The Forbidden Fortress Read online

  “So, what inspired your vegetarianism?” Mom asked my friend as she sat down.

  Eric piled ham on his sandwich. “Her eternal quest for attention?”

  Savannah glared at him. “Actually, I read some articles—”

  “About vegetarian movie stars—” my brother interrupted.

  “Eric!” I cried.

  “Well, yes, they were about movie stars,” Savannah admitted. “But they were also about the terrible conditions in factory farms, and how much pollution the meat industry causes. Anyway, after I read that—”

  “You wanted to be just like them!” Eric clasped his hands under his chin and batted his eyelashes.

  “I wanted to take more personal responsibility for what I eat,” Sav said smoothly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “If Omega City taught me anything, it’s that we only have one Earth to live on, so we have to treat it as well as we can so we never actually have to take shelter in a place like that.”

  “What a wonderful sentiment,” said Mom.

  Savannah looked at Eric and stuck out her tongue. He took a big bite of his meaty sandwich.

  “You should share that story with the Guidant people next week,” Mom said.

  Our trip was all set. Mom was driving the five of us kids to meet Dad at the Guidant campus in Eureka Cove for the weekend. We’d be taking a tour of their facilities, talking to the engineers about the things we’d seen in Omega City, and even having a special dinner with the Guidant CEO, Elana Mero, herself.

  “In fact,” she went on, “maybe each of you should work on a little statement about what your trip underground taught you.”

  That was a great idea. Darn it.

  “There were a lot of things that I felt like I lost in the last few years,” Eric said. I winced. “Like sailing and scuba diving. But when I was in Omega City, I realized that I still knew how to do those things, and I was glad that I had those skills when I needed them. Now I just want to be ready for whatever comes along.”

  My sandwich felt like cardboard in my mouth. Exploding rocket ships, indeed.

  “What about you, Gillian?” Mom made the mistake of asking.

  I put my sandwich back on my plate. “What I learned is that it’s important to believe that Dad knows exactly what he’s talking about, even if everybody else has abandoned him.”

  Everyone at the table fell silent. Mom put her sandwich down and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Excuse me . . .” She left the table. A few seconds later, I heard her door shut.

  “Gillian!” Eric kicked me under the table. Hard. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” I asked, incredulous. “What’s wrong with you? You were just as mad at her last year as I was! And now it’s all 5Ks and swimming lessons and moving to Idaho.”

  “What?” Savannah asked. “What’s this about Idaho?”

  “I was mad,” Eric said, “because she was gone. But now she’s back.”

  “Oh, great!” I threw my hands up in the air. “All’s forgiven! Hey, Fiona hasn’t tried to kill us in ten months, is she okay now, too?”

  “Mom,” Eric said in a dangerous whisper, “is not Fiona.”

  Savannah nodded. “I’m with Eric on that one. I can’t believe you, Gillian.”

  “Fine!” I pushed away from the table. “I’m used to not being believed.” I stomped outside. On the porch, our cat Paper Clip was snoozing on the glider, her striped yellow tail flicking lazily back and forth.

  She was a traitor, too. One woven ball filled with catnip and the cat was Mom’s slave. And I loved Paper Clip, but honestly, that kind of behavior was enough to make me agree with Dad that felines were completely untrustworthy.

  I paced the porch, bristling. No one followed me outside. No one did anything. Some best friend. Some brother.

  Some mom.

  One week until I saw Dad again. He would understand what I was going through. He wouldn’t be all hunky-dory with Mom just because she never burned our dinner and knew how to run a vacuum and liked to jog at sunrise and bought me school clothes.

  Maybe he would even insist we couldn’t move. Maybe Dad would see how helpful we were at Guidant and want us to come to more of his events. I had to be here, to encourage Dad with his next book . . . and make sure he didn’t light the kitchen cabinets on fire while brewing coffee.

  Though, to be fair, that had only happened once.

  I hopped on my bike and sped off down the dirt road leading to our cottage. Clearly, Savannah and Eric weren’t on my side. I needed to hang out with people who would be. And that meant I needed the Nolands.

