“We didn’t have much choice.”
“But why now?” Martina asked. “We’re the only people who’ve been in here for more than a century, right? Why are you looking for this place now?”
“Because somebody talked. Someone broke the secret pact.” Theo looked away from them, out over the jumbled laboratory, his expression grim.
“Who?” Sam asked.
Theo paused for a couple of seconds. “Evangeline’s father.”
“Whoa . . . wait,” said Sam. “Is he a Founder too?”
“He was.”
Sam swallowed hard.
“He disappeared months and months ago,” Theo continued. “When Evangeline finally found him, he only had a few moments left. Which is why she had to take his place and make some very quick decisions. It was the first clue that the Founders were under attack once again.”
“How did he die?” Martina asked nervously, as if she didn’t really want to know.
“Unpleasantly,” said Theo. “Let’s just say his captors didn’t give him much choice but to talk. And even then, he only told them the general location of the key, not how to get into the vault or survive its challenges.”
“Oh, man . . . ,” Sam whispered.
“The contest,” Martina broke in. “That’s why Evangeline created this contest, isn’t it? You needed someone who could figure out the puzzles.”
“Correct,” Theo agreed. “Not her first choice, as you’d imagine. But the other Founders have become . . . a little lazy in the past fifty years. Many of them figured those secrets were so dusty and forgotten that no one would ever make a move to steal them ever again. They were wrong.”
“Clearly,” Sam agreed.
“Anyway,” Theo continued, “when Evangeline tried to contact them about the danger, many of them were impossible to contact. Others thought Evangeline must be exaggerating about the danger. In the end, only one came to her aid.” Theo looked away, as if recalling a bad memory. But as quickly as the emotion came, Sam watched him push it aside. He continued, “But . . . one person’s help wasn’t enough. So she came up with the idea of the American Dream Contest. And believe me, Evangeline was less than pleased to find out the top two winners were kids, but there was nothing she could do. We needed you.”
Martina frowned. “You could have told us.”
“Correction,” said Sam. “You should have told us. I told my mom the trip was safe! Educational, even! And now I’ll be lucky if I get home with all my limbs intact!”
“We didn’t know if we could trust you yet,” Theo murmured.
“But you do now?” Martina asked.
Theo turned to look at her, rubbing his right shoulder with his left hand. “Yeah. I do.”
“Gosh, that’s nice,” Sam said, scowling. He felt anger pulling into a hard knot in the middle of his chest. “I’m touched.”
A deep thump echoed through the chamber, making the rock walls tremble. Martina gasped; Sam jerked upright. The metal door vibrated behind Theo’s back but held firm.
“Flintlock.” Theo got to his feet. “He must have found another way to drain the water.”
“But he can’t open the door . . . right?” Martina asked, eyeing the metal door nervously. “We locked it from the other side.”
“No, but he can blow it up,” Theo answered. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Right,” Martina agreed. “Sam, let’s— Sam?”
Sam stood with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. “You trust us now,” he said to Theo. “But maybe we don’t trust you.” He marched right up to the big guy and tried to ignore the fact that he only came up to Theo’s chin. “You lied to us,” Sam went on. “You said this was a vacation, a sightseeing trip—a prize! And now people are trying to kill us. All because you needed some puzzles solved!”
Theo still couldn’t meet his eyes.
Another loud thump shook the room.
“Sam!” Martina hissed. “I get your point, but maybe this isn’t the time for arguing?”
Finally, Theo looked up. “Look, I’m sorry to have dragged you both into this, I am. But Franklin’s secret is more important than any single life. The original Founders all knew that.”
“Don’t you think you should have let us decide for ourselves?”
“Let’s argue about it when we get out of this room!” Martina said. “There has to be a way out somewhere . . .”
“You’re right,” Theo said, still meeting Sam’s stare.
“I am?” Sam blinked.
“There’s another door down there.” Theo nodded toward the far end of the room, and before Sam could react, he was walking between tables and desks to check it out.
