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  “Whose idea was this again?” Remi said as he shook his head.

  “I guess that would be me. Sorry, bro,” Leo offered. He was rubbing his side, where he’d just been struck by a Remi wrecking ball.

  The platform was right in the center of the wall — no closer to the ground than the top edge of the stones.

  “Looks like it’s about twenty feet up there,” Leo said.

  “And twenty feet down,” Remi said. He was looking down into a hole on the platform that had a ladder leading to the ground.

  “Let’s have a look outside first, shouldn’t we?” Leo asked. “We can go down right after.”

  Remi sniffed the air.

  “Someone’s cooking,” he said, standing up. He sniffed some more, like a dog on a scent, and pointed back in the direction from which they’d come. “Down there. It’s bacon.”

  “Just give me two seconds,” Leo pleaded. “Don’t you want to know where we are?”

  Remi looked up, then back in the direction of the unseen bacon sizzling on a grill, then at his stepbrother and best friend in the whole world.

  “You’re the only person I’d do this for, but okay. Let’s get up there and have a look.”

  Leo smiled broadly and the two began climbing. A ladder leading up the side of the wall was wide enough for both of them to ascend side by side, so they went together. Remi kept looking over his shoulder, in search of breakfast, but there were so many branches and vines and tree trunks, it was useless. He could barely see past his own nose, let alone all the way off into the field of wacky inventions.

  “They sure do know how to grow trees around this place.”

  It was farther than either of them had supposed when they had looked up, and the rungs were farther apart the higher they climbed. By the time they reached up and touched the top of the wall, they were both out of breath.

  “This thing is wider than I expected it to be,” Leo said, ever the observer of all things before him. The top of the wall was about three feet wide, so both boys hopped up on top and let their legs dangle down on the other side.

  “Merganzer D. Whippet is a strange dude,” Remi said. “The guy’s got a moat.”

  Hazy green water came right to the edge of the wall and spanned fifty feet across. It was so wide, the moat made the field of wacky inventions look like it was sitting in the middle of a lake.

  “Do you suppose there are any alligators in there?” Remi asked, flipping over onto his stomach and lying down on the wall with his face staring down at the water.

  “One way to find out,” Leo answered, pulling out another lint-covered piece of beef jerky and tossing it over the edge of the wall. He reclined next to Remi and waited as the jerky floated on the surface of the water like a piece of bark from a tree. Looking past the moat, Leo saw a vast space of empty land, presumably owned by Merganzer, and no sign of a road into the property anywhere. It would seem that the only way in was by airship.

  “Check it out,” Remi said. “Did you see that?”

  Leo snapped to attention and looked straight down at the beef jerky. There were swirling movements coming in from four directions, and while Leo looked, four alligator heads burst out of the water and went after the treat at once. The water turned into a frothing, churning sea of sharp teeth and slapping tails.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” Remi said, sitting up and looking back into the relative calm of the world inside the walls. “Let’s go get breakfast.”

  Leo had to agree — there wasn’t a whole lot more sitting on top of the wall was going to get them. They’d gotten about as much information as they were likely to get, and it was not good: They were isolated, there was no way out, and there were alligators in the moat.

  Whatever Merganzer D. Whippet was doing in the field of wacky inventions, he didn’t want anyone finding out about it.

  “Come on,” Remi said. “There’s nothing a good pancake won’t make better. Let’s go find out what’s going on around here.”

  It was easy finding their way back. All they had to do was climb down onto the ground and follow the smell of sizzling bacon, which became stronger and more pleasant the closer they got to its source. As they walked, they saw enormous round tents and oddly shaped buildings off in the distance between the trees, but they didn’t dare do any more exploring on their own without permission. If there were alligators in the moat, there was no telling what might be lurking in a structure that looked like a circus tent.

  “It looks like the other airships are still here,” Leo said as they passed near a square building sitting on the grass with ropes leading up into the tall trees. “I think ours was the only one that took off last night.”

  “And we’ve arrived,” Remi said as they walked under a circle of leafy tree limbs overhead. Bright green grass covered a small grove they’d found, and in the middle, a long stone table awaited them. It appeared, from the way everyone was staring at them, that they were late.

  “Is this them?”

  The voice was not friendly, and the face that delivered it was even less so. It belonged to a man dressed in a white suit, with the longest face Leo had ever seen in his life, made longer because of the pointed white beard that extended six inches off his chin.

  Merganzer was standing to the side, wearing an apron and a tall hat. He presided over a round cooking surface as big as a tractor tire. When he saw Leo and Remi, he lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “There you are! I was starting to wonder who was going to eat all these pancakes. Have a seat — we’ve been expecting you.”

  There were five people seated at the long table, and they all looked as if they’d not only already eaten but had also grown tired of waiting around for whatever was going to come next. Leo and Remi sat down in the two empty chairs and waited for their pancakes and bacon to arrive. The plates before them were more like pizza pie pans — huge — and this made both of them feel a tinge of excitement in their empty stomachs.

