by Ryan Graudin
If Jake had let go of Nana’s goodbye first thing, so easily . . .
Well, then, what was next?
Marisol held her breath, but Jake’s remaining sand didn’t fall.
Her lungs started to burn.
She exhaled slowly. Getting angry wouldn’t do them any good. “If we want to get home, we should be calm on the route.”
“Huh—?” Her primo blinked. “Sorry, I was watching Oz. What’ve you got there, bud?”
The Tasmanian tiger had planted himself by a large leaf and was sniffing at its inhabitant: a lumpy, bright orange toad.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you!” A British voice rang out, clear as a bell. “That amphibian is one of the most poisonous creatures alive!”
Marisol and Jake turned to find a man emerging from the underbrush. He was dressed like an explorer—from his broad-brimmed hat to his worn boots. A crumpled handkerchief fluttered from his hand.
He waved it toward them with a reassuring grin. “It’s all right, young travelers! I’m a friend! Are you lost?”
“Yes,” Jake answered.
“Isn’t everyone lost here?” Marisol pointed out.
The man stroked his dark moustache. “I suppose so. But there are different types of lost, you see. Explorers lose themselves on purpose. The Unknown feeds our bones and fuels our souls. You two, on the other hand, look disoriented. Is there some place I can help you find?”
“We’re searching for someone actually—” Marisol paused when she realized Oz was still investigating the venomous reptile. “Stop that, Oz! You’ll get hurt!”
The newcomer took a closer look. “Ah—I was mistaken. Sometimes I forget which Amazon I’m in. This isn’t a golden poison frog but a golden toad. It wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Don’t toads eat flies?” Jake asked.
“That they do!” Wrinkles gathered around the man’s eyes as he laughed. “You’ve both got vim and vigor, that’s for sure. Colonel Percy Fawcett, at your service.”
Introductions were exchanged. Oz wandered over to a cluster of trees, his snout tilted skyward. Marisol was about to explain their search again when she realized exactly what the thylacine was staring at.
One of the trunks was moving.
And it had scales.
“Is—wait, what is that? A snake?” Her theory about extinct things being bigger looked right: the creature was almost forty feet long. It could swallow an elephant, no problem.
“A Titanoboa cerrejonensis. Amazing to look at, scary to see.” Percy backed away from the slithering giant. “Still, I’d rather take my odds out here with these beasts than be chained to some Curator’s clipboard. Life is so much bigger beneath the trees . . . plus I have some T-rex repellent back at camp. Come. We’ll be safe there.”
They didn’t have to think twice about following him.
The explorer’s camp was tucked into a rare clearing. A fire burned inside a ring of packs and mules. Two younger men crouched by the flames and another sat on a log, while a fourth gentleman carved the letter L into a nearby tree.
“Watch your step!” Percy warned as they followed him through the last of the underbrush, past the woodcarver. “Herr Ludwig Leichhardt here likes to string nets around the perimeter—they kept him safe from beasties in Australia when he was exploring the place.”
“We think so anyway. Poor chap’s memory has gone past half-glass!” exclaimed one of the men by the fire, who wore a hat like Percy’s and shared the same longish nose. “Who do we have here, Dad?”
“Marisol, Jake, and Oz, meet my son, Jack, and his friend Raleigh, who both joined me on my journey to search for the Lost City of Z!”
Jack and Raleigh were in the middle of sorting through intricate shards of pottery. They paused to nod at the cousins.
Percy Fawcett turned toward the camp’s last member. “And this is the intrepid Uemura Naomi, who arrived in the World after summiting Mount McKinley.”
Naomi was a middle-aged Japanese man in a red flannel shirt. So far, all the explorers seemed to be men. Perhaps, Marisol mused, lady explorers were too clever to get lost?
He bowed his head in greeting and edged over on his log, offering the cousins a seat. “Welcome, travelers!” His voice was musically deep. “Please call me Naomi. What brings you to Amazonia?”
The T-rex repellent Percy started spraying around the campsite made the whole place smell like peppermint.
