The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton's Lair Page 2

  “Mr. Nackley, I assure you. These students won fair and square, As you could see from the spectator’s area, there was a hidden—”

  “I said I want to see the briefing materials, Mr. Turnbull. There was no indication that the Explorer was a Neo. Therefore, the challenge is invalid.”

  “Mr. Nackley. I am happy to—”

  “I will expect the documents in my room within the hour.” Leo Nackley met my eyes and I could feel how much he hated me. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I knew it had something to do with his relationship with my dad, Alexander West, who had also been a famous Explorer before his disappearance. I looked away before Leo Nackley did. He took his son by the arm and they marched off toward campus. Jack, who seemed to care about girls a lot more than he cared about winning expedition challenges, cast a smarmy grin at Sukey and M.K. and wiggled his fingers at them in farewell before he trotted off behind the Nackleys.

  “Don’t worry,” Turnbull muttered. “He’ll get over it. He never did enjoy losing.”

  “Well, she looks happy enough,” M.K. said, pointing back at the hippo in the river. One of Turnbull’s assistants was tossing huge pieces of bloody meat to the hippo. Our friend Sukey Neville, who’d already been at the Academy for a year, had told us that the hippo’s name was Petunia, and that when she wasn’t playing her part in the simulations, she liked to chase Mr. Turnbull’s dogs. We watched as Turnbull’s assistants led Petunia back to her climate-controlled enclosure in a complex of barns at one end of the training grounds. The complex was well disguised behind a man-made rock face, and when you were in the middle of a simulation you almost forgot it wasn’t real.

  “You must have been scared, son,” Turnbull was saying to Zander, who grinned proudly.

  “When she charged the second time, I did think I was a goner, but then I remembered that—” A black form came racing through the sky and landed on Zander’s shoulder. It was his Fazian Black Knight Parrot, Amerigo Vespucci, whom we called Pucci, and following him was Sukey, her bright blue flight suit and tall plastic Neo boots shining against the dark green transplanted foliage of the simulated Derudan jungle.

  Hippo! Pucci squawked. Big hippo!

  “I had the worst time keeping him from flying to you when the hippo charged,” said Sukey, grinning. “You did it! Well done, you three. And you left Lazlo in the dust. He couldn’t even figure out the map!”

  Turnbull waited until she’d finished hugging us to ask, “How’s your mother, Miss Neville? She coming up for the kick-off dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Not this year,” Sukey told him. “She’s in Deloia again. But she’ll be up for the Announcement Banquet. She always likes to be here for the announcement of the expedition teams.” Sukey’s mother was the famous pilot and Explorer Delilah Neville. Even Turnbull seemed a little starstruck by her.

  Sukey had told me she understood why Delilah was always off on her expeditions, but I remembered how lonely the house had seemed when Dad was away. “Well, Raleigh can’t wait to see you,” I said. “You can sit with us.”

  “If you promise not to lord your new status as one of the chosen elites over us,” Zander said with a wink as we headed back toward campus. Sukey had been training for some sort of top-secret Academy flying squad and Zander loved to give her a hard time about it.

  “Where are you four going?” As we turned off the main path we ran right into Security Agent DeRosa. We had met DeRosa over the summer when he was working as a special agent for the director of the Bureau of Newly Discovered Lands, or BNDL. He didn’t like us very much, on account of the fact that M.K. had knocked him and his partner out with a wrench so we could escape from them. He’d been reassigned to BNDL’s Academy for the Exploratory Sciences right around the time we’d become students, which I was pretty sure wasn’t a coincidence.

  DeRosa pushed his dark hair out of his eyes and smoothed his flowing mustache. He was a dangerous-looking man and he was very proud of his mustache. A friend of Sukey’s claimed she’d seen him grooming it with a little comb behind a tree at the far end of campus. His dog, a Deloian Shepherd trained for guard duty, growled a low growl as we passed.

  “To dinner,” Sukey said, in an annoyed voice. “Don’t worry, Agent DeRosa, we’re not trying to escape.” I looked down at the ground, hoping he wouldn’t notice me, but M.K. gave him a sappy-sweet smile that made him scowl, and we all glanced up at the high razor-wire fence that surrounded the campus, guard posts every mile or so around the perimeter. It was supposed to keep intruders out, but the fence and the guards worked just as well to keep us in. Sukey said that the security was much tighter this year, since we’d arrived; I couldn’t help but take it personally.

  We’d been students at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences for a month and a half and I still couldn’t believe that we were really here, really eating in the Longhouse, where Dad had eaten all of his meals as a student, really taking classes in the forest lodge, really learning about cartography and big-game hunting and survival foraging on the Training Grounds where Dad had learned about these things too. Dad was gone, “disappeared and presumed dead,” according to BNDL, on an expedition in the Fazian jungle, but we could still find traces of him here, his initials scratched into the wood of a table in the library, his name on a locker in the mountaineering hut.

