Deadly Magic

by Skye Melki-Wegner

  We all stared at the floor.

  ‘What do we know about the Sunrise Vial?’ I said, after a while. ‘Mariner must have left some clues, right? I mean, he hid the information about the Midnight Vial in his cottage. Maybe the clues for the Sunrise Vial were there too, but we missed them.’

  Riff tilted his head, as if straining for a memory. ‘Last night, in the caves, didn’t Nephrite say something about Dragon?’

  The memory stirred, flickering at the edge of my brain. ‘You’re right! She said they were going to find the Sunrise Vial, if she was right about “that blasted Dragon”, or something like that …’

  ‘But what’s Dragon got to do with it?’ Phoenix said.

  I shook my head, my throat tight. ‘She and Mariner were the ones who worked this job in the first place. Maybe the clue’s got something to do with history, with the first time they encountered the vials …’

  After rummaging through my bag, I extracted my copy of the case file. I flipped through it quickly, hoping that a clue might leap out at me, but all I saw was a wall of text: interview transcripts and post-mission reports. As I scanned the pages, I had to blink to force my exhausted brain to focus. The words swam before my eyes: Mariner, vials, secret, Dragon …

  Dragon …

  My attention shifted to my open bag, where the items I’d collected from Mariner’s cottage were stacked. A wooden plaque, a photograph, and a tiny statue of a dragon in a sailing boat.

  ‘Dragon!’ I said. ‘What if Nephrite wasn’t talking about Dragon the person, but a dragon with a small “d”?’

  Before the others could respond, I seized the tiny statue. With a rush, I remembered Skate’s lesson on steganography. A secret message, hidden in plain sight … I turned the statue over in the light, straining my eyes, searching for a clue.

  Hundreds of intricately carved scales covered the dragon’s wings. I’d noticed them before, of course, but I’d thought they were only decorative. They were etched so finely into the porcelain, glittering and delicate, that we hadn’t bothered to study them closely. But now that I focused, I realised a few of the scales weren’t scales at all.

  ‘Numbers!’ I exclaimed. ‘Some of the scales are tiny numbers, etched into the wing.’

  The others gasped.

  ‘Hang on, do you realise what this means?’ Riff said, delighted. ‘It’s a code hidden on an animal statue! It’s just like Mr Oink!’

  It took the rest of us a moment to remember the name. When the memory struck, Phoenix gave a loud groan. ‘Seriously, Riff? This could be a secret code to save countless lives, and you’re comparing it to a plastic piggy bank from a Cryptography briefing?’

  I peered more closely at the dragon’s wing. Its painted scales were arranged in rows – and most of these rows were numberless. However, any rows which did contain hidden numbers always contained exactly two of them.

  ‘They’re in pairs,’ I said, and quickly read the numbers aloud. As I did so, Orbit jotted down each pairing with his uninjured hand.

  3 4

  4 5

  5 2

  1 9

  8 4

  ‘Got to be a cipher,’ Phoenix said. ‘Some kind of book cipher, with the pairs representing the page number and the word number …’

  She trailed off, and my hopes sank. If this was a book cipher, we had no way to crack it. It would be impossible to decode without the right key – and we had no idea which book Mariner might have used.

  I stared numbly at the dragon statue in my hands. The dragon looked so pointless now, sitting in its glittery little sailing boat, staring off into the distance. Then I remembered its position on Mariner’s mantelpiece, gazing at the wooden plaque on the wall.

  ‘What if it’s not a book?’ I whispered.

  ‘Huh?’ Riff said.

  ‘The cipher key! What if it isn’t a book? What if it’s another piece of writing, a piece of text that we’ve had the whole time?’

  It hit Orbit first, and his eyes widened. ‘Oh yes! You’re thinking of the plaque, aren’t you?’

  Before he’d finished speaking, I had already fished the wooden plaque out of my luggage. Excitement bubbled in my throat.

  ~ January, February, March, April, May, June ~

  Red sky at night, sailor’s delight

  Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.

  Keep your troubles at bay.

  ~ July, August, September, October, November, December ~

  Earlier, we had struggled to pry any meaning from those lines and had instead stumbled on Mariner’s clue for the Midnight Vial – but now, we held the key to the Sunrise Vial before us, printed in Orbit’s neat handwriting.