Sam would have loved to knock Theo’s shoulder back out of joint, but the big guy had a point. They needed a way out of Ben Franklin’s workshop, and they needed it fast.
The door looked familiar once Sam got there—exactly like the one he’d opened by solving Franklin’s magic square. A smooth bronze rectangle, flush with the wall, with no handle, knob, or visible way to open it.
“Another puzzle?” Martina asked.
“Has to be,” Theo answered. “Something in here will get it open.”
Martina quickly moved to start searching one side of the room. Sam turned away from Theo to search the other. He riffled through blueprints, sketches, and maps, glanced at a wooden tray full of little metal letters, scanned shelves full of glass jars with murky contents and dusty labels. He saw tools arranged neatly on oiled cloths—hammers from sledge to tack, pliers big enough to take out a giant’s tooth and small enough to pick fleas off a mouse, and every size in between.
It was all very interesting—kind of like sorting through someone else’s house—but unfortunately there was nothing that looked anything like a puzzle.
Martina was probably making lists in her head, checking things off, trying to use logic. But logic was going to be too slow. Sometimes you just had to let your mind drift and allow instinct to take over.
Ben Franklin had left a clue here, and Sam was going to find it.
He picked up a small sack made of soft fabric. Something inside it jingled.
“What did you find, Sam?” Martina appeared at his side as Sam emptied the sack out on top of a pile of old papers. Coins.
Sam had been ready to see gold doubloons or glimmering rubies. A pile of dull copper coins was pretty disappointing—but apparently not to Martina.
“Fugio cents!” she exclaimed. “They were the first coins minted after the Revolution!”
“Just pennies? Ugh, figures,” Sam said. He picked one up and looked at it. On one side of the thing was a sundial (so that’s where that puzzle came from!) and on the other side was a chain wrapped around the words “We Are One.” “No gold? Jewels? Pirate’s treasure?”
“Do you know how much one of these is worth, Sam?”
“Um . . . a penny?” Sam said as he tossed one into the air.
“Maybe a thousand dollars.”
“Seriously?” Sam fumbled to catch the coin before it fell to the ground.
“Yeah, well, money isn’t going to help us if we’re dead!” Martina said. “Keep looking!”
Sam slipped a couple of pennies into his pocket. A souvenir of the trip of a lifetime. Possibly a very short lifetime.
He stopped at the back of the room to look at a fancy wooden table with a latched lid. Curious, Sam flipped open the latch and lifted the lid to find something so weird he didn’t even know what to make of it. Inside, there were a series of glass bowls, all different sizes, each rim painted a different color. The bowls were threaded onto a spindle that ran the length of the table. Each bowl nested inside a slightly larger one, making the contraption look sort of like a huge glass unicorn horn. Under the table Sam found a foot pedal, like one for a piano or a sewing machine. Sam reached out one foot and began to pump the pedal up and down to see what would happen.
The spindle began to turn. And the glass bowls spun slowly around, t
heir colored rims catching the light. Sam reached out to touch one of the bowls. Its red rim squeaked under his damp finger, and a ghostly sound filled the room. It was something between a church organ and the chime of a bell, strange and beautiful at the same time.
All of a sudden, a loud, grinding noise interrupted the haunting melody. It sounded as if somewhere enormous rusty metal gears had slowly begun to turn.
“Sam!” Martina yelled. “What did you do?”
“Me? What? I didn’t do anything!” Sam jumped away from the table and looked wildly around. “Why would you just assume that I— Oh, boy.”
Martina followed Sam’s gaze, looked up, and shrieked.
The ceiling was moving. Slowly but surely it was easing downward.
It wasn’t so much a ceiling, Sam realized, as an enormous slab of stone that had been suspended above their heads, fitting neatly between the four walls but not actually joined to them. The note he’d played on that strange contraption must have triggered something, and now the slab was inching down toward them, getting closer by the second.
If they didn’t stop it soon, they’d be crushed.
“Man, Ben,” Sam murmured, as if the ghost of Benjamin Franklin could somehow hear him. “You were a genius, all right—but you sure had a twisted sense of humor.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Sam! What did you touch?” Martina appeared at his elbow.