  Zander and M.K. had jumped right into life at the Academy, M.K. spending most of her time in the engineering buildings with Quincy, learning about new steam engines developed for exploration, practicing small-engine repair and building boats and vehicles with scavenged materials. On the second day of classes, Zander had walked right up to an enraged Grygian bear during his Fauna of the Newly Discovered Lands class and scratched it on the back. He’d also grown another three inches since the summer and was now almost six feet tall. Despite the fact that I’d turned fourteen in September, I still only came up to his shoulder. Last week, a girl had asked me if I was really only a year younger than Zander. “Your brother’s so brave,” she’d said with a dreamy look on her face. “Everyone thinks so.”

  It was taking me a little longer to get used to life at the Academy. The agents were everywhere, watching us while we ate and trained, and Sukey had warned us that you had to be careful about criticizing President Hildreth and BNDL. There were students who would inform on you if you did. “Lazlo’s an informant, of course,” she’d said. “But there are rumors about others, too—people you wouldn’t expect.”

  Now she stopped on the path, letting Zander and M.K. get a little bit ahead of us. Her dark red hair, the color of shiny copper, was full of the late daylight. It was October and the maple trees were turning red and gold, the mountains around campus covered in a wash of autumn color. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said quickly, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  She looked around carefully before leaning in and whispering in my ear, “Have you figured out anything about the map?”

  The map. Last fall, six months after our father had disappeared on an expedition to Fazia, we had followed a trail of clues—and risked our lives in the process—to a remote canyon in Arizona. It had been waiting for us there, a mysterious bathymetric map showing the contoured floor of some unknown lake or ocean, a gouge in the center labeled “Girafalco’s Trench.” For the past four months I’d cursed Dad for disappearing in Fazia and leaving me to try to figure out what his mysterious maps meant. There had been a note for us too, a maddeningly brief message that raised more questions than it answered. Well done, Expeditioners, it had read. Here’s the next piece of the puzzle. All my love, Dad.

  But what was the puzzle we were trying to solve?

  I could smell Sukey’s hair, clean and faintly spicy, as she leaned in, and felt her warm breath on my cheek. “Nothing,” I whispered back, feeling the frustration of the past month rush through me. I’d searched every atlas I could find for mention of Girafalco’s Trench and compared Dad’s secret map to them with no luck whatsoever. “Off
icially, Girafalco’s Trench doesn’t exist.”

  Which was exactly the point, of course. Like the map that had led us to Arizona in the first place, it was highly likely this map’s secrets were somehow hidden, coded and waiting for me to discover them.

  If I could.

  A stray curl had escaped from behind her ear, and it brushed my cheek. I wanted her to stay just like that, so I went on, a little desperately, “I keep thinking that maybe it’s like the other map, that maybe there’s another half somewhere. But where?”

  “You don’t think someone’s supposed to give it to you, do you? The way that Explorer gave you the book?”

  “Maybe, but how would they get it to us? This place is locked up tight and protected like a military base.”

  “Some people say it is a military base,” Sukey muttered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” She thought for a minute. “So you’ve looked through all the maps in the library?”

  “Yeah, everything I could find.”

  “Who’s Girafalco anyway?”

  It was a good question. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Or her,” she said grinning. “Maybe Girafalco’s a she. Why didn’t you think of that?”

  “Maybe she is.”

  Sukey stared thoughtfully into the darkening sky, the sun hovering over the peaks to the west. “Well, whoever this Girafalco is, your Dad must have trusted you to figure it out the same way you figured out the map of Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

  “I guess. I just wish he’d explained what he wants us to do.”

  Her amber eyes twinkled with mischief. “That would be too easy.”

  We caught up to the others and walked the half-mile back to the Longhouse along the razor wire fence. “Aren’t you coming to dinner?” Sukey asked me when I hesitated outside. Zander had been telling her a funny story about Pucci stealing a pair of eyeglasses from Mr. Wooley, our History of Exploration instructor. Lately, Pucci seemed to think he was a magpie. He was always stealing people’s pens and compasses. The students thought it was funny, the teachers not so much. Pucci’s presence at the Academy was barely tolerated as it was. Like other unfortunate animals and birds, he’d been modified by the government for use during protests and crowd situations, his legs replaced by metal ones. He’d escaped somehow; Zander had found him on the verge of death and nursed him back to health. His presence on campus must have been a reminder of the government’s cruelty and we were worried they might take him away from us. But so far, they’d left him alone.

  “I’ll be there in a bit,” I told them. “I want to go to the library first.” I eyed the three agents stationed in front of the Longhouse, watching every student who went inside. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the thought of them watching me while I ate. Besides, the food was terrible here. The shortages were getting worse and there wasn’t much coming in from the territories and colonies now.

  “Okay,” M.K. said cheerfully. “We’ll make sure to save you some disgusting, unidentifiable slop.”

  Three

  The Academy for the Exploratory Sciences had been built into a wide valley of the White Mountains, most of the dark-timbered academy buildings nestled together at the foot of Mt. Arnoz, with the Simulation and Training Grounds stretching out in all directions, and the Mountaineering Hut high up in the foothills of the mountain.

  The centerpiece of the campus was the huge Longhouse, constructed of gargantuan pine logs, the bark smoothed or worn away in places, pine sap still glimmering here and there on the walls.

