We were halfway through The History of Exploration that afternoon when Kemal and Maria Montoya came in and sat down in the back. A few minutes later, Joyce followed them, her Kenyan Snake Falcon on her shoulder. Mr. Wooley nodded and Lazlo turned in his chair to give Kemal a nasty look. We had been studying Harrison Arnoz’s discovery of Grygia, and Mr. Wooley went over the conditions that existed at the time Arnoz stumbled upon the unexplored mountain valley.
“It’s probably hard for you to imagine the world that the enterprising biologist and explorer Harrison Arnoz left behind when, after nearly a year of living in the mountains, he ventured into that remote valley on the cusp of the Indorustan Empire only a year after the failure of all of the computer networks. His mother was Czech, and he had taken advantage of the confusion in the aftermath of the failures to make his way to Eastern Europe to study the bears of the Carpathian Mountains. Remember that there was very little fuel and very little opportunity to travel. Only a few ships made their way around the world, and Arnoz had to hitch rides on those ships and then walk across Europe to reach the Carpathian forest, where he was living when he made his great discovery. It’s an incredible story of bravery and exploration. Now, Kemal, do you remember why Arnoz ventured into the Grygian Valley in the first place?” He gave Kemal an encouraging smile.
I think Mr. Wooley was trying to be kind, welcoming Kemal back and telling him that everything was okay. But I knew that Kemal was nervous speaking in public, and as he stood up and cleared his throat, I wondered if he would rather have been left alone. “Uh, well, he had been studying bear populations, and he wondered whether they had established . . .” He hesitated. “Range, I think it was. He wondered whether they had established a wider area or something that they hunted in, and when he checked the maps, he discovered that they didn’t, well . . . they didn’t work. The measurements were off.” He looked shaken, rumpled, and worn out, as though he hadn’t slept.
“Can someone elaborate?” Mr. Wooley asked.
I raised my hand, but he had already called on Joyce. Unlike Kemal, she didn’t seem nervous at all. You’d never know she’d spent the night being interrogated. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything Joyce wasn’t good at. She’d beaten almost everyone at the simulations. A week ago, in Mountaineering and Ice Climbing Clinic, I’d watched her free-climb a rock wall that no one else in the class could scale. Zander had come close, but he’d fallen ten feet short of the summit. Luckily, unlike Joyce, he’d been wearing a harness. I’d heard stories about how she’d managed to lasso a charging rhino on her Final Exam Expedition the year before.
As if that wasn’t enough, Joyce seemed to know everything in every class she was in. Her brown eyes always seemed curious. Her hair was cropped close to her head, showing off her high cheekbones and heart-shaped face. Joyce wore a dark-brown alligator-hide jacket embedded with all the gadgets she used for sailing and exploring, and Njamba was always perched on her shoulder or flying overhead. I’d never heard anybody say a bad word about her—that she was arrogant, or that she tried to use her status with the teachers to get special treatment.
It was kind of annoying, how perfect she was. But today, I found myself filled with admiration for her.
“Joyce, what were the irregularities to which Kemal is referring?” Mr. Wooley asked.
She stood up and shrugged Njamba off her shoulder. The big golden-and-black bird hopped on her desk and cocked her head as Joyce said easily, “Well, the Muller Machines made digital maps based on the data that cartographers entered into them. That’s what Arnoz had. Old Muller Machine maps that he’d printed before the machines crashed because he was interested in the bear populations. People really weren’t allowed to explore very much. We didn’t have the technology that we have nowadays, no SteamCycles or IronSteeds or anything. Kemal’s right. Arnoz got there, and he noticed tracks leading out of the area that the bears were supposed to be living and breeding in. It took him a month of walking to follow the tracks all the way through the mountain range. He thought he’d discovered a new habitat for the bears. There had been a major drought the year before, and people say now that it must have been the drought that made the bears go beyond their range.”
“Here, I’ll show you.” Joyce got up and came up to the front of the classroom. She picked up a piece of chalk and started drawing a map of Eastern Europe and Grygia on the board, scrawling in coordinates and various locations. “Here’s the route he took to follow the bears.” She drew a dotted line. “He came up against an incredibly tall mountain range that seemed impassable, that he assumed was the southern edge of the Carpathians. But the mileage was off. He figured he’d traveled more than a thousand miles, but the Muller Machine map placed the Carpathians here.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “Most people would have given up. But Arnoz was curious. And he kept going. And during that long, cold winter, one of the worst in recent history, he pressed on over the mountain range, hunting and foraging for food. In the spring, he came down into the wide Grygian Valley and realized that he had discovered a new land.”
