The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon

by S. S. Taylor

  “I’m sorry.” Sukey poked at the fire with a stick. We all stared at the tiny orange-hot sparks that popped and shimmered between the burning logs.

  Something about the darkness, the silence, made me say, “Dad never talked about her. He refused to. So we stopped asking. But when we were at Raleigh’s, he told us she was called ‘Nika’ and that she was really smart, that she knew all about the Muller Machines and how they worked. Dad never told us that. Not once.”

  Sukey hesitated again. “How did she die?”

  “SteamCar accident,” Zander said.

  “What about her family?”

  “We never met her parents, if that’s what you mean.” I stared at the fire. “They died before Zander was born.”

  “When Dad disappeared, we kept expecting them to make us go to an orphanage or something, but they never did,” M.K. said. She reached up to rub her arm and I realized I’d forgotten about her cut.

  “They had agents watching us, though,” I told Sukey. “I’d see them every once in a while. They must have known about the map. They took all of the maps in the house and when they didn’t find it there, they must have figured that the guy with the clockwork hand would try to get it to us. We think that’s why they didn’t send us to an orphanage. They wanted to use us as bait.” I’d been thinking about it some more. “And they must have had someone watching me by the markets. They didn’t see me talking to the man with the clockwork hand, but he was spotted.”

  “So this map is pretty important,” Sukey said, “if they’d go to all that trouble.”

  “I guess it must be.”

  “M.K.,” Zander said, “how does your arm feel?” She’d been rubbing it the whole time I’d been talking. “Let me see it.”

  She leaned down toward the fire and pulled her sleeve up so we could see the gash. I felt a little wave of fear wash over me. It looked swollen and angry red, the edges of the cut pulling away.

  “That’s nasty,” Sukey said. She refused the juper berry cream I took out of my vest, getting a real first-aid kit out of her backpack and dressing M.K.’s wound. “Here, this should take care of the infection, M.K. But you have to tell us if it starts hurting again.” M.K., already looking happier, agreed, and Sukey put the juper berry cream and the first-aid kit back in her pack.

  I got out the map and laid it out carefully by the fire so I could study the route and check it once again for any sign of where the old mine might be. We would be hiking farther into the canyon tomorrow and we still had no idea where to look. With the Nackleys behind us, we didn’t have much time.

  As I studied Dad’s map, I was bothered again by the fact that the entrance to Drowned Man’s Canyon hadn’t been where it was supposed to be. According to Dad’s scale, it should have been eight miles along the floor of Azure Canyon. But we had entered it at five miles. What had happened to those additional three miles? Time and rivers could make canyons wider and longer, but nothing could have altered where the canyon started.

  “What are you doing?” M.K. asked, coming to sit beside me.

  “I don’t know. There’s something funny about this map.” I showed her how I’d compared it with the tourist map that Bongo had given us and my own calculations as we’d ridden through the canyon, and found that Dad’s map was wrong.

  “But he was never wrong,” I muttered, as much to myself as to M.K. I fooled around with the two halves of the map, making sure I’d matched them up precisely. They fit perfectly when I placed the two halves together so that they didn’t overlap at all, but I started experimenting, overlapping the edges and trying to match up the contour lines representing the depth of Drowned Man’s Canyon on one side with the lines on the other side.

  Dad’s map represented Drowned Man’s Canyon as a series of closely spaced squiggling contour lines, each one representing points connected at the same elevation.

  Contour lines were only invented in the sixteen hundreds, when a French mapmaker came up with them as a way of representing the actual features of a landscape, the mountains and valleys and lakes and rivers. Until then, maps had been able to represent places in only one dimension. You could draw a blue circle for a lake, but you couldn’t see how deep the lake was or how steeply the edges of it dropped off toward the middle. You could draw mountains and hills, but on paper Mount Everest would appear to be the same height as a little foothill. But once topographical maps—that is, maps that represented the rising and falling of the landscape—came along, you could read a map on paper or on a Muller Machine and get a feel for the landscape, for whether it was flat or hilly or wet or dry. It was funny, sitting in the cave high in the walls of Drowned Man’s Canyon, looking at a map representing those walls.

