by Emma Otheguy
“Is this really the time, Red?
Carmen shrugged. “I have almost eight hours, remember?”
“Six now.”
“That’s a long time. Try me.”
She listened closely to the silence on the other end of her comm-link earring.
Player sighed again. “I was looking for my dad,” he mumbled. “He left a few years ago. He and my mom had been fighting, but I never expected he’d just disappear—and I had no idea where he had gone. I thought if I could just, you know, poke around some of his accounts—”
“And did you? Find him?” Carmen asked, interrupting him.
“I’m good at this, Red. It wasn’t that hard. A little tinkering with home security cameras, changing some account numbers—”
“Player! You changed your dad’s account numbers?”
“Like I said, the guy ran out on me—and weren’t you, let’s see if I remember, an international criminal?”
“Yeah, but I saw the error in my ways.”
“So did I!” Player said. “I found my dad, but then I realized my mom and I were just fine—we didn’t need all the fighting, honestly.”
Carmen felt terrible. Player might have a jovial, lighthearted tone, but if he had wanted to find his dad so badly—it couldn’t have been easy.
“But by then I was already in the habit, you know? I realized you could find people online. And I found you!” It took Carmen a little while to process what Player was saying. “So . . . you get it.”
“Get what?” Player was breathing heavily, as if he had just gone running, but Carmen recognized the symptoms. It was the stress of reliving a difficult time. She always felt her heart racing when she remembered her time on Vile Island.
“You get what it’s like to want to find someone.”
“I get what it’s like to be abandoned, if that’s what you mean. You weren’t the only one, Red.”
“I’m sorry, Player,” Carmen said softly. She wished she could think of something else to say, of a way to explain to him that he was the one holding the other end of her rope, and that she was grateful.
“Hey, it’s okay. My mom got remarried and my stepdad is a great guy, so things are pretty good now. And hacking is like—what did you call it? A message in a bottle. I get to talk to you, and Zack and Ivy. It might be just me alone here in my room, but when I’m hacking—”
“It’s like you’ve got your best friend’s voice in your comm-link earring?”
“I mean I would never wear one of those, Red. But yeah, it’s like that,” Player said gruffly.
Carmen smiled ruefully. A silversmith in the Andes Mountains, an international criminal on an uncharted island, a guy in his bedroom missing his dad—they all had more in common than anyone could have guessed. And Carmen was grateful that Player had hacked into her cellphone, and that she had replied, like a shipwrecked sailor sending out a message in a bottle. A message that said: Hey, world, I exist. My name is Carmen Sandiego, and here I come.
Chapter 13
“RED?” PLAYER ASKED. “Maybe we should get back to the caper?”
Carmen shook herself. “Right, yes. We should.”
“Does the silversmith give any clues about the silver lion?”
Not about where the lion was hidden, Carmen thought. She could vividly imagine the lion’s lifelike roar from León Mondragón’s description, but she had to admit she was no closer to knowing where it was hidden than she had been when she found the vault. She looked around, almost as if expecting the lion to be sitting there on a stack of papers. It would be a pretty strange thing to use as a paperweight.
“Player,” Carmen said slowly. “There’s one more thing.” It was hard to express what she was thinking. Her neck and face felt warm, and she was vaguely glad that Player couldn’t see her. “I never thanked you. Not really.”
“Thanked me for what? For booking your plane tickets and using my sweet hacking skills?”
“No, not for that,” Carmen said. “I mean, thanks for all that, of course. I meant for talking to me on Vile Island. For the messages in bottles, like we were saying. You were the only person who didn’t think I was destined for great evil or whatever twisted future Professor Maelstrom and the rest of them had in mind.”
“Aw, thanks, Red,” Player said. “You’re good to talk to yourself, you know. It can get”—Player coughed loudly, as if the words choked him—“pretty quiet around here without a caper on.”
Carmen smiled. She and Player were lucky to have found one another. She stood up, dusted herself off, and went back over to the shelves. She needed to get serious about finding the silver lion.
“León Mondragón must have come to Spain eventually, because he created this vault.”
“Right,” Player agreed.
“But for all he wrote about wondering about the world outside Potosí, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of what he actually did on his trip to Spain.”
“Leave a letter explaining the whereabouts of the silver lion in the vault?” Player said hopefully.
“That would be ideal.” Carmen laughed. But Player was right—there had to be some kind of clue among these papers—otherwise why would Mondragón have gone through the trouble of creating this hiding spot, especially when it sounded like coming to Spain had been a bucket-list trip for him. If there weren’t some kind of secret involved, he would have had better things to do than creep around underground, hiding documents.
There were three stacks of papers left. Carmen rifled through the first set and groaned when she realized that it was nothing but charts with long strings of numbers—León Mondragón’s billing and accounts. She turned to the second stack of papers, and her heart sank as she flipped through even more charts and numbers. She wondered whether there could be some kind of code or clue hidden in the numbers—but that kind of code would take hours, if not days, to decipher. Carmen considered stealing the papers so she could analyze them for clues. There just had to be something worth finding in this vault. A person who had nothing to hide didn’t just build a secret vault deep below Sevilla for no reason.
