by Bryan Chick
Back into the Wotter Park
On the other side of the curtain was a wall of water like the one they’d touched in the elevator. After stepping into it, Noah saw a point of light a few feet above his head. He swam to it and arrived in a small, underwater cavern with smooth concrete walls. He realized he was somewhere inside the fabricated island in the Wotter Park exhibit. To one side was an opening. Noah swam through it and emerged in the channel of water beside the aquarium walls, his friends in front of him.
Following Hannah’s lead, the scouts hoisted themselves onto the island. The Descender led them out of the exhibit, following their path of entry in reverse: through a hatch in the ceiling, then down the steps to the door that opened into the visitor area. They stepped into the walkway, their wet sneakers leaving tracks.
Hannah indicated their backpacks on the floor. “Dry clothes?”
The scouts nodded.
Hannah’s eyes passed over them and she said, “You guys all right? You don’t look so good.”
Standing with his arms crossed over his body and his hands clutching his elbows, Richie shivered. “I’m freezing!”
Hannah continued to look them over. Her bangs clung to her forehead, her clothes to her body. She worked the gum between her jaws, chewing slowly and deliberately. For a moment—nothing more than a few seconds—her stare softened. She seemed to feel something for the scouts.
“I know you’re cold,” she said. “So am I. Crossing is tough. It’s a huge responsibility, and it’s not for the weak.” She seemed to consider something and then added, “Think about the places you’re going to be required to protect. As a Crosser, you’re going to need to know the ins and outs of our entire world—and I mean that literally.”
She paused and waited for the scouts to say something. When they didn’t, she began to speak again, her thoughts and words coming more rapidly.
“It took magic to create our world—a magic that’s still alive and all around. Every day the Secret Society struggles to contain it, to understand it, to use it. Think about its power. Look at the City of Species. Crossers are ready to die to keep that power from DeGraff.”
The scouts quietly listened.
“I know that the Secret Society does important work—great work—but there are times when . . .” Her voice trailed off and her gaze fell to the floor. Just when it seemed she’d forgotten her thought, she finished it: “There are times when many of us wish our world had never been created. Our civilization . . . it was born from madness and magic. Where does that put us?
“The four of you can walk away. You’re not bound to this place—you’re not bound by our burden.”
She became quiet, leaving a strange, empty space in the conversation that Noah dared to enter.
“What divides your world from ours?” he asked. “Nothing—a thin layer of dirt.” He paused, searched for the right words, and found them. “In facing your problems, we only face our own.”
Behind him, the scouts nodded.
The Descender shifted uneasily. She popped a bubble, turned, and walked off. At the door to the room with the built-in steps, she stopped and swung around. “Look, you have to understand something. We can’t permit you to fail. If you fail, we fail—all of us—and we’ve worked too hard for that to happen.”
Understanding this, the scouts nodded again.
“You kids are from the Outside. Outsiders are weak. And where there’s weakness, there’s danger.” She paused. “But Darby sees something in you, that’s for sure. And I admit that old man has a good eye for stuff—and for people, too.”
She left another awkward silence—a silence that Noah filled with a question he’d been wanting to ask for a long time.
“Hannah?”
“Yeah?”
“Those boots”— he pointed to her feet—“you’re always wearing them, and they’re . . . they’re just so strange.”
Hannah’s stare moved across the four scouts. She breathed out a small pink bubble that burst against her lips. With a quick lap of her tongue, she wiped her mouth clean. “They’re just boots. I wear them ’cause I like them.”
She turned and climbed the steps. The scouts heard her footsteps across the ceiling, then they watched her fall from the hatch onto the island. She glanced at the scouts and casually dropped into the pool to the gateway that would take her home.
“They’re not just boots,” Noah said. “Hannah’s not telling us everything. The Descenders—they’re hiding something from us.”
Megan nodded. “Yeah, I get the same feeling.”
