Migo left Percy with Meechee and went to find his dad. In the excitement, he’d forgotten that his father must have been worried about him. He found Dorgle sitting on the rim of the aiming circle. Migo climbed out onto the platform and joined him.
“Migo, what do I do?” Dorgle asked, gazing at the pieces of broken helmet in his hands. “I missed the gong. But the Sky Snail came up anyway.”
Migo didn’t take this as bad news. “So another stone is wrong?” he asked. “This is amazing.”
“What’s so amazing about it?” Dorgle asked. “The stones are supposed to be . . . stones! You know? Reliable. Sturdy. Like your mother’s ankles were. And now the snail is rising on its own?”
“If it’s even a snail,” Migo said. “Meechee thinks it might be a flaming ball of gas.”
“GAS?” Dorgle wailed. “I’ve been banging my head on that thing to wake up a gas ball? That’s usually what wakes me up.”
“Dad, I know all this change is scary,” Migo said. “But being with everyone today, asking questions, thinking, wondering—I’ve never felt so alive!”
“But if I don’t ring the gong, I’m not the Gong Ringer,” Dorgle said. “And if I’m not the Gong Ringer, then what am I?”
Migo didn’t have an answer for that. The father and son sat in silence for a moment, thinking. Then Thorp called up to them from below.
“Migo! My dad wants to see you, pronto!” he barked.
Migo hurried to the palace, where the Stonekeeper waited for him on the steps. Gwangi, Kolka, and Fleem observed them from nearby.
“What’s up with that?” Gwangi wondered.
“No, what’s up with that?” Kolka asked.
She pointed toward the turrets, where Thorp pedaled a unicycle, slowly moving them all by himself.
Gwangi and Kolka exchanged glances. They both knew that moving the tower must be really important if Thorp was trying to get it going.
“What? What am I missing?” Fleem asked.
Without answering him, Gwangi and Kolka turned toward the palace entrance.
The Stonekeeper led Migo inside and walked him through the great hall, past a line of statues.
“Look at them. The great Stonekeepers of the past,” the Stonekeeper said. “Each one adding new stones as they received wisdom about what was best for the village.”
Migo studied the statues. The earliest Stonekeeper wore a single stone as a necklace. The next one wore a vest of stones. With each Stonekeeper, more and more stones had been added as more rules had been made.
“The robe looks heavy,” Migo said, nodding to the Stonekeeper’s robe of stones, which touched the floor.
“Oh, it is,” he replied. “It requires a strong backbone.”
He stopped at the end of the great hall and stuck the bottom of his purple staff into a hole in the floor. Then he turned the staff. Behind them a wall lowered from the ceiling, creating a small room with no visible exit.
Then the Stonekeeper twisted the staff in the other direction. The sound of rock grinding on rock groaned as the floor beneath their feet sank, revealing a stone spiral staircase.
Migo’s eyes widened. “Whoa, secret stairs.”
The Stonekeeper motioned for Migo to go ahead.
“Where are you taking me?” Migo asked as they walked down the dark staircase.
“You have so many questions,” the Stonekeeper replied. “I think it’s about time I gave you some answers.”
The stairway ended, and the landing opened into a massive cavern that housed a collection of Smallfoot objects: airplane parts, a scrap of a hot-air balloon basket, a metal piece of a satellite. Migo didn’t know what they were, but it was clear that they were not from the Yeti world.
“These are Smallfoot things,” Migo said. “But where did they come from?”
“Our ancestors brought them,” the Stonekeeper said.
He banged his staff on the ground twice, and snails lit up, revealing a wall carved with images. The pictures looked like they told a story.
“You see, Migo, there was a time when Yetis lived beneath the clouds,” the Stonekeeper explained. “We lived happily for a long time, until we came across a group of Smallfoot—also known as humans.”
Migo studied the wall to see carvings of humans with spears chasing Yetis.
“They attacked with their spears, and their sticks of smoke and thunder,” the Stonekeeper continued. “They called us Sasquatch. They called us Abominable. They chased us and tried to hurt us.”
