“It’s kind of a secret,” Sukey whispered as she led us along the hallway. “I don’t understand why. Expedition Society members make maps of the places they visit. Certain ones get hung up in the Hall of Explorers and then others get stored in the Map Room. They do research down there, too. Nobody’s supposed to know about it, but I discovered it when I was looking around down here once. Let’s see, it was 209, I think.” She stopped in front of a door marked 209 and tried the handle. It was locked, but she reached up, took a key from the top of the molding over the door, and used it to open the door.
“Just ‘looking around down here once’?” I asked her.
She shrugged, smiling mischievously, and led us into a dark room. “Now,” she whispered, “I think the light is here somewhere.” Moments later, the gas lights came on and we found ourselves in a big room filled with tables and frosted-glass filing cabinets. The most remarkable thing about the room was that all four walls were covered with framed maps of different shapes and sizes, with many more stacked on tables or piled into boxes on the floor.
“Zander!” I said, staring up at the maps. “Look!” They were all here, all the exotic places in the world that we had heard about and read about: Peru and Grygia and the Grand Canyon and Micronesia and the Solomon Islands, and many I’d never heard of, with strange names that conjured up images of sun-washed beaches and snow-covered steppes and thick, dangerous jungles. It reminded me of the way the wall in the library at home had looked before BNDL had taken all of Dad’s maps away.
“We’d better hurry,” Sukey said, “in case someone saw us coming down here. What are we looking for, anyway?”
I thought for a moment. What were we looking for? Dad’s maps had gone with the agents, and we didn’t even know if he’d ever been to Drowned Man’s Canyon.
“I guess anything that says ‘Arizona,’ or has Dad’s name on it. You can look for ‘Azure Canyon’ or ‘Drowned Man’s Canyon,’ too,” I told them. We split up, each of us scanning one of the four walls we’d been assigned to, then looking through the piles. It took everything I had not to get lost in the incredible maps. Many of them were signed by well-known Explorers and there were more than a couple of Dad’s I’d never seen before, though they turned out to be of other locations.
“Why are these maps down here?” Zander asked as we looked. “Shouldn’t they be up where people can see them?”
“I don’t know,” Sukey said. “Maybe it’s for security. I can’t ask my mother, because I don’t want her to know I came down here. We’re underground and these rooms go on for miles and miles. I think it’s some kind of secret headquarters.”
I looked around at the tables. On one of them there was a box filled with framed maps and magnifying glasses and file folders scattered around. “It looks like someone’s been cataloging these,” I said. I flipped through the frames. “These are Dad’s maps!” I cried out. “These are the ones that they took out of our house! They’ve been studying them.”
Zander came over to look.
I kept flipping through the maps. “I don’t understand why they wanted these so badly. I mean, Dad published all of his maps, right?” Zander and M.K. shrugged, so I looked over at Sukey. “When your mother explores a new place, she makes maps for BNDL, doesn’t she?”
“Those are the rules,” Sukey said. She recited, “‘The cartography of all Explorers of the Realm is the property of BNDL. The reservation of any cartography or knowledge for personal gain is punishable by the suspension of exploring privileges.’”
I thought for a minute. “So they must have taken the maps because they thought there was something he hadn’t revealed to them, right?”
“One of these?” Zander asked.
“No, we know about all these places.” I looked around the room. “Hold on, remember the treasure map he made for M.K.’s birthday?”
“The what?” Sukey was looking confused, but Zander and M.K. jumped to it, slipping the maps out of their frames and testing the corners. I did the same.
“You could separate it only at one corner,” I reminded them. “So try all four.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sukey said, cutting me off, “but we better hurry up. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“He once made a map that peeled away from… I don’t have time to explain. We’ve got to find it.” I tried a map of the Canadian Rockies, but there wasn’t anything on top of it.
“We’ve got to not get caught,” Sukey said. “Come on. Put those back.” I picked up a map of Istanbul and started to take it out of its frame, but she grabbed it. We stared at each other for a minute, her eyes flashing a darker shade of amber. “I never should have brought you down here.”
“You don’t understand,” I said finally. “We have to find the map. I can’t tell you exactly why, but we just have to…”
“I’ve got it!” M.K. called. “Right here!” Sukey let go of the map I was holding and we rushed over. M.K. was carefully peeling the corner away from a map of a mountain range somewhere in Munopia, and as we all watched, another map was revealed underneath. It had been adhered to the very thin paper of the Munopia map so that you never would have known Dad’s secret if you didn’t know to look for it. It looked vaguely familiar to me. “Drown,” the title read, then ended.
“This is it!” I called out. “It’s Drowned Man’s Canyon. Just like Mr. Mountmorris said. It’s the other half of the map! Careful, M.K., Zander, make sure there aren’t any others hidden like this.”
