You should have seen the Expedition Society once they figured out what you’d done to those agents,” Sukey was telling us. She was eating an apple, talking with her mouth full. “It was crazy. Leo Nackley and Francis Foley were all up in arms, saying that the children of Alexander West had assaulted federal agents and broken into the Expedition Society. Even Mr. Mountmorris was there. And he almost never comes to the Society. Luckily, they didn’t realize I’d been in the Map Room with you, but I got into trouble for signing you in as guests. I just said it was a misunderstanding and I didn’t know who you were, but I’m not sure they believed me. You know who Mr. Mountmorris is, don’t you?”
“We do now. He’s an advisor to ANDLC, right?”
“Yeah, he’s an ‘advisor’ to ANDLC, an ‘advisor’ to BNDL. The truth is, he runs the whole thing. He was working for President Barbado when Harrison Arnoz discovered Grygia, and he made sure the Bureau got rid of any Grygians who were in the way. That’s what Delilah says, anyway.”
“I wish I’d known that before we showed him the map,” I grumbled.
“The map,” Pucci squawked. “Show her the map!”
“That bird is really weird,” Sukey said. She looked up at me. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on here or not?”
“Uh…” Zander and I glanced at each other, not sure about trusting this girl again. It was true that she’d saved our hides twice in the last couple of days, but still…
It was M.K. who decided it for us. “Come on, let’s tell her,” she said. “If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t even have the second half of the map.”
M.K. was right. We explained the whole thing, starting from the beginning, when the man with the clockwork hand had given me the book. The only thing we left out was the stuff about the Mapmakers’ Guild. From what Raleigh had said, it would be dangerous to reveal that Dad might have been a member.
“We think the treasure’s in this canyon and that our father wanted us to find it, but we don’t have any idea where in the canyon it is,” I told Sukey. “And now Leo Nackley is heading west, and he and Lazlo are going to get there before we do, and if they catch us, they’ll probably put us in jail.”
Sukey just nodded. “Well, we can’t let them beat us there, can we?”
“How did you find us, anyway?” I asked her.
“I heard something about how you’d gotten off the train in Philadelphia, but then I overheard Foley and Mountmorris talking about how they thought you’d be trying to get to Arizona. I figured you didn’t have a lot of options. When I checked the schedules, I saw there was a cargo line heading out and, well… It’s what I would have done in your place. Delilah’s on an expedition so I took the glider and I just flew low and followed the tracks and pretty soon, there you were.” She cocked her head and looked at me for a minute, then pitched her apple core over the wing of the glider. “I snooped around a little bit yesterday and I found out some information for you. About your father and why he got kicked out of the Society.” She stopped talking for a second and listened. “Did you hear something?”
We all listened. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what I learned, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
“It’s okay,” Zander told her. “We want to know.”
Sukey’s eyes met mine. In the bright sunlight, they were a liquid light brown. “Well, after everything calmed down, I found a good friend of my mother’s—Billi Pan, she’s an Explorer who defected from the Chinese Protectorate after the plagues—and asked her if she’d ever met your father. She said she’d known him well and that even if he was an Archy”—she grinned at us—“he was a wonderful man and a good Explorer. That’s what she said. She said he’d stood up to the land grabbers and that people like her, who agreed with him, thought he was a real hero for it. I asked some other Explorers why he’d been kicked out of the Expedition Society, and they said that it had never been explained completely, but that BNDL told them that he’d engaged in some kind of forbidden activity…” She hesitated.
“We want to know,” Zander said. “Go ahead.”
“Billi thought it was Leo Nackley who accused him, and that he’d accused your dad of fraud and belonging to an outlawed organization. She wasn’t sure what it was, though.”
Zander and M.K. and I exchanged glances. I had a pretty good idea.
“But if he was kicked out of the Expedition Society, how did he get to take the trip to Fazia?” Zander asked. “He needed boats, supplies, a crew.”
“I don’t know. Billi said everyone had wondered about that, but they were all too afraid of Foley and his agents to ask too many questions. They didn’t say anything after he’d disappeared.”
We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, just taking it in. I couldn’t stop thinking about his face as he’d gotten into the SteamTaxi to leave for Fazia. Had he known he wasn’t coming back? Or had he just been scared? I remembered the way his eyes had darted around the yard. Had agents followed him on the expedition?
“He didn’t say anything to you about all of this?” She seemed incredulous.
“No,” I told her. “As far as we knew, he was going down there on BNDL’s dime, same as always.”
“That Foley guy didn’t say a word about it when he came to tell us Dad had died,” M.K. said. “That seems pretty weird to me.”
“Well, Delilah says that you can’t trust Francis Foley as far as you can—” Sukey sat up, listening, looking out across the expanse of cornfield. “I could swear I heard something.”
“Pucci, what is it?” Zander asked, and Pucci rose into the air and made a wide circle.
“SteamCycles,” he called down as he circled back. “SteamCycles!”
“Someone’s coming!” Zander stood up, searching the horizon, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Did that bird just say ‘SteamCycles’?” Sukey asked.
M.K. gestured to Zander to bend down and boost her up on his shoulders. “I don’t see anything,” she said once she was up. “Do you think it’s BNDL?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if it is, we’d better get out of here.”
“Wait,” Sukey said. “Hold on. Did that bird really say ‘SteamCycles’?”
And then we heard the engines, just the faint sound of them in the distance.
“Looks like he did,” I said.
We were all up and moving in a couple of seconds.
“Where are we going to go?” Zander was asking us. “There’s nowhere to run. We’re like sitting ducks out here. Sukey?”
But Sukey was ignoring him. “I might have to dump some supplemental fuel,” she was saying to herself, doing some kind of arithmetic on her fingers. “Twenty times forty and…” She sprinted over to the glider, where she started fooling around with some knobs and dials on the outside of the fuselage. Then she took a thin wrench out of her pocket and tightened something on one of the rear wheels. “Come on, you three. I think we can do it.”
“Take off,” Sukey said, her curly hair springing up all around the edges of her helmet as she pulled it on, her eyes huge behind the goggles. “What do you think, Pirate Boy?”