A dusty ray of sunshine shone through the end of the pass. My grandfather held up a hand to silence us, then peered around the edge. While we waited, the Monitors closed their eyes, trying to sense the presence of the Undead. I felt nothing except for the strange sensation of someone watching me through the crowd. I peeked open one eye. The only other person with her head up was Clementine. She shot me a questioning look. Did you do this? she mouthed.
I shook my head. Then smiled.
My grandfather returned, his face grim, and broke us into groups. “We’ll split up and comb the side of the mountain. Whoever stole our gear couldn’t have gotten far.” He directed each group into opposite directions, some toward the end of the tunnel, others back the way we came from. I watched the groups depart, Clementine leaving with her father, until I was the only one left.
“What about me?” I asked.
“You stay here. That way I know you won’t get into any trouble.”
Stay here? To do nothing by myself while everyone else got to search for my friends? Over his shoulder, light streamed in from the end of the passage. Theo and Anya were somewhere out there. I had to find them.
Reading my thoughts, my grandfather continued, “Mr. Harbes and Ms. Vine are guarding either side of the pass, in case you get any creative ideas.”
I clenched my jaw and watched the outline of his silhouette blur as he strode off into the day. With nothing to do, I sat on a rock nearby and shone my flashlight around the ceiling of the cave. I waited, hoping I would hear Dante’s voice echo off the walls again, but the pass was quiet. How had it happened last night? Did the voices only come out at night, or had I done something to coax them out?
I held the flashlight up into the rocks above me and let his name slip from my lips. “Dante.”
I waited for it to refract back to me, its letters jumbled and strange. Ante—Ente—Enne—Renée.
The echo still worked. I parted my lips, hoping I could somehow conjure his voice through the mountain walls, when I heard someone call out my name.
“Renée!”
I spun around, trying to see where it had come from. Though it belonged to a boy, it didn’t have the same distant echo as the voice I’d heard the night before. It was too loud, too real, as if there were a person perched high up in the alcove.
I shone my light in its direction, scanning the rocks until a pair of eyes reflected back at me. I flicked off the light. A scuffle of footsteps. A grunt. Then a girl’s voice. “Ow!”
I turned my light back on to find Theo and Anya standing before me, wincing from the brightness of the beam. They each wore a crisp new outfit: Theo in a tan expedition shirt and a pair of expensive weatherproof pants, both of which were slightly too big on him. A wool cap was pulled over his brown hair. Beside him, Anya wore black winter leggings and a thick wool sweater. I paused, taking in her outfit once more. I recognized those leggings, that sweater, even her scarf. My face burst into a smile. They were mine.
“Put that thing down,” Theo said, shielding his eyes. The yellow bruise from our fight was still visible on his right cheek.
“You’ve been in here this entire time?”
“Of course we have,” Theo said. “And what a productive twelve hours it’s been.” He sat on a rock beside me. “I have to be honest, though. I was a little disappointed in you when I snuck into your grandfather’s tent and found all these goodies that you had neglected to take.” He patted his bag. “No, instead, we had to follow you up a snowcapped mountain, sneak into your camp at night, go into your grandfather’s tent while he was sleeping, and take them from him.”
Anya rolled her eyes, as if she’d been hearing that line for hours. She looked thinner than she had before, her face wan. Though perhaps it was just my clothes; I wasn’t used to seeing her in clothes that weren’t skintight.
“Goodies?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, just the little black box from the lake, the elders’ secret caviar and champagne stock, though I was more than a little upset when I tried to eat a spoonful and remembered that my taste was dull. But this—this was the real prize.” Theo slipped something out of my pocket. My grandfather’s notepad. “This was sitting in your grandfather’s tent the entire time you were with him. Tsk, tsk.” He rapped his fingers against the pad. “Have I not taught you anything?”
The sight of it brought back all those hours I sat in the car, watching my grandfather take notes. What had he been writing?
Theo sighed. “And then, of course, we couldn’t take just his things. We had to take everything, so no one would suspect we were targeting just the elders. We needed supplies, anyway. The Monitors just left us in the middle of nowhere with nothing. We let you have your shovels, though. We aren’t trying to kill anyone or anything.”
“Well, they didn’t exactly leave us in the middle of nowhere,” Anya corrected. “We left them.”
Theo brushed her off. “Same outcome.”
“What did you do with it all?”
“Your grandfather was right. We didn’t go far.” Theo gazed up at the steep rocks around us. “We barely went anywhere at all.”
“You hid it all up there?” I said in awe.
“It was my idea,” Anya said. “We didn’t want to leave any tracks in the snow. Though Theo did most of the lifting.”
“We’ve been playing this game for days,” Theo said. “We’ve been following you ever since we stole the car back from our Monitor escorts.”
“What?” I asked. “How?”
“Well, my first idea was that Anya should drug them with one of her famous elixirs—”
“They don’t work like that,” Anya snapped.
Theo acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “—but apparently, they don’t work like that.” He tapped his finger against his lower lip. “Do they work at all? Now that is the million-dollar question.”
