In a glass grimmly

We see now as in a glass, grimmly.

But then we shall see face to face.

o

nce upon a time, fairy tales were horrible.

Not boring horrible. Not so-cute-you-want-to-

jump-out-the-window horrible.

Horrible like they define it in the dictionary: Horrible (adj.)—causing feelings of horror, dread, unbearable sadness, and nausea; also tending to produce nightmares, whimpering for one’s parents, and bed-wetting.

I know, I know. You’re thinking: “Fairy tales?

Horrible? Please.” I get that.

If you’ve been raised on the drivel that passes for fairy tales these days, you’re not going to believe a word that I’m saying.

First of all, you’re probably used to hearing the same boring fairy tales over and over and over again. “Today, children, we’re going to read a Cinderella story from China! Today, children, we’re going to read a Cinderella story from Madagascar! Today, children, we’re going to read a Cinderella story from the Moon!

Today, children—” Second of all, those fairy tales that you hear over and over and over again aren’t even the real fairy tales. Has your teacher ever said to you, “Today, children, we’re going to read a Cinderella story where the stepsisters cut off their toes and their heels with a butcher’s knife! And then they get their eyes pecked out by birds! Ready? Is everyone sitting crisscrossapplesauce?”

No? She’s never said that?

I didn’t think so.

But that’s what the real fairy tales are like: strange, bloody, and horrible.

Two hundred years ago, in Germany, the Brothers Grimm first wrote down that version of Cinderella in which the stepsisters slice off pieces of their feet and get their eyes pecked out. In England, a man named Joseph Jacobs collected tales like Jack the Giant Killer, which is about a boy named Jack who goes around murdering giants in the most gruesome and

grotesque ways imaginable. And there was this guy called Hans Christian Andersen, who lived in Denmark and wrote fairy tales filled with sadness and humiliation and loneliness. Even Mother Goose’s rhymes could get pretty dark—after all, Jack and Jill go up a hill, and then Jack falls down and breaks his head open.

Yes, fairy tales were horrible. In the original sense of the word.

But even these horrible fairy tales and nursery rhymes aren’t true. They’re just stories. Right?

Not exactly.

You see, buried in these rhymes and tales are true stories, of true children, who fought through the darkest times, and came out the other end—stronger, braver, and, usually, completely covered in blood.

This book is the tale of two such children: a boy named Jack, and a girl named Jill. Yes, they do fall down a hill at one point. And yes, Jack does break his head wide open.

But there is more than that. There is a beanstalk. There are giants. There might even be a mermaid or two.

Their story is terrifying. It is revolting. It is horrible.

It is the most horrible fairy tale I have ever heard.

Also, it is beautiful. Not sweet. Not cute. Beautiful—like

the gray and golden ashes in a fireplace. Or like the deep russet of a drying stain of blood.

And, best of all, it is true.

Now, let me just say that if you happen to be the kind of person who actually likes cute and sweet fairy tales, or the kind of person who thinks children should not read about decapitation and dismemberment, or, finally, if you’re the kind of person who, upon hearing about two children wading through a pool of blood and vomit, runs out of the room screaming, you don’t need to worry. This book is for you. There is no decapitation, dismemberment, people without clothing, or pools of blood and vomit anywhere in this book.

At least, not anywhere in the first few pages.

“Wait!” you’re probably asking. “What was that about people without clothing?”

Nothing! Moving right along!

ch ap ter one

The Wishing Well

O

nce upon a time, there was a kingdom called Märchen,

which sat just next to the modern countries of England, Denmark, and Germany.

I need to interrupt. Already. I apologize. No one in the history of the world has ever pronounced the word “Märchen” correctly.

Some people say Marchin’, like what the ants go doing if you’re from Texas.

That’s not right.

Some people say MARE-chen. That’s closer, but still wrong.

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Others say MARE-shen. That’s about as close as I’ve ever gotten to pronouncing it right, so it’s probably good enough for you, too.

But if you really want to say the name of the kingdom that this story takes place in correctly (and I don’t know why you would, I’m just offering, because I’m nice like that), you’ve got to say MARE, then you’ve got to make a sound in your throat like you’re hocking a loogie, and then you have to say shen. Like this: MARE-cccch-shen.

You know what? You might just want to say Marchin’.

At the center of the kingdom Märchen was a castle. Behind this castle was a hidden grove. In the grove was a well. And at the bottom of the well there lived a frog.

He was a sad frog. He did not like his well. It was wet and mossy and dirty, and very very very very very very very smelly.

All day long the frog sat at the bottom of his well as salamanders splashed around him. Now, maybe you know it, and maybe you don’t, but salamanders are not the most popular creatures in the animal kingdom.

But why? Salamanders seem all right to you. They’re lots of pretty colors, like shimmery purple and glowy red. They have tiny

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black eyes that stare at you oh-so-very-cutely. And they have these little mouths that are permanently curled into tiny, maybe-smiles.

All of this is true. But, in addition to the pretty colors and the tiny eyes and the maybe-smiles, they have these shrill little voices which they use to ask the most idiotic, mind-numbing questions that you have ever heard.

For example: “Why is blue?”

Or, “Who is a stone?”

Or, “What tastes better, a fly or a fly?”

Or, “Who is uglier, me or Fred? Is it me? It’s me, right? Me? Is it me?”

The sad frog’s only solace, amid the damp, and the filth, and the smell, and the salamanders, was the sky. All day and all night, the frog stared up at a little patch of sky that peered down into his clearing. Sometimes it was gray like slate, other times it was inky black, other times it was washed with a burning red. But most of the time the sky above his well was a clear, deep blue, with white shapes like fluffy rocks that floated across its face. All day and all night he stared up, unblinking, at that sky.

And then, one day, while the frog was staring up at his sky, he heard a peculiar stomp-stomp-stomping on the forest floor. It was followed by a sudden whoomp, and then a cry. Curious, he climbed

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the slippery stone wall to the top of his well and peered out.

Sitting on the forest floor, with matted hair and muddied clothes, was a little girl. Her face was red with anger and exertion.

Her lips were all scrunched up and furious. But her eyes . . . The frog studied them. Her eyes . . . Well, her eyes looked just like the patch of sky above his well when it was its clearest, deepest blue.

“They can’t play with my ball!” the little girl bellowed at no one in particular. “They can’t. It’s mine!” She began to throw the ball up and down, glancing over her shoulder from time to time to see if she had been followed into the wood, and returning, disappointed, to her ball each time she discovered she had not been.

The frog watched, mesmerized. And where you or I might have begun to suspect this little girl of being a selfish brat, the frog, not knowing many (any) humans, saw only a maiden who had somehow captured the sky and kept it jailed behind her eyelids. And he suddenly felt that if only he could spend the rest of his days in the presence of this beautiful creature he would be perfectly and totally happy.

So the frog began to croak at the top of his lungs. Maybe she’ll notice me! he thought. And then he thought, Maybe she’ll take me home with her! And then he thought, Wait, she doesn’t live with salamanders! And so he put every ounce of hope that flowed through his froggy little veins into each expert amphibian warble.

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But, of course, the girl did not notice him. She only threw her ball up and down, up and down. The frog sat there croaking for a full hour, but never once did she look at him. Finally, she stood up and took her ball out of the wood. The frog, in despair, threw himself from the edge of his well, down to the depths, hoping that the long fall would kill him. It didn’t. Instead, the salamanders began to nudge him with their blunt noses.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” “Are you dead?”

“Are you? Frog? Frog?”

“What is it like to be dead?”

“Am I dead?”

“Am I smelly?”

“Who’s smellier, me or Fred? Me? It’s me, right?”

The frog shoved moss into his ear holes.

But, to the frog’s great joy, the girl returned to the wood to play with her ball the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. And every day, the frog wooed her with the most magnificent croaks he could muster. But she never noticed him.

Still, he took pleasure in watching her, examining her utterly perfect beauty, and imagining all the happy times they might one day spend together.

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Alas, dear reader, you know as well as I do the mistake that our poor friend, the frog, is making. We all know that beauty is well and fine, but that it is unimportant when compared to questions of goodness, kindness, intelligence, and honesty.

And, watching the girl throwing her ball in the air, the frog could determine nothing of these things. In fact, he knew next to nothing about her.

He did not know that this wasn’t just any little girl he had fallen in love with. She was the princess, the king’s only daughter. He also did not know that, as pretty as she was, she was a horror. Sweet and pretty on the outside, cruel and selfish on the inside.

If you know anything about children, dear reader, perhaps this will not surprise you. Perhaps you know that one of the greatest dangers in life is growing up very pretty.

You see, when you are very pretty, people tend to remark on your looks. They smile at you more easily. They are more permissive of your faults. Soon, you come to believe that your prettiness matters, and that you are better because you are pretty, and that all it takes to get through life is a batting of your eyelashes and a twisting of your hair around your little finger, and that you can scream and pout and shout and tease because everyone will still like you anyway because

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you are so unbelievably pretty. This is what many very pretty people think.

Beware, then, for this is how monsters are made.

And I fear that our poor frog has fallen in love with a pretty little monster.

One day, the girl came to the well rather later than usual. As she played with her ball in the small clearing, the sun began to set, and the edges of twilight rose like a black mist in the east.

The darkness made it harder to see the ball, and so, on one particular toss, the princess missed it, and it bounced directly into the well.

The girl yelped and ran to the well’s edge. She peered down into the dark. The frog, who had never been so close to the girl, stared at her and tried not to hyperventilate.

Suddenly, the girl began to wail like a foghorn. She wailed and wailed and wept and wailed some more. Well, it pained the frog to see her like that. He croaked at her, trying to comfort her, but she paid no attention to him.

Oh, if only she could hear me! he thought. If only she knew I was trying to help her!

As the girl wept into the darkness of the well, tears ran down

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her face, dropped from her dimpled chin, and splashed into the black water below.

Far up above, the first few stars had just begun to appear in the sky. The tears that fell into the well shook the surface of the water, and with it, the stars’ reflection. Now maybe you know it, and maybe you don’t, but this is the only way to wake the stars.

And awake they did.

Meanwhile, the frog was trying with all his might to croak something that the girl might understand. “I can get your ball!” he tried to tell her. “I can help you, beautiful, radiant, perfectly nonamphibious creature!” And as he stared into her cerulean eyes, now fading to gray in the dying light, he went beyond wanting to help her, and even beyond longing to help her. He wished for it, in loud, croaking, frog-wishing sounds.

Well, the stars heard his wish, and they granted it.

What? The stars heard the frog?

And they grant wishes?

Yes, they did.

And yes, they do.

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Without any warning, his croaks became perfectly comprehensible to the girl, and what had before been, “Ribbit . . . ribbit . . . ribbit . . . ” became, “Please, beautiful girl, let me help you!”

The girl stood up like a bolt. “Who said that?” she asked.

“I think I did,” said the frog, as surprised as she was.

“You can talk?” she asked.

“Apparently,” he replied, bemused. “I . . . I was offering to help you.”

“Oh, would you?!” she cried, and the frog nearly fell to pieces. “Oh, I would do anything! Really I would! Just get my ball and I’ll give you anything! You can have my jewels, or my fanciest clothes, or my crown . . . ” Your crown? the frog thought, but he didn’t say it. He hadn’t known that she was a princess. But of course, upon examining her again, what else could she have been?

With all the gallantry he could muster, the frog replied, “Of course I’ll get it! You don’t have to give me anything . . .”

He stopped. Her mouth—looking like an unbloomed rose— had moved just slightly as he spoke, and his emotions began to betray him. He stammered, and turned a brighter shade of green.

“Umm . . . ” he muttered. “Unless . . . ” he stammered. “You could always . . . ” he stuttered.

“Anything!” the princess said. “I’ll give you anything!”

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“I was just thinking . . . that we might be friends . . .”

“Oh, of course we’ll be friends!” the princess said. “I think we’ll be ever so close, if you would just fetch my ball!”

Well, the princess didn’t mean it, of course. It was just something nice you were supposed to say to lowly people (and, apparently, to frogs) so as not to hurt their feelings. She had learned all about not hurting people’s feelings ages ago.

But the frog, not having met many (any) humans, didn’t understand that. And he, poor frog, believed her. So, with a brimming heart, he dove into the depths of the well and brought up the princess’s ball. She instantly grabbed it, shouted with joy, said, “Oh thank you, frog!” and immediately ran toward the castle. The frog, who had expected to spend a bit more time with her, now that they were ever so close, hopped down from the well and tried to follow her.

“Wait!” he shouted, “wait for me! I can’t keep up!” But of course, the princess did not wait for him. She pretended she could not hear him.

Later that night, the king sat at dinner with his daughter. As they ate their salad course, the quiet was broken by a faint splishsplash splish-splash, coming from just under the windows. Then it seemed to start up the stairs. The princess went deathly white.

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There was a pause, and then there came a knocking on the door.

“What’s that?” the king asked.

“What? I don’t hear anything,” said the princess.

The knocking continued.

“That!” said the king.

But the princess had already leaped from her chair and rushed to the front door.

She opened it a crack. There, waiting wet and expectant on the doorstep, was the frog. She slammed the door and returned to the dinner table.

The king examined her pale features. “Who was it, my dear?” he asked.

“Oh, nobody,” she said, and shoveled far too much salad into her mouth so as not to be able to say any more. The knocking came again.

“It is someone,” the king insisted. “Who is it?”

The princess burst into tears. “He’s an awful, ugly old frog!” she cried. “He fetched my ball for me when it was lost in the well, and I told him he could be my friend! Oh, it’s terrible!” The princess’s wails echoed off the ceiling.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooooooh!”

The king, who had learned long ago that the princess could

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turn her tears on and off whenever she wanted to, insisted that she open the door and bring the creature in.

Meanwhile, the frog nervously knocked at the door again.

Perhaps, he thought, the princess hadn’t seen him when she opened the door. He was rather small, of course. Easy to overlook. He repeated this to himself, attempting to cover up a deeper fear that she had, in fact, seen him, and slammed the door because of it.

But his fears were allayed when the door opened again and the princess appeared. He broke into his broadest frog-grin and said, “Good evening, Princess. I was just passing by, and I thought I might stop in to call upon you. Is this a convenient time?” He had rehearsed this speech during the three hours it took him to hop from his well to the castle’s door.

“Well, it isn’t really . . .” said the princess, and she began to close the door again, when, from the dining room, the king bellowed, “Invite him to dinner!”

The princess scowled.

The frog’s heart swelled as he saw the stunning hall, the servants lined up against the walls, the glorious dining table, and the king—the king!—seated at its head. The king was very polite to him and offered him a chair. But the frog was too short to get up into it. “Pick him up,” the king commanded his daughter.

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The frog’s heart began to flutter. She was going to touch him! He pictured her delicate fingers, lifting him into the air. He sighed in anticipation.

Abruptly, he was dangling from one foot, and, just as abruptly, dropped onto the hard wood of a chair. He looked up.

The princess was grimacing. “I need to wash my hands now, Daddy,” she said.

Humiliation swept over the frog.

“Really,” said the frog, “I am quite clean. It’s those dreadful salamanders who give us well-dwellers a bad name.”

But the princess was already washing her hands in a bowl brought over by a servant. The frog sat awkwardly on his chair for a while. He certainly couldn’t reach the table—he couldn’t even see if there was food on it to eat. Presently, the king noticed this. “Honey, lift your friend up onto the table so he can have his soup.” (The salad course had been finished, you see, and the soup had been brought out.)

The frog found himself suddenly lifted and plopped down on the table, and he flushed to see the princess anxiously calling for the washing bowl again. He brought his face over the steaming saucer of soup and smelled it. “Luxuriant,” he said to the king.

“What is it?”

The princess let out a guffaw. The king began to turn red.

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Terror took hold of the frog. What had he said? The princess was laughing loudly and cruelly now. He couldn’t think of what he had done wrong. He looked imploringly at the beautiful girl.

“It’s frog’s leg soup!” she cried, laughing and pointing.

Servants stifled their laughter behind their hands. The king, though, was deeply embarrassed.

“Take this away!” he cried. Presently, other food was brought, though the frog had entirely lost his appetite. A few times he tried to engage the table in conversation, but each time the princess snickered or insulted him. By the end of dinner, he was on the verge of tears. His dreams of a new life with the skyeyed princess were dead.

