by Nadia Aguiar
“This is as far as we can take you,” said Eusebio. “A short distance farther is a fork. The tunnel to the left is the way you should go. The tunnel to the right is where the Red Coral are. The Red Man is with them and he’s very dangerous. Stay away from them—go quickly until you’re safely far away.”
Clanking and muffled voices echoed somewhere up ahead. The enemy was very near. Simon’s heart hammered. He shook the monks’ hands firmly. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m grateful for all your help—I would never have been able to learn all that stuff on my own.”
The monks gave him an ophalla torch to light his way and wished him well, the torchlight gleaming softly on their gray whiskers. Simon hoisted his backpack higher on his back and, taking a deep breath, headed deeper into the tunnel. Behind him he heard the giant stone roll back into place. There was no turning back now.
Chapter Fifteen
Deep in the Lair • The Floriano Operation • Like Rats in a Maze • A Vast Crescent
Simon proceeded cautiously, his body alert and tense. The clanging and hammering from the Red Coral mine echoed through the tunnel, and he could hear the river running faintly overhead. It sounded like being inside a very large shell.
He looked over his shoulder but the passage back to the monks was sealed—he could hardly tell where it had been. He kept walking, the ophalla torch lighting his way. The sounds from the mine grew louder. Soon he could see the fork the monks had told him about.
He slowed down.
Don’t be foolish, he told himself.
But was it really foolish?
In one direction lay his sisters and safety.
In the other, tantalizingly close, lay the chance to learn more about the Red Coral Project. Even after all Simon had learned from the Mole Monks he still didn’t know enough to find Faustina’s Gate. Nor had he learned how Faustina’s Gate was supposed to help them. He could keep going, slowly piecing together clues in the perplexing ophallagraphs, or he could take this opportunity to get closer to the Red Coral Project and perhaps learn something more immediately useful. No one suspected he was there; it would be easy to hide on the fringes.
Stepping as softly as he could, he turned right and began walking down the tunnel toward the Red Coral camp.
When he heard voices and saw lights up ahead, he stopped and stood very still. He wrapped the ophalla torch in a spare shirt and stowed it in his backpack so its light wouldn’t give him away. Breathing lightly, he inched forward and pressed his face to a large crack in the tunnel wall.
He looked into a large chamber. It was an ophalla mine, but almost all its ophalla had already been chiseled out. Eastern tribespeople were loading the final blocks into a caravan of wheelbarrows that were constantly running in and out of the room. Maroong men were sweeping glittering powder into piles, then into bags. Giant machines were being dismantled and hauled out. The Mole Monks had been right: The mine was shutting down and the Red Coral were getting ready to move somewhere else.
Two Red Coral men passed near where Simon was. He crouched at once and hugged the wall. The men were talking about a guerrilla who had been tormenting the Red Coral camp recently.
“It’s got to be more than one person!”
“No, I’m telling you—it’s just one kid. I’ve seen him twice with my own eyes. Otherwise I’d think he was a phantom—appearing out of nowhere and disappearing without a trace. You always see that green parrot hanging around first, so keep your eye out…”
Simon’s ears pricked up. Green parrot?
“We’ll catch the little son of a gun sooner or later. He’ll regret it when Fitzsimmons gets his hands on him…”
Simon couldn’t suppress his smile. It was Helix, he was sure.
The men’s voices faded, and Simon peeked cautiously through the crack again. He saw that a cart had appeared through a tunnel on the opposite side of the chamber and sat idling. He saw a flash of red beard. Dr. Fitzsimmons was driving it. Simon held his breath and watched. The two men Simon had overheard were striding over to the cart and as he watched, they climbed into the back and the three of them drove off down a side tunnel. Simon brushed a trickle of sweat off his temple. That was close.
He wished he could learn more, but it was impossible to go any farther without being seen. He’d got confirmation that the Red Coral were moving locations and heard the uplifting news that Helix was somewhere nearby—that was enough. He turned to go.
