“But what was it?” I asked him once he’d calmed down. “Did you actually see it?”
“No. It was too dark. I could just see its eyes. I had the feeling that someone or something was following me but it wasn’t until the sun had gone down and it was completely dark that I saw the eyes. They were high up in the rocks on the side of the cavern, and from the way they moved I could tell it was a large animal, not the birds. It was stalking me, keeping its distance, and it ran off only because good old Pucci dive-bombed it about twenty times.” He ran a hand through his hair, and on his shoulder Pucci murmured worriedly.
“Is it going to come after us?” M.K. asked.
“Not if I can help it,” Sukey told her, taking out her pistol and making sure it was loaded. “Don’t you worry, M.K.” And she slid over and put an arm around M.K.’s shoulder, resting her hand on my arm. I held my breath for a minute so she wouldn’t take it off.
“We’ve got to get some sleep,” I said as I breathed again.
I waited for Zander to tell me I’d been right but instead he said, “We’ll sleep in shifts. Kit, you and Sukey first. M.K. and I will keep watch with the pistol. M.K. can nap if she wants. You need to rest, M.K. Then we’ll switch.”
“I’ll stay up with you,” M.K. said weakly. “It’s only fair.”
Sukey and I got into the sleeping bags. The rock was hard underneath our backs, but I was so tired that I fell asleep right away, and it didn’t seem like I’d been out very long when Zander was shaking me awake, saying, “Okay, our turn.”
Next to me, Sukey stirred, too. “How long did we sleep?”
“Four hours,” Zander said. “Something like that.”
“Wow. It didn’t feel like four hours. How’s M.K.’s arm?”
“No better,” he said grimly. I rubbed my eyes. They had adjusted to the low light and I felt a bit like a cat, able to see through the darkness. Sukey and I stretched and moved to the outside of the little circle we’d formed, letting Zander and M.K. lie down where we’d been sleeping. Zander gave Sukey back her pistol and gave me M.K.’s knife, telling me to wake him if we heard anything. It wasn’t long before we heard deep, even breathing from their direction and knew they were asleep.
“Have your eyes adjusted?” Sukey whispered after a few minutes. Pucci was perched on my shoulder and he had curled himself up against my neck, his feathers tickling me every time he breathed. It was nice, feeling the warmth of him, the fast, even rhythm of his heartbeat.
“Yeah, isn’t it strange? I can almost see down here.” With the fading illumination from my vest, I could just make out the outline of her face, her eyes, the contours of her cheekbones. The little lights in her ears had stopped flashing.
“How do these work?” I reached out to touch one. The light felt more flexible than I’d imagined, almost like skin.
“Solar batteries. I guess they’ve died, huh?”
I nodded.
She scrunched up her nose a little in a way that had started to be familiar to me.
“I don’t like the dark. I don’t think I’d be a very good mole. What do you think we’ll find tomorrow?”
I thought for a moment. “According to the map, we’re nearing the end of the first part of the tunnel or the canyon or whatever it is. I don’t think my Dad would have sent us on this journey if there wasn’t something at the end for us to find, but—”
“But what?” Sukey had moved closer to me so she could hear, and now I could see her face even more plainly.
“Well, a lot of things could have happened. As far as we can tell, he was here, what, twenty years ago, something like that? Maybe someone else found it in the meantime.”
“But wouldn’t we have heard about it? I mean, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to announce they’d discovered a species of giant slug, or giant vultures?”
“Maybe there was a lot of gold there and whoever found it decided to keep it a secret so BNDL couldn’t claim the treasure.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Your father.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry to bring this up, but… what did they tell you? About his disappearance?”
“Nothing, really. They said they found an oar and some debris from the boats they were using near Bartoa. But I’ve done a lot of research on this. I’ve redone all the maps a hundred times. That can’t be right. They were way past there. They must have gotten it wrong. Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, it’s just… something Delilah said when we heard about him. I’m not sure I should tell you.” She looked away and I felt a small knot start in my stomach.
“Tell me.”
“Okay, well, it was in the newspapers, you know. And Delilah was really upset when she saw the story. As I told you, she respected your father a lot. And she said, ‘Perished in the jungle, my foot! He no more perished in the jungle than I would! I bet BNDL had something to do with this.’ I asked her what she meant and she wouldn’t say anything more.”
“Zander wants to go there, try to find out what happened,” I said. “Maybe we will someday. If we ever get out of here.”
She was silent for a long moment and then she said, “The man who gave you the package. He didn’t have a tattoo, did he?”
I was astonished. “How did you know?”
“Never mind. What did it look like?”
I pointed the light at the ground and drew an approximation of the symbol in the scanty dirt. “Like this,” I said. “Like a partial eclipse or something, two circles, one bigger than the other, overlapping. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”
She studied it for a moment, leaning close to the ground. “My mother used to have this friend, Harry Mokwobay, Sir Harry Mokwobay, actually. He was Zimbabwean, a brilliant, brilliant Explorer who died on a polar expedition five or six years ago.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Yeah, well, he would stay with us whenever he was in New York, and one day he was changing his shirt or something and I saw that he had this tattoo on his shoulder. It was that symbol.”
“Did you ever ask your mother what it meant?”
“No. She was really broken up when he died. I think maybe she was in love with him. What did your guy look like?”
I described him for her. “It’s awfully dangerous, being an Explorer,” I said.
“More than it should be, I would say.”
“That’s just what I was thinking.” I was quiet for a moment, deciding. “Sukey,” I said finally, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Raleigh said that he’d heard rumors about a secret organization, the Mapmakers’ Guild. They were supposed to be the ones who fed the wrong information into the Muller Machines. They were outlawed, but Raleigh said that there were rumors that they weren’t gone. I think maybe that tattoo was their sign. Have you ever heard anything about it?”
There was a long silence. “Not directly,” she said. “But I always wondered about Harry. He was, well… there was something about him that made me think he had a lot of secrets, that’s all. And there’s a lot of stuff Delilah doesn’t tell me.”
And then the light flickered once and finally gave out. We were in complete darkness. Sukey reached out and took my hand, something that surprised me more than the slugs and vultures combined. It was soft and her fingers laced with mine, fitting neatly into the spaces between them. The funny thing was that after a minute, it didn’t feel weird at all. She moved closer and leaned into me and I put my arm around her and sort of held her against me, the smoky, sweet smell of her hair in my nose. It seemed like a strange, grown-up thing to be doing, holding her like that. I could feel her breathing against me, the gentle rising and falling of her body. Pucci mumbled in his sleep. M.K. snored.
We let the darkness sit around us. We were quiet for a long time, a good kind of quiet, and then the sun started rising outside, the little stars and moons and suns starting to glow pink, then orange, then yellow. Sukey and I watched the day arrive out there, in the real world, and it seemed so far from where we were that I couldn’t imagine we’d ever get there.