“I am tired,” he said. “Perhaps I should go.”

“Perhaps you should,” the princess agreed.

But the king said, “Take him with you upstairs. He can sleep on a pillow in your room; certainly you won’t make him walk— hop—all the way home in the dark. A weasel might get him.”

“I wouldn’t care!” the princess announced. “And I’m not touching him again!” A few of the servants chortled, and the frog wished that he had never made his stupid wish. But wishes cannot be unwished, no matter how one wishes it. A wish is a powerful thing. It had the frog in its grip. And it was not about to let him go.

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Finally, the king convinced his daughter (through threats and imprecations) to take the poor frog upstairs. She did this as quickly as she could, holding him by a single leg and bouncing him as she climbed the long, winding staircases. He was afraid he might come to pieces. (Though then they could use me in the soup, he thought bitterly.) As he watched the little girl, he marveled at her lack of feeling, and also at her beautiful, deep blue eyes. If only she would like me, he thought. If only . . .

They reached her room, and she dropped him to the floor and went into her washroom to prepare for bed. When she emerged, she found him huddled in a damp corner, trying in vain to pretend he was at home, at the bottom of his loathed well. At least it was better than this, he thought.

She approached him, and he shivered with fear. But her face had changed. It was softer. Maybe even sympathetic. Hope blossomed in his little chest.

Gently, she reached down and took him under his belly. He shivered.

She lifted him up, so he was near her face. He stared at her rose-lips, and into her cerulean eyes.

And she kissed him.

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Right?

That’s what happens now, doesn’t it?

Of course not. What sense would that make?

As anyone who’s read the Brothers Grimm would know, this is actually when she throws him against a wall with all of her might in an attempt to kill him.

And only then, after the attempted murder, does he reveal himself as an enchanted prince. And then they get married.

And live happily ever after.

Which is clearly idiotic. Why would they live happily ever after if she’s just tried to kill him?

And why would being smashed against a wall turn him back into a prince?

And who said he was a prince in the first place?

At this point, I ought to make something clear. There are three versions of this story: There is the kiddie version, where they kiss. Obviously false.

There is the Grimm version, where she throws him against the wall, and then they get married. Which is, if you ask me, even more ridiculous than the kiddie version.

And then there is the true version. What actually happened.

Which is this:

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— The princess took the frog by one leg, swung him around her head, and hurled him as hard as she could at the wall of her room. But as she swung him, she held on too tight, and his little leg came off.

So the frog flew across the room and slammed into the wall.

The princess found herself holding a single frog leg in her hand, screamed, and threw it out the window. Where it was eaten by a weasel.

As you might have suspected, our poor frog did not regain the form of a prince, because he had never been a prince. He was a frog. A frog in love with a beautiful, cruel princess.

Which means that being thrown against a wall hurts. In all sorts of ways.

The frog lay crumpled in a heap at the base of the wall. He was bleeding from the place where his leg had been (for when you prick frogs, they do indeed bleed), while the princess stared at him with a disgusting air of satisfaction.

With all the dignity he had left to him, the little frog hobbled out of her room, down the great stairs, and out into the night, trailing froggy blood after him as he went.

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The End

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BOOK ONE

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CHAPTER 1

DEADWEATHER

obody lived on Deadweather but us and the pirates. It wasn’t hard to understand why. For one thing, the weather was atrocious. Eleven months out of twelve, it was brutally hot and humid, with no wind at all, so on a bad day the air felt like a hot, soggy blanket smothering you from all sides.

And the other month was September, which meant hurricanes.

Then there was the volcano. It hadn’t actually blown in ages, but it belched smoke and shook the earth enough to scare away anybody who might’ve overlooked the pirates and the weather.

The only reason it didn’t scare me, even though plenty of things do, was because I’d been born and raised halfway up its slope and didn’t know any different.

That’s how I felt about the pirates, too. There were two kinds on Deadweather: the normal ones, who hung around down in Port Scratch, drinking and getting into knife fights whenever they weren’t off raiding Cartager gold ships; and the busted-down, 1

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broken ones, who’d lost too many limbs or eyes or organs to crew a ship, but not enough to kill them outright. A few of those stayed in the Scratch, patching together a living in the taverns and the gun shops, but most of them hobbled up the mountain to work for Dad on the ugly fruit plantation.

I don’t know what he paid them—it couldn’t have been much, because we didn’t have much. But I guess it was enough, since none of them ever staged a mutiny or tried to kill us all in our sleep.

They slept down in the barracks and mostly kept to themselves in the orchards, except for Quint the house pirate, who cooked for us and did some occasional sewing. Dad had his hands full running the plantation, so he left the rest of the housework to the kids—the kids being me, my sister Venus, and my brother Adonis.

I was the youngest, which I didn’t much like. Adonis whaled on me every chance he got, and even though I fought back as best I could, he had three years on me, so I usually got the short end of it—especially after he turned fifteen and shot up past six feet, with shoulders almost as wide and thick as Dad’s.

Fortunately, as Adonis got bigger, he also got more lumbering, so eventually I figured out I could duck the beating by running to the orchards and climbing an ugly fruit tree, way up to where the branches got too thin to bear his weight. He knew Dad would skin him if he hurt one of those trees, so he’d just glower at me from under his heavy, black eyebrows, and shake his fist, and bellow that he could wait for me forever. Then he’d get bored and wander off.

Venus used to knock me around, too, right up until the day I S

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got big enough to take her in a fight. She backed off for good after that, except to constantly tell me how stupid I was, and how Dad 2

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had tried to sell me but couldn’t find a buyer at any price, and how someday she was going to marry a Rovian prince, and the prince would have me ground up and fed to his horses.

“They’ll gobble you up, Egbert, bones and all,” she’d say, sneering down her long, sharp nose at me.

At some point, I found out horses don’t eat meat, but I never bothered to tell Venus. Just like I never bothered to tell her no prince of Rovia would ever marry a commoner, let alone try to find a wife by leaving the Continent and sailing thousands of miles across the Great Maw to a sweaty little pirate-infested island so unimportant it didn’t even show up on the maps of the New Lands in Geography of the World.

There was no point in telling her any of that, because Venus ignored any fact she didn’t like, and the ones she couldn’t ignore, she screamed at. And whenever she screamed, Adonis would come running—not because he cared about Venus one way or another, but just for the excuse—and I’d get slugged, unless I got to a tree fast enough.

And if I did, he’d stand under it and yell the same fist-shaking curse every time: “Treat a lady like that, I’ll ’ave the pirates cut yer tongue out!”

Venus was hardly a lady, except in her own mind—she belched when she ate, and picked her nose at the table—and anyway, it was an empty threat. None of the field pirates could stand Adonis, so if he’d ever ordered them to cut my tongue out, the ones who still had legs would have kicked him in the shins.

But Adonis wasn’t much for facts, either. Or any kind of learning—I’m not even sure Mr. Sutch managed to teach him

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how to read properly.

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Mr. Sutch was our first tutor, and the only good one, which was probably why he didn’t last. This was years back—I was just seven when he showed up, which would have made Venus nine and Adonis ten. I guess Dad had figured out by then that we weren’t going to learn to read and write by ourselves— especially since the only book in the house was a chewed-up copy of Principles of Citrus Cultivation—so he’d sent out a flyer with the captain of the cargo ship that hauled the ugly fruit harvest up to the Fish Islands.

When the ship came back six months later, Mr. Sutch was on it—all bony and worried-looking, and pulling out a handkerchief every two minutes to wipe the sweat-fog from his glasses.

Right from the start, it was obvious he was a bad fit. The volcano and the pirates had him scared out of his pants, and on his first night, I overheard him out on the porch with Dad, complaining in his reedy voice that he’d been lured to Deadweather under false pretenses.

Dad snorted. “Stuff! Don’t even ’ave one.”

“One what?”

“A wot-ye-say. A faults pretenses.”

“What I mean . . . is that your advertisement specifically indicated this position was on Sunrise Island.”

“Nah, it didn’t.”

“Sir, if I may—” I was inside, listening from under the sitting room window, so I couldn’t see them, but I heard a crinkling of paper as Mr. Sutch unfolded what must have been Dad’s flyer.

“Right here, line three—it says ‘Sunrise Island.’ ” S

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“Nah, look—says ‘roundabout Sunrise Island.’ ” “No, it . . . that word there? It’s ‘roundabout’?”

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“Wot ye think it was?”

“I honestly didn’t know what that word was.”

“Now ye do. Says ‘roundabout.’ ” “That’s not even remotely correct spelling!”

“Quint read it fine.”

“Who’s Quint?”

“House pirate. In the kitchen. Got stumps fer legs. Smart one, he is. Reads AND writes.”

“Look, sir . . . spelling issues aside, this island is HARDLY ‘roundabout Sunrise’!”

“Wot ye mean? Head down to the Scratch, ’op a boat, east nor’east . . . catch the wind right, be there in three hours. ’At’s roundabout, seems to me.”

“Well, I’d very much like to do that. And as soon as possible— I think it’s the least you can do for me under the circumstances.”

“Wot? Put ye on a boat? Can’t. ’Aven’t got one—I’m a farmer.

And the cargo ship’s sailed, won’t be back till next season . . .

Might get one o’ the pirates to take ye, fer the right price. ’Ave ye got a gun?”

“What? No! I’m a man of learning.”

“Wouldn’t chance it, then. Man shows up in the Scratch with money in ’is pocket and no gun, not likely to go well for ’im . . .

Looks like yer stuck ’ere, then. So—gonna teach me kids? Or ye gonna pick fruit? ’Cause them’s the only jobs need doin’ round ’ere.”

Once he realized he wasn’t going anywhere soon, Mr. Sutch did his best to educate us. But it was a tough job. When he started, none of us could read a word or add higher than our fingers, and when we talked, we all sounded like pirates. That particularly bothered him, because he was a very formal sort, and he couldn’t 5

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abide the fact that we not only didn’t speak what he called “proper Rovian,” we couldn’t even see the point of it.

“Ye understan’ us, yeh?” said Venus. “So wha’s the need fer all these duhs and guhs and yoooooooos?”

“My dear young lady,” he said—and kindly, too, not at all sarcastic, because it was still his first day and Venus hadn’t bitten him yet—“how can you expect to grow up and marry a Rovian prince if you’re not capable of speaking like a princess?”

Looking back, I do wish he hadn’t put the idea in Venus’s head that all she had to do to marry a prince was start saying “you” instead of “ye,” because once it got lodged in between her ears, there was no getting it out, and for years afterward, we had to listen to her natter on about it. But I guess it was effective, because unlike Adonis, she actually did manage to stop talking like a pirate.

The rest of the tutoring she hated almost as much as Adonis did. As for me, I loved it—not so much for its own sake, but because Mr. Sutch was the first person I’d ever met who didn’t seem likely to slug me at any second, so spending time with him was a real treat. I did my best to speak properly for him, and to read, and add and subtract and even multiply things, although the multiplying could get pretty tricky.

And when Venus and Adonis complained to Dad, I kept my mouth shut. Fortunately, they didn’t get anywhere with their complaints.

“What we ’ave to learn things fer?” Adonis would gripe. “It’s stupid!”

“Nah, got it backwards. Need learnin’ ’CAUSE yer stupid.”

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“Wha’s the point?”

“Good for ye!”

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“Why?” “Just is.”

“Why?” “’Cause yer mum wanted it!”

There was no arguing with that. So my brother and sister just glared daggers at me and went back to their primers, and whenever Dad was off in the orchards—which was most of the time— they made life as miserable as they could for Mr. Sutch. Not that he needed much help to be miserable on Deadweather.

I was almost through the last of his primers and starting to like reading for its own sake when he suddenly disappeared. Venus and Adonis liked to say he was murdered by a field pirate, but the fact that he vanished right around the time a cargo ship lifted anchor for the Fish Islands probably wasn’t a coincidence.

Dad would have sent out another flyer, but then the Barker War got going, and for the next year or two, nothing sailed on the Blue Sea unless it had at least twenty guns on it. It was hard times—for the last few months of the war, we had nothing left to eat but ugly fruit, which gave everybody the trots.

The war was named for the Barker Islands, way down south where most of the fighting was. Like all the shooting wars in the New Lands, it was between Cartage and Rovia. They were the only two Continental powers with colonies on this side of the Great Maw, and the only kinds of people around at all except for Natives, who didn’t have any guns or ships and who’d been cleared out of the islands so completely that I’d never even seen one up close.

There were still tribes of them on the mainland—that’s where the gold on the Cartager treasure ships came from—but that was several days’ sail from us, and there was no reason to ever go there, 7

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since it was all wilderness except for a few Cartager ports like Pella Nonna.

The actual shooting only came near us once. It started as a distant rumble in the darkness, off and on, sort of like thunder but not quite, and at first it hardly seemed threatening. But Dad rousted everybody out of bed, loaded us down with all the food we could carry from the pantry, and started marching us up the hill without telling us why.

He had his pistol belt on, and he carried his rifle, along with a big rucksack stuffed with supplies. Dawn was breaking, but the fog made it hard to see.

“Where are we going?” Venus whined.

“Time fer questions later. Just haul that pack.”

“I can’t! It’s too heavy!”

“Then make Egbert carry it.”

After Dad said that, Venus and Adonis both dumped their loads on me, which weighed me down so much that my legs were shaking when I finally caught up with them at Rotting Bluff. Dad kept a single cannon there on a rough stone parapet overlooking the sea to the northwest. We helped him load it—I don’t know why, because from the sound of the battle raging out in the fog, there were a lot more ships than one cannon could ever stop. But Dad wanted it loaded anyway. Then we sat and waited, as the battle got steadily louder and more frightening. “’Oo’s fightin’?” For the first time I could remember, Adonis was curious about something.

Dad was hunched over the parapet, his elbows resting on it to S

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hold his beat-up brass spyglass steady as he squinted through the lens into the fog. “Dunno. Cartager Navy, that’s certain. Not sure 8

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who’s takin’ ’em on, though. Might be Rovians proper . . . but I think it’s the pirates.”

“The Cartagers comin’ ’ere?” “’Ere or Sunrise. Could be both.”

“Why ’ere? Sunrise got all the silver.”

“Yeh. But them rich folks on Sunrise don’t steal Cartager gold.

Pirates on Deadweather been doin’ that longer’n you been alive.

Reckon the Short-Ears got a mind to put an end to it. Wipe out the Scratch fer good.”

Ordinarily, Dad wasn’t much for talking, other than to order us around—and the fact that he was bothering to explain things to us was almost as unsettling as what he was saying. Venus, for one, looked like she might cry. “Wouldn’t wipe us out, would they?”

“Dunno why not,” said Dad. “I don’t want to get eaten!” she cried. I don’t know where she got the idea that Cartagers were cannibals.

Dad didn’t, either. He took his eye from the spyglass to cock an eyebrow at her. “Nah, won’t eat ye. Just slit yer throat.”

Around midmorning, the fog lifted, and we finally got a glimpse of the battle on the horizon—two massive Cartager men-of-war and five two-decker galleons were slugging it out against just four single-deck pirate sloops, muzzle flashes blinking through the smoke that hung around their sides.

“Don’t much like them numbers,” muttered Dad, his face knitting into an even darker scowl than usual.

But as the hours passed, it was clear the pirates were giving better than they got. All but two of the Cartager galleons had gone under before any of the pirate sloops sank, and when the first of the big men-of-war keeled over around midafternoon, 9

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Dad—who hadn’t lowered the spyglass from his eye for hours— gave a sharp huff of surprise that almost sounded like a laugh.

By sunset, it was over. The men-of-war had burned or sunk, and the last remaining Cartager galleon had been boarded and captured and was creeping back toward Port Scratch behind the two surviving pirate sloops. As he led us back down to the house, Dad’s mood was so chipper that I heard him whistling to himself.

We were all headed for bed when we started hearing gunfire from the direction of Port Scratch. Venus got panicky and ran out to the porch, where Dad had settled in with a bottle of rum.

“Is it Cartagers?! Are they coming to eat us after all?”

Dad cocked his head and listened. “Nah. No invasion, that— it’s a party.”

“A party? For true? Can we go?”

“Nah, girlie. Pirate party’s no fun for them’s not pirates.”

