The New Modern Age steam trains were remarkable inventions: huge, shining silver machines that could carry hundreds of people from place to place in record time. When we were small, Dad had often brought us to the railyards outside the city so we could watch them sailing in, one after another. He had told us how the trains could no longer be run by computers, as they once had, so they’d been engineered to respond to the expert handling of experienced drivers. “A great steam driver can convince you you’re sitting still, even if the world is flashing by outside your window,” he’d tell us as we waved to the men and women seated in the steering cabins of the big trains.
The train to Philadelphia was a gleaming new Fronsne 2000, and we leaped on just as it started to move—so smoothly that we barely knew it had started—out of the station and west out of the city.
“Did anyone follow us?” Zander whispered as we settled ourselves in a second-class compartment. The only other inhabitant was a white-haired Archy reading a newspaper and chewing dramleaf. He looked up as we came through the door and his eyes widened in alarm when he saw Pucci, who had found himself a comfy perch on top of the luggage rack. He squawked “All aboard” once before dozing off to the almost imperceptible motion of the train.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “But that was Mr. Mountmorris and Francis Foley with Leo Nackley in the basement. I recognized their voices. We never should have shown Mountmorris the map.” I felt sick. “We never should have gone to the Expedition Society.”
“We wouldn’t have the other half if we hadn’t gone to the Expedition Society,” Zander pointed out, a little too loudly. The man in our train compartment seemed very interested, and I nodded toward him so that Zander and M.K. wouldn’t say anything else.
Zander waited until the man was looking down at his paper again, then made a clicking noise that called Pucci to his shoulder. He whispered something to the parrot, who rose into the air, flapping his wings and cawing at the man in the corner, his metal legs out in front of him, ready to attack.
“Sorry,” Zander said. “He hates newspapers. Weird.”
The man, pale now, dropped his paper on the floor and stood up carefully. “Yes, yes, I think I’ll just find a different compartment.” Taking his leather briefcase with him, he slunk out the door.
“Good bird,” Zander said as soon as the man was gone. We were alone now. “Okay, Kit. Take it out. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I pulled the curtain across the window in the compartment door and took the two halves out. They matched up perfectly.
“Map,” Pucci announced. “Whole map.” We all looked up at him for a second, then back down at the map.
The complete map now showed Azure Canyon and the entirety of Drowned Man’s Canyon, as well as mesas and hills and other formations created by ancient floods and washes. I studied it carefully. Drowned Man’s Canyon was a squiggly worm of a canyon that widened in the center and then narrowed, branches jutting off the end like fingers on a hand.
As far as I could tell, there were no X’s for X marks the spot.
“Tickets, please,” bellowed a train conductor, coming into our compartment. I jumped up and spread our former seatmate’s abandoned newspaper out on top of the maps.
“Sorry,” Zander said. “We didn’t have time to get them at the station.” He smiled up at the conductor, a Neo with a large silver ring through one side of his nose and a couple of flashing lights in his ears. His name badge said Harry Craps. I tried not to look at Zander, knowing he would make me laugh if he saw it, too. “Can we buy them from you?”
The conductor sighed as though we’d just asked him to push the train up a mountain, and he got three tickets out of his pocket. “How far are you going?” he asked.
“Flagstaff, Arizona.” Zander gave him another smile, as if people asked for tickets to Flagstaff every day. “Three tickets to Flagstaff.”
Harry Craps looked surprised but jotted something down on the tickets and said, “All right. That’ll be two hundred thirty-seven Allied Dollars.” He eyed us suspiciously, three children alone in the train compartment with a parrot perched on the luggage rack.
I stared up at him. Two hundred thirty-seven AD! No wonder it was only rich government workers who traveled by train anymore.
“Come on, Kit, give him the money,” Zander said with a confident smile.
My hands shaking, I reached into my backpack and took out the money we’d collected from the house before we’d left. It was all that remained of the cash Dad had given us before he’d gone to Fazia, and we’d been trying to save it, trading copper for food and using a dollar here or there only when we had to. I counted out the fare and Zander and I exchanged a glance. We were down to about four AD. I felt my stomach drop.
Harry Craps took the money, handed over the tickets, and left us alone.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I told Zander. “Now we don’t have any money to get home.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. But he looked scared. “Take out the map again.”
“I don’t see anything about the treasure here,” I told them.
“But the important thing is that he left us the map.” Zander was excited, pacing around the train compartment and looking out the window. “Dad wants us to go to Arizona. He left us a map of the place where he wants us to go. He thought it would be in the house when we found it, of course, but Foley took it and we found it anyway. Maybe there’s some kind of hidden message.”
