Alistair threw up his hands. “Are you kidding me?”
“We know, buddy,” Chip said. “It’s a bit weird, but it’s necessary.”
“A bit weird?” Alistair said. “It’s plain stupid. Kyle, say you don’t want to make a wish. That’s how I answered, and they let me out.”
Dot shot Alistair a disapproving look. “If he says that, then we’ll definitely know he’s a cipher.”
“What? You make no sense.” Alistair put his hands back on the glass and tried to shake it open. Impossible.
“Don’t sweat it, little guy,” Kyle said. “I got this. I’ve even heard this riddle before. My three wishes would be…”
He put up a thumb. “Numero uno: I’d wish for infinite wishes.”
He put up an index finger. “Second wish: I’d wish that I’d never met the genie.”
He put up his middle finger and lowered the thumb and the index. “Wish the third: I’d wish you’d all stick this where the sun don’t shine.”
Then he laughed, hard.
If anything was going to seal it for Alistair, a vulgar joke was it. “That’s definitely Kyle,” he said. “You have to let him out.”
It also sealed it for Dot and Chip. “Cipher?” Dot asked.
Chip sighed and confirmed. “Cipher.”
All the yellow lights in the room shifted over to red. Chip pressed some buttons. Water began to fill Kyle’s chamber, pooling up around him like a bath being drawn.
“What’s going on, little guy?” Kyle asked Alistair.
“They’re trying to drown you,” Alistair cried as he sprinted over to the wall and slapped his hand against every button he could.
Chip and Dot didn’t bother to stop him. Water kept coming. “Sorry, guy,” Chip said. “Press all you want, but if you don’t know the combos, you aren’t gonna do a thing. It’s like playing a piano. You can’t hit random keys and get Beethoven.”
The water was up to Kyle’s chin when he said, “Okay, you can shut off the taps. Point taken. You don’t appreciate gettin’ flipped the bird.”
“You’re insane!” Alistair yelled at Chip and Dot.
“He’s a cipher,” Dot said calmly.
“He’s a friend!”
“He’s a cipher,” Chip echoed.
As the water slipped over his face, Kyle began to fight. He swung his fists and feet wildly. Alistair ran back to the glass shell. The chamber was soon full, and Kyle was flailing under the water, his arms and legs slowed by the liquid. Alistair pounded on the glass. It didn’t give at all. “Let him out!” Alistair cried. “Let him out! Let him out! Let him out!”
“He’s trying to fool you,” Dot said.
“He may look like the guy you know, but he’s not that guy,” Chip added. “Trust us.”
“Let him out! Please! Just let him out!”
“He’s a monster. Sent to trick. Sent to destroy,” Dot said.
With the chamber now full, Kyle’s eyes rolled back. His body went limp, floated to the top, and pressed against the glass. The blood from the wound in his stomach swayed red ribbons through the water.
“Let him out. Let him out. Let him out…” Alistair’s voice faded as his fists slowed down and finally stopped. He spread his palms across the glass and positioned them so he was almost cupping Kyle’s lifeless face.
More typing and button-pushing, lights shifting to green, then the counter opened again and the water and Kyle’s body slipped away. Even more button-pushing and the walls and ceiling folded up and Alistair, Chip, and Dot were back among the collection of ciphers. At a far end of the gallery, Kyle’s body ascended from a hole in the floor. A stick shot up and mounted him in place, his body frozen in a manic pose—fingers curled, joints bent, like he was about to pounce. He was now part of the collection.
* * *
The instinct to run was strong. This place was poison. These kids were heartless. And Alistair had a chance. He spotted a door, not far past where they’d mounted Kyle.
“Don’t bother, ace,” Chip said, placing a firm hand on Alistair’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t know how to open it, anyway.”
Dot passed Alistair her glasses. “Put them on.”
“I don’t follow orders from murderers,” Alistair replied.
“Put them on,” Dot repeated. “And then you can apologize to us.”
“Put ’em on, buddy,” Chip said, in a much kinder tone. “You’ll want to see this.”