For a week afterward, several times a day Venus would stop whatever she was doing, let out a happy little sigh, and declare, “I’m sooooo glad the Short-Ears didn’t come and eat us.”

“Wouldn’t a’ minded feedin’ ’em Egbert,” Adonis would chime in. Then he’d cackle—no matter how many times he said it, it never stopped being funny to him—and take another swing at me.

BY THE TIME the war ended, we were half starved—and in my case, it wasn’t just for food. I’d worked up a taste for reading from Mr. Sutch’s primers, but they’d all disappeared with him, and Principles of Citrus Cultivation was starting to get pretty tiresome, especially considering that it didn’t have much of a story, and I’d S

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read it so many times I could recite big chunks with my eyes closed.

“What ye always readin’ that book fer?” Dad asked me once.

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“It’s the only one we’ve got,” I said.

He just scowled at that, but it must have stuck with him, because when the cargo ships started running again and he sent out a flyer for a new tutor, he wrote “MUST ONE BOOKS” in big block letters at the bottom of it. I secretly fretted over his spelling, but I didn’t dare correct it—and I guess it got the point across, because when Percy finally showed up, he brought almost a wagonload of books with him.

I can still remember the first time I saw Percy and his books lurching up toward the house on top of one of the fruit wagons, the horses all lathered from the effort and Percy’s massive belly jiggling at every bump. I practically fainted with joy—I’d never seen so many books, and I instantly knew the man who’d brought them to us was going to be the most important person in my life: a teacher, friend, and savior all rolled into one big, fat, sweaty package.

It turned out I was dead wrong about Percy, except for the fat and sweaty part. As horrible people go, he was miles ahead of Venus and could practically outdo Adonis.

When he first arrived, though, we all thought he was some kind of genius. Not just because he had so many books (which we assumed he must have read), but because he acted like a genius would—all scornful and disgusted with how ignorant we were, and capable of tossing around all manner of facts, seemingly off the top of his head.

Percy could tell you everything from where the wind came from (a giant hole in the sky, somewhere west of the New Lands), to why seawater was salty (fish poop), to whether you could multiply fractions together (you couldn’t, and if you tried, they’d 11

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break). And he spouted his knowledge constantly—that is, during the half hour a day when Dad was within earshot. The rest of the time, he napped. Unless he was eating, which he did so often that Quint took to hiding our pantry food in sacks out behind the woodpile. Sometimes, the rats got into them, but even when they did, they left more for us than Percy.

Percy sussed out pretty quickly how things stood in our house—that Dad wanted us educated but wasn’t too clear himself on what that meant—so he struck a deal with Venus and Adonis that they’d pretend to learn while he pretended to teach them, and whatever else they did with their time was fine by him, so long as they left him alone.

At first, he ignored me and could’ve cared less whether I read his books. So I dug into them, and it didn’t take long before I learned enough to realize Percy was a complete fraud, and none of his facts made a lick of sense.

After that, he did his best to keep me away from the books for a while—mostly with a stick, which he could swing pretty fast considering how lazy he was—but the situation was no good for either of us, because it meant I couldn’t read and he couldn’t nap.

So eventually, we struck a deal of our own: he’d let me read the books as long as I kept my mouth shut about what was in them and didn’t let on to Dad that Percy was a fake.

It was fine by me, because even though I hated Percy’s guts, I figured if he left, he’d take his books with him. And I really loved his books. There were a hundred and thirty-seven of them, and eventually I read them all at least once, even the terrible ones.

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The things I learned from them staggered me—and not just the immediately helpful stuff, like the eating habits of horses (no meat, 12

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especially human meat, even if it’s ground up) or the real reason seawater is salty (I forget, but it’s definitely not fish poop). For the first time in my life, I realized there were whole other worlds beyond mine. On the Continent alone, there were cities, and countries, and kings, and castles, all going back a thousand years or more.

And not only did Deadweather turn out to be just a ragged little flyspeck in the Blue Sea a couple hundred miles east of the vast wilderness of the New Lands, but even Sunrise Island—a place that had always seemed, during the twice-yearly trips we took there for holidays and shopping, like the rich and bustling center of the universe—only appeared in Geography of the World as an afterthought at the very bottom edge of the Fish Islands map, and wasn’t mentioned at all in A New History of the Rovian Kingdom and Territories.

Once I started to learn about the larger world, I’d lie awake at night in my little windowless room off the kitchen, and imagine what it would be like to be part of it somehow—to live a life that mattered, to be and to do things worth reading about in books.

But I never thought for a moment it was possible. I wasn’t highborn, or rich, or brave, or strong, or even smart—none of those things that made the characters in the novels and the people in the history books so special.

I knew the world was out there. I just didn’t see a place for myself in it. And even if there might be, I had no idea how to go about finding it.

It never occurred to me that the world might come find me— and that without my lifting a finger to make it happen, one day S

my life would change, completely and forever.

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But it did. And this is the story of it.

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and the People Taker

by Adam-Troy Castro illustrated by Kristen Margiotta Grosset & Dunlap An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

CHAPTER ONE

The Strange Fate of Mr. Notes

The neighbors thought Gustav Gloom was the unhappiest little boy in the world.

None of them bothered to talk to him to see if there was anything they could do to make his life better. That would be “getting involved.”

But they could look, and as far as they could see, he always wore his mouth in a frown, he always stuck his lower lip out as if about to burst into tears, and he always dressed in a black suit with a black tie as if about to go to a funeral or just wanting to be prepared in case one broke out without warning.

Gustav’s skin was pale, and he always had dark circles under his eyes as if he hadn’t had enough sleep. A little quirk of his eyelids kept them half closed all the time, making him look like he wasn’t paying attention. His shiny black hair stood straight up, like tar-covered grass.

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Everybody who lived on Sunnyside Terrace said, “Somebody ought to do something about that sad little boy.”

Of course, when they said somebody ought to do something, they really meant somebody else.

Nobody wanted to end up like poor Mr. Notes from the Neighborhood Standards Committee.

Mr. Notes had worked for the little town where they all lived. His job was making sure people took care of their neighborhoods, and the neighbors on Sunnyside Terrace had asked him to visit the Gloom house because it didn’t fit the rest of the neighborhood at all.

All of the other houses on Sunnyside Terrace were lime green, peach pink, or strawberry red.

Each front yard had one bush and one tree, the bush next to the front door and the tree right up against the street. Anybody who decided to live on the street had to sign special contracts promising that they wouldn’t “ruin” the “character” of the “community” by putting up “unauthorized trees” or painting their front doors “unauthorized colors,” and so on.

The old, dark house where Gustav Gloom lived had been built long before the others, long before there was a neighborhood full of rules.

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It was a big black mansion, more like a castle than a proper house. There were four looming towers, one at every corner, each of them ringed by stone gargoyles wearing expressions that suggested they’d just tasted something bad.

There were no windows on the ground floor, just a set of double doors twice as tall as the average man. The windows on the upper floors were all black rectangles that might have been glass covered with paint or clear glass looking into absolute darkness.

Though this was already an awful lot of black for one house, even the lawn surrounding the place was black, with all-black flowers and a single black tree with no leaves. There was also a grayish-black fog that always covered the ground to ankle height, dissolving into wisps wherever it passed between the iron bars of the fence.

The lone tree looked like a skeletal hand clawing its way out of the ground. It was home to ravens who seemed to regard the rest of the neighborhood with as much offense as the rest of the neighborhood regarded the Gloom house. The ravens said caw pretty much all day.

The neighbors didn’t like the ravens.

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They said, “Somebody ought to do something about those ravens.”

They didn’t like the house.

They said, “Somebody ought to do something about that house.”

They didn’t like the whole situation, really.

They said, “Somebody ought to do something about those people, with their strange house and their big ugly tree that looks like a hand and their little boy with the strange black hair.”

They called the mayor’s office to complain.

And the mayor’s office didn’t know what to do about it, so they called the City Planning Commission. And the City Planning Commission called Mr. Notes, who was away on his first vacation in four years but whom they made a point of bothering because nobody liked him.

They asked Mr. Notes, “Will you please come back and visit the people in this house and ask them to paint their house some other color?”

And poor Mr. Notes, who was on a road trip traveling to small towns all over the country taking pictures of his one interest in life, antique weather vanes shaped like roosters, had folded his road map and sighed. “Well, if I have to.”

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E On the morning Mr. Notes pulled up to the curb, five-year-old Gustav Gloom sat on a swing hanging from the big black tree, reading a big black book.

Mr. Notes was not happy about having to walk past the boy to get to the house because he didn’t like little boys very much. He didn’t like little girls very much, either. Or, for that matter, most adults. Mr. Notes liked houses, especially if they matched the rest of their neighborhoods and had great weather vanes shaped like roosters.

Mr. Notes was so tall and so skinny that his legs looked like sticks. His knees and elbows bulged like marbles beneath his pin-striped, powderblue suit. He wore a flat straw hat with a daisy in the band and had a mustache that looked like somebody had glued paintbrush bristles under his nose.

He opened the iron gate, expecting it to groan at him the way most old iron gates do, but it made no sound at all, not even when he slammed it shut behind him. He might have been bothered by the lack of any clang, but was even more upset by the odd coldness of the air

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inside the gate. When he looked up, he saw a big, dark rain cloud overhead, keeping any direct sunlight from touching the property.

He did not think that maybe he should turn around and get back in his car. He just turned to the strange little boy on the swing and said, “Excuse me? Little boy?”

Gustav looked up from the big fat book he was reading, which, like his house, his clothes, and even his tree, was all black. Even the pages.

It looked like too heavy a book for a little boy to even hold, let alone read. He said, “Yes?” Some conversations are like leaky motorboats, running out of fuel before you even leave the dock. This, Mr. Notes began to sense, was one of them. He ran through his limited collection of appropriate things to say to children and found only one thing, a question that he threw out with the desperation of a man terrified of dogs who tosses a ball in the hope that they’ll run away to fetch it: “Are your mommy and daddy home?”

Gustav blinked at him. “No.” “Is—” “Or,” Gustav said, “really, they might be home, wherever their home is, but they’re not here.”

“Excuse me, young man, but this is very serious.

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I don’t have time to play games. Is there anyone inside that house I can talk to?”

Gustav blinked at him again. “Oh, sure.”

Mr. Notes brushed his stiff mustache with the tip of a finger and turned his attention to the house itself, which if anything looked even bigger and darker and more like a giant looming shadow than it had before.

As he watched, the front doors swung inward, revealing a single narrow hallway with a shiny wooden floor and a red carpet marking a straight path all the way from the front door to a narrower opening in the far wall.

Whatever lay beyond that farther doorway was too dark to see.

Mr. Notes sniffed at Gustav. “I’m going to tell your family how rude you were.”

Gustav said, “Why would you tell them that when it isn’t true?”

“I know rudeness when I see it.”

“You must not have ever seen it, then,” Gustav said, “because that’s not what I was.”

Mr. Notes could not believe the nerve of the little boy, who had dared to suggest that there was any problem with his manners.

What he planned to say to the people inside

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would ruin the boy’s whole day.

He turned his back on the little boy and stormed up the path into the house, getting almost all the way down the corridor before the big black doors closed behind him.

Nobody on Sunnyside Terrace ever figured out what happened during Mr. Notes’s seventeen minutes in the Gloom mansion before the doors opened again and he came running out, yelling at the top of his lungs and moving as fast as his long, spindly legs could carry him.

He ran down the front walk and out the gate and past his car and around the bend and out of sight, never to be seen again on Sunnyside Terrace.

When he finally stopped, he was too busy screaming at the top of his lungs to make any sense. What the neighbors took from it, by the time he was done, was that going anywhere near the Gloom house had been a very bad idea, and that having it “ruin” the “character” of the neighborhood was just the price they’d have to pay for not having to go anywhere near the house themselves.

Mr. Notes was sent to a nice, clean home for very nervous people and remains there to

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this day, making pot holders out of yarn and ashtrays out of clay and drawings of black circles with black crayons. By happy coincidence, his private room looks out upon the roof and offers him a fine view of the building’s weather vane, which looks like a rooster. It’s fair to say that he’s gotten what he always wanted.

But one strange thing still puzzles the doctors and the nurses at the special home for people who once had a really bad scare and can’t get over it.

It’s the one symptom of his condition that they can’t find in any of their medical books and that they can’t explain no matter how many times they ask him to open his mouth and say ah, the one thing that makes them shudder whenever they see all his drawings of a big black shape that looks like an open mouth.

It was the main reason that all the neighbors on Sunnyside Terrace, who still said that “somebody” had to do something about the Gloom house, now left it alone and pretended that it had nothing to do with them.

And that was this: No matter how bright it is around him, wherever he happens to be, Mr. Notes no longer casts a shadow.

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Originally published as The Case of the Deadly Desperados

CAROLINE LAWRENCE

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3RD PASS

N NEVADA TERRITORY

W USA

E S

ei g

er

Gr ade

area shown on map below

G

Mount Davidson Washoe VIRGINIA CITY City Gold Hill Six Mile C Ophir anyo

i Em n

Silver City

Fort Churchill

Devil’s Gate Dayton

er

Temperance

Carson City

Palmyra Como

Carson River

Si

er

ra

Ne vad a

Mo

Lake Bigler (Tahoe)

unta

ins

lv

Si Empire

Pi ne Nu t

Ra

ng

e

Franktown

il

Mo un tain s

Washoe Lake

a

gr

a Tr nt

K

Genoa ury Gra de gsb in

P.K.’s map of the Washoe 1862

Van Sickles

Mottsville

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0 1 2 3 4 5 Miles

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VIRGINIA CITY IN 1862 W N

S E

Mine Building

Colombo’'s

Ambrotype Studio

Fulton’'’s

Notary Public

Old Corner

Gold Hill, Silver City & Dayton Almack’'s

Opium Den

Union

Taylor

Washington

Smith

Int’'’l Hotel

(downhill) towards Six Mile Canyon & Fort Churchill

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half-built h

3RD PASS

Mo un tD ds avi

towards peak of Mount Davidson (uphill)

on

Mexican Mine Territorial Enterprise

A St.

Recorder'’s

Notary Public

B St.

Virginia Hotel

C St.

nt’'’l Hotel

D St.

half-built house

E St.

(Chinatown)

Mill

Carson

F St. Sutton

Opium Den

Mine Building

Mine Building

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3rd pass

Ledger Sheet 1

MY NAME IS P.K. PINKERTON and before this day is over I will be dead.

I am trapped down the deepest shaft of a Comstock silver mine with three desperados closing in on me.

Until they find me, I have my pencil & these ledger sheets and a couple of candles. If I write small & fast, I might be able to write an account of how I came to be here. Then whoever finds my body will know the unhappy events that led to my demise.

And they will also know who done it.

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This is what I would like my tombstone to say:

Pi n k e r P.K. Born in ton Hard Luck, September 26, 1850

Died in

Virginia City, September 28, 1862 “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” Galatians 3:28

R.I.P. My foster ma Evangeline used to say that when God gives you a Gift he always gives you a Thorn in your side to keep you humble.

My Gift is that I am real smart about certain things.

I can read & write and do any sum in my head. I can speak American & Lakota and also some Chinese & Spanish. I can shoot a gun & I can ride a pony with or without a saddle. I can track & shoot & skin any game and then cook it over a selfsparked fire. I know how to cure a headache with a handful of weeds.

I can hear a baby quail in the sagebrush or a mouse in the pantry.

I can tell what a horse has been eating just by the smell of his manure.

I can see every leaf on a cottonwood tree.

But here is my Problem: I cannot tell if a person’s smile is 2

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genuine or false. I can only spot three emotions: happiness, fear & anger. And sometimes I even mix those up.

Also, sometimes I do not recognize someone I have met before. If they have grown a beard or their hair is different then I get confused.

That is my Thorn: people confound me.

And now my Thorn has got me killed.

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Ledger Sheet 2

IT ALL STARTED THE DAY before yesterday, on September 26th. I came home from school & walked into our one-room cabin to the smell of scalded milk & the sight of things thrown everywhere. I closed the door behind me & stepped forward. It was only then that I saw my foster parents lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

They had both been scalped & they appeared to be dead.

I ran to Ma first. She was holding the big iron skillet and it had some hair & blood on it, so I guessed she had put up a fight.

