The Inventors and the Lost Island

by A. M. Morgen

  Oscar turned his fury on her. “Yes, now! You can’t wait to see what’s in there, either. I’m surprised you dried us off first. What do YOU think is in that box? Another adventure you can chase?”

  Ada seemed to shrink under Oscar’s glare. She shot George a worried glance. “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s important. Let’s all calm down. I’ll take us back to the camp.”

  “I AM calm,” Oscar said. “I didn’t come with you on this journey just to watch you DIE. I’ve spent TWO months with my FATHER, and I’m SICK of people risking their lives for TREASURE. I’m tired of seeing people FIGHTING and CHASING. I—I thought it would be different if I was with you two,” he finished, his voice raw and full of hurt. “I thought we could be friends, and that would be enough.”

  “It is different, Oscar, you belong with us—” George said just as Ada left the deck.

  “No, it’s NOT! Getting REVENGE on Don Nadie is not worth giving up your LIFE!”

  “He started it!” George cried, before pushing down his frustration. He extended his hand, one eye on the box. “I’m sorry, Oscar. I didn’t mean to put us in danger. We’ll all open it together. Didn’t you once say that pirates share everything?”

  “I’m not a pirate,” Oscar answered angrily, pressing the box to his chest.

  Below them, the engines rumbled to life. They both jumped at the unexpectedly loud sound. George desperately wanted to snatch the box from Oscar’s hands as they sailed away from the shipwreck, but he was afraid that if he moved an inch, Oscar would fling the box back into the sea.

  “I’ve apologized. I don’t know what else to say,” George pleaded. “What do you want from me?”

  But Oscar only hunched his shoulders miserably and said nothing. Wordlessly, they reached the shore, where Oscar jumped down onto the sand and carelessly cast the box to the ground. Screeching, Ruthie ran to him immediately and wrapped her orange arms around his leg, clinging to him as if he were a raft in the middle of the ocean.

  George strode over to the box, with Ada close behind. It was a small comfort that George knew they were thinking the same thing: they had circled the globe to find out whatever was inside that box. George knew the treasure would be worth the journey. It had to be.

  Oscar crossed his arms. “Well, are you going to open it?”

  George exchanged a glance with Ada. She nodded, then retrieved a lit lantern and set it next to the box. The sun had almost set over the smooth, calm sea that had tried to kill George less than an hour before. The dazzling blues had cooled to smoky purples and grays as the honey-kissed clouds faded into the evening sky. The horizon was so flat and straight that it could have been a line in one of Oscar’s drawings.

  “It’s rather small,” George said warily.

  “A number of dangerous and important things are small,” Ada observed. “Open it.”

  Carefully, George picked up the box and put it in his lap. It was time to learn what his grandfather had wanted him to find. What Don Nadie wanted so badly, and what they might use to stop him.

  A hundred butterflies flitted in his stomach.

  Water from the box dripped onto his cotton trousers. The thick outer wood layer of the box crumbled under his touch, revealing more of the tin lining. After he’d brushed away the loose wood and bits of mud, George could see that underneath the wooden casing, the metal structure of the box was slightly rusted but still intact and locked tight. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, with a hinged lock that secured the top. The rusted hinge was easy for George to break off with a sharp rock.

  George held his breath and lifted the lid, which popped off with a puff of musty air. Miraculously, the interior of the box was bone dry. There were two items inside: a soft leather portfolio with a sheaf of papers in it and a rusted compass.

  Ada picked up the compass between her index finger and thumb to inspect it. After a few seconds, she declared, “Ordinary.”

  George reached inside the box and gingerly pulled out the papers. Careful not to tear the parchment, which had grown almost translucent with age, he flipped through the pages. There were inventories of the cargo and a list of crew members and passengers, all documents for the ship called La Isla.

  George turned the box upside down, but nothing fell out. He used the Star of Victory to see if there was a hidden message to be decoded, but looking through the gem proved useless.

  A bundle of documents. That was all there was.

