by S. S. Taylor
“Someone’s coming!” Zander stood up, searching the horizon, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Did that bird just say ‘SteamCycles’?” Sukey asked.
M.K. gestured to Zander to bend down and boost her up on his shoulders. “I don’t see anything,” she said once she was up. “Do you think it’s BNDL?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if it is, we’d better get out of here.”
“Wait,” Sukey said. “Hold on. Did that bird really say ‘SteamCycles’?”
And then we heard the engines, just the faint sound of them in the distance.
“Looks like he did,” I said.
We were all up and moving in a couple of seconds.
“Where are we going to go?” Zander was asking us. “There’s nowhere to run. We’re like sitting ducks out here. Sukey?”
But Sukey was ignoring him. “I might have to dump some supplemental fuel,” she was saying to herself, doing some kind of arithmetic on her fingers. “Twenty times forty and…” She sprinted over to the glider, where she started fooling around with some knobs and dials on the outside of the fuselage. Then she took a thin wrench out of her pocket and tightened something on one of the rear wheels. “Come on, you three. I think we can do it.”
“Do what?” Zander asked.
“Take off,” Sukey said, her curly hair springing up all around the edges of her helmet as she pulled it on, her eyes huge behind the goggles. “What do you think, Pirate Boy?”
Twenty-two
It took us four tries to get off the ground. Sukey kept revving the glider’s supplemental engine, but we could all feel that there was something wrong. It just didn’t seem to have any power.
“Let me take a look,” M.K. said, jumping out and getting a wrench out of the tool kit on her vest.
“Does she know what she’s doing?” Sukey asked us.
“Dad always said she was a better mechanic than he was,” I said.
“You’ve got a loose connecting wire to the bio supp,” M.K. called out. “I’m just fixing it now.” We could all hear the SteamCycles, the engines’ put, put, putting getting louder.
“Hurry, M.K.,” Zander called.
A couple minutes later, she was jumping back into the cargo hold behind the cockpit. “Try that.”
Sukey revved the engine and we could hear the difference, but as the glider raced along the open ground, I could feel how heavy and unwieldy we still were.
“We’re too heavy,” I told Sukey.
“No, we should just be able to do it.” She circled around and tried again, but I could feel that gravity was not on our side. As we all watched, a line of black SteamCycles came into view on the horizon.
“You’re going to hit them!” I called out.
“Only if we don’t get lift,” Sukey said in a determined tone.
“Try again,” M.K. called out.
Sukey revved the engine and we sped along the ground, heading right for the SteamCycles. The riders wore the uniforms of local policemen and they looked absolutely terrified.
“Come on, come on,” Sukey muttered under her breath. I could feel the little glider straining and working and then suddenly, just when I thought we would hit them for sure, the glider’s nose rose into the air, and we were heading up, up, up into the bright blue sky.
The glider climbed for a couple of minutes and then we leveled out, slicing neatly through the air. Sukey settled us just below the cloud cover, and we all looked out the window at the patchwork of fields below.
“We did it,” Sukey said, patting the controls. “I wasn’t sure she was going to do it. Should be just a couple of hours to Arizona.”
I looked around the tiny cabin. We were crammed in there like pickles in a jar. “It’s safe, right? Flying with this many of us?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Sukey said, giving me a wide grin over her shoulder. “I’ve never done it before.”
Pucci cackled. “Never done it before.” I gulped and tried to focus on the view outside the window.
“That bird is really weird,” Sukey said. Pucci cackled again.
“That’s a late-adapted engine, right?” M.K. asked her. “How does it run?”
“Runs great,” Sukey told her. “She can burn any kind of vegetable oil. The engine gets us up in the air and the glider and the thermals do the rest.”
“How long have you been flying?” Zander asked her.
“Since I could walk, practically. I was born in a dirigible. This was before my mother started flying gliders. Delilah was making a run up to Greenland and I was early, so… Anyway, what were we saying about your dad and Leo Nackley?”
I looked out the window. We’d left the SteamCycles far behind.
“We found out that Leo Nackley and Dad were friends when they were younger,” Zander said. The glider was beautifully quiet. He told Sukey what we’d learned about their Arizona trip and about the Nackleys’ expedition.
“I know all about that,” she said. “They started talking about it after they realized you were gone. Nackley does whatever Foley and his agents tell him to do. Delilah can’t stand him.”
“What are we going to do when we get there?” M.K. asked.
Zander and I looked at each other. “I guess we’ve got to get down into the canyon and follow the map,” I said after a minute.
“I figured you’d have a better plan than that,” Sukey said. “Foley and Mountmorris are after you and Leo Nackley has decided he’s going to find the treasure before you do. You did assault those agents. What are you going to do when you see them?”
“The whole point,” Zander said, “is not to see them.”
Sukey just raised her eyebrows.
I was so tired I could barely think anymore. I leaned against the wall of the glider and I must have dozed off because when I looked up next, we had dropped down even farther and the reddish-brown ground was spread out below us, close enough for us to see fields and houses and barns, cars moving like tiny insects along the string-like roads and highways.
