by Nadia Aguiar
There was no way to go but over the falls or back underground. Simon and Isabella turned to run back into the tunnel to find another way out. But before they could reach its mouth they saw lights flashing from inside, and seconds later Maroong men burst out.
They were trapped!
The men pulled up short just as Simon and Isabella had done. Their fearsome painted heads bobbed. The tips of their bayonets gleamed in the moonlight. Torches bobbed inside the tunnel and more guards appeared, sealing the entrance.
“There’s nowhere to go!” gasped Isabella, squeezing Simon’s hand.
Simon felt dizzy. For a moment it was as if the earth slowed and the noise of the water fell silent. A strange calm descended on him. He reached for the umbrella in his backpack and undid the catch that held it closed.
“We’ll jump,” he said.
Isabella looked at him as if he were crazy, but she grabbed hold of the umbrella with him and they locked arms. Simon heard the men shouting anxiously from the mouth of the tunnel as they realized what the captives were preparing to do. Simon took a deep breath and got ready to jump.
But he couldn’t.
Suddenly the roaring thunder of the falls returned to him at full volume. What had he been thinking? An umbrella! It was too flimsy to hold them aloft or slow their descent. They would plummet to their deaths. Even if they survived the fall, the force of the water would tear them from limb to limb. It was lunacy. No, they would have to take their chances with the Red Coral men, who were shouting and edging closer along the ledge to them, their bayonets stabbing the night air. They wouldn’t kill them here—they would take them back to Dr. Fitzsimmons, who wanted them alive, at least for the moment. If they were prisoners, at least they would still have a chance.
Simon turned back, steeling himself to face the men. As he did, Isabella lunged forward and hurled them both over the edge of the falls.
Chapter Sixteen
A Dark, Violent World • A Key • A Light up Ahead
Simon felt nothing but pure shock for the first few seconds after Isabella shoved them over the edge of the falls. The wind pushed his mouth open and he felt the cold and pressure on his teeth. He clawed the air but there was nothing to grab. They kept plunging and then—
Whoosh!
The wind snapped the umbrella open, wrenching Simon’s arm upwards. Pain radiated through his whole body.
He looked up to see that the umbrella had bloomed above them and the tough fabric was acting as a parachute, slowing their free fall. Simon and Isabella hugged each other tightly as the winds swept them back and forth across the turbulent river. The furious white water and dark banks were coming up fast. In the final moment before they struck, they closed their eyes and held on to each other for dear life.
They landed in the water.
The river engulfed them instantly, immersing them in a dark, violent world. They were no match for the powerful current and Simon quickly lost all sense of where the surface was. The force of the water had driven their arms between the spokes of the shredded umbrella and they were caught together, struggling against each other. The burning in Simon’s lungs grew unbearable. He needed air desperately, but no matter how much he struggled, the river kept him pinned beneath it. The pain in his lungs was agonizing. Isabella was weakening beside him. But the next time he felt his feet strike rocks he pushed himself up with all his might and at last broke through the surface.
AIR!
Sweet, pure air—thick with mist but air! He gasped it in as Isabella popped up beside him. Simon saw the black diagonal of the shore before the river plowed them back under. For the next few miles they fought for the surface whenever they could, swallowing water and choking as the mighty river sped them along.
At last the current slackened. Simon felt his knees grind into stones on the riverbed. He discovered he could stand. Or he could have if his legs hadn’t felt like they were made out of rubber. He got to his feet as best he could and helped Isabella up—she was shaking, her long hair plastered wetly across her face—and they half crawled, half staggered the rest of the way.
They collapsed on the shore, breathing heavily, unable to move. The cuts on their arms from the spokes of the umbrella throbbed painfully. Isabella winced when Simon finally sat up and disentangled them. They were bleeding quite badly but the cuts were not as deep as he had feared. Isabella ripped the hem of her trousers and bandaged both their arms.
