by Emma Otheguy
It was slow going, testing each step as she went, feeling for the stone walls on either side in the darkness. If she lost her footing, it would be a long way down.
Carmen counted steps. After the first hundred down, the walls on either side of the narrow stone stairs disappeared, replaced simply by open air. If she fell now, she would surely break her neck.
It grew cooler and more humid as she climbed lower, like the inside of an unusually deep cellar.
“You doing okay, Red?” Player asked softly.
“All clear,” Carmen replied. “It’s just one foot in front of the other right now.” She was two hundred steps deep. She guesstimated she had a few more hundred to go.
“Let’s recap today,” Player said. “This Salvador de Burgos character sounds pretty fishy. Who has a hidden room in their house?”
“There was definitely something fishy about it,” Carmen said. “But I can’t figure out how exactly he fits into all of this. VILE is definitely behind the theft of the silver castle—no one else could have gotten it out of that glass case, and, anyway, we already knew they had taken the throne.”
“Maybe he’s their local host,” Player said. “A kind of evil hospitality guy.”
“I don’t think that’s a thing.”
She could almost hear Player shrugging on the other end of the line.
“Maybe he’s a kind of black-market salesman,” Carmen said. “He might be helping VILE find rich art collectors. Only he didn’t sound like he was lying when he said he would never sell the throne.”
“You think that delivery really was the throne?”
“Had to be,” Carmen said. “Why else put it in a secret room?”
“He has a reputation for being a bit of a spoiled glutton. Maybe he really just wanted a refrigerator in his private room—sure beats going down to the kitchen every time you’re hungry,” said Player.
“You think Salvador de Burgos makes his own sandwiches? I can guarantee you he has servants for that.” Player laughed. “I’m only joking about the refrigerator. I agree with you—he’s up to something with that throne. I’ll tell Zack and Ivy to patrol around de Burgos’s mansion. Make sure he doesn’t get up to anything funny while we’re down here—”
“Player,” Carmen interrupted. “I think I reached the bottom.” She slid her foot as far out in front of her as she could, making sure it wasn’t just some midway landing. But it wasn’t. She was in the maze below the Archivo General de Indias, deep below the city of Sevilla, Spain.
Carmen found the nearest wall and inched along it, using her hands to feel for anything unusual on the surface of the wall, and sweeping a flashlight in every direction. The maze looked unremarkable. All around she saw only the same rough tan stone that all of Sevilla seemed to be built from. So far, there were no forks or unexpected turns. She followed what felt like an endless tunnel. Finally, she turned a sharp corner and was standing in front of the vault where the silver castle had been found.
It was unmistakable. Carmen supposed building the vault in a maze deep below the city was enough disguise, but she hadn’t expected it to be so ostentatious. The door was layered with gold and silver, and over it was some kind of inscription. Carmen shone her flashlight at it.
PARA LA GLORIA DEL REY DE ESPAÑA,
LOS TESOROS DEL MERCADERO
JOAQUÍN REINOSO
“Red, fill me in—what do you see?”
Carmen translated in her head. As weird as it was to be grateful for anything VILE had done, it wasn’t the first time she was glad to have had so many different nannies from around the world—Spanish was just one of the languages she could speak well. “There’s an inscription above the entrance to the vault. It says, For the glory of the king of Spain, the treasures of the merchant Joaquín Reinoso.”
Player snorted. “Except he hid them well out of sight. Sounds like a good way to avoid the king’s taxes.”
Carmen tugged on the door. “He figured he was on the good list after getting the king that throne.”
“Yeah, finding a chair that could fit a chin like that.”
Player and Carmen were both laughing as she entered the vault. It was the size of a walk-in closet, and of course it had been emptied after the researcher had discovered it the week before. But Carmen could see the shelves that a short time before had held precious stones, gold, and silver. She scoured each shelf for any clues that had been left behind, but there was nothing there. She let herself out of the vault and closed the door behind her.
“Let’s see what else this maze has hidden.”