  BY THE TIME I got to Nate and Howard’s house, the August sun had turned my ponytail into a frizzy mess and made my shirt stick to my skin. I stood on their front porch, wiping streaks of road dust off my face with the back of my sweaty hand.

  “Gillian,” said Mrs. Noland, when she came to the door. “What a surprise. Are the boys expecting you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I replied. “Are they home?”

  “Nate’s got a shift at the pool,” Mrs. Noland said. “But Howard’s out back”—she hesitated—“testing a hypothesis. He says.”

  Right. Of course. “Should I go around?”

  She pushed open the screen. “Come through the kitchen. You look like you could use some lemonade.”

  I probably looked like I could use a whole bath of lemonade. In the kitchen, Mrs. Noland loaded up a tray with two glasses, a tall pitcher of water for the lemonade, and a bowl of pretzels.

  “We haven’t seen you much this summer,” she said as she stirred the pink lemonade mix into the water. “Of course, Howard’s been so busy with the baseball team. Have you been to any of the games?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Howard didn’t mention he’d started playing.”

  Mrs. Noland looked at me. “Oh, he doesn’t play, dear. He runs the stats.”

  “Oh.” That made more sense.

  “Anyway, the boys are so excited about the trip next week. Ask your mother to take lots of pictures. I think it’ll be great for Nate’s college applications, that he’s giving advice to engineers at Guidant. I’ve already told him he should write his application essay about Omega City.”

  “Okay,” I said. Did that mean Mom was staying for the whole thing? That wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal.

  I headed out to the backyard, loaded down with the tray. The heat out here was even worse than it had been on the ride over, as the tall fence seemed to keep out even the breeze. Howard’s yard was totally devoid of trees, and the sky was a bright, solid blue. I spotted Howard right away, or at least, a Howard-shaped object. He was lying perfectly still on a vinyl chaise longue in the middle of the yard, encased head to foot in his Omega City utility suit. Even his hood was up.

  I hurried over as quickly as my tray of dishes and lemonade would allow. He was going to get heatstroke in that thing.

  “Howard!” I cried. “Are you all right?” I put the tray down on the side table. There was a solar-powered radio there, tuned to some news channel.

  “Yes,” came his voice from inside the dark visor. “Is that lemonade?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded so calm.

  “What color?”

  “Um, pink?”

  He sat up and unzipped the hood, pulling it down around his face. “That’s the only drawback of this thing,” he said. “The dark visor really distorts the visible spectrum.”

  I stared at him, openmouthed. I’d expected him to look like he’d just stepped out of a steam room, dripping with sweat in the hot summer sun. But he seemed nice and cool.

  Howard was examining the contents of the pitcher. “I hope she remembered to account for the dilution of melted ice in the mixture this time. But at least it’s pink.”

  “You only drink pink lemonade?” Howard had a lot of weird rules about food, and none of them, unlike Savannah’s, were based on what he’d read in a celebrity magazine.

  I might be mad at Eric, but he was totally right abou
t the vegetarianism.

  “If it’s from a mix, I only drink pink,” he said. “If it’s real, I won’t drink pink, because they make it with strawberries.”

  “So why do you only drink pink from a mix?”

  He frowned. “I won’t drink pink if it’s real.” As if that made sense.

  I still wasn’t sure I understood, but I poured us some lemonade anyway. On the radio, a news announcer was talking about a newly discovered comet. “So what’s your hypothesis? Your mom said—”

  “Shh!” Howard turned up the volume. “I want to hear this.”

  “—Capella satellite, designed to detect and monitor near-Earth objects, will be assisting NASA when the comet passes within three hundred thousand miles of Earth this month. This will be the closest space object to pass by Earth this decade.”

  “Wow,” said Howard. “That’s close.”

  And Howard would know. Of course, thanks to Howard and Dr. Underberg, I knew all the relative distances, too. The moon was about two hundred and forty thousand miles away. So this comet was super close.

