Athel (16 page)

I step
over a fallen trunk, my boots crunching on splintered wood, and ponder his
words. “So five people were in charge of the five doors?”

Lukas
nods. “Had to be. You wouldn’t entrust everyone’s safety to just one person,
would you? I’m also guessing that each one knew of only one door and one
chavi
, preventing a single person from
unlocking all five at once.”

“It would
explain why all the engrams are so fragmented,” I reply.

“Also for
safety. Can’t hand over all the info to a single individual. Now, if they were
really smart—and so far they’ve proven they were—they’d not only
make the information fragmented, but also redundant.”

We descend
down a ravine and then cross a water stream that trickles over a bed of green
moss. Taeh stops and dips her head to drink.

“Redundant?”
I ask.

“Save it
many times, in different ways.”

The
terrain below our feet begins to slant in all directions. Old barricades sprout
between the trees, and roots coil around broken pillars and charred bricks.
Yuri and Cal stare at the place with their mouths hanging open. I can tell from
the looks on their faces they’ve never been this far into the forest, and
suddenly I wonder if it was a mistake to bring them here. Tahari has trusted
only a few people with these ancient secrets. And here I am, spilling the beans
to the two people I hate the most.
 

I let Taeh
roam on her own while Lukas and I look everywhere. We scrape the moss off the
cement, dig holes, upturn chunks of fallen walls.

Nada
.

“Plenty of
walls and no doors,” I mumble.

Lukas
looks comical as he wobbles through the overgrown ferns. “Look beyond the
obvious,” he chants.

His
easygoing attitude irritates the brothers. Yuri sits on a log, scowls, and
says, “You guys are full of it.”

“Lukas
likes riddles,” I say, and then nudge my friend in the ribs and whisper, “Do
you have it all figured out and now you’re enjoying teasing us?”

“No, but
I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be something we expect.”

“You said
you’ve seen the door!” I hiss.

“I did.
And now I can’t find—”

He stops
so suddenly I almost bump into him, his nose stuck up in the air as he watches
mesmerized the sun fanning through the treetops. The two brothers stare at us,
their scowls deepening.

“What is
it now?” Cal asks, rapping a hand against his side.

“This,” Lukas
says, pointing at the sunrays sweeping the forest like a transparent curtain. “
This
is what I remember.”

“The
light?” Yuri complains. He shoots to his feet and turns around, looking for the
way back. Our steps are now lost in the sea of ferns and wild vines, the trail
no longer visible.

“You’ve
got no choice but stick with us,” I say, though deep inside I want to flick
Lukas. “May I remind you that we’re looking for a door?” I whisper to my friend
as he follows the light fanning through the trees.

“I’m
telling you, this is it,” Lukas replies.

“Great.”
My eyes burn from lack of sleep. I blink, trying to see what he sees. I’m
clearly not trying hard enough, because all I spot are oaks, sycamores, and the
occasional moss-covered chunk of ruin. “Are you hallucinating or what?”

Lukas
walks through the sheet of light, sunrays framing his lanky figure. “A door
doesn’t have to be made of wood or metal. If I were to hide something, I’d do
it in a subtle way, one that can only be found at certain times of the day.” He
climbs over a fallen tree and stops at the end, where the sunrays fall and hit
the ground. He hops down and crouches, the exposed roots of the fallen tree
like tentacles above his head.

I sigh.
“Right. Perfect spot to look for a door.”

Lukas rips
away the weeds and ferns growing underneath the roots and pushes his hands
under the trunk, groping. “You’re not thinking straight, Athel,” he says. “A
wooden door would’ve burned completely in the fire. That’s not what we’re
looking for.”
 

He rests
his hands on the fallen tree, plants his feet on the ground, and pushes. The
trunk doesn’t budge.

I walk
over and help him out of pity, not because I see any sense to what he’s doing.

“I expect
the doors to the Underground City,” I reply, “to cover a manhole or something
like that. They could be made of metal, cement, or—”

“A slab of
rock,” Lukas interjects as the tree finally rolls to the side. Blinded by the
sudden light, a colony of blue beetles starts swirling in the pocket left by
the overturned tree.

Lukas
freezes, his face ashen. “Can you… send them away?”