The glasses were warm and hummed as if a little motor was running inside them, but the lenses looked normal. It was only when Dot had worn them that the red and white spirals had appeared.
“What the heck am I supposed to see?” Alistair asked.
“Proof that we’re not murderers,” Dot said. Then she snatched the glasses back, flicked her wrist to open the frames, and slipped them over Alistair’s face.
Everything became black or glowed an electric purple. A purple skull, with dark eye sockets and slightly crooked teeth, hovered in front of Alistair. “See what we mean?” the skull said in Dot’s voice.
The punch of surprise knocked Alistair back a few steps. Two purple human skeletons with two purple skulls stood in front of him, presenting their hands in a gesture of peace. “Spooky, right?” said a skeleton in Chip’s voice.
Alistair raised his own hand in front of his face and, sure enough, there was no flesh to see, only purple glowing bones. “X-ray?”
“Specs,” the skeletal Chip said. “That’s right. X-ray specs. Finest you’ll ever wear.”
“Look around,” the skeletal Dot said.
This was an order Alistair was happy to follow. For years, ever since he saw them advertised in the back of a magazine, he’d wanted a pair of these things. Even after Keri had told him they were “as fake as the tooth fairy,” he’d harbored hopes that someday science would catch up with his desires.
Though he was unlikely to admit it, back home, he would’ve wanted them to see through clothes, and he would’ve used them for more scandalous purposes. Here in Quadrant 43, they saw through flesh, and all he had were ciphers to look at. Mounted in the displays were glowing skeletons. There were the bones of a dog, maybe a hippo, possibly a sloth, and numerous other animals of various shapes and sizes. When Alistair lowered the glasses to the tip of his nose and peered over the rims, the same ciphers—those misshapen and terrifying monsters—populated the room, but when he pushed the glasses back up, it was animal bones that lurked inside of the flesh.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “The bones don’t match.”
“The mark of a cipher. Dem bones, dem bones gonna defy the laws of biology,” Chip sang.
“Now look at Kyle,” Dot said.
Lowering the glasses again to get his bearings, Alistair located his friend, taking notice of his hair, his eyes, his build, which was the build of an eighteen-year-old guy—skinny but basically normal. Pushing the X-ray specs back over his eyes revealed bones that were also normal. Only they were normal for a bird.
“No,” Alistair said.
“Yes indeedy,” Chip said.
“A penguin,” Dot added. “Small one too. A rockhopper I’m guessing.”
“No, no, no.” Alistair took the glasses off and thrust them at Dot, who happily took them back.
“A strange bit of voodoo,” Chip said, “but the Whisper works in mysterious ways.”
The air came out of Alistair all at once. “I need to sit down,” he said.
* * *
To open the door at the back of the gallery, Chip had to enter a code. To enter the code, he had to spin a rotary dial mounted on the wall, exactly like the type found on older telephones. He must have done it countless times, because he dialed so fast that Alistair couldn’t tell what the code was.
Through the door, Chip and Dot led Alistair down a passageway with a ceiling of glass. Starlight and the glow of distant planets provided the only illumination, but it was enough to light their way to another door where Chip dialed in anot
her code and granted them passage into a dimly lit room outfitted with leather sofas, wooden coffee tables, and walls that doubled as movie screens.
Alistair immediately flopped down on a sofa and closed his eyes.
“I guess I don’t have to say, ‘Go on, make yourself at home,’” Dot remarked.
Alistair didn’t bother responding. His body was melting into the cushions.
“You should obviously sleep,” Dot went on. “But first we need to clear a few things up. Where exactly were you trying to get when you arrived here? And where exactly did you think you were going to find Polly Dobson?”
“The Ambit of Ciphers,” Alistair said with a yawn. “She has a missing friend too, and that’s where she’s looking. So that’s where I’m going. Give me a few hours, and I’ll be on my way. As long as you can point me in the right direction.”