  The radio announcer started talking about some environmental disaster, and Howard flicked the switch and grabbed a glass of lemonade. “My hypothesis,” he said. “I’m testing the cooling functions on the suit. It’s twenty degrees in here, at the lowest setting. In Celsius, of course.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Actually, I had no idea what that would be in Fahrenheit, and Savannah wasn’t here to do the math for me. But it must be cool. “Wait, is that why you’ve been wearing your suit to the baseball games?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “It’s hot out there, and the dugout doesn’t have any air-conditioning.”

  I laughed. “Savannah said she thought it was because the team is the Rockets.”

  “What would that have to do with me wearing an Omega City utility suit?”

  “Because it looks like a space . . . never mind.” I sat down on the edge of the lounger and put up my hand to try to shade my eyes from the sun. It didn’t work so well, especially since Howard’s silver suit was bouncing rays all over the yard.

  Still, baking alive was better than my house with my mom and her fan club. I knew for sure that Howard would have no interest in my mom. If it wasn’t about NASA, he didn’t care.

  “Are you looking forward to the trip to Guidant?” I asked.

  Howard fiddled with the hexagonal zipper pulls on his suit. Their faceted surfaces glittered in the sunlight. “I’m not sure. I think it’ll be fun to see the technology on the Guidant campus, and I’m glad that my parents are letting Nate and me go alone, because they’ve never let us go anywhere without them before. Except Omega City, of course, and they didn’t know about that.”

  No, no one’s parents would have let their kids go exploring a drowned underground city. Not even my father.

  “But I don’t know what they want us to tell them. They have your dad’s book. Everything we know about Omega City is already in there.”

  “There’s always more to tell,” I said. “That’s what Dad does every day. Meets with people who have read his book and tells them more details and lets them ask questions.”

  Howard hesitated for a moment. “But if he didn’t put it in the book, didn’t he have a good reason?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like protecting Dr. Underberg.”

  “You mean because he tried to get a bunch of kids to run away to outer space with him?” I admit, if you hadn’t been there with us, underground, while Omega City was being drowned under water and explosions were rocking the cavern, Dr. Underberg’s offer to make room for us in his rocket ship might have struck you as a little . . . odd. Even in the moment, only Howard had considered it—and Nate had to practically beg him to unbuckle himself from his seat on the ship and escape with us.

  And it was a good thing, too, since Dad never did find out what had happened to Dr. Underberg after his ship took off.

  I wasn’t a space expert like Howard, but I did know how hard space travel was even on young, healthy astronauts. It had been ten months since Knowledge had rocketed into the stratosphere. Even if Dr. Underberg somehow had a fully operational life-support system in place—which was unlikely, given the state of the rest of Omega City—it didn’t mean that an eighty-six-year-old man would survive such a voyage.

  “No,” said Howard. “Not about that. But Dr. Underberg had secrets to keep. What if by talking about Omega City, we accidentally tell them?”

  3

  CAKE AND CODE BREAKING

  THE DAY BEFORE WE LEFT FOR EUREKA COVE WAS HOWARD’S BIRTHDAY, and his parents invited Savannah, Eric, me, and our moms to come out with them for pizza. Even though we weren’t sure if it counted as a birthday party, Mom insisted we bring gifts. She even drove us to the mall to shop, but since the mall didn’t have a NASA store, we were sort of at a loss. We wandered up and down the aisles of the toy store, as Mom pointed out Star Wars Lego sets and astronaut ice cream.

  “He’d only eat it if it’s Omega City brand,” Eric said, which was true. And, obviously, the ice cream was not.

  “It’s not like there’s anything space-related that we’d know about but not him,” Savannah pointed out as we left the store empty-handed. “The only thing I can think of that Howard might want for his birthday is a ride in a real rocket ship. You know, the one he didn’t get in Omega City.”

  That reminded me of our conversation the other day. After I’d talked with Howard, I’d gone home and read through the sections about us and our adventures in The Forgotten Fortress, looking for any important details Dad might have left out, but that wasn’t Dad’s style. He was the one who found out other people’s secrets, and told the whole world.

