The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The only way Logan knew he’d fallen asleep in the hammock was that Miles was now shaking him and saying, “Wake up! You fell asleep in the hammock.” Logan, disoriented in the darkness as he tried to sit up, found himself unable to stop from spinning over into the sand. “Oomph,” he said, spitting out a mouthful of sand and grinning. “It’s real. We’re still here. Did Frank come back?”

  Miles pulled him to his feet. “No, but look at the aurora!”

  Logan’s eyes hadn’t adjusted yet to the darkness, which had an odd reddish-green glow to it. “I don’t see her. Is she still curled up under the tree? She’s probably hungry. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” He patted down his pockets, hoping for a stray Icy Mint Blob, but they were empty except for that lollypop stick he’d stuck in there when he was cleaning up the hallway at home. It must have gotten stuck in his pocket when he’d emptied them that night.

  “Not the cat,” Miles said, tugging Logan’s sleeve excitedly. “The real aurora! The northern lights!” This time Logan tilted his head back, then farther back when he saw something in the sky he’d never seen before or even dreamt could be real. A green glow shimmered and undulated above them, as if someone were shaking a picnic blanket out in the wind or pouring a bucketful of chocolate on the stars (if the chocolate happened to be green!). Every few seconds a smudge of red would peek out from behind it. “But didn’t that astronomy lady say they’re hard to see in the summer?” Logan asked Miles, who stood transfixed next to him, grinning from ear to ear.

  “It must be something about this weird microclimate,” Miles replied. He couldn’t wait to tell his parents and Arthur and Jade about it. He pulled out his vid com to take a video, but it wouldn’t work. That was odd. Well, it wasn’t like he would ever forget it anyway. He tucked the device away and set about fixing the image in his mind so he could play it back for himself as he lay in bed at home.

  “Did part of it hit the ground?” Logan asked a minute later. “And turn blue?”

  Miles forced himself to look away from the sky and down at Logan. “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the stream. It’s glowing.” Miles turned around and squinted in the dark. His jaw dropped when he saw the water. For a second he thought maybe the lights actually had come down to the ground, although he was pretty sure that was impossible. As they got closer, they could hear Philip, Daisy, and AJ laughing.

  “Look at your legs!” Daisy shouted at Philip.

  “Have you seen your hair lately?” he replied. “Blue is a good look for you!”

  Miles stopped short. “Is that Philip… in the water? Well, his legs, anyway?”

  Logan rubbed his eyes. Daisy and AJ were floating in the stream, fully dressed, while Philip sat on a rock and dangled his legs in the water. The scene would be bizarre enough if the water wasn’t glowing bright blue, but it was glowing bright blue.

  “Hey, guys!” Daisy called out to them, waving a blue arm. “There are tiny glowing things floating all around us!”

  “We can see that,” Logan replied, hurrying to the edge. The water looked alive, pulsing with thousands of points of light. In the midst of it, Daisy and AJ resembled some kind of ethereal race of people with glowing blue skin and hair. Aurora walked by, the tip of her nose glowing. She must have tested out the water.

  “They’re called dinoflagellates,” AJ explained. “Tiny single-celled creatures that make their own light.”

  Miles pointed to Philip. “You realize you’re basically wearing fish right now.” Philip jumped up faster than they’d ever seen him move. He slapped at his legs in an effort to wipe off the invisible sea creatures.

  “Do you think it’s the River of Light from the map?” Logan asked.

  Miles nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing. “It has to be.” He ran back to get the map from his backpack and returned. The river shined a good amount of light on it, but the flashlight on the vid com would have helped a lot more. “Hey, Daisy,” he called into the water, “did you notice our vid coms don’t work?”

  Tiny blue lights glittered on her skin and hair as she climbed out onto the sand. “Vid coms always work,” she said confidently. But Miles was right; nothing happened when she tried to turn hers on. “AJ?”

  AJ shook his head. “They must be blocking the signal somehow. Kind of like the radio quiet at the telescope.”

  Daisy frowned as she pressed the button repeatedly. She didn’t like feeling so cut off. “Frank has the tech to scramble our signals? Doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Maybe it’s not Frank,” Philip said, picking the last glowing dot from his knee. “It could be whatever’s in the ground—those microbes that hitched a ride on the meteorite that landed here. Maybe they’re supermagnetic or something.”

  Logan looked from the river to the tree. “Are they the same thing that’s in the water?”

  AJ shook his head. Blue lights flew out from his hair. “If our equipment can’t pick it up, whatever arrived on that meteorite is a thousand times smaller. Like on the subatomic level.”

  “Frank might not know exactly what makes the beans different,” Miles said, tilting the map toward the blue light, “but he knows a lot more than we do. I say we try to find him.” His stomach growled. The others had eaten lunch, but he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No one has any food on them, do they?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” AJ said, feeling like a bad chaperone. “I should have planned better. Next time we get trapped in paradise, I promise I’ll be more prepared.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” Logan said, “but we’re still behind the house, right?”

  A line from Frank’s letter came floating back to him. Frank had said something about “smelling it from here.” That must have been a reference to how close he was to the source of the beans! Frank could definitely smell the chocolate from his backyard—and this whole thing actually was his backyard! Logan leaned over and tapped the map where it said FOG to the North. “FOG doesn’t stand for real fog. It stands for Franklin O. Griffin’s initials!”

  Miles laughed, his hunger momentarily forgotten. “You’re right!” He loved it when maps surprised him! He turned around in a circle, trying to get his bearings. “Frank’s mapmaking skills have come a long way since he made this one. He didn’t label which way is north. I knew I should have kept that plastic compass.”

  Daisy tried her vid com again, but it still didn’t work. She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Too narrow a swath of sky for me to see the North Star. Time to go old school. Philip, hand me your watch.”

  He hesitated a second, then undid the clasp and laid it in her hand. “Reggie gave this to me for my tenth birthday. You’re not going to smash it, right?”

  “Look on the bright side. At least we’re not teasing you for still wearing a watch that doesn’t do anything except tell time.” Then she said, “No one happens to have a toothpick on them by any chance?”

  No one did. She turned to Logan. “Do you think it’s okay to take a really thin stick from the tree? I haven’t seen any branches lying on the ground.”

  Logan hesitated. “I don’t know.… It kind of feels weird to break something off.”

  Daisy figured he would say that. She knew what he meant.

  “Too thick?” AJ asked, holding up the stick map.

  “Yes.”

  “Would this work?” Logan asked, pulling the Leapin’ Lolly stick from his pocket.

  She grabbed it. “That would be perfect.”

  Philip and Miles both did a double take when they saw the lollypop stick, but before they could ask about it, Daisy began walking away, and they scrambled after her. She placed the watch on a rock next to the map, where the light shone the brightest, and held the stick straight up from the center of the hands. She turned the watch slowly until the resulting shadow cast by the stick lined up with the hour hand. She knelt in front of it and pointed in the air at the halfway mark between the shadow and twelve. “North