I couldn’t help thinking that he was getting ahead of himself. “Yeah, maybe the message says, ‘Don’t go to Arizona,’” M.K. suggested sarcastically.
“Do not go to the place on this map.” I laughed.
Zander stopped pacing and sat down, giving us a nasty look. “There must be more to it. Let’s all think.”
I tried to keep my voice down. “Zander, what are we doing? We’re on a train. We have no food. They’ve probably found Wolff and DeRosa by now and there are a whole bunch more creepy government agents looking for us, agents who would probably kill us for Dad’s map if they thought they could get away with it.”
He looked scared for a minute, and I realized that even though Zander always seemed to know what he was doing, he hadn’t really thought this through.
I started thinking about what I’d just said. If the agents were willing to do anything to get the map, there must be something in it. Dad must have found something. And the man with the clockwork hand had risked everything to get the book to me. I felt a tingling all down my back. Whatever this was, it was big.
“Look,” Zander said finally, “for some reason, Dad gave us this map. Dad wouldn’t have joked about something like this. There must be some really important reason why he did what he did. That gold is… well, you know how much gold is worth now that there isn’t any more to find. Maybe he wanted us to find it so we can fix up the house, go to the Academy. Maybe he wants us to go to Fazia and try to find him.”
“What?” This was the second time he’d talked about this, and I stared at him. “You think he’s alive?”
“Maybe. You said yourself that nothing they told us about his disappearance makes sense.” He looked so much like Dad, his blue eyes wide and pleading, that it freaked me out a little and I had to look away.
M.K. and I didn’t say anything. I was excited now, but the idea of actually making it to Arizona seemed… impossible.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” I told them after a minute. “Why did Mr. Mountmorris tell us about the treasure? Telling us about it only made us less likely to give him the map, right?”
Zander looked up. “You think it was a trap?”
“Think about it. Why else would he have told us? If they can’t find the map, the next best thing is to let us find it and follow us. Maybe that’s why they sent the agents.”
Zander and M.K. were silent and I kept talking, thinking out loud now. “We’ve always wondered why they didn’t put us in an orphanage after they told us about Dad. Maybe this is why. Maybe they wanted the man with the clockwork hand to find me and they knew he couldn’t if I was locked up. They’ve been watching us the whole time so they can get their hands on Dad’s map and the gold. We all know how valuable gold is now. It’s the only money that’s worth anything. They need it for trading.”
“We just have to make sure they don’t catch up to us, then,” Zander said after a long moment. It was very quiet in the train compartment. Although we could barely feel the motion of the train, we could see the suburbs flying by outside our window. Along the train tracks there were little lean-tos where people had made their homes. Dad was always telling us how lucky we were, that his status as an Explorer of the Realm had meant that we could stay in our house, could get food and clothes and things. So many people were much worse off since the shipments from the New Lands had dwindled, he had always said. I watched a boy about my age scavenging by the side of the tracks as we flashed by, and I knew Dad had been right.
Above the racing train, the sky was bright blue and full of long, wispy bits of cloud. In the distance I could see a couple of dirigibles chugging along, emitting clouds of black smoke behind them.
The train slowed as it stopped at various stations, and a voice came over the loudspeaker saying that we’d be arriving in Philadelphia soon.
“We need to talk to someone,” I said finally. “We need to talk to someone who knew Dad well, who can tell us if he ever talked about Drowned Man’s Canyon.”
Fifteen minutes later the train slowed as it approached Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia.
I had been staring out the window, watching the crowds of people waiting for the train, when I noticed a couple of blue-uniformed security agents running onto the platform. They seemed upset about something, looking around wildly and then leaning in to talk to each other. As I watched, Harry Craps stepped down from the train and said something to them, pointing back toward the car where we were sitting.
“Well, we should think about who Dad might have told about Arizona or the treasure, if he found it or knew where it was. So who would he have—?” Zander was saying.
“Zander?” I reached out and pulled his arm to get his attention. “Zander, I think they’re here for us.” I tucked the map back into my sweater.
“What?”
“Damn!” M.K. exclaimed. “Look out the window!”
“They must have called the police,” Zander said. “We’ve got to get off this train.”
“But where are we going to go?” M.K. asked us. “We spent all our money on the train tickets. How are we going to get to Arizona?” She was already standing, ready to move.
“Welcome to Philadelphia,” came a voice over the loudspeaker.
“Come on. We’re going all the way to the back of the train,” Zander said. “Get ready to run.”