  A hard lump formed in George’s throat, but he swallowed it down. He’d nearly died for this box and it appeared to be… nothing. He looked to Ada, expecting some miracle to come tumbling out of her mouth—but she just stared back at him with sad brown eyes.

  “I think this is a dead end, George,” she said.

  A few paces away, Oscar scoffed. “What a surprise.”

  Frustration made George spring to his feet. Ada held his elbow to stop him, but George yanked it out of her grasp. “Oscar, what is wrong? Making rude remarks is not helping right now.”

  If Oscar’s stare could cut, the whole world would be sliced into ribbons. “I’ve done nothing but help you—both of you—since I first met you! And for what?”

  “For what?” Ada repeated softly, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “You said I belonged with you. But so far all I’ve done is draw your map and search for your treasure and fight your battles. I don’t want to fight villains. I don’t want to be a hero if this is what being a hero looks like.” Oscar met George’s eyes. Confusion and anger and pain were all mixed together on his face. “You almost died. I’d rather collect rocks on a deserted island for the rest of my life than have you or Ada or Ruthie die on some pointless intercontinental adventure.”

  “What are you saying, Oscar?”

  Oscar hoisted his rock-collecting sack and a blanket over his shoulder. “I’m saying that this is not where I want to be. I don’t have to be a hero or a villain, because from what I can tell, you’re all acting the same. Maybe there’s something in between that I can be. Or maybe I’m supposed to be a Nobody. What if that’s where I’m meant to belong?”

  George’s jaw dropped. The thought of Oscar becoming a Nobody hit him like a punch to his stomach. “You can’t be a Nobody!”

  “Why not? We can’t all be somebodies.”

  Without another word, Oscar turned his back to them and tramped off across the island, Ruthie still clinging to his leg as if she were stuck with barnacle glue.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Oscar would come back. He had to.

  And when he did, George would show him just how wrong he’d been.

  After Oscar stormed off, Ada disappeared into her tent. The lantern’s glow cast a silhouette of her writing in her notebook against the canvas. George remained on the beach, the contents of the ship’s box spread on the sand in front of him. He wouldn’t stop until he’d studied every inch of every object in that box, backward and forward, upside down and right side up. The sun had set, and the dark was pressing in all around, so he set the lantern on a rock and read each line as carefully as if it were poetry, or an enticing double-column ledger.

  According to the documents, La Isla had been a packet ship bound for the Ecuadoran port of Guayaquil carrying mail, passengers, and supplies. There were thirty-two crew members and fifty-five passengers aboard the ship. Among a constellation of water stains, the passenger manifest’s list of names was legible.

  With the dedication of an aspiring accountant, George ran his finger along the column of names, dissecting each one in turn. Nothing seemed remarkable until the fourth time George scanned the page, when he came to the twenty-seventh entry: Estelle D.

  The tip of his finger stopped like an arrow that had found its target. The name. Estelle. It was so familiar. But why? George shook his head as if he could dislodge the answer. Damp strands of blond hair fell into his eyes.

  Suddenly, a shuffling sound to his left jolted him upright.

  “Ada? Oscar? Ruthie?
” he called out.

  He glanced over, hoping to see Oscar and Ruthie. But all he saw was the sleeve of his jacket being dragged across the ground and disappearing into the scrubby bushes that lined the beach.

  “Hey! Stop!” George sprang to his feet and swung the lantern in an arc to illuminate the underbrush. He saw a flash of brown ankle and the white bottom of a foot as its owner ran into the wild unknown of the island’s interior.

  George plunged into the rough scrubland after the mysterious foot. Flocks of tiny finches exploded ahead of him, blooming into twittering clouds as the thief darted forward, faster than George could follow. George quickly realized that he was being led down a narrow path beaten into the ground. His lantern clattered loudly and the flame flickered, but he dared not slow down in case he fell too far behind.

  “Give me back my jacket! And my buttons! And my friend’s shoes!”

  After a while, the footsteps in front of him faded into the other sounds of the night. Hoots. Chirps. Growls?

