“All we know is, somebody died there,” said Kwan.
Clay’s eyes widened. “In the eruption? Who—Price?”
“A girl,” said Jonah. “And now the ruins are haunted.”
The others laughed.
“Go ahead and laugh,” said Jonah. “But you know that’s what people say.”
“The only thing that haunts that place is Price’s blood money,” said Pablo.
“And bees,” said Kwan.
As Kwan spoke, the sun shone directly on the ruins, turning them brilliant gold. For a moment, Clay could almost imagine Price Palace in all its former glory.
A girl was buried there, Clay thought. Was that what Skipper’s warning Beware—the—you—bury was about?
Beware who you bury. Maybe that was the message.
That night, after a dinner that was only slightly more filling than his lunch, Clay walked into his cabin to find Pablo smearing something on his arm with a rag. He almost jumped out of his bunk when he saw Clay.
“Oh, it’s you. Man, you freakin’ scared me.”
“Sorry,” said Clay. “Do they hurt?”
“What?”
“The beestings.”
“Oh, right,” said Pablo, pulling his sleeve down. “Nurse Cora gave me some lotion to put on them.”
Clay had the sense there was something more Pablo was going to say—the reason he’d been so scared when Clay walked in maybe? Or maybe he was going to reveal what he’d been hiding under his sleeping bag the day before?—but then the others started coming into the cabin. It was time for bed.
Later, Clay lay on his bunk, sleepless. As he listened to his cabinmates snore, he took stock of his situation. From the moment, almost two weeks earlier, when he found the words MAGIC SUCKS! written on his teacher’s wall, things had gone from bad to worse:
He’d been wrongly accused and suspended from school.
He’d been sent to a camp for delinquents on a remote volcanic island.
He’d been abandoned with a cryptic warning next to an alarming SOS sign.
He’d been threatened by a wild boar and a swarm of bees.
He’d made an enemy of the scariest guy at camp.
He’d insulted the only person who’d been very nice to him.
He’d failed at the simple task of weeding.
He’d been afraid to use the toilet and he’d hardly eaten a thing.
He was hungry and he wanted to go home.
But even as he started planning how he would approach Buzz, Clay already knew he wouldn’t leave. Not yet. It wasn’t just that he had to stay at Earth Ranch in order to return to school in the fall. It was something about the place itself. A feeling that there was more to the camp than met the eye. This strange camp with its fast-changing weather and even faster-growing weeds; with its Spanish-speaking llama and bee-speaking counselor; with its now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t teepee and its forbidden ruins where a girl had supposedly died. What had Jonah said? They never let you get too used to anything at Earth Ranch. Clay couldn’t put his finger on it, but he was certain that behind the clouds of vog, all was not as it seemed.
Seeing his own words on Mr. Bailey’s wall had been the most bewildering event in Clay’s life, but perhaps it had a purpose after all: to lead him to this foreboding but intriguing island. Clay would never have said it out loud—it would have sounded too superstitious—but he was almost convinced that something like fate had brought him to Earth Ranch.
He had a role to play here, he felt sure; he wanted to find out what it was.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
FREE TIME
Little by little, Clay began to adapt to camp life.
Within the next four or five days, he learned enough about “cooking” with raw foods to feed himself, and he ceased to be afraid of the self-composting toilet. The bees let him do his chores in peace, and he had no further run-ins with Flint. He even started pulling weeds out at the root. (Unfortunately, he couldn’t share the victory with Leira; she still wasn’t speaking to him.)
And yet he felt no closer to uncovering the camp’s secrets. Indeed, he was almost beginning to feel foolish for thinking that there was anything very mysterious about Earth Ranch at all. Maybe the camp was no more or less than it seemed: a slightly eccentric place where “struggling” kids went to farm and be one with nature.
The thing that made him think otherwise was Price Palace. Right there, overlooking the camp, were the supposedly haunted ruins of a spectacular mansion, eradicated in a volcanic eruption, a fascinating sight by any measure, and yet the campers seemed afraid to speak about it, and the counselors never mentioned it. It was a conspiracy of silence.
If there were mysteries to be unearthed at Earth Ranch, then they would be found in the ruins.
With all his farm duties to attend to, Clay didn’t have an extended period of free time until the end of the week. Even then free time turned out not to mean free time as much as it meant time to walk his llama.
Luckily, a llama walk was just what he had in mind.
In his week at camp, Clay had yet to see the camp beehive. Supposedly, it was in the clearing behind the banana grove, but when Clay looked there for Buzz, Clay saw only a tree. Or what was once a tree. It had been cleaved in two by lightning and now looked like a mismatched pair of blackened towers. Smoke billowed around the tree as if embers still smoldered inside.
Apprehensive, Clay stepped closer. Though long dead, the tree was teeming with life. Hundreds of frenzied bees flew in and out of a dark hole in the base of the tree, while honey oozed like sap out of the burned bark.
Buzz walked toward Clay, holding a smoking branch.
“Don’t worry, there’s no fire,” he said from behind his beekeeper visor. “The smoke calms them. So they don’t get too upset with me when I reach for the honey.”
“That tree—that’s the beehive?” asked Clay, keeping a safe distance from the smoke and the bees alike.
