The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon

by S. S. Taylor

  “Canada,” Zander said.

  “That right? Huh.” He watched Zander for much too long, as though he was trying to see the lie on his face.

  “Yeah,” Zander said, but not very convincingly.

  The guy nodded at M.K. “She looks a little young to be ridin’ rails.”

  “Looks can be deceiving,” said M.K, putting a hand on the sheathed knife on her belt. The guy looked surprised for a minute and then he smiled and said, “So they can, so they can.”

  The train slowed and then stopped, and we were all quiet as we listened to the sleek sound of the doors whooshing open and the voices of passengers getting on and off. A few minutes later we were moving again. The rail rider was sitting with his back against the wall of the car, still watching us. The little lights in his ears and lips flashed in time, as though they were sending out some sort of message.

  He laughed quietly. “So you don’t have a thing to drink, do you? That’s what you’re telling me?” He stood up. He was very tall, six-feet or more. “What about money, then? You got any money, four-eyes?” Self-consciously, I pushed my glasses up on my nose. “Riders share with each other. That’s the tradition.”

  There was a long silence as we all looked at him, and then M.K. jumped up, the little knife out of its sheath and up in the air where the guy could see it. He sat back down again, laughed nervously, and held his hands up where we could see them.

  “Hey, hey, sorry about that. Gotta try, you know, gotta try. But you three are all right. You’re all right. Yeah, yeah…”

  M.K. stood there for another couple minutes, just to be sure he got the message, and then smiled sweetly at him, put her knife away, and sat down again.

  He was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “Look, like I said, you three are all right. So I’m gonna tell you something. I’d get off this train if I were you. Word on the rails is that the next station up ahead is crawling with cops looking for three kids traveling with a black parrot. Modified, I heard. If I’m not mistaken, that’s you. Something about assaulting federal agents. I’m pretty impressed, I’ve got to tell you. Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”

  I was already on my feet. “How much farther to the station? What are we going to do?”

  Blue Hair put a hand out. “Easy now. You can make it. We’ll slow down up here on the final approach. The grass is pretty high there on the side of the tracks. I think you can jump out as we slow down and hide pretty well next to the rails. Crouch down until the train is gone and then you might want to lay low awhile. That’s my advice, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Zander said, standing, too, and holding on to the side of the rocking train.

  “Hey,” Blue Hair said, “good luck and don’t forget this.” He pressed Raleigh’s newspaper into M.K.’s hand. “You’re probably going to want some reading material. Now go.” He slid the door open for us. Outside the car, we could see the cornfields flashing by.

  And we could feel the train slow as it leaned into the curve.

  We jumped.

  Twenty

  I’m not going to lie—it hurt to hit the ground.

  M.K. yelped.

  “Ow!” I rolled over and lay there on my back for a second, then reached up to make sure my glasses weren’t broken.

  Zander didn’t say anything, but when I looked over at him, he looked like he wanted to say “Ow!” too.

  “Everyone okay?” he asked, once he’d gotten his breath back. “You two made it?” It wasn’t any problem staying on the ground until the train was out of sight around the bend, and once it was gone, we stood up and walked out of the field toward another large open one that had just been mowed. M.K. had her right arm cradled against her body, her shoulders hunched up. Pucci squawked and made a wide circle in the air as though he was trying to tell us something, but when we searched the sky and the horizon, we couldn’t see a thing but clear, blue sky for miles and miles. No dirigibles, no nothing. The only object on the horizon was a big commercial airship, far away to the south of us, heading east. A huge, rolling irrigator sat at the edge of the field, and we took off our vests and sat down under it to rest. It would shield us from anyone flying overhead, but if the police came by ground, we were out of luck.

  My left hip throbbed where it had slammed into the ground and my back ached from the long journey on the floor of the cargo car. We leaned back against the irrigator, Zander and I breathing hard. M.K. was still holding her arm.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “Yeah.” She rubbed at her biceps, and winced. “I think I hit a piece of metal when I landed. Can you see what happened?”