The scouts said nothing else. They grabbed their backpacks, rummaged inside for dry clothes, changed in the exhibit’s bathrooms, then stepped out of the Wotter Park into the early darkness.
As they walked across the cold zoo landscape, their eyes scanned the dark surroundings for signs of movement— signs of the Shadowist. They kept quiet, their thoughts turned to the mounting strangeness and mystery of the Secret Zoo.
Chapter 25
Words from a Dictionary
After their adventure at the Wotter Park, life went back to normal for the scouts for a week. In school they tried to focus on their work and steer clear of Wide Walt, who was surely planning some type of retribution for the cafeteria incident. At home they spent the evenings hanging out in Fort Scout, their conversations about the Secret Zoo and their next crosstraining. They wondered about the Descenders, worried about the sasquatches, and guessed about the Grottoes. Thanksgiving came and went.
On their walk home from school on Monday, the last day of November, the scouts were delivered another Instant Marlo when the kingfisher flew out of nowhere and perched on Noah’s shoulder. The note asked if the scouts were available to crosstrain on Saturday morning at nine o’clock. The scouts sent the note back with a “yes” response, then made plans for a Friday night sleepover at the Nowickis, which was rarely a problem with their parents. Ella often stayed with Megan, and Richie with Noah. On Saturday, the scouts could wake early and head to the zoo together.
Now, it was almost midnight on Friday night. Noah and Megan’s parents had retired to bed. The scouts were lounging around in their pajamas in the living room. Ella and Megan sat on the couch, Noah lay on the floor, and Richie sat all the way back in a large, pillowy recliner. In whispers, they were talking about the Secret Zoo.
No one understood the butterflies Noah had seen in the Grottoes. Where exactly had they come from? Where did they go? And why were there so many tunnels? Did they all go to the Secret Zoo? If not, then where?
They thought about the Descenders. What had moved inside Tameron’s backpack? Why did Sam have zippers on his jacket beneath his arms? Why did Hannah have such strange boots? And why did the four teenagers resent the scouts so much?
At one point Richie struggled out of the deep cushions on his recliner and said, “Bathroom break. I’ll be back.”
He left the room, then reappeared a few minutes later. As he strolled across the carpet, Ella said, “Honestly, Richie—those pajamas . . .”
Richie stopped and looked at his outfit. His shirt and pants were covered with miniature R2-D2s.
“What’s the matter? You got something against droids?” Ella smiled. “If we look up dork in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure we’ll find your class picture.”
Richie happened to be near a bookcase when Ella said this. He scanned the books and then pulled out a thick dictionary. “Let’s just see about that.” He thumbed through a few pages, touched his finger to a place, and said, “Nope. No Richie.” Then he flipped forward a bunch of pages. “But if we go here . . . Ah, yes. Here’s my picture. Under genius.”
The scouts laughed.
“Look up descender,” Noah said.
“Huh?”
“Just look it up. Is it even a real word?”
Richie turned to a page, read a few lines, then set the weighty dictionary on the floor beside Noah. “Weird,” he said. “Check it out.”
The scouts huddled around and rea
d from the page.
* * *
de·scend·er noun 1: in printing, the part of a lowercase letter that extends below the body; for example, in the letter y, the descender is the tail, or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two converging lines.
“Doesn’t make much sense to me,” Ella said. “We’re talking people, not letters.”
“Agreed,” said Richie.
Noah lifted the dictionary up to Richie, who planted it back into the row of books.
Around one o’clock in the morning, they decided to go upstairs to bed. As the girls slipped into Megan’s room, the boys went into Noah’s. Richie immediately fell asleep, but Noah didn’t. He lay in bed, fitfully tossing and turning. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to him in the Grottoes.
An hour passed. Then another. Noah’s bedside clock showed the time in glowing digits: 3:10. Noah finally dozed off and then woke, groggy and worried. The clock read 7:57. He angrily threw off the covers and went downstairs. He poured a bowl of cereal. Halfway through it, he became curious about the word descender again. What they’d read in the dictionary hadn’t made sense—not when applied to people.
