by Wendy Mass
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The only way Logan knew he’d fallen asleep in the hammock was that Miles was now shaking him and saying, “Wake up! You fell asleep in the hammock.” Logan, disoriented in the darkness as he tried to sit up, found himself unable to stop from spinning over into the sand. “Oomph,” he said, spitting out a mouthful of sand and grinning. “It’s real. We’re still here. Did Frank come back?”
Miles pulled him to his feet. “No, but look at the aurora!”
Logan’s eyes hadn’t adjusted yet to the darkness, which had an odd reddish-green glow to it. “I don’t see her. Is she still curled up under the tree? She’s probably hungry. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” He patted down his pockets, hoping for a stray Icy Mint Blob, but they were empty except for that lollypop stick he’d stuck in there when he was cleaning up the hallway at home. It must have gotten stuck in his pocket when he’d emptied them that night.
“Not the cat,” Miles said, tugging Logan’s sleeve excitedly. “The real aurora! The northern lights!” This time Logan tilted his head back, then farther back when he saw something in the sky he’d never seen before or even dreamt could be real. A green glow shimmered and undulated above them, as if someone were shaking a picnic blanket out in the wind or pouring a bucketful of chocolate on the stars (if the chocolate happened to be green!). Every few seconds a smudge of red would peek out from behind it. “But didn’t that astronomy lady say they’re hard to see in the summer?” Logan asked Miles, who stood transfixed next to him, grinning from ear to ear.
“It must be something about this weird microclimate,” Miles replied. He couldn’t wait to tell his parents and Arthur and Jade about it. He pulled out his vid com to take a video, but it wouldn’t work. That was odd. Well, it wasn’t like he would ever forget it anyway. He tucked the device away and set about fixing the image in his mind so he could play it back for himself as he lay in bed at home.
“Did part of it hit the ground?” Logan asked a minute later. “And turn blue?”
Miles forced himself to look away from the sky and down at Logan. “What do you mean?”
“Look at the stream. It’s glowing.” Miles turned around and squinted in the dark. His jaw dropped when he saw the water. For a second he thought maybe the lights actually had come down to the ground, although he was pretty sure that was impossible. As they got closer, they could hear Philip, Daisy, and AJ laughing.
“Look at your legs!” Daisy shouted at Philip.
“Have you seen your hair lately?” he replied. “Blue is a good look for you!”
Miles stopped short. “Is that Philip… in the water? Well, his legs, anyway?”
Logan rubbed his eyes. Daisy and AJ were floating in the stream, fully dressed, while Philip sat on a rock and dangled his legs in the water. The scene would be bizarre enough if the water wasn’t glowing bright blue, but it was glowing bright blue.
“Hey, guys!” Daisy called out to them, waving a blue arm. “There are tiny glowing things floating all around us!”
“We can see that,” Logan replied, hurrying to the edge. The water looked alive, pulsing with thousands of points of light. In the midst of it, Daisy and AJ resembled some kind of ethereal race of people with glowing blue skin and hair. Aurora walked by, the tip of her nose glowing. She must have tested out the water.
“They’re called dinoflagellates,” AJ explained. “Tiny single-celled creatures that make their own light.”
Miles pointed to Philip. “You realize you’re basically wearing fish right now.” Philip jumped up faster than they’d ever seen him move. He slapped at his legs in an effort to wipe off the invisible sea creatures.
“Do you think it’s the River of Light from the map?” Logan asked.
Miles nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing. “It has to be.” He ran back to get the map from his backpack and returned. The river shined a good amount of light on it, but the flashlight on the vid com would have helped a lot more. “Hey, Daisy,” he called into the water, “did you notice our vid coms don’t work?”
Tiny blue lights glittered on her skin and hair as she climbed out onto the sand. “Vid coms always work,” she said confidently. But Miles was right; nothing happened when she tried to turn hers on. “AJ?”