  I grabbed the sheet of numbers from Orbit and read the first line aloud. ‘Three and four. Third line, fourth word. “Morning”.’

  ‘Morning means sunrise,’ Phoenix whispered, as she scribbled it down. ‘And we’re looking for the Sunrise Vial …’

  Quickly, I moved onto the next pair of numbers. ‘Fourth line, fifth word. “Bay”.’

  ‘A bay … like a beach, maybe?’ Riff said.

  My voice was shaking now, tight with adrenaline. ‘Fifth line, second word. “August”.’ I scanned the next two numbers. ‘First line, ninth word …’

  My stomach dropped.

  ‘Can’t be right,’ Riff said. ‘There’s only six words on that line.’

  I swallowed hard and tried the final pair of numbers. ‘Eighth line, fourth word …’ But even as I said it, I knew it was useless.

  There was no eighth line.

  ‘I really thought we had it,’ Phoenix said. A note of quiet despair entered her voice. ‘But this can’t be the cipher key, can it?’

  She threw down the scrap of paper where she’d been writing the deciphered clues. It contained only three words: ‘Morning’, ‘Bay’ and ‘August’.

  Beside me, Orbit gingerly picked up the dragon statue. He examined it carefully, peering at its wing through his glasses. ‘You know, this bottom part of the wing is a darker shade of green. That’s where the last two pairs of numbers are located. I don’t suppose they might be deliberately different?’

  I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ Orbit said, ‘let’s assume the first three lines are indeed a cipher, and we’ve correctly translated their meaning. The final two pairs of numbers might be something else entirely. One, nine, eight, four. Perhaps it isn’t a cipher at all. Perhaps it’s –’

  ‘– a year!’ I said, eyes widening, as the realisation clicked. ‘It’s 1984 … the year when Dragon and Mariner found the vials in the first place!’

  Riff grabbed Phoenix’s list of words and added the date to the end of it. ‘Morning, Bay, August 1984. Hang on … didn’t we see that date on a photo, back at Mariner’s cottage?’

  I rifled quickly through my backpack, locating the photo I’d stolen from Mariner’s album. An image of Mariner and Dragon, standing on a clifftop, with a blurry tourist sign and the sea behind them. A few shadowy shapes rose from the sea, although they were too distant to make out clearly. And down the bottom of the picture, there lay the camera’s timestamp: 16/08/84.

  ‘This is the clue!’ I said. ‘This is where Mariner has been leading us, the whole time. Wherever this photo was taken, it’s where he hid the Sunrise Vial.’

  Phoenix dug through her pack to extract our Camp Adventure orienteering kit. It contained a variety of odds and ends, including a magnifying glass. We pressed the glass to the photo, trying to make out the shapes in the sea.

  ‘Islands!’ I said, squinting. ‘They’re tiny islands, out in the sea …’

  With a little gasp of realisation, Orbit pulled a map of New Zealand from my copy of the case file. He drew a finger along the map, and stopped at a point on the north-eastern coast.

  The Bay of Islands.

  ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘The entire rhyme about the “red sky” … it’s about sailors! So wouldn’t it make sense to hide the final vial o
n an island, somewhere only a boat could reach?’

  We all stared at each other, stunned.

  Phoenix snapped the case file shut. ‘This is out of our hands now; it’s too big for us to deal with. We’ve got to let Dragon know what we’ve found.’

  We reached the mess hall just in time for the morning roll. As soon as it finished, a chattering horde of cadets began to stream towards the doors. We pushed through the crowd, searching for Pickles.

  We found Dippy at the back table, finishing up his plate of scrambled eggs and tightening the screws on a tiny robotic sparrow. He blinked as we entered, apparently bewildered to see cadets entering the hall when we were supposed to be exiting.

  ‘Hullo, there!’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’

  I glanced at the others, uncertain. I would have preferred to speak to Pickles, who at least seemed to have her head screwed on the right way around, but there was no sign of her. ‘Um … is your sister here, sir?’

  Dippy waved a hand. ‘Oh, she’s off in town running some errands, picking up supplies. That sort of thing.’

