by Jess Keating
I took one of the head lamps he was offering and loosened the strap so it would fit around my forehead. I wasn’t one to be concerned about fashion statements, but I was glad that I wasn’t the only one stuck wearing one of these silly-looking things. Plus, it kept slipping down over my eyebrows and onto the bridge of my nose as I turned my head.
“Nikki.” Leo waved me over. “Here, I’ll fix it.”
I caught the faint trace of a smile on Mary’s face as I stepped by her to get my head lamp sorted. My hands gripped into fists to cover up the fluttering in my stomach.
“Thanks,” I said.
Leo bit his lip and reached up to my head lamp strap, carefully shifting some of my hair out from underneath. “No problem. These things can be a pain.” His hands moved quickly, tightening the strap and then realigning the lamp toward the center of my forehead. The tiny dimple in his cheek quirked as he assessed his work. “Is that better? Shake your head yes.”
I shook my head to test the strap. “Yes.” My voice came out a little too high-pitched, but I was able to cover up my embarrassment with a cough. “Ocean air,” I explained. “Must be allergies.”
He grinned. “It does take some getting used to, doesn’t it?”
Grace’s voice made us both jump. “Is everyone ready? I want us to pair up this time, jumping on land two by two and then moving in a line so we can watch each other’s backs. Charlie, you’re with me. Mary and Bert, Tesla and Leo, you’re all together. Mo, can you bring up the rear on your own?”
Mo grunted in agreement. (For him, that was saying a lot.)
Grace continued. “Keep your wits about you, and the second you notice something is off, stop. We’ll handle it together as a team.”
“Sorry, Pickles,” I said. I knelt down to hand her an almond from my pocket. She inspected it, turning it carefully before digging in. “You’re staying on the ship, okay? We’ll be right back for you, I promise.”
A thread of regret tugged inside of me. I’d almost lost Pickles on our last trip. Ever since then, I got anxious pangs in my chest when I had to leave her. What if we didn’t return and she got stuck on this ship without any food or help? The thought of her alone in this foreign place was too much to bear …
A hand squeezed mine. It was Mary, reading my mind again. “She’s a smart girl,” Mary said. “She’ll be all right, Nikki.” Mary wiggled her fingers at Pickles, who had perched herself on a deck chair. At least she didn’t look nervous. She appeared to be enjoying a nice vacation. All she needed was one of those drinks with a little pink umbrella sticking from the top.
Grace and Charlie were the first to leap off the ship and onto land, followed by Mary and Bert. The C-shaped platform curve of grassy land that led inside the cave was waiting for us.
“Ready, Nikki? Want to explore a potentially lethal cave full of hidden secrets and booby traps?” Leo asked. He held out his hand to me.
I swallowed down my nerves and reached out to grab it. “You had me at lethal.”
We leaped across to the grassy outcrop in front of the cave. My foot slipped a little on impact, but Leo was there to yank me close and stop me from falling.
“Gotcha!” he said. His hands gripped my shoulders tightly, then released when he saw that I’d regained my footing.
We walked two by two toward the mouth of the cave, with Grace and Charlie leading the way. I relished the warm sun on my arms for a few minutes longer, certain I’d miss it the moment we stepped inside.
And boy, was I right.
The cave was bigger than I’d expected. Brown tufts of parched grass clustered around the opening, and a few random bushes and rocks lined the sides. The rock face, gray and cracked, was warm against my palm. And there was a definite vibe in the air: This was not a place that was often visited. No footsteps or signs of human visitors around the entrance. A few minutes after our arrival, Grace, Charlie, and Leo had all taken extra time to search the entrance for traps or other security measures. But they all agreed. It looked like a normal cave.
Of course, I’d learned from experience that things weren’t always what they seemed. We stepped forward cautiously, edging together as a group.
I’d love to say that the moment we descended into the darkness of the cave, we knew instantly that we were in the right place. But no traps were activated. No red lights began to flash. The only thing I noticed was how dark it had become. The sunlight from outside filtered away with every step, and soon the only light came from the beams of our head lamps, which shifted and sliced through the air with every jostling step, crossing over each other in a chaotic spiderweb of pollen- and dust-filled light.
Every few moments, Grace held up her hand, and we all stopped, sometimes with one of our feet still hovering above the crunchy, rocky ground. She would inspect the cave wall, then the path in front of her. And then, when she gave us the signal, we carried on. Moisture settled onto the back of my neck. A lone, annoying trace of spiderweb stuck to my forehead, suspended between my head lamp and my ear.
Deeper and deeper into the cave we went, each step taking us farther from the safety of our ship. Until, finally, a voice rang out, halting us in our tracks.
“Wait.” It was Mary.
“What is it?” Grace whispered.
The beam from Mary’s head lamp swiveled to the right, focusing a spotlight on the wall above our eye level.
“Do you see that?” Mary asked.
“Uh …” Bert said. “The cave wall? What about it?”
“It’s not right,” Mary said. “The marks and divots in the surface of the rock …”
A footstep crunched forward. It was Leo, taking a closer look. He held his hand a few inches from the side of the wall, like he was afraid it might burn him. His head lamp beam scanned the wall slowly.
