The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon Read online

  “Obviously he wanted us to find the map,” I said. “But it was only by chance that he got it to me. What if I hadn’t cut through the alley? What if someone else had been there?”

  “That’s a good point,” Zander said. He thought for a moment. “You said he looked like he was just back from an expedition. Maybe he was… I don’t know, traveling with Dad or something, and he brought the book back for us.”

  “Everyone who was traveling with Dad in Fazia died,” M.K. said. “At least that’s what they told us.” We were all quiet, remembering the night Francis Foley had arrived, telling us that pieces of Dad’s party’s boats had been found in the Fazian River, in an area “unsuitable for human survival.” We’d known exactly what that meant. If the Fazian crocodiles or piranhas hadn’t gotten him, the cannibals had.

  “Yeah, that’s what they told us. But I’ve gone over and over the maps and there’s no way they were in Bartoa when the government says they were. I told you that I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  They both looked at me. “So what, you think Dad’s alive?” Zander asked.

  “No. If he was alive he would have let us know. But I don’t think he died where the agents say he did.”

  “Because I think that…,” Zander started, then trailed off, looking troubled. “Forget it.”

  We all fell into silence for a minute, remembering all the times Dad had complained about the government agents. He was always talking about how they asked so many questions about his expeditions and how he thought that they sometimes followed him, how no Explorer could go anywhere without BNDL’s okay. Dad hadn’t been a big fan of the government.

  “What do you think it means, anyway?” M.K. whispered, as though they were listening in at this very moment. “Do you think Dad wants us to go to this canyon, wherever it is? Do you think he went there?”

  “I have no idea,” I told her. “I don’t remember him ever talking about going to Arizona. He didn’t go on any expeditions there or anything like that. Arizona was explored a long time ago. By the Spanish. He liked to go to the New Lands.”

  “I think he wants us to go to Arizona,” Zander said. “I think that’s what he’s trying to tell us.”

  “Hold on a minute.” It was just like Zander to start packing before we knew anything about the map. “What we need to do first is find out whether he ever went to Arizona and whether there’s another half to the map.”

  “Who’s this Mountmorris guy?” M.K. asked, picking up the book. “He seems to know a lot about him. Was he friends with Dad?”

  I went over to the bookshelf and took down Dad’s raggedy copy of The Explorer’s Yearbook, which the BNDL agents hadn’t found interesting enough to take with them. “Here he is.” I read aloud from his entry, “‘Randolph Delorme Mountmorris. Author, historian, and collector. Notable for his books about the New Modern Age of Exploration and for his collections of animal specimens and artifacts from the New Lands.’ That’s pretty much it. There’s an address here too. In the city. On Fifth Avenue.”

  “He must have met Dad when he was writing the book,” Zander said. “Maybe he could tell us about the map.”

  “I think we have to be careful…,” I was starting to say when I heard the faint chug of an engine. “Did you guys hear something?”

  Pucci cocked his head, listening, too.

  We were all silent for a moment, and I was just about to say that I must have imagined it when we heard knocking from the hallway.

  “Knock, knock,” Pucci cackled. “Knock, knock.” He hid himself behind the dingy curtains.

  M.K. went to the window. “SteamCycles,” she told us, standing behind the drapes so she couldn’t be seen. “With BNDL logos on their sides. They’re back!”

  Seven

  Zander jumped up. “Hide it! Hide the map. I’ll go.”

  I put the book and the map into the hidden compartment of the backpack and then, just for good measure, stuffed it behind the empty wood box next to the fireplace. It wasn’t a great hiding place, but I thought it might buy us some time. M.K. and I hurried out into the hallway, where Zander was talking to Agent Wolff and the tall male agent with the flowing mustache. Agent Wolff had taken off her cape and we could see a holster containing a shiny silver pistol under one arm.

  “Oh, there he is,” she said, fixing her gaze on me. The eyepiece clicked a few times as it focused. “Agent DeRosa and I have gotten some new information from witnesses in the marketplace. There was a sighting of the man dressed in Explorer’s gear. We know you were there, too. Are you sure you didn’t see him?”

