We returned to the Academy in the dead of winter. There was a huge snowstorm in the White Mountains just after we returned, and for a couple of weeks, the snow was too deep for us to go anywhere but the Longhouse for meals and the library to study. Zander and Sukey went snowshoeing or skiing nearly every day, sometimes taking Joyce or Kemal with them. Lazlo and Jack had gotten permission to stay in New York with Lazlo’s parents until classes started again. M.K. was full of ideas for new gadgets and machines, and she retrofitted a SteamCycle with a small plow so she could clear the path to the workshop. I spent my time in the library, trying to find references to the Mapmakers’ Guild, trying to learn what Dad might want me to do with all these maps. Of course, I didn’t find anything, and after a week of searching I couldn’t believe I’d been stupid enough to think I would. After that, I focused on the atlases, trying to find a match for the mysterious arrangement of lines and angles in my head.
One night, I was walking to the library when Mr. Wooley caught up to me. He had taken the Deloian Princess home with us, but I’d barely seen him during the eleven-day voyage and I’d assumed he’d been seasick again. I’d had the feeling he’d been avoiding me since we’d been back at school.
But now he put a hand on my arm and said, “Hi, Kit.”
“Hi, Mr. Wooley.”
We each gave a New York glance down the path for agents who might be listening.
“How are you?” He didn’t look at me and I could see his fingers knotting and unknotting the ends of the neon-green plaid scarf tied around his neck.
“Fine. Cold.”
“I . . . wanted to apologize, to you, for what happened on the expedition. I’ve been feeling terribly guilty about it. I abandoned you. You could have died, and . . .” His pale face twisted with worry, a lock of platinum hair falling across one eye. I turned to face him.
“Mr. Wooley, no one blames you. We all knew that Leo Nackley had you kicked off the expedition so he could come along. They probably planned it from the beginning.”
He hesitated. A cold wind blew through the trees and he said, “Well, as it happens, that’s not exactly right. I asked to be taken off. I pretended I was sick.”
“Because you were scared of going back there?”
He looked surprised. “No, no. Well, there was that. But I’m an Explorer of the Realm. I can deal with fear. No, I didn’t want to go because . . .” He lowered his voice. “They asked me—forced me, really—to spy on you. They were convinced that your father had given you a map and they wanted me to find out where you kept it and steal it for them. For BNDL. That’s why you were all assigned to Lazlo’s expedition. It was all planned out. They set off in the Trident before you’d been gone two days.”
I stared at him. “You were the spy?”
He smiled. “Well, as it turned out, I wasn’t the spy. But I’ve been feeling terribly guilty about it and I just wanted to apologize. And to tell you how glad I am that you survived. It’s like something out of an adventure story, isn’t it? Castaways on a desert island. Well, goodbye for now.”
I watched him go. So it hadn’t been Kemal after all.
I was still turning Mr. Wooley’s words over in my mind as I sat down at a table on the second floor of the library and started working. I couldn’t risk drawing the map from my memory, but I’d been drawing pieces of it, which I then destroyed, in order to keep it fresh and to see if it meant anything. I doodled for a few minutes, aware of the sound of my pencil in the silent library, but something was bugging me. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was.
Castaways on a desert island.
I jumped up and went downstairs to request the books I’d looked through all those months ago, the ones that had led me to Gianni Girafalco. This time Mrs. Pasquale didn’t scowl quite as hard. Everyone at school had been nicer to us since we’d returned from the Caribbean.
Back upstairs, I started flipping through them, rereading until I found what I was looking for.
But in May of 1823, his ship disappeared and he was never heard from again. The sole survivor, a boy native to Southampton, UK, described rough and turbulent seas just before the ship foundered. The boy was found floating on a piece of wood by a fisherman.
There had been a survivor. A castaway. Just like Dad. I’d forgotten that detail. I thought about the debris we’d found on the island, the swords, the pieces of a lifeboat.
I went back through the books and found the one with crew lists from important nineteenth-century expeditions. I looked up the lists for Girafalco’s voyages. Running a finger down the names for the 1823 trip, I stopped at James Rickwell. Age 16. Southampton. Sixteen years old. A boy. Southampton. That had to be it. Rickwell.
Downstairs, I searched through the clockwork card catalog, the cards flipping past me as the engine clicked and whirred, but couldn’t find anything by or about Rickwell, James. I took a deep breath and went over to the big desk.
“Here you go, Mrs. Pasquale,” I said, handing the books over. I pretended to hesitate and then added, “We don’t have anything by a James Rickwell, do we? I checked the catalog. But I think it might be one of the old books in the special collections. A study of, uh, tropical frogs and their eating habits.”
She studied me, then turned to the huge card catalog for the special collections behind her desk. “Rickwell, Rickwell,” she murmured, flipping through the cards printed with authors’ names and titles.
