“Last night someone stole all of our gear and supplies. All they left behind were our Spades, burial tools, and a few cans of food.”
“What?” I said, confused. “Why would anyone steal all of our things, but leave us with all of our weapons?”
“I was hoping you would have an answer to that question,” said my grandfather.
“Me?” I let out a laugh. “Why would I know who took all of our things? I just woke up. All of my things are gone, too.”
My grandfather squinted at me, trying to figure out if I was lying. “They took that strange black box of yours, too. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“The box? Wasn’t that in
your
tent?”
My grandfather gritted his teeth together, as if he had been asked that question one too many times this morning. “It isn’t anymore. Now, I’m going to ask you one more time. Do you know who was behind this?”
This time, I didn’t have to lie. I was just as confused as they were. “No.”
My grandfather frowned. “Pack the remainder of your things,” he said. “We leave in one hour.”
I nodded and looked down at my empty tent, when I noticed a necklace, wrapped twice around my wrist like a bracelet. It hadn’t been there before. I froze, suddenly understanding. I touched the irregular brown beads. At first glance, they looked like they were made of wood, though I knew that they weren’t. They were a string of beans. And at their center hung the soft paw of a cat. For health and protection.
I bit my lip, trying to hide my excitement. Anya had made a necklace like this one for me just before I left St. Clément. She had told me it was supposed to bring me good luck and protection. I turned my wrist until I could see the clasp: a hasty knot tied into the twine. Could she have come here in the middle of the night and tied it on herself?
I realized then that I did have the answer to my grandfather’s question. I straightened my face, knowing the other Monitors were watching me, but inside I was beaming. There was only one person who could have snuck into our tents without us knowing and stolen all of our things. Theo. I remembered his tarot reading. He had decided to come back. And only one person would have risked sneaking into my tent and waking me, just to tie a bracelet around my wrist for good luck. Anya.
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 Netherworld.”
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.”