  Still, it was sweet that Howard wanted to protect Dr. Underberg.

  “Hey, guys?” Mom had stopped in front of a fancy stationery store. “What about a space pen?” She pointed at a sleek silver object in the window. “This says it was designed by NASA and has been used on all manned missions since 1968. You could go in on it together. They’ll even engrave his name on it.”

  I had to hand it to Mom. That was a pretty good idea. The pen was silver, like a little rocket ship, and came in a box with a NASA seal and certification and everything. We debated for a while about what the engraving should say. At first, we’d all thought Howard, but Mom suggested that H. Noland or Howard Noland might look “more professional.”

  “But he’s not a professional,” I said. “He’s a sixth grader.”

  “I like H. Noland,” Savannah said, ignoring me. “It’s dignified.”

  “Yeah,” Eric agreed. “Plus, we have to pay by the letter.”

  We chose a nice block print and the man engraved the pen, and even wrapped it in pretty blue paper with a white ribbon.

  As we walked out of the store, Savannah shook her head, grinning. “If you told me a year ago that I’d be spending two hours picking out a present for Howard Noland’s birthday, I would have laughed in your face.”

  “Yeah, especially if I told you that it was an engraved pen, and you agreed with Eric about what the engraving should say.”

  That made her stop dead in her tracks.

  GENERAL TSO’S PIZZA was located in an old brick building that I’m pretty sure used to be a chain pizza place. The roof had an odd, distinctive shape barely camouflaged by the weird dragons and other designs that had been added to the exterior of the building to make it look like a pagoda. Inside, murals of Venetian canals fought with silk screens, and carved wooden Buddhas stood next to plump Italian chefs holding bottles of wine.

  “Ah,” said Mom with a pained smile. “I’d forgotten how . . . unique this place is. Has the food gotten any better?”

  “Nope.” Eric smiled and waved at Nate, Howard, and their mother, who were hanging out at one of the four booths lining the walls. The restaurant was empty—most people who ate the food here ordered delivery.

  “Hey, guys,” said Nate as he dragged over a table to add to the end of th
e booth for us. We all sat down. “You know what you want?”

  “I don’t,” Mom said. She opened the menu. “Has the waiter been by?”

  “Waiter?” said Nate, as if he’d never before heard the word. “Yeah, they don’t have one of those. Just tell me what you want and I’ll tell the kitchen. I used to work here.”

  Nate had done delivery for General Tso’s, back before his truck got wrecked during the launch of the rocket ship Knowledge. This winter, he’d made extra cash by shoveling snow and chopping wood, and this summer, he’d started mowing lawns. He said he liked it way more than delivering pizza.

  “Why?” Savannah had asked a few months ago.

  And Nate had replied, “Because you don’t have a lawn, Savvy,” which had made Eric laugh for about five minutes straight.

  “Oh,” Mom said. “I think I’ll try the chicken fried linguini.”

  “Your funeral,” said Nate. He looked at us. “The usual?”

  We all nodded, and Nate headed off to the kitchen. I handed Howard our present.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking at the table. He put it with a small pile of other gifts.

  “Thank you for inviting us to your birthday dinner,” Mom prompted.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Eric echoed dutifully.

  “Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Noland responded. “We’re so glad to have some of Howard’s friends over.”

  For once. She didn’t say that, but the words seemed to hang in the air until Nate came back to the table with a pitcher of lemonade and a bunch of glasses. “When is Dad getting here?”

  “He has to work late tonight,” his mother explained, and poured a glass of lemonade. “Here you go, birthday boy. Should we start with the presents?” She reached for a big, oblong one. “This one’s from your father.”

  It was tough for Howard to get the paper off while cornered in the booth. Inside was a baseball bat and a set of two balls, as well as a note.

  “‘Dear Howie,’” Howard read, his voice flat. “‘To help you make the team next summer.’”

  I looked up to catch Nate rolling his eyes. I didn’t blame him. We all knew how much Howard hated it when his father called him Howie.