  I froze. Should I lie? Should I say I had seen him? The agents were staring at me and finally I choked out, “No. I definitely didn’t see that man.”

  I could see Zander’s eyes widen in alarm. I knew he thought I’d made a mistake lying to them. I felt a hard nausea start in my stomach.

  “Let’s sit down somewhere,” Agent DeRosa said, “so we can really… talk.” He reached up to smooth his moustache and there was something sinister about the way he said talk.

  I led the way into the dining room and lit a few of the candles in the candelabra over the table. We’d found some old packets of vegetable seeds in the attic and we had planted them in flowerpots and broken cups and bowls, thinking we could have a vegetable garden once it got warm. They must have been too old, because none of them had sprouted.

  Agent DeRosa pushed a few cups of dirt out of the way and crammed himself into a chair. “Now, we want to know what—” Agent DeRosa started to say, just as one of the many mice that had moved into the house during the cold winter decided to make a break for it and ran across the dining-room floor.

  Agent Wolff screamed as it ran over her foot and Pucci came flying in from the library, his metal talons unsheathed in front of him, ready to attack. I felt my stomach sink. We weren’t sure what would happen if the government discovered we had been taking care of the parrot, but I had a feeling we were about to find out.

  “It’s okay, Pucci,” Zander said desperately, and the parrot reversed direction and landed on his shoulder.

  “Danger!” he squawked. “Danger!”

  Agent Wolff stared at him. “Is that a modified Fazian black knight parrot?” she asked. “What are you doing with it? That thing is the property of BNDL.”

  “He’s not a thing,” Zander said in a low voice. “He’s a bird, a bird who had his legs cut off by a butcher in one of your workshops and replaced with metal ones.” He whispered something to Pucci, who squawked and went to sit quietly on the windowsill.

  “We’ll take it with us when we go,” Agent Wolff said to Agent DeRosa. “Now, I’ve lost my train of…” She caught sight of M.K., standing there with a furious look on her face. “You, girl, go make some coffee,” she said, waving a hand at her as though she were some kind of servant. I saw M.K.’s eyes narrow in anger.

  Please, M.K., please just go do it, I thought, wishing I was telepathic. I knew my sister, and I knew how much she must hate the way Agent Wolff was talking to her, but she must have been really scared of the agents because she forced a little smile and said, “Okay.”

  Once she was gone, Agent DeRosa took a deep breath and said, “You know that lying to agents of the Bureau of Newly Discovered Lands is a federal offense, don’t you? Do you know what they do to people who lie to BNDL?”

  “I can guess,” Zander said quietly.

  Agent DeRosa stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “Well, they lock them up and—”

  “No need to talk about that, Julian,” Agent Wolff interrupted, with a sickly sweet smile. “I’m sure they have good imaginations. Now tell us about the man.”

  “I don’t know anything.” My voice sounded shrill and scared, even to my own ears. I could feel the panic starting to rise in my throat and I started babbling, “I swear I don’t…”

  I didn’t know what to do and I remembered something Dad had told me once, that if you didn’t want to answer a question, you should answer with a qu
estion of your own.

  “What did he do, anyway?” I asked them.

  “That’s none of your business,” Agent Wolff said, her eyepiece boring into me. “What did he say to you?”

  I might have broken down and said something really stupid if I hadn’t, at that exact moment, seen M.K. come up quietly behind Agent DeRosa.

  She was holding her wrench.

  Agent DeRosa opened his mouth, but he didn’t have time to say anything before M.K. brought the wrench down squarely on the back of his skull. His eyes rolled into his head and he slumped to the floor with a long, muffled thump.

  I don’t know what kind of training Agent Wolff had gotten from the Bureau of Newly Discovered Lands, but whatever it had been, she forgot it as she blinked at me for a long moment, then looked down at Agent DeRosa as though she couldn’t quite believe he’d just been brained by the cute little girl with blond hair.

  A moment was all M.K. needed. She hopped over behind Agent Wolff, and just as the agent started to stand, M.K. brought the wrench down on her head, too.