Dot clucked her tongue in disapproval. “A long time ago, Chip and I teamed up and decided we were going to find our way home. We heard of the Ambit of Ciphers. We heard that if you battled through it, you would reach the Whisper and maybe even all the souls and people he captured. But were we ready? Could we handle it?”
“Short answer: no,” Chip said.
“Long answer: heck no,” Dot said. “We searched everywhere for the Ambit of Ciphers, but when we came upon this space station, we realized our time was better spent here.”
“This is a space station?”
“Of course,” Chip said. “Brought to life by some brainy daydreamer. The kid was a real sciency type, obsessed with studying and analyzing.”
“Before the Whisper stole the kid’s soul and world,” Dot added, “this daydreamer made all sorts of gadgets that monitored the emotions, thoughts, and health of figments.”
“You mean that room?” Alistair asked. “The buttons? The typewriter?”
“Yep, and the X-ray glasses, everything,” Dot said. “And we’ve learned to use them and apply them to swimmers and ciphers.”
“Kyle was not a cipher,” Alistair said. “Couldn’t you see that? He was a person. Not a monster.”
“But you saw his bones,” Dot said. “Clearly a penguin.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Alistair said, and yet he couldn’t deny the strange coincidence. It’s not often that you meet a penguin and a man with penguin bones on the very same day.
“It’s ridiculous to a mind that didn’t come up with it,” Dot said. “Just like that typewriter is ridiculous, or the glasses are ridiculous.”
“Or this racing stripe,” Chip added. He peeled the racing stripe off his green pants like it was a strip of masking tape and he crumpled it into a ball that he threw against the ground. It bounced back faster than it was thrown and ricocheted around the room, painting the air with little streaks of lightning before hitting his pants and reattaching itself as a stripe.
“Exactly,” Dot said. “The daydreamer who created this world had a different mind from yours. Our personal imaginations are—how should I say this?—personal. We can only use the materials we have. And the Whisper does the same thing. Which raises the question: He made this cipher, this Kyle. You said you knew Kyle from home. How does the Whisper know who you know?”
“You know more about the Whisper than you wanna say, don’t you?” Chip asked.
Of course he did, but Alistair was so fed up with the strangeness, with the violence, with everything in Aquavania, that exhausted anger split him open and he yelled his response. “Maybe I do! But what do you know? Really? If you’re so smart, why haven’t you stopped him yet?”
Dot tugged down on the fabric of her jumpsuit, flattening a few wrinkles. Her calm demeanor still in place, she turned toward the door and responded, “That’s perhaps the question we should be asking you. But you’re cranky and tired. I think it’s best if you sleep on things.”
CHAPTER 13
Alistair’s dreams weren’t dreams at all. They were memories. Soft and lilting visions and sounds from happier times. Alistair saw his parents unloading the car at a beach house they had rented when Alistair was barely five years old. He saw Keri dancing at a ballet recital, her face twisted in a grimace as she performed pirouettes. He saw Fiona Loomis on her bicycle, riding up and down the street, her dark hair fanning out behind her like a crow’s wing.
Alistair watched snippets of his life, pleasant things, hopeful moments. For the longest stretch, he was back in the Skylark, a restaurant where he and Fiona went to dinner once. He was watching her smile, and eat, and laugh. Beautiful. He had never told her that, but it was true. She was beautiful, and not because she looked like she should be famous. It was how she cared about things. The tilt of her head. The way she brushed away her bangs. Her deep stare that told Alistair she was listening. And feeling.
Waking from these memories was jarring. It took Alistair more than a few moments to figure out where he was. To say he was disappointed would be an understatement. Each bit of realization slapped on another layer of dread.
I’m on a sofa … in a lounge … down the hall from a monster gallery … which is part of a space station … that is floating through Quadrant 43 … one of the many worlds in Aquavania. Damn it!
“There you are.”
Alistair rolled over onto his side and looked across the room. Chip was sitting on another sofa. He cradled a thick leather-bound book. On the walls, four black-and-white movies played. Cowboys and Indians. A heroic dog. Gangsters. Teenagers in love.
“How long was I asleep?”