“It had better be a silver lion.”
“And we had better be the first ones here.”
“Speaking of which,” said Player. “Any sign of our friends?”
“No,” said Carmen, “but I can’t imagine they haven’t already searched this maze. When I talked to Salvador de Burgos, it became pretty clear that all three silver shapes together with the throne is the real prize. VILE might be two steps ahead of me for all I know—but I’m hoping there’s something they overlooked down here, because I don’t have any other leads.”
Carmen reached into her pocket. Searching this maze was definitely a job for Red Drone, a tiny tool that could fly up to any door or wall, record videos and x-rays, and communicate with security systems. She loaded it up and let it fly around the maze a few feet ahead of her, x-raying the walls and sending the data back to Player’s home computer.
“Nothing there,” Player said. “Just rock in every direction.”
“There’s gotta be something somewhere.” Carmen moved faster, and Red Drone sped up to keep pace with her. She came to a fork, made a split-second decision, and raced down the new tunnel.
“Red, do we have a plan to get you out of here later?” Player asked.
“One step ahead of you,” Carmen replied. “We’re doing this Hansel and Gretel style—with a little update.” Behind her was a trail of children’s glow sticks. Every few feet she reached into her pocket, grabbed a glow stick, cracked it to activate the light, and dropped it on her path. “The package said guaranteed to stay lit for eight hours. That should give us time.”
“I like your style,” Player said. “Plus, now we’re ready for Halloween.”
“Player, that was dad-joke level.”
Player laughed. “Just trying to keep things light while you’re six thousand feet under.”
Carmen groaned.
“Wait! I see something!”
Carmen stopped in her tracks. Red Drone was buzzing in place. “Behind that wall?”
“Yeah,” Player said. “Not much is coming in on my screen, but there’s definitely something behind there. Can you look?”
Carmen shone her flashlight where Red Drone was hovering. It looked like an ordinary wall. Undeterred, Carmen walked forward and started pressing her palm down all around the area, hoping to find a lever or a button like the one that had let her into Salvador de Burgos’s private study. But there was nothing.
“It’s just a wall, I think,” Carmen said.
“But there’s something back there! Empty space, it’s got to be some kind of secret hidey-hole!”
“Wait a second,” Carmen said. “There’s a turn just up ahead. I’m going to check it out.” Dropping another glow stick as she went, Carmen rounded the corner. “There’s a door here! I see it!”
It was completely unlike the entrance to the other vault. This was a stone door whose outline was only faintly visible. It blended into the wall the way the trapdoor had blended into the floor. The hinges were flat and rusty. There was no doorknob.
Carmen slid a thin knife into the crack between the door and the wall, until it met the latch. She pushed down, and the latch gave way. She stepped inside.
Chapter 12
NO ONE HAD BEEN INSIDE THIS VAULT for hundreds of years. It had the silent, hallowed feel of a place undisturbed by human affairs. Carmen tread slowly and quietly.
This space was the same size as t
he other vault, but it was modest. Carmen was standing on reddish dirt; the stone floor ended at the door. There were shelves like in the other room, but they were made of roughly chopped wood, each one uneven, warped, and full of knotholes.
Piles of papers were stacked on each shelf. The stacks of paper looked almost like parchment: thick and brown, and curling at the edges. A wax candle had melted onto one of the shelves, and Carmen shuddered, imagining what a fire could do in these underground tunnels.
For a long time, Carmen just stood and stared at the stacks of paper. Who had put them there? Why had they hidden these documents in particular? Had the merchant Joaquín Reinoso known about this other vault, or was it built behind his back? Most of all, who was Carmen to disturb this untouched spot?
“Must be pretty important stuff, if someone took all the trouble to hide it,” Player said, voicing Carmen’s thoughts.
“Yeah, I guess so.” Carmen turned left and right, letting the light from her flashlight shine over all the shelves. With steady hands, she lifted a stack of papers off the shelf farthest to the left. She would work counterclockwise around the vault. After all, she had almost eight hours left.
