The warmth of the memory fought off the chill in Alistair’s bones as frigid rock brushed against his chest and back. He held his hands up and slid sideways through the dark passage.
“A little farther, a little farther…” Baxter’s voice faded into nothingness, and once again, Alistair felt like a fool.
Why do I always follow? Why do I let others determine my fate? As soon as I get to the other end, then I’m making the decisions.
The other end was a long way off. Baxter must have had a poor sense of distance or time—probably both—because the passage went on and on until Alistair wasn’t sure he could keep going, and yet he knew he couldn’t turn back.
“Baxter!” he shouted. “Are you there?”
The response was muffled and unintelligible, and Alistair began to panic. The tight space felt even tighter, the darkness even darker. “Please,” he pleaded. “Where are we going, Baxter?”
Nothing.
Alistair closed his eyes. Baxter is good. Baxter is Fiona’s friend.
Fiona. His focus turned to Fiona. It had been about two weeks since he’d last seen her, since she’d told him that Charlie was the Riverman, since she’d said that Alistair was “so much better here,” kissed him on the lips, and then left for Aquavania one final time. Not even fifteen days—not very long—but already he was forgetting what she looked like. Memories were hitting him without warning, but he couldn’t summon the ones he wanted. He couldn’t will her face back into his head. Her dark hair. Her crooked nose. Her eyes. What color were they exactly? Green? Amber? Almost gray?
If there was any hope of answering such questions, then maybe it lay at the end of the passage. Baxter is good, Baxter is Fiona’s friend, he told himself again. He opened his eyes and pressed on.
Light. First barely a flicker, but soon it was illuminating every vein and bump on the surrounding stone. He quickened his pace. The air lost its staleness. There was an opening ahead.
At the other side of the passageway, where there was sun, wind, and earth, mountains dominated the skyline. There was no way to avoid them—immense, jagged, and capped with pink snow. They must have been miles high, perhaps higher than the Himalayas, the tallest of mountains. Well, the tallest in the Solid World, that is. Perhaps in Aquavania they were considered puny. Alistair had given up trying to understand the space and time of this place. All he wanted to know was how to get from point A to point F.
A frozen lake had the potential to hold some clues. It sat at the foot of the mountains, and Baxter stood along the edge of it with his wings outstretched. Alistair followed the path of three-toed footprints through the pink snow.
“It was written on the lake,” the penguin said. “I never saw who wrote it, but I’ve seen others come and go. From one hut to the next. They have little interest in chatting. Busy as bees and often strangely dressed.”
Scattered over the surface of the lake were a series of ice-fishing huts. They were all of similar construction—corrugated aluminum, shingles, knotty scraps of plywood. They were actually the least foreign things Alistair had come across in Aquavania. The lakes and ponds near Thessaly were dotted with similar makeshift shelters every winter. Alistair’s dad never built one, but occasionally he’d join a buddy with a thermos of something hot and they’d spend a Sunday bundled up and listening to football on the radio, catching mostly nothing. Alistair and Keri had even joined him once, but they both found it to be a cold and boring affair.
“What are you telling me?” Alistair asked Baxter.
“Back when Chua was around,” Baxter explained, “these were fishing huts. Go inside, drop a hook in the hole, and seconds later you would pull up a big Swedish fish.”
“Like the candy?” Alistair asked.
Baxter shrugged. “Like the Swedish type of fish, I guess. Red. Flat. Sweet.”
Alistair nodded. “Yep. Go on.”
“Well,” Baxter said, “ever since the … Whisper … got Chua, I haven’t gone in the huts. I don’t particularly like the feeling I get around them. But I see strangers sometimes, coming out of one and going into another.”
“They’re gateways?” Alistair asked.
“I suppose they could be. There were originally ten of them, but it seems someone’s added one recently. Though that’s hardly the oddest thing I’ve seen around here.”
“You said the people were strangely dressed?” Alistair asked. “How so?”
Baxter shrugged. “Hats, costumes, accoutrements of all varieties. Like I said, these weren’t chatty sorts. They came and went. That’s all.”
Baxter’s count was correct—there were eleven huts. Eleven doors, in other words, each possibly leading to a different world. “Should I look inside?” Alistair asked.
“Do they say ‘Look before you leap’?” Baxter asked.
“Who?”
“People.”
“They do.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
I’m making the decisions, Alistair had told himself earlier. Had he known his decisions would involve eleven different choices, he might have been a bit more careful with his proclamations. “Any other suggestions?” Alistair asked.
