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.
“Please come in,” he said. He stepped aside and we followed him inside. Zander shrugged Pucci off his shoulder, and the parrot found a perch above the door, where I could hear him mumbling.
The heavy front door closed behind us and immediately I felt chilled. We were in a large, formal entryway. The floor was green marble and the walls were made of some kind of synthetic paneling that reminded me of iced-over glass. The floor gave off a faint green glow. Everything was clean and shiny and smelled of rubbing alcohol, like a doctor’s office. A huge staircase of the same material as the walls curled away from us up to the second floor. There were no windows that I could see, and the light was very low. We could have been underground.
“This way,” the secretary said, leading us through the foyer toward a door cut into the paneling. He opened it and showed us into a very large room that was, for all intents and purposes, a museum.
Each of the four walls was lined with glass display cases. There were also freestanding display cases in the middle of the room, and we looked around at them, trying to take it all in. One section of the wall was devoted to trophies: a huge moose head, an elk, a stuffed Grygian bear, a Derudan carnivorous hippo head, a lion head, and many others. There were weapons, too. Guns and rifles and bows and arrows, nestled into the glass display cabinets. More cases contained stuffed birds of many colors—macaws, birds of paradise, pheasants, and other species I couldn’t name.
Yet another section of the room held wooden masks, fantastic things I knew to be from Africa and the South Pacific and the New Lands.
“Mr. Mountmorris is at his desk,” Jec Banton said, shutting the door behind him and leaving us in the big room. We looked around, trying to find a desk, but all the glass created a sort of hall of mirrors, and we couldn’t see a thing. It was even colder in here than in the hallway, and I found myself shivering, even in my warm sweater.
“Please come back this way,” called a high voice from somewhere at the back of the room. We followed it, winding in and out of the display cabinets. “Over here,” the voice said again, and we finally found him sitting behind an enormous wooden desk. The wall above him was adorned with many brass gear clocks, and they tocked along at different speeds, so that it was hard to keep track of the seconds. The desk was covered with glass paperweights, and each one contained a different species of frog—some green, some black, one red, one blue. They stared up at us from their glass prisons.
The man sitting above them reminded me of a larger version of the creatures on his desk. He was nearly bald, with just a thin, low crown of bright white hair above his ears and a few long pieces stretched across his scalp. His egg-like blue eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. They were bright and I had the feeling that he was watching everything we did. His right ear was pierced with many small lights—all shades of green—and they seemed to flash in response to his speech, as though they could hear him.
“What a marvelous surprise!” he said. “At last, I meet the children of the great Explorer Alexander West!”