Sighing, Carmen flipped through the last stack of papers. Charts, numbers, more charts, more numbers.
That was it. She had read every stack of paper in this entire vault. Clearly, León Mondragón—whenever it was he had come to Spain—had just built this hidey-hole for absolutely no reason. It’s not like anyone was going to steal his old account papers. Carmen sighed and slumped against the wall.
She hit a stone that jutted out a few centimeters, and some sand and tiny pebbles drifted down the wall.
“Ow,” Carmen complained aloud, rubbing her shoulder.
“What’s up?” Player said. “Did you trip or something?”
“Wait a second!” Carmen said, straightening up. The sand and pebbles had fallen on the last stack of papers, which Carmen had been too frustrated to put back properly. A few sheets off the top floated down to the dirt floor. One of them had actual writing on it.
“What is it?” Player asked.
Carmen grabbed the paper off the ground. “Give me a minute,” she told Player.
The paper had a detailed description of how León Mondragón had made the lion’s fur, which, based on what was written here, was probably as detailed and lifelike as the feather on the silver arrow. Even though she’d gotten much more comfortable with León’s handwriting, she still had to read slowly to decipher his loopy script. But even after she had read every detail about the tools he had used and the number of hours it had taken him to make the silver lion, there was nothing about where the lion could be found. Carmen was about ready to bang her head against the wall.
There were some scribbles on the bottom of the document, as if León had been testing his ink or something like that. He clearly was the sort of person who used a ruler, because each sheet of paper had a perfect one-inch margin all around. The scribbles were in the bottom margin, and Carmen was sort of surprised that León would do something that
messy in the margins he had so neatly created—It wasn’t like he could have used a computer back in the 1600s—but Carmen was so frustrated from not finding anything that she tossed the paper back onto the ground.
“Nothing, Player. There’s nothing here. Total red herring. We’re no closer to the silver lion than we were a few hours ago, and VILE is probably onto another lead.”
“What were you looking at?” Player asked. “You seemed pretty excited.”
“Just another document about how León Mondragón worked so hard to make the silver lion and the fur was so lifelike and no one understands the artistry that goes into it,” Carmen complained.
Player snorted. “I thought we liked León Mondragón?”
In reality, Carmen had started to think of León as a friend. He loved silversmithing the way Carmen loved solving crimes, and she felt like he understood what it had been like for Carmen, growing up completely cut off from the outside world on Vile Island. But she did not like dead ends.
“There was nothing interesting on the document?” Player asked. “Nothing unusual?”
“Just some squiggles.”
“Squiggles? Well, let’s analyze them! Maybe they’re a kind of special writing code.”
“Worth a try,” Carmen said. She snapped a scan of the squiggles and sent it over to Player.
She waited, while hearing Player click things on his computer.
“They do look like squiggles,” Player admitted. “But I’m going to run these through an advanced character recognition program I made and see if anything comes up.” Carmen paced around while Player ran the photo through his software.
“Red! I found something!”
Carmen stopped in place. “What did you find?”
“These are definitely letters. Look at your phone, I just sent it back to you.”
Her phone was buried deep in her coat—it wasn’t something she usually used in the middle of a caper—so Carmen fished it out. She unlocked it and looked at the document Player had just sent over. It was the squiggles superimposed with typed letters. Player’s program had figured out what the squiggles said!
“It’s in Spanish,” Carmen said.
“No kidding.”
“Give me a minute to translate.” Carmen said the words aloud as she read. Fascinaba—entender—castillo—león—
“I think,” Carmen said slowly. That it means something like this. She read aloud to Player:
Only someone who cared about my story would seek out such a humble hidey-hole and read these papers. Perhaps that someone would understand—the rich merchant may keep among his treasures the silver castle, but he has not had the last word. The silver lion, they ask? Don’t bother looking, it vanished into thin air.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Player said—and Carmen couldn’t agree more.
Chapter 14
NEITHER PLAYER NOR CARMEN could think of anything to say. It had been a long search, only to come up empty.
Carmen was gathering herself to leave when a sound caught her attention. It was quiet at first, and far away. Some kind of ringing, buzzing noise. Carmen flattened herself against the wall of the vault, just to the right of the door. She was using an important trick from VILE Academy—this way, she would be hidden if the door was to swing open. She clutched the squiggle document in one hand and crossed her fingers with the other that the noise would move away. But the sound only grew closer, and the closer it came, the more Carmen recognized it as humming. A sweet, childlike tune.
There was only one person Carmen knew who would hum like that in an underground maze.
The door clicked open, and Carmen held her breath.
Through the crack in the hinges of the door, Carmen watched as Paperstar surveyed the stacks of papers and picked up a document to read. Carmen personally thought the VILE operatives should have to read all of León Mondragón’s writing so they would understand how much work had gone into the throne they had so cruelly stolen, but if Paperstar spent as much time reading as Carmen had, it would be difficult to sneak out unnoticed. Carmen hoped she would move quickly.