  Agent Wolff didn’t so much crash to the floor as slide out of her seat and fold into a heap of chain mail and leather.

  We all stared at the two of them stretched out under the table.

  “M.K.?” Zander asked finally, drawing out her name the way Dad had when he suspected her of something.

  M.K. shrugged. Her little fish knife was tucked into the leather belt she’d wrapped around the waist of the mechanic’s jumpsuit and there was a wicked gleam in her eye. Other than that, she looked like any other cute ten-year-old girl in need of a haircut.

  I watched Agent Wolff’s chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm.

  “Are you crazy?” Zander asked M.K. in a low whisper.

  I pointed at the agents. “What are we going to do now, M.K.? We’re going to be in really big trouble.” I could feel the panic set in. There was no way to undo this, no way to go back to the moment before she had appeared with her wrench.

  Agent Wolff let out a soft little snore.

  “I had to,” M.K. said. “They were going to take Pucci. And what about the map? You were about to tell them you saw the man, and they would have searched the house until they found the map.” Her little chin was thrust out at me, her blue eyes calm and steady.

  “I wasn’t going to tell them,” I protested weakly. I was almost shaking, still scared from the agents’ questions, and completely rattled by the realization of what M.K. had just done. “What do you think they’re going to do when they wake up?”

  “I’m kind of thinking,” Zander said slowly, “that it’s going to be better if we’re not here when they wake up.”

  I turned to look at him. His cheeks were red, like he’d been outside, and he was staring into the distance the way he always did when he had an idea.

  “And where will we be?”

  He was still staring. The agents kept snoring.

  “Zander? Where will we be?”

  “Arizona,” Zander said thoughtfully. “Like I said, Dad must have wanted us to go there.” He gestured to the agents. “And it does have the advantage of being all the way across the country.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t even have the whole map.”

  “But the part we do have is of Arizona, right? Maybe the other half is there.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is. Luckily it’s not like it’s a huge state filled with deserts or anything.” I looked down at the agents. “How long do you sleep when you’ve been hit on the head?”

  M.K. shrugged. “It depends. An hour? Something like that.”

  “We need more time than that,” Zander said. “Help me, Kit.” He opened the door to the kitchen closet and dragged Agent DeRosa over to it. “Get his feet.”

  “Zander!”

  “Come on. This will buy us some time.”

  And because I didn’t have any better ideas, I helped him stash Agent DeRosa and then Agent Wolff into the closet. He shut the door and M.K. wedged a chair under the doorknob.

  “We should probably get out of here,” she said, picking up her wrench and wiping something off it onto her sleeve.

  “And go to Arizona?” I paced around the kitchen, thinking out loud. “This is crazy. I wish we could find out if Dad ever even went there.”

  “Let’s ask that guy. Mountmorris,” Zander said. “We have his address, right?”

  “But… I don’t know. We don’t know anything about him. That Explorer risked his life to get me the map. We can’t just go around showing it to people.”

  “We won’t say anything about where we got it.”

  I hesitated. What did Dad want us to do? It was frustrating, not having any idea.

  “Uh, aren’t you forgetting something?” M.K. asked us. “Say we did want to see this guy. How are we going to get into the city?”

  We all stared at each other. We hadn’t thought of that. It would take us a long time to walk. We’d be caught for sure. Dad had had a SteamCar, but it had been taken away by Foley and his agents.

  Pucci, who was still on the windowsill, made a funny put-chugga-chugga sound, like an engine, in his throat. He liked to imitate sounds, rain falling or wind blowing or…

  SteamCycles.

  We all looked out the window. The agents had parked them right in the driveway. They were brand new, with Gryluminum frames and polished Gryluminum boilers and brass instrument panels. The wheel spokes shone in the late-morning sun.

  “Hey,” M.K said, “look at that.”

  “All right,” I said, deciding. “M.K., do you want to go and check to make sure they’re working and everything?”

  She was already out the door.

  “That’s settled, then,” Zander said, grinning. “I’ll get some warm clothes for us. Kit, find that money Dad left for emergencies and make sure you’ve got the map.”