A thought filled his head. He stopped crunching on the cereal and sat perfectly still, a bead of milk streaming down his chin.
Maybe the scouts had focused on the wrong word.
He jumped from the table and went to the bookcase in the living room. He pulled out the dictionary, sat on the couch, and starting flipping through the pages. Instead of stopping on the word descender, he stopped on the word descend. Then he read from the page.
de·scend verb 1: to approach or pounce upon, especially in a greedy or hasty manner 2: to attack, especially with violence and suddenness 3: to sink or come down from a certain intellectual, moral, or social standard.
Noah tapped the page and stared off into space. He thumbed forward and found the word descender again. Once more, he read the definitions.
“These don’t mean anything,” he said to himself. “They don’t . . .”
He fell silent. A few of the words in the definition seemed to jump off the page. He read out loud the phrases that struck him as important: “‘The part . . . that extends below the body . . . the descender is the tail . . . created by the two converging lines.’”
He raised his eyes and stared at the wall.
“‘The part below the body . . . the tail.’”
The definition undoubtedly referred to letters. But was it possible that the Secret Society was using it to refer to something else? Noah scanned the passage again.
“Like an animal’s tail?” he asked himself.
He focused on the final words, created by the two converging lines, and remembered his first day of crosstraining, and how Tameron had mentioned that there were two lines of defense protecting the sector gateways, a line of humans and a line of animals. Each line had its own strengths.
What if these two lines of defense could converge? What if the two species that protected the Secret Zoo could become one? With the intelligence of a human and the strength of an animal . . .
Noah scoured his thoughts for something meaningful, something relevant. Four distinct images came to him: Tameron’s backpack; Hannah’s long, bulky boots; the zippers and buckles on Sam’s jacket; and the pin-size holes in Solana’s leather outfit.
His heart began to hammer. He focused his gaze back on the dictionary. As he tried to locate descender on the page, he stumbled across another word: descendant. Could being a Descender have something to do with being a descendant?
No, Noah told himself. “Descender” and “descendant” . . . two different things.
But weren’t nicknames suggestive rather than literal? But a descendant of what? he asked himself. He thought of the short history of the Secret Zoo—not more than a hundred years. What kind of ancestry could this blip in time include?
Forget it, he told himself. He slammed the dictionary closed. You’re overtired—making something out of nothing. Try to relax.
But there was no way he was going to relax. Not now. Not until he had some answers about who the Descenders really were. Not until he understood the Grottoes and their purpose.
Noah checked the clock: 8:10. The scouts planned to leave for crosstraining around 8:45, before Noah’s parents normally woke. Maybe he could get to the zoo early and have another look at the Grottoes. This time he’d be more careful. This time he’d run down the tunnels, read the engraving on the plates, and then get out. He could leave a note with his friends telling them that he’d gone early to the zoo.
Without another thought, he went upstairs and quietly got dressed in his bedroom, stepping over Richie in his sleeping bag as he walked between his dressers. Back downstairs, he put on his jacket and red cap and slipped into the garage. He grabbed his bike and silently stepped out the side door.
He pedaled down the street, his thoughts on the Grottoes. At Walkers Boulevard, he turned right. As the Clarksville Zoo appeared in the dim morning light, Noah realized that in his haste he’d forgotten to leave his friends the note.
Chapter 26
Back to the Grottoes
Noah parked his bike and headed to the zoo entrance. The attendant at the front booth was a bit surprised to see Noah so early in the morning, but she simply waved at him as he spun the turnstile. Being a Crosser came with its privileges, Noah thought, and one of those privileges was not being questioned by zoo workers about early morning visits.
He ran across the zoo grounds. The shortest path to Butterfly Nets involved cutting across a series of connected paths—concrete to dirt to concrete again. All across the zoo, animals raised their heads at the commotion. Realizing that he was making too much noise, Noah slowed to a jog.
