Connect the Stars by Marisa de los Santos Page A

Randolph gloat about all the sleep they were getting. My feet hurt, and I could feel thirst creeping up the back of my throat. At least my pack was feeling lighter. But so was everybody’s. Because our water was nearly gone.
    Louis panicked at the sight of a stick in the bushes and had to stop three times to take twigs out of his boot, and once an ocotillo stuck to his pack like the tentacle of an alien, scaring him stiff. Every time we halted, we askedhim about Daphne’s team. And when he got calm enough, he almost always heard their footsteps behind us. One of the team, he said after a while, was limping.
    â€œWait until I tell Hardy Gillooly about you,” I told Louis.
    â€œWho’s Hardy Gillooly?” he asked.
    â€œA friend of mine. From back home. He’s interested in superpowers,” I said.
    â€œWhat I have is anything but a superpower.” Louis sighed.
    We crested a rise, and Caesar’s Nose was gone. The double-cross trail was fading beneath our feet. All I saw were white rocks, stained red by the setting sun, scattered across the peak. We’d hiked onto a new mountain without realizing it. I checked, but I didn’t have a map or a satellite photo or even a travel brochure in my head to tell me where we were.
    I saw Audrey stumble, and I realized that as soon as we’d hiked over the pinnacle, the sun had disappeared. “Hold on,” I said. “Maybe we should look at the clue sheet again.”
    Audrey reached into her pocket. Then she reached into another pocket. Then she squirmed out of her pack straps and unzipped the flap. “It’s gone!” she said. “What happened to our clues?” Frantically, she dug through her pack.“Does anyone have it?” she cried. Louis and Kate shook their heads.
    â€œMaybe we dropped it when we stopped to help Enod,” surmised Louis.
    â€œAaron? Do you have the sheet?” asked Audrey.
    â€œâ€˜The first step is easy—follow Caesar’s Nose,’” I recited, because of course I had the clue sheet. Right there in my brain, beside everything else.
    Benedict Arnold the river’s ghost.
    Do not go gentle into that good night, caballero.
    Delve back into time.
    By turning, turning, we come out right.
    â€œAre you sure that’s right?” Audrey asked.
    â€œOh, yeah,” I said.
    â€œBut what does it mean?” asked Kate, shivering. The nighttime chill was setting in fast now that the sun had begun to fade. “‘Do not go gentle into that good night, caballero’? Jare wrote these?”
    â€œMaybe his girlfriend wrote them for him,” said Audrey.
    â€œOr his English teacher,” I said. Everybody stared at me. “What?” I asked. “Some people are friends with their English teachers.”
    â€œNo,” giggled Kate. “They’re not.”
    â€œâ€˜Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ is a poem written in the form of a villanelle by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 1951. It’s addressed to his dying father.”
    â€œMaybe,” said Audrey, before I had a chance to go any further, “it just means what it says. Don’t go into the night.”
    â€œMaybe,” agreed Louis. “But why not?”
    I heard the narrator of an educational show start to speak inside my head. He sounded like Morgan Freeman. He was talking about the exact place we were standing: “Los Cañones de los Muertos y Sus Caballos . . .”
    â€œHold on,” I told the team. “Let me listen to something.” Because even though I’d been doing my sixth-grade math homework at the kitchen table when it came on, I could hear the documentary my dad was watching on PBS in another room. I repeated what Morgan Freeman was saying so the rest of the team could hear: “. . . is an isolated stretch of desert, where, in 1553, the Piñones expedition, in their quest to find a mythical town of gold, foolishly rode into