Their parents should have gotten here already. They would have moved more quickly along the main trail, with their longer legs and no poky branches getting in their way. So where were they?

  “Mom!” Luis called out.

  Sutton squatted down and unzipped her pack. “Want a snack while we wait?”

  “Where are they?” Luis asked. The clearing was about the size of the basketball court where the regional robotics competition was held. It was surrounded by thick woods on all sides. “Which way did we come from?”

  That was easy. The tunnel was right behind them. “They’ll get here.” Sutton examined Luis’s face. It looked normal—a warm brown, several shades darker than his mom’s. But his breathing was still a little funny. “I think you should have something to eat.”

  Sutton had been very careful not to pack any snacks with Luis’s allergens.

  But Luis returned to the tunnel entrance and peered inside—as though their parents could fit through there when the kids had barely made it. Then he walked back and forth along the bushes, trying to find where their parents might come through to meet them.

  He reminded her of the mini-bot, spinning in circles, unable to find the next turn in the maze. Unlike the bot, which would keep trying until its charge ran out, Luis finally gave up and came to sit next to Sutton, who had spread a towel on the bug-infested ground before sitting.

  She bit into an apple. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was sitting on the floor of her room. She did have some imagination after all. Except birds kept chirping. Something buzzed past her ear. And her fingers were itching for a screen to swipe.

  People, not pixels.

  But she didn’t have people! She only had Luis. Her dad and even Elizabeth would make it people. Sutton took another bite of apple. If her dad hadn’t shown up by the time she finished the apple, then she might start to worry. A little. It was a big apple. There was time.

  It was quiet for a minute, except for the birds and bugs and Sutton’s chewing. Then Luis said, “I think we have to work together if we’re going to defeat the Dark Force.”

  Sutton paused, midbite. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It’s from a book. There are these two schools for magical misfits, and normally they’re clashing and in competition, but then the Dark Force starts trying to defeat them by taking control of the students at the rival magical academy.”

  Sutton blinked at him. She really did not get this kid. But she had promised to try. “What’s the book called?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested.”

  She frowned. “I could be. But also my friend Sabina is really into fantasy, and she has a birthday at the end of the summer.”

  “Oh!” Luis brightened. “I could give you a bunch of suggestions! Has she read The Serpent’s Secret? Or Shadows of Sherwood? Or The Jumbies?”

  “I don’t know. What was the one you were just describing?”

  Luis’s cheeks went pink. “Oh. She can’t read that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a real book! It’s just a story I’m writing.”

  “Oh.” That was pretty neat, actually. Sutton might not have enjoyed reading stories, but she had a full and complete appreciation for how difficult it was to create them. Her dad made her do a creative-writing unit every year. “So what does your story have to do with our situation?”

  “I was saying our parents aren’t coming,” Luis said. “It’s only the two of us now, and even if we don’t see things the same way, we have to work together. We can’t sit here doing nothing. If they were coming, they’d be here by now.”

  Sutton frowned and took the last bite of her apple. Logic said they should stay in one place and their parents would come. But logic didn’t always work. Sure, it could be relied on most of the time, but there were outliers. Maybe some creative thinking was exactly what she needed to get her bot through its maze. And maybe if she tried things Luis’s way, she would learn something about how to do that.

  “Okay.” She got to her feet and dusted herself off.

  “Wait, really?”

  She shrugged and started walking around the edges of the clearing. “There has to be a way out somewhere. Do you know how many people hike in Discovery Park every year?”

  “But adults don’t fit through that tunnel.”

  “I’m sure we’re not the first kids in this situation.”

  Upon reflection, they probably were the first kids in this particular situation: on a second family date after the first rather disastrous one, mismatched in every way except one—they were both completely unprepared to survive alone in the wilderness.

  “Is your mom outdoorsy?” Sutton asked as she prodded a particularly thorny-looking bush.

  Luis paused. “She wasn’t, before your dad.”

  “Yeah, my dad was never into hiking before he met your mom.”

  “Oh.” He was quiet for a minute, except for a tiny yelp Sutton thought might have been caused by a ladybug flitting past. “Actually, she used to do outdoorsy stuff with my dad. They got married on a beach. And climbed a volcano in Guatemala. But that was a long time ago.”

  Sutton realized she hadn’t asked her dad about Luis’s parents. Were they divorced? Was his dad around? Something about the wistfulness in his voice right then made her think maybe he wasn’t.

  On her second time around the clearing, Sutton saw something she hadn’t noticed before. Tucked behind an overgrown bush, there was a trail. It wasn’t a tiny, narrow passage like the tunnel. It was an actual trail.

  “There is a way out!” she announced. “A trail behind this tree!”

  “Really?”

  “We can stand up and everything!”

  Luis cheered, grabbed his backpack, and headed for the trail.

  “Wait.” Sutton grabbed Luis’s arm. “Are we sure this is the best idea? My dad would tell me to wait here.”

  “But ‘stay where you are’ is for when you’re lost and your parents can come find you. They can’t get through the tunnel! Plus, what if they’re much farther down the trail?” Luis said. “What if, from the outside, it looks like the tunnel goes on a longer way? They would keep walking. But by now they’re probably worried too. My mom is probably freaking out!”