“Well . . .” Jake pinched his nostrils. Everything he said sounded sucked through a straw. “It’s a long story.”
“Always better than a short one.” Jack Fawcett grinned.
Marisol and Jake took turns telling their tale, and even though she’d lived the adventure, it was strange to hear. Drowned cities, a desert queen, and prehistoric monsters? Mom and Dad would never believe this. Victor would probably pee his pants with laughter.
The explorers, however, seemed rapt. Except for Herr Leichhardt, who was busy carving a second L onto a second tree.
“So now we’re trying to get back the stolen ledger so we can go home,” Marisol said.
“Home?” Percy seemed stunned. “Whyever would you want to do that?”
Jack broke in, smiling at his father’s surprise. “Not everyone’s like you, Dad. You were always more at home in uncharted jungle than in England. Truly, it was the World Between Blinks calling you.”
“That it was,” his friend Raleigh agreed. “There were always rumors about the Lost City of Z—stories about a piece of pottery someone found deep in the Amazon, about a trace of a building left behind, about piles of treasure beyond counting. Legends that sent men searching the jungle. They always returned empty-handed.”
“And now we know why,” Jack concluded. “The Lost City of Z had already disappeared on the other side of the Unknown by then. We strove so hard to find it that we slipped through too.”
“It’s just upriver,” Percy said, his eyes shining with all the gold he could not see. “For now, anyway. The Lost City of Z is more beautiful than anything the imagination could conjure.”
“What do you mean, it’s upriver for now?” Jake asked.
“It refuses to stay still,” replied Percy. “Here one day, gone the next.”
“Oh, just like Portus.” Jake glanced at Marisol. “It keeps moving back to where it wants to be, no matter what the Curators do.”
“Just so, my lad,” Percy agreed, pleased. “The city doesn’t want to be in any one place. It wants to stay lost, and that suits us right down to the ground. The joy is in the chase, you know! We love nothing better than to hunt for it!”
“Really, who’d want to find it properly anyway?” Jack touched the brim of his hat, which looked as if it had been on his head for quite some time. “What would you do then? Grow corn? Raise chickens? Miss home?” He shook off this thought. “Once we laid eyes on Dad’s city for the first time, we knew there was no going back. We belong here.”
Marisol swallowed. This sounded similar to what Jake had said on the ocean floor: You say the lostness pulls you. I think it follows me, and this time it finally caught up. Like . . . like I belong here, or something.
What if they were in the World Between Blinks because of Jake?
What if he wanted to stay here too?
Her cousin leaned close to the fire, drawn in by the explorers’ words.
She fought the urge to pull him back. “Aren’t any of you sad, being lost?”
Raleigh and the Fawcetts shook their heads. Herr Leichhardt kept hacking away at the trunk.
Naomi picked at his flannel shirt, thoughtful. “Sad?” he asked. “No. Not sad. This is the biggest adventure any of us could ever undertake! Meeting such fascinating people and seeing such strange sights. I, for one, have made it my mission to explore every part of this world.”
“It has been an adventure,” Marisol replied. “But we still want to go home to our family.”
Oz, who’d been resting by their log, cried out in warning. Branches snapp
ed. All five explorers whirled around, brandishing whatever they had on hand—pottery shards and the can of T-rex repellent and a pocket knife.
There was another crack.
Then . . .
Thwip!
“By golly!” Jack Fawcett tipped up his hat and squinted into the emerald jungle. Howls erupted from the leaves. “I think Herr Leichhardt’s trap actually caught something!”
The German explorer stood by his chiseled initial, looking vaguely surprised. “A dingo?”
“Dingoes don’t exist here, mate,” Raleigh reminded him. “It could be a dire wolf, though.”
“Or a demon duck of doom,” Percy said. “It sounds squawky enough.”
“I AM NOT A FOWL!”
Marisol’s heart forgot to keep beating.
She knew that voice.
So did Jake. Her cousin sprang to his feet and ran for the trees. Marisol followed with the rest of the camp, halting beneath a giant net that looked like it belonged in a scene from an adventure movie.