The bleeding staunched, they sat there for a moment as their hearts slowed. The night air was cold on their skin after the icy water. They looked back where they had come from. The falls shone in the distance. Simon shivered—how had they survived such an enormous drop?
“Do you think they’ll be after us?” Isabella asked when she could speak.
“I doubt they’ll think we survived,” said Simon.
“That gives us a little time,” said Isabella through softly chattering teeth.
Simon looked over at her. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she sniffed. “I’m just cold.”
Simon turned away and looked back to the hill above them. They were back in the jungle, at least, which was a huge relief. Simon never wanted to see a desert again. In panic, he remembered the ophallagraphs. What if they had been destroyed?
Frantically he emptied the contents of his backpack. To his surprise the images were crisp edged and unharmed. The señoras had been right—they really were indestructible. In fact, their glow seemed stronger now.
“What are those?” Isabella asked curiously.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Simon. “But now I have to get to Prince’s Town.” He fanned the images dry and after squeezing out everything else in the backpack as best he could—the mineral-fruits were too hard to have even been bruised—he put everything away and got to his feet.
Cradling her arm, Isabella began walking up the hill to get a better view. “There’s a light up there,” she whispered, cringing as she flexed her arm.
Simon looked up the hillside. There was indeed a light, shining through the trees.
“What do you think?” asked Isabella.
Friend or enemy? It was impossible to know. Simon looked back at the falls in the distance. “We’ve come a long way from the Red Coral camp,” he said. “I vote we take our chances.”
“Agreed,” said Isabella. She started up the hill.
Glancing behind him one last time, Simon caught sight of the battered remains of the umbrella. He had almost forgotten it! The pole had cracked and the umbrella lay in a crumpled heap. It was one of the precious tools and now it was ruined. The fabric had been torn away entirely by the force of the water, leaving only the skeleton of spokes. The ornate handle was lodged in the mud. He looked at it despondently. When he pulled it out, the handle came loose from the pole. He leaned over to rinse it off in the clear water and then he noticed something that he had not before. He raised it over his head and looked at it in the moonlight. It looked like …
“A key,” he whispered.
The handle of the key had been the handle of the umbrella. The teeth of the key had been hidden inside the pole and only revealed when the umbrella had broken. It was made of pure white ophalla without any blue-green tinge. Creamy swirls spiraled into the palely glowing stone. While the handle was carved ornately, the key itself was crudely made and had only three teeth, each of slightly different lengths. Simon turned it over in his hand. He had already opened the Blue Door.
What else would need to be unlocked?
His heart quickened.
A gate. A gate might need to be unlocked.
Faustina’s Gate, in fact.
The key was one of the tools they were supposed to find—he’d had it all along!
He glanced up to find Isabella already partway up the hill, making a path through the tall sugarcane grass. He nestled the key safely in the pocket of his backpack, and with new energy he hoisted the bag, soaking wet and heavy, onto his shoulders and hurr
ied to catch up.
The roar of the falls changed pitch as they climbed. Simon’s gashes stung, but he gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the pain in his arm and the bruises on his legs. Near the top of the hill they slowed and made their way forward cautiously.
The light held steady through the trees.
They were close to it now.
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” whispered Isabella at last.
Carefully Simon pulled aside a branch and they saw the source of the light.
Chapter Seventeen
Train to Nowhere
“It’s a train!” said Isabella.
Simon’s hopes sank when he saw the old relic, a locomotive, abandoned in the jungle, carbuncled in rust. They went closer to examine it. The light they had seen came from a headlight made out of a convex lens of ophalla. Vines threaded through the grates and in and out of the open windows. Simon reached out and pushed the side gently and it groaned. The whole thing looked as if it were about to crumble to dust before them. He noticed a simple plaque near the cab window that read DAVIES MARONER, INVENTOR.
Davies Maroner again! “Man, would I have liked to talk to that guy,” said Simon. “What’s a train doing out in the middle of nowhere, anyway?”
