The Key of Lost Things

by Sean Easley

  One ambassador who didn’t leave, however, is Mr. Nagalla. He’s insisting on conducting a full “audit” of our security measures now that we’ve been breached.

  As I busy myself cobbling together a plan to get my sister back, Mr. Nagalla stays a step behind me—or, more often than not, in my way. He’s like the world’s most annoying shadow. I’m tempted to create a Most Likely to Make Me Want to Punch Someone award if he sticks around much longer.

  “Why the sour face?” Elizabeth asks when I come to the front desk window for the daily status report.

  “Three guesses,” I whisper, eyes darting to my short shadow-man, who is examining the safety pamphlets. “I swear, if he follows me to the bathroom . . .”

  Elizabeth covers a laugh. I should know better than to make comments like these to her. Subtlety is not her strong suit. What is it Sev says? If Elizabeth knows a thing, everyone knows a thing.

  “Leave him to me,” she says, and stands to lean over the desk to call out to him. “Mr. Nagalla, have you seen the sorry state of the wood on these counters? It’s so grainy . . .” And just like that, Nagalla totters over to examine the poor counters that never did anything to anyone, while I sneak up the stairs to get away from him.

  • • •

  The winds of the Nightvine make me feel at peace. Here, I don’t have to worry about people messing with my plans, or taking matters out of my control. This is my domain, if only because there’s no one here to challenge me.

  I wander the roads—up the rises and down the dips, winding past hundreds of arches that lead to who knows where. Queenie saunters along beside me, tail swishing back and forth, my ever- present companion whenever I’m here, navigating the roads between piles of forgotten things.

  Up ahead I spy an intersection where multiple vine roads connect, and on it another collection of junk from the outside world. It’s like the Nightvine collects lost things and builds little shrines out of them for the cats to play on.

  Does the magic here feel as lost as I do? Is it gathering lost things because, like me, it doesn’t know where it fits?

  “I see you’ve found my hiding place,” a voice says from around a junked-out minivan.

  I freeze. All this time, I’ve never encountered another person out here. But I recognize that voice.

  “Admiral?” I peek around the minivan to find Admiral Dare perched upon an old box TV set like the one Oma used to have. My mouth hangs open like the koi fish in the fountain. I figured she’d be mobilizing her marines to get her key back.

  “Was it you?” she asks as soon as I step into view.

  Huh? “I don’t—”

  “Not you.” She puts a fist to her chin in thought. “Your sister, then? Or was it another one of your hotel friends working for Stripe?”

  I cross my arms. It’s one thing to say that Cass helped the Hoppers, but to suggest that she’s with Stripe is going too far. “My sister is not working for Stripe.”

  “Someone in the Hotel is. And yet”—she fixes her gaze on the tea-green sky—“the search brings me here again. I’m not sure why.”

  “Well, I’m not the one you’re looking for, and it’s not Cass either.” Though, I have to finally admit that it could be Nico. Then a new thought hits me. The trouble at the Hotel, sending out invitations to all those ambassadors, the grand party. . . “Your binding day gala—it was a trap, wasn’t it? You were trying to draw out Stripe’s agent.”

  She sits back and folds her hands. “Yes. The gala was my idea, in fact. In a way it worked too, though not quite as I expected.”

  “Is it even really your binding day?”

  “It is, but once you’re as old as I am things like that don’t matter quite as much. It did provide a fortunate excuse, though. Agapios asked me to track Stripe soon after you evicted him from the Museum. When the key led me to the Hotel, I knew that someone with a strong connection to Stripe had been operating within its walls. Whoever it is, they are very good at staying hidden, and we needed to draw them out.” She motions to a boom box nearby. “Have a seat. You make me nervous, lurking like that.”

  I brush off the old stereo and sit.

  The admiral crosses her legs and rests her hands on her knees. “It’s been quite some time since I last visited this place. I used to love that wet smell on the air.”

  “So this really is where you disappeared to,” I say. “Your father came to the New World to bind a door for the Embassy, but something went wrong and you escaped by coming here.”