Migo couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His Smallfoot wasn’t dangerous. He had helped Migo when he was hurt! Could these humans really have tried to hurt Yetis?
“We had to run and hide,” the Stonekeeper said. “So we climbed this mountain, where we knew the Smallfoot could not survive. And then the first stone was written: ‘Our world is an island that floats on a sea of endless clouds.’ ”
The wall carvings showed the Yeti mountain, surrounded by a ring of clouds.
“Then we wrote more laws,” the Stonekeeper explained. “It was the only way to protect ourselves from the humans. So it’s just best to leave things the way they are.”
“But my Smallfoot—he’s not like that,” Migo protested.
“They’re all like that,” the Stonekeeper replied. “Tell me, when you found him, did he meet you with open arms?”
Migo thought back to his first encounter with the Smallfoot. He had thrown a ski pole at Migo—or had it been a spear? And he’d tried to fire a gun at Migo, just like the gun in the carving on the wall. (It had been a tranquilizer gun, but Migo didn’t know that.)
“They don’t care about us,” the Stonekeeper said, “which is why we must protect our future.”
He slammed his staff into another slot on the floor and pushed down. The wall opened up, and a hiss of hot air hit Migo’s face. The sound of rhythmic clinking called to him from inside a room full of steam.
The Stonekeeper motioned for Migo to enter, and he obeyed. After a few feet the steam cleared, and Migo stared at a big, strange machine.
Part of the machine was a giant fan, its blades slowly turning. The machine sat in a huge hole bored out of the mountain, and continued to pump out steam. Through the fan the two Yeti could see a blanket of clouds stretched across the blue sky.
“Wait, are we below the clouds?” Migo asked, confused. “Our village is above the clouds.”
“Or so it would seem, but look closer,” the Stonekeeper said.
The truth suddenly hit Migo. “Those aren’t clouds. It’s steam!”
The Stonekeeper smiled. “The stones are working,” he said.
“The stones?” Migo asked.
The Stonekeeper led him around the corner, to where another machine hummed.
“You might think that the jobs in this village are pointless,” the Stonekeeper went on. “But each one is important. Every task insures that this machine keeps churning to make the clouds. Those below the clouds won’t look up—and those above the clouds won’t look down.”
Migo looked at the second big machine. Ice balls dropped from the machine into an enormous cauldron, where they melted and became water. A beam of light shone on the cauldron, creating steam. The fan turned the steam into the clouds that surrounded and hid the mountain.
Migo looked at the whirring blades of the fan, which were connected to long rods that stretched way, way up. That was when it hit him—the Yetis riding unicycles had been turning the turret that powered the fan!
“So none of these stones are true?” Migo asked. “They’re all lies?”
“Good lies,” the Stonekeeper replied. “To protect our world.”
Migo thought of all the Yetis, and how excited and happy they’d been to see the Smallfoot. How they had come alive when they’d started asking questions.
“They need to know the truth,” Migo said.
“Oh, do they?” the Stonekeeper asked. “I was young once too, Migo. But as I got older, I realized that the need to protect the Yetis was more important than any misguided search for the truth.”
Migo shook his head. “But the truth is important.”
“Protect the lie, and you protect our village,” the Stonekeeper said. “Lives are at stake, Migo. Your friends, your father, Meechee. You want to protect them, don’t you?”
Migo felt a heavy weight on his heart. The truth was important. But so was being safe.
He sighed. “So, what do you want me to do?”
“Tell everyone you were lying about the Smallfoot,” the Stonekeeper replied.
“But they’ve already seen it,” Migo argued. “They’re not going to believe me.”
The Stonekeeper grinned. “You’d be surprised what they’ll believe.”
Migo turned to the carvings on the cave wall and stared at the drawings of the humans hunting the Yeti.
“Knowledge is power, Migo,” the Stonekeeper said. “The question is, What are you going to do with all that power?”
Migo didn’t know. He was sure of only one thing: this was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make in his life!