“Will do!” said Kwan, jumping up.
“What’s the fastest way to get in trouble at a casino?… Win!” he said to his friends as they headed out. “It’s the only thing you’re not allowed to do.”
Leira rejoined them before they reached the exit. “Better not go out that way,” she said. “Look—”
The bouncer was still standing by the door, watching people go in and out. Meanwhile, behind them, the security officer was standing in front of the casino area, arms crossed.
There was only one safe option: to walk deeper into the nightclub and sit down for the magic show.
They settled into their seats just as the magician walked onstage. He was now wearing his top hat, and he looked… better! Definitely better! Much, much better, really. Amber had seen to it that his suit was, well, slightly less rumpled, anyway. And with the stage lights lending their sparkle, and with the exhilaration of a live theatrical event putting a flush in his cheeks, I believe you could begin to see just how terribly handsome and dashing I—I mean he!—was beneath his sunglasses.
“Welcome to an evening of magic and mystery,” he said with an engaging smile that would have won you over immediately if you’d been there, I promise. “I come to you from the exotic East… Hoboken, New Jersey.”*
The audience laughed heartily at this hilarious joke. Or, to put it another way, they smiled uncomfortably at this somewhat awkward witticism. (What can I say? I, er, Max-Ernest was feeling very anxious and perhaps not delivering his magician’s patter with his usual aplomb.)
“For my first trick, I would like to introduce you to my assistant, Quiche.”
Bowing slightly, the magician removed his hat—and revealed his pet rabbit sitting on his head.
At this charming visual joke, the audience laughed much louder, although I admit that a few of them might have thought that the rabbit was sitting there by accident. (It was not an accident; the magician had rehearsed this joke with his rabbit over and over to get it right, suffering even the occasional indignity of rabbit, shall we call them, pellets in his hair, not to mention more than a few scratches on his nose.) The magician played along by pretending to be surprised. Then, in his inimitably witty style, he performed a series of tricks so clever and inventive you wouldn’t believe it if I described them to you. I will only tell you that at the end of these magnificent wonderments, the rabbit was again sitting atop the magician’s head—but this time Quiche was wearing a miniature top hat on his own furry little cranium!
Well, what do you think of that?! Not only an astonishing feat, but I daresay an adorable one as well! Do you not agree?
Is it any wonder that after such a demanding, tour de force performance, the magician would get a little confused and distressed when suddenly a group of rambunctious kids in his audience all stood up and started shouting, “Fire!… Fire!… Fire!”
It was Brett’s idea—whispered to the others—that they shout “Fire!” as a way of getting everyone to exit the room with them. What they needed was the cover of a crowd. Otherwise, the bouncer would have picked them off one by one as they left.
Unfortunately, before panic and mayhem could properly ensue, a young woman in a yellow evening dress ran up onstage, crying “False alarm! False alarm!”
“Oh no! It’s Amber, my dad’s fiancée,” said Brett under his breath to Clay. He tried to hide his face behind his arm.
“Don’t worry,” Amber said to the audience, smiling her dazzling smile. “If there really were a fire, the alarm would go off, right? And the sprinklers in the ceiling would turn on. But you’re all dry, aren’t you? And thank goodness for that!”
Her reassurances worked; everyone sat down. Disappointed, Brett and his friends were forced to sit down, too.
But not before—for one short but significant second—the magician raised his sunglasses and looked at Clay with an expression that was a peculiar combination of surprise, pride, relief, disbelief, love, guilt, and a certain wry humor about the odd turns that life sometimes takes. At least I assume all those things were conveyed in the magician’s expression; I know he felt them.
By the time Clay looked back at him, however, the magician’s sunglasses were again resting on his nose and he was no longer looking Clay’s way.