“Hey,” said Isabella, “I think I know what this is … It was a provincial revival project—a train to connect the North to the South, but they never made it that far because of the war. Eventually they just stopped working on it and the tracks finished—well, in the middle of nowhere.”
“I have to go north,” said Simon. “I left my sisters at Hetty’s Pass four days ago. We’re supposed to meet in Prince’s Town.” He took out his compass. Outside the Neglected Provinces it worked once again. They found that the tracks indeed ran north. He withdrew the map and smoothed it out on the ground. Made of oiled paper, it had survived the river remarkably well. “Where do you think we are now?” he asked.
“There are the Mumbagua Falls that we just went over,” said Isabella, pointing with a stick to a curling blue sweep painted almost in the dead center of the map. “And we’re somewhere around here right now, I’d guess. And here’s Hetty’s Pass.” She brought the stick down on a place far to the northwest of where they were. Then she moved it all the way up to the north coast. “And here’s Prince’s Town.”
“All the way up there,” said Simon. “I’m still miles away!” He gazed in disappointment at the map.
His eyes traveled over the barren expanse on the map where he had wandered lost for three days, and he took a deep breath. At least he wasn’t out there anymore. He was making progress. He had found the final ophallagraph, the mineral-fruits, and the key. He knew about the Floriano operation and about the Red Coral’s deadly plan to take over all of Tamarind. Isabella was free and perhaps now they could work together to stop the Red Coral. Simon’s journey hadn’t been in vain. He squinted at the map—it looked as if Prince’s Town was just on the other side of the same mountains they had seen at Hetty’s Pass, when they met the general. It wouldn’t have been a long journey for Maya and Penny—they were probably safely in Prince’s Town right now waiting for him. Simon could keep going for a little longer.
He looked up at the train tracks, gleaming between soft grasses and prehistoric ferns, unfolding across the plateau. He chewed his lip.
“These tracks head north,” he mused.
“That’s an idea,” said Isabella. “We can walk along them at least and know we’re going the right way. I believe they stop somewhere up”—she waved the stick over the map and brought it down to rest with a sharp knock in the middle of a vast, sandy stretch in the north—“here. From there we could walk to Prince’s Town easily. I’ll go with you that far. From Prince’s Town I can get a boat to Cabarro, farther down the coast, where my mother and brother are being held—it will be faster than going over land.”
“It would be a really long walk from here to Prince’s Town,” said Simon. “We’d lose a couple of days at least. And we don’t have that much time—the new mine in Floriano will open in three days.” He sized up the dilapidated old train.
“You’re joking,” said Isabella, skeptically following his gaze to the rusty old contraption.
“It would be faster than going on foot,” said Simon.
“It would be,” said Isabella. “If it worked.”
“Well, then, it’s worth a few minutes to try,” said Simon. He hopped up into the engine room. A quick study revealed that the train had an old-fashioned steam engine. Beside it was a chute that led to what looked like a furnace. On the other side of that was a closed bin filled with crude charcoal. When Simon looked closer he saw that all the parts were made and fitted together slightly differently from those in a regular steam engine. He wondered if Davies Maroner had had to figure it out all on his own. Either way, it was impressive and unlike anything else he’d ever seen in Tamarind.
He jumped back down to the ground, dusting off his hands. “I think we can get this thing moving again,” he said. “We need water—a lot of it—the boiler’s only half full, and we need to get a fire going in the furnace.”
Isabella went to see if she could find a bucket and Simon climbed back in the engine room and hunted around until he found an old flint and strike hanging on a wall. He took it down and gave it an experimental strike. A small shower of sparks flew out. “We’ve got fire!” he called.
“And there’s a tub here,” called Isabella. “It’s a bit leaky and it’s big—I’ll need you to help me carry it. I can hear a stream just over there—we won’t need to walk all the way back down to the river.”
