by S. S. Taylor
“Just ‘looking around down here once’?” I asked her.
She shrugged, smiling mischievously, and led us into a dark room. “Now,” she whispered, “I think the light is here somewhere.” Moments later, the gas lights came on and we found ourselves in a big room filled with tables and frosted-glass filing cabinets. The most remarkable thing about the room was that all four walls were covered with framed maps of different shapes and sizes, with many more stacked on tables or piled into boxes on the floor.
“Zander!” I said, staring up at the maps. “Look!” They were all here, all the exotic places in the world that we had heard about and read about: Peru and Grygia and the Grand Canyon and Micronesia and the Solomon Islands, and many I’d never heard of, with strange names that conjured up images of sun-washed beaches and snow-covered steppes and thick, dangerous jungles. It reminded me of the way the wall in the library at home had looked before BNDL had taken all of Dad’s maps away.
“We’d better hurry,” Sukey said, “in case someone saw us coming down here. What are we looking for, anyway?”
I thought for a moment. What were we looking for? Dad’s maps had gone with the agents, and we didn’t even know if he’d ever been to Drowned Man’s Canyon.
“I guess anything that says ‘Arizona,’ or has Dad’s name on it. You can look for ‘Azure Canyon’ or ‘Drowned Man’s Canyon,’ too,” I told them. We split up, each of us scanning one of the four walls we’d been assigned to, then looking through the piles. It took everything I had not to get lost in the incredible maps. Many of them were signed by well-known Explorers and there were more than a couple of Dad’s I’d never seen before, though they turned out to be of other locations.
“Why are these maps down here?” Zander asked as we looked. “Shouldn’t they be up where people can see them?”
“I don’t know,” Sukey said. “Maybe it’s for security. I can’t ask my mother, because I don’t want her to know I came down here. We’re underground and these rooms go on for miles and miles. I think it’s some kind of secret headquarters.”
I looked around at the tables. On one of them there was a box filled with framed maps and magnifying glasses and file folders scattered around. “It looks like someone’s been cataloging these,” I said. I flipped through the frames. “These are Dad’s maps!” I cried out. “These are the ones that they took out of our house! They’ve been studying them.”
Zander came over to look.
I kept flipping through the maps. “I don’t understand why they wanted these so badly. I mean, Dad published all of his maps, right?” Zander and M.K. shrugged, so I looked over at Sukey. “When your mother explores a new place, she makes maps for BNDL, doesn’t she?”
“Those are the rules,” Sukey said. She recited, “‘The cartography of all Explorers of the Realm is the property of BNDL. The reservation of any cartography or knowledge for personal gain is punishable by the suspension of exploring privileges.’”
I thought for a minute. “So they must have taken the maps because they thought there was something he hadn’t revealed to them, right?”
“One of these?” Zander asked.
“No, we know about all these places.” I looked around the room. “Hold on, remember the treasure map he made for M.K.’s birthday?”
“The what?” Sukey was looking confused, but Zander and M.K. jumped to it, slipping the maps out of their frames and testing the corners. I did the same.
“You could separate it only at one corner,” I reminded them. “So try all four.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sukey said, cutting me off, “but we better hurry up. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“He once made a map that peeled away from… I don’t have time to explain. We’ve got to find it.” I tried a map of the Canadian Rockies, but there wasn’t anything on top of it.
“We’ve got to not get caught,” Sukey said. “Come on. Put those back.” I picked up a map of Istanbul and started to take it out of its frame, but she grabbed it. We stared at each other for a minute, her eyes flashing a darker shade of amber. “I never should have brought you down here.”
“You don’t understand,” I said finally. “We have to find the map. I can’t tell you exactly why, but we just have to…”
“I’ve got it!” M.K. called. “Right here!” Sukey let go of the map I was holding and we rushed over. M.K. was carefully peeling the corner away from a map of a mountain range somewhere in Munopia, and as we all watched, another map was revealed underneath. It had been adhered to the very thin paper of the Munopia map so that you never would have known Dad’s secret if you didn’t know to look for it. It looked vaguely familiar to me. “Drown,” the title read, then ended.
“This is it!” I called out. “It’s Drowned Man’s Canyon. Just like Mr. Mountmorris said. It’s the other half of the map! Careful, M.K., Zander, make sure there aren’t any others hidden like this.”
“Mr. Mountmorris? And what do you mean the other half—?” Sukey started, then stopped, cocking her head toward the door. We heard voices coming along the hallway, too far away to make out what they were saying. “We’ve got to go.”
“Any others, Zander?” I folded the map of Drowned Man’s Canyon and tucked it into the front of my sweater with its other half.
“I’ve got one more to check.” He had replaced the other maps in their frames and was testing the corner of the final one. “Nope. That’s it.” He put it back in the pile. “They can look at these ones all they want.”