“Nothing about frogs,” she said after a few long minutes. “But we do have something by James Rickwell. Diary of a Caribbean Voyage. Surely it’s not the same—”
“I’ll take it,” I practically shouted. “I mean, it’s the Caribbean. That’s tropical. It might contain some of his notes.”
She looked at me carefully before slipping a hand into the IronGrabber and reaching high into the stacks to bring down a wooden box. “It’s damaged and very fragile,” she said, reading the label on the front. “Be careful.”
I nodded, my heart pounding, and took it upstairs.
Inside the box, I found a small leather book. The pages were stained and torn, some missing altogether and many others torn in half. I lifted it out very carefully and began to read.
I, James Rickwell, aged 16 years, of the city of Southampton, in the country of England, on this 3rd day of May, 1823, do hereby put down this record of the voyage of the Adelaide, captained by the mapmaker and explorer Gianni Girafalco, in the hopes that our expedition will prove of historic value to those who come after us. It is my hope that if our expedition is successful, this journal may prove of interest to future generations of explorers.
It was a diary of a boy on Gianni Girafalco’s voyage to discover King Triton’s Lair. I started leafing carefully through the entries that were still legible, a sense of déjà vu washing over me. I was reading about the precise voyage that we had just taken.
Rickwell had met Girafalco in Southampton and been taken on board to learn navigation. It sounded as though he’d started to suspect that Girafalco had a secret motive in making the voyage to the Caribbean, but it didn’t sound like Rickwell had ever learned of the existence of the underwater city or the maps.
I read the short diary straight through over the course of the next two hours. When I got to the diary’s final entry, I read:
. . . when the sea started to become very rough, despite the clear skies and lack of any wind or rain. As we looked down at the churning water, he seemed to be filled with joy and he said, “This is it. This is what I have been searching for.”
I now must go above deck to see if I can help. The ship is pitching terribly. I pray to our Lord for our survival and salvation. If I should not survive and this book is found, give my most fervent regards to Miss Mary Jennings of Southampton and tell my mother and father that I love them.
There wasn’t anything else in the book—just empty pages, torn and stained like the others. I closed the book and stared at the black leather cover.
It had seemed like such a promising lead. I’d been sure that I would find something in the journal. I flipped through it again. On the outside of the box a small printed label read, “Generously donated from the personal collection of Mr. R. Delorme Mountmorris.”
As though I could will words into existence, I flipped through the torn and blank pages after the final entry again. Running a finger over the water-stained pages, I felt a slight texture on the surface. I remembered the feeling of the bioluminescent ink on the map, like a faint scar, barely there under my fingertips.
Was it possible?
I felt my heart race. I was wearing the whistle—it had become something of a talisman since we’d returned and I’d never taken it off. I needed a dark place to look at the book in safety. There was the secret room, but I couldn’t risk leaving the library with the book. Mrs. Pasquale was already suspicious, and if I was caught leaving with the book hidden on me, it would draw attention to the map. I looked around. I was completely alone on the second floor. I listened for a moment, then opened the door to the stairway that led to the roof and climbed the stairs as quietly as I could, hoping Mrs. Pasquale didn’t have some kind of listening device.
It was cold and blustery and dark on the other side of the door at the top and I stepped out into the night, taking care not to slip on the sloped roof. The book was warm from being inside my vest. I opened to the blank page and passed the whistle over the raised texture on the page.
While I waited, I looked up at the stars, trying to find the constellations Dad had taught us: Andromeda, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor. He had loved watching the night sky. I felt superstitious, as though the longer I waited the better chance there was that something would appear.
Finally, I looked away from the night sky and down at the journal.
The blank page was now covered with glowing writing.
Scrawled on the next page in the invisible ink was a map I had come to know very well, a map of King Triton’s Lair, with the wind roses and emanating lines, and the little sea horses dancing up and down along them. It took me a minute to see the difference—this map didn’t include St. Beatrice or Ruby Island because they hadn’t been discovered yet, but everything else was the same.
I closed the book.
Dad had seen this map. In order to make his own map, Dad must have seen this one. Which meant that Dad had been . . . chosen, the way Gianni Girafalco had been chosen, the way James Rickwell had been chosen.
My mind was whirring. I was thinking about Gianni Girafalco and the map of Girafalco’s Trench. I was thinking about Dad’s map and the code he’d left for me to find.
Gianni Girafalco had been a member of the Mapmakers’ Guild. Just like Dad. Dad had followed Gianni Girafalco’s map because like Gianni Girafalco, he had been chosen to do so. Someone had given him the turtle. Someone had pointed the way to King Triton’s Lair.
I looked up at the black sky again, filled with the same stars and planets that Sukey and I had watched on the island. The same stars and planets the Explorer with the Clockwork Hand was probably looking at now, wherever he was.
The Explorer with the Clockwork Hand—he’d recognized Gianni Girafalco’s name.
And you should know that it isn’t about your brother and sister. I was directed by your father to give the book to you. Just you. Not to Zander, not to M.K. To you, Kit.
