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

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” I told them after a minute. “Why did Mr. Mountmorris tell us about the treasure? Telling us about it only made us less likely to give him the map, right?”

  Zander looked up. “You think it was a trap?”

  “Think about it. Why else would he have told us? If they can’t find the map, the next best thing is to let us find it and follow us. Maybe that’s why they sent the agents.”

  Zander and M.K. were silent and I kept talking, thinking out loud now. “We’ve always wondered why they didn’t put us in an orphanage after they told us about Dad. Maybe this is why. Maybe they wanted the man with the clockwork hand to find me and they knew he couldn’t if I was locked up. They’ve been watching us the whole time so they can get their hands on Dad’s map and the gold. We all know how valuable gold is now. It’s the only money that’s worth anything. They need it for trading.”

  “We just have to make sure they don’t catch up to us, then,” Zander said after a long moment. It was very quiet in the train compartment. Although we could barely feel the motion of the train, we could see the suburbs flying by outside our window. Along the train tracks there were little lean-tos where people had made their homes. Dad was always telling us how lucky we were, that his status as an Explorer of the Realm had meant that we could stay in our house, could get food and clothes and things. So many people were much worse off since the shipments from the New Lands had dwindled, he had always said. I watched a boy about my age scavenging by the side of the tracks as we flashed by, and I knew Dad had been right.

  Above the racing train, the sky was bright blue and full of long, wispy bits of cloud. In the distance I could see a couple of dirigibles chugging along, emitting clouds of black smoke behind them.

  The train slowed as it stopped at various stations, and a voice came over the loudspeaker saying that we’d be arriving in Philadelphia soon.

  “We need to talk to someone,” I said finally. “We need to talk to someone who knew Dad well, who can tell us if he ever talked about Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

  Fifteen minutes later the train slowed as it approached Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia.

  I had been staring out the window, watching the crowds of people waiting for the train, when I noticed a couple of blue-uniformed security agents running onto the platform. They seemed upset about something, looking around wildly and then leaning in to talk to each other. As I watched, Harry Craps stepped down from the train and said something to them, pointing back toward the car where we were sitting.

  “Well, we should think about who Dad might have told about Arizona or the treasure, if he found it or knew where it was. So who would he have—?” Zander was saying.

  “Zander?” I reached out and pulled his arm to get his attention. “Zander, I think they’re here for us.” I tucked the map back into my sweater.

  “What?”

  “Damn!” M.K. exclaimed. “Look out the window!”

  “They must have called the police,” Zander said. “We’ve got to get off this train.”

  “But where are we going to go?” M.K. asked us. “We spent all our money on the train tickets. How are we going to get to Arizona?” She was already standing, ready to move.

  “Welcome to Philadelphia,” came a voice over the loudspeaker.

  “Come on. We’re going all the way to the back of the train,” Zander said. “Get ready to run.”

  “Run where?” M.K. asked. “Where are we going to go?”

  “I wish we knew someone here,” I said, realizing as I spoke that, in fact, we did.

  “Hold on,” Zander said, his eyes brightening. And I knew he’d had the same thought I’d had. “Actually, we do know someone here.” We poked our heads out of the compartment and, seeing no one, headed toward the back of the train. People were coming out of the compartments as the train slowed, and we had to push past them.

  “Hey!” someone called after us. On the other side of the clot of passengers, I could see a couple of uniformed policemen trying to make their way through.

  “Excuse us, excuse us,” I murmured as we rushed along the corridor, but we were still getting some pretty nasty looks.

  “Who do we know?” M.K. whispered, bringing up the rear.

  “Think, M.K., think,” Zander turned around to say. “Philadelphia?”

  “Oh,” she said, as it dawned on her. “You mean…” We’d reached the last car and we opened a door at the very back of the train, where the caboose would have been if they had cabooses anymore.

