Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (21 page)

“From the bus station. Yes. And she showed up about three blocks ago. I don’t know where she came from.”

“You’re serious about this?”

“The trouble with being in Imagineering School is that we seem to have forgotten we’re escapees from a place that basically had us locked up. A place that would like to have us back.”

“You think these two are from Barracks 14? That’s clear across the country! It’s in Baltimore, Jess!”

“I think,” Jess said calmly, “that the kid yesterday, in Cars Land…what was his name?”

“Jason Ewart.”

“All I remember about him is: ‘Naughty, naughty. Someone’s in trouble.’”

“Yeah. Why haven’t we talked about that more?”

“Because we’re scared,” Jess said. “But you know the truth, too, Amanda. He’s a Fairlie. He was at Barracks 14.”

“No! We don’t know that!”

“There’s no other explanation. That was an expression the Major used. No one else. When have you ever heard that before? Jason Ewart is a Fairlie.” She paused. “Thankfully, Tim and Emily don’t know. This is all ours.”

“You’re freaking me out.”

“Good,” Jess said. “Maybe you’ll take our secret admirers more seriously. Maybe they have to do with Jason Ewart, maybe our showing up this morning at dawn at the studios. Does it matter?”

“Do we try to lose them?”

“I don’t think so. I think we want them to see what we’re doing. They want to scare us? We’ll scare them back.”

“Listen to you!”

“I won’t go back there.”

“Of course not!”

“Ever.” Jess had never sounded so angry.

“Me neither.”

“If they are who we think they are, we can’t allow them to bully us. If they get closer, we get farther away. If they get in our faces, we…I don’t know.”

“We say something random and walk away. Shouting is good.” Jess looked at her curiously. Amanda smiled. “I actually paid attention in elementary school. We spent two weeks talking about how to beat bullies.” She quoted: “‘Show no reaction; feel your inner strength; walk your way around them; make jokes, but not at your own expense; reflect insults back at the bully; outsmart with laughter,’ which is my personal favorite.”

“And yet you ended up in Barracks 14.”

“True,” Amanda said, “but I won’t take full blame for that.”

The girls laughed.

“Better now?” Amanda asked.

“A lot. Thank you.”

“No problem. You take Mr. Bike. I’ve got Little Miss Skinny Legs.”

They’d reached the Flower Street entrance to the Los Angeles Public Library. Together, the girls headed up the concrete stairs leading up to the reflecting pond.

“This is such a long shot.”

“It is not. It makes total sense.” Jess was proud of her Internet search, which had turned up an exact match for the Latin phrase Dillard/Wayne had told them. It came from Lucretius’s
De rerum natura
, and translated roughly as, “Like runners they bear the lamp of life.” The same search returned several links to the Los Angeles Public Library. The expression, it seemed, was carved into the library’s tower. “Look up.”

Amanda shielded her eyes from the sun and caught sight of the rectangular tower, rising up above the rest of the library’s facade. “Seriously, you can see that?”

“You need glasses.”

“No doubt. So, let’s say Dillard was trying to lead us here.”

“Dillard was trying to lead us here.”

“Ha-ha. Now what?” Amanda inquired.

“First, we lose these two behind us. We’ll go inside through different doors. We get lost in there and meet in the children’s library in ten minutes.”

“There’s a children’s library?”

“There’s always a children’s library.”

“Show-off.”

The girls separated. They did so at the exact same moment without any signal. Such understanding had developed and grown between them, their souls braided.

For Amanda, Dillard’s quest meant everything. It arose out of Finn’s carving their initials into the window jamb, a message intended for her.

“To reach them you must follow them,” Dillard had said. She assumed he was speaking metaphorically—to reach, as in “reach for,” not “to touch or grasp.” She would have liked to touch Finn’s hand or kiss him. Just thinking about it made her blush.

Of course, she was nearly certain Wayne had no such intentions in mind. He wanted her to be able to communicate with Finn in the past: he wanted to warn the Keepers about something Amanda had no knowledge of. Not yet, anyway.

The cute girl in leggings followed Amanda at a comfortable distance. She was good at it; tailing someone was clearly not new to her. Amanda made no eye contact; in fact, she barely looked in her direction. Knowing she was being followed was enough. Losing her would require a combination of confusion, disguise, and misdirection, tools Amanda had been using since her escape from Barracks 14.

Disguise was the most difficult part. It required her to comb the reading areas for abandoned items; people often left a scarf or hoodie over a chair to save it while they searched the stacks. Amanda borrowed a Dodgers baseball cap and an atrocious tie-dyed shawl on the fly. She did so before her tail entered, and kept the items bundled at her waist to avoid them being seen. Then it was only a matter of racing up a flight of stairs—catching her tail by surprise, no doubt—and hurrying through an exhibition on polar bears and out the other side before descending a different set of stairs. She moved down a long hall fluidly, like a dancer, and ducked into a closing elevator, stepping into the back to avoid being too obvious. The doors slid shut. Amanda put on the hat and slung the shawl around her shoulders.

When they met up, Jess had on a headscarf wrapped like a hijab. She looked gorgeous, Amanda thought; no big surprise. Jess had a way of transforming her look with the slightest alteration. A change in lipstick could make her nearly unidentifiable, a rare and lucky quality.

“I was just asking Ms….”

“Fabicon. Joanna Fabicon.” The children’s librarian was a round-faced woman in her early twenties with perfect, full eyebrows and a huge smile. Jess immediately felt comfortable with her. Her thin dark hair was long, brushing against her necklace of gold leaves.

“…if they have a book on Lucretius.”

“And I was telling your friend: not per se. But the general collection includes many reference works that would include bibliographical data on the author.”

“It’s the quote on the tower, in particular,” Amanda said.