As I stood there looking down, her eyelids

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fluttered and she opened her eyes and said, “Pinky?” Pinky was her nickname for me. It is short for Pinkerton.

I crouched down beside her. “I’m here, Ma.” She said, “Is Emmet alive?”

I looked over at Pa. He was not breathing. His eyes were closed & he had a peaceful smile on his face. He also had a hatchet buried in his chest. I swallowed hard.

“No, Ma,” I said.

“He was a good man,” she said. “I will see him walking the Streets of Glory before too long.”

“Don’t talk that way, Ma. I will fetch Doc Finley from Dayton.”

“No.” Her voice was faint. “There is no time. I’m dying. Your medicine bag. The one your other ma gave you.”

“I do not think my medicine bag can help you now, Ma.” “No. I mean . . . that’s what they were after.” She gave a kind of sigh and I thought she had gone. But then her eyes opened & she gripped my hand tight. “It holds your Destiny. Pinky, do you remember my special hiding place?”

“Loose floorboard behind the stove?”

She nodded. “You’re smart, Pinky. You’ll figure out what to do. Take that medicine bag and get out fast. Before they come back.”

I did not understand what she meant at first. Then I did.

“The Indians who did this might come back?” I said.

“They weren’t Indians.” Her voice was real faint now & her skin was a terrible white. She said, “One of them had blue eyes. And he smelled like Bay Rum Hair Tonic. Indians do not wear Hair Tonic.”

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I sniffed the air. Ma Evangeline was right. Above the smell of blood, scalded milk & fresh-baked cake, I could detect the sweet scent of cloves: Bay Rum Hair Tonic. I also picked up a tang of sweaty armpits.

The men who did this had left a few minutes ago & could return any moment. My instinct was to run, but I did not want to leave my dying ma.

“Go, Pinky,” she said. “Take your medicine bag and get out of here before they come back.”

I stood up & looked down at her. She would be dead in a minute. I clenched my fists.

“I will find those men,” I said. “And I will avenge you, Ma.” “No,” she said. And then she said, “Pinky?”

I could barely hear her, so I squatted down beside her again. “Yes, Ma?” “Promise me that you will never take another life. Not even those who killed me. You must forgive. That is what our Lord teaches.”

“I can’t promise that, Ma,” I said. My vision was blurry. I blinked & it got clearer.

“It is my dying wish,” she said. “You have to.”

“Then I promise,” I said.

She closed her eyes & whispered, “And promise you will not gamble nor drink hard liquor.”

“I promise.”

But this time she did not hear me.

I stood & looked down at the bodies of my foster ma & pa.

They lay next to each other and the pool of mingled blood was still spreading.

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I went over to the stove, carefully picking my way around the things that had been thrown down. A tin canister of flour had been emptied onto the floor. I made sure I stepped around it. Flour would make me leave footprints as sure as blood.

I took the burning milk off the hot plate. Then I knelt down beside the stove & felt for the floorboard with the little knothole. I got my fingertip in there & pulled it up. I found my medicine bag & took it out. I hung it around my neck. I also found a gold coin worth twenty dollars that Ma kept for emergencies. She would not need it now, so I took that, too.

I put it in my medicine bag with the other things. Then I put the board back in its place.

Outside I heard men speaking in hushed tones. One of the porch stairs creaked.

I knew it was them. The killers were coming back.

I looked around the house. There were not a lot of places in that one-room cabin that I could hide.

It seemed to me there was only one.

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Ledger Sheet 3

TExT SHORT

OVER AGAINST THE FAR WALL of the cabin stood Ma Evangeline’s tall pine dresser. Its shelves were about half full of books and half full of plates.

I scrambled up that dresser as fast as a squirrel with its tail on fire. When I got near the top I half turned and leapt onto one of the two big rafters of the house. I am small for my age, but I am agile.

I was up on the rafter before the door handle even began to turn, but in my haste I had set some of the china trembling. As the front door eased open I noticed a big blue & white plate rolling along the top of the dresser.

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It slowed, hesitated, and then stopped right at the edge.

I breathed a sigh of relief, then froze as I heard a man’s whiny voice say, “Is it safe?”

“Yeah, it’s safe,” said a deeper voice. “They’s still dead. Come on, you big scaredy-cat.”

“I ain’t a scaredy-cat,” said the one with the whiny voice.

“That woman brained me real good with the skillet. It hurt.”

I peeped over the edge of the big rafter and saw three men below me. They sounded like white men but they looked like Indians. Then I looked closer and saw they were white men dressed up as Indians. They were wearing canvas pantaloons, not buckskins, and their moccasins were clumsy things made of buffalo hide. They had war paint on their faces & turkey feathers in their greasy hair. One of the men smelled strongly of Bay Rum Hair Tonic. From up above I could not be sure which one was wearing the Hair Tonic but I guessed it was the man with three turkey feathers. He was leading the others across the room.

I held on to the roof beam & tried a trick my Indian ma had once told me about. It is called The Bush Trick. If you hide behind a small bush and imagine that you are that bush, they say you become invisible. I did The Beam Trick. I pretended I was part of that beam. I concentrated real hard & prayed my Indian ma had been right.

“I told you they wouldn’t of hid it in the outhouse,” I heard the leader say. “And now they’re dead. We won’t get no more out of them.” He went over to my pa, looked down at him & said, “Nothin can happen more beautiful than death.” Then he

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laughed & took the hatchet by the handle & tugged. It made a sucking noise as it came out.

“Let’s get out of here, Walt,” said Whiny Voice. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Yeah, Walt,” said the third man. He was tall & had a raspy voice. “Whatever you’re looking for, it ain’t here.”

“Dang,” Walt said. (Only he used the bad word that starts with d and ends with mn.) He spat some tobacco-tinted saliva onto the floor. “It’s gotta be here. I just ain’t figured out where.” There was a pause and in that moment of silence I thought they must surely hear my heart thumping. Then Walt said, “Well lookee here.”

I squirmed forward a little & looked down and saw what I had not noticed before. On the table was a cake with chocolate frosting & red licorice strings on top that spelled out: HAPPY 12th BIRTHDAY PINKY. It was a layer cake: my favorite. It must have cost Ma Evangeline a fortune to get chocolate out here in the Nevada desert.

“They got a kid?” said Whiny Voice. From up here I could see the bloody patch on his head from where Ma had hit him with the skillet.

“Course they got a kid, you fool,” said Walt. “Kid’s real ma was the one who had what we are looking for.”

“Maybe the kid has it,” said Raspy Voice.

“Pinky a girl’s name or a boy’s?” said Whiny Voice.

“Boy’s name,” said Raspy. “I knew a Pinky in Hangtown.

Pinky O’Malley. He was one of them Albino types. White hair and pink eyes.”

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“What about Pinky’s Saloon in Esmeralda?” said Whiny.

“That’s owned by a lady. A French lady, I think.”

Walt had taken out a fearsome Bowie Knife and was cutting himself a chaw from a plug of tobacco. He said, “Shut your traps, you two. I am trying to think.” He ate the tobacco right off that blade & chomped for a while. Then he said, “Is there a school in this flea-bitten excuse for a town?”

“Dayton,” said Raspy. “I think there’s a schoolhouse down in Dayton. But I saw some kids over by the church when we rode up earlier.”

“Let’s check it out,” said Walt. “We gotta find that kid.” He started towards the door & I was about to breathe a sigh of relief. Then he stopped & turned slowly back to the stove. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I reckon someone has been here since we kilt Mr. & Mrs. Preacher.”

“What do you mean, Walt?” Whiny Voice touched the bloody place on his head & brought his hand away fast.

“Something here is different,” said Walt. “Somebody has taken the milk off the heat. And I’ll bet they are still here.”

rise of the wolf

CU RT IS JOBLING

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Pa rt I Autumn, Cold Coast

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1 Parting Words DREW KNEW THAT there was a predator out there.

He looked out over the barley field, mottled shadows racing

across it, and the crops swaying rhythmically as storm clouds flew by overhead. Behind him his father and twin brother continued to load the wagon, backs bent as they hauled sacks of grain onto the wooden boards. A heavy gray shire horse stood harnessed to the front, tugging with its teeth at tufts of grass it found at the base of the tethering post. Drew stood on the roof of the rickety old toolshed, scouring the golden meadow for a telltale sign, of what he wasn’t entirely sure.

“Get your idle bones down off that shed and come and help your brother,” shouted his father. “We need to get this loaded before the rain hits.”

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pa rt i ng wor d s

“But Pa, there’s something out there,” Drew called back.

“Either you get yourself down from that thing or I come over and knock you down,” Pa warned, pausing momentarily to glare at his son.

Begrudgingly, Drew searched the barley field with narrowed eyes one last time before jumping down onto the muddy, rutted surface of the farm’s yard.

“I swear you’d rather do anything than a bit of hard work,” muttered his father, hefting a sack up to Trent.

Drew snatched up his own load, struggling for purchase against the rough hemp as he hoisted it up to his brother. Their father returned to the barn to haul out the remaining grain destined for the neighboring market town of Tuckborough.

Tall, broad, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, Trent was the very image of Mack Ferran. Shorter and slighter in build than his brother, with a shock of black hair that tumbled over his finer features, Drew was an exact opposite in all aspects. Though the twins were now on the verge of manhood, Drew knew it would be clear to the most casual observer which of the two had eaten the bigger portions of porridge at the Ferran breakfast table.

But, different as they were, they were as close as any brothers could be.

“Don’t mind him,” said Trent, taking the weight of the sack and dragging it across the wooden boards. “He just wants to be off so he can get to market on time.” He slammed the bag down as Drew pulled forward another to the foot of the wagon. Trent

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rarely had any trouble believing Drew—if his brother said something was amiss when they were in the wild, nine times out of ten he’d be correct. “What do you reckon it is?” he asked.

Drew paused to glance back at the fields surrounding the Ferran farm. “Can’t say. A wildcat? Dogs maybe? Possibly a wolf?” he guessed.

“At this time of day, so close to the farm? You’re mad, Drew.

I’ll grant you it might be wild dogs, but not a wolf.”

Drew knew he wasn’t mad. Trent might have been strong, athletic, and a natural horseman, but he knew little about the wilderness. Drew, on the other hand, was a born outdoorsman and with this came the gift of an innate understanding of the countryside and the creatures within it. Since his first trip out into the fields as a boy with his father, he’d taken to shepherding with an uncanny ease. He found he was completely in tune with the animals, his senses seeming to match theirs. From the smallest field mouse to the largest (and, thankfully, very uncommon) bear, Drew could usually recognize their presence readily, be it from the reaction of the other animals or the tracks and signs they left behind.

But today’s feeling vexed him. Something was out there, watching them, stalking them, but it was unfamiliar. He knew it sounded crazy, but he could pick up the scent of a predator when the air was clear. This had proved invaluable on many an occasion, saving several of the family’s sheep and cattle. Although today was blustery, there was still the faint hint of a

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creature that was out of place, foreign to these parts. A large animal was out there, looking in, and it irked Drew that he couldn’t figure out what it was, much less spy it.

“You think it’s the thing from last night?” asked Trent.

That was exactly what Drew had been wondering. For the last few nights Drew’s shepherd watch had been unusual. The sheep had not been themselves, and all the while Drew had been consumed by an awful sense of foreboding. Ordinarily the sheep would be very receptive to his commands and calls but, bit by bit, they had become more erratic. This had coincided with the waxing of the moon, which often spooked the animals and had even caused Drew to grow ill with worry. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, the feeling of being stalked by a predator in your own backyard.

Toward the end of last night’s watch he’d gathered and penned the majority of the flock and picked up the stragglers that had wandered farther afield. Only one had remained—the ram, naturally—and it had managed to find its way up onto the bluffs that towered over the coast below. The Ferran farm was situated on a rocky promontory of land that reached out from the Cold Coast into the White Sea, cut off on almost every side by the rock walls that surrounded it. He’d found the ram in a state of panic.

It had bucked and started, throwing its head back in fear.

Drew raised his hands, which should have calmed it down, but it had the opposite effect. Shaking its head from side to side,

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mouth open and gulping at the salty air, the ram had backed up a step. Then another. Pebbles had tumbled over the cliff edge, dislodged by frantic hooves, as it struggled for purchase. One moment it was there, an eye fixed on him in stricken terror, the next it was gone, disappearing off the cliff.

Drew had scrambled the remaining distance to the edge, white-knuckled fingers clutching the earth as he peered over.

A hundred feet below, heaped in a broken mass, the sheep lay unmoving, its life dashed away on the sharp rocks.

As the moon shone down Drew had looked about, convinced he wasn’t alone, sure beyond reason that whatever had startled the animal was still nearby. He’d raced home through the sickly moonlight, heart thundering, not stopping until he’d hit the farm’s front door with an almighty crash. Now, on this stormy morning, Drew had the same familiar feeling. He’d be keeping the sheep penned in tonight, close to the farm where he could keep an eye on them.

“Drew!” His father pointed in the direction of the remaining sacks that were lined up outside the heavy timber doors of the barn. “Get a move on. I want to get to Tuckborough while there’s still daylight, lad.” Drew trudged to the barn, speeding up when he caught sight of his father’s glower.

His mother, Tilly, stood on the doorstep of the farmhouse, drying her hands on her apron.

“Try not to be hard on him, Mack,” she said as her husband approached, reaching out and brushing the sweat-soaked hair

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from his brow. “He’s probably still raw from what happened to that ram.”

“He’s still raw?” said Mack incredulously. “It’s not him who has to fork out for another animal. If I don’t get there before noon, the best on show will be gone to some other bidder.” He saw his son dragging the last two sacks across the farmyard to the wagon. “If you tear those sacks, then it’ll come out of your wages, lad!” he shouted.

Tilly had to bite her lip, mother’s instinct telling her to jump in and defend the boy, but she thought better of it. Mack’s mood was bad enough without one of their rows darkening it further.

Drew stopped to throw one of the sacks over his shoulder, looking back to his parents, who stood talking beneath the farmhouse porch. His father was pointing his way, his hooked thumb gesturing, while his mother shook her head. A few choice words to her husband and she walked indoors in annoyance. The boys’ father looked back toward them, shaking his head wearily before following his wife indoors. Drew trudged over to the wagon.

“Are they arguing again?” asked Trent, positioning the final sack and binding them to the timber hoardings with a heavy length of rope.

Drew nodded, aware that the words his parents had exchanged were probably about him. It always seemed to be about him. It felt as though they were keeping something from him, but he didn’t know what.

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Times were undoubtedly changing at the farm, and Trent was biding his time before he finally left home to join the military. Under duress, their parents had agreed to their son’s constant badgering to allow him to become a soldier, something he’d wanted to do since childhood. As a matter of routine, their father had trained both his sons in skill at arms from an early age, teaching them things he’d picked up himself a long time ago. Mack was a member of the old king’s Wolfguard, and there were very few places across the continent of Lyssia that he hadn’t visited. With Leopold the Lion on the throne, it was a very different monarch Trent would serve if he pursued his dream. This part of the Seven Realms was a changed place from days gone by. Leopold ruled with an iron paw, and it was rumored that many of Lyssia’s people had fallen on hard times.

Their father would mutter that the Lionguard were now little more than glorified tax collectors, a shadow of their former selves. He had done his parental duty in basic self-defense, with both boys now proficient with a sword, but there was only so much he was prepared to teach.

Regardless of his own skills, Drew had no desire to travel to Highcliff with his brother and join the Lionguard. His home was on the farm, and he felt no need to see the world. He knew his mother found his homebird nature heartwarming and loved the fact that her young boy would always be around. Drew suspected that his father found his lack of ambition disappointing, but the old man never spoke of it if he did. It seemed that his

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father had written him off at a young age, and if he were to stay around here for the rest of his life then so be it. After all, as Mack Ferran often said, another pair of hands was always needed on the farm, so the boy was good for a few things. It was as close to a compliment as he was likely to get.

Straining against his harness, the great gray shire horse kicked his hooves into the earth, keen to be on his way. He threw his head back and took a couple of forceful steps, almost causing Trent to fall off the back of the wagon.

“Whoa there, Amos,” called Drew, slapping his hand against the wooden side. The horse relented, stepping back gingerly and dipping his head by way of an apology. “He wants to set off,” said Drew, looking up at the gathering storm clouds.