“Just this thing!” Sam flapped his hands frantically at the glass bowls/spindle/foot pedal contraption. “It played a note when I touched it.”
The ceiling continued to rumble toward them. Another three feet and they’d have to start ducking.
“It’s an armonica!” Martina said, staring over Sam’s shoulder.
“Not a harmonica!” Sam told her. “This weird glass thing.”
“A glass armonica, you moron! That’s what it’s called. Benjamin Franklin invented it.” Rock dust showered down on them from above. “You can play different notes on it by touching different bowls. And when you played it . . .”
“I started the ceiling coming down like some giant trash compactor?”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
Sam looked up. Theo probably could have reached up and touched the ceiling by now if he stood on his tiptoes. “Okay.” He rubbed his hands over his head, as if that would get his thoughts working more quickly. “Don’t panic.”
“I’m not.” Martina glared at him.
“I just meant—don’t yell at me. No, wait a minute.” Back up on top of the mountain, Flintlock had said something—that Sam and Martina solved problems by arguing. “Yes, yell at me! I played the wrong note. Now the ceiling’s coming down. So if I play the right note, the ceiling should stop. Right?” Sam stretched out a hand.
“Don’t touch it!” Martina shouted. “You could make the ceiling come down faster!”
“Okay, okay! I won’t touch it!” Sam said. “We just have to figure out which note to play.”
“Sounds like a puzzle,” Theo said quietly. He’d come up behind them without Sam noticing. He sure walked softly for a guy who could probably bench-press a piano.
“Yeah,” said Sam. A puzzle where, once again, a wrong answer meant certain death. “There must be clues,” Sam muttered. “A puzzle always has clues.”
Martina had her nose an inch away from the armonica. “What’s this? On the base.” She blew dust away from a metal plate, and Sam leaned over her shoulder to look at it: IN MEMORY OF THE BATTLE OF YORKTOWN, 1781.
“Yorktown. That was the last battle of the Revolutionary War,” Martina said.
“Okay. Keep talking.” Sam couldn’t believe those words were coming out of his mouth, but they were. “What do you know about Yorktown?” Martina screwed up her eyes in thought, consulting the giant database that was her memory.
Sam glanced up nervously. The ceiling had come down another inch—it was now about seven feet off the ground. Now Theo could touch it. Laying his hands flat against the descending roof, Sam saw him strain, looking for all the world like Atlas holding up the Earth. For a mad second, Sam dared to hope that superhuman Theo could do it, but then his elbows kinked. “Nope,” muttered Theo through gritted teeth. “I can’t stop it. I’ll get something to try to hold it up. You two keep thinking!”
“Um . . . well, Yorktown’s in Virginia,” Martina told Sam. “The British built a fort there, and the Americans had it under siege. Lord Cornwallis was commanding the British, and they couldn’t hold out. Cornwallis surrendered and gave up his sword.”
“To George Washington,” Theo added over his shoulder. He’d gotten ahold of a metal rod and jammed it into the narrow gap between the ceiling and the wall. It held for a few seconds before the metal crumpled in a shower of sparks. Sam started flipping through the papers in an old rolltop desk.
Martina nodded, impressed. “Right! That was the end of the fighting. The Americans knew they had won.”
All of that is great, Sam thought. But it still isn’t music. “What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Anyone know Franklin’s favorite tune?” Though the ceiling was still over their heads, they were all crouching, Sam noticed. He tugged out a desk drawer and emptied it onto the ground. Then he saw it.
A piece of yellowed paper covered in musical notation. He waved it at Martina. “How about this?”
Theo came over, his eyes running over the page. He whistled seven little notes, and a huge smile broke across Martina’s face. She clapped her hands. “‘Yankee Doodle’!” she said. “The British originally made it up to make fun of the Americans, but then the revolutionaries reclaimed it. The American military band played it at Yorktown when Cornwallis gave up his sword!”
Theo grabbed the score. “I knew old Ben wouldn’t leave us in the lurch!”