  Eight

  R. Delorme Mountmorris lived in a five-story brick mansion on a quiet block facing Arnoz Park, surrounded by huge apartment buildings. It was a part of the city where a lot of merchants and government workers lived, and the security was especially tight. There were blue-uniformed security agents everywhere, and we were glad we’d ditched the SteamCycles in a not-so-fancy neighborhood on our way in. Three kids and a parrot standing on a street corner didn’t seem to arouse their suspicions, but three kids and a parrot on BNDL SteamCycles definitely would have. Just to be sure, we saluted the big picture of President Hildreth mounted on a building across the street.

  “I think there was a terrorist attack near here last week,” I said, watching two agents carefully checking a trash can on the corner in front of Mr. Mountmorris’s house. “Some guy who works for Hildreth got blown up while he was out walking his dog.”

  “Simerians?” Zander asked. I was surprised. He never paid attention to the news unless the story was about Explorers or animals.

  “That’s what they said, anyway.”

  Two green-haired mail messengers raced by us on their SteamCycles, almost colliding on the turn. They were always competing with each other to see who could make deliveries faster, and lately there had been a lot of accidents. They were fun to watch, though. Most of the messengers were Neos, and they cut their hair in crazy Mohawk styles and dyed it all kinds of amazing colors.

  As for us, we were dressed in our own clothes and worn-out pieces of Dad’s exploring gear that we’d been able to find quickly. I was wearing an old pair of his alligator-skin leggings, a cactus-fiber T-shirt he’d brought me back from somewhere, a yak-fiber sweater lined in namwee fur, and a pair of tall brown cowhide boots with crampons hidden in the soles that Dad had made for me the winter before.

  Zander was wearing Dad’s hunting gear—warm yak-fiber leggings and a long-sleeved shirt painted to look like the Grygian forests. M.K. was wearing an old pair of Doolandian buffalo-hide leggings that I’d outgrown and a cactus-fiber field shirt of Dad’s that she’d tucked into the leggings. She’d wrapped a long piece of buffalo rawhide around her waist
, and into this makeshift belt she’d tucked her wicked little fish knife, her wrench, which she’d cleaned, and a few other tools. Zander and I had both brought a few tools, too, and I’d brought pens and paper for maps. I kept wishing we had Explorer’s vests like Dad’s; his was in Fazia, though, wherever his body was, and I doubted we’d ever see it again. Both Zander and M.K. had on boots like mine.

  We climbed the stone steps to a dark-green door with a heavy brass knocker in the shape of a frog. Zander lifted it and let it fall. Almost immediately the door opened and we found ourselves face to face with a bright red Mohawk hairstyle. Beneath it was a tall man dressed in a red synthetic jumpsuit, the sleeves decorated with the flashing purple lights that Neos liked to wear on their clothes and sometimes embedded in their skin. I’d always found the way Neos dressed kind of silly, but there wasn’t anything silly about this man; he looked as though he wouldn’t think twice about using the sharp edge of his Mohawk to cut someone’s throat.

  He looked past us as though he couldn’t quite believe that there were three children and a parrot on the doorstep. Finding no one else behind us, he settled his eyes on us and said, “Yes?”

  “We’d like to see Mr. Mountmorris, please,” Zander said.

  “I’m Mr. Mountmorris’s secretary, Jec Banton. I’m sorry, but he’s not available. Can I give him a message for you?”

  Something about the way he said it made me think he wasn’t going to give Mr. Mountmorris any message at all. Zander must have thought so, too, because he said, “We have to see him. Please.”

  “Absolutely not. He’s a very busy man. He doesn’t have time for… visitors.”

  He gave us a snide sort of look, and his voice was full of sarcasm. I didn’t like him at all.

  I don’t know what gave me the courage, but I said, “Just tell him that the children of Alexander West are here to see him. If he doesn’t want to see us, we’ll go.”

  Jec Banton raised his eyebrows and disappeared inside the house, leaving us on the steps. A couple of minutes later, he was back, with a slightly surprised look on his face.