“Can’t say I blame him.”

Trent jumped down, and Drew followed him indoors to say farewell. They found their parents standing in the kitchen, embracing.

“Right, then,” said their father. “I guess we’re ready. Trent, get that basket off the table, lad. It’s our lunch in there.”

Trent picked up the basket and sidled past, back to the front door and the waiting wagon. They always took it in turns to accompany their father on the road to market. Tuckborough was some ten or so miles away from them, the nearest spot of civilization. By horse it was a brisk gallop, the coast road skirting the edge of the Dyrewood, weaving one way and the other along the cliff top past bays. By wagon it was a far slower af-

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fair. With a number of shops, watering holes, and other more diverting interests, it was usually a welcome break from mundane life on the farm. Come autumn, however, it was decidedly less enjoyable. Cold winds and sleeting rain seemed to instinctively appear on market days. Even the prospects of a sly sip of ale with their father or a flirtation with a pretty girl proved lean enticements.

Their mother cleared up the breakfast pots from the kitchen table. Drew reached up and unhooked his father’s heavy hooded cloak from its peg, handing it to him as he made for the door.

“We should be back around nightfall, depending on the road and weather,” Mack said as he fastened the brass clasp of his cloak under his chin. “You may want to see about keeping the flock a little closer to the homestead today. After yesterday and all, yes?”

Drew nodded his agreement as his mother squeezed by, looking to say her good-byes to her other son. Beyond the doorway, a light rain had started to fall.

“Try not to lose any more of them. And look after your ma,” his father added as she passed.

The old man patted his hip, checking his hunting knife was at home in its sheath. Drew handed his father’s longbow to him before picking up the quiver of arrows that lay at the foot of the stairs. He’d rarely had to use any of these weapons on the road, certainly not in recent years anyway. There had been a time, when the boys were toddlers, that bandits had stalked

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the coast road, and bows and blades were a necessity for travelers. Eventually the local farmers and road traders had come together to form a makeshift posse that dispatched the brigands.

Those who weren’t slain or hanged in Tuckborough had fled to pastures less feisty. Now the most dangerous encounter they might face would be a boar, big cat, or wolf. Still, old habits died hard for the ex-soldier. Trent followed his father out into the drizzle, wrapping his scarf tightly about his face and pulling up the hood of his cloak.

They both climbed into the cart, and Drew followed them to pass up the quiver of arrows. Amos gave a whinny of excitement, feet stepping in anticipation, aware that they were about to be off. Drew stepped up to pat the horse’s nose with an open hand, but the beast pulled back, uncharacteristically arching his neck with a nervy snort. Clearly the horse was also on edge, and Drew guessed he was picking up on the same unsettled atmosphere.

“Gee up,” called Mack Ferran, snapping the reins in his hands and spurring the old shire horse on. With ponderous footsteps the horse stepped out, pulling the great long wagon behind him. Drew stood clear of the vehicle, the huge wheels cutting up the mud as it went. As the drizzle slowly turned to a downpour and a storm rumbled overhead, the wagon disappeared into the rain.

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volume one

THE SHADOWS

by

Jacqueline West

illustrated by

Poly Bernatene

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PUFFIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2010 Published by Puffin Books, a member of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2011 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Text copyright © Jacqueline West, 2010 Illustrations copyright © Poly Bernatene, 2010 All rights reserved THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

West, Jacqueline, date.

The shadows / by Jacqueline West ; illustrated by Poly Bernatene. p. cm. — (The books of Elsewhere ; vol I) Summary: When eleven-year-old Olive and her distracted parents move into an old Victorian mansion, Olive finds herself ensnared in a dark plan involving some mysterious paintings, a trapped and angry nine-year-old boy, and three talking cats.

ISBN: 978-0-8037-3440-1 (hc) [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Dwellings—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.

4. Painting—Fiction. 5. Cats—Fiction.]

I. Bernatene, Poly, ill. II. Title.

PZ7.W51776Sh 2010 18p [Fic]—dc22 2009013128 Puffin Books ISBN 978-0-14-241872-7 Designed by Jennifer Kelly Text set in Requiem

Comp: Plea to the text m than the text a narrower m narrower tha

19p 20p

Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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For everyone who read to me— especially Mom and Dad

—JW

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1

M

s.

McMartin was definitely dead. It had taken some time for the neighbors to grow suspicious, since no one ever went in or came out of the old stone house on Linden Street anyway. However, there were several notable clues that things in the McMartin house were not as they should have been. The rusty mailbox began to bulge with odd and exotic mail-order catalogs, which eventually overflowed the gaping aluminum door and spilled out into the street. The gigantic jungle fern that hung from the porch ceiling keeled over for lack of water. Ms. McMartin’s three cats, somewhere inside the house, began the most terrible yowling ever heard on quiet old Linden Street. After a few days of listening to that, the neighbors had had enough.

The authorities arrived in a big white van. They

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marched in a group up the porch steps, knocked at the door, waited for a moment, and then picked the lock with a handy official lock-picking tool. A few minutes went by. All the neighbors held their breath, watching through the gaps in their curtains. Soon the uniformed group reappeared, rolling a white-sheeted stretcher onto the porch. They locked the ancient front door behind them and drove away, stretcher and all.

Rumors soon began to fly regarding where and how Ms. McMartin had finally kicked it. Mrs. Nivens, who had lived next door for as long as anyone could remember, told Mrs. Dewey that it had happened in the hallway, where someone—or something—had startled Ms. McMartin so badly that she fell down the stairs. Mr. Fergus told Mr. Butler that Ms. McMartin had collapsed on the living room rug in front of the fireplace, while a sheaf of secret family papers went up in smoke behind the grate. Mr. Hanniman decreed that she had died of old age, plain and simple—he had heard that she was 150 years old, after all. And there were various theories as to just how much of Ms. McMartin’s face had been eaten by her cats.

Ms. McMartin had no close family. Her nearest relative was a distant cousin who had recently died in Shanghai, after a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup. There was no one to come and collect an inheritance, or to dig through the rick-

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ety attic for long-lost treasures. The old stone house, covered with encroaching scarves of ivy, was left full of its antique furniture and strange knickknacks. Ms. McMartin’s yowling cats were the only items to be removed from the house, wrestled into kitty carriers by three scratched and bleeding animal shelter workers. And then, according to Mrs. Nivens, who saw it all through her kitchen window, just as they were about to be loaded into the animal shelter truck, the three kitty carriers popped open simultaneously. A trio of gigantic cats shot across the lawn like furry cannonballs. The sweaty shelter manager wiped a smudge of blood off his cheek, shrugged, and said to the other two, “Well—how about some lunch?”

It wasn’t long before someone heard about the old stone house for sale at an astonishingly low price and decided to buy it.

These someones were a Mr. Alec and Mrs. Alice Dunwoody, a pair of more than slightly dippy mathematicians. The Dunwoodys had a daughter named Olive—but she had nothing to do with the housebuying decision. Olive was eleven, and was generally not given much credit. Her persistently lackluster grades in math had led her parents to believe that she was some kind of genetic aberration—they talked to her patiently, as if she were a foreign exchange student from a country no one had ever heard of.

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In late June, Mr. Hambert, Realtor, led the Dunwoodys through the McMartin house. It was a muggy afternoon, but the old stone house was dark and cool inside. Trailing along behind the rest of the group, Olive could feel the little hairs on her bare arms standing up.

Mr. Hambert, on the other hand, was sweating like a mug of root beer in the sun. His cheeks were pushed up into two red lumps by his wide smile. He could smell a sale, and it smelled as good as a fresh bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. As they walked along the firstfloor hallway, he kept up a flow of chitchat.

“So, how did you two meet?” Mr. Hambert asked Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody, pulling the chain of a dusty hanging lamp.

“We met in the library at Princeton,” answered Mrs. Dunwoody, her eyes glowing with the memory.

“We were both reading the same journal—The Absolutely Unrelenting Seriousness of Mathematics for the New Generation—” “Or ‘Ausom’—get it?” interjected Mr. Dunwoody. “ ‘Awesome.’ Very clever.”

“—and Alec asked me, ‘Have you seen the misprint on page twenty-five?’ They had written that Theodorus’s Constant—” “Is the square root of two!” interjected Mr. Dunwoody again. “How their copy editors missed that, I can’t imagine.”

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“Oh, we both laughed and laughed,” sighed Mrs. Dunwoody with a misty look at her husband.

“Well, you must be a regular math whiz, with parents like yours—am I right?” said Mr. Hambert, leaning his sweaty face toward Olive.

Mr. Dunwoody patted Olive’s shoulder. “Math isn’t really her thing. Olive is a very . . . creative girl, aren’t you, Olive?”

Olive nodded, and looked down at the toes of her sneakers.

Mr. Hambert kept up his shiny-cheeked smile.

“Well, good for you,” he said, stopping in front of a pair of dark wood doors, carved into shiny raised squares.

He pushed them open with a grand gesture.

“The library,” he announced.

Through the doors was a large, dusty room, almost the size of a small ballroom. The wooden floor was a little scratched, and the tiles around the giant fireplace were chipped here and there, but these flaws made the vast room seem cozier. In fact, it looked as though it might have been used yesterday. Long shelves, still covered with rows of embossed leather volumes, stretched from the hardwood floor to the stenciled ceiling. Ladders on wheels, the kind that Olive had only seen in old paintings, were leaning against the shelves so that the very highest books could be reached. There were hundreds, maybe thou-

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sands of books, obviously collected by several generations of McMartins.

“The managers of the estate have decided to sell the contents along with the house. Of course, you can dispose of these however you choose,” said Mr. Hambert consolingly, as though so many books would be a terrible bother.

“This room would be just perfect for studying, correcting papers, writing articles . . . don’t you think?” said Mrs. Dunwoody to Mr. Dunwoody dreamily.

“Oh, yes, very cozy,” agreed Mr. Dunwoody. “You know, I don’t believe that we need more time to make up our minds—do you, dear?”

Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody exchanged another misty look. Then Mr. Dunwoody declared, “We’ll take it.”

Mr. Hambert’s face turned as red as a new potato. He burbled and shone and shook Mr. Dunwoody’s hand, then Mrs. Dunwoody’s hand, then Mr. Dunwoody’s hand again.

“Excellent! Excellent!” he boomed. “Congratulations—perfect house for a family! So big, so full of history . . . A quick look around the second floor, and we can go back to my office and sign the papers!”

They all trooped up the mossy carpet of the staircase, Mr. Hambert in the lead, puffing happily, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody following hand in hand, smiling up at the high ceilings as though some lovely algebraic

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theorem unfolded there. Olive trailed behind, running her hand up the banister and collecting a pile of thick dust. At the top of the stairs, she rolled the dust into a little ball and blew it off of her palm. It floated slowly down, past the banister, past the old wall sconces, into the dark hallway.

Her parents had disappeared into one of the bedrooms. She could still hear Mr. Hambert shouting “Excellent! Excellent!” every now and again.

Olive stood by herself on the landing and felt the big stone house loom around her. This is our house, she told herself, just to see how it felt. Our house. The words hovered in her mind like candle smoke. Before Olive could quite believe them, they had faded away.

Olive turned in a slow circle. The hall stretched away from her in two directions, dwindling into darkness at both ends. Dim light from one hanging lamp outlined the frames of the pictures on the walls. Behind Olive, at the top of the stairs, was a large painting in a thick gold frame. Olive liked to paint, but she mostly made squiggly designs or imaginary creatures from the books she read. She had never painted anything like this.

Olive peered into the canvas. It was a painting of a forest at night. The twigs of leafless trees made a black web against the sky. A full moon pressed its face through the clouds, touching a path of white stones that led into the dark woods and disappeared. But it

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seemed to Olive that somewhere—maybe just at the end of that white path, maybe in that darkness where the moonlight couldn’t reach—there was something else within that painting. Something she could almost see.

“Olive?” Mrs. Dunwoody’s head popped through a doorway along the hall. “Don’t you want to see your bedroom?”

Olive walked slowly away from the painting, keeping her eye on it over her shoulder. She would figure it out later, she told herself. She would have plenty of time.

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ABR A H A MS

P h i lom e l Books An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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philomel books A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

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Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2012 by Pas de Deux. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

Edited by Jill Santopolo. Design by Semadar Megged.

Text set in 12.5-point Bembo.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abrahams, Peter, 1947– Robbie Forester and the outlaws of Sherwood St. / Peter Abrahams. p. cm.

Summary: After getting a strange charm bracelet from a homeless woman, thirteenyear-old Robyn Forester and new friends join together to fight injustice in their Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood.

[1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Justice—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.

4. Neighborhood—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Family life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 7. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.A1675Out 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2010042330 10

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ISBN 978-0-399-25502-1 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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t first I thought it all began with a foul—if an elbow to the head’s not a foul, then what is?— but I figured out, maybe not as soon as I should have, that the beginning had come a little earlier. Just five or six hours, in fact, with me on my way to school and no time to lose. The second the doors of the subway car slid open, I jumped out, hurried along the platform, and took the stairs to street level two at a time. At the top, I was turning left, all set to run the block and a half to school, when I noticed something not right in front of the newsstand by the subway entrance. A homeless woman who’d been sitting outside for the past few weeks—homeless, please help read the writing on the coffee cup she always held—was out there again, only now she’d tipped over and lay on her side. It must have just happened, because none of the people around—and there were lots—had gone to her yet. So I did.

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I leaned over her. The woman was old, with white hair and a lined face, but maybe because her eyes were closed, I suddenly had this vision of how she’d looked as a young girl. She’d been really pretty. Something about that took away the fear I’d normally have had at such a moment.

“Are you all right?” I said.

Her eyes opened—blue eyes, but so faded there was hardly any color at all, except for the whites, which were crisscrossed with red veins. “Do I look all right?” she said, her voice surprisingly strong and not at all friendly.

I didn’t know what to say.

Her eyes narrowed. “I know you,” she said. “You’re the girlie who dropped eighty-five cents in the cup. And sixty another time.”

My parents said not to give money to street people, that there were better ways of helping, which maybe made sense but didn’t feel right. So all I thought at that moment was: eighty-five cents and sixty cents—not much.

“Sorry,” I said, “but that was all I had on me and—” Before I could finish, strong hands were pushing me to the side and voices were calling “Get back, out of the way.” Two cops had arrived and were clearing space around the woman. I ended up behind some tall people.

An ambulance came roaring up, siren blaring. I caught

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glimpses of EMTs hopping out, feeling her pulse, clamping an oxygen mask over her face, rolling her onto a stretcher, and hoisting her into the back of the ambulance. The crowd lost interest fast, everyone dispersing, giving me a clear view, and what I saw was the woman’s arm dangling down from the stretcher and something slipping off her wrist and falling into the gutter. I went forward and picked it up. It was a braided leather bracelet, possibly a charm bracelet, although only a single charm hung from it—a tiny silver heart.

“You dropped this,” I called, just as the ambulance doors were closing. No one inside noticed me, except for the woman. Her eyes were looking right into mine and seemed to be trying to send some message, but I didn’t get whatever it was. The doors slammed shut, and the ambulance took off. I ran a step or two after it before giving up. Then I put the charm bracelet in my pocket and hurried to school.

The foul I mentioned before happened after school on the basketball court, and real fast. Real fast was how things always happened on the basketball court, the mental part, too. Final seconds ticking down, Welland 18, Thatcher (that was us) 16, a typical score in the Independent School League, Seventh and Eighth Grade Girls Division, “independent” being a nicer way of

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saying “private.” The games went by in blurs, partly because of the speed and partly because Dr. Singh, my ophthalmologist, didn’t believe in fitting kids for contact lenses before they turned thirteen and I wasn’t about to wear my stupid glasses on the court, since that meant wearing those even more stupid safety goggles over them. Did that mean I’d rather let my team down than look like a bug? If so, I’d have to live with it.

Back to the foul. In this particular blur, a component blur within the blur of the whole game, Ashanti, our tallest and best player, had intercepted a pass and cut across the key, a step ahead of number ten for Welland, who was even taller. But as Ashanti rose for the shot, number ten leaped, too, twisting in the air, elbow up, and that elbow caught Ashanti smack on the forehead. And right in front of the ref, a chinless guy with sharp, darting eyes whom I’d seen around the neighborhood but couldn’t place at that moment. Right in front of his sharp, darting eyes: impossible to miss, but no whistle, no call. What was up with that?