At first, it was hard to make any sense of the papers. They were written in Spanish, in an old and unusual script. Carmen had never learned much cursive, and even if she had, the writer’s handwriting was completely unruly. But after a few minutes of squinting and turning the paper in different directions, things started to make sense to Carmen: she caught words like plata (silver) and artesanía (handicrafts), and soon she was reading entire sentences.
The first stack of papers wasn’t very interesting. They were written by a master silversmith by the name of León Mondragón. He described different orders he had filled, for objects like candlesticks, vases, and tableaus for church altars. But a few stacks of papers in, Carmen realized that León Mondragón was more interesting than his accounts originally led on. He was born in 1590 in the city of Potosí, Bolivia—which, Carmen realized, perking up, was where the silver shapes had first been made! He described the city so well it was as if Carmen was really there herself. Potosí, according to León Mondragón, was full of little squares and tiny churches, and markets selling everything you could imagine. There were women selling chicha, which was a type of beer made from corn—doesn’t sound that tasty, Carmen thought—concoctions to cure altitude sickness—could have used that in Ecuador —and different breads and cloths. People in Potosí dressed well. In fact, most of them sounded a little vain, according to Mondragón’s words.
A creek that people called “La Ribera” ran through the city, and it powered the mills that ground the ore, which was like a kind of rock filled with pieces of silver. Then workers separated the crushed-up rock from the silver.
At first, Carmen thought making silver was kind of fun—the way Mondragón described the rock turning into silver sounded a little bit like one of those mica-cleaning machines that Coach Brunt had gotten her as a kid. But the more she read, the more she realized that silver mining was actually horrible. The Spanish conquerors wouldn’t go into the mines themselves, because it was dark, back-breaking, and dangerous down there. Instead they forced Indigenous people (people who were native to the Andes) to go mining for them. The workers had to bring their own tools, and some of those tools were expensive—leather bags to carry up the ore, and candles, which were really valuable back then, to illuminate the dark mines. The workers counted on their kids and wives to bring them food, because it’s not like the Spanish would feed them. Sometimes, Indigenous miners could make good money, because they got to take home some of what they had mined. But other times, they made barely anything—and they were still forced to work.
Carmen balled her fists in anger, thinking, No one should have to work in those conditions. She read on and learned that León Mondragón was a mestizo, which meant he was half Indigenous, half Spanish. His mother was Lupaca (an Indigenous group in the Andes) and had spoken to León in a language called Aymara. The Lupaca people in Potosí lived a little upland of La Ribera, near the mine—which people in Potosí called either the “Cerro Rico” (Rich Hill) or the “Cerro Rojo” (Red Hill), because from far away, the dirt made it look reddish. Mondragón’s mother’s people had not been well off, but they had been lucky to avoid mine work and hone their talents as artisans. It was from his mother that León Mondragón had gotten his skill and interest in art and crafting. Mondragón’s father was a poor Spaniard who had come to Potosí hoping to make his fortune—and failed spectacularly. Mondragón did not have a charmed childhood, but he was grateful that his father had secured him an apprenticeship with a silversmith at a young age, and he fell in love with the craft of silver working.
León Mondragón must have written every day of his life, because he had chronicled everything: he wrote about the teams of llamas and mules that carried supplies from the countryside, about the vicuñas and the vizcachas, the large and small animals that lived in the highlands just outside the city, and about the shocking-pink flamingos that flocked to shallow pools that formed nearby.
León loved living way up in the mountains, but he often wondered about life outside of Potosí. Even though Potosí held many mestizos like him, León was never quite sure whether he really belonged more with his Lupaca family or with his Spanish family. He thought he might like to travel, to visit Spain and see with his own eyes the many works of silver that he and other artisans in Potosí had made for wealthy Spaniards. There was a line in León’s writing that caught Carmen’s attention. He talked about being half Spanish but not having seen Spain with his own eyes, and how hard it was to be both Spanish and Lupaca when he knew what the Spaniards were doing to so many of his people in the mines.