He froze. Inches from his neck was a serrated metal spearhead bound to the end of a thick, short baton. He looked up its length to see a giant Maroong woman standing above him. She must have been nearly seven feet tall, with shoulders broader than any man’s Simon had ever seen. He had not heard her approach—even now as he watched her she barely seemed to breathe. Her lips were pulled back in a grimace, baring a full set of teeth shaved to sharp, menacing points. Her bald head was scabbed from the razor and painted bloodred.
She plucked the backpack from Simon’s back.
“No!” he cried. The precious ophallagraphs, the mineral-fruits, and the umbrella were all in his backpack. He felt sick. What had he been thinking? He should have just kept going as the monks had told him to. He watched miserably as the woman began to rifle through the bag. She took out a mineral-fruit and tried to bite it, but even her sharply filed tooth could not pierce it. She opened and closed the umbrella. She shoved Simon’s clothes and the map to one side, and withdrew the ophallagraphs and gazed at them rapaciously. She looked at him with a glimmer in her eye. She rooted through the bag once more, considering his compass and pocketknife and canteen, before she withdrew the sparkle pistol and tucked it surreptitiously in her leather skirt.
“Dr. Fitzsimmons will be back very soon,” she said ominously. “He’ll take care of you then.”
With that, she shoved Simon ahead of her down the tunnel.
His knees felt like rubber. At any time Dr. Fitzsimmons was going to return and find him there. The roar of water overhead grew louder—they must be directly under the river here. In a few minutes Simon heard tuneless and relentless hammering and someone shouting.
He knew that voice.
It was hoarse, but he knew it.
He turned a corner with the guards, who unlocked a metal grate, shoved him unceremoniously into a cell, and left.
The cell’s sole occupant—prepared for the unknown—looked fierce, but her expression quickly turned to surprise.
“Simon!” she cried. She looked behind him. “Where are your sisters?”
Simon glared at Isabella. She was among the last people he wanted to be locked in a cell with. He knew she must have told Dr. Fitzsimmons the children were in Tamarind after she had been captured and that’s why the Red Coral had been chasing them.
“We had to separate,” he said. “No thanks to you. If you’d listened to us in the beginning we might have been able to help you and we wouldn’t be here right now!” He looked around the rough stone walls of the cell and rattled the door, but the lock was solid.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.” Her hair was tangled and her clothes, the same ones she had been wearing the last time Simon saw her, were filthy. “It was only after Dr. Fitzsimmons caught me that I knew for sure you didn’t have anything to do with the Red Coral.”
“Too late,” said Simon. He looked around the empty cell. “Where’s your family?” he asked. “I thought they captured your mother and brother, as well.”
“They’re being held in Cabarro,” said Isabella. “That’s what one of the guards told me. If that’s the truth…” She sniffed suddenly. Simon saw that her fingers were scabbed from a futile attempt to dig her way out of the cell.
“Listen,” she whispered, her eyes suddenly bright, “I know you’re angry, but I’m going to make it up to you. I’ve had a way out of here since this morning, but there’s been too much activity in the tunnel. I’ve been waiting for it to quiet down so that once I’m out I’ll have a goo
d head start.”
“What do you mean, you have a way out?” whispered Simon, instantly alert.
From within the folds of her clothes Isabella withdrew a long, thin tooth.
“The Maroong woman who brought me food this morning dropped it,” she said. “You know they decorate themselves with bones and teeth—it must have fallen off her clothes. I’m sure I can pick the lock with it.”
Making sure no one was coming, she kneeled and tried without success to unlock the door. It was clear to Simon that she didn’t know what she was doing.
“You’re going to break the tooth like that,” he said. “Let me try.”
Isabella kept an eye out for anyone coming while Simon set to work on the lock.
“They want your boat, you know,” she said.
“Our boat?” Simon asked in surprise, pausing for a moment to look up at her.