“Hey!” I yelled.

Oops. Yelling at the ref was a complete no-no, also a technical, and in all the years I’d been playing basketball, now almost three, I’d never heard a player do it. But it was so obvious! And wrong! The ref didn’t seem to have heard my yell—he was missing everything, an equal-

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opportunity goof-up—and meanwhile things were happening, such as Ashanti starting to fall, the ball coming loose, and big number ten turning to chase after it. Somehow the ball came bouncing right into my hands, out in three-point land.

“Shoot, Robbie, shoot!” That was the coach, Ms. Kleinberg, shouting at me from the bench. She’d played for Dartmouth and even tried out for the Olympic team, getting cut in training camp. Ms. Kleinberg had a fantastic shot; I’d seen her hit forty-seven in a row from the free-throw line. But shooting wasn’t my thing. Passing was my thing. I always looked to pass the moment I got the ball.

But no one was open, at least no one in my field of vision—not a very clear field, on account of my unaided eyesight, minus three in the right, minus two-point-five in the left.

“Shoot!”

I just stood there, felt a sweat smear on the ball, not mine, since I hadn’t yet worked up a sweat. This was actually the first time I’d touched the ball in the second half. I was a seventh-grader and new to Thatcher and not a starter, and also didn’t deserve to start—don’t get me wrong about that. In the first half, I’d come in with about five minutes left, made two successful passes, and been called once for traveling, probably adding up to my

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best performance of the season, so far. For some reason, Ms. Kleinberg had decided to push her luck and send me back in at the end of the game, crunch time. Since then, I’d mostly been running up and down the floor, never too far from the ball but also never a factor. I was fine with that; I liked running.

Number ten closed in.

“Two seconds! Robbie! Shoot!”

Two seconds? Not a good moment for weird distractions to be happening, but a weird distraction was happening: suddenly my head hurt, my forehead, in the exact same spot where number ten had elbowed Ashanti.

Was pain even the right word? This . . . feeling, maybe a better name, was like a tiny low-powered electric ball. It seemed to be pressing just behind my forehead, pressing, pressing, and then with no warning, two tiny electric currents seemed to emerge, one hooking up to each eye, and the pain, or feeling, vanished immediately. And all at once, my vision cleared, and I could see perfectly, more clearly than at any time in my life, every detail sharp and focused! And not only that— Number ten was almost on me, her long arms up, hands high.

“Shoot!”

And not only that, but I saw—or thought I saw, since it was so impossible—the strangest thing: a narrow beam of light, reddish light, very faint, with golden highlights, 6

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that seemed to glow right out of my eyes. It shaped a long, rising arc, then sloped down into the basket, dead center. Somehow I knew it was no longer a matter of shooting the ball—normally so big and unmanageable— but simply lofting it up onto that red-gold glowing beam. So I did, just lofted the ball onto the beam. The beam vanished at once, and then there was only the ball, soaring over number ten’s outstretched hands, curving through the air with lots of backspin, just like a shot launched by someone who knew what she was doing, and then—swish. Nothing but net, from three-point land.

Bbbbzzzz. The buzzer buzzed. Game over. Thatcher 19, Welland 18. A buzzer beater? I’d just won the game with a buzzer beater, like in the kind of daydream fantasy I didn’t even have anymore, at least when it came to sports. The kids were around me now, pretty pumped, although not too pumped, which seemed to be the Thatcher way.

We went into the locker room. In my old school, PS 501, the Joe Louis School, there hadn’t been a locker room—the kids made do with the bathroom near the gym—but the Thatcher girls’ locker room was nice, with a steam bath, individual shower stalls, fluffy white towels.

Ms. Kleinberg patted me on the back. “Nice job,” she said. “More, more, more.”

“Um,” I said, giving Ms. Kleinberg a careful look.

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Now that the excitement, what there’d been of it, had died down, I had a chance to think, Hello? That beam, red and gold? Anybody? But nobody said a word about it.

Meaning no one else saw it except me? Whoa.

“No foul?” said Ashanti, kicking off her shoes. “Is he blind or something?”

“That’s life,” said Ms. Kleinberg, handing her an ice pack. “Have a good weekend, everybody. Practice Monday.” She went into her office.

Ashanti sat in front of her locker, dropped the ice pack on the floor, gave me what seemed like an angry look. “An elbow in the head is life?”

“Does it hurt?” I said.

“What do you think?” said Ashanti.

Ashanti was intimidating, but a question I thought was important had occurred to me, so I pressed on. “Does it feel kind of like a tiny electric ball?”

Ashanti squinted at me in a scary way. “Huh? Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No,” I said. “No, no.” I moved to my own locker, which looked out of focus, meaning my vision was back to normal. I took out my glasses and put them on. Very cool glasses from the Smith Street Eyeware Boutique, one of the coolest opticians in Brooklyn, which probably meant in the whole world, but I hated them. Other ophthalmologists handed out contacts left and right. How

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come I got stuck with Dr. Singh? And as for the red-gold beam, either some new eye screwup was in the mix, or I’d imagined it. What other explanation was there? No one had seen it: therefore, not real. The imagination played tricks on you. That was one of my dad’s big beliefs. He was writing a novella about it, or possibly a memoir.

I closed my locker, glimpsing my face in the mirror that hung on the inside of the door. Nonna—the name for Grandma that my grandmother on my mother’s side had finally chosen for herself, after tryouts for Mummymum, Nana, and Gretchen (her given name)—had gazed at me on her last visit (she lived in Arizona and didn’t visit often) and said, “She’ll be a beautiful woman, one day.” Kind of a mystery who Nonna had been addressing, since there’d been just the two us in the room, but that wasn’t the point. The point: was this supposed day coming anytime soon, the day of my beauty revealed for all to see? No sign of it yet. I clicked the combination into the locked position and was turning to leave when I felt a strange warmth in my pocket. I reached in and took out the braided bracelet. The tiny silver heart was more than warm—in fact, almost too hot to touch. My locker was near the heating vent: maybe that was the explanation. But that silver heart was kind of pretty. I slipped the bracelet on my wrist.

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• • • Home was two subway stops away, but it was a nice day—nice for winter, meaning sunny, not too cold, and none of that wind funneling through the gaps between buildings and down the streets, like icy invisible streams— so I started walking. Twenty-two blocks—twenty-five if I took a detour past Joe Louis—from the edge of one cool neighborhood, where the adults looked a lot like my parents, through the main portion of the walk where they did not, and finally to the edge of another cool neighborhood, mine, where they did again. The difference wasn’t skin color—Ashanti, for example, lived practically across the street from me—or the manner of dress, although that was part of it; it was more something else, some attitude thing, much harder to define.

I passed some nice brownstones, the fi xed-up kind with freshly painted trim, nothing crumbling, plants in the windows. Two nannies stood in front of one of them, each push-pulling on a stroller, back and forth, back and forth, in a machinelike way. The babies slept, one drooling, one not. Then came a grocery store with brightly colored fruit in the window, all arranged in neat rows. I crossed the street to the first block where walking at night wasn’t a good idea, passing a boarded-up building, a warehouse, an old greasy sofa in the gutter. A veiled woman with just a little slit to see through went past, her

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dark eyes lighting on me for a moment. Rowdy boys on bikes blew by, fluttering the veiled woman’s robe. My backpack got heavier—there was homework at Thatcher, lots—but I turned left at the next corner and took the detour anyway. Not that I liked going by Joe Louis, exactly; it was more a matter of just being drawn to it.

It was past dismissal by the time I reached my old school, a brick and glass building of no distinction, very different from Thatcher, which was a grand nineteenthcentury affair on the outside, bright and modern on the inside, thanks to the work of a famous architect who was also an alum; there were lots of famous alums from Thatcher.

Some of the kids from my neighborhood got sent to private school right from kindergarten; others made the switch later—third grade, maybe, or fifth. But the plan had always been for me to be a public school kid from start to finish; my parents believed in public schools.

“Just wait,” some of their friends had said. I’d heard that plenty of times. My parents had waited and waited and then been in the very last group to cave. Nothing I said or did had budged them, and I’d thrown everything I’d had at them, emptied out the cupboard of bad behavior. “Your friends from Joe Louis will still be your friends,” they’d told me. Which had already turned out to be false. And “Don’t worry—you’ll make new friends

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at Thatcher.” Which hadn’t happened yet, most of the Thatcher kids having been there together for years. Didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, I told myself, stopping by the chain-link fence and gazing through at the small, paved school yard with its single backboard, no net on the basket, windblown trash and broken glass heaped in the corners.

No one was shooting hoops. There was only one person around, a kid I’d seen in the halls. What did they call him? Tut-Tut? Yes, that was it, on account of his stutter.

He’d arrived from—Where was it? Haiti?—two or three years before, a scrawny kid with modified dreads and a sweet face. Right now he was squatting down on the pavement just a few feet from the fence, drawing with chalk. Tut-Tut didn’t seem to notice me at all; I could feel his concentration. He shifted around a little, and I saw what he was drawing.

Hey! It was beautiful: a red bird, maybe a parrot, with a green head and yellow eyes, so lifelike that it looked as though it could actually fly off the pavement at any moment.

“It’s great,” I said.

Tut-Tut glanced up, startled. He almost tipped over backward.

“Is it based on a real bird?” I said.

Tut-Tut’s mouth opened, and his lips moved a bit, like he was forming a word, but no sound came out.

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“Or did you just make it up?” I said.

“N-n-n-n-,” said Tut-Tut. “T-t-t-th-th-th-th . . .”

He went silent.

“It’s real?” I said.

“T-t-t-t-th-th-th-th-the b-b-b-bb-bb-bbb-bbbbbbbbb-bbbbbb . . .” He went silent again, took a deep breath, and nodded yes.

A real parrot, meaning it had a name, maybe a parrot he’d seen in Haiti, or even kept in a cage. I had lots of follow-up questions, but I didn’t have the heart to watch Tut-Tut trying to answer them. Plus, that strange pressure ball thing in my head was back, not electrical and powerful like on the basketball court, more just letting me know it was there.

Tut-Tut licked his lips. “W-,” he began. “W-w-w-w-ww-w-wh-wh-wh—” The pressure thing grew. And the more Tut-Tut tried to say whatever it was he wanted to say, the stronger it got. “W-wh-wh-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha—” Now I felt the electrical component, and my vision started going funny. My imagination playing tricks? I took off my glasses, watched the world grow clearer.

“Wh-wha-wha-wh-wh-wh-w-w-w-w . . .” Tut-Tut gave up.

And the moment he gave up, my vision began deteriorating back to normal. The pressure in my head vanished. I put on my glasses. If this was my imagination, 13

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it was suddenly getting good at tricks. The streetlights went on.

“I better get going,” I said.

Was I coming down with something? I took off my glove and touched my forehead; it felt cool. And in fact I felt fine all over, head to toe, the way you do after running around for a while. There were also growing pains to factor in: lots of possible explanations for something that would probably never happen again. “Anyway, cool bird,” I said.

Tut-Tut grunted.

I walked off. A block away, waiting for the light to change, I felt the silver heart. It had heated up again, but now cooled quickly under my touch. The light changed.

I glanced back. The school yard was empty.

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JOHN GRISHAM

the accused

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PUFFIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2012 Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2013 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © Boone & Boone LLC, 2012 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

Puffin Books ISBN 978-0-14-242613-5

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Comp: Plea to the text m than the text a narrower m narrower tha

Designed by Irene Vandervoort Printed in the United States of America

19p

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of 20p copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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Chapter 1

T

he accused was a wealthy man by the name of Pete Duffy, and his alleged crime was murder. According to the police and the prosecutors, Mr. Duffy strangled

his lovely wife in their attractive home on the sixth fairway of a golf course where he, the accused, was playing golf that day, alone. If convicted, he would spend the rest of his life in prison. If acquitted, he would walk out of the courtroom a free man. As things turned out, the jury did not find him guilty, or not guilty.

This was his second trial. Four months earlier, the first trial had ended suddenly when Judge Henry Gantry decided it would be unfair to continue. He declared a mistrial and sent everyone home, including Pete Duffy, who remained free on bond. In most murder cases, the accused

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4

JOHN GRISHAM

cannot afford to post a bond and stay out of jail while waiting on a trial. But because Mr. Duffy had money and good lawyers, he had been free as a bird since the police found his wife’s body and the State accused him of killing her. He had been seen around town—dining in his favorite restaurants, watching basketball games at Stratten College, attending church (with greater frequency), and, of course, playing lots of golf. As he waited on his first trial, he seemed unconcerned with the prospect of a trial and the possibility of prison. Now, though, facing his second trial, and with a new eyewitness ready to be used by the prosecution, Pete Duffy was rumored to be very worried.

The new eyewitness was Bobby Escobar, a nineteenyear-old illegal immigrant who was working at the golf course on the day Mrs. Duffy was murdered. He saw Mr. Duffy enter his home at about the same time she died, then hurry away and resume his golf game. For a lot of reasons, Bobby did not come forward until the first trial was underway. Once Judge Gantry heard Bobby’s story, he declared a mistrial. Now, with Bobby ready to testify, most of the folks in Strattenburg, who had been closely watching the Duffy case, were expecting a guilty verdict. It was almost impossible to find someone who believed Pete Duffy did not kill his wife.

And it was also difficult to find a person who did not

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TH EOD ORE B OON E • the accused

5

want to watch the trial. A murder trial in the Strattenburg Courthouse was a rare event—indeed, murder was rare in Stratten County—and a large crowd began gathering at 8:00 a.m., just after the front doors of the courthouse opened.

The jury had been selected three days earlier. It was time for the courtroom drama to begin.

At 8:40, Mr. Mount got his eighth-grade class quiet and called the roll. All sixteen boys were present. Homeroom lasted for only ten minutes before the boys went off to first period Spanish with Madame Monique.

Mr. Mount was in a hurry. He said, “Okay, men, you know that today is the first day of the Pete Duffy trial, round two. We were allowed to watch the first day of the first trial, but, as you know, my request to watch the second trial was denied.”

Several of the boys hissed and booed.

Mr. Mount raised his hands. “Enough. However, our esteemed principal, Mrs. Gladwell, has agreed to allow Theo to watch the opening of the trial and report back to us. Theo.”

Theodore Boone jumped to his feet, and, like the lawyers he watched and admired, walked purposefully to the front of the room. He carried a yellow legal pad, just like a real lawyer. He stood by Mr. Mount’s desk, paused for

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6

JOHN GRISHAM

a second, and looked at the class as if he were indeed a trial lawyer preparing to address the jury.

Since both of his parents were lawyers, and he had practically been raised in their law offices, and he hung out in courtrooms while the other eighth graders at Strattenburg Middle School were playing sports and taking guitar lessons and doing all the things that normal thirteen-year-olds tend to do, and since he loved the law and studied it and watched it and talked about little else, the rest of his class was quick to yield to Theo when discussing legal matters. When it came to the law, Theo had no competition, at least not in Mr. Mount’s eighth-grade homeroom.

Theo began, “Well, we saw the first day of the first trial four months ago, so you know the lineups and the players.

The lawyers are the same. The charges are the same. Mr. Duffy is still Mr. Duffy. There is a different jury this time around, and, of course, there is the issue of a new eyewitness who did not testify during the first trial.”

“Guilty!” yelled Woody from the back of the room.

Several others chimed in and added their agreement.

“All right,” Theo said. “Show of hands. Who thinks Pete Duffy is guilty?”

Fourteen of sixteen hands shot upward with no hesitation whatsoever. Chase Whipple, a mad scientist who

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TH EOD ORE B OON E • the accused

7

took pride in never agreeing with the majority, sat with his arms folded across his chest.

Theo did not vote, but instead became irritated. “This is ridiculous! How can you vote guilty before the trial has started, before we know what the witnesses will say, before anything happens? We’ve talked about the presumption of innocence. In our system, a person charged with a crime is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty. Pete Duffy will walk into the courtroom this morning completely innocent, and will remain innocent until all the witnesses have testified and all the proof is before the jury. The presumption of innocence, remember?”

Mr. Mount stood in a corner and watched Theo at his best. He had seen this before, many times. The kid was a natural on his feet, the star of the Eighth-Grade Debate Team, of which Mr. Mount was the faculty adviser.