  “It took four hundred years for someone to learn that secret.” She smiles warmly at the sky. “The lost and found of the world.”

  “Why not tell anyone, though? What happened?”

  She scrunches her brow. “The Commandant happened; you call him Mr. Stripe. He wanted to take my father’s door and use it to add the Americas to his empire. Thankfully, the indigenous people of Roanoke had developed a relationship with a magic of their own.” She motions to the verdant sky overhead.

  “So they’re the ones who created the Nightvine.”

  “Not created—cultivated,” she corrects. “They hid us colonists here and pruned the vine safely away from the outside world. She has grown wild ever since.”

  “She?”

  “I don’t know what they called this place before we came here. My father called her Vitis Nocturna Via, ‘the way of the vine of night.’ Though, I suppose ‘the Nightvine’ has a certain ring to it as well. Once those who protected us cut her off from the world, she—and those trapped inside—felt lost and forgotten. She’s been reshaped by those feelings. By my feelings. The others didn’t survive our long imprisonment here, but the vine bonded with me, sustained me. She gave me a place to hide, and her fruit to survive. It wasn’t until my father passed that the vine let me use her magic to escape.” The admiral pauses. “She gave it to me, you know. The Key of Lost Things—power to seek what’s lost, or to lose it entirely.”

  I toe the dirt with my shoe. “I’m sorry for letting the Hoppers steal it.”

  “The Nightvine doesn’t belong to me, young man, and neither does her key. Magics like that are much too wild to ever be owned. She chose to act kindly toward me. I’m not sure I’ll ever know why.”

  The Key of Lost Things. Was that the Hoppers’ target all along? Seems as though something like that would be very helpful right now.

  The admiral looks me in the eye. “Don’t you worry about that key, keybearer. It was born from the Nightvine’s lost state, so it’s in the key’s nature to be lost as well. The key will find its way back eventually.” She stands, dusting the dirt from her uniform. “That’s the funny thing I’ve learned about lost things: the important ones always come back to you.”

  She starts walking down the path back to the Hotel.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I have a vengeful magic to hunt,” she says. “And I suspect you have one more thing to find as well. A gift from a friend?” The admiral waves, and continues down the vine. “Find your destination, Cameron Kuhn. Find it, and don’t let go.”

  22

  Resignation and Determination

  One more thing to find.

  My topscrew opens the door to Sev’s room right up, and the familiar scent of wood shavings and sawdust wafts through.

  It’s weird entering his room without him—like I’m intruding. Cameron Kuhn, Most Likely to Be Up to No Good. Yeah, right. Nico’s the one who deserves that honor. Which raises the question: Why didn’t Nico come to the Hotel himself to steal the key? He’s a schemer, sure, but he’s also prideful—he wouldn’t allow Bee to take all the glory unless there was something more important for him to do elsewhere.

  Or unless someone was preventing him.

  I scan the floor and shelves of Sev’s suite, looking for a box or something with my name on it, but I can’t find anything. Where else would it—

  Then I notice the garment bag on the rack in the closet, a card dangling from the hook with For Cam written on i
t in Sev’s neat, blocky handwriting.

  Sev got me clothes?

  I zip open the bag to reveal a suit—a fine suit, tailored in the formal style that Agapios and I wear for our concierge duties. There’s a spot of red near the collar, like a tiny drop of blood that couldn’t be washed out. I remember that spot. I was wearing this suit when Nico first loosed the cats on the Hotel, and one cat got me square in the face. Sev must have snuck it from the laundry. But why?

  I lay the suit on the bed before realizing just how dusty the bedding is—Sev’s woodworking projects always leave his room feeling more like a workshop than a bedroom. I quickly yank the suit back off the coverlet to brush loose all the dust off the back, but strangely, there is none. The dust didn’t stick.

  Curious, I wipe my hand in the dust on a nearby shelf and grip the sleeve. When I release the fabric, it’s perfectly clean. The jacket must be coated with something. An anti-binding? After all my complaining about the Laundry Service, Sev made me a suit that won’t get dirty. Awesome.