  I pushed up the sleeve of her shirt, finding a long gash, oozing blood. “This looks bad,” I told her. “I need a cloth or something so I can clean it. Zander, do you have anything in your vest?”

  “I think there was a little…” He went through the pockets, coming out with a small chamois cloth. I used it to soak up the blood and then pressed it against the wound, hoping it would stop bleeding.

  “Look in ours, too,” I told him. “We should put something on it.” He searched through our vests and in mine and found a small first-aid kit. He tossed me a small tube. “‘Roweben juper berry cream’,” I read. There was some very small writing on the tube and I scanned it until I read, “‘antibiotic properties’.”

  “This is the stuff, M.K.” I spread some on the wound, but I didn’t like the way the sides opened up. It was deep. It might need stitches. Zander had found a bandage in the first-aid kit and he came over and spread it carefully over the cut.

  M.K. tried to grin. “Good as new,” she said. “Thanks, guys.”

  But there was something about her voice that made me nervous. M.K. didn’t cry when she got hurt, never had. She wasn’t crying now, but she looked a little pale and her grin stayed on her mouth, never reaching her eyes. I felt panic creep through my veins. If that cut didn’t heal, we couldn’t just walk into a hospital and ask them to stitch it up.

  “What are we going to do now?” I asked Zander. “We can’t hop another train out west. They’ll be looking for us. In fact, when they discover we’re not on the train, they’ll probably come searching for us. We’re not exactly good at blending into the scenery, you know.”

  “I know,” Zander said. “It’s a problem.”

  “A problem! Dying of thirst and hunger in a field in the middle of I-don’t-even-know-where is a little bit more than a problem, Zander.” My glasses were dusty. I polished them on my shirt and then replaced them on my face. Everything was brighter: the green fields, the blue sky. “And what if M.K. needs a doctor?”

  “I’m fine,” she said in a stubborn voice. “I won’t need a doctor.”

  “Dad wants us to find the treasure,” Zander said in the annoyingly calm way he has when he’s arguing. “Do you wish you’d never opened the book? Do you wish you’d put the map back in the drawer?”

  I hesitated. “No, of course not. But we don’t even know what Dad meant for us to do with it. It’s crazy. It’s a wild goose chase.”

  “Dad would never have sent us on a wild goose chase.” Zander folded his hands over his stomach and leaned back against the big metal contraption.

  Zander and I sat on opposite sides of the irrigator, not talking. M.K. picked up the newspaper and looked through it while Zander and I sat, mad at each other and getting hotter in the bright sun.

  We’d been sitting there for a good five minutes before M.K. said, “Zander, Kit, look at this.”

  She held up the newspaper that had held the cookies, folded so that we could read the story on the back.

  EXPLORER AND SON TO EMBARK ON SOUTHWESTERN TREASURE HUNT

  By Dolly Frost Exploration Correspondent

  Famed explorer Leo Nackley and his son, Lazlo Nackley, a student at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences, leave today on a hunt for Dan Foley’s famed golden treasure in a remote canyon in the American Southwest. The senior Nackley told our reporter that new infor
mation has come to light that will help his son pinpoint the location of the treasure, which has long been rumored but never found despite considerable effort and outlay of funds. Nackley said that the treasure is priceless, in terms of both monetary and cultural/historical value. We await news from our intrepid treasure hunters.

  “New information? Hah!” I said. “Mr. Mountmorris told him about the map!”

  “You’re right.” Zander shrugged. “But he doesn’t have it. We do.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I grumbled.

  “We’ve got to beat them out there,” Zander said. “Maybe we could hitchhike.”

  “Hitchhike? Are you crazy? Who’s going to pick up three children and a bad-tempered parrot with the ability to rip a man’s face off?”

  Pucci murmured indignantly.

  “Something’s bound to turn up.”

  I didn’t even bother answering. It was so hot out in the field, the sun beating down on our heads. The dust from the dry ground was making it hard to breathe.