“More than a few hours,” Chip said. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d come and watch a few movies. Maybe powwow with you if you were awake.”
“I am now,” Alistair said, rubbing his eyes. He did feel well rested. Hardly calm, but certainly well rested.
“Did you enjoy your memories?” Chip asked.
“What’s that?”
Chip looked up and sighed. “I wish I still had those. Thing is, when you first get to Aquavania, you don’t dream. This place is already like a dream, right? So instead you get to look at memories when you sleep. Sometimes when you’re awake too. Memories will smack you like gusts of wind.”
Alistair nodded, because that was exactly what had been happening to him. Memories as vivid as the present seemed to be hiding around every corner in Aquavania.
“It passes,” Chip told him. “Your brain changes. The memories stop coming. First during the day, then at night. Soon you only sleep. And it’s black. And it’s nothing.”
“I prefer nightmares,” Alistair said.
“Come again?”
“Really,” Alistair said as he sat up. “When you wake up from a nightmare, it’s a relief. You know that your real life is better than all that scary stuff. Give me nightmares or nothing over nice memories and dreams.”
“You’re not happy with how life is going for you?” Chip asked.
Alistair might have laughed if it weren’t so sad. “I’m trapped in some alternate dimension, full of monsters and crazy people, and I’m looking for my friend, and I promised some penguin that I’d find his friend, and I’m basically guessing about where they might be, and my best friend, he’s … well, let’s say life could be better.”
Chip laughed for the both of them. “When you put it that way…” He stood and walked over to the coffee table next to Alistair. He set the book down.
“Stories?” Alistair asked.
“A map,” he said. “Actually, a collection of maps. An atlas. If it were one map, it’d be as big as this space station.”
Alistair flipped the cover open and read the title and inscription:
THE CAPTURED REALMS OF AQUAVANIA
Without the tireless work of countless swimmers, this book would not exist. Remember their sacrifices and use this wisely. Pay heed to warnings. Whenever possible, record your discoveries.
He turned to the first page. It was a map labeled MAHALOO (THE ENTRYWAY).
On the edge of the page there were numerous candy-colored rivers, feeding into a ring
of fields that formed a grassy border around everything else. In one of the fields there was a rock icon, which was labeled as THE HERDS OF NIGHT. Woodlands made up a great deal of the map, and there were valleys cutting through like wrinkles on an old face. The land was populated with numerous creeks, ponds, and lakes. On a few of the bodies of water there were golden rings, marked with text.
THE ELFIN SEA
ROKOKO’S LABYRINTH
ROOM 101
ISLANDS IN SOUP
THE HUTCH
That last ring was centered on a tiny pond, presumably the same pond that Polly had made Alistair dive into, the same one that led to …
Alistair pressed his finger to the golden ring and the pages started to flip on their own. He pulled his hand away, as if from snapping teeth, but it took barely a second for the book to stop on the page labeled THE HUTCH.
There it all was. The trails. The village. The platform. The sea of blood. The underground fortress. The tentacles. Golden rings clustered around the tentacles. They were labeled with more ambiguous names. All except for two. One was labeled PLANET POLAR BEAR. Another, THE AMBIT OF CIPHERS.
Alistair pressed the dot next to THE AMBIT OF CIPHERS. Nothing.
“No one’s been there and recorded anything,” Chip said. “So we don’t have any solid data yet. Only rumors.”
“What are the rumors?”
“That it’s a place where the Whisper keeps the worst of the ciphers. It forms a border around his home. If you make it through, then you make it to him.”
Alistair looked back at the map of the Hutch. There was a message written at the top in red ink: According to swimmer Alistair Cleary, the Mandrake may have dominion over this world. Hadrian may be dead. Until more evidence is presented, consider this map unreliable.
“We edited that after you went to sleep,” Chip explained. “Dot likes to keep things up-to-date.”
Along with the golden ring, Alistair saw a red ring labeled THE MANDRAKE. He pressed the red ring and a tab shot up from the page like an illustration in a pop-up book. It displayed the following text:
The Whisper Page 12