Clay stared at the back of the magician’s head, wondering if it was possible.… He had not seen a magic show in the two years since his brother left. Or not a magic show of the bunny-in-hat variety. So of course he’d been thinking about his brother from the moment he sat down. But he figured he was only imagining the resemblance. It seemed too unlikely a coincidence that it should really be his brother standing onstage in front of him. Besides, his brother’s suits were always wrinkled, and his hair was always sticking up. Max-Ernest was a mess; this magician seemed, well, a hair more put together.
Still, he was almost certain the magician had been looking his way. And why else would he single out Clay?
“Sorry about the interruption, darling,” said Amber to the magician. “Please continue your fantastic show!”
He smiled. “Of course. And thank you for volunteering! Every magician likes a lovely young woman to assist with his tricks. And I have the perfect trick for you! Do you remember Gateway to the Invisible, Amber?” He gestured to a dark mirrored cabinet standing behind him. “These days I do a version called Up in Smoke. But in honor of the island nearby, I think we should call it Lost in the Vog. How ’bout that?”
Amber stared at him: “I knew I knew you! You’re—”
But before she could say his name, the magician waved his wand over his hat, and suddenly—“Abracadabra!”—the hat was on fire, and Amber was engulfed in a big puff of smoke.
When the smoke dissipated, she was gone.
“Huh. Where did she go?” said the magician, with the kind of satisfied smile that only comes when you disappear a lifelong enemy.
He held up the flaming hat. “Oh no! It looks like there really was a fire all along! Everybody, run! Now! Get out of here before it’s too late! Fire! Fire!”
He leaned down and whispered to his rabbit. “Sorry about the hat. We’ll get it patched.”
As the panicked audience started to leave, the kids looked at one another in confusion.
“That’s not a real fire, just an act…” said Pablo.
“Why is he helping us like this?” asked Leira.
Because he’s my brother, Clay thought.
It had to be Max-Ernest. It was the only explanation.
“I dunno what his deal is,” said Kwan. “But don’t look a gift horse and all that—let’s bail.”
As the group ran out, now protected by the crowd, Clay glanced back at the magician, who was looking at him again from behind his sunglasses.
Clay wanted to run over and hug him. Or hit him. He wasn’t sure which. Now that he was sure it was his brother, the old anger was returning in force. Maybe Max-Ernest had gotten rid of Amber for them, but his brother had also abandoned him. He’d only contacted Clay once in two years. And now he didn’t even have the courage to say hello?
Clay was about to go confront Max-Ernest when Leira tugged on his sleeve. “C’mon, there’s no time to dawdle! If we want to save Ariella, we have to run!”
He ran.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
ESCAPE ROUTINE
It didn’t take Amber more than three minutes to escape from the old trick cabinet, but they were three long, long minutes in which she was forced to relive a terrible humiliation of her early teen years.
By the time she was free, Max-Ernest was gone, and she was very, very angry.
If only she’d recognized him a minute earlier, she could have had him dragged offstage by his ears and fed him to the dragon! Better yet, she could have thrown Max-Ernest into the brig with that moralistic sourpuss Captain Abad. Ha. He would die of boredom! Instead, Amber thought, she was going to have to hunt everywhere on the boat for him.
The idea that her nerdy middle school
nemesis had returned after so many years to be a fly in the ointment of her life once again—ugh, it was enough to make her break out in hives!
She should have known he’d still be working with that wacky group of do-gooder crackpots, the Terces Society. (It spells secret backward—how obvious can you get? And those poor pathetic souls thought they were so clever!) Why else would Max-Ernest be on the ship if not for them? Funny, in the old days, when she had first learned of the Terces Society and their enemies, the Midnight Sun, all the players had loomed so large in her imagination. How harmless everyone appeared now in retrospect! Not just Max-Ernest and that crazy, pointy-eared friend of his, Cassandra, but also Yo-Yoji (why did she ever think he was so cool?) and that kooky old magician—what was his name?—Pietro. Max-Ernest certainly seemed to be following in Pietro’s dilapidated footsteps, didn’t he?
