CHAPTER ONE

DETRITUS



MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

I must have dozed off. With a start, I woke up beneath a mahogany tree to find the clearing deserted. Only minutes before, or so it seemed, the N.T.Z. had been packed with local teens celebrating the end of summer. Or celebrating despite the end of summer, I suppose. But now there wasn't a soul in view. Or a ghost, for that matter.

I got to my feet and stretched, arching my back and craning my neck. What had been a roaring bonfire was now a cold, wet fire pit, but there was no shortage of light. The nearly perfect circle of an almost full moon illuminated the nearly perfect circle of the clearing. I padded over to the sandstone slab at the edge of the cliff and looked out over the Atlantic. A heavy quilt of mist had descended upon San Próspero below. Competing smells—orchids and bananas and ozone from the storm that had passed through earlier—tickled my nose. Mostly, I was hungry.

I scoured the place to see if the kids had left anything behind, but half a corn chip does not a meal make.

So I took off, slipping under banana plants and into the dense jungle that surrounds the N.T.Z. Heading down Macocael Mountain, dodging low-hanging vines and leaping over exposed roots, I passed "The Sign." I glanced back over my shoulder to confirm it hadn't changed. Because, as Maq is fond of saying, in these parts, you never know. But the incongruous artifact remained a true constant: a stolen PED X-ING sign with two iconic pedestrian-tourists surrounded by a hand-painted red circle with a line through it. Above the figures, the hand-painted, slashing red initials N.T.Z. marked the hidden, semisecret clearing above as a haven for local kids only. No Tourists Allowed in the No Tourist Zone.

Near the bottom of Macocael, I passed into the wet blanket of mist and, reaching Camino de Las Casas, paused to violently shake myself and fight off the damp. Then I trotted down the Camino toward Próspero Beach. I knew Maq would be there, and I knew he'd have something for me to eat.

I wasn't wrong. (I rarely am.) Maq had a small driftwood fire going on the sand, which would have been lovely and warm, except he had constructed it ridiculously close to the incoming tide. A baby breaker spilled water into flame, extinguishing about half of the already minute blaze. But Maq didn't seem to mind. He cheerfully fed more driftwood into what remained of his fire and a nice piece of fresh snapper into my mouth.

"It's long after midnight, Opie," he said. "Where've you been?" I was too busy wolfing down my meal to answer. Still, he seemed satisfied with that response and nodded sagely. I swallowed, and he said, "Want some more?"

Well, we are feasting tonight. I barked my approval, and he rubbed his knuckles across the yellow fur between my ears, while dropping another chunk of fish into the sand in front of me. I wagged my tail. (Okay, yes, I'm canine. Get over it.) Another wavelet sloshed into his shallow, struggling fire pit, as I snapped up the snapper.

Seconds later, I was bouncing around him like a batey ball, hoping for more—before realizing there was none. So I settled in beside my best friend and watched him contemplate the universe from beneath his straw hat. Maq stared down at the fire as the ocean finally put it out for good with an accompanying hissss and a cloud of steam, smoke and ash—all instantly carried off by a stiff breeze from the east. The water receded, leaving behind a layer of dirty seafoam amid the soaked coals, the foam quickly absorbed by the sand beneath. Maq, more pensive than I'm used to seeing him, considered this and nodded once again. "So many things are fleeting," he said, in that voice he had appropriated from W. C. Fields, back when the famous Hollywood actor had come to party on the Ghost Keys in 1935. "But even the most fleeting things return."

At first, I didn't have the slightest clue what he was talking about—but I was pretty sure he was talking about something. So I widened my perception beyond the beach, beyond the Pueblo, beyond San Próspero. And there, across the bay, I found what I was looking for on Sycorax Island: Isaac Naborías, bushy gray hair peeking out from under the hat of his official Sycorax Inc. security guard uniform, paused before the silent archaeological excavation at the mouth of the old bat cave.

It was part of Isaac's lonely, 4:00 A.M. rounds: a trip about the Old Manor, past corporate headquarters, between the three factories and the cannery, and then out to the dig and the cave—soon to be the site of a fourth factory. (Or is it a second cannery? Naborías wondered, none too sure.) Normally, he'd take a quick peek inside the cave, shining his heavy flashlight into its depths to make sure none of the late-shift employees were in there smoking anything funny. But tonight, just as he took a couple of shuffling steps toward the mouth, a lone bat flew out—right into his face. Naborías, eyes screwed shut, waved the thing away frantically; he hated bats! When he opened his eyes it was gone. He thought the exterminators the boss hired had taken care of those pests. Poisoned most of them and driven the rest away. Unfortunately, the cave was clearly still infested. He'd write that up in his nightly report, of course. That was his duty. But there was no way he was going inside there with those flying rats. So Isaac walked away in a huff—thus completely missing the bloodless, pale corpse lying faceup, not five feet away on the dark, sandy floor of the cave.



Copyright © 2014 by Greg Weisman