by Trudi Trueit
She hit her comm pin. “Sailor York to security. We need help in the haunted house in the CAVE. Now!” She turned to Cruz. “Are you okay?”
Still gasping, he put a hand to his neck. “I think so…”
Dugan was coming toward them. He was dressed in a foam taco costume. “Is that the mystery box room?”
“Yes, but you can’t go in,” snapped Sailor.
“How come?” Dugan went for the doorknob. “The light’s not on. Taryn said I could go in if the light was off.”
“No!” Cruz reached out for Dugan. “Somebody dangerous…in there—”
“Hey, hands off the lettuce, man. It took me forever to glue this stuff on.” Jerking free of Cruz’s grip, he pushed open the door.
“Security!” They heard the call from the front foyer.
“Here!” shouted Sailor. “Officer Dover! We’re down here!”
Dugan had taken the opportunity to slip inside. He poked his head back out. “Whatever joke you’re trying to play, it’s not funny.”
“What do you mean?” asked Cruz, his heart still thrashing in his chest.
Dugan opened the door. “There’s nobody in here.”
Sailor and Cruz peered in.
Dugan was right. The room was empty.
“WHAT DO YOU mean we didn’t get it? How could this happen?”
“Zebra said there was a bit of a mix-up, but we’re handling it,” said Thorne Prescott.
He felt ridiculous, talking to an oil painting of flowers. As usual, his boss preferred to keep his identity hidden, which was why today, Hezekiah Brume had pointed his phone at a canvas of canary yellow poppies in a dark brown vase. Three red poppies had been tucked into the side of the vase, almost as an afterthought.
“It’s a minor setback, sir,” said Prescott.
“What about your end?” Brume was asking about their captive.
“Smooth as silk,” Prescott answered confidently.
It was true. Marco Coronado was safe in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet. He’d had a hot shower, a change of clothes, and a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast with jam, and coffee. Prescott had even given him a chance to stretch his legs on the balcony. However, they had to be careful. They would need to keep moving. They couldn’t take the chance they’d be spotted by a nosy neighbor, or someone from the botanical gardens next door. Scorpion hadn’t realized when he’d rented the place it was so close to a popular tourist destination, but by then it was too late. Things were already in motion. Prescott was annoyed, though not worried. As long as they behaved like normal vacationers and didn’t stay too long, everything would go according to plan.
“Komodo and I will be leaving today,” said Prescott. “We’re taking the sugar—I mean, the shuttle to the airport.” He winced at his slip. He had nearly blurted out their next destination: the abandoned sugar mill at the south end of the island. That’s what happens when you have too many codes to remember. You make mistakes. Brume insisted that everyone in his inner circle use code names. In their line of work, real names were forbidden to speak and, often, dangerous to know. Brume’s code name was Lion. Prescott’s was Cobra, for his snakeskin boots. Komodo and Scorpion were assigned to Prescott. Spies Zebra and Jaguar were both on board Orion.
Brume’s phone tipped forward. Prescott’s boss was standing up. The shot gave Prescott a closer view of the trio of red poppies in the painting. The largest bloom faced upward, its blood-red petals open to the sun. The middle stem hung limp. The last poppy was a small bud. It couldn’t have taken more than a brushstroke or two to create. And yet, it seemed…necessary.
“Cobra?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The clock is ticking.”
Prescott bristled. He knew precisely how much time he had—four weeks. It was plenty of time to get the cipher pieces and get rid of Cruz, though he still didn’t know why the kid had to be dealt with before he turned 13. “We’ll make it, Lion.”
“You’d better,” growled Brume. “Or else.”
Prescott’s gaze dropped to the tiniest red flower on the canvas.
Or else what?
“I KNEW IT, I knew it, I knew it.” Sailor was pacing Emmett and Cruz’s cabin. “I should not have left you at the party.”
