Ethan Cooper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Ethan Cooper had one summer to find a shipwreck, and no idea where to dig. He stood on the Sandy Shoals beach with his new metal detector, the green backpack sagging off one shoulder. He wanted the artifact in a real museum, with a little card bearing his name. But the coast ran for miles in both directions. Every stretch of sand looked the same. He could sweep the wrong spot for weeks and find nothing but bottle caps. He'd read about the wreck in an old library book. A trading ship, lost two hundred years ago, somewhere along this shore. The book never said where. Ethan pushed his glasses up and tried not to panic. He had eight weeks. He had a detector he barely knew how to use. And he had, he realized, absolutely no plan. Smoke drifted over from a grill up the beach. A tall, bald man worked it, shirtless, a spatula in one hand. A chef's knife was tattooed on his arm. Ethan had bought a burger from him yesterday. The man cooked for anyone who showed up and never said much. Ethan walked over, because he had no better idea. "The shipwreck," Ethan said. "The old one. Do you know where it went down?" The man flipped a burger. "North end. Past the lighthouse ruin." He said it like a fact about the weather. Ethan's heart jumped. "You're sure?" "Grew up here. Everybody's sure." He pointed the spatula down the beach. "That doesn't mean anybody's found it." A girl sat cross-legged near the grill, barefoot, short blue hair, a ring in her lip. She'd been quiet. Now she looked up. "North end's wrong," she said. "My mom sketched this coast for twenty years. She mapped the old timbers at the south shoals. I saw the drawings." Ethan blinked. Two answers. Opposite directions. "Which one is it?" "South," the girl said, flat. "North," the man said, not louder, just certain. The girl stood. "I'm Azure. I came here looking for her sketchbooks. Somebody stole them." She said it fast, like she'd said it before and stopped expecting help. "But I remember the south map. Timbers in the sand. I saw it." Ethan looked between them. He pulled a notebook from his sorted backpack and wrote both down. His hands were shaky. This was the break he needed and the trap at the same time. One of them was wrong, and following the wrong one would burn half his summer. "I can't check both," he said. "Not in time." Azure crouched and drew a line in the sand with her finger. A rough coast. She marked two X's, far apart. "Then you pick," she said. "Or you prove which map is real before you dig." Ethan stared at the two marks. He finally had a place to start. He just didn't know which one would cost him everything.