  I shifted the sides of the map.

  “Wait a second,” I said. Zander and Sukey looked up from their conversation.

  “What?” M.K. watched as I fiddled with the edges of the two halves, overlapping them and then making a few calculations. Instead of matching up at the edges, the right side of the map—the side we’d found in Dad’s desk—was now laid over the other half—the half we’d found in the Map Room—covering about three inches of the left side. The contour lines still matched, but the strange lines that I had assumed were mesas and hills to the north of Drowned Man’s had now come together.

  “The map wasn’t wrong,” I said. “I was.”

  “What do you mean? And what’s that?” M.K. pointed to the squiggly contour lines. Zander and Sukey had come over and were looking at the map over my shoulder.

  “We haven’t been thinking about why there are two maps or, I mean, two halves,” I told them, so excited by my discovery that I was talking too fast. “Dad wanted us to find the map, right? He wanted us to find both halves of it. But why split it in half? Look.” I placed the maps next to each other. “Here’s Dad’s map of Drowned Man’s Canyon and here’s the one Bongo gave us.”

  I went on. “Remember when I said that we reached the turnoff to Drowned Man’s Canyon too soon? Well, we did, according to Dad’s map, anyway. Because Dad’s map is wrong.”

  “But you said Dad was never wrong,” M.K. said suspiciously.

  “Well, he wasn’t. Or at least, he was wrong on purpose. Because the two halves of the map aren’t meant to be matched up perfectly. It’s meant to go like this.”

  I pointed to the two halves, now overlapping by three inches rather than matching up exactly. I waited, for dramatic effect. “It goes like this instead.”

  Now we were all looking at the same canyons we’d seen before, but Azure Canyon was a bit shorter than it had been and branching off from Drowned Man’s Canyon was another canyon. I was too excited to stop and calculate the depth but I assumed it was about the same as Azure and Drowned Man’s.

  “When you do it like this,” I told them, so excited now I could barely contain myself, “there’s another canyon there. See?” I pointed to the spot where it broke off. “There is a secret canyon. He found it and included it in his map. He split the map in two so that we could put it together only if we actually came here! He knew that I would map it as we came through the canyon. He knew that I would notice that it wasn’t right. It must be where the treasure is. And we’re the only ones with this map. We’re the only ones who know there’s a secret canyon and the only ones who know how to get there.”

  Twenty-five

  I didn’t sleep well that night. The rock floor of the cave was hard and M.K. was a terrible snorer. Once our fire died down, the temperature dropped and I was cold even in the reflective sleeping bag Dad had tucked into my vest, folded into a bag the size of a pack of cards. I must have drifted off to sleep a few times because I had terrible dreams, about giant rattlesnakes and ghosts and monsters and, finally, one in which Dad was rowing away from me in a boat and I was trying to throw a rope to him, but the rope kept falling in the water and disappearing beneath the dark surface.

  When I woke up from that one, the sky was just getting light and I decided to get up and expl
ore a little bit. I figured I could go ahead on foot and find the entrance to the secret canyon so that we’d be ready to go once the others were up.

  I put some wood on the fire before leaving. Pucci was perched on a rock near the mouth of the cave, making his funny little clucking noises. I gave him a little scratch on the top of his head and he chortled before falling back to sleep.

  I tucked Dad’s map back into the hidden pocket of my vest and started out, scrambling down to the almost-dry canyon floor. Suddenly the sun cleared the rock walls and the canyon was full of pink morning light. It was still cold, the air smelling of our campfire, and I felt incredibly awake and alive as I hiked along. I imagined the look on Sukey’s face when I came back to the cave. “Thought I’d just see what’s up ahead,” I’d tell them. “Oh, I found the secret canyon, by the way.”

  According to Dad’s map, the entrance was another three miles along the floor of Drowned Man’s Canyon from our cave. I set off, walking briskly through the morning.