“It’s okay,” said Cruz for the millionth time. He propped up his tablet against the dresser so Lani could see them and they could see her. “I had my octopod—”
“But if you hadn’t…” said Lani from her bedroom in Kauai.
He put his nose to the screen. “But I did.”
“But if you hadn’t.”
Cruz glanced at his tablet. He’d been checking his email every two minutes since he’d gotten back to his cabin, hoping for a new message from Nebula. So far—nothing.
Sailor passed behind Cruz, still pacing. “I should never have left you.”
“Me either,” said Emmett, turning from his computer. His emoto-glasses were ash gray ovals. “We fell right into their trap.”
Cruz tipped his head. “Trap?”
“Nebula must have figured Sailor and I would be stuck to you like glue, so they knew they’d have to get us out of the way. And boy, did they. First they got Sailor with the zombie, then me with our security breach, which, by the way, was a false alarm.”
“That might not have been Nebula,” said Sailor. “You’ve had false alarms before, you know, like when housekeeping comes in to vacuum.”
“Yes, but somebody had to trip it.” Emmett gestured to his screen. “I’ve looked at all the video footage from tonight. Nobody was in here. They didn’t even jiggle the door, yet all the sensors went off.”
Cruz was puzzled. “How could that happen?”
“Someone had to have hacked into the system.”
Not just someone. Nebula.
“Nebula knew I’d have to investigate since they’d instructed you to be at the CAVE for the party,” concluded Emmett. “And that, of course, left you alone.”
Sailor stopped pacing. “Yeah, but how did Nebula know Cruz would go into the mystery box room?”
Emmett lifted a shoulder. “We’re explorers, aren’t we? Not many of us are going to turn down a game like that. And if Cruz hadn’t gone in, they probably had a plan for that, too, like slipping him a note or something.”
Cruz put a hand to where the cipher pieces usually laid on his chest. “Okay, but how did they know I wear the cipher? Besides Aunt Marisol, you guys are the only ones who know that.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious,” said Lani.
It was? All eyes swung to the screen on Cruz’s tablet.
“They saw you,” explained Lani. Staring at three confused explorers, she let out an exasperated sigh. “If Nebula hacked into your account to trigger your sensors, couldn’t they have hacked into your surveillance system, too?”
“Well…y-yes,” sputtered Emmett, “but they’d have to get past my firewalls first, and those are impenetrable.”
“But if they managed to do it somehow,” continued Lani, “then they could have been watching you using your own cameras!”
At that, every hair on the back of Cruz’s neck stood at attention. He moved slowly toward the bookshelf above his desk, to one of the five cameras Emmett had placed around the room. Each camera was disguised as a conch seashell. Stepping up on his chair, Cruz peered directly into the dark eye of a tiny lens. If Lani was right, Nebula could have been spying on them for days. Or weeks. They could be watching them right now!
“Shut it down, Emmett,” ordered Cruz, leaping from the chair. “Shut down the whole system. Now!”
“Check,” cried Emmett.
“I’ll get a box.” Sailor rushed to the closet.
While Emmett tapped at his keyboard and Sailor riffled through the closet, Cruz raced around the room and grabbed the rest of the shell cameras.
“Got one!” Sailor stepped back from the closet with an empty shoebox.
Cruz dumped the cameras into the box, and Sailor slammed on the l
id.
“Done!” Emmett swiveled in his chair. “I shut down my account. The system is off—cameras, laser beams, motion sensors, the works.”
For a moment, nobody said a word. They all stared at the shoebox in Sailor’s hands as if it might explode.
Getting up, Emmett took the box from Sailor. He carried it out to the veranda, shoved it under one of the chairs, then came back inside. “I’ll give everything back to Fanchon in the morning. Sorry, Cruz. I thought my protocol was totally secure, but I should know by now that when it comes to Nebula, nothing is totally secure.”
“Um…it’s getting late,” said Sailor, glancing at her OS band. “Do you still want to open your mom’s journal for the third clue?”
