by Trudi Trueit
Cruz turned into the store. It couldn’t have been more than 20 feet long and half as wide but, like all the other shops, it was packed floor to ceiling with candies, nuts, dried fruits, and teas. Cruz slowly made his way around the store to the back counter, where he pretended to be interested in a case of speckled candy-coated chocolate balls that were so big that at first he thought they were eggs. Thank goodness the signs were in English!
A plump Turkish woman who could have been his grandmother peered at him between the jars of candy. “Merhaba.”
“Hello,” said Cruz’s universal translator.
“Merhaba,” said Cruz.
The old woman toddled out. She was carrying a small tray with several dark red squares with rounded edges. She grinned at him. “Türk lokumu denemelisin.”
“You must try my Turkish delight,” said his translator.
Cruz remembered Nebula’s instructions. Releasing his octopod, he reached for a square of the red candy dusted with powdered sugar. The soft candy tasted sweet, a cross between strawberries and cherries. It held a crunchy surprise inside—pistachios. It was good.
The woman leaned in. “Leave the store and turn right,” she said in English. “Walk straight until you see the man in the black-and-white-striped cap. Give him the cipher.”
Cruz hurried out of the shop. Swinging right, his eyes swept the path in front of him. He glanced back. “I don’t see Officer Dover.”
“Don’t worry about her,” said Emmett. “Look for the man in the striped cap.”
“I’m looking, I’m looking.”
If only the market weren’t so busy. Cruz kept moving, his eyes darting left and right, in case the man came out of a store.
“Cruz?” It was Emmett. “Lani’s on the phone.”
“Not a good time,” hissed Cruz.
“She’s with your aunt and…the clue…observe…”
“What?” snapped Cruz. “Emmett, you’re cutting out. Repeat.”
There! Ahead, a stocky man in a black-and-white-striped cap and a black peacoat was heading Cruz’s way.
“I think I see him.” Cruz’s hand tightened around the cipher in his pocket. To be sure he had the right guy, he went to the far right of the aisle. The man mirrored his movements. “It’s Nebula, all right,” said Cruz. “I’m about fifty feet from him.”
“Cruz…did you…okay?” Emmett was still cutting out.
As their gap closed, Cruz’s heart beat faster. He felt light-headed. His hands were cold, his feet hot. They were now a mere 20 feet apart. Cruz brought a frozen hand with the cipher from his pocket. He held his left arm out and turned his fist down. The man’s head was lowered, so Cruz couldn’t see his face. A black glove went out, palm up. In a matter of seconds, they would pass each other. Cruz began to uncurl his fingers. He felt the marble stones slide between them…
“Abort!” Emmett’s voice ricocheted through his head.
“What?”
“Abort, abort! Cruz, don’t give him the cipher!” shouted Emmett. “Do not give him the cipher.”
Cruz clamped his fist closed, catching the cipher a second before it would have dropped into the outstretched glove.
“What the…Hey, you!”
Cruz had no intention of turning around. He began to run, his heart pumping wildly. Cruz hoped his roommate knew what he was talking about, because if he didn’t, Cruz had just cost his father his life. “Emmett,” he huffed, slowing to a jog. “What’s going on?”
“Your dad is free…he’s all right. Do you hear me? I said your dad’s all right. Lani and your aunt rescued him…police have the kidnappers.”
A glove clamped on to Cruz’s wrist. “I want that cipher, kid.”
“No!” Cruz tried to pull away, but the man in the cap was too strong. He began to bend Cruz’s arm back, pushing him to the ground. Pain shot through Cruz’s wrist. His knees buckled. Cruz tried to keep his fingers locked, but his opponent was peeling them back, one by one. Desperate, Cruz threw his other hand up onto the man’s glove to keep him from ripping away the cipher.
His octopod! One spritz from the blue-ringed orb would get this guy to back off, but to reach the weapon in his pocket, Cruz would have to let go with his right hand. His attacker would easily pry apart the rest of his fingers and take the cipher. The octopod wasn’t going to work. Cruz had only one option left.