  George slowed to a stop to see that he was standing at the base of the long-dead volcano that towered like a mountain at the island’s center. The ground ahead was getting steeper and steeper, and the path seemed to vanish as the plants became taller.

  George turned to go back the way he’d come, but the path had disappeared.

  He closed his eyes, trying to remain calm. When he opened them, he spotted the bright pinpoint of the campfire Ada had made. Above him, stars glittered in the night, lavishly decorating the darkness like jewels, or the shiny minerals that Oscar collected, thrown into the sky. Together, the lights would guide him home.

  Under the sky, the black ocean writhed and moved in the distance, scattering the silver starlight and moonlight—and another small constellation of yellow lights in the bay he didn’t recognize.

  George lurched back. The yellow lights in the bay. They weren’t reflected from above. They belonged to a ship. No, a fleet of ships.

  A fleet of ships heading straight for Ada’s campfire.

  George snuffed out his lantern and stumbled toward the campfire as fast as he could. When he got near the camp, he saw that the ships had launched smaller boats that were swarming toward the shore. Did Ada know they were coming or was she too busy writing in her notebook?

  George kept his eyes locked on the ships. They were six large and well-armed two-deckers, each with several dozen cannons at least. When he finally managed to creep to the edge of the camp, the shore was already teeming with invaders. They had organized themselves into tidy formations, each headed by a man wearing a familiar style of dark blue naval jacket with gleaming rows of gold buttons.

  He rubbed his eyes in disbelief, but the scene did not change. It couldn’t be, he told himself. It was impossible.

  But, as Ada had told him countless times, nothing was impossible.

  In a moment of wild hope, George let himself believe the navy had come on behalf of the King to apologize for the truffle incident. But immediately his hopes were dashed. A contingent of officers escorted Ada out of her tent like a prisoner. She looked so small pressed between the soldiers. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, which made her appear even younger than she was. Finally, he saw that her wrists were bound with rope. The sight of it filled George with fury such as he’d never known.

  A portly man with bushy eyebrows stepped off the last boat and strode onto the beach. George’s stomach seized as he recognized him. The last time he had seen him was through the bars of the prison carriage, just after he’d sentenced George to prison for trying to poison the King of England.

  Vice-Chancellor Shadwell had found them even on the other side of the world.

  After five seconds of carefully considering all his options, of which he could only see two—stay or run—George made a decision. The bravest one he could muster. He wouldn’t let Ada be taken into custody alone.

  The 3rd Lord of Devonshire strolled into the middle of the British navy with his palms facing up.

  “I surrender.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Don’t talk,” Ada whispered under her breath to George when they brushed shoulders on the narrow rowboat. The fresh-faced soldiers on either side of them talked over their heads as if they weren’t there at all.

  “That’s the London Truffle Assassin? He’s just a child.”

  “I know. Scrawny, ain’t he? Kind of dull looking, too. Wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.”

  “It’s a pity the girl got mixed up in his schemes. She must not have known who he was.”

  “Shadwell says the girl’s the smart one. Faked her death, broke him out of prison, and helped him escape here. Anyway, the whole world knows who he is now. He’s been on the front page of every newspaper in the empire. It’s the biggest news of the year.”

  “Ghastly shame, is what it is. What is this world coming to? Children trying to murder kings and gallivanting around the world? Nothing like that ever happened when I was a boy.”

  Unable to listen any longer, George shouted, “I’m innocent!”

  The nearest soldier rapped George in the skull with an oar, then shouted, “Quiet!”

  Grumbling, they were taken aboard one of the sleek ships. Thankfully, there was no sign that Oscar or Ruthie had been captured. The mechanical whale also seemed to have vanished. At any moment, George expected it to come bursting through the surface, mechanically transformed into a shark or something similarly ferocious, to rescue them. But the waters below them remained dark and still.

  Ada and George were then brought belowdecks and put in separate iron cages. Although they could see each other, they were an arm’s length away. Guards were stationed around them so that even if the two somehow escaped the bars they would be immediately captured again.

