Omega City (7 page)

“Oh, hush,” said Savannah, smiling like it was her birthday. “We're in.”

We made arrangements for Nate and Howard to pick us up in the morning, then went out to tell Dad about our new “school project.”

“Deep Creek Lake, huh?” he asked, packing away the last of the camping gear. “What a coincidence. Fiona was talking about it today, too. That's actually what reminded me to check on our camping gear.”

“Really,” my brother said flatly.

“Yep,” Dad said. “She's a pretty good researcher, for a beginner. She told me something even I didn't know—apparently, Dr. Underberg's father used to have a cabin out there.”

“Really?” I said, my tone far more interested than Eric's. If Fiona was asking about the forest, maybe she knew another way to get to the treasure without the missing diary page. What if we'd gone through all of that trouble to calculate the location and it was really just an old family cabin? Worse, what if I dragged everyone out there and Fiona had already taken the battery?

“She said it's impossible to find, though.”

That was a relief.

“The road doesn't even exist anymore.”

Nonexistent road, check. Good thing we had the exact coordinates.

“Did she, um, have any idea how to find it?” Eric asked.

“No. Seemed pretty frustrated, too.” Dad shrugged. “Maybe we'll go look for his cabin next summer.”

Or maybe we'd find it a lot sooner than that.

WHEN NATE'S RED PICKUP PULLED IN TO OUR DRIVEWAY ON SATURDAY morning, the General Tso's Pizza sign was nowhere to be seen. I almost missed it. Savannah was already waiting with us on the porch, adjusting the zipper of her pink velour jacket and smoothing her hair. I think she'd even put on mascara. I was just wearing jeans and a long-sleeve top. Eric had found a bit of rope and was practicing his sailing knots, which was something I hadn't seen him do since Dad sold off his dinghy and made us live in a tent.

Savannah, Eric, and I approached the truck as Howard got out of the passenger side and pulled the seat forward so we could all climb in back. “I read the Underberg book last
night,” he said instead of greeting us. “All of it—even the parts that aren't about the space program.”

“Yay?” I climbed in the backseat.

“You know, Howard,” Savannah said sweetly, “if you want to talk to Gillian about the book, I'd be happy to sit shotgun and let you have my seat.”

No!
I mouthed at her. I could already imagine thirty miles of space talk.

“Forget it,” said Nate. He was sitting up front, his hands draped casually over the steering wheel. “Howard sits up here. I need him to navigate.”

Savannah pouted, then hopped on the bench next to me. Eric shook his head and climbed in last.

On the road, Savannah leaned forward between the two bucket seats and tried to talk to Nate, who mostly grunted one-word replies. Meanwhile, Howard peppered me with questions about Dr. Underberg, and what, precisely, we were looking for.

“But the author of the book”—no matter how many times I reminded Howard that the author was my dad, it didn't seem to sink in—“didn't discover why the government buried all the information about Underberg and his battery. The story has no ending.”

“That stuff is classified,” I said.

“You can still make an educated guess.”

I wasn't so sure about that. Everything Dad wrote was
fact, and he'd still gotten in plenty of trouble.

Eric stared out the window as the fields flashed by. “Great. So the publisher didn't pull Dad's book because of a conspiracy. It was just that it sucked.”

“Did not!” I snapped.

“It doesn't make sense,” Howard said. “If the battery was going to save all this energy and money and help the environment and everything else, why didn't the government get behind it?”

“Dad says people in power sometimes work against the public's best interests,” I said.

“That doesn't make sense,” Howard insisted.

“But that's how it works anyway,” Nate broke in. “In history class we learned how Henry Ford and other car manufacturers convinced President Eisenhower back in the fifties that highways were the best way to escape a nuclear attack.”

“Probably better than hiding under your desk,” said Eric.

Nuclear attack again? Was every decision made by the government in the twentieth century because people were afraid of getting nuked? I looked out at the pale blue sky. I couldn't imagine living under such a shadow.

“Whether it actually would work is beside the point,” said Nate. “It got the government to build highways instead of public transportation systems. Trains and subways
might save energy and money, just like that battery, but it didn't help Ford sell cars.”

“So whoever buried the Underberg battery had something they wanted the government to use instead,” I said.