“Mell, defense mode,” he said between gritted teeth. “Target—”
A hand was over his mouth. Someone else was behind him. Another attacker! Cruz couldn’t finish giving Mell directions. Cruz was on his knees now, hanging on to the cipher with only his ring and pinkie fingers. He couldn’t hold on much longer…
Cruz heard a cry in front of him. Then another yelp from behind. A yellow cloud descended on him. The death grip on his hand was suddenly gone. His mouth was free, too, however, his eyes and nose were starting to burn.
Someone was yanking him up. A hand latched on to his. “Run!”
Half blind, his throat on fire, Cruz stumbled through the crowded market. He clung to his rescuer with one hand and the cipher with the other. Tears streamed down his face, transforming the colorful bazaar into an oil painting left out in the rain. Was that a black headscarf bobbing in front of him? It was! Officer Dover! She wove through the jammed aisle with Cruz in tow, expertly dodging strollers and shopping bags. Officer Dover didn’t slow up until they were through the front of the market and halfway across the main square.
“Stop…please…” His lungs heaving, Cruz couldn’t take another step.
She flung the headscarf aside. “I think we’re safe now.”
Cruz nearly collapsed. “Sailor?”
“Sailor!” Emmett was still in his head.
“We thought you were Officer Dover!” cried Cruz, still trying to wipe the sting from his eyes.
“Hardly. You gave her the slip five minutes ago.”
“I was supposed to come alone.”
“Yeah, well…what kind of friend would I be if I let you do that?”
Standing in the middle of the square, a blur of people crisscrossing around him, it hit Cruz. He’d been wrong. His vision blurry, he looked up at his friend, struggling to rewrap her headscarf. Sailor. Lani. Emmett. Taryn. Fanchon. Cruz may not have had his family to turn to these past few weeks, but he wasn’t alone.
Never had been.
THORNE PRESCOTT hung an elbow out the window of his truck as it rumbled up the side of the volcano. The road to the top of Mauna Kea curved back and forth between bare brown hills for 18 miles, slowly rising to an elevation of almost 14,000 feet.
A few miles from the summit, Prescott couldn’t contain his grin. Genius. That’s what it was. Who would ever guess that within one of the many domed observatories perched on the highest point in Hawaii there would be anything—or anyone—other than telescopes and research equipment?
But there was.
Prescott glanced at his phone on the seat beside him. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon, Swan would call to confirm that Nebula had the cipher and the team could be on their way. They would have to leave Marco behind, of course, in the hidden soundproof room beneath Gemini Observatory. Prescott was sorry about that, but it was business. Marco had been kept alive this long only in the event that Cruz had demanded to talk to his father before surrendering the cipher. Once Nebula had it, well…
Business.
Rounding the last bend, Prescott saw flashing red and blue lights. His heart fluttered. He told himself not to panic. Another observatory was in the way, so he couldn’t be sure…there could be something else going on…
Right?
Gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, Prescott veered off the access road into the looped driveway leading to Gemini. It was his worst fear. A half dozen police cars surrounded the silver dome. Officers were swarming the place.
Prescott frantically rolled up his window. Slumping down, he slowed to pass the scene. Scorpion was being taken out of the building in handcuffs.
He didn’t see Komodo. Marco was standing outside the main door, a blanket over his shoulders. Marisol Coronado stood next to him. A teenage girl was there, too, but Prescott had never seen her before. As his truck went by, the girl looked right at him. He turned to look forward. Prescott was on a circular road. He had no choice but to continue around another smaller observatory and go past Gemini again to get back to the main road. The second time he went by the scene, Prescott saw Scorpion in the back of a police car. The girl was still staring his way. Although the wind whipped her chin-length chocolate hair around her face, Prescott could see her eyes.
She was angry. No, furious.
Cruz didn’t have any siblings. So who was she?
Prescott drove down the mountain, his eyes darting to his rearview mirror looking for flashing lights every other second. Did Nebula have the cipher? Or had that part of the plan fallen apart, too? He would have to make contact with Zebra and Jaguar to see how things stood on the other end, but Prescott had a gut feeling the news wasn’t going to be good. One thing was for sure: Brume would not be happy they had failed. Again.
