“Yeah, but what will he do when he finds out that there’s no club? It’ll break his heart.”
“He won’t find out, because there is a club — maybe a gang or a full-on league. And we’re in charge. Well, technically I’m in charge, but you can be the secretary or something.”
“Yeah,” said Antigone. “Sure. That’ll happen.”
“Treasurer?” Cyrus asked. “Or do you want to be the Avengel, like Greeves? You can enforce my proclamations. Or you can just be the mascot. Your call.”
“Copresident.”
“Ha.” Cyrus eyed his sister. “A second ago, you were denying that the league existed, and now you want to muscle in on my leadership?”
“Shut up, Rus, or I’ll drop the ‘co.’ ”
“Hey!” Dennis yelled. “I’ve found a way … somewhere.”
When Cyrus and Antigone reached him, Dennis was beaming with pride beside an open rusty door. Ancient hay bales had been stacked on one side of the room. On the far wall, a ladder ran straight up to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
“I’ll bet it goes up to the feeding rooms behind the cages,” Dennis said. He scurried up the ladder and lifted the trap. “At least, I think so. It’s a little dark.”
“Okay,” Cyrus said. “Hop down, Dennis. We’ll check it out.”
Dennis stared at him. “No. You said this was a test. There are rules. You can’t trick me. I always follow rules.”
Cyrus opened his mouth and then shut it. He had nothing to say. Dennis climbed up, wriggled through the trapdoor, and let it bang behind him.
“Terrific,” said Antigone. “Dennis always follows rules, and you are now his rule book. Pull the plug now, Cy.”
“Pull the plug on this new, amazing Dennis?” Cyrus shook his head and moved out of the way. “Go ahead. Ladies first.”
Antigone climbed the ladder, and Cyrus climbed behind her. With each step, leather water dripped out of her boots and onto Cyrus’s head.
When she reached the top, she threw open the trap and climbed through.
When Cyrus reached the top, he stuck his head up and into pure reek.
“Oh …” He groaned, gagging.
“Get up here, Cy. Plug your nose. I think Dennis passed out.”
The room was extremely dim, but Cyrus could just make out his sister’s shape. The only light was seeping in through the seams around a heavy door and a smaller, square hatch set into it at head height.
Cyrus stood up and covered his nose. “Did an elephant die? I can taste it.”
“It smells like skunk plus last year’s fish,” Antigone said. She nudged Dennis’s crumpled shape with her toe. “What do we do with him?”
“What do we do with us?” Cyrus asked.
“No! Leon, down!” A boy’s shout echoed through the darkness. “Down!”
A bubbling bellow drowned out the voice. A second later, the floor shook with a crash. Birds shrieked. Unknown animals whooped with excitement.
Cyrus and Antigone jumped to the light-outlined door. Cyrus found a bolt and jerked it back with a loud crack. The heavy metal door swung open into a cage.
The two of them stepped through onto a dry floor dusted with old straw. The walls on each side were gray stone. In front, thick iron bars separated them from a bright and immensely large room lined with cages.
Cyrus walked to the bars and pressed his face between them. Antigone squeezed beside him. The foul-smelling zoo was beautiful, but battered. Marble floors were smeared with filth. Cracked stone columns grew into steel girders, which peaked in Gothic arches, carrying a paned mountain range of skylights that ran the length of the room.
The place was alive with daylight.
Cages lined the walls and mezzanines, but Cyrus didn’t look to see how many were full. His eyes were on an armored white shape attempting to run down the middle of the room. It looked part astronaut and part white fire hydrant, rocking forward on thick, awkward limbs.
Chasing it, clattering and clawing, grunting and snapping, was a turtle the size of a van. A tail that looked like a whole crocodile dragged behind it. Clawed, elephant-size feet thumped beneath it, and its long, rocking, spiny shell was the size of a smaller car all by itself.
“Leon!” the white shape shouted, hopping slowly. “Stop!”
The turtle stretched out a wrinkly, scaled head that would have been big on a buffalo and opened a mouth large enough to swallow pumpkins. Its neck sprang forward, and its mouth snapped shut around the white shape’s head. It clamped and reclamped, while thick white legs kicked and thick white arms flailed. Then, lifting the shape up off the ground by its head, it began shaking its prey from side to side, banging legs against its spined shell.
“Hey!” Antigone yelled. “Over here! Come over here!”
“What are you doing?” Cyrus asked. He reached for his sister’s mouth.
But Leon the turtle had already heard. The thick white chew toy clattered to the floor.
“We have bars,” Antigone said. “We’ll be fine.”
Cyrus looked at the iron in his hands, and then he looked at the turtle as it flared its lopsided nostrils and stepped toward them.
“I don’t think these bars have a chance.”
The white thing tried to sit up but couldn’t. It flopped side to side and managed to roll onto its face. When it looked up, Cyrus blinked. It had two large silver mesh eyes and an upside-down triangle for a mouth.
“What are you doing in here?” it asked. “You better get out fast.”
Leon the turtle was approaching slowly. And then he levered open his enormous mouth. A long piece of skin in the back of his throat writhed like a snake.
Cyrus and Antigone took a step back from the bars. When they did, the turtle bellowed, raised its shell off the floor, and thundered forward.
Before it hit the bars, Cyrus and Antigone shot back through the rear door, tripped over Dennis as he sat up, and tumbled into a wall.
The iron bars screamed under the turtle’s impact.
So did Dennis.
The bars bent, but they did not break. The turtle twisted his head to the side, hooked a single bar with his beak, and ripped it free.
“That’s Leon!” Dennis yelled. “We’re going to die!”
A second bar clattered to the floor.
Antigone stood and kicked Dennis. “Get up and start acting like a Polygoner!”
The white shape appeared behind Leon and pointed. “Four doors down!” it yelled. “That way!” And then it lumbered off.
Leon tore two more bars out at once, then he wormed his head through the gap. He needed to show off his bait.
The huge turtle dropped its shell belly to the floor, cranked open its mouth, wrinkling its puckered old-man face, and held very still — all but the attractively wiggly bit of skin.
Cyrus grimaced, watching the turtle’s snake-size uvula twist and slither. “That’s disgusting.”
Antigone grabbed him by the arm and dragged him down the dim hallway behind the cages.
Leon writhed and snapped as they left, banging his shell forward, bending iron.
Four doors down, Cyrus threw another dead bolt and opened the door, and the three of them stepped into another cage. Wooden roosts were mounted to one wall in an enormous tangle. Bones were strewn across the floor. The bars of the cage were not bent and were not merely missing. They had been torn to pieces.
Dennis froze, giggling nervously. Cyrus and Antigone pulled him through the bones, through the fragmented bars, and out into the main room. The three of them stopped and stared.
“Oh my,” Antigone said. “Cy, are you seeing this?”
Cyrus nodded. He had no words. Leon the impossible turtle was still grunting and trying to fight his way into the cage, but Cyrus couldn’t even be bothered to look at him. The room was much bigger than he’d been able to see through the bars of a cage, and it was not a room. It was a neoclassical indoor jungle. Second-and third-story mezzanines held open cages and palm trees. Vines climbed eighty feet from the floor to the upper peaks of the skylights. At the far end, so distant as to be visible but noiseless, a small waterfall flowed off the upper mezzanine and into a pool. A few long-tailed birds circled high above.