  I go ahead and change, anxious to see how the suit looks, but my enthusiasm quickly fizzles when I check the mirror. It doesn’t fit anymore. The jacket, the pants . . . it’s all much too big, as if Sev resized it to fit him, not me.

  I should have known it was too good to be true.

  I’m about to take the jacket off and change back into my original suit—filthy now from being dropped on Sev’s floor—when I see more words written on the back of the gift tag.

  Beshaped Suit (Please read instructions carefully before using.)

  To clean: This Beshaped Suit never needs to be cleaned. It is shaped and tailored to resist all bindings beyond the one between it and its wearer.

  Ha! Resists bindings? Let’s see Rahki try to stick me to a wall now. Though . . . that won’t matter if the suit doesn’t fit.

  To operate, infuse your coin and insert it into the front jacket pocket.

  An infusion: binding a part of yourself to an object for a short time to tap into the binding’s magic. We use that whenever we lick the pins and sign our name to our coins with our spit to activate the icons, or the map boards, scattered throughout the Hotel. Does that mean this suit is an icon, too, like the statues, or Cass’s chair?

  I feel the pocket normally designed for handkerchiefs and pocket squares. This one contains both a normal pocket and a smaller, coin-size inner sleeve.

  On first binding, the infused coin will tether you to the suit, and the suit to you. The suit will then adjust to fit your needs, and maintain that shape until bound to another person.

  Reminder: like all icon bindings, the magic will only last as long as the binding infusion remains active. Do not forget to renew the binding as necessary to use added functions.

  Happy birthday, Cameron. You are a good friend.

  Magic? Added functions?

  I step in front of Sev’s mirror and take in the suit’s loose, dumpy appearance. Using a little spittle and a pin from my pin-sleeves, I scribble my name on the coin and slide it into the pocket.

  The suit shimmers along its seams. The sleeves draw up to my wrists. The waistcoat cinches around my abdomen, and the slacks rise up on my butt all on their own, tightening around my hips.

  When the shimmer dies, I check the mirror again. It’s a perfect fit. I admire the cut of it, and am shocked at how sophisticated it makes me look.

  I blink, and the reflection in the mirror changes. Nico. Again. Like before, the image isn’t the crisp vision you’d expect to find in a mirror, but rather a moving sketch, redrawn frame by frame, like the drawings in the Ledger.

  I reach out to touch the glass, and mirror-Nico does the same.

  “Can you hear me?” I ask, and the reflection mimes my words perfectly.

  Then . . .

  “Don’t go.”

  I take a step back. The reflection spoke, in Nico’s voice. This time I wasn’t saying anything at all.

  “If you leave, bad things will happen,” he says. “Honor your promise to Rahki. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

  And when I blink again, he’s gone.

  • • •

  I march through the Hotel halls with Sev’s have-sack over my shoulder, intent on my new goal. I don’t know what that was back there in Sev’s room, or how Nico keeps managing to appear to me in mirrors, but one thing is clear: he doesn’t want me coming to find him.

  That’s all I need to know. If Nico doesn’t want to be found, then I absolutely must find him. But first I have to find Cass. If I’m right, finding her will lead me to Nico.

  I rub the face of her Hotel coin under my thumb. She left it behind, and I retrieved it from her room right after the Ledger shared Cass’s journey with me. This coin is how I’ll find her. There’s always that subtle, unstoppable pull between the coin and its owner, and I think I know just how to access it.

  “Here, kitty-kitty,” I say, adjusting the have-sack and waving Queenie to me in the hall outside the Nightvine. “That’s right. . . . Come on.”

  The little calico prances coyly. She can pretend all she likes, but I know she’s been waiting for me to come back, like always.

  I strike my hand—wrapped in the Maid Service glove I swiped from Dad’s room—down one of my pins and use its dust to attach Cass’s coin to Queenie’s back. The cat stops rubbing against my knee to lick at the coin, but she must recognize the feeling because she goes back to ignoring it right away.