“She’s right!” he said. “It’s not a natural surface at all. There’s a pattern here.”
I squinted at where his fingers were pointing to the small scratches and bumps along the surface of the damp gray rock.
“I see it!” I exclaimed. The pattern was hard to spot. But if you unfocused your eyes juuust enough, instead of a random smattering of dips and marks from wind or rain, you began to see a repeating pattern, like the cave wall had been stamped in some fake-rock factory.
The rest of the cave may have formed naturally over millennia without being touched.
But the section of wall that faced us? There was nothing natural about it.
“This is some real Indiana Jones stuff,” Bert whispered. “Anybody else got the feeling we’re being watched?”
“This false wall must be the door to the vault.” Leo stepped back from the rest of us and scanned the paneling with his head lamp again.
“If this is the door, how do we open it?” Charlie tapped her chin aimlessly.
“Should we start poking around?” I asked. I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of randomly knocking on a false wall in a hidden cave. What if we set off an alarm or released a cave troll or something? But what other choice did we have?
“That’s our best plan,” Grace said. The beam from her flashlight slid up and down the wall as she nodded in agreement. Then she stepped forward and took a deep breath, letting the air slowly out of her lungs. Her right arm extended, fingers curled gently to face the wall. “Here goes nothing.”
Every muscle in my body tensed as her fingertips brushed the cave wall lightly. Gaining more confidence, Grace let her palm settle flat against the wet stone.
We all shifted on our toes, waiting for a noise, an electrical spark, or even worse … a booby trap.
When Grace turned to us, her expression was bright. “Ta-da.” She faked a goofy bow.
Leo breathed a loud sigh of relief. “Nothing.”
“Nope,” Grace said. “At least nothing tactilely induced. Now we can work. Nikki, Leo, Mary, you take the left portion of the wall. The rest of us will do the right. Look for anything that gives us some indication of how to open this stupid door.”
I strained to piece together the puzzle in front of me as we scoured every mark and divot on the wall’s surface. The cave was very cold to the touch, and small rivulets of water trickled down from above us, forming almost invisible patterns at our feet. Mary and Leo ran their fingers over the wall and leaned as close as they could, with their noses only inches away. While they tapped and explored, I tried to get inside the head of whoever had designed the vault in the first place.
If I wanted to hide something in a cave, how would I design the door? Would I have a password? Or a secret compartment? Would I press a button to reveal a hidden passage?
I stood back from the wall for a better perspective and tried to ignore the others. We were supposed to be retrieving what Martha called some of the most dangerous technology in the world, but to others, it would look like a simple ring. And what’s more, it wasn’t hidden in some big-city vault or advanced security system with guns or guards. Whoever had wanted to keep his secrets safe chose a cave on a remote tropical island to do the hiding.
Advanced technology in a simple space.
Big tech. Small cave.
What kind of a person would choose to do that?
Something obvious swirled around in my thoughts. Big yet small, it screamed at me, but I couldn’t quite hear it. It was muted by my own uncertainty. No matter how much I forced myself to focus on the area in front of me, my attention kept tugging down.
Down to my feet.
Down to my toes.
Big tech. Small cave.
“Mary …” My voice was the only sound in the cave. Everyone was busy concentrating.
“Mm-hmm?” She didn’t turn away from the wall to answer.
“Do you know of any stories with hidden vaults like this? Or secret spaces that reveal themselves?” I was grasping at straws, but if anyone could help me connect the shifting constellation of dots in my head, it would be Mary. I knew the others were listening, grateful for any inspiration.
Mary continued to run her hand over the surface she was examining as she spoke. “Oh, sure,” she said. “There are lots of hidden vaults in books. One of the most famous is the ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ story,” she said.
“And how did they open the secret vault?”
Leo stood up and wiped his wet palms on his shorts. “They said the password,” he answered. “Open sesame!”
Every set of hands froze in place as the others waited to see if Leo’s password worked.
But this wasn’t the desert or a tale in some ancient book.
“Worth a shot,” he mumbled, and set back to work.
I tried to explain to Mary what I’d been thinking. “I was wondering about the kind of person who would store such a dangerous weapon here. All we know is that it looks like a ring, but it’s supposed to be some huge advancement of science. And yet they chose to keep it in this rudimentary location without any security. Don’t you find that a little …” I struggled for the right word.
“Sentimental,” Mary said. “I don’t know why someone would choose to hide something important to them in a place like this unless it’s got some personal meaning for them.”
“Maybe they like old-school methods?” Bert offered. “They could have read about some ancient passageway in a story, liked how mysterious it sounded, and wanted to store their technology in a place like that …”
“It does seem like something from a book, doesn’t it?” Mary put her hands on her hips and rested for a moment. I could tell by the look on her face that she was circling the same puzzle I was. We were missing something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
I tried to urge her forward. “I keep thinking we’re looking in the wrong spot,” I admitted. “This could be one big riddle—if we don’t think properly, we’ll miss the opening completely. This person clearly got some ideas from those old-fashioned, romantic stories about hiding treasure. Are there any other stories you can think of about secret passageways or places to hide things we don’t want found?”
