by S. S. Taylor
“Get them out of here before that damned woman gets to them,” Foley hissed. He looked furious, his sharky eyes small in his red face.
“Mr. Foley, Mr. Foley,” Dolly Frost was calling out.
“Get this one out of here, too,” Foley said, nodding to me.
I didn’t have much time. I looked up and saw Zander, the spitting image of Dad, struggling with Agent DeRosa, and M.K., who would have come to my aid with her little knife if she could have gotten away from Agent Wolff. And Sukey. Sukey was trying to get free, calling my name, and I remembered how it had felt to hold her, to keep her safe and warm for just a minute, even though everything had fallen apart.
“What is going on here?” Dolly Frost was asking.
She had almost reached us. I knew this was it. I thought of Dad and I reached up, grabbing Foley’s jacket and pulling him down so he could hear me. Mr. Mountmorris was behind him and I said to them, “Listen to me. Listen hard. There isn’t much time. You know as well as I do that Lazlo Nackley didn’t find that gold. You know as well as I do that we used my dad’s map to find it. Now, we’re willing to let the Nackleys take the credit. But you have to let us go. You and BNDL got what you wanted. The gold. You can use it to buy airships and send Explorers all over the world. So let us go. Sukey Neville, too. Promise me nothing will happen to us and we’ll forget about everything we just saw. If that reporter wasn’t here, you might get away with it. But she is. And I don’t care how much power you have, you might be able to claim you killed Tex in self-defense, but you can’t explain away a dead reporter. There are too many people here.”
I was breathing hard, my head throbbing where I’d hit it on a rock.
“Mr. Foley, I demand an answer,” Dolly Frost was saying.
He stared at me for another long moment and then he looked at Mr. Mountmorris, who nodded, holding my gaze for a minute.
I stood up, my legs shaking. “I’ll talk to you,” I called down to her. “I saw everything.”
“What happened?” she asked. “Who shot that man? Why are you children here?” She wasn’t much older than we were, tall with blond hair, wearing beige Explorer’s leggings and a vest with lots of pockets. The vest looked brand-new. “Mr. Foley, there’s a dead man down there and I demand to know what’s going on.”
Foley turned away and reached out a hand to help her climb up to where we were. “Oh, these children are… they were just camping down here and we had a… a misunderstanding. You know, it’s very important for BNDL to secure any potential find, for the safety of everyone involved, of course. There’s been a lot of concern for their safety and I just wanted to make sure they were quite all right. Very unfortunate, the accident with Mr. Tex. I’m sorry they had to see that. But we’ll make sure they get home safely. I’m going to accompany them myself.”
Dolly Frost still looked skeptical. She looked right at me. “Is that true?” she asked. “Was that man trying to take the gold? Did he shoot at Mr. Foley? Mr. Nackley is claiming that his son is the rightful discoverer of the treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon. But you seem to have been here first. Did you find the treasure before the Nackleys got there? Did you see the gold?”
“Oh no,” I told her. “Lazlo Nackley’s the one who found it. We were just hiking past. We never saw the gold. And Mr. Foley’s right. That man was working for Mr. Nackley, but he must have wanted the gold for himself. I saw him trying to take it.”
“And who are you? What’s your name?”
She had the notepad out and she was writing down everything I said.
“Christopher West,” I told her. “My father was the great Explorer of the Realm Alexander West.”
I looked up at Mr. Mountmorris. I was so tired, I could barely form the words. “And now, if you don’t mind, we’d like to go home.”
Fifty-seven
Mr. Mountmorris came to see us on a still, hot day in August that smelled like the end of summer.
It had been a strange couple of months, full of nightmares in which I relived Tex’s death over and over again, and other dreams in which Halla spoke to me in exotic languages I didn’t understand, or giant cougars leaped at me from behind boulders. Every day, alongside stories about Simeria and aggression by the Indorustan Empire, the newspapers had reported new details of the Nackleys’ find, and if any of the archaeological experts they’d called in had any doubts, they weren’t saying so publicly. I had gotten tired of seeing Lazlo’s smug face staring out at me from the morning paper with the headlines calling him a “National Hero” and “Brave Boy Explorer.” There hadn’t been anything about Tex’s death; they’d managed to keep it quiet.