“Run where?” M.K. asked. “Where are we going to go?”
“I wish we knew someone here,” I said, realizing as I spoke that, in fact, we did.
“Hold on,” Zander said, his eyes brightening. And I knew he’d had the same thought I’d had. “Actually, we do know someone here.” We poked our heads out of the compartment and, seeing no one, headed toward the back of the train. People were coming out of the compartments as the train slowed, and we had to push past them.
“Hey!” someone called after us. On the other side of the clot of passengers, I could see a couple of uniformed policemen trying to make their way through.
“Excuse us, excuse us,” I murmured as we rushed along the corridor, but we were still getting some pretty nasty looks.
“Who do we know?” M.K. whispered, bringing up the rear.
“Think, M.K., think,” Zander turned around to say. “Philadelphia?”
“Oh,” she said, as it dawned on her. “You mean…” We’d reached the last car and we opened a door at the very back of the train, where the caboose would have been if they had cabooses anymore.
This was it. We jumped from the back of the train onto the tracks and clambered up the end of the platform, Pucci flying ahead to show us the way. The policemen were still on the other side of the platform, and we ducked down, keeping low to the ground as we ran toward the stairs that would take us up and out of the station. The three of us said it at exactly the same moment, “Raleigh McAdam!”
Raleigh and Dad were ten years old when Harrison Arnoz discovered the Grygian Alps. They didn’t know each other yet, of course; Raleigh grew up in Philadelphia and Dad in New York. But I think that they must have had pretty much the same reaction to the news that Arnoz had scaled a mountain pass that had been declared impassable and discovered a difference between the old government-issued maps of the region generated by the Muller Machines and what he was seeing as he camped in and hiked through the thick forest, looking for bear tracks.
Dad said that the world had suddenly opened up before him, new possibilities stretching and turning and expanding like the lines on the new maps. After the Muller Machines were outlawed, no one had had much hope for a while. The discovery of the New Lands was like an electric charge. Dad would be an Explorer; he would travel the world, just the way he’d dreamed when he’d played with the wooden puzzle his father had made.
Four years later, when he joined the first class at the brand-new Academy for the Exploratory Sciences, Dad became friends with Raleigh McAdam. Dad was always telling us stories about Raleigh, about the things they’d done together at the Academy, about their classes on navigation and mapmaking and wilderness survival and the biology of the Fazian violet anaconda or the new Grygian bear.
Raleigh had visited us a couple of times, armed with fake excuses about collecting supplies from Dad in case the agents asked questions about his trip. I remembered those trips vividly because Dad had seemed younger when he was with Raleigh. They stayed up late playing harmonica and drinking Rubutan whiskey and talking about the old days at the Academy. It had really been something to be an Explorer of the Realm in those days, when there was still so much to discover and explore.
We had visited Raleigh once, too. Dad had come up with some excuse to tell the agents, and we’d taken the train to Philadelphia, found our way to Raleigh’s house, and spent an afternoon with him. “Raleigh is the most trustworthy person I’ve ever known,” Dad had told us on the way home. “Don’t ever forget that.”
A couple of years or so before Dad disappeared, Raleigh had had some kind of accident. Dad didn’t tell us much about it, except to say that Raleigh had lost the use of his legs. Dad went to visit him once and when he came home he had seemed depressed. I’d wondered if Raleigh might get in touch with us when he heard about Dad, but he never had.
“Do you think he’ll even recognize us?” M.K. asked.
“Probably not,” I said. “We were just little kids the last time we saw him.”
We were standing in front of the door of Raleigh’s big, ramshackle row house, exhausted by our sprint from the train station. It looked the way I remembered it, just more dilapidated, the shutters missing or hanging at odd angles, and bright green graffiti to one side of the door. Years ago, Raleigh had cemented little gargoyles to the windowsills, but most of them had broken off. The few that remained looked lonely and angry on their perches.
“Well,” Zander said, putting out an arm for Pucci, “we can’t stand out here on the steps all day. Someone’ll see us.” He pulled his fist back and knocked, hard, on the door. We didn’t hear anything for a long time, and then there was a jangling and clicking on the other side of the door and it swung open.
It was Raleigh, looking twenty years older.
He stared up at us from an old wheelchair, his straggly brown-and-gray-streaked beard grown almost to his chest, his hair an unruly mess on top of his head. There was a tin of dramleaf in his lap, and I could smell the spicy scent of it in the doorway.
He stared up at Zander. “As I live and breathe. Alex? Is that really you? Have you come back?”