  “Where have you been hiding?” a meticulously dressed, overly tanned woman with jet-black hair asked. She was more Hollywood than Fifth Avenue, and Leo had the feeling she was much older than she appeared. Had he been aware of all the ways in which a person could hold back the sands of time, at least in the facial department, he would have been doubly sure she was pushing seventy even if she didn’t look a day over forty.

  “We were up in a tree house,” Remi said. “It took some work getting down here.”

  The woman introduced herself as Miss Harrington, then picked up her coffee cup and stared off into the trees. Leo had the distinct feeling something was going on here that he wasn’t fully in on, but there was no way to be sure. He didn’t have time to think more about it because Merganzer had sprung into action.

  “Incoming!” he shouted, flipping a pancake the size of a dinner plate into the air and over the long table. The pancake flew skyward, rolling end over end as it went, and arrived in the general vicinity over Leo’s and Remi’s heads. Leo was fast, but Remi was faster. Before Leo knew it, Remi had his gigantic plate held high in the air, catching the pancake before Leo could get under it.

  “Nice catch,” Leo had to admit.

  Remi sniffed the pancake and his dark eyebrows rose. “He cooked the bacon right into this thing. By golly, he is a genius.”

  “Incoming!” Merganzer screamed again, and a second unusually large pancake went flying and flipping.

  “I do wish he would stop shouting,” a dapper-looking gentleman at the end of the long table said. He rested his chin on the end of a long cane, which had a golden duck head for a top.

  “I got this one!” Leo cried, and he did, standing up and holding his plate higher than Remi could reach (a good thing, because Remi was shamelessly going for two out of two).

  Merganzer walked to the head of the table, where Leo and Remi sat on his left, and pulled what looked like a can of spray paint out of his apron pocket.

  “Whipped cream,” Remi whispered to Leo. “Awesome!”


  “It’s not whipped cream,” Merganzer said, leaning down closer to the boys and shaking the can with all his might. “It’s something much better than that.”

  “Better lean back,” the dapper man with the cane said. “This could get ugly.”

  But it was much too late for that, because Merganzer didn’t have a can of whipped cream, he had a can of Glooooob, the amazing, sour, sweet, syrupy, sparkling perfection that Dr. Flart had invented in his laboratory under the Whippet Hotel. The canned kind was highly volatile, and once Merganzer started spraying, the stuff was flying out like foam from a fire extinguisher. Green fizzy glop flew up into the trees, slathered every person in the gathering, and covered most of the table before Merganzer finally tamed the can and directed its contents to Leo’s and Remi’s plates.

  “I hate when he does this,” a large man who looked more like a walrus than a person said. His very bushy mustache was covered in Glooooob.

  “Eat fast!” Merganzer said when the deed was done. “It won’t last long, as you already know.”

  Leo was laughing too hard to start eating, but Remi knew better. The most amazing thing about Glooooob was that you could make the most spectacular mess imaginable with it, and within a few seconds it would start to evaporate into thin air. By the time Leo looked down, the Glooooob on his plate was already beginning to evaporate. Remi slurped up everything but the pancake on his plate with a disgusting sucking sound that sent Leo and Merganzer into howls of laughter while everyone else sat silently watching, not the least bit amused.

  “I suppose we should be getting on with it,” Merganzer said, wiping a laughter-induced tear from the corner of his eye. The last of the Glooooob disappeared as Merganzer set the can on the table and looked suddenly serious. “It’s time I told you all what’s really going on here.”

  Remi, who could be very fast when he wanted to be, grabbed the can of Glooooob and pointed it into his mouth, firing until green fizz poured down his face.

  “Leo, if you please,” Merganzer said. Leo, being the slightly more mature of the two boys, took the can from Remi.

  “All is about to be revealed,” Merganzer said, cracking one more hiccup of a laugh before he, too, was ready to proceed.

  “You have all been running hotels owned by me for some time now,” he began, and everyone at the table either gasped or looked quizzically at him. “That’s right. Through a complex collection of holding companies, I own all of the hotels you represent. I’m sure Blop or Mr. Powell could explain it to you, but really — none of those details matter. The only thing that does matter is that we are about to begin a competition that will forever alter your lives.”

  “Say, what’s this all about?” The man with the very long face and the even longer pointed beard was reaching the limit of his patience. “And why did the top of my hotel end up here? And, while we’re at it, where is here?”

  “I’ll get to all those details right away, I promise. But first let me introduce you to one another. You’re going to want to know who you’ll be competing against.”

  “Competing for what?” the large man who looked like a walrus asked. He was sitting directly to the right of Merganzer.

  “Everyone, this is E. J. Bosco,” Merganzer said, ignoring the walrus man’s question as he introduced him. “Bosco runs the Boomtown Hotel on the Lower East Side. Lively place, lots of parties. The top floor of the Boomtown Hotel is sitting over there, thataway. I’ve taken the liberty of collecting all the roofs of all my hotels and bringing them here.”

  “Why, that’s insane,” said the very tan woman, who was sitting next to E. J. Bosco. “You can’t just remove the tops of hotels. It’s not done!”

  Merganzer leaned forward, placing the tips of his long fingers on the table.

  “Well, of course I can. I just did.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Miss Harrington, if you please,” Merganzer said. “The Rochester is a fine hotel, even without its top.”

