The Forbidden Lock

by Liesl Shurtliff

  A vision of a plan raced through Santiago’s mind, where they would go, who they would unravel, who would stay.

  “Clean yourselves up,” the captain said, “and prepare for travel.”

  Brocco helped Wiley up off the floor, still crying and clinging to a pile of books.

  Santiago could not feel sorry for him. Captain Vincent could have done much worse to him than take away his books. Wiley should consider himself lucky. They were all lucky to be part of the captain’s crew. Wiley was especially lucky he had not been discarded. So what if he couldn’t read? Clearly the words had done nothing but muddle his senses.

  Santiago scurried after the captain. He climbed up his leg and perched on his shoulder. He squeaked in his ear.

  “I quite agree,” the captain said. “He got exactly what he deserved. Everyone does, you know, one way or another. The Hudsons will get what’s coming to them.”

  Santiago squeaked again. It wasn’t that he disagreed with the captain’s plans, but he had his concerns. One in particular.

  “I’ve told you before, Santiago. Mateo is not the enemy. You will see soon enough. So will the rest of his family, I believe. They’ll come to see he’s not really part of their family at all. And then they won’t even be a family anymore.” He laughed and then he looked over at Santiago sitting on his shoulder.

  “Ugh, Santiago,” the captain sneered. “What have you done to yourself?” Without any warning, the captain shoved Santiago from his shoulder, and he fell to the wooden floor with a thud. He squealed as he wriggled on his back. The captain looked down at him with pure disgust.

  “You’re filthy,” he said. “Don’t show yourself again until you’re clean.” He turned on his heels and walked away without a backward glance.

  Santiago finally righted himself. He hissed at the captain’s retreating back. Mean captain. He turned his head and saw how his coat was matted and sticky, no longer white but a dull gray. Bits of peanut butter and cheese puff were stuck in his fur. The captain was not wrong. He was a mess, but still . . . he did not think his filth warranted such brutality.

  Santiago nibbled on some of the cheese puff bits stuck in his dirty fur. He was still hungry.

  12

  A Few Answers

  It was 3:00 a.m. and Matt was wide awake. He’d had the nightmare again, the one where all his family disappears, and now he couldn’t go back to sleep. So he just lay there in his bed, holding on to his compass. It still wasn’t fixed. After the conversation at breakfast yesterday, he’d retreated to his bedroom and worked on it almost all day. It felt pointless, if he was being perfectly honest, after the things Albert had told them about Captain Vincent’s plans, and what would happen to them all. To Matt. Still, he couldn’t just sit around. He had to do something, fix something.

  Everyone else had been in a sort of haze, ambling around like zombies with a dark rain cloud hanging over their head. Jia had mainly kept to herself, reading the book Pike had left on Blossom. She seemed to be avoiding everyone, especially Matt. Things were weird between them for some reason. He wished they could just go back to their easy friendship. He couldn’t tell if he was the one being distant or if she was, but there was something blocking the way of their friendship. Was it him? Or was it what had happened to Pike? Or was it just everything? Maybe there were some circumstances where you just couldn’t be easy with each other. They had to be soldiers right now, not friends.

  Gaga and Haha seemed to have recovered a bit from the shock of all that had happened, but now there was the question of where they could go from here. Last night Matt overheard Gaga ask his dad if there wasn’t any way of going back and fixing this so she and Henry weren’t decades apart. Mr. Hudson said it wasn’t impossible, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it right now, not with everything that was going on.

  And what was going on, exactly? What did their future hold? The things Albert had told them haunted Matt every moment. Could Captain Vincent really make his dad not exist? Make him, Matt, a totally different person with a different life? He thought of the initials on the handkerchief. The Aeternum must create an alternate universe, he was thinking. Because his dad existed now. So even if Captain Vincent erased his existence, there would always be some space in the universe where he did exist in some form or another. He couldn’t just make something not exist, right? That was just basic physics. It all had to go somewhere.