“Yep. We call it the treehive.… Where do you think bees make their hives in the wild?”
He put a dripping piece of honeycomb into a bucket.
“So anyway, would it be cool if I took Como up to the ruins on our walk today?” asked Clay. “I thought it would be fun to check the place out,” he added, trying to sound as casual as possible.
Buzz seemed a little put off by Clay’s request. “I don’t know—this really should be the director’s call,” he said. “I’m sorry you didn’t get here a minute earlier. Then you could have asked Eli yourself.”
“Eli was here?” asked Clay, surprised. He’d been at Earth Ranch for seven days and still hadn’t laid eyes on the director of the camp.
“Oh, he’s always around somewhere,” said Buzz vaguely. “He just likes to keep an eye on things in his own way.”
He told Clay that as long as he stayed within view of camp, he could go as far as the old palace gate. “That gate marks the boundary of the Wall of Trust. If you cross it, you may as well not come back.”
A bee landed briefly on Clay’s arm, as if to emphasize the point. He winced, bracing himself for a sting, but the bee flew away.
“Don’t worry,” said Clay, relieved. “I’m not actually going into the ruins. I’m just going to look.”
He had no intention of crossing the Wall of Trust. The beestings on Pablo’s arm were still fresh in his mind.
“Good, because that’s the one thing that will get you sent straight home,” said Buzz sternly. “And be back in time for Circle. We’re having our first fire-starting lesson right afterward—”
An old gravel path connected the camp to the palace. Much of the path was overgrown, and most of the steps broken, but the hike posed no difficulty for the llama, and Clay did his best to follow.
As they zigzagged up the hill, Clay kept looking back and forth between the camp and the ruins. Partly, this was to gauge his progress; partly it was to keep an eye out for bees. At one point, Clay saw Leira standing on the dock in her ba
thing suit and a bathing cap. He waved to her. She did not wave back, though he was certain she saw him. When is she going to forgive me? he wondered. While he watched, Leira grabbed onto the rope, swung herself into the lake, and started swimming toward Egg Rock, the large rock jutting out from the water. He remembered that the girls were having their swim test that afternoon. The boys would have theirs the following week.
After twenty minutes or so, the llama stopped, and Clay stepped onto a stone patio built to take advantage of the view of the lake and the volcano beyond. The patio was circled by an elegant marble balustrade that had somehow managed to survive the eruption of Mount Forge intact.
In the middle of the patio, sitting on a rock, was an old bronze statue of a girl reading a book. Years of exposure to the elements had turned parts of the statue turquoise and corroded other parts beyond recognition, but the girl’s singular expression remained. Though her eyes were fixed on her book, she seemed to be looking somewhere far, far away.
Clay walked around the statue, studying it from all sides. According to the Worms, a girl had died when Price Palace burned down. Was the statue a memorial to her, maybe?
As clouds of vog started to drift over the lake, Clay tugged on the llama’s leash. “C’mon, Como, let’s go see what’s up with these ruins.”
The gate Buzz spoke of—and hence the Wall of Trust itself—stood about twenty feet inland from the patio. The doors of the gate had long ago disappeared, and the gate was now no more than an arch framing Clay’s view of the ruins.
Clay glanced around, afraid that at any moment he would be surrounded by a swarm of bees. He didn’t see any bees, but just in case, he picked a daisy out of the ground and held it between his fingers the way Leira had instructed him.
To Clay, the ruins still looked more like the remains of an ancient civilization than of someone’s home. A row of columns—a few of them unbroken, the others broken off at varying heights—stood alone, no longer holding up anything except the sky. Around them, bits and pieces of wall and roof lay like shards of a giant pot, but most of the ground was covered with lava rock and ash. Evidently, the volcano had made a direct hit on the palace. There was only one wall of any significant size left standing. It was white and unadorned—a perfect spot, Clay couldn’t help thinking, for a large graffiti piece.
While mentally writing his name on the wall, he became aware of a buzzing sound: A bee was flying straight at him.
“Aaack!” Clay swatted the bee away, dropping the protective flower and the llama’s leash at the same time.
“Sorry, sorry!” he exclaimed, immediately regretting what he’d done.
He was afraid the bee had flown away to collect recruits, but the bee hadn’t left; it had landed on the llama’s nose. For a second, nobody moved. Not Clay. Not the bee. Not the llama.
Then, apparently stung, the llama shrieked, reared his head, and bolted. Moving faster than Clay had ever seen him move, he ran through the ruins and disappeared around the hill. The bee disappeared after him.
“Como, come back! ¡Aquí! ¡Aquí!”
Clay called the llama’s name repeatedly, but the llama didn’t return.
Panicking, Clay tried to decide what to do. To retrieve the llama, he would have to cross the Wall of Trust, and risk getting expelled from camp. And yet he couldn’t just leave the llama; taking care of Como was his primary responsibility, and who knew what kinds of hazards there were on the island for a llama not used to life in the wild.
Clay hesitated, his fingers outstretched, as if there were an invisible electrified fence in front of him.
He looked back at camp. As far as he could tell, nobody was watching. And the bee hadn’t come back.