Baxter thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Whenever Chua would leave Aquavania and go back to the Solid World, she’d tell me and the polar bears to ‘be smart, be safe … and try not to eat one another.’”
Alistair smiled and Baxter smiled back. “Well, I guess the smart and safe thing to do is to check them all out first,” Alistair said.
So that’s what he did. One by one he opened the doors to the huts and stepped inside. The interiors were almost identical. On the floor of each, there was a perfectly round hole in the ice, an entrance into the frigid water. There were walls, a few wooden seats, some fishing poles. There was only one significant difference. In each hut, a hook was mounted above the hole, and on each hook hung a different object. They were as follows.
Hut One: A leather saddle.
Hut Two: A paintbrush.
Hut Three: An empty backpack.
Hut Four: A spyglass.
Hut Five: A rubber flipper.
Hut Six: A white glove.
Hut Seven: A nylon harness.
Hut Eight: A baseball bat.
Hut Nine: An arrow.
Hut Ten: A locked diary.
Hut Eleven: A hunk of dried meat.
Of all the objects, the white glove was the most intriguing. Alistair went back to it a second time and felt the fabric. It was smooth and cool. He brought it out and showed it to Baxter. It shimmered when held in the sunlight.
“Polly Dobson wore a spacesuit,” Alistair said. “The material of this glove is kinda like the stuff that suit was made of. Have you ever seen anyone in a spacesuit coming from this hut?”
Baxter looked at the ground. “Not that I remember,” he said. “But that’s not to say it didn’t happen. I don’t spend much time here. Like I said, the ones who come and go aren’t exactly sparkling conversationalists.”
Without warning, the door to Hut Seven—the one that contained the harness—opened, and a boy dressed in a thick down coat stepped out onto the frozen lake. Water dripped off his body. He wore boots with spikes on the bottom that made a crunching sound when he walked.
“Hey there!” Alistair shouted, and he started across the ice toward the boy. The boy appeared disinterested as he moved quickly toward Hut Four—the one that housed the spyglass. He opened the door and slipped inside without saying a word. When Alistair reached the hut, there was an audible splash, and when he opened the door, the boy was gone.
Baxter cocked his head and offered a look of See what I mean?
“I could follow that kid,” Alistair said. “Or I could see if the hut with this glove leads me to where Polly came from. Maybe someone there can tell me about the Ambit of Ciphers. Polly was going to the Ambit of Ciphers because she was looking for someone too. That place may be where the captured kids are hidden.”
“You can also stay here,” Baxter said. “I’d be thrilled if you found Chua and Fiona, but from what you’ve told me, it’s dangerous out there. So if you feel safer here…”
Staying put wasn’t an option, and besides, it didn’t seem any safer than leaving. It was cold here. The polar bears were starving, probably desperate to eat anything or anyone. Strange people passed between the huts, and there was no telling if the Whisper would send something like the Mandrake to destroy them all. There was no telling anything. The best Alistair could do was make an educated guess.
He headed back to the hut where he’d found the glove. “I appreciate the offer,” he told Baxter, “but the sooner I find them, the sooner things will be back to normal. I’m going in this one.”
His own decision, clear and definitive. This was what he should have been doing all along.
“You told me how you got here,” Baxter said. “But tell me this: what did Fiona do? You know, after Chua was taken?”
Alistair placed a hand on Baxter’s shoulder and said, “She, Rodrigo, Boaz, and Jenny, they tried so hard to stop the Whisper. Rodrigo and Boaz … they were captured too. Jenny chose to hide. Then there’s a big chunk of time where I don’t know exactly what Fiona was doing. Twelve years, actually. But I can assure you of this: she did everything in her power to get Chua back, to get back every captured kid. And when she’d exhausted every option, she wrote books about them.”
“Books?”
Alistair nodded. “She wrote down their stories and buried them in Aquavania. She wanted to make sure the kids weren’t forgotten. Maybe someday people will dig up the book about Chua and then they’ll know how great your creator was. Sorry, is. How great your creator is.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“And you can find them? Both of them?” Baxter asked.
I really don’t know, Alistair was tempted to say. I’ve been trying to make you feel better, but I’m grasping at straws. Finding Fiona is going to be hard enough. Chua too? I really don’t know.
Instead, Alistair said, “Yes.” And he handed the glove to Baxter and opened the door to Hut Six.
Stepping into the hut, he didn’t gauge the consequences of what he was about to do. He simply did it. He hopped, landed feetfirst in the center of the hole, and plunged into the icy water.