“Are you okay?”
We turned around to find the copper-haired girl standing in front of us again. She had taken off the goggles, and they were dangling from her right hand. I hadn’t noticed it at first, what with the glittery jumpsuit and the flashing lights distracting me, but she was pretty. She was grinning at us in a good-humored way.
“Excuse me,” Zander said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, we…,” Zander started to say. He stopped and focused on her. “What makes you think we’re not?”
She scratched her nose and shrugged. “Well, first of all, I had to get you in, and then you seemed surprised and dismayed about something up on the wall. Then you had a run-in with the awful Lazlo Nackley. And now you seem surprised and dismayed about something in there.” She pointed to the book. “So I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
Zander and I glanced at each other. We weren’t sure how much we should tell this strange Neo girl. But there was something about her that made me trust her.
“My name’s Kit,” I told her. “Kit West. This is my brother, Zander, and my sister, M.K.”
“West as in…?” Her eyes widened.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re his children and we came here to… to see his portrait, and his portrait’s gone, and all of his entries are gone from the Expedition Log, and we… we don’t know why.”
She had strange, amber-colored eyes, with heavy, dark lashes. “Oh,” she said in a low voice. “I’m so sorry. Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Know that he was stripped of his membership in the Expedition Society?”
“No,” Zander said. “We didn’t know.”
She seemed worried all of a sudden. “Look, everyone’s looking at us. Nackley’s raised the alarm, I think. Why don’t we go over there and talk.” She pointed to one of the little rooms off the hall. We nodded and followed her into the tiny conference room, settling into the comfortable chairs. On the wall was a painting of Mount Fuji in the mist.
“Why did they take away his membership?” I asked her, keeping my voice down and looking around for BNDL agents.
“I don’t know. It was a while ago. I’m so sorry, by the way, about what happened to him. He was kind of a hero of mine.” She looked up at us quickly with her strange eyes. I’d assumed her hair was dyed red, but close up I could see its rich color. “I remember my mother talking about it, but I never heard why. No one seemed to want to go into it.”
“Is your mother an Explorer?” Zander asked her.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I should have…” She stuck out a hand. “I’m Sukey Neville. My mother is—”
“Delilah Neville,” M.K. finished. “I have a picture of her on my wall. With her glider.” Delilah Neville was probably the best-known Neo pilot and Explorer of the New Modern Age. She’d flown her combination-engine glider all over the world and tested lots of other Neo technology besides. People called her “Brave Delilah.”
“I remember when your mother made her first flight over the New Polar Lands to map Rubutanland,” I told her. “I thought she was amazing. And are you really the granddaughter of Pierre Neville?”
“Yup.” She smiled, which made her even prettier.
“I don’t understand,” Zander said. “What could have happened for them to take his membership away?”
“I remember people saying that it had something to do with the BNDL Code for Explorers,” Sukey told us. “I wish I’d paid more attention.”
“Nackley and his son seem to hate him for some reason,” I said.
Sukey shrugged. “I can try to find out something for you.”
Zander was silent for a moment and then he said, more to himself than to the rest of us, “There’s got to be a way to figure out whether he went to Arizona.”
“Arizona?” Sukey asked. “What does Arizona have to do with anything?” Her eyes widened as she watched the lump on the front of Zander’s sweater move slowly up toward his face. Zander pushed it back down.
“I can’t tell you why,” he said. “But we’re trying to find out if our dad ever went to Arizona. We were hoping the Expedition Log would tell us, but—”
Sukey started to say something, then stopped. She stood up, walked over to the door, and closed it.
“What?” Zander asked her.
She spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. “Well, it’s just that… he was a cartographer, wasn’t he?”
“He was the best American cartographer of the New Modern Age,” I said indignantly.
Sukey walked around the room, her head down, mumbling to herself. Suddenly she said, “Come with me. I’m going to show you something.”
“What is it?” Zander asked.
“Just follow me.” She stood up, opened the door again, and led the way back through the Hall of Explorers to the reception area. “Wait here.”
Sukey disappeared into one of the small rooms off the main area.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to Zander.
“I have no idea,” he said. “But she seems to know something.”
A couple of minutes later, she was back.
“It’s clear. Come on.” She led us into a small office, and then, looking around to make sure no one was watching, opened what looked like a closet door. She let us through, followed us in, and shut it carefully behind us.
It wasn’t a closet. We were at the top of a long wooden staircase, carpeted in pale blue, the banister and walls painted blue to match. Following Sukey’s lead, we went down the stairs and along a dark hallway lit with gas lights and lined with ornate frosted-glass doors, each one labeled with a number written in silver ink. There were no windows, so I figured that we had descended underneath the street. At the end of the passage, I could see more hallways heading off in different directions.
“Sukey,” Zander said, sounding, for the first time since we’d left home, a little nervous. “What is it? Where are we going?”
She stopped. “Shh. We’re not supposed to be down here. It’s off-limits even to members.”
“But where’s ‘here’?” He had stopped walking, too, and I knew he wouldn’t go any farther until we had an answer.
“The Map Room, you idiot,” Sukey said, pulling him along the hallway. “I’m taking you to the Map Room.”