To heck with it, Clay thought. What was the worst that could happen? Just a few days ago, he’d been hoping to go home anyway.
Bracing himself, Clay ran through the gate, and—nothing happened. No alarm rang. No swarm of bees descended. He was in the ruins.
The llama hadn’t gone far.
He was grazing next to a round gray stone building that wasn’t visible from camp or even from the palace gate. It was a tower, though I hesitate to call such a squat building a tower. About four stories high and equally wide, it had a conical roof covered with red tile. A single row of small square windows snaked around the side of the tower, starting at ground level and rising all the way to the roofline.
The tower looked like no other structure Clay had ever seen, but what was most remarkable about it was that it was completely untouched by fire or lava. Volcanic rocks were everywhere in the vicinity, but they stopped about three feet away from the tower’s base, as though the perimeter of the tower had been protected by some invisible force field. In this protected space, wildflowers bloomed.
A few bees hovered among the flowers, but they appeared to take no notice of him; they could have been bees anywhere.
The llama stood a few feet from the front entrance: two oversized bronze doors that together formed a triangle. Above the tower entrance appeared a cryptic name:
U BRARY
Why did that name seem so familiar?
When he looked again, Clay could see that the sign had once said PRICE PUBLIC LIBRARY; it was just that most of the letters had fallen away.
Clay smiled sardonically. There was nothing public about this library. The front doors were locked with chains. Most of the windows were boarded up. There were vines covering the walls. It was the most private place he could imagine. Never mind that a private island was an absurd location for a public library to begin with.
In a flash, Clay realized that the library must have been the place the pilot tried to warn him about. That was why the name seemed so familiar.
Not Beware—the—you—bury, Clay thought. Beware—the—U—BRARY.
Did some unknown danger lurk inside? It was foolhardy, no doubt, but Clay felt a sudden, undeniable desire to find out.
Well, what would you have done? (I would have run back to camp, but I’m assuming you’re more adventurous.)
Leaving the llama to graze a moment longer, Clay walked around the library tower, looking for a way in.
He found a small door hidden in a stairwell below ground level, but when he drew closer, he discovered that a large combination lock was built into the door; it was like the door of a safe. It could take years to get the door open. He was almost relieved. In truth, as much as he wanted to see inside the library, he was scared of what he might find.
The sun was shining directly overhead and Clay was beginning to feel hot and dizzy. It was time to go back to camp and drink some water.
“C’mon, Como. Vámonos. Maybe we can come back some other time.”
As Clay turned away from the library, he happened to glance upward. He froze, his heart pounding.
There was a girl reading in one of the tower windows. Her red hair lit by the sun, she looked as though she were on fire. And yet her face was as pale and serene as snow.
She was pretty, beautiful even, but that wasn’t why Clay stood there, rooted to the spot, unable to look away. It was the feeling of déjà vu. He knew he had seen her before, whoever she was, and yet he knew he had not. He’d never seen anyone remotely like her before.
Suddenly, their eyes met. Her mouth opened in surprise, as if she were as startled to see him as he was to see her.
Clay pointed from himself to the library. Can you let me in? he mouthed.
She shook her head vehemently, fear on her face.
Then she disappeared. The tower looked as empty and desolate as it had before.
Clay blinked. Had she been an apparition? An effect of the light?
He considered banging on the door or looking again for a way in. But from far down below he could hear the sound of the gong reverberating across the valley. Free time was over.
Not only that, but wisps of clouds were floating by. The vog had begun to climb up the hillside. Soon visibility would be poor, and getting back to camp would be difficult.
As he led the llama back down the mountain, Clay realized where he’d seen the girl in the tower before. Or rather why he thought he’d seen her.
The old statue on the patio. The statue of the girl reading. The girl reading in the tower window had worn the same faraway expression.
They could almost have been the same person.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
A CAMPFIRE STORY
I’m not sure who first got the idea that you could start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible. As you may know if you are a Scout or a forest ranger, a somewhat easier method for starting a fire is to make a hand drill out of a stick. Alas, even this method is difficult unless you’ve done it many times before. The first time he attempted it, Clay failed to make a spark. Thankfully, so did everyone else in his cabin. He was not alone in his embarrassment.*
The fire pit was situated under a large geodesic dome about halfway between Big Yurt and the lake. They could see the sun setting over the lake as each of them tried over and over to make a flame. Eventually, they were sitting under the dome in the dark, like cavemen waiting for the invention of fire. In the center of the fire pit, logs were piled in the shape of a teepee, teasing them with the promise of warmth. Clay felt chilly for the first time since he’d been at camp.
“You’re all trying too hard,” said Buzz, who was seemingly as impervious to the passage of time as he was to the vagaries of temperature. “You have to let the fire breathe.”
“Look at the bright side, this way you don’t have to teach us how to put a fire out,” said Kwan.
“Can’t you just do it for us? I’m freezing,” complained Jonah.
“I heard somebody needed a light,” said Flint, casually swinging himself under the dome from out of the darkness.
His eyes glinting, Flint stood over the fire pit and snapped his fingers. For a second, sparks flew from his hand as if he were soldering a pipe. Then the logs burst into flame.
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