I didn’t sleep well that night. The rock floor of the cave was hard and M.K. was a terrible snorer. Once our fire died down, the temperature dropped and I was cold even in the reflective sleeping bag Dad had tucked into my vest, folded into a bag the size of a pack of cards. I must have drifted off to sleep a few times because I had terrible dreams, about giant rattlesnakes and ghosts and monsters and, finally, one in which Dad was rowing away from me in a boat and I was trying to throw a rope to him, but the rope kept falling in the water and disappearing beneath the dark surface.
When I woke up from that one, the sky was just getting light and I decided to get up and explore a little bit. I figured I could go ahead on foot and find the entrance to the secret canyon so that we’d be ready to go once the others were up.
I put some wood on the fire before leaving. Pucci was perched on a rock near the mouth of the cave, making his funny little clucking noises. I gave him a little scratch on the top of his head and he chortled before falling back to sleep.
I tucked Dad’s map back into the hidden pocket of my vest and started out, scrambling down to the almost-dry canyon floor. Suddenly the sun cleared the rock walls and the canyon was full of pink morning light. It was still cold, the air smelling of our campfire, and I felt incredibly awake and alive as I hiked along. I imagined the look on Sukey’s face when I came back to the cave. “Thought I’d just see what’s up ahead,” I’d tell them. “Oh, I found the secret canyon, by the way.”
According to Dad’s map, the entrance was another three miles along the floor of Drowned Man’s Canyon from our cave. I set off, walking briskly through the morning.
It took me almost an hour on foot and I found myself wishing I’d brought my horse. As I went, I measured the distance with my spyglass’s pedometer, and as I approached the place where it was supposed to be, I heard the crash of falling water and felt a mist in the air. I came around a bend in the canyon, and right where the entrance to the secret canyon was supposed to be, there was a giant waterfall.
There was a little stand of cottonwood trees and, above, a vertical cascade of water to the canyon floor. It was easily as high as the waterfalls in Azure Canyon, but where those had been magical, this waterfall was a little spooky, the water falling from the top into the pool below, which was black as night. I knew it probably wasn’t that deep, but when I peered over the edge, it looked as though it reached down into the center of the earth. According to Dad’s map, the secret canyon was right here, but when I looked up, all I could see was solid rock and the river spilling over the edge of the canyon wall, where it had worn away the earth for thousands of years.
I walked around the side of the waterfall, looking for breaks in the rock, but the limestone was completely solid, without any of the caves and crevices we’d seen at the other end.
The only part of it I couldn’t see was the area behind the waterfall itself. But in order to examine the back of the pool, I’d have to get into the water. I bent over and cupped my hands, filling them with water and gulping it down. It was freezing cold.
I was trying to figure out what to do when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and ducked behind one of the cottonwood trees. Slowly, I got the spyglass out of my vest and lifted it to my eye. I turned the eyepiece, zooming in. Across the canyon, riding back in the direction from which I’d come, was a lone figure on horseback.
He looked like an old-time miner or cowboy, in cowboy boots and a wide hat and beard. I increased the magnification and saw that he wasn’t as old as I’d thought at first. His face was set in a grim scowl, his eyes searching the canyon as he rode. The spyglass gave me a perfect view and I played around with it, turning it this way and that to see if I could get better magnification. I hadn’t noticed a small button on the side, but I must have pressed it by mistake because there was a little buzz from the spyglass and all of a sudden I could hear the sound of a horse’s hooves. It took me a minute to realize that the sound was coming from the mysterious rider’s horse and that Dad must have invented some sort of sound-amplification system for the spyglass.
I tried to figure out what to do. I had to go and tell the others. This man, whoever he was, might be with the Nackleys or he might be a BNDL agent. We would need to come back with ropes and look for the entrance to the secret canyon before anyone saw us. I watched him through my spyglass, not sure how to get back to the cave without him seeing me. And then, as I watched him through the glass, he disappeared into the wall of the canyon.
One minute he was right there, riding along in the morning sun. And the next he was gone. I put down the spyglass and searched the canyon with my naked eye, but he wasn’t there.
He couldn’t have just disappeared, of course, I told myself. He must have ridden out of my view and around a bend. Or it may have been the low light in the canyon. Perhaps he’d just blended into the wall. Or there was a cave there like the one we’d camped in.
Or maybe I hadn’t seen him at all.
Either way, I wanted to get back to the others as soon as possible. The Nackleys might already be on their way and our only hope was to get to the secret canyon before they did.
I jogged all the way back, much more quickly this time, and I had almost reached the cave when I heard, off in the distance, a sort of low metallic rumbling. It was so faint that I wasn’t sure for a minute I’d heard it at all, but as I ran it got louder and louder, resolving itself into a distinctive clanking: IronSteeds.
I felt my stomach sink. They were already here.
High above us, I heard Pucci’s warning call, “Careful, careful, careful,” and looked up to see Zander, Sukey, and M.K. in front of me.
Approaching along the floor of the canyon, clanking loudly, was a small army of IronSteeds, twenty of them, the machines we’d seen at Bongo’s. In the morning light, their metal armor gleamed.
I thought about running, but we were no match for those robot horses and all the people they had with them besides, so I just stood there, terrified, aware of Pucci still circling high above us in the air. At least they couldn’t get him.
The IronSteeds clanked and then stopped.
“Hello there,” Leo Nackley said as he dismounted. He had a pistol holstered at his belt and he took it out, holding it loosely in his right hand, reminding us it was there. “Mr. Foley will be glad to hear that we’ve found you. There are a lot of people looking for you.”
There was a flash of red behind him and Mr. Mountmorris’s secretary, Jec Banton, got down from his IronSteed. His Mohawk looked even sharper than it had yesterday and he was wearing red leather boots with little lights embedded along the laces. “That was fast,” he said, raising an eyebrow at us.
Leo Nackley must have noticed Sukey because he smiled at her and said, “Does your mother know where you are? I should have known you’d join up with these young criminals.”
“They’re my friends,” Sukey told him, her hands clenched in fists at her side. “What are you going to do about it, you dirty land grabber?”