  His breath started to come in short bursts again.

  Sutton wasn’t going on a quest. This wasn’t a magical land and there was no sinister force trying to curse them. But Luis had a point. Her dad was probably freaking out too. “Okay.” Sutton slung her backpack onto her shoulders. “Let’s check it out.”

  It didn’t take them long to reach the end of the path. Where the trail divided into three more paths. Sutton groaned.

  “Three paths!” Luis’s breathing was back to normal. “Three’s an important number in classic fairy tales. Three bears, three wise men, three billy goats gruff…”

  Sutton waited. Then she watched his face fall. Now they were on the same page. Having three different options wasn’t actually a good thing.

  “Okay, we can’t panic,” he said. “Whenever characters in books get lost, panicking just takes up time.”

  Sutton was very proud of herself for not rolling her eyes. He was the one who kept panicking.

  “We should build a cairn,” he blurted.

  “A what?”

  “A cairn. Explorers use them to mark their paths. If we take one path and end up back here, we’ll know which path we already tried.”

  Sutton fiddled with the end of her backpack strap. Sometimes Luis’s ideas were wacko. But sometimes they were so wacko, they ended up being good.

  “In Kaya’s Escape, she builds a cairn on the Buffalo Trail and it helps her people find her!”

  Sutton didn’t know who Kaya was, but she vaguely remembered cairns from a history lesson. “We have to decide which path we’re taking before we build the cairn, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess? I mean, yeah! Where do you think we should go?”

  Deciding which way to go had not been Sutton’s greatest strength lately, at least if she considered herself the brains of the bot. Which she did. “If my dad hadn’t taken my tablet, this would be a lot easier. But I remember from the maps that the park entrance was to the north.”

  Luis looked one way, and then another. “So… which way’s north?”

  Sutton peered at the sky. The sun hadn’t risen up above the trees yet. (She was kind of glad, because while she knew she was supposed to be able to figure out directions from the position of the sun, she didn’t really know how.)

  “If only I hadn’t taken off my watch with GPS,” she said. “Even a compass would help.…”

  “Oh! I have a compass!”

  Sutton stared at Luis. Why hadn’t he said so sooner?

  He set his pack down, rummaged around, and came up with a compass. He handed it to her. “I don’t know how to use it.”

  “Then why do you have it?”

  He shrugged. “Because that’s what explorers have.” Then quieter: “And it belonged to my dad.”

  It belonged to his dad. Past tense.

  “I’m really sorry. Is it… the only thing of his you have?”

  Luis reached like he might grab the compass back, but then held off. “No. We have lots of stuff and pictures. Even videos. But it still matters to me!”

  Of course it mattered to him. Sutton’s mom was alive; she was just on the other side of the globe. She was like a mother penguin who’d left her egg to be cared for by its father, not because she didn’t care about it, but because that was what worked for their family. The mother penguin had to return to the sea to feed, after all the effort of laying an egg. Sutton’s mom had to return to the research station to do the work she was meant to do. Important work, work that could save whole ecosystems. And Sutton still missed her all the time.

  “Well, your dad’s compass is going to get us out of here,” she said. “So I’m glad he left it to you.”

  Sutton knew how to use a compass, even though they were ancient technology. Her dad always made her learn the principles behind a technology before she used it, like how to do the math herself before she used a calculator.

  She found north with the compass and then decided which of the three trails would take them north. Sort of.

  “Cool! So we put a cairn here to mark which way we went. That way, if we try to retrace our steps, or someone comes through here looking for us—”

  “Does it matter what size rocks?” Sutton asked, handing the compass back to Luis. She hoisted the biggest rock she saw and lugged it toward the trailhead.

  Luis shrugged. “It’s just a pile of rocks. Whatever we can find.” He started gathering more rocks.

  “But if we want it to be stable, we should think about it like engineers,” Sutton pointed out. “A random pile will get knocked over by any animal that walks past.”

  Luis froze. “Are there animals out here?”

  Of course there were animals. It was a forest. But hopefully nothing more menacing than squirrels. Not bears. Or wildcats. What else lived in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest? Sutton’s mind flashed to news reports about mountain lions along hiking trails.

  But Discovery Park was in the middle of a major city. There couldn’t be mountain lions. Could there?

  Sutton shoved the biggest rock into the center of the trail entrance. “We need a stable base,” she said, “as wide as possible.”

  Working together, it didn’t take long before the cairn was built and they were on their way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Luis

  The next time they came to a fork in the trail, Sutton offered to show Luis how to use the compass. It was his, after all. On the one hand, after getting separated today, his mother would probably never allow him to go outside ever again. But on the other hand, all the old-timey adventurers in his favorite books knew how to use a compass. It seemed like a useful skill.

  Luis held the compass in his palm. His papi’s compass. A little arrow on the compass pointed to the N, which Luis knew stood for north. “That way!” he said. Which was weird, because it was back the way they had come.

