It wasn’t raining as we got out of the glider, but the clouds overhead were gray and threatening and the air was humid, a swift breeze coming from the East. We looked around and found ourselves in a vacant lot behind the straggly little village. Sukey threaded a chain and padlock through brackets on either side of the cockpit door, closed the lock, and we started walking. It felt good to be on solid ground again, and despite the fact that we were, by any read of our situation, in pretty serious trouble, I felt oddly cheerful. We had made it to Arizona. I hadn’t ever traveled very far from home and here I was, in the great outdoors, ready to embark on a treasure hunt.
And Sukey was coming with us.
My mood changed when we got to the town. Someone had been having fun when they’d called it “Azure City.” It wasn’t anything more than a dozen or so trailers parked in little yards decorated with cacti and old washing machines and toilets and rusting cars. Azure Canyon had been discovered at the very beginning of the New Modern Age of Exploration, when Dad was in his teens, and for ten years or so it had been a fairly popular place for Explorers to visit because of its famous blue waterfalls. The canyon had been carved out of highly reflective limestone and travertine rock, and the water that collected beneath its many waterfalls appeared to be a brilliant Caribbean Ocean blue.
Pretty soon, though, it had become clear that there weren’t any resources that could be taken out of the canyon, and the Explorers had moved on to more exotic locations in the New Lands. Now the little village looked run-down and desperately poor. I couldn’t help but remember Dad ranting about how Native Americans had been treated during the New Modern Age. “You would think we would have learned our lesson already,” he would bellow whenever the subject of the new discoveries out west came up, “but here we are, doing it in our own country, taking everything out of the land for ourselves and leaving a mess behind for those it belongs to!”
We walked past a couple of little market stalls advertising Food for Campers and Hikers, and a withered old man wearing a feathered headdress, standing on the street with a hose, who filled up our water bottles for fifty cents a pop. There was a stall with a sign that read Exotic Foods from the Territories, but when I went to look, the old woman in the stall just had a couple of dried-out Juboodan grubfruits. A group of young guys on rusty IronLegs were sitting in front of a broken-down building, holding a sign reading Veterans. Hungry. Please Help. They stared at us as we passed by.
At the end of the short road was a huge, handmade billboard: Bongo’s IronSteed Rental. The Best Way To See The Canyun. IronSteeds Nevur Neid Food or Water. Underneath was a picture of Azure Canyon’s famous blue waterfalls and a childlike drawing of a mechanical horse. A parking lot next to the sign was filled with the big machines that had always reminded me of medieval horses in armor ready for jousting.
In front of the sign sat a young guy in an old lawn chair. He was a Neo, but a strange kind of Neo, with bleached-out blond hair that hung halfway down his back. He had sunglasses on and was staring up at the sky as though he was expecting to see something appear there. “Are you Bongo?” Sukey asked him. I glanced around nervously. I had gotten really paranoid about the BNDL agents, but I didn’t see any here.
Slowly, he raised his sunglasses. “Yeah, that’s right. You looking for IronSteeds?”
“Yup,” Zander said. “Four, please. How much?”
Bongo looked up at us, blinking as though Zander was speaking a different language. After a minute, he pointed to Pucci. “But, dude, what’s he going to do?”
“Uh, he’ll fly,” Zander said. “He’s a bird.”
“You don’t want a horse for him, then?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Sukey and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh. The hot desert sun must have gotten to this guy’s brain.
“I like his little boots.” Bongo stared at Pucci for a minute. “Well, anyway, I can’t. Sorry, dude.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t rent you any IronSteeds. I don’t have any.”
“There are about twenty of them out there,” Zander said. “I can see them.”
“No. Those are all reserved. Big group of people. Some kind of archaeological expedition.”
“Who reserved them? Was his name Leo Nackley?” Zander asked.
“No… local guy. Tex somebody. Said he had a big group coming out from the East Coast.”
It had to be the Nackleys. Zander and I exchanged a worried look.
“Couldn’t you spare a couple?” Sukey asked. “Surely the party you’ve got coming in doesn’t need all of those.”
“Dude,” the guy said, “they do. They already paid and everything. They have a lot of stuff to carry.”
We stood there, not sure what to do, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement in a field behind the little restaurant. There were seven real-live horses grazing in the late-afternoon sun.
“Hey,” I said to Bongo. “What about those horses?”
“What?” He looked where I was pointing. “Those? But they… they need food and water.”
“Well, we can give them food and there’s water in the canyon. I mean, people rode horses into the canyon before IronSteeds were invented, right?”
“Sorry, dude. They’re not mine.”
“Well, who do they belong to?” I asked him. I was getting annoyed. We didn’t have much time. We needed to get down into the canyon before anyone figured out we were here.
“I don’t know. They just kind of hang out there.”
I rolled my eyes at Sukey.
“Did the big party say when they’d be getting here?” she asked Bongo.
“There’s gonna be a big party?” He looked really excited. “Dude, I love parties.”
“No, the… the party that you said reserved all the IronSteeds. When are they getting here?”
“Oh, yeah, today, dude. Later today.”
“Okay,” Zander said. “We better get going, then. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“You sure you want to go down there?” Bongo asked. “I think it’s gonna rain soon. You don’t want to be in a canyon when it rains.”
“We’ll be all right,” Zander said. “We’ve got to get going.” But he looked nervous, and when I looked up at the sky I could see that the clouds were moving in, dark and menacing.
“Can you do us a favor?” I asked him. “When that group gets down here, don’t tell them you saw us, okay?”
“You in trouble or something?”
“No, not exactly. Just don’t tell them about us.”
“You got it. Tell them about who?” He winked and handed over a grubby square of paper. “Here, take one of these maps.”
We were just about to leave when I thought of something. “Bongo, you’ve heard about the legend of Drowned Man’s Canyon, right?”
He looked a little less dumb and a little more scared. “Yeah. I heard it,” he said. “About the gold and everything. They say there’s a ghost of that dead miner down there. He comes out of the rocks and takes you away if you go near his treasure. You couldn’t pay me to go down that way. Stay in Azure Canyon. It’s real pretty. That’s where the tourists like to go.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “By the way, you should really fix your sign. There are some typos.”
“Yeah, dude. I know. The horse has three legs and in real life horses have four.”
“No… that’s not… forget it,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” We started walking away. I turned back to wave at him, but he was staring up at the horse on the sign as though he’d forgotten what it was.
“What are we going to do now?” Zander asked. “If we walk down, it’ll take forever. There’s no way we’ll beat them.”
“Go see if you can find some food and then meet me over by that barn,” Sukey said. “I just want to see something.” She took off at a run for a falling-down little barn near the horse paddock. Zander and M.K. and I looked at each other. I shrugged and we did as she’d asked.
There wasn’t much food to be had, but we bought a couple of cans of beans and some beef jerky from an old Indian lady and went back to wait by the barn. The air was hot and close and I was itching to get moving. If we had to walk into the canyon, we’d better get going. “What’s she doing?” I complained. “They’re going to be here any minute.”
“Want me to check?” Zander asked.
“No, I’ll check,” I told him. I started for the barn, but Sukey was already coming out. “No need to fight, boys,” she said. “I think we’re in luck.”
She was leading four horses, all saddled and bridled. They were skinny, but they looked excited to be out of the paddock, dancing around and sniffing the air. “Good thing Delilah dragged me on all those pony treks on the Grygian steppes,” she said.
I stared at her. “Did you just steal them?”
“Kind of.” She grinned. “Now we’re all criminals. That keeps it nice and even. Let’s get going.”