Theo pressed on, still pretending to be indignant at his classmates’ rush to judgment. “And proof beyond a reasonable doubt, remember? What’s the matter with you guys?”

“Guilty!” Woody yelled again, and got some laughs.

Theo knew it was a lost cause. He said, “Okay, okay, can I go now?”

“Sure,” Mr. Mount replied. The bell rang loudly and

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JOHN GRISHAM

all sixteen boys headed for the door. Theo darted into the hallway and raced to the front office where Miss Gloria, the school’s secretary, was on the phone. She liked Theo because his mother had handled her first divorce, and because Theo had once given her some unofficial advice when her brother was caught driving drunk. She handed Theo a yellow release form, signed by Mrs. Gladwell, and he was off. The clock above her desk gave the time as exactly 8:47.

Outside, at the bike rack by the flagpole, Theo unlocked his chain, wrapped it around the handlebars, and sped away. If he obeyed the rules of the road and stayed on the streets, he would arrive in front of the courthouse in fifteen minutes. But, if he took the usual shortcuts, and raced through an alley or two, and cut across a backyard here and another one there, and ran at least two stop signs, Theo could make it in about ten minutes. On this day, he did not have time to spare. He knew the courtroom was already packed. He would be lucky to get a seat.

He flew through an alley, got airborne twice, then darted through the backyard of a man he knew, an unpleasant man, a man who wore a uniform and tried to act as though he were a real officer of the law when in fact he was little more than a part-time security guard. His name was Buck Boland, (or Buck Baloney, as some people whispered behind his back), and Theo saw him occasionally hanging around

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TH EOD ORE B OON E • the accused

9

the courthouse. As Theo flew across Mr. Boland’s backyard, he heard a loud, angry voice. “Get outta here, kid!” Theo turned to his left just in time to see Mr. Boland throw a rock in his direction. The rock landed very close by, and Theo pedaled even harder.

That was close, he thought. Perhaps he should find another route.

Nine minutes after leaving the school, Theo wheeled to a stop in front of the Stratten County Courthouse, quickly chained his bike to the rack, and sprinted inside, up the grand staircase and to the massive front doors of Judge Gantry’s courtroom. There was a crowd at the door—spectators in a line trying to get in, and TV cameras with their bright lights, and several grim-faced deputies trying to keep order.

Theo’s least favorite deputy in all of Strattenburg was an old grouchy man named Gossett, and, as luck would have it, Gossett saw Theo trying to ease his way through the crowd.

“Where do you think you’re going, Theo?” Gossett growled.

It should be obvious where I’m going, Theo thought quickly to himself. Where else would I be going at this moment, at the beginning of the biggest murder trial in the history of our county? But being a wise guy would not help matters.

Theo whipped out his release from school and said,

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JOHN GRISHAM

sweetly, “I have permission from my principal to watch the trial, sir.” Gossett snatched the release and glared at it as if he might have to shoot Theo if his paperwork didn’t measure up. Theo thought about saying, “If you need some help, I’ll read it for you,” but, again, bit his tongue.

Gossett said, “This is from school. This is not a pass to get inside. Do you have permission from Judge Gantry?”

“Yes, sir,” Theo said.

“Let me see it.”

“It’s not in writing. Judge Gantry gave me verbal permission to watch the trial.”

Gossett frowned even harder, shook his head with great authority, and said, “Sorry, Theo. The courtroom is packed.

There are no more seats. We’re turning people away.”

Theo took his release and tried to appear as if he might burst into tears. He backtracked, turned around, and headed down the long hallway. When Gossett could no longer see him, he ducked through a narrow door and bounced down a utility staircase, one used only by the janitors and service technicians. On the first floor, he eased along a dark, cramped corridor that ran under the main courtroom above, then stepped nonchalantly into a break room where the courthouse employees gathered for coffee, doughnuts, and gossip.

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TH EOD ORE B OON E • the accused

11

“Well, hello, Theo,” said lovely Jenny, by far Theo’s favorite clerk in the entire courthouse.

“Hello, Jenny,” he said with a smile as he kept walking across the small room. He disappeared into a utility closet, came out the other side onto a landing which led to another hidden staircase. In decades past, this had been used to haul convicts from the jail to the main courtroom to face the wrath of the judges, but now it was seldom used. The old courthouse was a maze of cramped passageways and narrow staircases, and Theo knew every one of them.

He entered the courtroom from a side door next to the jury box. The place was buzzing with the nervous chatter of spectators about to see something dramatic. Uniformed guards milled about, chatting with one another and looking important. There was a crowd at the main door as people were still trying to get in. On the left side of the courtroom, in the third row behind the defense table, Theo saw a familiar face.

It was his uncle, Ike, and he was saving a seat for his favorite (and only) nephew. Theo wiggled and darted down the row and wedged himself into a tight spot next to Ike.

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With art by j o n n y d u d d l e

ph i lom el book s a n i m p r i n t of p e ngu i n g rou p (usa) i nc .

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ph i lom el books A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd).

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India.

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Text copyright © 2011 by C. Alexander London. Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Jonny Duddle.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

Edited by Jill Santopolo. Design by Semadar Megged. Text set in 11-point Trump Mediaeval.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data London, C. Alexander.

We are not eaten by yaks / C. Alexander London.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The calamitous adventures club ; bk. 1) Summary: As the children of two world-famous explorers, eleven-year-old twins Celia and Oliver prefer television-watching to adventure-seeking until their father takes them to Tibet to help search for their long-lost mother.

[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Explorers—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4.

Twins—Fiction. 5. Parents—Fiction. 6. Television—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L8419We 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010006020 ISBN 978-0-399-25487-1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

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To Getting Lost

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“I am averse to writing about adventures, for I dislike them.”

—Roy C . A n dr e ws , Arctic explorer and president of the Explorers Club from 1931 to 1934

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Contents

1.

we meet the reluctant residents ................................. 1

................................... 8 3 . we get no love and no bears . .................................... 19 4 . we Debate Death and Cable ....................................... 26 5 . We DeclarE a Discovery . ......................................... 39 6 . We Witness a Wager ............................................... 52 7 . We Hear from a Yak ................................................. 71 8 . We Feel the Gravity of the Situation ............................. 81 9 . WE See a Shushing .................................................. 88 1 0 . We Aren’t Even at the Worst Part . ............................. 96 1 1 . We Discuss the Local News ...................................... 105 1 2 . We Learn about Lamas and Leopards and Life Itself .......... 120 1 3 . We Blast Some Blessings Through the Air . ................... 129 1 4 . We Have a TV Dinner ............................................... 141 1 5 . We Wonder Why the Lama Speaks Frankly ..................... 149 1 6 . We See a Brand-New Rerun ...................................... 154 1 7 . We Dare a Deal .................................................... 160 1 8 . We Notice What the Note’s Not . ................................ 168 1 9 . We Descend Indecently ............................................ 179 2 0 . We Don’t Question the Wisdom of Rainbows ................... 190 2 1 . We Know He’s No Lama . .......................................... 196 2 2 . We’re Shown Some Shamans . ................................... 208 2 3 . We Are Trapped ................................................... 219 24 . We’re Being Watched ............................................. 226 2 5 . We’ve Got a Universal Remote and We Know How to Use It ..... 232 2 6 . We’ve Had Quite Enough of Tunnels and Bad Guys ............ 243 2 . we have an unbearable banquet

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..................................... 250 2 8 . We Share a Disappointing Dinner ............................... 257 2 9 . We Wonder What Celia’s Up To .................................. 266 3 0 . We Didn’t Plan for the Plane . ................................. 270 31 . We Wish This Was a Better Story .............................. 274 3 2 . We Are Family ..................................................... 283 33 . We Visit an Old Friend ........................................... 290 34 . We Visit a New Friend ........................................... 300 3 5 . We Can’t Cook Either ........................................... 309 3 6 . We Don’t Do “Derring-Do” ...................................... 318 37 . We’re at Our Last Ceremony .................................... 329 3 8 . We Are Not the Key .............................................. 342 A note from the author ................................................ 353 about the author ........................................................ 355 27 . We’ve Got to Trust the Yak

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1

We Meet the Reluctant Residents

If you did not know what business took place inside Number Seven East Seventy-fourth Street, you might look up from the sidewalk toward the light flickering in an upper window.

You might see two eleven-year-olds pass by that window, their faces pale and thin, with dark circles around their eyes, and you might imagine that they are the lonely and neglected children of wealthy socialites, forever trying to escape from their dull and pointless days.

But you’d be wrong.

Number Seven East Seventy-fourth Street is home to the old and exclusive Explorers Club, which is the most important society of adventurers, explorers, daredevils and globe-trekkers in 1

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the world. The two children who sometimes pass by the windows are reluctant residents of the 4½th floor of this club, and it is their story which concerns us here.

Now, most children would love to live on the 4½th floor of the Explorers Club. Most children would thrill to learn the mysteries and secrets shared among the explorers, and most children would love spending every evening hearing tales of danger and distant lands from the adventurers, explorers, daredevils and globe-trekkers who passed through those grand halls.

At least, that’s what the adventurers, explorers, daredevils and globe-trekkers kept telling the Navel Twins.

Celia and Oliver Navel, it must be said, are not most children. They did not like mysteries or secrets, tales of danger and distant lands, nor did they like adventures or exploring, and certainly they hated trekking the globe. While other boys might have turned green with envy because Oliver Navel had celebrated his ninth birthday in a cursed graveyard on the edge of the Sahara Desert, Oliver turned green with a stomachache because of the sweet-and-sour caterpillar cake he 2

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was served, which tastes even grosser than it sounds.

And while most girls might have screamed with jealousy that Celia had been given a Mongolian pony for her sixth birthday, Celia could not stand the smell of horses. In fairness, I believe that the horse could not stand the smell of her either. Whatever the case, the horse had to be returned to Mongolia with a formal apology from the Explorers Club, and Celia Navel was banned from ever entering the country, which suited her just fine. She did not like wild animals or exotic places. Nor did her brother.

The Navel Twins liked television.

They liked television more than anything else in the world. They would watch for hours and hours without a break, and it didn’t even matter what they were watching as long as the comforting glow of the TV flickered across their eyeballs.

That little box contained worlds! Nature shows gave them nature. Dramas gave them drama. And cartoons about talking llamas gave them talking llamas, which one could hardly find in the “real” world anyway. They never wanted to miss a show

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for anything as boring as school, or dinner parties or going outside to play, and definitely not for trips to places like Mongolia.

Unfortunately for them, Oliver and Celia lived at the Explorers Club with their parents, Dr. and Dr. Navel. Well, they actually only lived with their father, Dr. Navel, as their mother, Dr. Navel, had gone off to find the Lost Library of Alexandria, which she believed had never been lost, and had, herself, unfortunately been lost in the process.

Though a search party searched for her, no trace had yet been found. Two of the explorers sent to find her even disappeared themselves.

Sometimes, when there was nothing to do during commercial breaks for one of their shows, the twins would talk about their mother.

“You ever miss her?” Oliver would ask his sister, popping cheese puffs into his mouth like it was no big deal, but really holding his breath for his sister’s answer. Looking at Celia was almost like looking at a picture of his mother. Celia had the same little nose and giant eyes. She had the same pale skin and dark hair. Oliver had a face more like his father’s, but his hair and eyes were the exact same as his sister’s. Both of them had 4

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dark circles under their eyes from staring at the screen all the time.

“It’s her own fault,” said Celia. “If she’d just stayed home with us, she’d never have gotten lost.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think—” “Shhh,” Celia cut him off, “Ten Ton Taco Challenge is back on.”

Oliver didn’t say anything after that, because he loved Ten Ton Taco Challenge and because he could tell his sister didn’t like talking about their mother. Oliver secretly missed his mother a lot. Celia’s secret was that she hated Ten Ton Taco Challenge. She was only watching it now because the sound of frying tortillas kept her from thinking about the Saturday morning their mother left.

“Good-bye, Oliver,” she had said. “Good-bye, Celia.” She kissed them each on the forehead.

“Uhuh,” both kids grunted because cartoons were on and they did not appreciate interruptions. It was hours before they even noticed their mother had gone and taken her big backpack with her. She was always going off somewhere. That was the thing with having explorers for parents.

W E MEET T H E RE L UCTANT RESI D ENTS

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They were always coming and going, looking for the Ancient City of This or the Lost Library of That. Oliver and Celia could not have known that that kiss on the forehead was the last time they would see her.

Some kids might have taken a lesson from that, and stopped watching so much television, but not Oliver and Celia. After their mother left, they watched even more. A television could do a lot of what a mom did, anyway, like telling stories and keeping them company when they were lonely.

And even better, if they got tired of it, they could just turn it off, which you couldn’t do with a mom at all. Of course, they never did get tired of TV. It drove their father crazy.

“Too much television rots your brain!” he complained. He was standing in his usual spot behind the couch with his arms crossed in their usual upset way.

“No,” Celia answered without looking away from the screen. “Mongolian Horse Fever rots your brain.”

Dr. Navel sighed. Celia was right of course.

She’d caught Mongolian Horse Fever from that

6

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horse he gave her for her sixth birthday. They’d barely gotten her to the hospital in time.

“Well,” he said, changing the subject. “We have a dinner to go to. It’s in honor of your mother.”

The twins stood slowly. They couldn’t argue with him about their mother. Ten Ton Taco Challenge would have to go on without them.

“Another banquet,” Celia groaned.

“There will be a prince, and a hot-air balloonist, and a deep-sea diver,” Dr. Navel said excitedly.

“Ugh,” Oliver and Celia said together and deflated like two hot-air balloons crashing into the sea.

W E MEET T H E RE L UCTANT RESI D ENTS

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Nancy Paulsen Books

wellsbequest_3p.indd 3

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

2/28/13 3:43 PM

NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd).

Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne,Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India.

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

Penguin Books South Africa, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa.

Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China.

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2013 by Polly Shulman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

Nancy Paulsen Books, Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. 18p Purchase only authorized editions. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

19p

Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

Text set in Bembo.

Comp: Please us to the text meas than the text mea a narrower measu narrower than the

20p Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shulman, Polly.

The Wells Bequest / Polly Shulman. pages cm Summary: Two teenagers use H. G. Wells’s famous time machine to race through time 21p and stop a dangerous enemy. [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S559474We 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012036571 ISBN 978-0-399-25646-2 22p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 23p 23p6 24p wellsbequest_3p.indd 4

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24p6

CONTENTS 1. How a Six-Inch-Tall Me Appeared in My Bedroom

1

2. The New-York Circulating Material Repository

15

3. Jaya Rao

23

4. Five Automatons, One Wink

30

5. The Great Man’s Assistant’s Great-Great-Grandson

43

6. I Build a Very Strange Radio

51

7. A Stiletto, a Niddy Noddy, and a Serpent

63

8. Jaya Hits Me

72

9. The Wells Bequest

83

10. Simon’s Sabotage

95

11. My Brilliant Idea

105

12. Chocolate at the Time Traveller’s House

118

13. Jaya Stops Time

132

14. The Terror 140 15. The Death Ray

150

16. The Shrink Ray

157

17. Time Passes­—Backward

166

18. A Steam Train in Manhattan

174

19. Her Royal Highness, the Rani of Chomalur

183

20. Two Geniuses and One Very Long Lecture

195

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21. A Firefight on South Fifth Avenue

208

22. I Meet Myself Coming and Going

216

23. A World Without Simon

222

24. Jaya’s Brilliant Idea

228

25. I Save the Life of the Most Awesome Girl in the Universe 232 26. The Green Mouse Machine

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239

Note to Readers

251

Librarian’s Note

255

Acknowledgments

259

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CHAPTER ONE

How a Six-Inch-Tall Me Appeared in My Bedroom

T

he Wednesday when the whole time-travel adventure be-

gan, I was fiddling with my game controller, trying to make the shoot button more sensitive.

Wednesdays are my intense days. It was a Wednesday back when I took the test for Cooper Tech, where my big sister, Sofia, goes, and a Wednesday when I found out I didn’t get in. It was a Wednesday when I didn’t get into any of the other schools I was hoping for either and learned I would be going to my current school, the Manhattan Polytechnic Academy. Which means it was also a Wednesday when Sofia stopped calling Poly “Tech for Dummies” and started telling everybody that Poly kids are really very creative.