Anya crossed her arms. “Of course they work,” she said. “Maybe not on you, maybe your internal chemistry just isn’t right. Your body can tell when you’re not taking a treatment seriously. Perhaps that’s the problem.”
Theo raised an eyebrow, clearly amused. “So they work on you? Your hearing, your sense of smell, your sense of taste—they’re all back to normal?”
Anya frowned. “There’s definitely a difference,” she said. “Not a big one, but I think they’re definitely getting better.”
Theo rolled his eyes. “All I’m saying is that I’ve been taking a concoction of those pills of yours for days now, and nothing has changed.”
I hated to side with Theo, but he was right; her elixirs hadn’t helped my senses in the slightest.
“Anyway,” Theo continued, “so my next best idea was to break out the old-fashioned way. Our escorts made the mistake of locking us inside the car while they went to the bathroom, not realizing one doesn’t always need keys to start an engine.”
“We followed you up to that castle,” Anya said. “All we had to do was park our car behind the others. No one even noticed.”
“It was pretty boring, though, sleeping in the car, so I decided to stir things up a bit,” Theo said.
“Stir things up?” I said. “But nothing happened while we were at the castle.”
Theo raised an eyebrow. “The letter from Monsieur that mysteriously arrived for your grandfather? That wasn’t Monsieur. That was us.”
“What?” I cried, a little too loudly. “But the envelope and the paper—where did you get it?”
“Snagged it from the hotel. They always have stuff like that hanging around.”
“And his handwriting,” I continued. “It looked perfect.”
Anya beamed. “That was my work.”
“I wanted to give your grandfather a little spook,” Theo said.
“But how did you know what to write? Do you know what he’s up to—what the elders are up to? Because I overheard them talking. They know where the Liberum are. They’ve been tracking them for years, and using them to find the N
etherworld.”
Theo tilted his head, impressed. “So you did figure something out,” he said with a grin. “I have to say, I didn’t think it would happen.”
“But how did you—”
“That story will take all night,” Theo said, and glanced at Anya.
“What we wanted to tell you,” she said, “is that while we were following you, we stumbled across an Undead camp.”
“Undead?” I said. “When?”
“Late last night,” Theo said. “We had been following you until we reached the third point, but after that, the landscape became so barren that we couldn’t risk hiking directly behind you. So we trekked a little farther down the mountain, walking parallel to you until night fell, giving us cover. It was then, when we made our way back up toward the tunnel, that we saw them.”
Late last night. That must have been right after I’d heard Dante’s voice echoing off the walls of the cave.
“Was Dante there? Was he okay?”
Anya wrung her fingers together the way she did when she had to tell me something unsavory. “Yes.”
My chest collapsed with relief, but Anya didn’t seem to share my excitement.
“The Liberum weren’t there,” she continued. “I couldn’t feel them anywhere.”
Dante had escaped, I realized, excitement stirring within me. His plan had worked. He had taken the chest from the Liberum and left their camp.
“He was sitting with a group of Undead boys. At first we thought they were keeping him against his will,” Anya said. “But he looked happy. They were talking and laughing. It was like he was one of them.”
My stomach tightened. Dante laughing with Undead boys? It didn’t make sense. “He isn’t one of them,” I said. “There must be an explanation. I know him. He wouldn’t do that. Maybe he had converted a few of them to his side.”
But Anya only bit her lip. “We crept closer and listened to them. He was telling them about the Monitors. About where they were going and how to find you. He was helping them.”
Her words made me sink back. “Are you sure it was him?” I asked. “Because he would never do that. He could have been pretending to be on their side so that they wouldn’t hurt him. Or—”
“That’s an awful lot of information to divulge,” Theo said. “And he wasn’t lying. Everything he said was accurate. Details about me, about Anya, about Clementine. It didn’t sound like he was trying to appease them.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t let myself believe that.
“He’s been aging,” Theo said. “I’ve noticed it; you must have, too. The way his eyes kept clouding when he was angry. The way he stiffened, his skin hollowing—”
“I trust him,” I said, though my lips quivered.
Before Theo could respond, I heard a shout ripple in from the other side of the pass. My grandfather’s dark outline eclipsed the sunlight pouring in through the mouth of the tunnel.
Anya backed away.
“We have to go,” Theo said.
“What about the sealed box?” I asked.
“It’s safer with us,” Theo said. “Read this, and you’ll see why.” He handed me the spiral pad he’d taken from my grandfather’s tent.
In the distance, my grandfather turned on his flashlight.
Anya receded into the darkness, Theo following her. “We’ll find you tonight,” he said, letting the darkness fold itself around him until all that was left was his echo fading into gibberish as it bounced off the rocks.
I slid the notebook into my coat and sat down on the rocks, just as the beam from my grandfather’s light searched the dirt floor of the cavern.
He loomed over me, the mist of his breath vanishing into the cold air. He shone his light at the rocks surrounding us, until he let it rest on me. I winced.
“I heard voices,” he said. “Who were you talking to?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, hoping he couldn’t see the outline of his notepad through my coat. “No one. It was probably just the echo.” Corroborating my story, the cavern reflected my words back to us, contorting them until they sounded like they belonged to someone else.
