Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman

whose lives were given to the ride.
    Lightning sparked in the sky again as I realized we were clinging to the highest point of the boat. Then I looked at Quinn’s moronically metallic face. Dangling chains and rings—all perfect electrical conductors.
    “You’re a lightning rod! You’ve got to get down from here!”
    “No way!” He returned his gaze forward. “I’m not letting you spoil this! It’s the best ride yet!”
    With Quinn, action always speaks louder than words, so I tugged him from the rope net, and we both fell, rolling down the rough ratlines, bouncing painfully off the boom, and landing hard on the deck.
    “This ship’s going down!” I told him, ignoring my aches from the fall.
    “How do you know? You don’t know everything.”
    “I know the story. One way or another, this ship is going down.” I looked around for something—anything that would give us an out. Then I caught sight of a strange, unearthly light escaping around the edges of a closed hatch. I knelt down and pulled at the hatch with all my strength. Finally it popped open.
    The light within was too bright. My eyes fought toadjust, and for an instant I got the briefest glimpse of bright chrome gears turning. They were pieces of some colossal gear-work that couldn’t possibly fit in the hold of a ship. This hatch was a doorway to another place entirely!
    The Works, I thought. It must be The Works!
    Beyond that hatch was the mechanism that ran every ride. But before I could get a better look, crazy Captain Carl slammed it shut with his foot.
    “Nobody goes below!”
    Just then the whale breached right beside the ship.
    “Was that a whale?” Quinn asked, clueless as ever. “What’s up with that?”
    As the whale with my mother’s eyes came down, the force of its wake threw the ship against the rocks with a shattering of wood.
    “Blast ye!” yelled that strange blending of Captain Ahab and my mother’s fiancé. He threw his fists to the sky. “The madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood, and the smoking brow!”
    “That’s it, we’re outta here.” I pushed Quinn to the railing. “Jump. Now!”
    “Are we gonna ride the whale? Is that part of the ride?”
    “Just jump!” I practically hurled him over the side, and followed right behind. I hit the icy water. Then, for an instant, I felt something huge and rough brush right past me. I fought my way to the surface, breaking through into the noise of the storm.
    Quinn sputtered beside me. He wasn’t as strong aswimmer as I was, so I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. He kicked me away and began swimming toward the rocks. I turned back to see the ship, twenty yards away now . . . and then a blue gray wall rose in front of me. The whale breached again, but this time it came down right on the ship. Riders were thrown from the ratlines. The ship cracked in half, and in a few moments both whale and ship were gone into the darkness of the churning sea.
    A wave hurled me onto the rocks, where brand-new faces were appearing. I tried not to look directly at them; I was afraid I’d be too horrified to move if I did.
    When I turned to look for Quinn, he was scrambling away over the rocks.
    “No!” I grabbed him by his collar as we reached a wide plateau. I was so mad, I would have grabbed him by his nose ring if I could get my finger through it. “You’re not getting away from me again!”
    “Why did you have to come?” he yelled. “You ruined everything! You made me miss the best part of the ride!”
    “Best part? What, are you out of your mind? If you went down with that ship, you wouldn’t be coming back up.”
    And then Quinn looked me dead in the eyes. “Who says I wanted to?”
    If my temper was a burning fuse, that pinched it right off. My head reeled from what he said. From what he meant.
    “Who says I want to do anything but finish the ride?”
    I took a deep breath, and another, as I stared at him.The sound of the ocean raged behind us, but right now I