She could only imagine what Antoinette would say if she were to see Max-Ernest now. The French were cruelly snobbish, very strict about their manners and customs, none more so than the grande madame Antoinette Mauvais; and there had been many times over the last ten years when Amber had regretted making herself Antoinette’s ward. She knew she could never fully please the ancient French woman. Well, if Max-Ernest was the alternative, she was more than glad to have thrown in her lot with Ms. Mauvais and the Midnight Sun. And now Amber was a grown woman herself, free—or relatively free—to manage her own operations in her own way, with no one looking over her shoulder. Of course, Ms. Mauvais was always looking over Amber’s shoulder—she was always looking over everyone’s shoulder—but at least it was from afar.…
How much did Max-Ernest know about the dragon, or about their plans for it, Amber wondered. Had he seen the habitat? Those were the questions of the moment. It didn’t matter so much what he knew personally. She would see to it that he never interfered with her affairs again. But whatever he knew, others might know as well. Those kids in the audience, for example. Max-Ernest had helped them escape. Why? What were they up to? And why were they with Brett junior?
She knew that kid would be a problem as soon as she’d met him. Oh, why couldn’t he have just drowned like everyone else who gets pushed off a ship!
“Now, now, Amber, don’t turn into the evil stepmother,” she chided herself. “You’re the nice one, remember? You’re Cinderella. You’re Sleeping Beauty. You’re Snow White…”
Okay, I’ll move on. Amber is not our main character, and she deserves no more page space. Forgive me—she’s just too much fun to write about. How often do you get to have total control over your enemy’s brain?*
Let’s go back to a much more heroic and likable character, whose thoughts and actions I have a somewhat closer knowledge of: Brett, who was by now back in the Lido Deck Snack Shack kitchen.
The Jell-O parfaits were still there, just as beautiful and tempting as Brett remembered—but, alas, much fewer in number. With the ship stalled, maybe the parfaits were in greater demand than they had been before. Or maybe some other kid had discovered them and single-handedly eaten half the ship’s parfait supply. Brett hadn’t had a decent meal in days, and he would have loved nothing more than to dive into the parfaits, but he knew there wasn’t time. Almost tearing up with regret, he forced himself to turn away.
“That’s it,” he said, pointing to the steel door beneath the red light.
Leira slid the security officer’s ID card through the slot, then tried the door; it wouldn’t open. She tried again.
“It’s not working,” she said, gritting her teeth with frustration. “Maybe he didn’t have a high enough access level.”
“Or maybe he already reported it stolen, and it was canceled,” said Kwan.
“Just try again,” said Clay, who was unwilling to believe they’d gotten this far only to have a bad card.
Leira slid the card through the slot again.
Click.
Everyone smiled.
They entered cautiously, not knowing what they’d find.
As far as Brett could tell, there were just as many live animals in the hold as before. But their mood had changed drastically. The animals cowered in their pens, huddled together, as far away as possible from the shipping container—and from the terrifying predator inside. Doubtless, this was the first dragon they’d ever come across, but they knew instinctively that they were meant to be its food.
Clay stepped up to the container, put his eye to one of the airholes, and was immediately enraged by what he saw.
Ariella, the most majestic of beasts, in a monstrous cage.
The muzzle was back on the dragon’s mouth, and its arms and tail were locked in manacles, but it was awake and could turn its head just enough for its big golden eye to meet Clay’s smaller brown one.
In this hard metal environment, the dragon’s eye looked meltingly soft.
“Hi, Ariella,” said Clay quietly. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get you out.”
The dragon’s response was characteristically prideful; translated into human speech, it was something like, Nobody lets us out; we come out when we choose to come out, you pathetic little human. But it was not nearly as harsh as that makes it sound.
The dragon, Clay sensed, was strangely at peace with its situation. Perhaps it was just tired of fighting, but Clay suspected that Ariella was taking the long view. He couldn’t get over the feeling that the dragon had willingly been caught, or at least that the dragon had known what was going to happen. It was as though some predetermined script were being played out, and Ariella was only mildly interested in watching the action, having already seen the ending.