The low, flat plains of the Midwest gave way to the high, ridged mountains of the Rockies and then the beige and green high desert of Colorado and northern Arizona. Huge, gray-white clouds had rolled in from the West, and they sat there below us like a wall of fog, just where we needed to go.
For the first time, I noticed that the walls of the glider were decorated with a collection of little dolls, woven out of plant fiber and decorated with beads. “What are those?” I asked her.
“Oh, those are Delilah’s Rubutan idols,” Sukey told us. “There’s one up there for every flight she’s made to Rubutanland. They’re supposed to be guardians. They watch out for her when she’s flying.”
I looked up at the little beaded faces and hoped they were watching out for us, too.
“We’re almost there,” Sukey called back to us. “Brace yourselves. I don’t like the look of the weather up ahead and it may be a little bumpy as we drop down for the landing.”
We all braced ourselves against the sides of the glider as it started to pitch and roll and Sukey switched over to the engine. As she struggled to keep the plane even, Sukey went pale, her eyes squinted in concentration behind her goggles, and her hands gripped the throttle. I remembered Dad saying that after the Mass Failures, aeronautical engineers had had to completely reinvent the controls on new dirigibles and gliders since aircraft had become so dependent on computers. The dirigibles and gliders were made to be flown by expert pilots, and as I watched Sukey flying the pitching glider, I knew we were in the hands of an expert.
At least I hoped we were.
“Hang on!” she shouted. “I’ve got to get us out of these clouds.” There was a loud rumble of thunder and a few seconds later we saw lightning flash across the nose of the glider. And then we dropped. It was a terrifying feeling. We were in free fall, plummeting through the sky toward the earth as rain suddenly pelted the windshield. Finally, after what seemed like a year, we leveled
out.
“Sorry,” Sukey called back. “I had to get us out of that. It should be better now. Everyone okay?”
We sailed below the gray clouds rolling across the western edge of the mountains, and suddenly I could see a huge gouge in the reddish surface of the ground.
“There it is,” Sukey called, pointing out the window to the left side of the glider. “The Grand Canyon.”
We looked down and it took me a moment to take in the sheer depth of the thing. The canyon was a giant scar in the solid, rocky earth, winding out of view over the landscape, the Colorado River a tiny, silvery thread in the distant bottom. The afternoon sun filtered through the clouds, and it hit the red and pink and orange rock of the canyon so that it looked like it was lit up from within.
I don’t think I understood until that moment the thrill that Dad must have gotten exploring new places. I had always wondered how it was possible that there were hidden, undiscovered places on the Earth. But up here, looking down at the hugeness, the vastness of it all, it finally made sense to me. We were so small and the Earth and all of its mountains and canyons and rivers and oceans… they were so enormous. Of course we didn’t know all there was to know about the Earth. How could we?
“Look,” Sukey said as the plane dropped, “that’s Azure Canyon right there. I see a little village where we can probably leave the glider. Then we’ll have to get some IronSteeds for the ride into the canyon. I’m a little worried about the weather.”
She made an adjustment on the dash.
“We?” Zander asked.
“That’s what I said.”
“You’re coming with us?” He looked happy all of a sudden. “Really?”
She looked sideways at him and grinned. “Of course I am. You have no idea what you’re doing. And you don’t think I’m going to miss out on my first treasure hunt, do you? You better share the gold with me if we find it.”
“But you don’t have any equipment,” I said.
“Of course I do.” She gestured toward a stuffed backpack in the corner of the plane. “I’m always packed and ready to go. Learned that from Delilah.”
She must have seen the worried look we exchanged because she said, “Don’t worry. I know what I’m getting into. And I won’t slow you down. I’m a student at the Academy. I’ve taken more outdoor survival classes than you have. Besides, I know these guys.”
And with that, she brought the glider down in a little sandy lot, a few trees dotting the ground here and there. We ran along the ground for a few minutes, the racing red rock landscape slowing through the windows.
Pucci squawked.
We’d arrived.
Twenty-three
It wasn’t raining as we got out of the glider, but the clouds overhead were gray and threatening and the air was humid, a swift breeze coming from the East. We looked around and found ourselves in a vacant lot behind the straggly little village. Sukey threaded a chain and padlock through brackets on either side of the cockpit door, closed the lock, and we started walking. It felt good to be on solid ground again, and despite the fact that we were, by any read of our situation, in pretty serious trouble, I felt oddly cheerful. We had made it to Arizona. I hadn’t ever traveled very far from home and here I was, in the great outdoors, ready to embark on a treasure hunt.
And Sukey was coming with us.
My mood changed when we got to the town. Someone had been having fun when they’d called it “Azure City.” It wasn’t anything more than a dozen or so trailers parked in little yards decorated with cacti and old washing machines and toilets and rusting cars. Azure Canyon had been discovered at the very beginning of the New Modern Age of Exploration, when Dad was in his teens, and for ten years or so it had been a fairly popular place for Explorers to visit because of its famous blue waterfalls. The canyon had been carved out of highly reflective limestone and travertine rock, and the water that collected beneath its many waterfalls appeared to be a brilliant Caribbean Ocean blue.