AJ shook his head. “They must be blocking the signal somehow. Kind of like the radio quiet at the telescope.”
Daisy frowned as she pressed the button repeatedly. She didn’t like feeling so cut off. “Frank has the tech to scramble our signals? Doesn’t seem possible.”
“Maybe it’s not Frank,” Philip said, picking the last glowing dot from his knee. “It could be whatever’s in the ground—those microbes that hitched a ride on the meteorite that landed here. Maybe they’re supermagnetic or something.”
Logan looked from the river to the tree. “Are they the same thing that’s in the water?”
AJ shook his head. Blue lights flew out from his hair. “If our equipment can’t pick it up, whatever arrived on that meteorite is a thousand times smaller. Like on the subatomic level.”
“Frank might not know exactly what makes the beans different,” Miles said, tilting the map toward the blue light, “but he knows a lot more than we do. I say we try to find him.” His stomach growled. The others had eaten lunch, but he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No one has any food on them, do they?” he asked.
“Sorry,” AJ said, feeling like a bad chaperone. “I should have planned better. Next time we get trapped in paradise, I promise I’ll be more prepared.”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Logan said, “but we’re still behind the house, right?”
A line from Frank’s letter came floating back to him. Frank had said something about “smelling it from here.” That must have been a reference to how close he was to the source of the beans! Frank could definitely smell the chocolate from his backyard—and this whole thing actually was his backyard! Logan leaned over and tapped the map where it said FOG to the North. “FOG doesn’t stand for real fog. It stands for Franklin O. Griffin’s initials!”
Miles laughed, his hunger momentarily forgotten. “You’re right!” He loved it when maps surprised him! He turned around in a circle, trying to get his bearings. “Frank’s mapmaking skills have come a long way since he made this one. He didn’t label which way is north. I knew I should have kept that plastic compass.”
Daisy tried her vid com again, but it still didn’t work. She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Too narrow a swath of sky for me to see the North Star. Time to go old school. Philip, hand me your watch.”
He hesitated a second, then undid the clasp and laid it in her hand. “Reggie gave this to me for my tenth birthday. You’re not going to smash it, right?”
“Look on the bright side. At least we’re not teasing you for still wearing a watch that doesn’t do anything except tell time.” Then she said, “No one happens to have a toothpick on them by any chance?”
No one did. She turned to Logan. “Do you think it’s okay to take a really thin stick from the tree? I haven’t seen any branches lying on the ground.”
Logan hesitated. “I don’t know.… It kind of feels weird to break something off.”
Daisy figured he would say that. She knew what he meant.
“Too thick?” AJ asked, holding up the stick map.
“Yes.”
“Would this work?” Logan asked, pulling the Leapin’ Lolly stick from his pocket.
She grabbed it. “That would be perfect.”
Philip and Miles both did a double take when they saw the lollypop stick, but before they could ask about it, Daisy began walking away, and they scrambled after her. She placed the watch on a rock next to the map, where the light shone the brightest, and held the stick straight up from the center of the hands. She turned the watch slowly until the resulting shadow cast by the stick lined up with the hour hand. She knelt in front of it and pointed in the air at the halfway mark between the shadow and twelve. “North
,” she declared.
Miles took the map and adjusted it accordingly until the path of the river lined up with what they could see in front of them. Something jumped out at him that he hadn’t noticed before. The W and E of the word AWE were now lined up with where west and east would go on the compass. He sat back on his heels. “Frank did label the directions, right in the title!”
They all turned to face where the house should be. Basically sand as far as they could see. “Remember,” Daisy said, “it’s only an illusion. We know the house is there. Somewhere. Follow me and stay close.”
Daisy did a variation of the rock throwing when the cat disappeared, except this time she tossed sand ahead of her. When it didn’t hit a mirror, she took a step and waved the others forward. Miles’s stomach growled louder with each step, but he didn’t complain. They kept doing this until Daisy got frustrated and called out, “Franklin O. Griffin Jennings, if you can hear us, Miles is about to gnaw off his own foot!”