There, swinging alongside several vines, was Christopher Creaturo.
“LET ME DOWN!” He was upside down, arms and legs poking through at odd angles, unable to see who he was shouting at. “PLEASE!”
Percy Fawcett’s head moved in circles, taking stock of the man. “What is a Curator doing so deep in the unzoned zone? With a ledger, no less.”
“He’s not a Curator!” Marisol and Jake said, almost in unison.
Christopher looked more like a castaway now, anyhow. His suit was less white after a night in the desert and a day in the jungle. His face was red from twisting against the ropes. His expression went limp as soon as he spotted the cousins.
“Oh, hello. Marisol. Jake,” he said meekly. “How—how did you get here so fast?” The ledger was already mashed to his chest, but Christopher repositioned to hug the book even tighter. “Ah, those were your parachutes. . . . You jumped out of an airplane to beat me. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re both Berunas, through and through. I—I don’t suppose you’d like to free me from this net?”
“Why should we?” Jake crossed his arms. “All you’ve done since the Aral Sea is run away from us!”
“Wait, is this the chap who tricked you?” Percy asked.
“¡Sí!” Marisol’s answer burned. “He made us steal the ledger! And he’s been using it steal other things, like Queen Nefertiti’s Amber Room! He’s been creating cracks in the Unknown!”
“Cracks?” Christopher frowned.
“Um, yeah,” Jake told him. “You’re ripping the fabric between the worlds every time you send an object back through the Unknown. The Curators said you could destroy everything.”
“Really?” Christopher had a dizzy, almost-sick look on his face, even though the net was swinging less. “Oops.”
“Oops?” Marisol yelled. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
“Sounds more like an evil plan than an accident to me,” Colonel Fawcett interjected. “What exactly are you up to, my not-so-good fellow? And why have you dragged these poor children into your schemes?”
“I’m not evil,” Christopher protested. “And I wasn’t trying to steal the Amber Room, or any of the other entries I crossed out. Those were test runs to make sure I could safely send my one true love back home. I’m trying to save her, you see.”
“But if you’re not evil, then why did you trap Jake and me here? We want to return home too!”
“I’m sorry.” It was difficult to tell if Christopher was red from embarrassment or because he’d been hanging upside down for so long. “I didn’t know the Curators would be so cross with you. I only brought you here because—”
He didn’t get a syllable further—both the cousins and all of the explorers raised their voices at once, their words twisting together like a many-headed monster.
“How did you—?”
“My not-so-good sir, you cannot—”
“It’s not possible to—”
“What do you mean brought us here?”
“How could you—?”
“You can’t—”
“What do you mean BROUGHT US HERE?”
“I—” Christopher shrank from the clamor of voices, causing his net to twist again. “You have to understand, I desperately needed help. Those of us who’ve been cataloged by a Curator can’t enter the repositories—there was no way I could get an old ledger on my own. I needed someone who’d arrived here recently. So I snuck into the record room where they keep the current ledger, and wrote your names in.”
“You wrote their names in?” Percy Fawcett demanded. “Nobody has ever brought anybody to the World Between Blinks. Everybody knows the only way here is to slip through the Unknown by accident!”
“I’ve spent a long time hunting for a way,” Christopher replied. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had any other choice. My sister, Lucy, agreed to help me, but she was too frail by the time I had a plan in place. Aside from you two there was no one else in our family who could make the trip so easily—”
“Wait a second,” Jake interrupted. “Our family?”
Lucy. That was Nana’s name. Marisol had heard it said a thousand times, and she’d seen it written down with the middle initial as well: Lucy C. Beruna.
The jungle’s light shifted as Marisol finally saw Christopher Creaturo for the first time. Still-life. Black and white. An exact match to the wartime photograph in the beach house hallway. Where he stood beside Nana and Papa and the dancing woman from Kitezh—his one true love.
“You—” she whispered. “You’re Nana’s brother.”