  “I just think,” Zander said, to fill the silence, “that it’s going to be all right. I don’t think Dad would have sent us out to Arizona if he didn’t think we could find the treasure.”

  “Dad didn’t send us to Arizona,” I reminded him. “He didn’t send us anywhere.”

  “He wouldn’t have left the map for us if he didn’t think we were going to go after the treasure. I know that.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I said. I stood up and glared at him. “Maybe the man with the clockwork hand works for BNDL. Maybe that’s the trap. I don’t know what we were thinking. You convinced us to come all the way out here, with no plan, with no food. M.K. attacked those agents. We broke into the Map Room. They could put us in jail!” I pushed my glasses back up my nose. I was sweating and they kept slipping down.

  Zander hardly reacted. He just bent down and plucked a straggly piece of grass from the dust. “Dad wanted us to—”

  I cut him off. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe Dad didn’t have the best sense of direction? Dad got lost, remember? That’s why he’s dead! He left us! Maybe his judgment wasn’t so great, Zander. Did you ever think of that?”

  By the time I finished, I was almost shouting. Zander just stared back at me with a stunned look. He was about to say something when Pucci flew up into the air, very excited, and squawked, “Plane! Plane!” We looked up to find a small plane approaching.

  “It must be security agents,” I said, scrambling to get up. “That rail rider must have told them about us. Quick! We’ve got to hide.” We put our vests on and started running. But as I started moving, I realized how improbable it was that they’d send a plane for us rather than a dirigible. Hardly anyone used planes anymore because they used too much gasoline. I stopped for a minute and listened, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “It’s unmarked,” M.K. shouted. “And it’s not a plane. It’s a Router Glider 432. The same kind Delilah Neville flies.”

  The three of us stopped and looked up as the glider sailed closer and closer. It was a graceful, birdlike machine, painted a creamy white that made it look like a huge airborne swan. The glider’s wings were much bigger than the wings of an airplane, broad and flat and shaped to make the most of the thermal air currents that Neo machines depended on. Most of the gliders used by Neo explorers were combination machines, with an engine to get them off the ground and huge flat wings to help them stay up once they were airborne.

  “Do you smell anything?” I asked, sniffing the air. “Doesn’t it smell like popcorn?”

  “That’s not popcorn,” M.K. said. “That’s a late-adapted biofuel engine burning pure-grade corn oil!”

  “Do you think…?” Zander started as the glider circled lower and the lone figure in the cockpit waved to us. We heard an engine kick on and then the aircraft made a long approach, setting down neatly in the unplanted field. We all stared as the door opened and the tall, copper-haired pilot stepped out and strode over to us wearing her bright blue flight suit, her brass and blue-leather goggles pushed up onto her turquoise leather flight cap.

  “What’s the story with the matching vests and pants?” Sukey Neville asked, grinning at us, her eyes an intense amber-brown. “You three starting a singing group or something?”

  Twenty-one

  You should have seen the Expedition Society once they figured out what you’d done to those agents,” Sukey was telling us. She was eating an apple, talking with her mouth full. “It was crazy. Leo Nackley and Francis Foley were all up in arms, saying that the children of Alexander West had assaulted federal agents and broken into the Expedition Society. Even Mr. Mountmorris was there. And he almost never comes to the Society. Luckily, they didn’t realize I’d been in the Map Room with you, but I got into trouble for signing you in as guests. I just said it was a misunderstanding and I didn’t know who you were, but I’m not sure they believed me. You know who Mr. Mountmorris is, don’t you?”

  “We do now. He’s an advisor to ANDLC, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s an ‘advisor’ to ANDLC, an ‘advisor’ to BNDL. The truth is, he runs the whole thing. He was working for President Barbado when Harrison Arnoz discovered Grygia, and he made sure the Bureau got rid of any Grygians who were in the way. That’s what Delilah says, anyway.”

  “I wish I’d known that before we showed him the map,” I grumbled.