“It still doesn't make sense,” Howard said. “And it isn't about space, either.”

I bit my tongue. Why did everything have to be about space with him? I know he'd helped us, and that he was the reason we even had a ride today, but, honestly, a little bit of Howard went a long way.

“I mean, that puzzle you found was clearly astronomical, but Underberg wasn't an astronomer. He did do some rocket science, but he mainly worked on life support for the astronauts. Not just suits, but everything that had to do with living in space, eating, breathing—”

“Pooping,” Nate volunteered. Savannah sat back in her seat, wrinkling her nose. I snickered. Oh no, her idol said the P-word.

“And the military,” Eric added. The submarine research had always been my brother's favorite part. “He built things for guys living in subs at the bottom of the Pacific for months and months.”

“All kinds of survival stuff. Astronauts, submarine stuff, nuclear war preparations . . .”

“So why did he stop?” Nate asked. “Did they find out he was a Russian spy or something?”

“No!” I practically shouted. “Underberg hated the Russians. He thought they were going to destroy the world with nuclear bombs. You know, if the USA didn't do it first.”

“Sounds like a good cover story to me.” Nate pulled off the road and into a service station. “I need to fill up. You each owe me two bucks for gas, by the way.”

I got out of the truck on the driver's side to give Nate six dollars. Since this whole trip had been my idea, the least I could do was pay Savannah's and my brother's way.

“You're the ringleader of this operation, huh?” he asked as I handed over the money. “Why don't you tell me what this is really all about?”

“What did Howard say?”

“Nice try. He said you were trying to find a scale model of the solar system built by a crazy Cold War scientist.” Nate rolled his shoulders. “Howard doesn't lie—not to me. But though my brother might do that kind of thing for fun on Saturdays, I don't know what the rest of you are doing out here. It's not a school project. That much I know for sure.”

I looked away. Off in the distance, a dark SUV was coming down the road, kicking up dust across the asphalt.

“Hey.” Nate waved a hand in front of me. “My brother—he doesn't have the easiest time of it at school. And if you three are messing with him—”

He might have said something else. I'm not sure. Because that SUV pulled in to the parking lot, and sitting in the front seat was none other than Fiona Smythe.

I SCRAMBLED BACK into the cab of the truck before she could see me. “Eric! Head down!”

Eric, with all the training of a sailor who knows to duck when a boom comes flying at him, flattened against the seat.

“It's Fiona,” I whispered. “She just pulled up.”

Savannah leaned over me to see out the window. “Oh, she's even prettier than you said. Except I don't know about her fashion sense. What's up with the black jumpsuit? And who are the two guys in the car with her?”

Nate stuck his head back inside. “So, you were telling me how this is totally a school project and you aren't about to get my brother into trouble . . . ?”

“Fine.” I slid even farther down in the seat. “The woman in that SUV is my dad's girlfriend, and we're pretty sure she's been stealing stuff from him, and that crazy Cold War scientist we were talking about? She's on a hunt to find the lost prototype of his hundred-year battery and we want to get there first.”

Nate blinked at me. “See? The truth wasn't so hard.” Then he shut the door again.

“Sav,” I hissed. “What's happening?”

“She's getting out of the car and coming over,” Savannah said.

Oh, no. She'd seen us. She'd seen us and she knew.

A second later, I heard Fiona's smarmy voice floating above us. “Excuse me, young man? Can you help us? We seem to be a little lost.”

“Sorry, ma'am,” Nate replied. “I'm not from around here.”

“Have you heard of Charon Way? It's the street I'm looking for, and I don't see it listed on the map.”

“Nope,” Nate said. I peeked over the side of the window. Fiona was indeed wearing some kind of weird military-style black outfit, with a utility belt and everything. The two men with her were dressed similarly, and their vehicle was crammed full of boxes, wires, and ropes.

Howard was mumbling something under his breath.

“What?” I whispered to him, ducking back down.

“Charon,” he repeated. “It's the name of Pluto's largest moon.”

“Really?” I asked. That couldn't be a coincidence. Maybe that was the road that Fiona had been asking Dad about. We were so close. I couldn't let Fiona find that battery first. I strained to hear if Fiona and Nate were saying anything else.