When we went out to the market now, I always had the feeling that someone was watching us. Once, I’d turned quickly and caught sight of a figure ducking into an alleyway, but no one had tried to contact us, and though we’d turned the house upside down looking, we hadn’t found another map.
In July, Raleigh had come for a visit and never left. He loved the beach and he would go out every morning to walk on his IronLegs, still getting the feel of his new body. He’d gotten better and better on them and he could be found most evenings puttering about the kitchen, making us dinner, telling us stories about Dad, Pucci watching him from his perch on a curtain rod and sneaking bites of meat or salad when Raleigh wasn’t looking.
Now it was August and Sukey had come out from the city for the day for a picnic. She’d be leaving for the Academy soon and we knew it would be a while before she’d be able to visit. She’d brought some lunch: Fazian beef sandwiches she’d lifted from the Expedition Society and Deloian cocoa cake that had been in Delilah’s Explorer’s rations that week. Raleigh had baked bread and we had plums from the plum tree in our yard.
We’d been sitting on a blanket on the beach, eating and looking at a photograph of our parents that I’d found up in the attic. I’d brought it down to show Sukey because she wanted to know what Nika had looked like. I still couldn’t think of her as Mom or Mother. I could barely remember far enough back to when I’d called her that, but Raleigh’s stories had stuck in my mind and I thought of her now as Nika, intelligent, beautiful, frozen in time. The photograph was a wedding portrait, printed at one of the government-approved photography studios, and it showed them hand in hand, standing in a field in their fancy clothes, Dad in a gray morning suit and Nika in a long, lacy white dress with a high neck and short sleeves. Raleigh had cried when I showed it to him, but he’d told us more stories, about how they’d met at the Expedition Society and how he had been the best man at their wedding. He’d told me about how he thought her father had been a Muller Machine engineer, and that was how she knew so much about them, but he didn’t know for sure.
“You look so much like her, Kit,” Sukey told me, running a finger over Nika’s dark hair, cut in bangs like M.K.’s in the picture. I’d been staring at it ever since I’d found it, at Dad’s happy smile and Nika’s level, contented gaze.
Sukey put it down, folding her hands together behind her head and stretching back out on the sand. We all stared at the sky for a long time and then she said, “I just keep thinking about Tex, lying there on the ground. It doesn’t seem right that they got away with killing him when he was just protecting us.”
“He was protecting me,” I pointed out. “But mostly he was protecting the maps.”
“But we have to tell someone,” Sukey said. “We have to tell someone the truth. They can’t just… murder people.”
“You know we can’t,” I told her, as gently as I could. “This is the only way to protect the canyon.”
“He’s right,” Zander said. “I bet if we could ask Tex, it’s what he’d want us to do.”
“How’s it going with the map?” Sukey asked me.
“Nothing yet,” I told her grumpily. “I haven’t found any references to Girafalco’s Trench anywhere. But even if I do figure it out, I don’t know what we can do about it.”
Zander was tossing little pieces of ham to Pucci, who was
perched on the end of his foot. “We can go there,” he said. “Raleigh will give us money. There’s obviously something there that Dad wants us to see. That the Mapmakers’ Guild wants us to see. And there’s the man with the clockwork hand. We’re going to track down the man with the clockwork hand.”
I stared at him. “Zander. They would never let us go.”
“Never,” Pucci squawked.
“And I’ll be back at the Academy,” Sukey said sadly. “I don’t know when I’ll get to see you.”
“I wish we could go with you,” M.K. said. She had ripped the sleeves off an old T-shirt of mine and I could see the shimmery, glittering skin on her arm. Whenever it started seeming like Ha’aftep Canyon and everything that had happened there had been a dream, I had only to look at M.K.’s arm to know it had been real.
“So do I. Maybe you can come visit.”