  This was it. We jumped from the back of the train onto the tracks and clambered up the end of the platform, Pucci flying ahead to show us the way. The policemen were still on the other side of the platform, and we ducked down, keeping low to the ground as we ran toward the stairs that would take us up and out of the station. The three of us said it at exactly the same moment, “Raleigh McAdam!”

  Raleigh and Dad were ten years old when Harrison Arnoz discovered the Grygian Alps. They didn’t know each other yet, of course; Raleigh grew up in Philadelphia and Dad in New York. But I think that they must have had pretty much the same reaction to the news that Arnoz had scaled a mountain pass that had been declared impassable and discovered a difference between the old government-issued maps of the region generated by the Muller Machines and what he was seeing as he camped in and hiked through the thick forest, looking for bear tracks.

  Dad said that the world had suddenly opened up before him, new possibilities stretching and turning and expanding like the lines on the new maps. After the Muller Machines were outlawed, no one had had much hope for a while. The discovery of the New Lands was like an electric charge. Dad would be an Explorer; he would travel the world, just the way he’d dreamed when he’d played with the wooden puzzle his father had made.

  Four years later, when he joined the first class at the brand-new Academy for the Exploratory Sciences, Dad became friends with Raleigh McAdam. Dad was always telling us stories about Raleigh, about the things they’d done together at the Academy, about their classes on navigation and mapmaking and wilderness survival and the biology of the Fazian violet anaconda or the new Grygian bear.

  Raleigh had visited us a couple of times, armed with fake excuses about collecting supplies from Dad in case the agents asked questions about his trip. I remembered those trips vividly because Dad had seemed younger when he was with Raleigh. They stayed up late playing harmonica and drinking Rubutan whiskey and talking about the old days at the Academy. It had really been something to be an Explorer of the Realm in those days, when there was still so much to discover and explore.

  We had visited Raleigh once, too. Dad had come up with some excuse to tell the agents, and we’d taken the train to Philadelphia, found our way to Raleigh’s house, and spent an afternoon with him. “Raleigh is the most trustworthy person I’ve ever known,” Dad had told us on the way home. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  A couple of years or so before Dad disappeared, Raleigh had had some kind of accident. Dad didn’t tell us much about it, except to say that Raleigh had lost the use of his legs. Dad went to visit him once and when he came home he had seemed depressed. I’d wondered if Raleigh might get in touch with us when he heard about Dad, but he never had.

  “Do you think he’ll even recognize us?” M.K. asked.

  “Probably not,” I said. “We were just little kids the last time we saw him.”

  We were standing in front of the door of Raleigh’s big, ramshackle row house, exhausted by our sprint from the train station. It looked the way I remembered it, just more dilapidated, the shutters missing or hanging at odd angles, and bright green graffiti to one side of the door. Years ago, Raleigh had cemented little gargoyles to the windowsills, but most of them had broken off. The few that remained looked lonely and angry on their perches.

  “Well,” Zander said, putting out an arm for Pucci, “we can’t stand out here on the steps all day. Someone’ll see us.” He pulled his fis
t back and knocked, hard, on the door. We didn’t hear anything for a long time, and then there was a jangling and clicking on the other side of the door and it swung open.

  It was Raleigh, looking twenty years older.

  He stared up at us from an old wheelchair, his straggly brown-and-gray-streaked beard grown almost to his chest, his hair an unruly mess on top of his head. There was a tin of dramleaf in his lap, and I could smell the spicy scent of it in the doorway.

  He stared up at Zander. “As I live and breathe. Alex? Is that really you? Have you come back?”

  Sixteen

  “I thought you were a ghost,” Raleigh said for what must have been the twentieth time since we’d knocked on the door. “My god, you look so much like him. You look exactly the way he looked when I met him.” He stared at Zander for a long moment, then looked away. “What are you kids doing here, anyway?” He looked up at Pucci, who was inspecting the clutter of knickknacks on his mantel. There were four huge candelabras, one on each wall, tall wax candles burning away in them, and the faded red wallpaper was scarred by old ports and wires that had once connected to the Muller Machines.