“I figured you might be getting hungry,” said a voice. Frank appeared out of the darkness only a few feet ahead of them. One more toss of sand from Daisy and they would have found the way in! He carried a tray piled high with something delicious-smelling.
“Where did you go?” Philip demanded. He was never one for small talk.
“I hope you’ll forgive my disappearing act,” Frank replied with a tentative smile. “I wanted you to experience this place on your own. And I wanted to see your famous teamwork skills for myself. Well done!” He looked at Daisy and AJ, who were still glowing blue. “I see you’ve found the bioluminescent water. Isn’t it marvelous?”
Daisy would have agreed that the water was awesome, because it totally was, but she was annoyed to have come so close to finding their way out. Just for spite she tossed some sand in the air in front of her. It still didn’t hit anything. She grumbled.
Frank chuckled. “Don’t feel too bad. You got much farther than I’d ever expected you to. Now, I know you must have a lot of questions.” He motioned for someone to grab the blanket tucked under his arm. Daisy grumbled but took it and laid it out on the sand. Frank set the tray down and Miles pounced on the food. “Chocolate pizza!” he said in amazement.
“Sam gave me his recipe years ago,” Frank said. “I thought you might appreciate a taste of home. And don’t worry—I didn’t use these beans to make the chocolate. Got it from the supermarket, like anyone who didn’t have a blue-cocoa tree growing in their backyard would.”
They dug in gratefully, even Philip, who had passed it up during the contest.
“Only the right combination of people could have landed on my doorstep,” Frank said while they wolfed down the food. “If I didn’t think you had what it took, I wouldn’t have let you in.” He paused before saying, “We were barely twenty. Sam had been working for years on his chocolate recipes, never finding the exact right thing that would allow him to open the factory. Then suddenly we find this amazing tree in this wondrous place that’s the closest thing to paradise any of us has ever come across. It felt like destiny. It felt like the beans were waiting for us. It still feels that way. Only now they’re waiting for you.”
The four of them paused in their chewing and exchanged looks. They’d been right. He really was going to ask them to take over. If they hadn’t been so hungry and it hadn’t tasted so good, they’d have put down the food.
Frank continued. “We thought protecting the tree would be a twenty-five-year commitment at most, but as you can see, the tree is still going strong. Those butterflies? They’re here all year. I’ve been the caretaker almost fifty years now. It’s ironic, really. The only place on Earth I could never map is in my own backyard.”
Logan pointed to the map Miles had laid on the blanket. “Other than this one, you mean?”
Frank shook his head. “I didn’t make that one. Your grandfather did. We couldn’t risk taking photographs of the place, and Sam loved to draw.” He pointed to the rock with the numbers. “Instead of signing his name, those are the house numbers where we all grew up.”
“Those numbers came in handy,” Daisy said under her breath.
To Logan, Frank said, “I hadn’t expected to send it until you were eighteen, but Henry moved the timeline up when he gave Philip chocolate made from the beans for your contest.” Frank sighed. “He may have been looking out for me, or he may have been looking out for you. I don’t know. Maybe he worried that if he didn’t give you a reason to stick together, you might have drifted apart by the time I was ready to show you.”
No one said anything for a minute as that thought sank in. Would they have drifted? Daisy couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. If anyone pulled away, it would have been her. She’d come so close already. She swallowed hard and said, “Evy told us Sam knew he shouldn’t be using the beans to make the Magic Bar. What did she mean by that?”
“Tantum ad tempus,” Frank said solemnly. “It’s Latin for ‘only at the right time.’” He got a faraway look in his eyes, then said, “Those words are carved on the base of the cocoa tree. Over time the soil has grown over them, but when we arrived, they were clear as day. The only other sign that anyone else had ever been here was a carved stick we found below the words.”
AJ held up the stick map. “This one?”
Frank smiled. “That would be the one. To the others, it was just a carved stick. Finding it gave me the confidence to believe I could be a mapmaker.”