As he passed the outdoor exhibits, he peered into them. They prickled with activity. At the Bear with Us! exhibit, a pack of watchful black bears prowled a concrete mountainside. At Ostrich Island, a crowd of ostriches jostled for space, their blocky, feathered rumps colliding. At the Elephant Event, several elephants roamed the yard, their trunks swinging, their ears flapping, and their ivory tusks stabbing up at the yawning sky.
Noah reached Butterfly Nets and used his magic key to get inside. The exhibit was quiet and still. He hurried across the bridge to the clearing, slipped through the rails, and headed to where the Grottoes waited. When he reached the stairs, he stopped to stare down into the darkness.
Just be careful, he told himself. Read the engravings, then get the heck out.
He took one step, then another, then began to breathe in the cool air of the Grottoes. At the bottom of the staircase, the lights switched on. He walked down the short passage to the two branches—one left, one right—and looked in each direction. The Grottoes were perfectly still. He peered out at the distant metal plates but, as before, he couldn’t read them from his angle.
He took a step down the left branch and fear halted him. He remembered the butterflies and the blinding way they had flown all around him, causing him to lose his bearings.
He peered at the plate above the nearest tunnel. He could faintly see the engraving, but he couldn’t yet read the letters.
Be brave, Noah told himself. And be quick.
He took five fast steps, stopping at the mouth of the first tunnel. Above the curtain, an engraving read, THE SECRET ELEPHANT EVENT. He moved to the next tunnel, which read THE POLAR POOL. Then he went to the third tunnel, which read THE SECRET KOALA KASTLE.
He realized something. The name above the second tunnel was different than the other two. It was marked THE POLAR POOL rather than THE SECRET POLAR POOL. Why? Why was the word secret missing? Why had—
His thoughts stopped. He heard something beyond the mouth of the fourth tunnel. Stomping. Something was headed for the gateway—a large animal. The tunnel floor trembled. Flecks of mortar skipped down the brick walls.
The curtain suddenly burst inward, and a rhino plodded into the Grottoes. The curtain sli
d off its horned snout as the big animal turned in Noah’s direction, pressing him against the wall. As the rhino rumbled down the tunnel, it swept against Noah, twisting and pulling him along.
A second rhino brushed the curtain aside. A third, a fourth—each one on the tail end of the one before it. They either didn’t see Noah, or didn’t care that he was there.
Noah sloppily stepped sideways, trying to prevent himself from twisting in a knot. His cheek scraped the brick wall and the front of his jacket tore open.
Several feet to his right, a curtain dangled. Noah had to get to it or risk being squashed. He squirmed several feet along the wall and then was pushed through the gateway. Water engulfed him and Noah understood why: he’d passed through a wall of water similar to those in the Wotter Tower elevator.
It was pitch-black. His legs kicking, Noah twisted and turned. He lost his sense of direction and couldn’t decide where the curtain was. When he tried to rise for air, he bumped his head. He swam back and forth, sweeping his arms above him, hoping to find an opening or a place to surface. Nothing.
In his panic, Noah quickly ran out of breath. His heart began to hammer painfully in his chest. He finally detected a sliver of light and swam to it with all his might. Just as he reached it, the world blinked out and the pain in Noah’s chest stopped.
In the dark body of water connected to the Grottoes, Noah had passed out.
Chapter 27
The Scouts Wake Up
Richie was munching on a mouthful of sugary corn-flakes when Ella poked her head into the dining room.
“Where’s Noah?” she asked.
Richie shrugged. “Haven’t seen him.” Milk dribbled down his chin. “He was already up when the alarm clock went off this morning.”
It was just before 8:30. Noah and Megan’s parents were still sleeping, and Ella, Megan, and Richie were dressed and almost ready to leave for crosstraining.
Ella went upstairs. Noah’s bed was empty, and so was the bathroom. She headed back into the kitchen, where Richie had just loaded another spoonful of cereal into his mouth.