  Leo was beginning to understand. For whatever reason, Merganzer had built a lot of hotels and created them so that, when he was ready, he could remove the tops. Leo had a pretty good feeling that Merganzer was actually hiding all those roofs as he got them ready for some mysterious reason. This was getting exciting.

  Merganzer next introduced the man with the long face and beard.

  “This is Mr. Pilf, who runs the Spiff Hotel.”

  “You run the Spiff?” asked E. J. Bosco. The two men came from completely different worlds, but Bosco clearly respected Mr. Pilf from the start. “That’s a very fine hotel, I must say.”

  “Why, thank you,” Mr. Pilf said, though he had nearly nothing to do with whether the hotel was very fine. He, and the others, ran the hotels. It was Merganzer who had built them.

  “Miss Sheezley runs the Foxtrot Hotel on Long Island,” Merganzer continued. “We had to do a lot of work in the middle of the night on that one. Very curious people, Long Islanders.”

  “You’re pretty curious yourself, Whippet,” Miss Sheezley snorted. She was wearing lots of makeup and had large eyes that were constantly wide open with surprise. They were eyes that looked like they could swallow up all of outer space.

  “And last, Mr. Alfred Whitney, of the Paddington Hotel in Westchester,” Merganzer said, acknowledging the dapper, cane-bearing man who looked like an aristocrat.

  There was an uncomfortable silence at the table as everyone realized Merganzer had neglected to introduce Leo and Remi.

  “Are these your children?” Miss Sheezley asked. There was a certain something in her voice that Leo and Remi understood immediately: Miss Sheezley did not like children.

  “Oh dear, I’ve completely forgotten Leo Fillmore,” Merganzer said, laughing nervously as he looked down at the two boys. “Leo runs the Whippet Hotel, which I suppose I should mention is my very favorite hotel of them all.”

  A murmur of displeasure moved across the table. Everyone wanted their hotel to be Merganzer’s favorite. But they also knew about the Whippet. There were thousands of hotels in New York — they were opening and closing all the time — so none of them could be expected to know about every hotel. But everyone knew about the Whippet. It was famously weird, outrageously exclusive. The fact that a kid was running it was a double insult.

  “Why on earth would you have a child running a hotel?” Mr. Pilf said the words like he was spitting them out of his mouth. He was not an attractive talker.

  Merganzer ignored the question and moved on.

  “Leo has brought with him his newly minted stepbrother, Remi. These two are a very resourceful pair, I warn you.”

  “And I brought a robot,” Remi said, though he didn’t take Blop out of his pocket and show him around. If this really was a competition, Blop could be a secret weapon, with his vast knowledge of the Whippet Empire.

  “Come along then, we’re walking,” Merganzer said without any warning at all. He was up, taking off the apron and the tall white cooking hat, before any of the guests could question him further about why he’d put a child in charge of arguably the most famous hotel in the world.

  “If I were running the Whippet, it would be making money. Lots of it,” Bosco said under his breath.

  Leo heard the remark but held his tongue. Inside he was feeling, for the first time in his life, a sense of competition about his work. Running a profitable hotel had never occurred to him. He’d only ever wanted to keep the Whippet running in tip-top condition. Profit was a new idea, one he wasn’t sure he liked very much.

  As Merganzer walked, he began to explain what was going on. Falling behind might mean missing an important detail, so Leo grabbed Remi by his red jacket and pulled him away from the can of Glooooob before Remi could reach for it.

  “You are standing in a very secret place: the field of wacky inventions. It was left to me by my father many years ago, and it sits on the most precious undeveloped parcel of land in the whole of New York State. The land is three square miles in size, but I
only use what’s inside the walls — that amounts to approximately five football fields, give or take a yard.”

  Merganzer snaked through the trees, walking quickly as everyone tried to keep up, hanging on every word.

  “The large tent to your right is for you to explore, should you feel there might be something worth finding inside. I really can’t say what’s in there. Stuff. Lots of stuff. The building far off over there is by invitation only. It’s for your own good, because of the tests going on inside.”

  “What kinds of tests?” Leo asked, hoping but not expecting an answer.

  “We’re using the Wyro in there, trying to fire something big. Big, big, big.”

  Leo knew about the Wyro, because he was the one who had retrieved it from under the Whippet Hotel. It was small, like the size of two yo-yos glued together, and it was extremely powerful.

  “What’s a Wyro?” Miss Harrington asked curiously.

  “Never mind that, just don’t go in the building and start searching around. There are some things that go bump in the night, and you definitely do not want to run into any of those. And Lucy, a twelve-foot chicken. She’s excitable. Here we have the electric eel ponds — very useful sources of energy, but don’t get too close.”

  Leo looked at the four small ponds and noticed little bolts of electricity traveling between them. There was also a long extension cord hanging down from a tree, the end of which was hidden in the blue-green water.

  “What’s the cord for?” asked Miss Sheezley.

  “Oh, that,” Merganzer said, continuing on past the ponds. “That was for heating the pancake griddle.”

  Merganzer pulled a key card out of his jacket pocket and tried to hide the fact that he was whispering something to someone, but Leo heard.