Time was running out.
Prescott let up on the brake, coasting faster down the hill. He would be glad to leave paradise.
The sooner the better.
IT WAS the best early birthday present he could have hoped for, seeing his dad, Aunt Marisol, and Lani all happily crammed together in front of the camera. They were waving at him from the Goofy Foot.
Cruz waved back. “I can’t believe you rescued Dad.”
Aunt Marisol and Lani beamed.
“I gotta know,” said Sailor, leaning in. “How did you figure out Nebula had taken Mr. Coronado from the sugar mill to Mauna Kea?”
Cruz’s aunt looked to Lani. “You want to take that one?”
“It took a while.” Lani tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I knew Mr. C had left us the silverware tied up with the necklace for a reason, but I couldn’t put the pieces together, or should I say the Pisces together.”
Everyone groaned.
Listening to his best friend, Cruz did not take his eyes off his father. Standing behind Lani, in a bright red-and-orange floral shirt, his dad was grinning, but his face was gaunt, his eyes puffy.
“Then it dawned on me,” continued Lani. “Cruz, I remembered last year, your dad took us up to Mauna Kea for that habitat restoration project for school. We spent the whole day on the volcano replanting native silversword plants. Get it? Silversword—silverware? Still, I wasn’t completely sure that’s what it meant, and even if I was right, I still had no idea where on Mauna Kea they could have taken him. So I looked up all the observatories, weather stations, and research facilities in the area, and I came across Gemini Observatory. It’s the only one named after a constellation, just the way your mom’s Pisces necklace is a constellation. It clicked. I thought maybe your dad wrapped the necklace around the silverware to tell us, in the best way he could, that he was being taken to the Gemini Observatory on Mauna Kea.”
Cruz’s dad patted Lani’s shoulder.
Lani tipped her head. “So I told your aunt—”
“Honestly, it seemed a bit of a stretch to me.” Aunt Marisol picked up the story, “But we had no other leads or ideas about what the clue could mean, and you know how persuasive Lani can be.”
Cruz grunted. Boy, did he.
“I told Lani we couldn’t go alone,” said his aunt, “so she persuaded one of the detectives to come with us. At first, everything at the observatory looked normal and I was sure we were on the wrong track. There was a scientist from the university on duty, but he checked out okay. He even showed us around the inside of the building.”
“I knew something wasn’t right,” interjected Lani. “I just knew it.”
Aunt Marisol made a face. “She wouldn’t let us leave. Since we’d gone all that way, the detective agreed to a short stakeout. We drove down to the parking lot of one of the other observatories, waited, and watched. About forty-five minutes later, we got lucky. A man went to the back of the building and opened a door to some kind of underground bunker we hadn’t even noticed was there. When the officer saw that the man was armed, he called for backup and—”
“We got ’em!” cried Lani. “Well, we got two out of three.”
“They’ll get him,” said Cruz’s dad. “They’ll get Cobra or Tom or whatever his name really is.”
Cruz had a funny feeling that Cobra or Tom or whatever-his-name-really-is also owned a pair of snakeskin-print cowboy boots.
“We’d better go,” said his dad. “It’s getting late for you, and I have a lot of work to catch up on.”
“I have a ship to get back to,” said Aunt Marisol.
“I have a ton of homework,” groaned Lani.
Everyone chuckled.
They said their goodbyes, and Cruz left his cabin with Sailor. They had about a half hour until lights-out, but he needed to burn off some energy. Maybe he would head up to the lounge to see if anyone was playing a game. Or go to the observatory to watch the Leonids. And to think. Cruz still had more than a few questions to ponder—questions like: Who was the English girl in red who had saved him at Petra? Where was Malcolm Rook and what did he want? And why was Jericho Miles and at least one other Synthesis scientist hiding in the belly of the ship?
Up ahead, Taryn’s door opened. Hubbard trotted out, his green ball in his mouth. When he saw Cruz, the Westie dropped the ball and bounded toward him. Cruz knelt and patted his knee. Hubbard ran down the passage at full throttle, tail up, ears flapping. He jumped into Cruz’s arms, licking, licking, licking with his wet pink tongue.