14
Jake
A LONG, PRICKLY SILENCE FOLLOWED.
Percy was the one to break it, his accent punching through the clearing’s chorus of insects. “Nana? Who is Nana?”
“Our grandmother,” Jake answered, his head whirling.
“You are their great-uncle, sir?” Percy’s gaze swiveled back up to Christopher. “If that’s the case, this is a poor show indeed.”
Christopher squirmed against the ropes. “You must understand,” he said, almost pleading. “This is my last chance. My Hazel has faded, and soon I will fade too. Soon I’ll forget her and lose her forever.”
The look Jake and Marisol exchanged was crammed with a hundred questions, all of them wordless. Marisol didn’t speak, but Jake knew by the way her mouth had softened that she was willing to listen to Christopher. His cousin had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever met, and the break in Christopher’s voice was hard to hear. And he was—somehow, distantly—their long-lost relative.
Still, Jake wasn’t feeling very forgiving.
“We have a lot of questions,” he told his great-uncle.
“Starting with, who’s Hazel?” Marisol planted her hands on her hips. All stern. “Is she the lady we met underwater?”
Christopher managed a small nod. “She doesn’t remember me, but I visit her anyway.”
“This conversation might take a while,” Naomi observed. “Perhaps we should let Mr. Creaturo down before too much blood rushes to his head?”
“Yes, please,” their great-uncle croaked.
“It’s up to the children,” Percy decided. “What say you, Marisol and Jake?”
Marisol scrunched her nose. Then nodded. “Bueno.”
“But only if he promises not to run anymore,” Jake added.
The vow was made. Herr Leichhardt cut the rope with his pocketknife and lowered Christopher to the jungle’s loamy floor. He lay there for several seconds, letting his face become a less beet-like shade, before picking up the book and following them to camp.
“I’ll make some tea,” Jack Fawcett volunteered as everyone settled by the fire.
“Good idea, son!” said Percy. “Everything’s better with tea.”
A smile flickered across Christopher’s face. “That’s what Lucy used to say.”
Nana had said that, usually when she was pouring sweet tea into glasses tall enough to last throug
h two or three stories. By the end Jake was down to ice cubes, wanting more. But that wasn’t possible now—his grandmother was gone, the tea would be hot, and the idea that Christopher Creaturo was Nana’s brother was just too weird to swallow.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” he asked. “You’ve lied to us before. . . .”
“I can do better than tell,” said Christopher eagerly, digging in his pocket. “Let me show you my story.” He produced a miniature flashlight and began to peel off his jacket. “We’ll need to hang this up,” he instructed. “Stretch it out like a projection screen.”
Jack’s friend Raleigh stepped forward, taking the coat from him and pegging it up on the explorers’ makeshift clothesline. Several mismatched socks fell off to make room, which Oz dutifully collected as chew toys.
“This,” said Christopher, brandishing the flashlight, “is called an Illuminator. Curators use it to examine archived memories; shine it through a grain of sand and the scene comes to life!”
It felt as if the Illuminator’s light was beaming straight through Jake—gutting and glowing. If the Curators could use this tool to examine specific memories, then that meant they could tell one memory from another.
Perhaps there was a way to leave behind his worst memories—the goodbyes, the hurts—while keeping the ones he liked.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, thinking of what Archduke Johann had told them about missing memories. “The Library of Alexandria?”
“I imagine that’s where it came from,” Christopher said, in a vague sort of way that made Jake think that whoever had taken the Illuminator hadn’t asked for the Curators’ permission first.
Their great-uncle took off his necklace. Now that its hourglass wasn’t concealed by his shirt, Jake could see that much of the sand had fallen. Forgotten. Christopher flicked on the Illuminator and held it against the timepiece. Light shot through the top granules, landing on the white surface his jacket provided.
Jack Fawcett handed out cups of tea as an image appeared on the fabric, colors dancing to life in a quick swirl, then resolving into the most familiar view of Jake’s life.
“Nana’s beach house!” Marisol cried. “But who are those people?”