“Yes,” answered Cruz. He did, more than ever.
He reached into the lower pocket of his uniform jacket hanging on the back of his desk chair and brought out the flat, square holo-journal. Laying it on the dresser next to Lani’s head, he slid the white paper out of the protective sleeve Lani had created for it. Cruz stepped back and waited for the journal to transform into a three-dimensional pointed sphere, which would then emit an orange beam to scan and identify him.
Five seconds passed. Then ten.
Cruz put his hand on the journal. It was his touch that had activated it the first time. Maybe he hadn’t held it long enough.
Everyone stared at the flat white piece of paper. Another minute went by. Still nothing.
They could hear Felipe next door, practicing his violin. He was doing scales.
Lani was craning her neck. “Shouldn’t something have happened by now?”
Cruz looked at Sailor in the reflection of the mirror. “You don’t think…?”
She frowned. “It looked fine in the ice cave, but…?”
“What’s the matter?” pressed Lani. “Why isn’t it doing its morphing thing?”
Cruz hated to even think it, let alone say it. “It might be…broken.”
“Broken?” She gasped. “How?”
Cruz looked at Emmett, who looked at Sailor. None of them wanted to break the bad news.
Sighing, Sailor walked toward Lani. “Before Tripp set off the blast in the ice cave, he threw the journal on the ground and…stomped on it. After the blast and cave-in, Cruz found it in the rubble. It didn’t look damaged, but I guess…I guess it was.”
“Impossible,” proclaimed Lani. “My sleeve is made from reinforced goethite nanofibers, which would have sufficiently protected the journal from Tripp’s crushfest as well as the explosion.”
There was an awkward silence. Nobody wanted to suggest that, like Emmett’s security measures, Lani’s sleeve wasn’t as perfect as she thought.
“It could have been the cold weather,” offered Sailor.
“Or…or…” Cruz was grasping for a reason. “…one of the corners was sticking out of the envelope.”
“Or it could be malfunctioning all on its own,” said Emmett. “There could be lots of reasons why it’s not working.”
Cruz turned to his roommate. “Do you think you could fix it?”
“I don’t know.” His forehead wrinkled. “I…I could try.”
Cruz held out the journal. “Try.”
“I can help, too,” said Lani. “I mean, if you want me to, Emmett.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll get to work.”
“Sounds good.”
The lights flickered, signaling they had only a few minutes until lights-out. “I’d better go.” Sailor touched Cruz’s arm. “We’ll figure it out. Night, Team Cousteau and Lani.”
Lani and Emmett said goodbye.
Once Sailor left, Emmett went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
“Okay, for real, Cruz”—Lani’s face loomed closer to the camera—“how are you?”
The fear he’d been squashing down into the pit of his stomach was beginning to rise. Cruz started to pace, following the footprints Sailor had left in the carpet. “I think I may have ruined everything, Lani…I think my dad may be…” He shook his head as the terrible thoughts overwhelmed him.
“No, you didn’t, and no, he isn’t,” Lani said firmly.
“Then why haven’t they contacted me?”
“They will. They let you talk to your dad, right?”
“Yes, but that was before—”
“And what did he say?”
“Not…much. We only got a few seconds.” Cruz scrambled to think. “He asked about me. I said I was fine and he said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t’…and that was it. They cut us off.” Cruz looked up at his best friend, helpless. “Don’t what? Don’t worry? Don’t give them the cipher? Don’t screw up and spray paralytic octopus venom into the bad guy’s face after they deliberately tell you no tricks?” Cruz ran his hands through his hair, clawing at his scalp, then, suddenly, stopped. He slowly lowered his arms to stare at his wrists. What was it his dad had said? At the time, something about it had seemed strange, but everything had happened so quickly he hadn’t had time to think…
“Cruz?” Lani brought him back to the moment. “What’s the matter?”
“On the phone my dad said…It was just weird…”
“What was?”