  Orbit stepped forward. His injured wrist was painfully obvious in its makeshift bandage, but Dippy paid it no notice. He was too busy fiddling with the sparrow’s leg, which had apparently half-detached itself during its most recent flight.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we have something important to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ Dippy said, still distracted by his sparrow. ‘Been working on your wilderness skills, have you? Found a new solution for the ropes course?’

  ‘Er … not quite,’ Orbit said. ‘Actually, it’s about a HELIX mission.’

  Dippy blinked up at us, startled. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We were sent here by Dragon,’ Orbit said, ‘to investigate the death of an agent called Mariner …’

  ‘Look,’ Phoenix interrupted, ‘the point is, we’ve got some important information. Information that could save a lot of lives. We need you to put us in contact with Dragon so we can make our report.’

  Dippy just stared at us. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, looking suddenly sad. ‘I really thought I was past this stage. But it’s still the same old game, isn’t it? Let’s all make fun of silly old Dippy, see how we can play a joke on him today …’

  ‘It’s not a joke, sir!’ I said. ‘And it’s not a trick, I swear.’

  Dippy sighed. ‘It’s always been the same, you know. Even when I was a cadet, people used to trick me into believing the most outrageous lies. I’ve wised up now, though. I’m afraid I’m not as gullible as I used to be.’

  Orbit looked mortified. ‘Sir, we wouldn’t do that! You know how much I respect your work.’

  ‘Your camp security guard is in on it!’ I said. ‘He’s helping the Inductors. Has he reported for work this morning?’

  Dippy frowned. ‘He’s accompanying Pickles on her trip into town. She often takes him along to carry the heavy boxes.’

  ‘No offence, sir, but that’s a load of rubbish!’ Riff said. ‘We saw him last night, and you can’t trust that bloke as far as you can throw him. You’ve got to let us –’

  Dippy held up a hand, and Riff fell silent.

  ‘Now,’ Dippy said, ‘I’ve heard enough of this nonsense. I’ve worked for HELIX my entire life, and the idea that Dragon would send a bunch of children on a secret mission is ludicrous. You might as well try to convince me that a pig can fly, or the moon is made of cheese!’

  I pulled out my copy of the case file. ‘But look, sir! This is proof – you’ve got to let us talk to Dragon, or something terrible is going to happen.’

  Dippy glanced at the file. ‘Clearly a fake,’ he said. ‘If it were real, Dragon would have broken the confidentiality laws of HELIX to entrust it to you.’

  ‘It’s not fake, it’s –’

  ‘Enough!’ Dippy interrupted. ‘Please leave me alone. All I’ve ever asked, you know, is for a bit of respect. I hoped the years of teasing were done with. It’s very cruel of you to try to play such a prank.’

  He waved a hand, shooing us sadly away.

  I looked at the others, desperate. They simply shook their heads, giving in to the inevitable. We shuffled back out of the hall, heads hung low, as we racked our minds for another possible option.

  ‘We could try the younger supervisors?’ Orbit said, half-heartedly.

  Riff snorted. ‘They’re a bunch of airheads. Never been on a proper mission in their lives, I reckon. Anyway, Dippy’s their boss – they’ll just go along with whatever he tells ’em.’

  ‘We could tell him everything,’ I said. ‘About the vials, and the caves last night, and how Orbit hurt his wrist …’

  Riff shook his head. ‘Too risky. Can’t trust anyone with all those details.’

  Phoenix laughed. ‘What, you think he’s in on it?’

  ‘We can’t rule him out,’ Riff said. ‘But right now, my money’s on his sister. Gone to town to pick up supplies … and she’s taken the security guard with her? A bit convenient, isn’t it?’

  I gave a slow nod, my insides twisting. Riff was right. It was hard to picture the bumbling Dippy as a ruthless traitor. But if there was even the slightest chance that Pickles was involved, we couldn’t risk giving too much information to her brother.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ I said. ‘If Pickles is in on it, and Dippy tells her that we claimed to be here on a secret mission …’

  Riff chewed his lip. ‘Yeah, but where are we supposed to go?’

  ‘The Bay of Islands,’ I said.

  They stared at me.

  ‘What?’ Phoenix said. ‘But that’s hundreds of kilometres away.’