His face glazed with dog drool, Cruz could only laugh. How could he have forgotten to include Hubbard among those who had been there for him? After all, the little Westie had given Cruz the best gift of all.
Love.
DIG, SCOOP, DROP.
Dig, scoop, drop.
Cruz had gotten into an easy rhythm. Gently pierce the ground with the small shovel, scoop up a chunk of dirt, and toss it into the hover sifter. Once Cruz had put 10 or so shovelfuls of dirt into the sifter, a wood-framed box with a screen for a bottom suspended in midair, the solar-powered device would slowly shake the contents from side to side. The dirt then fell through the mesh to a square bucket below, leaving any artifacts behind in the sifter. Cruz had been digging, scooping, and dropping all morning and had only found a couple of bone fragments, a shard of 18th-century pottery, and a one-lira coin from 1947. Not exactly earth-shattering discoveries.
Cruz didn’t care. Archaeology was fun. It was not, however, easy. Or speedy.
Twenty-three explorers had been eager and enthusiastic when the Academy’s plane had whisked them from Istanbul to Konya, in central Turkey. With the snowcapped twin peaks of Mount Hasan in the distance, they had trekked a few hours to the rolling brown plains outside of Aksaray. The city was once an important stop along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route connecting the Far East to western Europe. Professor Luben and Aunt Marisol had led them to the area where Team Cousteau had spotted the ruins on their looting tile. Then it was time to search for the circles that had appeared on their satellite map. Six days later, they were still at it—digging, sifting, scraping, and brushing—with little to show for their efforts but a broken two-foot section of a curved wall. Their PANDA units revealed the stone wall was once part of a temple in a Neolithic city more than 9,000 years ago!
That was exciting enough for Cruz. He was thrilled that Team Cousteau had discovered a lost city. It didn’t matter that the work went slowly or that they weren’t finding much. He was outdoors in a valley under a big ice blue sky with white puffs of train-engine clouds gliding past with his friends and Aunt Marisol, even if she was a bit too busy to dig alongside him.
Cruz nudged Dugan, who was working next to him. “I meant to thank you for convincing Team Magellan to come here. I don’t know how you did it, but thanks.”
Sailor, Emmett, and Bryndis chimed in. “Yeah,
thanks, Dugan.”
Dugan lifted a shoulder. “No big deal.” But the grin on his face said it was a big deal.
As Cruz dropped more dirt into the sifter, his aunt scurried past. “Tao, the idea is to gently scrape with the trowel, not stab the ground. You don’t want to damage anything under the surface.” She bent, took Tao’s hand, and readjusted her wrist. “Relax your grip a little. There you go.”
“Professor Coronado, how long does a dig take?” asked Felipe.
“Depends,” answered Aunt Marisol. “It’s like a treasure hunt. You could find something amazing in your very next shovelful, or a major discovery could take months—even years.”
“Years?” Felipe’s mouth dropped.
“In A.D. 79, the entire Italian city of Pompeii was buried by an eruption from Mount Vesuvius,” explained Cruz’s aunt. “It took several centuries for archaeologists to excavate such a large site. They didn’t finish until the early twenty-first century.”
“And we’re still finding secret chambers in the pyramids at Giza,” boomed Professor Luben, galloping down the slope behind them. He was wearing khakis, a tan shirt, and a matching safari vest covered in a million tiny pockets. “You can’t rush exploration, and I, for one, wouldn’t want to. The adventure that leads to the discovery is half the fun. Okay, it’s most of the fun. Nope, I gotta say it, it’s all the fun.”
Cruz and his teammates laughed.
“Keep at it, explorers,” said Professor Luben. “Somewhere, something unknown is waiting to be known.”
Felipe glanced at his feet and sighed as if to say, “I doubt I’m standing on it.”
Aunt Marisol turned to Cruz. “You’re not upset that we’ll be spending your birthday here, are you?”
Cruz’s birthday was tomorrow.
“No! This is a pretty cool present.”
“Good.” She sighed. “Because I was so hoping you’d like archaeology fieldwork, even though I know it can be tedious at times— What in the world is Zane doing?”