning, the staff often found play toys from the otters’ tank stuffed into and under the rocks in the octopus’s tank. Several signs had been jimmied off the walls and had also ended up in the exhibit. The octopus seemed particularly

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