“Yes. Professor Alexander’s theme of light and knowledge was beautifully chosen.” Joanna would have made a good teacher, Jess thought. She had no airs about her. “The quote from Lucretius is such a great starting point for the theme.”

“Starting point?” Jess asked.

“Well, yes! Have you seen the Hope Street quotation?”

“I don’t think so,” Amanda said.

“‘A lamp to my feet…a light to my paths.’ At various points on the building, Professor Alexander placed symbols that emphasize the themes of light and knowledge.”

“The truth,” Jess whispered.

“Interesting way to put it, but yes, I suppose.” The librarian’s oversize smile took over her face.

“Professor Alexander?” Amanda said.

“One of the designers of the original building. Included on the tower are representations of eight forward thinkers and writers of the time, each of whom contributed to the theme of light and learning. Professor Alexander called them his Seers of Light. We have a tour, if you’d like?”

As the words sunk in, Amanda knew what it had felt like to be Finn, facing the Stonecutter’s Quill. This woman’s explanation felt so much like something Walt or Wayne would invent; a puzzle too difficult and challenging for the boneheaded Overtakers to piece together, but just solvable enough for the Keepers.

“Is there anything written by him, the professor?” Jess asked.

“Let me think…” Joanna turned in her seat to face her computer. “There’s the original guidebook from 1927. It’s in our rare books collection on the third floor. Professor Alexander wrote an essay for it. Does that interest you?”

“That’s perfect!” Amanda said. “Do we need an appointment or anything?”

“You do, as a matter of fact. But you’ve come to the right place. I’m connected.” Joanna winked and placed a phone call. “You’re in. Ask for Mallory.”

The girls thanked her.

“We should split up again,” Amanda proposed.

“Good idea.”

“Five minutes?”

“See you there.”

L
ITTLE
M
ISS
S
KINNY
L
EGS
was getting annoying. She hadn’t identified Amanda’s disguise yet, but she kept showing up anyway, like a mosquito around the campfire. Amanda could not risk leading her to the rare books room.

So she did what she had to do: she tailed her. It was like following a dog who could smell barbecue in the neighborhood, but was either too dumb or too easily distracted to hone in on it.

Amanda moved fast, not wanting to keep Jess waiting. Without looking at the title, she snatched a book from a shelf. Pulling her hat down tightly, she moved with agility and speed toward the girl. Amanda smacked into her hard and sent her tumbling. In the ensuing effort to help her back to her feet, Amanda slipped the book into her backpack. She apologized, gave the girl her hand, and, with the brim of the hat still lowered, pulled her up.

“Sorry ’bout that,” she muttered, and moved on, already having singled out a man in a security uniform up ahead.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Amanda said as she passed, “but I just saw that girl in the leggings put a book in her backpack.”

She hurried ahead, reached the elevators and tapped the UP button. As the doors slid open, she heard a girl’s protesting voice: “That’s not mine! I swear! I swear!”

Amanda smiled.

The rare books room had the clubby appeal of a study in an old English manor house. The walls were rich with storytelling and meaning, iconography and symbolism. A few dark wood tables sat beneath green-domed law lamps. A hushed reverence muffled every turn of a page. From the moment Amanda and Jess applied their signatures to a journal scrawled with a hundred pages of names, most of which ended with initials like PhD, there was little question they’d entered a sacred space. This was where the ancients lived, the palace of the elderly.

Two librarians oversaw the activities, including a man named Ricky Hart, who hunted down volumes in a professionally accommodating way for the new arrivals.

Amanda, Jess, and the only known copy of Professor Alexander’s original guidebook in the library were left to themselves at a large table. Wearing white cotton gloves, Jess turned the pages of the small book while Amanda looked on. The professor’s essay was so densely written it was nearly indecipherable.

“I don’t know,” Amanda whispered. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.”

“Agreed. So what now?”

“You think there’s a code in here? You think we messed something up?”

“If there is a code,” Jess said, “then it has to have something to do with the original clue, right? ‘Like runners they bear the lamp of life.’ So…lamp…life…What are we missing?”

“His essay. It’s got to be in his essay.”

“Okay!” Jess turned once again to the yellowed pages.

Amanda saw it first. “Look at this!” Her chipped fingernail traced a line without touching the fragile paper. “‘Light and learning are associated together by an impulse so natural that it pervades the great literature of the world. Knowledge is imagined as a lamp, wisdom as a guiding star, and the conscious tradition of mankind as a torch passed from generation to generation.’”

The girls stared at the page, rereading the quote. Finally, Jess whispered so softly that she might have been talking to herself, “I realize we have no way of knowing, but that’s got to be it. That’s got to mean something.”

“‘Generation to generation,’” Amanda said. “Wayne and Dillard passed the torch to us, because the Keepers aren’t here. That much I get. But the generation stuff doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Maybe it’s the message we’re supposed to deliver. Something about…” Jess had continued turning pages past the book’s brief index. An old yellowed pocket was glued to the inside of the back cover. It had probably once held a library card. Something had been sketched in pencil onto the paper pocket.

“What is that, a hand?”

“Looks like a Q-tip,” Jess said.

“It’s a torch!” Amanda said too loudly, earning the attention of the librarian. “It’s not a good-looking torch, but it’s a torch.”

Jess rubbed her gloved thumb over the drawing ever so lightly. It smudged. She gasped and jerked her hand back. The smudged pencil left a small horizontal line in the middle of the torch.

“Wait a second,” Amanda said. “There’s something in there.” She reached for the page.

“Shh!” Jess slapped her hand back, reprimanding her. “You don’t have to tell the whole place, you know?” She delicately lifted the fragile paper pocket. She couldn’t get her finger inside without risking tearing it.

“This is so Wayne,” Amanda wheezed.

“We need a tool, something flat like a letter opener,” Jess said. “Tweezers.” She closed the book.