Pretty soon, though, it had become clear that there weren’t any resources that could be taken out of the canyon, and the Explorers had moved on to more exotic locations in the New Lands. Now the little village looked run-down and desperately poor. I couldn’t help but remember Dad ranting about how Native Americans had been treated during the New Modern Age. “You would think we would have learned our lesson already,” he would bellow whenever the subject of the new discoveries out west came up, “but here we are, doing it in our own country, taking everything out of the land for ourselves and leaving a mess behind for those it belongs to!”
We walked past a couple of little market stalls advertising Food for Campers and Hikers, and a withered old man wearing a feathered headdress, standing on the street with a hose, who filled up our water bottles for fifty cents a pop. There was a stall with a sign that read Exotic Foods from the Territories, but when I went to look, the old woman in the stall just had a couple of dried-out Juboodan grubfruits. A group of young guys on rusty IronLegs were sitting in front of a broken-down building, holding a sign reading Veterans. Hungry. Please Help. They stared at us as we passed by.
At the end of the short road was a huge, handmade billboard: Bongo’s IronSteed Rental. The Best Way To See The Canyun. IronSteeds Nevur Neid Food or Water. Underneath was a picture of Azure Canyon’s famous blue waterfalls and a childlike drawing of a mechanical horse. A parking lot next to the sign was filled with the big machines that had always reminded me of medieval horses in armor ready for jousting.
In front of the sign sat a young guy in an old lawn chair. He was a Neo, but a strange kind of Neo, with bleached-out blond hair that hung halfway down his back. He had sunglasses on and was staring up at the sky as though he was expecting to see something appear there. “Are you Bongo?” Sukey asked him. I glanced around nervously. I had gotten really paranoid about the BNDL agents, but I didn’t see any here.
Slowly, he raised his sunglasses. “Yeah, that’s right. You looking for IronSteeds?”
“Yup,” Zander said. “Four, please. How much?”
Bongo looked up at us, blinking as though Zander was speaking a different language. After a minute, he pointed to Pucci. “But, dude, what’s he going to do?”
“Uh, he’ll fly,” Zander said. “He’s a bird.”
“You don’t want a horse for him, then?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Sukey and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh. The hot desert sun must have gotten to this guy’s brain.
“I like his little boots.” Bongo stared at Pucci for a minute. “Well, anyway, I can’t. Sorry, dude.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t rent you any IronSteeds. I don’t have any.”
“There are about twenty of them out there,” Zander said. “I can see them.”
“No. Those are all reserved. Big group of people. Some kind of archaeological expedition.”
“Who reserved them? Was his name Leo Nackley?” Zander asked.
“No… local guy. Tex somebody. Said he had a big group coming out from the East Coast.”
It had to be the Nackleys. Zander and I exchanged a worried look.
“Couldn’t you spare a couple?” Sukey asked. “Surely the party you’ve got coming in doesn’t need all of those.”
“Dude,” the guy said, “they do. They already paid and everything. They have a lot of stuff to carry.”
We stood there, not sure what to do, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement in a field behind the little restaurant. There were seven real-live horses grazing in the late-afternoon sun.
“Hey,” I said to Bongo. “What about those horses?”
“What?” He looked where I was pointing. “Those? But they… they need food and water.”
“Well, we can give them food and there’s water in the canyon. I mean, people rode horses into the canyon before IronSteeds were invented, right?”
“Sorry, dude. They’re not mine.”
“Well, who do they belong to
?” I asked him. I was getting annoyed. We didn’t have much time. We needed to get down into the canyon before anyone figured out we were here.
“I don’t know. They just kind of hang out there.”
I rolled my eyes at Sukey.
“Did the big party say when they’d be getting here?” she asked Bongo.
“There’s gonna be a big party?” He looked really excited. “Dude, I love parties.”
“No, the… the party that you said reserved all the IronSteeds. When are they getting here?”
“Oh, yeah, today, dude. Later today.”
“Okay,” Zander said. “We better get going, then. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“You sure you want to go down there?” Bongo asked. “I think it’s gonna rain soon. You don’t want to be in a canyon when it rains.”
“We’ll be all right,” Zander said. “We’ve got to get going.” But he looked nervous, and when I looked up at the sky I could see that the clouds were moving in, dark and menacing.
“Can you do us a favor?” I asked him. “When that group gets down here, don’t tell them you saw us, okay?”
“You in trouble or something?”
“No, not exactly. Just don’t tell them about us.”
“You got it. Tell them about who?” He winked and handed over a grubby square of paper. “Here, take one of these maps.”
We were just about to leave when I thought of something. “Bongo, you’ve heard about the legend of Drowned Man’s Canyon, right?”
He looked a little less dumb and a little more scared. “Yeah. I heard it,” he said. “About the gold and everything. They say there’s a ghost of that dead miner down there. He comes out of the rocks and takes you away if you go near his treasure. You couldn’t pay me to go down that way. Stay in Azure Canyon. It’s real pretty. That’s where the tourists like to go.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “By the way, you should really fix your sign. There are some typos.”
“Yeah, dude. I know. The horse has three legs and in real life horses have four.”