  George only dared to speak when the bells for the next watch sent the guards hurrying to the upper deck. He pressed his face between the bars and whispered a frantic string of words. “Adahowwillweescape!”

  “I’ll just invoke Princess Victoria’s name. That should get us back to London alive, at the very least.” She smiled. “On the bright side, if we are hanged, I won’t have to go to the Somerville School for Ladies of Substance.”

  George did not have time to scold Ada for making such an awful joke before footsteps sounded above them and a handful of fresh-faced guards flowed in.

  “We demand to see the vice-chancellor,” Ada said to the nearest guard.

  “Prisoners don’t make demands,” he replied curtly.

  George leaned against the bars. “Can we make polite requests?”

  Ada lifted her chin and stretched herself to her full height. “Please inform the vice-chancellor that his presence is demanded in the name of Princess Victoria.”

  “Princess Victoria is not the Queen yet, nor do I answer to her,” said the vice-chancellor as he descended the narrow staircase into the prison hold. “You’d do well to remember that, Miss Byron.”

  The guards suddenly snapped to attention. Smiling, Vice-Chancellor Shadwell approached the cells. Though his eyes still crinkled kindly beneath his bushy brows, George saw that there was a cruel slant to his smile.

  “She will be the queen one day, and then you will answer to her. You’d do well to remember that, Vice-Chancellor,” Ada replied calmly.

  The vice-chancellor smiled. “One day is a very long time from today. Yet, it is also true that a lot can change in one day. I hope you are not implying that you have ill wishes toward our current elderly sovereign and his equally elderly brother. Because then it would seem that you have something in common with your friend here, the London Truffle Assassin.”

  “But I didn’t—” George began.

  “This is outrageous!” Ada interrupted. “The King was not assassinated. He’s alive and well. No crime was committed, and I think you are clever enough to see that he”—she pointed angrily at George—“is no type of assassin. I demand you release us at once.”

  Vice-Chancellor Shadwell turned his bac
k to Ada and strolled over to George’s cell. He reached through the bars and put a firm, strong hand on George’s shoulder. “My boy, I’m very disappointed in you. Your friend thought she was doing the right thing by helping you escape, but you know deep down in your heart it was a cowardly thing to do. A real man accepts the consequences of his actions.”

  The words reached into George’s very core and twisted.

  Ada rattled the bars of her cell. “Don’t listen to him, George. You didn’t do anything wrong. He’s manipulating you.”

  “If anyone’s manipulated you, it’s that girl,” the vice-chancellor said in a quiet voice, leaning even closer to the bars. “I can see that she’s thoroughly muddled you with her fanciful notions. Has she filled your head with tales of adventure plucked from her father’s poetry? It’s quite understandable that you’d be seduced by her pretty words. She is a Byron, after all.”

  George gritted his teeth. “A real man would not speak ill of Ada Byron.”

  The vice-chancellor waved his finger at a guard, who clamped his hand over Ada’s mouth. “I only want the truth. Is she hiding the map for you? If you admit that it was her idea to poison the King, then I can spare you from the gallows.”

  George met Vice-Chancellor Shadwell’s gaze. “How did you know about the map?”

  The kindly twinkle completely vanished from the vice-chancellor’s eyes, and now his face was entirely cruel. His fingers tightened around George’s shoulder, gripping his muscle like a vise. “I can make things easier for you, if you tell me where it really is.”

  George wrenched himself from the vice-chancellor’s grasp and backed up, all the way to the rear wall of the cell. The hair on his arms and neck stood on end. “So you do know about the map. You’re working for Don Nadie?” he asked, horrified.

  The guard who’d been holding Ada’s mouth closed yelped and drew his hand back. She must have bitten him. She shouted, “How did you find us?”

  The vice-chancellor sighed. “One of his men put a device on your ship back in Spain that left a trail of phosphorus in the water. You’ve heard of cold light, haven’t you? It was quite pretty, and it led us straight to you.”