“Though, really, they're more like binary dwarf planets because—”

We were saved from hearing the
because
as Nate got back in the car. “All right, Howard,” he said. “I'm going to drive now, and you're going to tell me where, and blondie here is going to make sure the SUV doesn't follow us, and the other two are going to keep their heads down and explain to me exactly what is going on. Got it?”

“Yes,” we all said, though with varying levels of enthusiasm.

Savannah leaned over me and squeaked in excitement. “He likes my hair.”

“He
described
your hair,” Eric corrected.

“Shut up, you two,” I snapped at them. “Nate, what else did she say?”

“That she was looking for a road that didn't seem to exist.”

So I'd been right. Charon Way was the road near Underberg's old cabin. Fiona was closer on our heels than I'd have liked. Still, she didn't have a precise location and we did. All we had to do was follow the directions on Howard's device and we could find it, road or no road.

Eric gave Nate the short—and extremely skeptical version—of my theory about Fiona and her activities. “So then we went and looked up the torn-off page and we found that riddle, and we gave it to Howard—”

“Howard,” I said. “Which way to get to the location you marked?”

“It's south of here,” he said, pointing to the left. “There doesn't seem to be a direct road. Must be in the woods somewhere.”

Perfect.

Once we were sure we'd left Fiona and her companions behind, Eric and I sat up again.

I looked out the window at the trees flying past, just a short field of grass away. In there, somewhere, was Dr. Underberg's secret. His “last and lasting gift to mankind.” I
had
to find it before Fiona did. If she got her hands on that prototype, I knew she'd never show Dad. His last chance at proof would be gone. My eyes roamed over the grass and brush streaming by, when I saw something that didn't belong.

“Nate!” I cried. “Stop!”

He pulled over and I tumbled out of the car almost before it came to a halt. There, sticking up from the weeds around the soft gravel shoulder, was a broken wooden pole. I spread the stalks of grass around the base, kicking until my foot hit something hard.

There. I pulled the object up. It was an old rusty road sign. The only letters I could make out were
HARO AY
.

CHARON WAY
.

“CHARON WAY,” HOWARD FILLED IN BEHIND ME.

“Yeah, that part I figured out all on my own.” Howard wasn't the only one around here who could work out riddles.

Eric was kicking at the dirt on the shoulder. “And here's the missing road.” He pointed into the field. “Look, you can see where it used to go.”

“So right down there”—I pointed—“is where the old Underberg family cabin is. Or was. Or something.”

Nate was still behind the wheel of his truck, watching us from the window with wary eyes. “Okay, kids, this just went from interesting weekend science project to
interesting start of a horror movie. Back in the car.”

“No way!” I cried. Not when we were so close. The grown-over road beckoned.

“Yes way,” said Nate, in the tone you hear from babysitters and summer-camp counselors. The one that says
I'm totally your friend, except when I'm handing down the discipline
. “Finding a model solar system is boring but harmless. Getting chased by people wearing jumpsuits and driving unmarked black SUVs down a nonexistent road to an abandoned cabin is—well, maybe exciting, but definitely not harmless. I'm not putting any of you in danger.”

“Nate,” Howard protested, turning to his brother. “You
promised
.”

Nate's expression was unreadable, but he stared at his brother for a full two seconds. Howard, surprisingly, stared back.

Right away, Nate's expression softened. “Okay. But you guys have to swear that you'll do exactly as I say.”

We all nodded.

“And that the second I say we're going home, we go home.”

We all nodded again.

He sighed. “I'm going to regret this. I knew as soon as you two girls showed up at the door I was going to regret this. Get in.”

We got in, and Nate backed up and turned down the overgrown road, driving slowly as we rumbled over the thick grass.

“If I hit anything, you all owe me big time.”

“Stop here.” Howard tapped the GPS. “We're less than a kilometer from the location. It's right in the woods.”

As we got out of Nate's truck, I looked back at the road. Were we far enough in to conceal the truck from Fiona and her friends if they drove by? I hoped so.

We picked our way through the tall grass of the field toward the trees. There were signs posted there showing the boundary of the state forest and telling us that hunting and fishing were not allowed. We kept going, silent except for Howard's regular updates on how close we were to the target.

“Ah, this brings me back,” Eric said. “Dust? Check. Boredom? Double check.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “but last summer, we were just wandering around this park. This time we're going somewhere.”