“They’re stuck in Tamarind,” said Isabella. “They can’t get out—whatever instrument they built that enabled them to cross the Blue Line was damaged so badly in the storms on their way here that they still haven’t been able to fix it. They’ve been looking for somewhere called Faustina’s Gate that they think will let them go back and forth, but they haven’t been able to find that, either. Fitzsimmons thinks that the Pamela Jane is how you were able to get here. It wasn’t anything you actually knew—it was the boat itself.”
“She has ophalla in her hull,” said Simon, putting his ear to the lock to hear the gears clicking. “It’s attracted to the Line.”
“You didn’t tell me that when I asked you how you were able to cross the Blue Line,” whispered Isabella. “You weren’t exactly up front with me, either!”
“Can you blame us?” asked Simon. “You didn’t trust us from the moment we got here. What else have you found out while you were here?”
“The Red Coral have just discovered a huge new ophalla deposit in a place called Floriano,” said Isabella. “They’re packing up and leaving for there now.”
Floriano, thought Simon. That’s where the señoras were.
“I’ve heard them say that the Floriano operation is at least as big as the total of everything they’ve mined already,” said Isabella, dropping her voice. “If the mining is what’s been causing the chaos in the environment, then what they’re going to do at Floriano will be devastating. Excavations are set to start in three days.”
Simon’s heart plunged. Three days—what could they do in three days?
The lock opened with a click.
“Hey, you got it!” said Isabella.
Simon looked quickly both ways down the tunnel. “They took my backpack from me,” he said. “I’ve got to find it.”
“Forget your bag!” said Isabella. “We need to get out of here before anyone sees us!”
“It’s important,” said Simon. “It has the ophallagraphs in it.”
“The what?”
“The ophallagraphs,” whispered Simon. “I’ll explain later—right now I have to get my bag. The Maroong woman kept it. Do you have any idea where she would have put it?”
“Dr. Fitzsimmons has a room,” said Isabella.
“Good,” said Simon. “It should be empty now—I saw him leaving just before the Maroong caught me.”
“But he could come back any time,” said Isabella, looking nervously down the tunnel. “Oh,” she grumbled at last, “all right, I know where it is. Come on.”
They hurried silently through the passage. They heard voices far ahead, but to Simon’s relief they saw no one.
“This is it,” said Isabella finally, stopping in a stone doorway. “Be quick! I’ll keep watch.”
The makeshift office was empty. Papers were strewn across the single desk, along with a microscope and several tools. A small laboratory was in the process of being packed up and crates were open, half-filled with equipment. Samples of ophalla had been tossed into a cardboard box. At once the haphazard disarray reminded Simon of his father’s study at home. He saw his backpack on top of a stack of papers on the floor beside Dr. Fitzsimmons’s desk. He grabbed it and quickly checked its contents. With relief, he saw that everything except the sparkle pistol was there.
He was about to leave when he noticed that a large map hung on the wall nearby, darkened by scores of mysterious black circles.
“Hurry up!” whispered Isabella.
“Hang on,” said Simon. “This looks important.”
He tiptoed closer. In a box at the bottom of the map was printed Future Mine Sites.
Shocked, Simon looked back up at the sinister circles. There were so many of them! They spread like a pestilence across Tamarind, from north to south and east to west, beneath towns, deep in jungles, in valleys, on hills. Nowhere was spared. Xs marked the sites that had already been mined, but the staggering majority remained to be excavated. Even Maracairol was marked for demolition. The Red Coral Project had only just begun their plan to upend Tamarind.
Isabella had crept into the room and together they looked at the map in horror.
“They aren’t going to stop,” whispered Simon.
He turned frantically to Dr. Fitzsimmons’s desk, looking for anything that might help them. As he rifled through the papers his eyes fell on a folder. A chill crept up his neck as he recognized the handwriting on the cover. It was Papi’s. He opened the folder and scanned the pages quickly. The research was all dated at the top. It was his father’s early conjectures about ophalla, from soon after they returned from Tamarind. But his father would never have given his research to Dr. Fitzsimmons. Dimly Simon remembered that around that time two men had come to Granny Pearl’s house. His father had pretended they were old colleagues. Simon had been reading on the porch when he had seen them leaving with boxes of documents. He was only nine or ten then and, thinking that the men were fellow scientists of his father’s, he had chatted obliviously with them and even offered to help carry the boxes until his father had called him indoors sharply.