My grandfather squinted at me. “The Liberum are drifting,” he said finally. “We have to press on with the little gear we have left. I’ve already alerted the others.”
He took one last glance at the inside of the cave, shining his flashlight just over the spot where Theo and Anya had emerged minutes before. I hoisted my bag to my shoulders, mouthing them a silent good-bye as I followed my grandfather out into the daylight.
CHAPTER 13
The Red Spade
S OURCE: JEREMY B. AGE: THIRTEEN. Undead for five years.
I stole glimpses at the most recent entry in my grandfather’s notebook while we hiked across the alpine ridge toward the floating peak we’d seen from the third point.
Enrolled in Gottfried Academy: September 2011.
My grandfather led the way with a newfound vigor, using the pull of the Undead to guide us. Without the chest, Pruneaux, or Dante to help lead them, the Undead were slowing; I could feel the gap between them and us shrinking.
But if Dante wasn’t with them, then where was he? Every few steps I searched the white expanse of mountains below us for a dark speck moving over the snow, waiting for his vacancy to reach out to me through the wind. Theo and Anya couldn’t have been right. They must have misheard him. After all, their hearing had dulled, too...
I slid my grandfather’s notebook out of my pocket and continued reading.
Recruited on November the 24th, 2011. Sent as source on December the 12th, 2011. Questioned on December the 22nd, 2011.
Recruited, and sent as a source? That could only mean one thing. I squinted at my grandfather’s handwriting, making sure I had read his notes correctly. But before I could turn the page, Mr. Harbes glanced over his shoulder at me. “What are you doing back there?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just looking for a tissue.”
He frowned, and dug through his pocket until he pulled out a crumpled bit of napkin. “Here. Now hurry up. The sooner we catch up to the Liberum, the sooner we can go home.”
It wasn’t until after we camped and finished a meager dinner of rice and canned beans that I was able to sneak back to my tent. But when I flipped to the second page of the notebook, someone ripped open the flap of my tent.
I slammed the cover shut and thrust it beneath my sleeping bag just as a dark, heart-shaped face appeared in the entrance. Clementine. I relaxed my grip on my shovel. “Was that really necessary?” I whispered.
She rolled her eyes. “You scare too easily,” she said, and after glancing over her shoulder, she climbed inside.
“Turn off your flashlight,” she said to me. “We can’t have two lights on in here or they might suspect there are two people.”
“You turn off yours,” I said. “This is my tent.”
Clementine shook her head as if she were doing me a favor. “Fine.” She inspected the blue nylon of the tent. “This is where you’ve been sleeping this whole time?” she said with a grimace.
“It’s a tent,” I said. “Is yours really that different?”
“It’s bigger,” she said, and wiped away a bit of dirt beneath her legs. “And a lot cleaner.”
I clenched my jaw, trying to hold my tongue. “So what do you want?”
“I’ve been watching you,” she said, her eyes sharp. “You’ve been acting weird all day. You know something.”
I slid the notepad out from under the sleeping bag, lowered my voice, and told her about Theo and Anya, about how they had visited me in the cavern and given me this. I left out what they had said about Dante. Although she had aligned herself with me now, Clementine was still a Monitor, and a fierce one at that. I didn’t want to give her any reason to change her mind.
She leaned over my shoulder and together, we flipped through my grandfather’s notepad.
Stephen L. Age: fourteen. Undead for eight years. Enrolled in Gottfried A
cademy: September 2011. Recruited on November the 7th, 2011. Sent as a source on November the 14th, 2011. Questioned on December the 1st, 2011.
Notes on the questioning:
Source confirmed that the Liberum were searching for the clues left behind by the Nine Sisters, which they believe will lead them to the Cartesian Map. Source also confirmed that the Liberum have a potential lead on the first clue, which they obtained through force, and are now moving on foot to Montreal to find it.
Source was put to rest December the 5th, 2011.
Clementine furrowed her brow. “Does this mean what I think it does?”
“I think so,” I whispered, a knot forming in my stomach. I flipped through the pages. Atop each entry was the name of an Undead boy, followed by a slew of similar notes.
“The elders weren’t just spying on the Liberum by following them, and turning a few of their boys to their side,” Clementine said. “Your grandfather was using his time as the headmaster of Gottfried Academy to recruit Undead boys to spy on the Liberum for him. He was using students to help get more information on the Netherworld.”
I swallowed. “Then he put them to rest so they couldn’t tell anyone.”
Clementine flipped back in time to the earlier entries. There were dozens and dozens of them, some dating back over thirty years. “Wait,” she said. “But your grandfather has only been the headmaster of Gottfried since September. So what are these from?”
“Actually, my grandfather was the headmaster of Gottfried twice,” I said. “First in the 1970s.”
“It couldn’t possibly be 1972,” Clementine said, pointing to the date of the first entry.
“That sounds about right,” I said. “He was the headmaster for seventeen years. There was some sort of scandal there. A fire. He resigned and went back to the High Court. Then last year, he returned to Gottfried Academy to resume his job as headmaster, limiting the school to Undead students only.”