“You’re
afraid of beetles?”

“It’s a
phobia. You can’t control irrational emotions.”

I stifle a
snicker and chase away the critters with a stick. “I thought you were all
rationality, Lukas.”

“That would
make me a robot,” he scoffs.

Yuri and
Cal finally decide to shuffle over to see what’s going on. Part of me wishes
they were scared of beetles too, but it turns out they’re not. They stomp over
and squash the critters with their boots until I yell at them to stop wasting
energy on stupid things.

“That’s
what you’ve been doing from the get-go,” I say. “Wasting energy on enemies you
don’t have, while the true enemies get their way.”

Yuri
glares at me, my words hitting home for the first time, even though he’s too
proud to admit it. He leans close and growls, “Fine. But you’d better have a
really strong argument for keeping me here while I could be training with the
one thing that will destroy the droids—my laser beams.”

“Your
laser beams will do nothing against a full army of sniper droids.”

He balls
his fists, itching to strike me again.

Something
shines in my eyes, a pencil of light coming from one of the holes in the dirt.
I ignore Yuri’s threatening pose and crouch over to take a better look.

Lukas cringes
as a few beetles crawl up my arm. I dig with a flat stick until the tip hits a
hard surface buried underneath, then continue spooning out dirt with my bare
hands. Whether they’re moved by curiosity, or simply because they want to get
the search over with, Yuri and Cal kneel at my sides and help me out, our
blackened fingers crossing and touching as we brush away dirt. And when we
finally uncover what’s underneath, we all stop and stare without uttering a
word.

The
familiar symbol of Astraca emerges through the dust, carved in black on the
tarnished surface of a copper plate.

“What’s
that?” Yuri asks.

“The
symbol of Astraca,” Lukas replies, standing behind us and looking down on our
find.

I swat the
beetles away and knock on the copper plate. “It doesn’t sound hollow,” I say,
not bothering to hide my disappointment.

If it is
the door, there’s no empty space on the other side.

Lukas
finally overcomes his terror of beetles, drops to his knees, and squeezes between
us. Most of the beetles have fled anyway, their hairy legs digging for new
hideouts under the fallen tree trunk. Lukas brushes his long white fingers over
the plate and retraces the pentagon.

“Look,” he
whispers as if in the presence of something sacred. “There’s a hole inside the
head of the Prudence key. I bet that’s the lock.”

“I still
don’t understand.” I rattle my knuckles on the plate one more time. “Hear that?
It’s not the sound a door makes when you knock on it. This sounds just like
what it looks like: an old plate buried in the dirt.” I slide my fingers along
the plate searching for a hinge, a latch, anything. I close my fists around the
edge and pull.

“Don’t,”
Lukas says.

“Why not?
I want to see if it’s a hoax or—”

“Stop,”
Yuri says. He locks eyes with me and for the first time I see a sparkle of
recognition. He waves a hand at his brother, his stare no longer spiteful. “Get
me the thing.”

Cal blinks
a few times. “What thing?”

“The key,
genius!”

“Oh.” Cal
fumbles in his pockets and finally produces it—the Prudence key. It’s
smaller than I thought, and it looks just like the Wisdom key Aghad showed me,
except the head is different: the golden thread is shaped like a crescent moon.
I feel a surge of anger seeing it in Yuri’s hands, but then repress it, knowing
that he’s the one who had the engram to open the cylinder. So, in a way, this
is his
chavi
, too.

He leans
forward, clears his throat, and then clicks the key into place.

At first,
nothing happens. And then, just as Yuri’s anger is about to be unleashed, a
light from within the symbol flashes. The pentagon rotates and the triangle
containing the Prudence key slides open, revealing an LED screen.

I read the
words out loud: “You have unlocked the Prudence door. One of five doors
unlocked.”

We stare
at the message one minute longer, holding our breaths. Smiles blossom on
everyone’s faces. And just like that, for no reason other than that we’ve
finally achieved something, and we did it together, we all cheer and share high
fives.

“Where are
the other keys?” Yuri asks.

“One’s
still missing—the Foresight key. The other three are in Tahari’s
possession. We should go retrieve them and unlock the other three doors. It
shouldn’t be too hard now that we can pinpoint this location on the map.”