“I asked him if he was all right, and he said he was, except he’d turned his hand like he did last year on my birthday. The thing is, he didn’t twist his wrist on my birthday. I remember because for my twelfth birthday we went up to the botanical gardens.”
“Limahuli or Princeville?”
“Limahuli.”
“That’s my favorite,” sighed Lani. “I love the terraced taro gardens there.”
“Me too. After we walked through the gardens, we had lunch at Ke’e Beach, then went on a short hike on the Kalalau Trail.” Cruz’s mind was whirling. “Dad didn’t get hurt at all. I don’t get it. Why would he say he did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he sprained his wrist and didn’t notice until the next day or something. I did that with my ankle once, playing soccer. I thought I was fine, but when I got home, it started to swell and throb—”
“Lani!”
“What?”
“Turned hand. Limahuli means ‘turned hand’ in Hawaiian.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Are you saying you think your dad was trying to give you a clue to his location?”
“Could be,” said Cruz. “Limahuli is only about twenty minutes from Hanalei.”
“There aren’t many roads up there. It’s mostly forest and the perfect place to hide someone you’ve just kidnapped.” He could hear her tapping on her laptop. “Tiko and I could drive up and check it out after he closes the shop. Oh, by the way, Tiko is running the Goofy Foot while your dad is…away. He wanted me to tell you that everything is under control.”
“Tell him thanks. I know Dad appreciates it, too. Lani?”
“Yeah?”
“Watch your step at Limahuli,” warned Cruz. “I don’t need you getting kidnapped, too.”
She snorted. “You’d better go or you’ll be brushing your teeth by the light of Mell. Text me when you hear from Nebula…or if you can’t sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Try not to worry.” She cringed. “Sorry. I hate it when people say that to me, because trying not to do something only means you’re sure to do it. Somehow, it’ll all work out. I know it will.”
“Thanks,” he said, but Cruz wasn’t nearly as optimistic as his best friend. The same people who had killed his mother now held his father. Would it all work out? Somehow, he doubted it. “Aloha, Lani.”
“Aloha.”
Cruz checked his inbox again, even though the icon clearly showed there were no new messages. He moved his tablet from the dresser to his nightstand and got into his pajamas. When he came out of the bathroom, all the cabin lights were off, except for Emmett’s industrial desk lamp. He’d made it out of an assortment of antique pipes, clamps, and an old Bunsen burner. The shade was a lab beaker with a clear t
ubular bulb hanging inside. Cruz had nicknamed it the mad scientist lamp.
Cruz turned up the volume on his tablet so he would hear the chime of a message, and climbed into bed. The boys said their good nights and Emmett clicked off the light.
Turning his head on the pillow, Cruz looked at the silver dome on his nightstand. He longed to play the video it contained—the one of his mother and him at the beach when he was a toddler. He resisted the impulse to reach out for it. He didn’t want to keep Emmett up. Besides, he knew every second of the video by heart. He could just as easily play it in his head.
“Cruz?” Emmett’s voice drifted through the dark cabin.
“Yeah?”
“Your cipher…”
Cruz sighed. He had been waiting for this. “You want to know where it is.”
“I…I was surprised you took it off, that’s all. You always wear it.”
“Well, I could hardly bring it with me tonight.”
“But you are…I mean, you are going to give it to them, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Cruz was not about to play games with Nebula, not with his father’s life at stake.
For a while, Cruz focused on listening to the hum of the engines, hoping they might lull him to sleep. It didn’t work. If only he could hear Felipe play Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor. The haunting melody almost always put him to sleep. Unfortunately, Felipe usually played it in the early evening, while Cruz was trying to do his homework.
“Cruz?”
“It’s somewhere safe, Emmett. It isn’t that I don’t trust you,” he hurried on, “but the more you know, the more danger you’re in. Believe me, it’s better this way.”
Emmett didn’t say anything, but in the darkness, Cruz saw him turn away.