“Somewhere,” Eric echoed skeptically. “Everywhere is
somewhere
.”

“You're such a party pooper,” Savannah said to him.

“Two hundred meters,” Howard intoned, eyes glued to the screen. My heart was racing, even though we were walking at a nice, steady pace. We trailed after him, over
roots and fallen logs and ditches and hills. “One hundred and fifty. Keep your eyes peeled. Remember, we're looking for something really small, like a tennis ball.”

“How about a squirrel?” Eric suggested. “That's the right size.”

It wasn't a squirrel. It was the battery. I just knew it.

I surveyed the forest. There was no road—abandoned or otherwise—back here, and no sign of a cabin, even as Howard announced we were one hundred meters away from our destination. Only a football field's distance. We should be able to see some sign of a cabin now, right?

“Twenty,” said Howard. “Fifteen. Ten.”

Ahead of us, a massive boulder rose out of the earth. We'd passed several others on our path, but this one was by far the biggest—almost the size of a tool shed. Howard walked right up to it, pressing the GPS into the stone. “That's odd.”

Savannah snickered. “Walking into a giant rock?”

“The location is a half meter in,” he said, tapping the stone. “In there.”

“Maybe the boulder
is
the treasure,” Eric said.

“No,” said Howard. “It's supposed to be as small as a tennis ball, remember?”

Or a battery.

But my brother didn't buy it. “Maybe it's a space rock. From Pluto.”

Howard shook his head. “A meteorite would have left a crater, and probably blown all these trees outward around the impact site, like in Tunguska.”

“The Tunguska Event,” I corrected, “was
not
a meteor impact site. There was no debris or crater, and witnesses say the sky glowed for days after—”

“Are you kidding me?” Howard said. “
Another
conspiracy theory? I can't wait to hear what you think Tunguska was.”

I shrugged. “Lots of possibilities. Hydrogen explosion, electricity experiments, extraterrestrials . . .”

“Aliens?” Howard blurted. “That's nuts. And inaccurate. Soil samples taken from the impact site showed large amounts of iridium, which is consistent with—”

“Guys,” Eric broke in. “I was joking. It's not a space rock. It's a wild goose chase.”

I looked at the boulder with dismay. We couldn't dig under there. And there was no sign of a cabin, abandoned or otherwise. Maybe we were wrong about the riddle. Or the math. Maybe Fiona had a better idea of where the treasure was, or
what
the treasure was. . . .

Or maybe it was all a joke, just like Eric thought.

Savannah had been pretty quiet this whole time, not even trying to flirt with Nate. Now she laid her hand on my shoulder. “Don't give up, Gillian. Let's look on the other side. Maybe he was off by a few feet, or there's a clue
carved into the stone or something.”

“Oh, goody,” Eric said, in a tone that meant the opposite. “Another clue.”

“That's a great idea!” I said, brightening. We started around the side of the boulder, and I brushed away leaves and dirt as I went, looking to see if there were any markings cut into the stone.

On the opposite side of the rock, there was a massive, perfectly straight crack, running from the ground to a few feet above my head. “That's weird.” I ran my fingers along the crack, but couldn't feel anything else.

Eric scrambled up the side of the boulder, wedging his fingers and toes into cracks and divots as he went. “The crack makes a right turn up here,” he said. “A perfect ninety-degree angle.”

Even weirder. I raised up on my toes, hopping in excitement as I watched my brother brush debris from the line of the impossibly perfect crack. Could this be another clue? I should have brought the Underberg book. What if this rock just led to another riddle, the way the granite block in Solar Park did?

Nate hurried around to our side of the boulder, his eyes wide. “Okay, time to go.”

“Already?” I said. “What, you saw some dangerous-looking squirrels?”

“No,” he replied. “The chick from the gas station and her friends. They're just over the rise.”

I caught my breath. Fiona. Were they following us? Or following steps of their own? And if so, what else did they know that we didn't?

“Hey, Gills,” Eric called down.

“Shh!”

He slid down the side and landed lightly on his feet on the dirt. “Sorry. I just thought you'd like to know that your space rock?” He swept away a curtain of moss. “It's a door.”