  But Matt knew his thoughts were all theoretical, and who knew if anything he understood about the universe even applied in this situation? Who knew how it all really worked in reality? Matt considered himself a smart person, but he knew in the grand scheme of things, he was about as knowledgeable as a flea.

  A light flicked on outside Matt’s door. He heard a bit of shuffling, the opening of drawers and cupboards. It had to be one of his parents. Matt climbed out of bed, careful not to step on Albert, and slipped out of his bedroom.

  He found his mom standing at the dining table with a steaming mug of tea and one hand pressed to her temple, like she was trying to stanch a headache. She seemed to get a lot of headaches lately. Maybe it was all the time travel, a touch of time sickness. Matt stepped into his mom’s line of sight. She whipped out a dagger and jumped from her seat, spilling hot tea all over herself. “Ah!” She winced and cursed under her breath.

  “Sorry!” Matt rushed to the kitchen and got a towel.

  “You’d think an expert with blades would know not to handle knives while drinking hot beverages,” his mom said while blotting up the mess. When it was all cleaned up she finally looked at Matt and then at the clock. “Why are you awake, chéri?”

  Matt shrugged. He didn’t want to tell his mom about the nightmares, partly because he didn’t want her to worry any more than she already was, and partly because he felt saying it out loud would make it even more real and solid in his own mind. He just wanted it to fade away, to forget.

  His mom ran her fingers through his hair. “You’re turning into an insomniac like your mother.” She patted the chair for him to sit next to her. He did and she wrapped a strong, comforting arm around him. He leaned against her and breathed in her scent—a mix of soap, old leather, metal, and varnish. The smells of home.

  “Mom?” Matt asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  “About?”

  “About my adoption. Where I came from. And maybe some other things.”

  “Of course, chéri. You know you can ask me anything.”

  Matt nodded. His parents had never tried to hide anything from him. As soon as he could understand, they had told him that he’d been adopted and what that meant. He knew he came from Colombia, that his biological parents were unknown, and that was pretty much it. He’d never cared to know more. His parents were his parents as much as if he’d been born to them. Corey and Ruby were his brother and sister. End of story. And that was all still largely true, but with the recent revelations about his identity, as well as Captain Vincent’s, he felt he needed to know more, even if his mom didn’t like the questions, even if he didn’t like the answers.

  “When you adopted me,” he asked, “where did I come from, exactly? I mean, where was I found?” He knew he had been adopted in Santa Marta, a small seaside city in the Caribbean, but he didn’t know where he’d come from before that, and he could tell by the look on his mother’s face that this was not an insignificant question, but she still answered, as she said she always would.

  “The agency told us you were found somewhere in the jungle,” she said. “They believed you had come from one of the tribal villages, but even when government officials investigated, no one claimed you. There were no missing babies, they said. They speculated you’d maybe been born to some young woman who was frightened and not ready to have a child, and she abandoned you in a place where you’d be easily found by someone who would take you.”

  “Who found me?”

  “A tourist, they said. Someone who’d been
hiking to Ciudad Perdida.”

  The Lost City . . . Matt had read a little about Ciudad Perdida in National Geographic. It was an ancient ruin, predating Machu Picchu, that had once been a great civilization until Spanish conquistadors invaded. He wondered if his origins could have anything to do with that place.

  “Do you know the name of the person who brought me in?”

  “No. They did not wish to have their name on the record,” his mom said.

  “But they knew my name,” he said. Matt had memorized every word of the adoption papers he’d gotten from Vincent. Liaison claims infant’s name is Mateo. Requested name to remain in adoption terms.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hudson said.

  “Didn’t that make you wonder . . . ?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hudson said plainly.

  Matt’s mind was buzzing in erratic circles. He had half a mind to travel to Colombia at the time of his adoption and see who brought him in, maybe question them. But the compass was still in pieces, and anyway, he didn’t think he could handle any more revelations right now.