  “The map,” Pucci squawked. “Show her the map!”

  “That bird is really weird,” Sukey said. She looked up at me. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on here or not?”

  “Uh…” Zander and I glanced at each other, not sure about trusting this girl again. It was true that she’d saved our hides twice in the last couple of days, but still…

  It was M.K. who decided it for us. “Come on, let’s tell her,” she said. “If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t even have the second half of the map.”

  M.K. was right. We explained the whole thing, starting from the beginning, when the man with the clockwork hand had given me the book. The only thing we left out was the stuff about the Mapmakers’ Guild. From what Raleigh had said, it would be dangerous to reveal that Dad might have been a member.

  “We think the treasure’s in this canyon and that our father wanted us to find it, but we don’t have any idea where in the canyon it is,” I told Sukey. “And now Leo Nackley is heading west, and he and Lazlo are going to get there before we do, and if they catch us, they’ll probably put us in jail.”

  Sukey just nodded. “Well, we can’t let them beat us there, can we?”

  “How did you find us, anyway?” I asked her.

  “I heard something about how you’d gotten off the train in Philadelphia, but then I overheard Foley and Mountmorris talking about how they thought you’d be trying to get to Arizona. I figured you didn’t have a lot of options. When I checked the schedules, I saw there was a cargo line heading out and, well… It’s what I would have done in your place. Delilah’s on an expedition so I took the glider and I just flew low and followed the tracks and pretty soon, there you were.” She cocked her head and looked at me for a minute, then pitched her apple core over the wing of the glider. “I snooped around a little bit yesterday and I found out some information for you. About your father and why he got kicked out of the Society.” She stopped talking for a second and listened. “Did you hear something?”

  We all listened. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I learned, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

  “It’s okay,” Zander told her. “We want to know.”

  Sukey’s eyes met mine. In the bright sunlight, they were a liquid light brown. “Well, after everything calmed down, I found a good friend of my mother’s—Billi Pan, she’s an Explorer who defected from the Chinese Protectorate after the plagues—and asked her if she’d ever met your father. She said she’d known him well and that even if he was an Archy”—she grinned at us—“he was a wond
erful man and a good Explorer. That’s what she said. She said he’d stood up to the land grabbers and that people like her, who agreed with him, thought he was a real hero for it. I asked some other Explorers why he’d been kicked out of the Expedition Society, and they said that it had never been explained completely, but that BNDL told them that he’d engaged in some kind of forbidden activity…” She hesitated.

  “We want to know,” Zander said. “Go ahead.”

  “Billi thought it was Leo Nackley who accused him, and that he’d accused your dad of fraud and belonging to an outlawed organization. She wasn’t sure what it was, though.”

  Zander and M.K. and I exchanged glances. I had a pretty good idea.

  “But if he was kicked out of the Expedition Society, how did he get to take the trip to Fazia?” Zander asked. “He needed boats, supplies, a crew.”

  “I don’t know. Billi said everyone had wondered about that, but they were all too afraid of Foley and his agents to ask too many questions. They didn’t say anything after he’d disappeared.”

  We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, just taking it in. I couldn’t stop thinking about his face as he’d gotten into the SteamTaxi to leave for Fazia. Had he known he wasn’t coming back? Or had he just been scared? I remembered the way his eyes had darted around the yard. Had agents followed him on the expedition?

  “He didn’t say anything to you about all of this?” She seemed incredulous.

  “No,” I told her. “As far as we knew, he was going down there on BNDL’s dime, same as always.”

  “That Foley guy didn’t say a word about it when he came to tell us Dad had died,” M.K. said. “That seems pretty weird to me.”

  “Well, Delilah says that you can’t trust Francis Foley as far as you can—” Sukey sat up, listening, looking out across the expanse of cornfield. “I could swear I heard something.”

  “Pucci, what is it?” Zander asked, and Pucci rose into the air and made a wide circle.

  “SteamCycles,” he called down as he circled back. “SteamCycles!”