“Come on,” Sukey was saying. “Hurry.” We ducked out of the Map Room and she locked the door and replaced the key. We started back toward the staircase, but the voices were coming from that direction, so we turned around and went the other way. “Keep going,” Sukey whispered, “to the end of the hallway. There’s a door there that leads to another staircase.” She, Zander, and M.K. were ahead of me, and we ran as quickly as we could along the hallway. Sukey opened the door, and she and Zander were inside when I heard a man’s voice, vaguely familiar, say, “The light’s on. I think someone’s been down here.” I didn’t think there was time for both of us to get through the door without being seen, so I pushed M.K. through and shut it behind her. Then I ducked through an open doorway that led to a dark, basement-like boiler room. I ran along the wall, crouched behind a water tank, and tried to keep my breathing as quiet as I could.
“It must be the West children.” Another man, his voice also familiar.
“How should I know? What are they doing here anyway?” said a third voice.
“I should think that would be obvious.” Suddenly, I recognized Mr. Mountmorris—his formal way of speaking and the high, squeaky quality of his voice. “They came to see if they could find the other half of the map they showed me.” My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. Mr. Mountmorris!
“Well, is it here?” The second voice was bordering on angry.
“No, we looked through everything you took from Alexander’s house,” said the third voice. “The Drowned Man’s Canyon map wasn’t there. Damn! We should have had them arrested as soon as my boy Lazlo told me who they were. At least we’d have half of the map.” Leo Nackley. But who was the other man? I knew I’d heard that voice before.
“I saw it, Leo,” said Mountmorris. “On its own, it doesn’t tell us anything. We need the other half.”
I was terrified, my leg muscles screaming from crouching perfectly still, but I couldn’t help smiling. We’d outwitted them.
They moved down the hallway, their voices growing fainter. Now I could hear only a few snippets of their conversation.
“…went out to the house,” one of them said. “…contacting agents… no… word yet. Soon.”
“…associate of Alex’s,” Mr. Mountmorris’s voice said. “…the Mapmakers’ Guild, perhaps… the…” His voice disappeared, and I couldn’t hear anything more.
The Mapmakers’ Guild? It rang some sort of bell, dee
p down in my brain. Maybe it was something I’d overheard a long time ago, but I couldn’t remember if Dad had ever mentioned anything about it.
I counted to one hundred and when I was sure they were gone, I snuck out. I checked the hallway to be sure, then found the staircase where the others had gone. They were waiting at the top for me.
“Where were you?” Zander asked angrily.
“I panicked,” I told them. “I hid in some sort of boiler room and could hear them talking. I think they’re going to the house to figure out what happened to the agents.”
“We’ve got to go,” M.K. said, “before they get there.”
“Why?” Sukey turned to look at her. “What’s at your house?”
“Well, I kind of knocked out some BNDL agents at our house,” M.K. explained, shrugging. “I had to, though. Seriously.” She blinked innocently.
Sukey’s eyes narrowed. “‘Kind of knocked out some BNDL agents’? I wish you’d told me that. You three are full of mysteries, aren’t you?” We burst through the door and hurried through the lobby toward the front door, ignoring the looks we were getting from the Explorers standing around talking. We stopped running and Pucci scrambled up Zander’s chest, popping up through the collar and settling himself on his shoulder. The parrot bobbed his silver head to Sukey in greeting.
“What are you, some kind of pirate nanny?” she asked with a smile. But the smile disappeared as she took a good look at Pucci. “Is that a modified Fazian black knight parrot?” Her eyes were very wide.
“Kind of.” Zander pushed Pucci’s feet back under his collar.
“Where did you get him?”
“We adopted him. Or he adopted us.” Zander smiled and she rolled her eyes.
“I don’t even want to know. Run,” she said. “I’ll hold them off.”
“Thank you for everything,” I said to her. Her cheeks were flushed and her curly hair looked even curlier. People always say that things look copper, but her hair really was the color of pennies, dark and red and alive against the vivid blue of her jumpsuit.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Now go!”
It was only once we were back out on the street, navigating the crowds of people and running toward the train station, that I realized why the third voice in the downstairs hallway was familiar to me.
It belonged to Francis Foley.
Fifteen
The New Modern Age steam trains were remarkable inventions: huge, shining silver machines that could carry hundreds of people from place to place in record time. When we were small, Dad had often brought us to the railyards outside the city so we could watch them sailing in, one after another. He had told us how the trains could no longer be run by computers, as they once had, so they’d been engineered to respond to the expert handling of experienced drivers. “A great steam driver can convince you you’re sitting still, even if the world is flashing by outside your window,” he’d tell us as we waved to the men and women seated in the steering cabins of the big trains.
The train to Philadelphia was a gleaming new Fronsne 2000, and we leaped on just as it started to move—so smoothly that we barely knew it had started—out of the station and west out of the city.
“Did anyone follow us?” Zander whispered as we settled ourselves in a second-class compartment. The only other inhabitant was a white-haired Archy reading a newspaper and chewing dramleaf. He looked up as we came through the door and his eyes widened in alarm when he saw Pucci, who had found himself a comfy perch on top of the luggage rack. He squawked “All aboard” once before dozing off to the almost imperceptible motion of the train.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “But that was Mr. Mountmorris and Francis Foley with Leo Nackley in the basement. I recognized their voices. We never should have shown Mountmorris the map.” I felt sick. “We never should have gone to the Expedition Society.”