  The boys’ and girls’ cabins were a half mile north of the Longhouse, and there were many other log buildings around, some of which I’d never been inside. Sukey had told us that she’d heard rumors there were secret caves and tunnels through the mountains, but she’d never seen any evidence of them and no one knew what they were supposed to be for, so the stories may have just been . . . stories.

  I turned up the collar of my Explorer’s vest against the chilly breeze coming down off the mountains and trudged along the path to the library, thinking about Sukey. Lately she had seemed preoccupied, her amber-brown eyes always darting around worriedly, her forehead scrunched in thought.

  She’d told us that she’d been asked to be on a top-secret flying squadron of Academy students. They’d been taking extra classes and practicing at night and she was tired. I wondered if that was what was on her mind, or if it was something else. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the Cruthers Memorial Library, looking up at the statue of the famous Explorer George Cruthers seated on the horse he’d used to explore Deloia and other Newly Discovered Lands.

  The library was three stories high and, like the Longhouse, it smelled of the pine logs from which it was constructed. The walls of the big main room were lined with books and document boxes and, on one side, a winding staircase leading to three floors of tables and study nooks and shelves around the outside walls that were filled with books and maps.

  Most of the books were new, printed since the Muller Machines had failed, taking their huge libraries of computerized books and maps with them. But one of my favorite things about being at the Academy was that there were also some really old books from before the Muller Machines. I loved to pore over them, smelling the smooth leather and musty paper. The maps and nautical charts were stored in special wooden and glass boxes that allowed you to slide them out on trays. You could examine the winding lines showing places that we’d known about for a long time, as well as the places discovered by Dad and his fellow Explorers. I’d been through them a thousand times, looking for Girafalco’s Trench. I’d had no luck, but something Sukey said had gotten me thinking.

  I couldn’t find a record of Girafalco’s Trench, but maybe I could find out something about Girafalco himself—or herself.

  The Academy librarian, Mrs. Pasquale, sat behind the big desk in the main room, stamping books and keeping an eye on the students working at tables on the first floor. Next to her was a pair of IronGrabbers, steam-powered gloves that got longer and longer and reached high up into the shelves with their chrome fingers to pull down the books you wanted. Mrs. Pasquale was an elderly Neo, her acid-yellow hair in a bun and her glittering spectacles suspended from her neck by a chain of flashing lights. She always thought people were trying to deface the books and maps and she kept a close watch on the students, making notes in a little notebook next to her desk about what you were reading or checking out.

  I spent a half hour in the clockwork card catalog, looking for books about famous explorers, and gave her a list of the first five texts I wanted. She slipped her hands into the IronGrabbers. They clicked and whirred as the wrists telescoped, getting longer and longer until she could reach the shelf where my books were. Then, with more clicking and whirring, they shrunk down again and she handed me the books.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Pasquale.” She just scowled, so I took them back up to my favorite leather armchair by the big windows on the third floor and started checking each index, skimming for mention of a Girafalco. When I finished the first pile, Mrs. Pasquale and her IronGrabbers got me another, and I went through those, feeling more and more frustrated as I failed to turn up any reference to a Girafalco, male or female, living or dead, human or animal. Ready for a break, I got up and went over to the big bureau where the Academy kept its collection of maps and nautical charts.

  I’d been through them over and over, looking for a reference to Girafalco’s Trench, and now I tried yet again, straining my eyes to see the fine lines of the old documents, the strangely shaped continents and coastlines, the big, wide-open spaces of the oceans, where cartographers had drawn in sea serpents and mythical beasts. But no matter how many times I squinted at the maps, the words I was looking for weren’t going to magically appear. Dad had taught me how to memorize maps, and I was good at it, scanning the loops and whorls and lines and making a picture of them in my mind. I had most of these committed to memory now, I’d looked at them
so much. By the time dinner was over and students started streaming into the library, the IronGrabbers had had a good workout, and I had made my way through all of the general histories of exploration and all of the biographies of Explorers and had started on the shelves of textbooks that were kept on reserve by the front desk.

  Every time I came down with a stack of books and she had to get the IronGrabbers out again, Mrs. Pasquale would make a little notation in her notebook and look up at me with growing admiration. She must have thought I was some kind of speed reader.

  I had finished the animal biology and cartography textbooks and had moved on to geology, and then suddenly there it was, at the end of a textbook called Understanding the Earth:

  “The Italian scientist, mapmaker, and explorer Gianni Girafalco developed an early theory about the permeability of the earth’s surface, but it was overshadowed by Tyler’s more mainstream hypothesis during the New Modern Age explorations of . . .” That was it. Nothing more about Girafalco. The Italian scientist, mapmaker, and explorer Gianni Girafalco. I put the book aside and started on the rest of the geology texts. I found a few more references to Gianni Girafalco, most of them noting that he had explored the Caribbean in the 1800s and was an early believer in something called “trench theory,” or the belief that the planet was covered with trenches that represented entry points to the inside of the earth. Girafalco seemed to have believed that if you could enter these trenches, you could actually travel deep inside the earth. He hypothesized that many of these entry points were under the sea and that if you could explore the ocean floor, you could access the center of the earth. I found another reference in an old book about nineteenth-century exploration that contained crew lists from his voyages.