  It took me almost an hour on foot and I found myself wishing I’d brought my horse. As I went, I measured the distance with my spyglass’s pedometer, and as I approached the place where it was supposed to be, I heard the crash of falling water and felt a mist in the air. I came around a bend in the canyon, and right where the entrance to the secret canyon was supposed to be, there was a giant waterfall.

  There was a little stand of cottonwood trees and, above, a vertical cascade of water to the canyon floor. It was easily as high as the waterfalls in Azure Canyon, but where those had been magical, this waterfall was a little spooky, the water falling from the top into the pool below, which was black as night. I knew it probably wasn’t that deep, but when I peered over the edge, it looked as though it reached down into the center of the earth. According to Dad’s map, the secret canyon was right here, but when I looked up, all I could see was solid rock and the river spilling over the edge of the canyon wall, where it had worn away the earth for thousands of years.

  I walked around the side of the waterfall, looking for breaks in the rock, but the limestone was completely solid, without any of the caves and crevices we’d seen at the other end.

  The only part of it I couldn’t see was the area behind the waterfall itself. But in order to examine the back of the pool, I’d have to get into the water. I bent over and cupped my hands, filling them with water and gulping it down. It was freezing cold.

  I was trying to figure out what to do when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and ducked behind one of the cottonwood trees. Slowly, I got the spyglass out of my vest and lifted it to my eye. I turned the eyepiece, zooming in. Across the canyon, riding back in the direction from which I’d come, was a lone figure on horseback.

  He looked like an old-time miner or cowboy, in cowboy boots and a wide hat and beard. I increased the magnification and saw that he wasn’t as old as I’d thought at first. His face was set in a grim scowl, his eyes searching the canyon as he rode. The spyglass gave me a perfect view and I played around with it, turning it this way and that to see if I could get better magnification. I hadn’t noticed a small button on the side, but I must have pressed it by mistake because there was a little buzz from the spyglass and all of a sudden I could hear the sound of a horse’s hooves. It took me a minute to realize that the sound was coming from the mysterious rider’s horse and that Dad must have invented some sort of sound-amplification system for the spyglass.

  I tried to figure out what to do. I had to go and tell the others. This man, whoever he was, might be with the Nackleys or he might be a BNDL agent. We would need to come back with ropes and look for the entrance to the secret canyon before anyone saw us. I watched him through my spyglass, not sure how to get back to the cave without him seeing me. And then, as I watched him through the glass, he disappeared into the wall of the canyon.

  One minute he was right there, riding along in the morning sun. And the next he was gone. I put down the spyglass and searched the canyon with my naked eye, but he wasn’t there.

  He couldn’t have just disappeared, of course, I told myself. He must have ridden out of my view and around a bend. Or it may have been the low light in the canyon. Perhaps he’d just blended into the wall. Or there was a cave there like the one we’d camped in.

  Or maybe I hadn’t seen him at all.

  Either way, I wanted to get back to the others as soon as possible. The Nackleys might already be on their way and our only hope was to get to the secret canyon before they did.

  I jogged all the way back, much more quickly this time, and I had almost reached the cave when I heard, off in the distance, a sort of low metallic rumbling. It was so faint that I wasn’t sure for a minute I’d heard it at all, but as I ran it got louder and louder, resolving itself into a distinctive clanking: IronSteeds.

  I felt my stomach sink. They were already here.

  High above us, I heard Pucci’s warning call, “Careful, careful, careful,” and looked up to see Zander, Sukey, and M.K. in front of me.

  Approaching along the floor of the canyon, clanking loudly, was a small army of IronSteeds, twenty of them, the machines we’d seen at Bongo’s. In the morning light, their metal armor gleamed.

  I thought about running, but we were no match for those robot horses and all the people they had with them besides, so I just stood there, terrified, aware of Pucci still circling high above us in the air. At least they couldn’t get him.

  The IronSteeds clanked and then stopped.

  “Hello there,” Leo Nackley said as he dismounted. He had a pistol holstered at his belt and he took it out, holding it loosely in his right hand, reminding us it was there. “Mr. Foley will be glad to hear that we’ve found you. There are a lot of people looking for you.”