He’s just like Milly, Carmen thought. He belongs to two places at once.
Finally, León de Mondragón started writing about the Throne of Felipe. Carmen found a diagram of the throne’s base, which was sent to León by a secretary of the merchant Joaquín Reinoso. The diagram showed exactly where the inlays would go, and what size and shape they had to be. León would have to match the dimensions given precisely, so that when the inlays were sent to Spain, they would fit in the spots that the throne’s carpenter had carved out for them. If León was off by so much as a hair, the inlays wouldn’t fit, and the throne would be unadorned.
León described how hard he worked on the inlays, how he tried to make the feather at the end of the silver arrow seem real, and how he wanted the castle to seem three-dimensional. When he described the lion, Carmen felt a thrill going up and down her spine. León talked about carving the lion midroar, how he wanted the viewer to feel the lion’s hot breath and the reverberations of his powerful roar. That’s how lifelike he wanted his carving to be.
León was clearly proud of his work, but there was also a sadness to his writing. He showed his neighbors and friends his work when it was finished, but all too soon the inlays had to be packed up to make the long journey to Spain. To León, that didn’t feel fair. Indigenous people had mined and ground the ore, had refined it into silver, and he had shaped it into beautiful designs. But the only people who would get to enjoy this work were those in Spain—powerful people, who knew the king himself. León wished the inlays could have stayed in Potosí for the people of the city to enjoy them.
And yet—León was so conflicted—he said it was like sending a message in a bottle, knowing his work would cross an ocean he had never crossed and leave a city he had never left. Maybe someone would see his work and be inspired to make their own art. Maybe someone would be moved by his skill. He imagined that if even one person in Spain felt a connection to his work, León wouldn’t feel isolated on his mountain anymore. His art would be like a conversation across the distance of the ocean.
Carmen stopped reading. León’s words now reminded her of someone else: herself. She understood exactly what León meant by wanting a connection to someone outside his mountain, wanting to know that someone out there understood
him. She remembered when she was living on Vile Island and Player figured out how to hack into the VILE network and call her cellphone. He didn’t know who he was calling—he was just hacking for fun. At first, Carmen wasn’t sure whether to trust Player. But before long, her curiosity got the better of her. Player knew what life was like off the island, and Carmen had never been anywhere but the island—well, not since she had been found as a baby, which she didn’t remember anyway.
“Red?” said Player, into her earring. “What’s the latest?”
Carmen smiled. She remembered the first time Player had used her nickname—when they video chatted right after she ran away from Vile Island. He’d asked her if she was okay, and called her Red, because of the fedora she’d swiped from Cookie Booker as she made her escape.
“Everything’s fine,” Carmen said. “Something about León—he was the artisan who made the silver inlays, I’ve been reading his writing—he reminds me of myself.”
“How so, Red?”
“Because he wanted a connection to the world outside his mountain. Like I wanted a connection to life outside Vile Island. When you hacked into my cellphone, I finally got that—talking to you was like getting a message in a bottle. I realized that there was a whole universe out there.”
“I can understand that,” Player said. “Feeling alone and wishing there was someone out there you could talk to.” He sighed heavily, and Carmen got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling her—something he wanted to tell her but couldn’t find the words.
“Player, how did you get into white-hat hacking, anyway?” Carmen blurted out.
It was a question he always seemed to avoid, and Carmen hadn’t asked it for many months, not since those first few days after she had left Vile Island. She had asked back then because she had been surprised the first time she video chatted with him: his bedroom was like his voice, inviting and casual, with piles of electronics, baseball hats that never seemed to get worn, and a mini basketball hoop hooked over the door. But she had been expecting some kind of hacker headquarters and wanted to know how Player had gotten so good at hacking, and why he worked from his bedroom. But Player didn’t seem to like the question, and Carmen was reluctant to pry. Yet sometimes she thought he might like to tell her, if she caught him at the right moment.