  His next question he did not want to ask. He’d rather spare his mother the pain as well as the awkwardness of asking it, but he knew he had to. “I have some questions about Vincent.”

  His mother stiffened but nodded. “What do you want to know?” she said in a calm voice that did not match the rest of her body.

  “Well . . . I guess I wanted to know if you knew what Vincent’s last name was?”

  Mrs. Hudson’s brow furrowed. “His last name?”

  “Yeah, like how our last name is Hudson. And your name before you married Dad was Bonnaire. And Captain Vincent’s last name is . . . ? Pretty sure it’s not just Vincent, is it?”

  Mrs. Hudson shook her head. “I never knew his surname.”

  Matt found that hard to believe. Was she lying to him? To protect him or spare his feelings?

  “I know that seems crazy considering how . . . well we knew each other,” his mom said, her cheeks coloring a little. “But if you understood Vincent’s history, it’s not so surprising. He hated his family. He was all too glad to shed his family name and never speak of them again. So he was always just Vincent to me. Or Vince. I never suspected anything deceitful in it. I, too, had things I never wished to speak of in my past.”

  “What do you know about Vincent’s past? His family?”

  Matt vaguely remembered Wiley telling him something about Vincent not getting along with his brother, that he had run away from home and that was when he’d met Belamie Bonnaire, Matt’s mom long before she was his mom.

  “I know some,” Mrs. Hudson said. “Vincent didn’t like to speak of his family or his past, but he shared bits and pieces every now and then when his guard was down. Vincent was born in Cornwall, England, the second son of a wealthy lord. His father always compared him to his older brother, and Vincent always fell short. He came in second at everything. Vincent’s relationship with his father had always been strained, but it was worse with his brother. When his parents died and his older brother inherited his father’s title and estate, he took pains to make Vincent miserable. He withheld the living promised to him by his father, and just to add salt to the wound, he stole the girl Vincent had loved all through childhood. His brother didn’t care for the girl one whit, but he knew it would drive Vincent mad if he married her. So he courted her, and he being the elder brother with the lands and title and money . . . well that’s just the way things were. She was young, and her parents of course saw it as the superior match, so they became engaged. Vincent left before his brother’s wedding. He joined the Royal Navy, and we met a year or so after that. The rest you know well enough.”

  Matt wondered how different things would have been for him and his family if Vincent’s brother had treated him differently, or better yet, if he’d had no brother at all. If he’d been his father’s heir, he likely never would have left home, never would have met Belamie Bonnaire and gotten so entangled in all their lives.

  “Did he ever see his brother again?” Matt asked.

  Mrs. Hudson hesitated a moment. She seemed uncertain as to whether she should share what she was thinking or remembering. “Only once that I know of,” she said. “After we’d been together for a few years, Vincent learned that his brother and his bride had both died. He didn’t tell me how or when it happened, or even how he had learned of it. He grew quiet and reclusive. I left him alone. I thought he was mourning the loss of his first love, and maybe even his brother a little, even if they didn’t get along. I thought maybe he’d forgiven him, because if they hadn’t quarreled Vincent never would have left home and so he never would have met me.

  “One day, shortly after he’d gotten the news of his brother’s death, he asked me to take him to his brother. He told me he wanted to make amends with him, before his death. We knew he could do nothing to prevent it, but perhaps he could mend the breach between them. I thought it showed strength of character. I never would have believed he was capable of what he actually did.” She shivered and closed her eyes as though trying to block out the memory.

  “I didn’t go with him,” she continued. “Vincent said he needed to go alone, and though I worried about him, I wanted to be respectful of his wishes. So I stayed with the rest of the crew on the Vermillion, as a ship at the seaside, just below Vincent’s family’s estate. I waited for him late into the night and grew increasingly uneasy. I worried something might have happened to him. I still didn’t know the details of his brother’s death, and what if Vincent was in danger? Just before dawn, I decided I had better go after him. That’s when I saw an orange glow up on the cliffs. Vincent’s family estate was engulfed in flames.