  “We’re kind of in trouble, Raleigh,” I told him. “BNDL’s looking for us and there’s this map and we thought maybe you could tell us if Dad ever went to Arizona, to a place called Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

  Raleigh was sitting straight up in his chair, staring at us. “BNDL? Drowned Man’s Canyon?” he asked. “Tell me everything.”

  I did, leaving out the part about the man with the clockwork hand. The Explorer had risked a lot to get the map to us, and I think we had all started feeling protective of him.

  When I was finished, Raleigh looked up. “I’ll say you’re in a lot of trouble. These people are very dangerous.” He ran a hand through his crazy hair, not meeting our eyes, and tucked a new wad of dramleaf behind his lower lip. I could see the relaxation wash over his face as it took effect. “You shouldn’t be fooling around with these things.”

  “But what are ‘these things’?” I asked him. “We can’t figure it out. Obviously they think that Dad made a secret map and that he knew where the treasure is. But there isn’t anything on the map. Did he know about the treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon, Raleigh? Did he go there?”

  Raleigh didn’t say anything. He just wheeled himself over to the fireplace and poked at the fire halfheartedly. He had regular firewood—Raleigh had inherited a lot of money when his parents died and he must have been able to buy firewood on the black market—but it wasn’t a very good fire and the room was quite cold.

  When he turned around, his eyes settled on Zander. “I still can’t believe how much you look like him,” he said again. Zander smiled, embarrassed. I just felt irritated, the way I always did when people commented on Zander and Dad’s similarity. But then Raleigh looked at me and said, “And damned if you don’t look exactly like Veronique. ‘Nika,’ I always called her. God how I miss her. Him, too.” Raleigh’s eyes filled with tears and we looked away while he got ahold of himself.

  “In answer to your question,” he went on after a long moment, “yes, your father went to Arizona, looking for the treasure. In fact…” He started to wheel himself over to a big bureau on the other side of the room and then stopped and said, “Kit, do me a favor and open the second drawer from the top. There should be a stack of photographs there.” I opened the drawer and started hunting under the piles of envelopes and mail for the photos. “This chair isn’t working well,” Raleigh said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

  “Don’t you have a set of IronLegs?” M.K. asked him. Zander and I glanced at each other. I’d wondered why Raleigh was using the old-fashioned chair, too, but neither of us had had the nerve to ask.

  “Ah, they’re over there, against the wall.” He pointed to the mechanical brass braces leaning up against the far wall. “They don’t work, either.” He smiled sheepishly. “Nothing works around here. Your father had a knack for mechanics. I don’t. I should get them to a shop, but I just…” Raleigh looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to get around to it. It’s not like I have anywhere to go. Maybe I should become a Neo and use one of their crazy devices.” We’d heard about strange new leg braces made by Neo engineers that allowed the user to stand and walk without any clanking or awkwardness.

  “I’ll take a look,” M.K. said. “I’m good at things like that.” She went over and started inspecting the braces as I found the stack of photos and brought them to Raleigh.

  “Here we go,” Raleigh said. He flipped through them and laid a couple down on the table. “We shouldn’t have kept these pictures, of course. But your dad had some film from somewhere and he knew how to develop it. That’s why I keep them hidden. Anyway, there we are: the treasure hunters.”

  The picture showed three young men laughing into the camera, squinting against the bright sun that washed everything with a bleached, sandy light. I recognized Dad right away, even without his beard. He was the tallest of the three, his blond hair almost white from the sun, his eyes crinkling with happiness, but only a small smile on his lips. I would have known Raleigh, too; even then he’d had a roundness that was the opposite of Dad’s tall slimness. Raleigh’s brown hair was cut short and he was grinning from ear to ear, looking as though he’d just told a dirty joke. The other boy in the picture had light hair like Dad, a pointy chin, and thin, rangy build. He was making a funny face and holding a walking stick. “That’s our school friend John Beauregard,” Raleigh said. “What a group we were. We’d heard about the golden treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon and we were convinced we were going to find it. We’d practically started spending the money. Your father and I were going to use it to finance a trip to the New North Polar Sea. Hah! We didn’t find it, of course, but we sure had a good time trying.”