  There was a flash of red behind him and Mr. Mountmorris’s secretary, Jec Banton, got down from his IronSteed. His Mohawk looked even sharper than it had yesterday and he was wearing red leather boots with little lights embedded along the laces. “That was fast,” he said, raising an eyebrow at us.

  Leo Nackley must have noticed Sukey because he smiled at her and said, “Does your mother know where you are? I should have known you’d join up with these young criminals.”

  “They’re my friends,” Sukey told him, her hands clenched in fists at her side. “What are you going to do about it, you dirty land grabber?”

  Twenty-six

  Leo Nackley stared for a minute, the pistol twitching a little in his hand, and then he waved and the people behind him dismounted together and sprang into action, unloading bags and boxes from the backs of the giant machines.

  Lazlo Nackley was wearing his shiny Explorer’s gear, the jacket gleaming black over his snowy white shirt. On his head was a broad-brimmed black hat with wicked-looking knife points on the brim. It had gotten hot now that the sun was up and there were little drops of oily sweat running down his cheeks. “How did you get hooked up with these kids, Sukey? Did you know they almost killed two BNDL agents? Not that you’d care.”

  He walked toward us, his black boots stamping out a rhythm on the floor of the canyon. He looked from me to Zander and then back at me again. “Well, where is it? Where’s the treasure map?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, stepping back. I looked over at M.K., who was glaring at Lazlo, her chin jutting out and her fists curled at her sides like Sukey’s. Pucci had disappeared into the sky.

  “Yes, you do.” Lazlo leaned forward and lifted one side of my vest and then the other, looking for inside pockets. I could feel the map, hidden away in its secret compartment, burning against the small of my back.

  “That’s enough, Lazlo,” Leo Nackley said coldly, brushing some imaginary dust off his own black jacket. Lazlo’s face fell. He took a few seconds to look us over with his cold blue eyes. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

  The men and women unloaded shovels and picks, steam-hydraulic digging machines, and other contraptions I’d never seen before. We watched as they unpack
ed and began unrolling what looked like a series of elaborate Gryluminum tents.

  “I don’t know why,” Zander said in a calm voice. “We’re just down here to enjoy some camping and hiking in the canyon. Same as you.”

  “Not exactly,” Jec Banton said. “This expedition is sponsored by BNDL. The location of the possible treasure has been kept a secret from the general public, and BNDL agents are deputized to do whatever they need to do to keep it that way. Besides which, there’s a directive for your detention. You assaulted government agents.”

  “And I would do it again,” M.K. said, stamping her foot.

  The workers rolled out Gryluminum tents, and as I watched, they pulled on the tops and the tents popped up, creating a little compound of waterproof shelters in only a couple of minutes. I’d heard about these tents from Dad, who always liked to build his own shelter when he was in the field.

  “What treasure?” Zander asked. I recognized the tone of his voice as the one he used when he was trying to keep me from finding out about something he was up to.

  Leo Nackley smiled, a slow smile that rippled across his lips, just barely shifting his mustache. “Is that how you’re going to play this?”

  Zander didn’t say anything.

  The men and women who had ridden in on the IronSteeds were milling around and Leo Nackley turned and nodded at a tall, bearded guy mounted on the only real live horse of the bunch. “Tex,” he said, “take these children to a tent as soon as one’s ready.”

  “Yes, sir.” The guy looked like an old cowboy in his leather boots and wide-brimmed hat. It was hard to see his face beneath his bushy gray beard, but his eyes stared out from his sunburned face, hard and mean.

  He was the lone rider I’d seen in the canyon. I hadn’t imagined him, after all. He was as real as Zander. It had been the morning light shining in my eyes that had made it seem like he’d vanished.

  “What are you doing?” Sukey demanded, as they started pushing us toward a tent. Tex had ahold of my arm and I could feel the strength of his fingers on my elbow. He smelled of sweat and woodsmoke. “Where are you taking us?”