“Well …” Mary closed her eyes. Probably going through her bookshelves in her mind’s eye. “The one that comes to mind is Alice.”
A chill zipped through my body and out the tips of my toes. Alice.
And then a long-buried memory bubbled to the surface: sitting on my dad’s lap while he read me the fanciful story of a white rabbit and a brave girl jumping down a magical portal in the ground. I hadn’t thought of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for years, but hearing Mary say the name made the sound of his voice ring in my ear as though he were sitting beside me.
“Magic is science we can’t yet explain,” he said. “You only need to change your perspective to see it for the science it truly is.”
We’d gone on to read about Alice exploring a whole new world she had a hard time believing existed. At the time, I’d dismissed those stories because talking rabbits and secret passageways made no sense. Who needed magic when you had science, right? But something about Alice—about her journey down the rabbit hole to find the white rabbit—wouldn’t let go of me.
After all, I needed to find a secret passageway right now.
I swallowed down the sharp memory and forced myself back to the present moment. Back to the cave wall. My fingertips tingled, still lingering on the old memory I hadn’t even realized I had. I tipped my head to the side, changing my perspective.
“You okay, Nikki?” Leo took a step closer to me, inspecting my face. He quirked his eyebrow.
“Absolutely,” I said. I was grateful for the darkness, as I knew from the heat in my cheeks that my face was burning red. But there was no need to get into all the stuff about my dad right then. It didn’t matter how I’d arrived at the answer. What mattered was I now had a hunch about the solution to our problem.
I knew why my attention kept tugging downward. Alice had been the key. My instincts were telling me to change my perspective.
Big tech.
Small cave.
Whoever hid his technology here appreciated the irony: having a massively important weapon hidden in a small, plain-looking cave. To get something big, we needed to think small.
But how do you think small? It’s impossible to shrink your thoughts, isn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t thinking small that was the answer. Maybe we needed to be small like Alice, drinking the potion and shrinking down to enter the portal.
Only, in the real world, we didn’t have to drink any potion. It was worth a shot, wasn’t it?
“I think we’re going to find the way in near our feet,” I said. I don’t know how I’d gotten to the solution, but I knew I was right.
The others faced me, confusion in their shining, flashlight-reflected eyes.
“Feet?” Grace asked. “Why? We should be inspecting the whole wall.”
I didn’t want to admit that I’d gotten the idea from something my dad had said to me all those years ago. Thankfully, Mary came to my aid.
“I think Nikki’s right,” she said. “We’ve got too much area to cover. Whoever owns this tech hid it here. That shows he has a flair for the dramatic. Nikki’s idea will narrow our focus, which can only help us. And if she’s wrong, we can still look elsewhere.”
I threw her a grateful glance.
“Good enough for me,” Grace said. “Concentrate on the bottom of the wall, everyone.”
We all dropped to our knees and began inspecting the very bottom of the cave wall, where dust and pebbles sat in tiny piles against it. Using our hands to sweep them away, we were able to see portions of the wall that had been hidden. We got down to an ant’s perspective, and pored over every indent.
“I’ve got it!” Mo said. He spoke up so rarely that the sound of his excited voice seemed almost foreign.
“What is it?” Leo skidded over beside him. “Did you find a button? Or a secret lever?”
We all shuffled over to where Mo lay on his stomach. He held a small magnifying glass in his hand, which was focused directly above a small pile of pebble
s by his fingertips.
“Nope,” Mo said. He handed the magnifier to Grace and pointed. I was close enough to see what he had found.
Not a button or a lever.
It was a series of letters and numbers, each barely bigger than my pinkie fingernail. They were etched along the bottom of the wall and had been hidden by rocks and dirt only a few moments earlier. Grace sat back on her heels and used her fingertip to brush away the remaining dirt, revealing the letters and numbers in full relief.
90 68 53 G1 T8 10 M92 16 T16 15 EA 19
“It’s a code,” I said. “And if we want into this vault, we need to crack it.”
I wish I could say we all sat down and started brainstorming happily, coming up with the answer at our leisure.
But unfortunately, that’s when the cave began to shake.
At first, it was hard to place the eerie, deep groaning sound emitting from the walls of the cave. It was almost mechanical, like twisting or grinding metal. Was an earthquake or volcano thundering under the ground? No. The noise was much sharper.
And much closer.
“Gears!” I shouted. I pressed a hand to the wall to feel for vibrations. Something was shifting and turning beneath my fingertips. “They’re in the wall!”
Leo beat me to my next thought. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he yelled to the team.
“Go!”
We stumbled to our feet and hightailed it for the cave entrance. The sound of the moaning gears inside the wall grew louder with every step, melding with the frantic pace of my own panting. My lungs burned with exertion and my breath was as loud as my feet on the dirt pathway as I raced to keep up with the others. Floating dust motes began to dance in front of us as we got closer and closer to the light. We weren’t far—the sun was a beacon, guiding the way.
But something was wrong. The bands of bright sunlight were growing smaller and narrower as we pushed forward. We should have been running into more light as we exited the cave, not less.