  Raleigh pointed to another picture of Dad, leaning against a solid rock face. “There he is, the intrepid explorer. It was the summer after our second year at the Academy. We hitched rides, jumped trains, whatever we had to do. It was easier to get around then. The government didn’t care so much about what people did. Took us three weeks to get out there.”

  “But obviously you didn’t find the treasure,” Zander asked after he’d gone through all the photos.

  “No, but your dad had some ideas,” Raleigh said. “It was the legend of Dan Foley that first got us interested in Drowned Man’s Canyon, but there were all kinds of other stories about that part of Arizona, crazy stories…” He trailed off.

  “What stories?” M.K. asked, looking up from the leg braces, which she’d disassembled on the carpet.

  “Oh, weird things. Some people think that there are aliens in the canyon, or that a race of giant ant people lives in tunnels inside the rocks. We met an Indian guide who told us that the ghost of Dan Foley haunts the canyon, that there are other ghosts that appear in the night and take you away. I have to admit, some of those stories scared the bejeezus out of me. But your father was very interested in them. He said it showed there was something there.” Raleigh waited for a minute before saying, “He believed there was a secret, undiscovered canyon somewhere near Drowned Man’s, a canyon that contained Dan Foley’s treasure. And he believed the stories supported the idea that it was there. Not that they were true, but that the stories had been created to keep people out of the canyon. He went back to Drowned Man’s Canyon, you know, just before he met your mother. Nika.”

  There was a long, thick silence. “Do you remember her at all?” he asked us finally.

  “A little,” Zander and I said at the same time. M.K. didn’t say anything; she’d been only a few months old when our mother had died.

  “He was so in love with her. She was so in love with him, too. She was smart, Nika, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She understood all about the Muller Machines, how they worked, how they had malfunctioned. Your dad was so proud of her.”

  “He never talked about her,” I said angrily. “It was like she never
existed at all. I didn’t even know that, about the Muller Machines. He never told us that.”

  “It broke his heart,” Raleigh said simply. “I think it hurt too much even to say her name.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway. He went out there again. Alone.”

  I wanted to ask him more about our mother, but instead I took the two pieces of the map out and laid them on the table.

  “There aren’t any other canyons here,” Zander said. “But maybe he made this map before he’d found it.”

  “If he had found the treasure,” Raleigh said, “we would have heard about it. Your father was scrupulous about bringing his findings to museums.”

  I looked at the picture of the three boys again. They were standing in front of a desert landscape, red-brown rocks and a waterfall behind them. A dark shadow fell across the right-hand side of the picture. “Wait a second, Raleigh,” I said. “Who took this picture of the three of you? There’s a shadow there.”

  Raleigh looked surprised. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? There were four of us. Your father and John and I and…”

  A dark look passed across his face as though he was remembering something especially unpleasant. “Leo Nackley.”

  Seventeen

  We were all silent for a moment. “Leo Nackley?” Zander asked. “Leo Nackley was with you, too? In Arizona?” “Of course. Didn’t you know that? When you said you heard him in the basement of the Explorer’s Society, talking about your father’s map, I thought you knew that he was after the treasure, too. Yes, Leo was there when your father, John, and I went to Drowned Man’s Canyon the first time. He was a good friend of ours from the Academy… back then, anyway.”

  “Do you think he knows where it is?” I asked. M.K. had stopped working on the leg braces. She had them standing up and was testing the joints.

  “No, if he’d found it you can bet we would have heard about it. Leo is one of those Explorers who does it for the glory. The money and the resources, too, but always the glory.” The dark look passed over Raleigh’s face again.