  ‘We haven’t got a choice!’ I said. ‘No one else knows about this, and we’re the only ones who can stop the Inductors. We can’t contact Dragon, and we can’t trust anyone at camp. Dippy was our last chance, and he doesn’t believe us. All we can do is try to steal the Sunrise Vial before the Inductors do. Without the third vial, the first two are useless.’

  Silence.

  ‘But how do we get there?’ Phoenix paused, and then turned to Orbit. ‘Can you fly a Chameleon?’

  Orbit shook his head, looking apologetic. ‘I’ve tried my hand at a couple of simulators, but it’s far too complicated; it takes years of training to even launch a jet, let alone to control it properly. The number of quintessic circuits involved is mind-boggling.’

  ‘We haven’t got a jet, anyway,’ I said. ‘We have no idea where Nephrite hid the one that brought us here. It could be anywhere in the bush, or out in the countryside.’

  ‘Or she could have already flown it up to the Bay of Islands,’ Phoenix said.

  ‘We could steal a car,’ Riff suggested. ‘Anyone know how to drive?’

  We all shook our heads.

  ‘How do tourists get up to the Bay of Islands?’ I asked. ‘I mean, there’s got to be a way to get there without a car.’

  ‘There are tourist buses,’ Phoenix said. ‘I saw a small bus stop in Waitomo last night, and there must be a bigger interchange in Otorohanga. We could ride our bikes into town, and then –’

  ‘But how can we afford the tickets?’ Riff cut in. ‘Dunno about you lot, but I only brought enough cash for a few souvenirs. This isn’t just a local bus; I reckon it’ll be pretty pricey to buy a ticket between cities.’

  I remembered the pouch that Dragon had given me before our mission. It had contained three items: the Converator, the camera, and a credit card. ‘We’ve got a card from Dragon, remember? Just in case any emergency expenses cropped up.’

  ‘I’d say this qualifies as an emergency,’ Phoenix said. ‘Do you think Dragon’s got a security alert running on that card?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she might’ve it set up to get alerted if the card is used. If we use it to buy our bus tickets up to the Bay of Islands …’

  ‘… she might figure out where we’re going!’ I finished, with a surge of hope. ‘This is our best shot of getting info
rmation back to her.’

  The others nodded, although their smiles were grim. My own excitement faded as I thought of the journey ahead. A bike ride into Otorohanga, ignoring our aching limbs and throbbing wounds. A long journey northwards on the bus, all the way up to Auckland – and then another bus after that, to carry us up to the Bay of Islands. There lay the third vial, and the Inductors, and a deadly plan to rule the world …

  But we were out of time, and out of options.

  ‘Well, that settles it,’ Riff said. ‘Looks like we’re going on a road trip.’

  The bus didn’t depart from Otorohanga until 10.20 am. From there, it rattled slowly northward, stopping at various towns, service stations and public toilets. At the first stop, we used Dragon’s card to buy hot chips, orange juice and coffee. Not much of a breakfast, but it was better than nothing.

  We took our chance to grab some sleep, dozing restlessly as the bus jolted around us. At first, I thought I’d be too stressed to sleep, but sheer exhaustion won out in the end.

  In the early afternoon, our bus trip ended in the heart of Auckland, a bustling city of skyscrapers and office blocks. I knew that New Zealand’s HELIX HQ was located here; if only we could find it, we could alert the local agents to the danger of the vials. But we had no idea where to look – and if it were hidden half as well as its Melbourne equivalent, we would never find it in time.

  We found an ancient payphone at the bus interchange, but we had no idea who to call. Melbourne HQ was protected by a sorcerous firewall, and no phone calls could penetrate its magic. Our only hope was that Dragon might notice the strange charges on her credit card, and investigate our decision to take such a peculiar bus route.

  And so, with pangs of growing panic in our bellies, we purchased a fresh set of bus tickets to travel further northwards.

  ‘Where to?’ the ticket lady asked.

  ‘Bay of Islands,’ Riff said, with his most innocent grin. ‘We wanna go swimming with the dolphins.’

  The lady, who looked utterly bored, swiped Dragon’s credit card and issued our tickets. She also handed us a few tourist leaflets about the Bay of Islands, which we studied carefully as we waited for the bus. Our bus would deliver us to Paihia, one of several towns that bordered the bay. From there, the brochure recommended a dolphin-spotting cruise, visiting the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, or parasailing above the bay.