Now Paperstar was dragging her fingers along the shelves. She picked up one of the charts, fingered the heavy paper, and in an instant folded it into a weapon, which she slipped into her pocket. Carmen tensed. She might have been frustrated that León Mondragón didn’t leave any clues, but she still thought his words were important. She thought it mattered how hard he worked on his craft, and how angry he was about how the mine owners treated Indigenous people. She didn’t want to see his words turn into nothing but tools for Paperstar’s evil rampages, likely to end up in a gutter—or worse, slicing someone open.
Then suddenly, Paperstar lunged for something. Carmen’s jaw dropped.
She had left her cellphone on the ground. Unlocked. With the image of the squiggles and the typed words still open.
Please don’t speak Spanish, Carmen thought.
“Interesting,” Paperstar said aloud in her singsong voice. “That must mean my little friend is around here somewhere.” She slipped the phone into her pocket.
This was not the time for hiding. “Player,” Carmen hissed. “Wipe my phone’s memory! Now!”
She jumped out from behind the door, slamming it shut. “What do you want, Paperstar?”
Paperstar shrugged. “Well, I already have your phone.” She held it up, smiling sweetly. Carmen could still see the photo Player had sent on the screen.
“I’m working, Red!” Player said frantically into her earring. “There’s a lot of data on that phone—it’ll take a few minutes to back up and clear!”
Carmen had no choice but to distract Paperstar. “So,” she said, hoping to get Paperstar talking. “I see you found my hiding place.”
Paperstar waved a glow stick in front of Carmen’s face. “You didn’t exactly make it hard. Amateur hour—didn’t even cover up your tracks.”
Carmen laughed. “I think my tracks are going to come in pretty useful when I’m trying to find our way out of here.”
“Oh, you’re not leaving anytime soon!” Paperstar remarked cheerfully. She lunged for the door and locked it. “Tell me everything you know about the silver lion.”
Carmen almost breathed a sigh of relief. However much time she had wasted reading León Mondragón’s papers, at least VILE hadn’t gotten the silver lion in the meantime. Then she had an idea. She crossed her arms.
“What do you want to know?”
“Where it is and how I get it from you,” Paperstar growled.
Carmen balled up the document in her hand—sorry, León, she said to herself—and opened up her coat, giving Paperstar a one-second glimpse at the tools inside. “Too bad I can’t help you. The silver lion has been moved to a secure location.”
Paperstar’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re going to tell me where that secure location is, right?”
“Now, why would I do a thing like that?”
“Because if you don’t—” Paperstar lunged toward Carmen, who ducked and rolled to the other end of the vault. She jumped up and paced around Paperstar, ready to pounce. Eyes locked, the two made a circle. Carmen’s phone glowed in Paperstar’s hand, still clearly unlocked and loaded with Carmen’s information. Carmen sprung toward Paperstar, who tossed the phone up and caught it as Carmen fell past her.
“Here’s a deal. Tell me where the silver lion is, and you get back your phone. Don’t tell me and—hooray! I’ll have a new toy all to myself.”
“As if I would tell you,” Carmen said, trying to buy time. “But here’s the thing, Paperstar. There’s a clue about the silver lion. You can find it all by yourself if you look. You don’t need me at all.”
“And what is that?” Paperstar crossed her arms.
“In those papers.” Carmen nodded toward the shelves. “That’s where the clues are. Sit down and read those, and you’ll know everything I know about the silver lion.”
Paperstar turned for just a second and Carmen made another desp
erate grab for her phone, but Paperstar yanked it away. In that moment Carmen saw her phone flash with these words:
MEMORY WIPED
RETURNED TO FACTORY SETTINGS
Carmen breathed a sigh of relief. “Actually,” she said cheerfully, “I never knew anything about the silver lion. I don’t have it at a secure location.” If Paperstar didn’t have her phone’s memory, Carmen sure didn’t need to keep her here talking. “See ya!” Carmen jumped, flipped the lock, and kicked open the door. She tore down the maze, picking up glow sticks as she ran. This time, she would definitely be covering her tracks.
Unfortunately, Paperstar was close behind, following Carmen’s footsteps instead of the glow sticks. Carmen looked up, as if a way to shake Paperstar would somehow appear out of nowhere, but the narrow maze didn’t give her many options. All she could do was run, staying a step ahead of Paperstar.
They reached the stairs and Carmen took off, desperate to reach the trapdoor and not be overtaken. Carmen climbed and climbed. A square of reddish light appeared above her, and she almost cheered. It was the Archivo, illuminated that night only by the glow of an emergency exit sign. Carmen threw herself upward, wriggled through the trapdoor, and shut it behind her as quickly as she could. A closed door wouldn’t stop Paperstar for long, but it would buy her a few minutes.
She raced out of the museum and onto the street. The plaza was softly lit by streetlamps, and a couple was kissing on a bench. Carmen picked a direction and dashed off just as the museum door swung open and shut behind her—Paperstar was on the chase again.