“What are we going to do, ask Francis Foley for permission?” I asked them. I hated the way they were pretending it was even a possibility. I felt sick at the thought of not seeing Sukey again for months, and it seemed like forever until Christmas vacation. I couldn’t even look at her. “You don’t understand. I bought us some time, but they know something’s up. I’m sure we’re being watched. Foley isn’t going to leave us alone. Even if I could figure out the other map, we’d never get there without them following us.”
“Never say never,” Pucci squawked.
We all turned to look at him.
“I’ll say it again, that bird is weird,” Sukey said.
We were all silent for a long time. It was one of those hot summer afternoons where you lose all track of time, the air perfectly still, all of us drifting in and out of sleep. I looked over my shoulder at the house and, through the windows, caught sight of Raleigh moving around in the kitchen. Then I turned back to watch Sukey. She was wearing a summer dress, a funny Neo thing made of shiny green fabric, and the green made her hair look brighter than ever. She had a new light in her right ear, a pale amber one, and I liked the way it almost matched her eyes. She caught me staring at her and I closed my eyes and pretended I was sleeping.
At first I thought I was imagining the sound of the engine, the steady chug chug of it over the water, but Pucci gave his warning call and when I opened my eyes I saw the huge silver form of an airship.
It was the Grygia. We all watched as it came closer and closer and then, thanks to some new technology I hadn’t heard about, hovered in the air over the beach. There wasn’t a landing platform on the beach, but a set of stairs unfurled from the door of the gondola. We all watched as Jec Banton, holding a folded green umbrella, came down them, then waited on the sand next to the wreck of an abandoned boat. He was wearing his red jumpsuit, only he’d removed the sleeves. His hair still looked like a lethal weapon.
“Where’s the map?” Zander whispered to me. “Did you hide it?”
I nodded. I’d found a perfect place for the bathymetric map and Dad’s note to us, a floorboard in the attic that could be tipped up to reveal a little hiding spot below. We’d burned the maps of Ha’aftep Canyon as soon as we’d returned home. But my heart was still beating nervously as we watched Mr. Mountmorris, dressed for the weather in a thin green-and-white-striped suit and a white plastic sun hat, come slowly down the stairs.
It seemed like it took forever for them to walk across the sand to us, but when they got there, Mr. Mountmorris gestured and Jec Banton shook open the umbrella, which turned out to be a folding chair. It was a beautiful thing, with thin but sturdy wooden legs and an intricately carved seat, like something Dad might have made.
Pucci hopped over and pecked at the chair, then looked suspiciously up at Mr. Mountmorris, who sat down and studied us for a minute.
“How are you getting along, children?” he asked finally.
“You mean, have we recovered from seeing a man murdered?” M.K. asked, her little face set in a scowl.
Mr. Mountmorris’s blue eyes flashed. “He was impeding a BNDL operation. Mr. Foley was very much justified.” He seemed to be forcing himself to remain calm and he took a deep breath before saying, “I feel that perhaps you are angry with me.”
“You lied to us,” I told him. “You didn’t tell us that you worked for BNDL.”
“BNDL,” Pucci squawked.
“And you lied to me,” he said, glancing at Pucci in a puzzled way. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
“Why are you here?” Zander asked him.
Mr. Mountmorris rearranged the strands of white hair stretched across his scalp. “I’ve been thinking about your dilemma. Despite the trouble you caused, you did ultimately… aid, shall we say, in the recovery of the gold from Drowned Man’s Canyon. Since the death of your father, you are, sadly, without an adult presence to guide you”— he nodded to Sukey— “in the way that Miss Neville has her mother to guide her. In these… difficult times, that is most unfortunate.”
Jec Banton nodded sympathetically.
Mr. Mountmorris went on. “You showed great… initiative in locating your father’s map and so forth, and despite what you may believe about those of us charged with protecting the New Lands and resources of the world, initiative does not go unrewarded.” Mr. Mountmorris reached up to wipe his forehead with the green silk handkerchief he always seemed to carry. “As you know, I have many contacts at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences and we have found three places there for you, if you agree to take them. What do you think?”