Simon and Isabella spent the next hour carrying water up from the stream to pour into the boiler, and gathering armloads of kindling from the underbrush for the furnace. They attacked the vines and weeds ensnaring the train carriage with gusto and Simon cleaned the grit out of the engine. Sweaty and dirty and feeling gallant, they climbed up into the train.
Simon sparked the igniter and after a few tries the tinder caught. He blew it into a larger flame, then added it to the firebox. He and Isabella waited, hardly daring to breathe. If this didn’t work they had wasted time and energy and still faced a few days’ walk to Prince’s Town. Isabella wiped sweat off her face. Simon tossed in several more handfuls of coal and closed his eyes, wishing desperately for it to work. He was exhausted and the thought of walking farther tonight was almost too much to bear.
Then a puff of white smoke appeared from the funnel.
The engine coughed once, then again.
With an unholy shriek of protesting metal, the train lurched forward and pulled sluggishly away from the vines and roots and leaves that entrapped it. The breeze swept out the last of the dead leaves on the carriage floor.
“It’s working!” Isabella cried joyfully as the carriage chugged forward, flattening the shrubs and ferns on the tracks. “It’s actually working!”
Soon they were picking up speed. The magnificent waterfalls came into view once more, jets and fits of spray brilliant in the moonlight. Black palms stood silhouetted against the pure white mists. They stretched for miles—white curtains and combs of them, the most distant of them so far away that they appeared frozen in midair. Finally, Simon and Isabella left them behind as the train trundled steadily through the dark night.
Isabella stuck her head out of the window, breathing the fresh night air deeply. “I think we can climb onto the roof,” she said, and disappeared through the window. Simon replenished the firewood and followed her up. The air was fresh and smelled of grass and earth. They sat and looked up at the great vault of sky and the big orange moon and the lush grasslands unfurling on either side of them. Butterflies came and settled on the roof, brown until they blinked their wings open for a second, revealing astonishing shades of purple, blue, and saffron. The train passed herds of elegant fleethorns, and Simon and Isabella saw stocky waterbeasts and tiger buzzards sitting shoulder to shoulder around watering holes. Lightning storms flashed in th
e distance and the fleethorns, disrupted by the threat of the storm, raced on under the moon.
“I’m going to return to Maracairol and get rid of that horrible Red Coral Project,” said Isabella fiercely. “I won’t let them hurt my home.”
Looking out over the land, Simon felt his own deep love of Tamarind. This was why he and Maya and Penny had returned. Tamarind was part of them. He would find his sisters and they would close Faustina’s Gate and stop the Red Coral.
Whatever it took, they would find a way.
* * *
Simon and Isabella took turns fueling the train throughout the long night, sleeping when they weren’t on watch. At dawn, through the mist, they kept an eye out ahead on the tracks.
“This is it!” cried Isabella finally.
Simon stopped loading the engine with sticks—they were down to the last few, anyway—and went to the front of the carriage to look out. Less than a hundred yards ahead of them the tracks came to an abrupt end in a great sand dune. Simon tried to pull the brake but it wouldn’t move. Its handle was soldered with rust and though he pulled on it with all his might, it didn’t budge. Isabella helped, too, but it was no use. The train bore down on the end of the tracks, unstoppable.
“Hang on!” Simon shouted.
Seconds later the tracks ended. The cow catcher drove into the sand. Simon and Isabella hung on for all they were worth. The back of the carriage swung around to the front and shimmied sideways across the sand, screeching and groaning and kicking up a blinding cloud of dirt. Simon and Isabella were thrown to their knees.
Then, with a deep rumble, the carriage tilted, teetering for several desperate seconds, before it thumped on its side and didn’t move again.
The cloud settled and Simon and Isabella waited a few moments, catching their breath, before they climbed gingerly out of the window and hopped down onto the hot sand. A tumbleweed somersaulted past them and, caught for a moment, nudged the train carriage before the breeze loosened it and it rolled away. The wind blew the sand over the tracks behind them. Sand trickled down into the overturned carriage, filling it like an hourglass.