“Mr. Mountmorris? And what do you mean the other half—?” Sukey started, then stopped, cocking her head toward the door. We heard voices coming along the hallway, too far away to make out what they were saying. “We’ve got to go.”
“Any others, Zander?” I folded the map of Drowned Man’s Canyon and tucked it into the front of my sweater with its other half.
“I’ve got one more to check.” He had replaced the other maps in their frames and was testing the corner of the final one. “Nope. That’s it.” He put it back in the pile. “They can look at these ones all they want.”
“Come on,” Sukey was saying. “Hurry.” We ducked out of the Map Room and she locked the door and replaced the key. We started back toward the staircase, but the voices were coming from that direction, so we turned around and went the other way. “Keep going,” Sukey whispered, “to the end of the hallway. There’s a door there that leads to another staircase.” She, Zander, and M.K. were ahead of me, and we ran as quickly as we could along the hallway. Sukey opened the door, and she and Zander were inside when I heard a man’s voice, vaguely familiar, say, “The light’s on. I think someone’s been down here.” I didn’t think there was time for both of us to get through the door without being seen, so I pushed M.K. through and shut it behind her. Then I ducked through an open doorway that led to a dark, basement-like boiler room. I ran along the wall, crouched behind a water tank, and tried to keep my breathing as quiet as I could.
“It must be the West children.” Another man, his voice also familiar.
“How should I know? What are they doing here anyway?” said a third voice.
“I should think that would be obvious.” Suddenly, I recognized Mr. Mountmorris—his formal way of speaking and the high, squeaky quality of his voice. “They came to see if they could find the other half of the map they showed me.” My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. Mr. Mountmorris!
“Well, is it here?” The second voice was bordering on angry.
“No, we looked through everything you took from Alexander’s house,” said the third voice. “The Drowned Man’s Canyon map wasn’t there. Damn! We should have had them arrested as soon as my boy Lazlo told me who they were. At least we’d have half of the map.” Leo Nackley. But who was the other man? I knew I’d heard that voice before.
“I saw it, Leo,” said Mountmorris. “On its own, it doesn’t tell us anything. We need the other half.”
I was terrified, my leg muscles screaming from crouching perfectly still, but I couldn’t help smiling. We’d outwitted them.
They moved down the hallway, their voices growing fainter. Now I could hear only a few snippets of their conversation.
“…went out to the house,” one of them said. “…contacting agents… no… word yet. Soon.”
“…associate of Alex’s,” Mr. Mountmorris’s voice said. “…the Mapmakers’ Guild, perhaps… the…” His voice disappeared, and I couldn’t hear anything more.
The Mapmakers’ Guild? It rang some sort of bell, deep down in my brain. Maybe it was something I’d overheard a long time ago, but I couldn’t remember if Dad had ever mentioned anything about it.
I counted to one hundred and when I was sure they were gone, I snuck out. I checked the hallway to be sure, then found the staircase where the others had gone. They were waiting at the top for me.
“Where were you?” Zander asked angrily.
“I panicked,” I told them. “I hid in some sort of boiler room and could hear them talking. I think they’re going to the house to figure out what happened to the agents.”
“We’ve got to go,” M.K. said, “before they get there.”
“Why?” Sukey turned to look at her. “What’s at your house?”
“Well, I kind of knocked out some BNDL agents at our house,” M.K. explained, shrugging. “I had to, though. Seriously.” She blinked innocently.
Sukey’s eyes narrowed. “‘Kind of knocked out some BNDL agents’? I wish you’d told me that. You three are full of mysteries, aren’t you?” We burst through the door and hurried through the lobby toward the front door, ignoring the looks we were getting from the Explorers standing around talking. We stopped running and Pucci scrambled up Zander’s chest, popping up through the collar and settling himself on his shoulder. The parrot bobbed his silver head to Sukey in greeting.
“What are you, some kind of pirate nanny?” she asked with a smile. But the smile disappeared as she took a good look at Pucci. “Is that a modified Fazian black knight parrot?” Her eyes were very wide.
“Kind of.” Zander pushed Pucci’s feet back under his collar.
“Where did you get him?”
“We adopted him. Or he adopted us.” Zander smiled and she rolled her eyes.
“I don’t even want to know. Run,” she said. “I’ll hold them off.”
“Thank you for everything,” I said to her. Her cheeks were flushed and her curly hair looked even curlier. People always say that things look copper, but her hair really was the color of pennies, dark and red and alive against the vivid blue of her jumpsuit.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Now go!”
It was only once we were back out on the street, navigating the crowds of people and running toward the train station, that I realized why the third voice in the downstairs hallway was familiar to me.
It belonged to Francis Foley.