  “I shouted for the crew to prepare for travel. And then I saw him. Vincent was standing at the bow of the ship, sipping a goblet of wine, watching his own family estate burn to the ground as though it were a beautiful sunrise. He smelled of smoke and kerosene.”

  Matt was starting to get the picture pretty well, but his mom continued.

  “I asked him what had happened,” Mrs. Hudson said. “And he told me he’d gotten wind that his brother and new bride died tragically in a fire on their wedding night, and he realized that it was he who set the fire. Just as I had been responsible for my parents’ deaths, he would be responsible for his brother’s death, only in his case he would enjoy it. Why not be the one to light the match and have his revenge?

  “We never spoke of it again. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t so bad, that his brother had been really horrible to Vince and maybe he deserved it. Vince could be so kind and gentle, it was easy to forget his streaks of anger and how vindictive he could be. Forgiveness had never been a virtue to him, only a weakness. It made no sense to forgive those who’d wronged you. But revenge? That made sense. People should get what they deserved.

  “Later, when our search for the Aeternum intensified, Vince said if he had the power to change the past, he wouldn’t kill his brother, and for a moment I thought he truly regretted his actions. I felt such relief. He wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. Just a man in pain. But then he explained further. I’ll never forget what he said. ‘Death doesn’t remove the stain of their existence. It still doesn’t give me what I want. When I have the Aeternum, I’ll make it so he was never born at all. I’ll make my own family, my own kingdom. The one I choose.’”

  Mrs. Hudson shivered a little.

  “What about Marius Quine?” Matt asked. “Do you think he’s on our side? Or Vincent’s?”

  Mrs. Hudson shook her head. “I can’t say. His actions, his communications seem to contradict themselves. I don’t know if he’s changing his mind over time, or if he has some other kind of grand scheme I can’t comprehend, or if he’s just different people at different times.”

  “What do you mean different people?”

  “People change. I was a different person when I was Captain Bonnaire. That was me, but I’m not her anymore, you know? I went from Captain Belamie Bonnaire the time pirat
e to Belamie Hudson, the wife and mother who likes her swords and knives. The same and yet not. So I suppose Quine could be on our side at times and then not at other times. I don’t know.”

  Matt shivered. He wanted to believe that he was on his family’s side always, but future evidence would suggest otherwise. What would happen between now and then? What kind of person would he become? Would there ever be a circumstance where he, Mateo, could decide that they were not his family?

  He wanted to say no. Never! But the truth was, the discovery of who he really was, and this possible connection with Vincent, had turned him upside down, so he didn’t feel like he could definitively say anything. Nothing was certain. Nothing was so fixed that it could not be broken. His mom knew that better than anyone.

  Matt felt dizzy. He started to tremble, almost like he was going to have a seizure, but then his mom placed her warm hand on his cheek, and it steadied him.

  “Hey.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I need you to know, to never forget, that you are my son. You will always be my son, no matter what happens to any of us. I’ve known it from the moment I set eyes on you. Past, present, or future, we are family. Do you understand?”

  Matt nodded.

  “I love you, Mateo.” She kissed his forehead.

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  Matt rested his head against his mom’s shoulder. She started to hum a tune and then she opened her mouth and sung the words. It was a French lullaby, one she used to sing to him when he was little, when he had the same nightmare that woke him up tonight. She must have known then.

  When you feel lost and all alone

  Look to the sky and you’ll find home

  The stars will guide you back to me

  They shine for all eternity

  His mother finished singing. She kissed the top of his head, and they sat in silence for a minute. Usually he would have felt comforted. The fears and dark thoughts would dissipate, but tonight’s nightmare made them extra potent. The fear clung to him, like wet clothing, cold and chafing to his soul.