“So what’s going on with him, anyway?” Steve Carrillo asked. “Dude, he looked like a zombie.”
“He didn’t even look like himself,” said little Alma. “Like the real Gideon is lost in there somewhere.” She hugged herself as if the hot day had made her shiver.
Mr. Carrillo returned, his conversation with Mr. Walkwell finished. He did not look happy. “ Vamonos, kids,” he said. “In the truck. We’re not going to get anything done here today.”
Lucinda waved as they drove off, but the Carrillo kids just looked embarrassed. As Mr. Walkwell turned the cart back toward the house, Lucinda realized her brother had been silent the whole time since the Reptile Barn, deep in thought-Tyler hadn’t even said anything to Steve Carrillo or asked what he was playing on his GameBoss.
That proves it, she thought gloomily. The world really is coming to an end.
Chapter 17
According to Mr. Walkwell, the male dragon Alamu had been around the night of the laboratory fire and had probably even caused it. Octavio Tinker’s Continuascope had been gone since then. Jackson Kingaree had also disappeared that night, but hadn’t shown any sign of having the Continuascope then or now. And Haneb said dragons, and especially Alamu, loved to collect shiny things for their nests. The Continuascope had been very shiny.
Elementary, my dear Watson, Tyler thought. Find Alamu’s nest, find the Continuascope. More important, make sure Colin Needle didn’t find it, because if Colin got hold of Octavio’s invention he’d be able to use the Fault Line. He’d be able to travel back and forth through time. In fact, Colin might even find a way into the washstand mirror world to rescue Grace, and then Gideon would put him in the will instead of Tyler and Lucinda.
The biggest problem, of course, was that Lucinda had opened her mouth and started babbling about dragons and shiny things and what Haneb said right in front of Colin Needle. Yes, if someone forced him, Tyler would have admitted that he loved his sister, but right now he didn’t like her very much. Colin might be a total jerkwad but he wasn’t stupid-he would definitely be thinking the same things as Tyler.
So it all came down to two questions: where was Alamu’s nest and how could he get to it before Colin did?
Almost halfway through his second summer on the farm now, Tyler knew better than to walk around asking people where Alamu kept his hoard. He didn’t want to talk about it to Lucinda, even if he hadn’t been angry with her, because he knew she would have a fit at the idea of him going anywhere near a dragon’s nest. His sister was the kind of kid who always waited for the grown-ups to fix things. They didn’t, of course, which was why she was grumpy a lot. Tyler had figured out a long time ago that if you wanted something you had to do it yourself: if he was hungry for cookies he scavenged money from under the sofa cushions and went and bought some at the store, because Mom sure as heck wasn’t going to bake any. But finding double-stuffed Choco-Marshes in the grocery aisle was quite a bit easier than finding a dragon’s nest in a farm the size of a state park.
It turned out to be a good time to ask questions. With Gideon back at home, people were bustling in and out of the house all day long and Tyler had plenty of opportunities to talk to the farm hands. Kiwa, one of the three Mongol herdsmen and the one who spoke the least English, still managed to tell Tyler a few things he hadn’t known, and his fellows Jeg and Hoka were even more help, letting Tyler know all the places that Alamu seemed to frequent. Even Ragnar had useful information to offer.
“Of course he spends a lot of time around the Reptile Barn because that is where his mate and her child live,” Ragnar told Tyler, “and he comes there when we put food out as well, but he also spends many warm afternoons in the sun on that rocky hill there.” The big Norseman pointed to a distant granite face, a shiny smear along one of the hills that fenced the valley. “Why do you write down these things, boy? You are not going to go near the worm, are you? He will kill you and eat you. That is no joke.”
“Trust me-I don’t want to go anywhere near him,” Tyler said, which was true. “I’m just making notes.” Ragnar’s hard green eyes were full of doubt; Tyler began to regret having asked him anything in the first place. “Okay, I have a sort of… bet with Colin Needle. That I can predict something better than he can. I don’t want even to see Alamu, I just want to figure out where he goes. Honestly, it’s nothing important… ”
Just then Ragnar was called to help Mr. Walkwell with something, but Tyler knew he’d better stay away from the big man from now on-Ragnar suspected that something was up. That was certainly something they didn’t teach you in schooclass="underline" how to deal with a suspicious Viking.
To his delight, Tyler discovered that little Pema, the young Tibetan woman who worked in the kitchen, had been paying attention to the dragon as well.
“I love to see him fly,” she said, and he could see how much she meant it-her dark eyes were shining with excitement. “When I was young my grandmother told me stories of the dragons-we call the country my family came from Druk Yul, the Dragon Land. So it is a great goodness to live so close to them now. And Alamu… ” She blushed and smiled. She was older than Tyler had realized-not a girl but a young woman who just happened to be small. “He is so beautiful. His wings are like hammered copper! The dragons are messengers of the gods, you know.”
Tyler wasn’t certain what to say to that, but he was definitely interested in hearing more. “Do you see him in the same place all the time?”
Pema shook her head. “He flies past sometimes on his way out to the east.” She pointed out over the gardens toward the distant hills. “Sometimes he also flies over the garden, looking for things to catch-rabbits, other animals. But for some reason he does not like to fly above the garden this summer… ”
Tyler wrote everything down. Pema was a careful observer, and the fact that she considered every sighting of Alamu to be a good omen meant she had plenty of information to share.
On his way out of the kitchen Tyler met Colin Needle. Colin was looking for extra blankets to help his mother prepare Gideon’s new bed in the snake parlor, where she could nurse him and still keep an eye on everything else in her domain. Tyler was delighted to see that Colin was being kept on a short leash.
“Staying busy, are we?” he asked.
Colin glared at him. “You better not be going anywhere, Jenkins. Everyone’s supposed to stay around the house and help.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Tyler said. “I am helping… in my own way.” He was enjoying Colin’s discomfort. “In fact, I’d better get going-and so should you. Don’t want to keep your mother waiting.”
“You’d better not leave the house,” Colin almost hissed. “You can’t afford to get into any more trouble!”
“And who’s going to stop me? You?” Tyler stepped around him. “Run along now. Help your mother. Be a good boy.”
Colin just stared, as if he couldn’t believe that Tyler would dare to talk back to him. “You… you have quite a big mouth, Jenkins, and one of these days… ”
“Colin!” Mrs. Needle shouted from the Snake Parlor. “Where are you?”
Tyler waved as he walked away. “Enjoy your afternoon!” He made a point of sauntering out the front door in case Colin had doubled back to watch. It would drive him crazy to think that Tyler might already be going out in search of the nest.
Dude, this is crazy, Tyler thought. Who would ever believe I’d ever be glad I took math?
But his teacher Ms. Shah had taught him how to make a Cartesian Plane, which was basically a piece of graph paper with a big cross in the middle of it and a zero at the center point with numbers going off in each direction so that they made a cross. Each number then became half of a coordinate, so Tyler drew the whole thing in pencil on a copy of an Ordinary Farm map from the Yokuts County Assessor’s Office he’d found in the library and then began marking in everything the farm workers had told him about where they usually saw Alamu. When he’d finished with that he spread his newly marked map over his bed and studied it.