“We wouldn’t have the other half if we hadn’t gone to the Expedition Society,” Zander pointed out, a little too loudly. The man in our train compartment seemed very interested, and I nodded toward him so that Zander and M.K. wouldn’t say anything else.
Zander waited until the man was looking down at his paper again, then made a clicking noise that called Pucci to his shoulder. He whispered something to the parrot, who rose into the air, flapping his wings and cawing at the man in the corner, his metal legs out in front of him, ready to attack.
“Sorry,” Zander said. “He hates newspapers. Weird.”
The man, pale now, dropped his paper on the floor and stood up carefully. “Yes, yes, I think I’ll just find a different compartment.” Taking his leather briefcase with him, he slunk out the door.
“Good bird,” Zander said as soon as the man was gone. We were alone now. “Okay, Kit. Take it out. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I pulled the curtain across the window in the compartment door and took the two halves out. They matched up perfectly.
“Map,” Pucci announced. “Whole map.” We all looked up at him for a second, then back down at the map.
The complete map now showed Azure Canyon and the entirety of Drowned Man’s Canyon, as well as mesas and hills and other formations created by ancient floods and washes. I studied it carefully. Drowned Man’s Canyon was a squiggly worm of a canyon that widened in the center and then narrowed, branches jutting off the end like fingers on a hand.
As far as I could tell, there were no X’s for X marks the spot.
“Tickets, please,” bellowed a train conductor, coming into our compartment. I jumped up and spread our former seatmate’s abandoned newspaper out on top of the maps.
“Sorry,” Zander said. “We didn’t have time to get them at the station.” He smiled up at the conductor, a Neo with a large silver ring through one side of his nose and a couple of flashing lights in his ears. His name badge said Harry Craps. I tried not to look at Zander, knowing he would make me laugh if he saw it, too. “Can we buy them from you?”
The conductor sighed as though we’d just asked him to push the train up a mountain, and he got three tickets out of his pocket. “How far are you going?” he asked.
“Flagstaff, Arizona.” Zander gave him another smile, as if people asked for tickets to Flagstaff every day. “Three tickets to Flagstaff.”
Harry Craps looked surprised but jotted something down on the tickets and said, “All right. That’ll be two hundred thirty-seven Allied Dollars.” He eyed us suspiciously, three children alone in the train compartment with a parrot perched on the luggage rack.
I stared up at him. Two hundred thirty-seven AD! No wonder it was only rich government workers who traveled by train anymore.
“Come on, Kit, give him the money,” Zander said with a confident smile.
My hands shaking, I reached into my backpack and took out the money we’d collected from the house before we’d left. It was all that remained of the cash Dad had given us before he’d gone to Fazia, and we’d been trying to save it, trading copper for food and using a dollar here or there only when we had to. I counted out the fare and Zander and I exchanged a glance. We were down to about four AD. I felt my stomach drop.
Harry Craps took the money, handed over the tickets, and left us alone.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I told Zander. “Now we don’t have any money to get home.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. But he looked scared. “Take out the map again.”
“I don’t see anything about the treasure here,” I told them.
“But the important thing is that he left us the map.” Zander was excited, pacing around the train compartment and looking out the window. “Dad wants us to go to Arizona. He left us a map of the place where he wants us to go. He thought it would be in the house when we found it, of course, but Foley took it and we found it anyway. Maybe there’s some kind of hidden message.”
I couldn’t help thinking that he was getting ahead of himself. “Yeah, maybe the message says, ‘Don’t go to Arizon
a,’” M.K. suggested sarcastically.
“Do not go to the place on this map.” I laughed.
Zander stopped pacing and sat down, giving us a nasty look. “There must be more to it. Let’s all think.”
I tried to keep my voice down. “Zander, what are we doing? We’re on a train. We have no food. They’ve probably found Wolff and DeRosa by now and there are a whole bunch more creepy government agents looking for us, agents who would probably kill us for Dad’s map if they thought they could get away with it.”
He looked scared for a minute, and I realized that even though Zander always seemed to know what he was doing, he hadn’t really thought this through.
I started thinking about what I’d just said. If the agents were willing to do anything to get the map, there must be something in it. Dad must have found something. And the man with the clockwork hand had risked everything to get the book to me. I felt a tingling all down my back. Whatever this was, it was big.
“Look,” Zander said finally, “for some reason, Dad gave us this map. Dad wouldn’t have joked about something like this. There must be some really important reason why he did what he did. That gold is… well, you know how much gold is worth now that there isn’t any more to find. Maybe he wanted us to find it so we can fix up the house, go to the Academy. Maybe he wants us to go to Fazia and try to find him.”
“What?” This was the second time he’d talked about this, and I stared at him. “You think he’s alive?”
“Maybe. You said yourself that nothing they told us about his disappearance makes sense.” He looked so much like Dad, his blue eyes wide and pleading, that it freaked me out a little and I had to look away.
M.K. and I didn’t say anything. I was excited now, but the idea of actually making it to Arizona seemed… impossible.