  “No.” Sutton grabbed the compass, but then she held it out for Luis to see. “That arrow never moves. Here. If I look at the red arrow, it seems like that way is north!” She turned another direction. “Now that way is north!” She turned another direction. “Now that way is north!”

  Luis frowned. “Is it broken?”

  “No. You have to line up the red arrow that always points at the N with the floating arrow that spins. When they line up, it’s pointing north.” She handed the compass back to Luis.

  He turned it slowly, carefully until the arrows lined up. “So… that way?”

  “Right,” Sutton said.

  Luis swelled with accomplishment as he wrapped his hands around his papi’s compass. Luis didn’t really remember him, but from his mom’s pictures, Papi had loved the outdoors. He hiked and mountain biked and rock climbed. He used to run marathons back in Guatemala. Maybe his mom had been missing the outdoors all these years, stuck inside with Luis so he wouldn’t get stung by a bee.

  “Thanks for showing me,” Luis said.

  Sutton smiled. It might have been the first time Luis had seen her smile. “The next time I see you, I’ll show you how to use GPS,” she promised. “It’s much cooler.”

  Luis grinned. When they’d first met, Sutton hadn’t seemed interested in a next time. This was progress. Of course, he hoped next time wouldn’t involve the possibility of getting lost in the woods. Maybe Sutton and her dad could come over to their house. They could make an allergen-free meal, and Luis could show Sutton his Penelope Bell notebook. Maybe.

  “Do you think there’ll be a next time?” he asked.

  “As long as we don’t die from exposure,” she said.

  Luis froze and Sutton burst out laughing. “I’m joking,” she added. “There are plenty of things we could die from out here. It’s way too warm to die from exposure, though. I’m pretty sure that means, like, freezing to death.”

  This was not making Luis feel any better.

  “And,” she said, more serious this time, “there’ll probably be a next time.”

  They came to another fork, or at least it looked like a fork. Except the path that continued north only went a few feet before it dead-ended in blackberry brambles. The other option was to take the path that turned left, which sent them directly west.

  “This isn’t right,” Luis said.

  “No,” Sutton agreed. “But on the bright side, we can’t go very far west before we’ll reach the water.”

  Was that a bright side? “We don’t want to go west at all! The parking lot is north! My mom said if we got separated, to meet in the parking lot.”

  “So we go west until the next chance to go north. Maybe it’s not the most direct way, but it’ll still get us there.”

  She set off to the west. Luis followed, mostly because he wasn’t going to be left behind. After a few minutes, Sutton spoke up again. “I’m programming this robot to go through a maze,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not a big robot like at the MoPOP with all sorts of buttons and abilities. It’s just a little mini-bot.”

  “It still sounds cool.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, I’ve been trying to program it to get through a maze by the quickest route possible. I’m doing something wrong in the code that I can’t figure out.”

  Luis had no idea how to help with robots, but he wanted to keep Sutton talking. “Could you ask your mom? Isn’t she some kind of scientist?”

  “She’s a biologist. She doesn’t know a lot about coding, but she does think sort of like I do. So maybe. I don’t know when she’ll get back in town, though. Anyway, I was thinking about how my focus has been on getting the bot through the maze as quickly as possible, right? That’s the goal I set when I started.”

  “Maybe the bot will still get through by a different route?”

  “Exactly! And maybe speed isn’t the most important thing.”

  “Yeah!” Luis thought about Penelope Bell and her friends, rushing to get to Alistair Academy before the Dark Force took over the school. If they hadn’t been so focused on getting there quickly, they could have gathered more misfits to their side for the battle ahead. “Though I definitely would rather get to the parking lot before dark.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sutton

  Sutton had been right about the water.

  Eventually the westbound trail brought them to a clearing that overlooked Puget Sound, a huge expanse of water between Seattle and the Olympic Mountain range. Between Seattle and the mountains, though, lay a string of islands where Sutton’s mom used to take her on day trips.

  Since Sutton had been five when her parents got divorced, she only remembered snapshots from that time. Moving from the house they all shared in Ballard to the apartment building in South Lake Union. Missing her mom at bedtime. Meeting Mrs. Banerjee and Moti, who was a brand-new puppy.

  On weekends, Sutton’s mom would take her on special outings. They’d go to the Science Center or the Children’s Museum or the Seattle Aquarium. Sometimes they’d take a ferry across to one of the islands and get ice cream that wasn’t really any different than ice cream they could get in Seattle, but it was special because it was with her mom.

  But then one weekend they took a ferry out to Whidbey Island, and Sutton was licking a huge scoop of blackberry-honey ice cream when her mom explained about a new job. A new job that would send her far away for long stretches of time. Important work! Female scientists! Saving penguins!

  They hadn’t gone back to the islands again.

  “Are you okay?” Luis asked.

  Sutton nodded and turned away from the view of the water and the mountains. And the islands. “Yep,” she said. “So if the water is west, that way is north.”

  There was a clear, well-traveled trail heading north. “Yes!” Luis did a little leap on his way toward the path. He was so busy dancing around, he nearly crashed into a grizzled old man with an intricately carved walking stick. “Oh!”