“Do you want it back?” AJ asked, holding the stick out to him.
Frank shook his head. “I had it for fifty years. That’s long enough.”
Miles cleared his throat. “If it’s up for grabs, can I keep it for my collection?”
Frank nodded. Miles wrapped it carefully in some napkins and tucked it into his backpack. He couldn’t wait to show it to Arthur.
“You have no idea who carved the words or why?” Daisy asked. “In all this time, no one ever came back?”
Frank shook his head.
Philip was busy running the words only at the right time over and over in his mind. How were they to know when that was? Who had the right to determine it? “What do you do with the pods when they ripen?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Frank answered. “We learned early on that if we didn’t pick them, they just hung there on the tree forever. They never rot or drop.”
Logan shook his head in bewilderment. He’d spent his life around cocoa trees. This one sure was different. He started to say, “Philip and I op—” but Philip cut him off by asking, “Does the aurora come out every night?”
Frank tilted his head back to admire the sky, as did Miles. Logan shot Philip a questioning look. In response Philip just shook his head and mouthed the words, “Don’t tell him.”
“Why?” Logan mouthed back, but Frank had started talking again. “The aurora does come almost every night. We figured it has to do with all the magnetic energy in the valley.”
“There’s a microbe from space in the beans!” Miles blurted out. Frank seemed stunned as Miles shared what little they knew.
When Miles was done, Frank took a long breath. “You’ve learned more about our little tree in a week than we did in five decades. I knew you were the right four—sorry, AJ, hadn’t really factored you in.”
AJ held up his hand. “It’s all good.”
“I don’t expect an answer right now,” Frank was quick to assure them. “What I’m asking of you is too much. I need you to come to it on your own. When you are eighteen, I will pass you the keys to the kingdom, as the expression goes, and then it will be up to you to do as you please.”
“You’re getting ready to leave,” Daisy said. She didn’t frame it as a question.
“I am,” he admitted. “Not today, though, and not tomorrow. I am old now, and I’ve been blessed with this view for a long time. It’s time for me to go see the world I’ve been mapping all these years. The mirrors are very challenging to maintain, even with Evy’s help, and with all the new technologies, it’s getting
almost impossible to keep my life hidden from outside eyes.”
“You’ve done an excellent job in that department,” Daisy muttered under her breath.
“What if you didn’t have to wait?” AJ asked suddenly. “I’m eighteen. I can check on the place when you leave. I have access to certain… equipment. I can set up cameras inside the house and outside in the backyard, as you call it. With twenty-four-hour surveillance and early-warning alarm systems, you won’t need someone to live here full-time.”
Daisy jumped in. “And I can improve on those trick mirrors of yours. Not that they aren’t impressive. They’re truly a work of art. But I know someone who has developed a very special hologram projection technology. We can program it so that this whole area looks like anything you want it to. The scene can change each season.”
Frank’s eyes filled with tears, making him look even more like Henry. “You would do all that?”
AJ and Daisy nodded. Daisy turned to her friends. “I mean, if we’re really all in?”
Logan’s heart thumped. So much for not having to decide yet. He’d never been much of a planner. But here he was, sitting in Paradise, a place of such natural beauty that it filled him up inside and threatened to burst out. And whatever that tree was meant to do, even just knowing of its existence was a gift that only a few people had ever gotten. He knew his grandfather had trained him early on for this task. And Henry had faith in them as a team. But did that make him brave enough to take on this responsibility?
Instinctively, Logan and Miles turned toward each other. They both recognized the mixture of fear and excitement in each other’s faces. They turned to Philip. His face showed only determination. Wordlessly, Philip stuck out his hand, palm down. With a glance at Logan for reassurance, Miles leaned over and placed his hand on top of Philip’s. Logan looked to Daisy. They locked eyes as he added his hand to the pile. Daisy laid hers on top. They stayed like that for a long time.