“Oh yeah, big help,” said Sam. “Unless we didn’t happen to find it and got squashed like roadkill instead!” Sam was already pumping the foot pedal under the table, getting the bowls of the armonica up to speed again.
“Sam, can you read music?” Martina asked.
Sam shrugged. “I played drums for a bit, but the neighbors complained.”
“So, no?” said Martina, her face going pale. “Neither can I.”
They both turned to Theo. “I’ve taken a few piano lessons,” he said quietly.
Sam raised an eyebrow. Theo, taking piano lessons? He tried to imagine Theo’s huge form hunched over a keyboard, tinkling away at Mozart. This day just got weirder and weirder.
“What?” Theo asked, seeing the look on Sam’s face. “My mom loved the piano. I did it for her.”
“All right, Ludwig van Theo,” Sam said, making way for him. “Play away!”
Theo placed the old sheet of parchment on the table behind the armonica and cracked his knuckles. “Knowing the notes isn’t enough,” he muttered. “You have to be able to play the instrument as well.” He licked a finger and reached out to a spinning bowl. The glass squeaked a sour note.
Sam looked up, craning his neck awkwardly. He felt half-crushed already, as if the air itself, compacted by the stone slab over their heads, was pressing down on him.
Theo shook his head. He tried again. “It’s not just picking the right bowls,” he muttered. “It’s the pressure. Have to get it right . . .”
Crack! A lamp shattered on one wall, splattering hot oil onto the floor.
“Hate to rush you, Theo,” Sam whispered, “but . . .”
Theo was frowning, concentrating. “No, that’s F-sharp, I need C-natural . . .” His fingers jumped over to a new bowl. The sound that squeaked out sounded like some kind of operatic rodent. Sam winced.
“Try again,” Martina said, keeping her voice impressively calm.
Theo did. He was bending his knees all the time, dropping farther into a crouch. More notes squealed and shrilled. None of it sounded like music.
“Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni,” rattled through Sam’s head, fast and high-pitched, maddening and menacing. Theo kept tryi
ng. A tall contraption of glass tubes and brass wire on one of the tables groaned and shattered as the ceiling inched lower and lower.
“Don’t stop pedaling, Sam,” Martina whispered. “Theo, you can do it. ‘Yankee Doodle went to London . . .’”
Martina had a pretty good voice, right on key. Sam chimed in, trying to follow her, even though the music teacher at school had begged him to stand in the back row and move his mouth silently when the holiday concert came around.
“‘Riding on a pony . . . ,’” Sam and Martina chorused.
Theo picked a new bowl. His thick finger pressed down lightly, then harder. His eyes widened. “That’s it!” he said. “Middle C!”
“Keep going!” Martina whispered.
Theo had the hang of it now. His eyes were half on the sheet music, half on the bowls, and as his fingers leaped from one bowl to another, an eerie, piercing music sprang out. The sound was seriously weird, but Sam could recognize the tune. If aliens had decided to invade while whistling “Yankee Doodle,” it would have sounded like that.
The ceiling shuddered, paused, and began to rise again. Theo stood up straighter. Sam groaned with relief, and Martina put her hands to her face.
Sam heard other voices, muffled by the thick rock walls. “What’s going on in there? Is that music?”
The metal door at the far end of the room swung silently open.
“Come on!” Theo shouted to Sam and Martina.
Sam looked back at the room. Everything more than five feet from the floor was smashed to smithereens. Then he followed the other two through the door. As he swung it shut behind himself, it closed with a thump that he felt in his bones. He got a glimpse of a long passageway just before the door shut, and then darkness closed around them, thick and stifling.
“Marty? Where’s your old-timey-prospector head lamp thing?” Sam groped around for her and touched something soft—her hair?
“Sam, get your finger out of my eye! Let me turn it on—there!”
The light sprang on, illuminating the long tunnel Sam had glimpsed earlier.
“Better keep moving.” Theo started off, with Martina following. “Flintlock’s probably in the workshop right now.”