“But where have you been? How did you get out?” I asked her once we’d dragged the two guards into another closet and hidden ourselves again.
We couldn’t stop hugging her and finally she got tired of it, pushing us away and rubbing at a patch of dirt on her cheek.
“This huge cat attacked me,” she said. “I got a couple good jabs in it with my knife, but before I could get back to you, some of those guys saw me and captured me. They took me through these secret tunnels in the walls of the canyon and brought me back here. By then I wasn’t feeling very well. I was really hot and my arm was throbbing and I was so hungry I was feeling sort of dizzy. They gave me food and water and—this is the weird part—this guy wearing these long robes and all these feathers came in and looked at my arm. I don’t know what he said, but someone brought him these little rocks, kind of like crystals, and he put them on my arm. It got very hot, almost like he was burning me, and then all of a sudden it was better. Look.” She pulled up her sleeve and showed us the wound. The skin that had been swollen and infected only a couple of hours ago was now smooth and healed. You could see where the gash had been, though, because the surface of her upper arm was now strangely shimmering, as though her skin had been embedded with gold glitter.
I looked at Zander. This was weird. “And you feel okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, fine. Anyway, they wouldn’t tell me what they were going to do with me or anything and they just kept asking me if I was alone. I figured I’d better get out of there, so I used my knife to wedge open a sort of vent in the ceiling and pulled myself up. It came out right over there in the hallway. I was about to see if I could find another one of those tunnels when I saw you and that girl come up the stairs. Then I saw the guards.”
Sukey looked worried. “How did you keep your knife?” She asked M.K.
“I hid it in my shoe after I got the cat.” M.K. grinned. “They never even looked. Who is that girl, anyway? Did she capture you? And where’s Pucci?”
Before we could answer, we heard two low taps on the door and Halla’s voice saying, “It’s me. She’s escaped. They’re all looking for her. I told them that I saw her escaping the city and running into the canyon, so that should buy us some time to find her. All the guards are heading out after her.”
She opened the door and smiled when she saw M.K.
“And this must be her,” Halla said. We introduced them and Halla said, “We don’t have much time. Follow me and don’t let anyone see you.” We went out into the hall again and she opened another door in the wall, waited for us to follow her in, and shut it quickly.
“Okay, let’s go.” We followed the long hallway for a few minutes before she pressed on an intricate carving on the wall. It was a relief sculpture depicting a large group of people climbing a staircase to the cliff city. There were more of the hieroglyphs that Dad had used for the code.
“I’m trying to remember where it is,” she said. “I discovered it kind of by accident.” She must have pushed the right spot because all of a sudden we heard a click and a door swung open and we were looking into a small room. Halla used her torch to light another, larger torch mounted on the wall, and as the room was suddenly bathed in light, we could see what was inside.
“Look,” Zander whispered. “Look, Kit, look.”
The walls were covered with maps—maps of the world, of the United States, of Latin America, of Europe and Asia. There were old maps of Arizona and maps of the New Lands, and maps of Ha’aftep Canyon and of Drowned Man’s Canyon. They had been created with some kind of natural ink in various shades of blue and red and brown. They were beautiful.
“Where did these come from?” I asked.
“They used to be hanging out in the great hall,” she said, “for everyone to see and study. But the new Keedow decided that it was too dangerous to have them out there, that it might make people want to go to all these places. So he hid them here, with… well, you can see for yourselves.”
We had been so focused on the maps that we hadn’t noticed the large table in the middle of the room. It was carved out of some kind of brown stone that I hadn’t seen in the canyon, and the surface, when I touched it, was warm and smooth. There was a large golden frame in a stand on the table. Around the frame were little objects, stones and gold coins and little statues.
And in the frame was a portrait of Dad.