“Hey, you—step away from that cage!”
Clay wheeled around to see two men entering the room. They both had guns in their hands—pointed in his direction.
“All of you—stand in a row with your hands up!”
“Are you police?” asked Pablo. “Are we being arrested?”
“Never mind that—just be quiet!”
One of the men spoke into a walkie-talkie: “They’re in here, just like you said they’d be.”
He listened to a voice on the other end, his eyebrows raised in incredulity. “You’re sure?… Okay, you got it, boss.”
He turned to the other man. “She says to lock ’em in the cage with the dragon.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. Most secure place on the ship, she says.”
His companion laughed. “She’s got a point there.… All right, kids, if there’s any funny business, I’m going to take that muzzle off the dragon as soon as I throw you in with it.”
A few minutes later, the kids were all sitting on the cold steel floor of the container, trying not to be too alarmed by the terrible rumbling coming from somewhere in the dragon’s stomach—and the terrible stench.
“It’s like being in a car with my dog,” Kwan whispered. “Only worse.”
“What do you mean?” said Jonah.
“The farting. Duh. This dragon is lethal.”
Kwan’s friends glared at him. Nobody knew how much the dragon understood—or what would offend it.
“Don’t worry,” said Leira to the dragon. “He didn’t mean it.”
“Psst! Clay…” said a familiar voice.
Clay glanced up from Secrets of the Occulta Draco, which he had been reading like his life depended on it—because it very well might.
He saw an eye staring at him through one of the airholes. An eye remarkably like his own.
“What’s the bad word?” said the voice.
“Max-Ernest!?”
It was his brother. Bad word was like a secret handshake they shared. Or had shared, in the days when they shared things like secret handshakes.
“Yep, it’s me. Or my eyeball, anyway. It’s great to see you.”
“Yeah…”
There were so many things Clay had wanted to say to his brother over the past two years, but the only thing he could think to say at the moment was the obvious:
“What are yo
u doing here? On the ship, I mean.”
“You’re not going to believe this,” said Max-Ernest, “but actually, weirdly, why I’m here, it’s just a coincidence, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. How ’bout that? I mean, of course it has to do with you, in a way, it affects you, and right now, I’m right here in this exact place to see you, but—”
“You’re on the ship for another reason?” Clay finished for him.
His brother was a man of words—many, many words—and sometimes you had to force him to come to the point.
“Right,” said Max-Ernest, relieved. “I’m following some people, some bad people—”
“The Midnight Sun.”
“Right,” said Max-Ernest, a little surprised. “We know they’re building something somewhere, something big, like a stadium or a coliseum or something. They call it—”
“The Sanctuary.”
“Right,” said Max-Ernest, a little more surprised. “And anything the Midnight Sun is putting that much effort into can’t be good. Unfortunately, we don’t know where it is, except that it’s in a desert somewhere. I’m on this ship hoping they’ll lead me to it. And then we can figure out what it’s for—”
“I know what it’s for,” said Clay.
“You do?” said Max-Ernest, even more surprised than he’d been before.
“Uh-huh. Look—” Clay stepped back so his brother could see inside.
“What is that?!” Max-Ernest’s one visible eye blinked in surprise.
“Oh, that?” said Clay blithely. “That’s a dragon.”
“A what?!”
“A dragon. You really didn’t know?”
“Max-Ernest! How convenient to find you here!” sang a voice from across the cargo room.
“Uh-oh, it’s Amber!” Max-Ernest whispered. “I’d better go.”
Amber was flanked by two members of Brett’s father’s crew. They walked casually in the direction of the container.
“You’re just going to leave us here?” said Clay, aghast.
“Oh, right!” Max-Ernest surreptitiously unlatched the container door. “Okay, when I slide the door open, everybody run.”