What a dumb kid he’d been! The men had been taking his father’s work by force to give to Dr. Fitzsimmons! The research was stolen! Knowing what he knew now, Simon felt sure that the Red Coral would have made threats—maybe even threats about him and Maya and Penny—and Simon’s parents had been powerless to stop them. They had done the best they could to keep the children safe and have their lives be normal. Simon flushed with shame when he remembered how impatient he’d been.
He hated Dr. Fitzsimmons.
He couldn’t be any more different from his father.
Papi loved knowledge for its own sake and for the good it could do for other people. Dr. Fitzsimmons only wanted information so that he could be powerful and control people and possess things. He didn’t care who he hurt or exploited in the process. Even Simon’s family.
Isabella had returned to the door. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered anxiously.
Simon snapped back to where he was: in Dr. Fitzsimmons’s room, where he could return to find them at any moment.
He hurried to the door and he and Isabella dashed down the tunnel.
“I think we should head toward the sound of the water,” he whispered. “It must come up to the surface at some point. Can you run?” He thought that after days trapped in the small cell her legs might be weak, but she nodded gamely.
Simon took his ophalla torch out of his back to light their way, and they ran lightly on the edges of the tunnels out of the puddles. Dripping water echoed all around them. The air smelled like cold mud. The rumble of water overhead got steadily louder and Simon was sure they were getting closer to a way out. But suddenly they realized they had overshot the river and the roar was growing more distant.
“Let’s double back and try another tunnel,” he said.
They twisted and turned down winding passages. One moment the water boomed overhead; the next it faded to a whisper. Finding a way aboveground wasn’t going to be as easy as Simon had hoped. Cold water dripped down their necks from the dank ceiling. Isabella slipped on the
slick stones and skinned her knee. Simon helped her up and they kept running.
“At least we must be far away from them by now,” said Simon at last. But the words were barely out of his mouth when a cry rang out in the tunnel ahead of them. He and Isabella stopped dead in their tracks.
“We’re not far at all,” she whispered breathlessly. “We’ve been going in circles!”
More voices filled the tunnels. The stamp of running feet echoed off the walls. Simon took Isabella’s hand and they ran faster, sloshing through puddles, turning this way and that. Several times they reached a dead end and had to double back. Simon had a wild hope that the Mole Monks would hear and appear to save them, but no one did. The cacophony of footfalls reverberating through the passages made it impossible to tell how near or far their pursuers were. Simon caught a glimpse of a group of men rounding a corner up ahead. Seconds before they would have been seen, Simon and Isabella ducked down a new tunnel.
“We haven’t been down this one before,” whispered Simon, his breathing ragged. The tunnel was widening, the ceiling getting higher, and they were going uphill now. The thunder of water grew louder and louder, drowning out the sounds of the Red Coral behind them. Simon realized he was breathing fresh air. Just a little farther …
A moment later they emerged from the tunnel into the great dark night.
Freedom!
They stopped, out of breath. Simon closed his eyes, drawing in deep lungfuls of pure, cool night air. Being outside had never felt so good. The water roared beside them. Then he felt Isabella squeeze his arm. He opened his eyes.
They were standing on a mossy ledge that jutted out over the most enormous waterfall that Simon had ever seen. A vast crescent of tumbling ivory foam stretched on either side of them, receding into opaline mists in the distance. Just a few yards from their feet, water poured glassy over the edge and shattered into thunderous, muddy surf two hundred feet below. The sheer immensity and power rendered them dumb. Simon looked down into the colored bands of rainbows that spangled the mists. Hardy tufts of vegetation near the base of the falls were slicked down and gleaming in the spray. Nocturnal butterflies jittered through the air above them. Within seconds the heavy mists had doused the children.