“How did he know?” Mr. Wooley asked the class.
“The bears,” Zander answered. “They were different after he went over those mountains. They were bigger and a different color, and their heads were a different shape.”
“Like this.” Joyce scrawled a surprisingly good likeness of the Great Grygian Bear on the chalkboard. I looked over at Zander, who was nodding his head in appreciation.
“Thank you, Joyce,” Mr. Wooley said. “That was an excellent explanation.” Joyce sat down again. “Now, does anyone remember how Arnoz came across the first Grygian Tree Dwellers?”
“Didn’t he get shot at?” Kemal said.
“That’s right. But instead of shooting back, he took the time to discover where the arrow had come from and to establish peaceful contact with the Tree Dwellers. If it hadn’t been for his . . . prudence, he would have been killed, and we would never have learned about them, and we would never have learned about Grygia itself. Okay, good work. Now we’re going to move on to Admiral Piel’s discovery of the New North Polar Sea. Can anyone tell me about Admiral Piel?”
“Wait,” I said. “I have a question.”
“Yes, Kit?” Mr. Wooley smiled at me, but his foot tapped nervously on the floor.
“The maps that Harrison Arnoz had—the Muller Machine maps. Why were they wrong?”
Lazlo Nackley jumped in. “Because the people who programmed the Muller Machines put the wrong information into them. My father says that the Muller Machine engineers were foreigners”—he glanced darkly at Joyce and Kemal—“and they wanted to undermine the security of the United States and keep all of the discoveries for themselves. So they put the wrong information into the machines.”
“Wait, you mean they did it on purpose?” I looked at Mr. Wooley. I wanted to know what he had to say.
He nodded. “Well, yes. That’s what we assume, anyway.”
“They wanted to keep all the resources to themselves,” Lazlo said. “Thank goodness they didn’t get away with it. Didn’t you know? Or did your father not teach you anything?” He snorted. “Of course, he had his own problems with keeping resources to himself, didn’t he?” He and Jack laughed.
I ignored him. “But how did people not realize they were wrong? Why didn’t they see?”
Mr. Wooley glanced at Lazlo again and took a deep breath. “You have to remember that it was very hard to get around. Petroleum was discovered in Texas in 1875, and for a while it looked like we might have a new source of fuel. We built planes and cars and furnaces and tanks and machinery that ran on the stuff—black gold, they called it—but then it slowed to a trickle after only seven years. The government carefully rationed what was left. There have always been rumors about fuel in Arabia, but if there is any, the Indorustans haven’t found it, or they haven’t told us if they have.”
“Maybe Kemal can tell us,” Lazlo said, snorting. “You’re an Indorustan, aren’t you, Kemal?”
“We escaped,” Kemal said, in a tight, quiet voice. It may have been my imagination, but his accent sounded stronger than usual. “I live here now. My father works for the government. I’m American.”
“Oh, you may have lived here for the last couple of years, but you’re not an American,” Lazlo said.
“Lazlo,” Mr. Wooley warned him.
“Well, it’s true. Isn’t it, Mr. Wooley?” There was something threatening in the way Lazlo said his name.
“As I was saying . . .” Mr. Wooley shot Lazlo another anxious glance. “Steam technology was inefficient then, and as the Muller Machines became more sophisticated, most agriculture and manufacturing became automated. Everything was controlled by the machines. All the coal we use for SteamCars and SteamCycles now was used to keep the Muller Machines running. There were cameras everywhere, tracking people’s movements. The Muller Machines had records of everything anyone ever did. The government knew where you were at all times.”
“Sounds a lot like today,” I muttered.
The room went silent.
“What did you say?” Lazlo Nackley stood up and came around from behind his desk so he could look at me, his light blue eyes boring into mine. “Say that so everyone can hear.”
I stared at Lazlo for a moment, then glanced over at Mr. Wooley. He looked terrified. I could feel the tension flowing from Sukey’s body.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t say anything at all.”
“All right, then,” Mr. Wooley said. “Let’s get back to the acquisition of knowledge. Please turn to page 236.”
Lazlo shot me a final look before we all bent our heads to our books, the Muller Machines and their maps set aside for the moment. A few minutes before the end of class, I looked out the window and saw a gray wall of storm clouds crowding up against the mountains. They rolled toward us with incredible speed. When I turned my attention back to the classroom, I found Kemal gazing at me, dark circles under his eyes, which were as tense and troubled as the sky.