“Why?” I asked him. “Why do you want to help us out? So we won’t tell anyone about Tex?”
Jec Banton shook his head as though we’d said something unpleasant.
“Oh no,” Mr. Mountmorris said quickly. “I think we trust that you won’t mention that unfortunate situation. In truth, I believe we could benefit from your particular talents. If you agree to certain conditions, that is.”
“What conditions?” I asked.
“That you abide by all the rules and regulations of the Academy. They like to keep things running like clockwork there, you know. They’re very particular about the rules.”
“That’s it?” I was wary, waiting for the catch. He was buying us off and I wondered what the price was going to be.
He smiled. “That’s it. Mr. Banton has all the necessary paperwork, which he’ll leave with you. Let me remind you that you have now entered very elite company. The Academy received 2,371 applications this year for twenty places in the incoming class. Now, if there aren’t any more questions, I’ll say good day.”
Jec Banton handed M.K. a brown envelope. “Hail President Hildreth!” he said, and we all raised our hands to our foreheads.
They had already turned to go when I called after them, “What about Dad?”
It took Mr. Mountmorris a long moment to turn around, and when he did, he looked tired to me, as though his offer had cost him a lot. “What about him?”
“Are you going to put his picture back up at the Expedition Society? Are you going to tell everyone he wasn’t a crook?”
“That,” Mr. Mountmorris said in a quiet voice, “is completely out of my hands.” They walked back across the yard and someone in the Grygia dropped the stairs down again.
“Is he serious?” Zander asked me.
Sukey had jumped up and she was twirling M.K. around. “This is so exciting. I can introduce you to everyone and show you around. I can’t believe you’re coming with me! M.K., you’re going to be able to use the Academy workshop. You can build a steam engine. You can help me work on a better engine for the glider!”
Pucci gave a loud and happy squawk.
“You can come, too, Pucci,” Sukey said. “Lots of students bring animals with them.”
“It’s great,” M.K. said, smiling. “But why is he helping us?”
“They want to keep an eye on us,” I told her. “This way they’ll be able to watch us, make sure no one’s trying to contact us. We won’t be able to make a move without an agent there.”
�
��But it’s what we always wanted,” Zander said. “Becoming Explorers. Traveling. We might be able to go to Fazia.”
I wasn’t sure. “They’ll own us,” I told him. “It’s bribery, pure and simple.”
Pucci alighted on his shoulder, chattering happily to himself. Zander smiled, his blue eyes sad for a minute, and then he shrugged. “What choice do we have?”
“Come on, Kit,” M.K. said. “We have to go tell Raleigh! Let’s start packing. Sukey, you can tell us what we need to take.”
“They’ll give you uniforms,” Sukey said. “But you should bring regular clothes and any gear you want to have.” She was grinning and I couldn’t help smiling back at her. At least we wouldn’t have to say goodbye.
I thought about what Mr. Mountmorris had said, about the Academy running like clockwork, and suddenly I knew it had been a little secret joke he’d meant for me, just to make sure that he knew I’d lied to them. None of the agents had ever mentioned the Explorer’s clockwork hand. But he knew I knew and he was reminding me that he held my whole future in his hands.
I watched as the stairs were pulled up and the Grygia began to rise into the hot blue sky.
“I have to tell Delilah,” Sukey was saying, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, and her freckles standing out against her skin. “Maybe she can fly us all up there. Zander, wait until you see the Training Grounds. And there are tons of atlases in the Academy library, Kit. I bet you’ll find the location of that map.” She took my hand. “Come on.” Her skin was warm and soft against mine. When she squeezed my hand, I felt a hot thrill run through my arm and up across my shoulders.
As I turned to follow her, I gave the airship one last glance. It rose slowly, majestically, and I saw Mr. Mountmorris’s face in the window. The airship got farther and farther away and finally disappeared over the water, followed by a tail of dark smoke that was the only sign they’d been there at all.
But I could have sworn that he’d smiled at me, a small, grim smile that had disappeared almost instantaneously, like a frog’s tongue snapping out to catch a fly.