Cal raises
a brow. “There’s a map?”

Lukas
nods. “Yes, but it’s missing cardinal points. We didn’t know the exact location
of the doors until we found the first one. So now we can find the rest.”

Yuri
narrows his eyes, still not one hundred percent convinced. “What about the
rocket?”

“The
rocket belongs to the Gaijins. If you help us recover it, we may still have a
chance to avoid a massacre tomorrow.”

Yuri
considers the offer very carefully. He bends over the door and removes the key.
“It’s probably best if we cover the door again, until we unlock all five of
them.”

I nod and
together we push the tree log back over the copper plate. When we’re done, Yuri
wipes the dirt off his hands, then looks at his brother and says, “Come on,
Cal. Let’s go find the rocket.”

Cal
stiffens. “Seriously? I thought we were going to find the rest of the doors.”
He scratches the top of his head and scuffs the ground. “This was… sort of
fun.”

Yuri sends
me a sideways glance. “No. Let them find the rest of the doors. We set off the
rocket, so now we’d better get it back.”

I give him
thumbs up. “Come get us when you do find it. We need to haul it back to the
gorge.”

If it is the rocket the droids want back
, I think.

But that
last thought I keep to myself.

Chapter
Fifteen

Akaela

Tahari looks at the three of us
with big, worried eyes. He rubs his wide forehead the way he’s done multiple
times these past few days, then jerks his chin toward the Tower and says,
“Let’s go talk in my office.”

“But—”
Wes starts, but Tahari is already climbing the stairs to the Tower and no
longer listening.

On the
second floor, a man is waiting by the door to the office. He looks old, his
skin parched and his shoulders hunched from many hours spent out in the fields.
He must be the rice farmer Athel told us
about
, I think.
The one who helped
Tahari find the map
.

Tahari
opens the door and motions us kids—Wes, Jada, and me—inside. We sit
quietly on a wooden bench by the wall, overlooking Tahari’s wide desk. To the
left, a large window looks out over the river bend, the hammering and beating
from the workers on the shore muffled by the sound of water rushing downstream.

“They
found the Ingenuity door,” Tahari explains to the rice farmer as he shuffles to
his desk. There’s no enthusiasm in his voice, no reason to celebrate. I feel
bad for Jada, who was so excited to tell Tahari about her discovery. She felt
important when she realized it wasn’t just a dream.

Something’s not right
, Wes
messages.

“Should we
go see it?” the rice farmer asks.

Tahari
leans against his desk and crosses his arms. “No,” he says. “I want you to
proceed as we’ve discussed.”

I shoot to
my feet and demand, “Why not? We found the door. Don’t you want to unlock it
before—”

Tahari
raises a hand and stops me from saying another word. “It’s too late. I’m
ordering an evacuation tonight, once night falls. We’ll hide in the forest and
hope for the best.”

Wes backs
me up. “But you already have three of the
chavis
,
and we know where the fourth one is.”

“The fifth
one is missing,” the rice farmer says, his voice grave. “We found the engram,
went to the location and…” He rubs his tired eyes with flat, black-rimmed
fingers.

“And?” I
ask.

“It wasn’t
there,” Tahari replies. “Someone took it.”

I open my
mouth to say something and realize I’ve got nothing to say. What Tahari has
just revealed is the worst possible news. Engrams are the only way we have to
trace back the
chavis
. Once moved,
the engrams are no longer a clue. They turn into a dead end.

Voices
stream from the open window. They become louder and more frantic. Jada hops off
the bench and runs over to see. “They’re coming back from the river!” she
says.
  

Tahari
nods. “Yes. I just sent out the order. I’ve asked everyone to drop whatever
they’re doing, pack their things, and leave the Tower by nightfall.”

The
message finally streams along the bottom of my retina. “Emergency order.
Prepare for evacuation. Repeat. Collect all essentials and prepare for
evacuation.”

Next to
me, Wes’s face is as blank as mine. He walks over to the window, wraps his
hands around Jada’s shoulders, and whispers softly in her ear.

“You too,”
Tahari says. “Join your family and leave. Before it’s too late.”
 

I nod and
storm out of the office.

Athel
, I think.
I have to find Athel
.