Eric was right. There, clear as day, was a rectangular outline formed by the cracks in the stone. I reached up with trembling fingers to trace the outline, while Eric started feeling around inside the crack on the right side. He tugged and tugged, and, impossibly, the rock shifted. The crack widened, revealing a dark hollow that smelled of rot and glowed with dim red light.

My breath caught in my throat. I had no explanation for this. I'd been looking for a cabin. A battery in a box or on a shelf. But this . . .

“It looks like the gates of hell,” Eric said softly.

“Fitting,” said Howard. “Pluto was the god of the underworld in mythology.”

“You swore,” Nate reminded me under his breath. “You swore when I said to go, you'd go.”

I stared at the entrance, afraid to blink, as if it would suddenly vanish. This was real. There
was
a treasure. It was right in there.

We should have brought Dad. Dad would know what to do. But there must have been some small part of me afraid this was just one more wild goose chase. I hadn't wanted to see that look of disappointment on his face if there'd been nothing there, like Eric had thought.

But now? Now, I'd give anything to see him tell us what in the world we'd just found.

“Another fifty meters,” said a strange voice, not nearly far enough away to suit me.

Nate cursed.

“Should we run?” Savannah whispered, her eyes wide.

“Too late,” Nate said under his breath.

“Hello?” came the voice again. Deep. Rough. Close. On-the-other-side-of-the-rock close.

We all froze.

“Is anyone there?”

Nobody on our side of the rock said anything, moved anything, maybe even
thought
anything, just in case.

On the other side, I heard footsteps and then a harsh, feminine whisper. Fiona. “Get out your gun.”

I swear my heart stopped, and I don't care what Howard might say about it being scientifically impossible.

Gun
. The word was a drumbeat in my head.
Gun
. Nate
was right. We should have left.

Somehow, I heard Nate hiss, “Inside,” and then he was shoving us all into the darkness.

“No—” Sav protested as we jostled and squeezed our way in. All our efforts at silence had ceased, but the only sounds I heard were the shouts from the other side and the horrible grinding as Nate and Eric threw themselves against the stone door, trying to shut it and keep Fiona and her friends out. I saw a glimpse of Fiona's face glaring at me, then a flutter of hands in the crack of light.

Fiona cried out, “It's his kids. They found it—” and then a massive clang as Eric threw down some sort of metal bar across the door, shutting us inside.

Wait. There was a metal bar?
Inside
the boulder?

“They have a gun. They have a gun.” Savannah was hyperventilating beside me.

I blinked, trying to adjust my eyes to the red glow. The inside of the rock was hollow, a sort of metal cage with the form of the boulder arcing just beyond. Tiny red pinpricks of light glowed from every crossbar of metal. There was nothing else inside. No box. No shelf. No battery.

“What is this place?” Nate asked.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Savannah blubbered.

“This can't be it,” Howard was saying, still clutching tightly to the GPS. “It was supposed to be small, the size of a tennis ball.”

“It's pretty small,” Eric pointed out. We were all pressed together inside the space, clinging to the center as if afraid the metal box around us might electrocute us.

Outside, there was a commotion.

“What do you mean you can't get the door open again?” Fiona was shouting, her voice shrill. “I'm so close. I will not have the Seagrets get there first.”

Get
where
? The boulder? I had half a mind to let her know that there was no treasure inside this rock. The other half, of course, wanted to shout out to her that I knew she'd been messing with my dad all along, so there!

But as for treasure, there was . . . um. Metal. A boxy metal cage with red lights. I looked around, following the grid of red lights that outlined our new space. What little illumination came from the red lights showed my friends' frightened faces and the rough, hollowed-out rock wall beyond the cage. Nothing remotely interesting, except . . .

There, opposite the door, embedded in the grid at about waist level, was one big red light, several inches across. A button. And Howard was staring right at it.

“The size of a tennis ball . . . ,” he murmured, reaching out.

“Howard,” Nate warned. “Don't touch anything.”

Howard pressed the button, which promptly blinked off. There was the sound of whirring, of engines coming to life, as one by one, the lights went off all around us, then
blinked back on a sickly greenish white. Everything shuddered, and a clanking groan filled the space as sheets of metal rose from the floor beyond the metal cage to enclose us and block out the outline of the boulder. I felt my stomach push up against my chest.

We were going down.