  If I’m right, the coin should draw a cat to the coin’s owner as easily as it would a person—better, since animals are more sensitive to the binding than humans. I won’t be able to find my way around that maze of vine roads nearly as well as the cats of the Nightvine can, but with the cat’s help and the Nightvine’s affinity for lost things, I’m really hoping the combination will do the trick.

  Of course, the fact that Queenie’s still rubbing against my legs nonstop doesn’t bode well.

  “Go on,” I tell her. “Good kitty. Shoo.”

  Queenie’s purring intensifies.

  “Cameron? What are you doing?”

  I whirl to find Sana creeping down the hall toward me in her Motor Pool coveralls, a suspicious look on her face.

  “Oh . . . hi, Sana. Uhh . . . what are you up to?” Way to play it cool, Cam. She’s totally going to know something’s up.

  “Just walking the halls,” she says, fidgeting with a hammer in her over-the-shoulder tool-sari. “I like letting my feet wander—helps me figure out particularly tricky problems.” She notices Queenie at my feet. “Is that one of the cats that everyone’s been looking for?”

  I gulp down the panic inflating in my chest. “Uh . . . yeah. Look, I found it!”

  Queenie rubs my calf as though I’m her best friend in the world.

  Sana places her hands on her hips. “Really? Because it looks as though you bound a coin to that cat in hopes it would lead you somewhere. And if I were to make an educated guess, I’d bet that’s Cass’s coin.”

  I’m no Nico when it comes to deception.

  “I’ve got to find her. To find all the Hoppers, and stop them before they strike again—”

  She holds up a hand to stop me. “You had me at ‘finding Cass.’ ” Sana bends down and ruffles the scruff on Queenie’s neck above the bound coin. “So, why aren’t we leaving already?”

  “You want to come with me?”

  “Duh.” Sana examines the coin between Queenie’s shoulder blades. “Did you infuse it? I don’t sense an infusion. . . .”

  I didn’t even think of that. Of course. We had to do the same thing when we were searching for Dad.

  “You can’t come with me, Sana,” I tell her. The last thing I want is someone else getting hurt on my watch.

  She claps the cat hair from her fingers. “If you want the coin to guide you to Cass, you have to strengthen the binding between you two. The coin connects your will to the cat. It’s like the icons, only using something alive instead of a statue. Influence, not control. In order to
influence the cat, you’ll need to add your own binding, so that the magic can read you too.” She smirks. “Face it. You need me.”

  “But—”

  Sana searches her tools for a pen. “Here. Lick this and write your name—”

  “On the coin. I know.”

  I do as she says, though my insides buck against the idea of her coming with me. This mission could get me kicked out of the Hotel for good. Will they kick her out as well? And what about the Nightvine? What will Sana think of it? What will it think of her?

  Sana eyes me with suspicion. “What’s wrong with you? You look like I spat in your chutney.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say as I finish scribbling my name. The crackle of the binding echoes in the back of my mind. “You sure this’ll work?”

  “I would have tried it myself, but I didn’t have her coin. Plus I’m not family-bound. You, on the other hand . . .” Sana trails off as Queenie darts down the hallway and under the veil to the Nightvine. Her jaw drops. “What in the world was that?”

  Maybe this’ll be fun after all.

  “I’ve got something to show you.” I grab the tuft of blossoms in the corner and lift the rippling bricks as easily as I lifted the shower curtain this morning. “This way, before she gets too far.”

  23

  Broken Walls

  We step out under the matcha-colored sky of the Nightvine.

  Sana stumbles through the veil, gaping in awe. “Arey,” she says in disbelief, and spins to take it in, arms outstretched like she’s dancing in a field of flowers. “What is this place?”

  “I call it the Nightvine,” I say, and spot the lithe calico scurrying down one of the offshoot paths. “That way.”

  Sana trails behind me, and I glance back to see her opening and closing her mouth like the koi fish in the Shadedial Fountain. We don’t have time to stop and smell the Nightvine blossoms, though—the binding will fall off Queenie eventually, and we have to be there when it does, or risk losing the coin.

  “Cam!” Sana calls as I angle down another split in the path. “Do you know the way back? What if we get lost?”