It’s not just bad things that happen to me on Wednesdays, though. I was born on a Wednesday. My family came to America on a Wednesday. And it was a Wednesday both times Jaya Rao and I first met—the Wednesday when I first met her, and the S

one when she first met me.

R

I had just figured out how to double the input speed on

L 1

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my game controller. I was messing around with the wires with half my attention, while with the other half I tried to think of a good science fair project. Science fair projects are a big deal in my family. Dad is the chief technology officer at a big media software company downtown, Mom is a cognitive neuroscientist, my brother, Dmitri, is a physics major at MIT, and my sister, Sofia, can’t seem to remember she’s not actually an immunooncologist yet, just a high school junior interning in FranklinMorse Hospital’s immuno-oncology lab.

Me? I’m a student at Tech for Dummies, where the kids are really very creative.

I toyed with the idea of doing something really very creative involving rats. I like rats. They’re jumpy and inquisitive, like me. But what, exactly? Something with mazes, or chemicals, or electric shocks? Everything I could think of sounded pretty unpleasant for the rats. Besides, rats have minds of their own. They were sure to make my project skitter off in surprising directions, with unusable results.

That’s what usually happens to my experiments, even without rats. I’m great at coming up with clever fixes and mysterious surprises. Unfortunately, science fair judges aren’t so crazy about mysterious surprises.

I reconnected the game controller to my computer and launched Gravity Force III. A space raider appeared at the upper left of my screen. I whipped the cursor down to the right, ducking my ship behind a dust cloud. My fix worked! The button moved twice as fast as before, and so did the blaster fire.This S R

was great!

I heard a slither behind me, then a crash. I looked up, startled.

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A blast of wind had come from nowhere. It had blown my new manga poster off the wall and knocked over my lamp. And— wait! Was something wrong with my eyes? Slowly, right in front of me, an object was appearing.

No, it wasn’t my eyes. The thing had heft. It was a machine around the size of a football, made of glittering metal. It had gears and rods and knobs and a little saddle, with two tiny dolls sitting on it. They were moving like they were alive.

Not dolls—people.

But that wasn’t even the weirdest part.The weirdest part was that one of the tiny people looked just like me.

“Hi, Leo! Bet you’re surprised to see us,” said the one who didn’t look like me. She was sitting in front of him. The guy who looked like me—exactly like me, with my long face, brown eyes, that stupid curl falling down his forehead—was hugging her tightly around the waist so he wouldn’t fall off the saddle.

I should have been too busy with surprise and confusion for anything else, but I felt a distinct jab of jealousy.

That surprised me even more. I never thought much about girls, but when I did, it was the action-graphic type, the kind of girl who wears skintight bodysuits and high-tech, thigh-high boots so she can kick the blaster out of the bad guy’s hand while doing a backflip.

The tiny girl on the tiny machine looked nothing like that.

She was wearing an old-fashioned dress like something out of an educational video about pioneers. Her knot of black hair had fallen over her left ear, and tufts were sticking out in all directions. Her dress was all muddy. She had soot on her face and a

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funny chin. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

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“What . . . who . . . where did you come from?” I said.Wow, Leo. Real smooth talking.

“Hi, um, me,” said the tiny guy. He was wearing a dorky oldfashioned suit. “It’s me, Leo. I’m you. Wow, you’re big. Listen, this is important. Read H. G. Wells—” “What do you mean you’re me?”

“I’m you, only later.Well, right now we’re the same time, but I was later before. Then I was earlier. But from a linear point of view, I guess I’m always later. But it doesn’t matter—” “What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s not important. The important thing is, read The Time Machine.”

“I don’t understand. How did you get so small?”

“We used a shrink ray,” said the girl impatiently, like it was obvious. “Listen, Leo, this is important. When you meet Simon FitzHenry, make sure you stop him from—” “Jaya! Stop it!” Mini-me put his hand over her mouth.

“You’ll change history! Ow! Don’t bite!”

She pulled his hand away. “I’m trying to change history! Save everybody a whole lot of trouble.”

“Cause everybody a whole lot of trouble, you mean. Wow, you’re impossible.”

“Me? If we just tell him a few things that he’s going to know anyway soon, we can stop Simon before he—” The guy covered her mouth again. “Come on, Jaya.We don’t have time to argue about this right now. Ow!” She spat out his hand again. “Oh, so you’re the impatient one S R

now? What do you mean, we don’t have time? Time is exactly what we have. We have all the time in the world.”

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“No, we don’t! My sister’s coming.”

The girl—Jaya—ignored him. “Listen, Leo,” she said to me.

“You have to tell Simon not to—” Mini-me leaned around her and pressed a lever.They started to fade, getting softer and more transparent. Jaya was still talking, but I couldn’t hear her.The wind sprang up again, knocking my books over. Then they were gone, machine and all.

Not a moment too soon. My door burst open. “Jeez, Leo, what’s all the banging?” It was my sister, Sofia.

“Just knocking things over.” I picked up the lamp and the books and put them back on the desk. I turned my back, hoping she’d go away. I had a lot to think about.

“You know what the trouble with you is?” asked Sofia.

“Yeah. I better by now, because it’s your favorite thing to tell me.”

“The trouble with you,” she said, “is you’re growing so fast you don’t know where your hands and feet are.”

“That’s not what you said yesterday. Yesterday the trouble with me was I didn’t have the simple human decency to put the milk back in the fridge.”

“Maybe the two things are connected,” Sofia said, sitting down on my bed. She looked like she was planning to stay awhile.

I tried to make her leave by saying,“Well, I better get back to my project.” I didn’t think it would work, though.

It didn’t. “What project?” she asked, looking pointedly at my computer screen, where my ship was lying in an ignominious

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heap of fragments. Schist! I’d almost made it to Level VIII before

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the tiny machine distracted me. That crash was going to poison my score.

I had to admit, it was a little crazy to worry about a game score being destroyed by impossible tiny people riding a sciencefiction machine.

“Science fair,” I said.

“What’s the topic?”

I shrugged. “I was thinking about teleportation or maybe time travel. Maybe I could build like an anti-gravity device. Or a shrink ray.”

Sofia waved her hand in the air, the way she does. “There’s no such thing.”

She was wrong. After what I’d just seen, I knew those things existed. That machine with the little people had to involve teleportation or anti-gravity or time travel. Or maybe all three. It definitely involved a shrink ray. I said, “Sure there is!

Physicists can teleport subatomic particles. Just ask Dmitri. Or time travel—you told me yourself you could go back in time if you had a faster-than-light spaceship.”

“So you’re going to build a faster-than-light spaceship for your science fair project?”

“No, but . . .” Why did Sofia always make everything sound so impossible? “I thought I could work on the theoretical underpinnings.You know, like Dmitri did when he won the Randall Prize.”

“Oh, well, listen, Cubby.” That’s her pet name for me—Leo, lion, cub, get it? She uses it when she’s trying to be nice, which S R

means when she’s not saying what she’s really thinking, which in this case was: Dmitri’s a genius, you idiot, and you’re . . . not.

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See, I can read minds! Maybe I should do my project on telepathy.

“Until you get up to the Randall Prize level,” Sofia continued gently, “the judges like to see a nice, clear demonstration of something hands-on. Why don’t you try some genetics experiments breeding Arabidopsis?”

“Grow plants?” I knew how that would end: with thirty-two paper cups full of dead dirt.

“All right, Drosophila.”

“You want me to breed fruit flies in the apartment? Mom’s gonna love that.”

“Fine, then. If you don’t want my help, why’d you ask me?”

I hadn’t, actually, but there was no advantage in pointing that out. “I’m sorry. Maybe Ms. Kang has ideas.” Ms. Kang is my science teacher.

“Good plan, Cubby. Let me know what she says.” Sofia ruffled my hair, just to rub in how much more mature she was than me, and left me alone with my thoughts.

Now that I had some privacy to think, my thoughts were pretty alarming. What had just happened? Either I’d been visited by a pair of kids straight out of a science-fiction story or I was losing my marbles.

Choice A—the science-fiction story—sounded much better than choice B: wacko Leo. But in my experience, unfortunately, sounding better rarely makes a thing true. That’s one reason I never do as well on multiple-choice tests as other people who have the same “natural gifts,” as my parents like to call them. I

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tend to pick the interesting choice.

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I knew which possibility Sofia would pick here.There isn’t a multiple-choice test known to man that Sofia couldn’t ace. She wouldn’t hesitate to go for choice B: Leo is loopy.

The truth is, I do sort of see visions sometimes. Sometimes when I’m thinking very hard about a gadget I’m trying to build or fix, I imagine it so clearly it seems real. I see it in front of me, with all its gears and wires. But it isn’t actually real, and it certainly never talks. This vision was a whole different kind of freaky.

What if Sofia had seen the tiny people herself? Would she conclude she was crazy too?

Definitely, I decided—and she’s so proud of being rational that considering herself crazy would drive her completely out of her mind. It was lucky my visitors had vanished before she came in.

Well, not lucky, exactly. I remembered what the one who told me he was me had said just before they disappeared: “My sister’s coming.”

That meant the little guy must really have been me! And he’d talked about a time machine and the danger of changing history. That’s exactly what I would worry about if I found a time machine: going back to the past and changing something so that my parents never met or messing things up so that World War III started last Wednesday or my family never left Moscow.

The little guy on the machine talked just like me.

Except, if he was me, how could he act that way with that amazing girl, Jaya? Calling her impossible! Sitting there calmly S R

on a time machine with his arms around her waist!

Well, Future Me knew her better than I did. Maybe she was

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impossible. I had no idea what she was really like. I only knew I wanted to find out.

But how could I find her? It’s not like I could put an ad on Craigslist: You: Six inches tall, dark complexion, messy hair, gorgeous.

We met in my bedroom. You knocked over my lamp. You disappeared before I could get your digits.

Where would I even begin to look for her?

Then it hit me. Maybe I didn’t have to! My future self clearly knew her well. Maybe I just had to sit tight and wait until she appeared in my life. It would be pretty soon, too—Future Leo didn’t look any older than I am now.

The idea made my insides do a happy little dance. Soon I would know that amazing girl well enough to tell her she was impossible.

Then a less cheerful thought struck me. Jaya and Future Me had a time machine. They were traveling back in time. What if they changed something in the past—or even in their past, my future? What if they snarled up the universe in a way that made me never meet the girl?

Unthinkable. Somehow—somehow!—I would have to stop that from happening.

I wished I had someone to discuss this with. Not my family, obviously. My best friend, Jake, was cool enough not to freak out, no matter what I told him. But he wouldn’t be any help. He wasn’t interested in thinking too hard about anything.

I would see what my science teacher, Ms. Kang, had to say.

She has lots of interesting thoughts about things like whether

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the universe goes on and on forever or loops back around on

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itself or what cavemen talked about when they were falling asleep. I wouldn’t tell her about the tiny, lamp-knocking-over time travelers, of course, but we could discuss general topics in time travel.

I found her the next day in the little room next to the library, which used to be a coatroom. She was grading tests, bent over in a student desk chair, the kind with a big flat arm for writing on. Ms. Kang gets cold easily, so she’s always tugging the sleeves of her sweaters down over her hands. She has very dark, slightly purplish red hair, which is kind of strange—don’t most Korean people have black hair? Maybe she dyes it. Her lips are the same color as her hair, but I’m pretty sure that’s lipstick.

“Hi, Leo,” she said, pushing aside the tests. “What’s up?”

“Hi, Ms. Kang. I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Okay, shoot.”

I suddenly felt self-conscious, so instead of asking about time travel, I said, “Why do you hang out in this little room instead of the science office?”

“I miss being near the library.” Ms. Kang used to be the school media specialist before she switched to teaching science.

“And nobody knows where to find me here, so I can actually get my work done.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

I started to leave, but she caught my sleeve. “Not you, silly!

Sit down. Is that what you wanted to ask me—why I work here?”

I sat in the other chair. “No, not really. I wanted to ask . . .

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What do you know about time travel?”

“That’s more like it.” She rubbed her hands together. “Well,

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I know that we’re all traveling forward in time together, at a rate of one second per second. But that’s probably not the kind of time travel you mean. Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking about my science project.” That was true, anyway.“Has anyone ever made, you know, a real time machine?

Like you could use to go backward and forward in time?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Ms. Kang. “But some physicists think it might be possible. If you could build a fasterthan-light spaceship, theoretically you might be able to arrive before you left.”

I nodded. “That’s what my sister says.”

“Or you could try to find a wormhole in the space-time continuum.”

“A wormhole! Where would I look?”

“Nobody knows for sure, but I have some books that you could start with. There’s a good one by Stephen Hawking. The thing is, nobody knows for sure whether time travel is possible.

Like Hawking pointed out, if there really are time machines, why haven’t we ever met any time travelers?”

“Yeah, but . . .” Yeah, but I have!! I wanted to say. I met two of them yesterday! And one of them was ME! If I said that, Ms. Kang would think I was crazy. “Maybe this isn’t where they want to come,” I said. “I mean when they want to come. Or maybe there just aren’t that many of them. I’ve never met any travelers from Iceland, but that doesn’t mean the Icelanders don’t have airplanes.”

“True,” said Ms. Kang.

“So do you think I should . . . I don’t know, try and make a

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time machine myself?”

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“You mean for the science fair?”

I nodded.

Ms. Kang tilted her head. “No harm in trying. I wouldn’t count on getting it done for the fair, though. The deadline’s at the end of the semester.”

“If it took longer, I could use the time machine to go back in time and show myself how to finish,” I said. “I could even make an extra time machine and carry it back in time to my present-day self.”

Hey! Was that what I had been doing yesterday?

No, probably not—in fact, I’d seemed to be trying very hard not to tell myself anything about time machines.

Ms. Kang shook her head. “Wouldn’t that be cheating? The other kids only get a few weeks to work on their projects.”

She was right. Plus, that would be changing the past, and the one thing Future Me seemed completely certain about was that I/he shouldn’t change the past.

But wait. If the only reason I wasn’t changing the past was that Future Me was dead set against it, then by influencing me to not change the past, Future Me was doing exactly what he didn’t want to do: changing the past. So in order to save Future Me from changing the past, did I have to change the past myself?

“You okay there, Leo? Your face is all scrunched up.”

“Sorry. I was just trying to think the whole time-travel thing through,” I said. It’s all right, I told myself. I hadn’t needed Future Leo to tell me changing the past was dangerous. I knew that already, all by myself. “So if I can’t build a time machine, got S R

any other suggestions?”

“But Leo, you’re usually so full of ideas! Remember that

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time you used mirrors and fiber-optic cables to project the view from the roof into the auditorium? Or when you and Jake tuned the toilets to play chords when they flushed? Why don’t you do something like that?”

“For my science fair project? But those things weren’t real science! They didn’t discover anything new or test any theories.

They were just . . . fun.” That was one great thing about Poly. It may not be as rigorous as my siblings’ schools, but the administration can be surprisingly tolerant. Any other school would kick you out for messing with the plumbing.

“The science fair is supposed to be fun too,” Ms. Kang pointed out.

I shook my head. “Not if you come from my family. Science fairs are deadly serious. If I do some silly gag project, my brother and sister’ll disown me.”

“Wow, that sounds like a lot of pressure,” said Ms. Kang.

“You’re not your brother and sister, you know. You have your own unique talents and interests.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

“I can’t see it as a problem. But if you really don’t want to build one of your fun inventions, have you considered submitting something in the History of Science category?”

“History of Science? Is that even a category?”

She nodded, tugging down her sleeves. “Sure. It’s not as popular as some of the more hands-on ones, but it’s on the list.

You’d look at how some aspect of science or technology developed over time.”

“Like, write a library research paper instead of doing an ex-

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periment?” I liked that idea. No plants or mice to die on me.

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Ms. Kang nodded again. “It could be book research, or you could do some hands-on history.You could look at how scientific tools changed over time and how that affected the science.

Like telescopes or clocks. Maybe you could build a model.”

“The library has lots of books about science and history. But where would I find a bunch of antique telescopes and clocks?”

I asked.

Ms. Kang said, “Have you ever heard of the New-York Circulating Material Repository?”

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with illustrations by IAN SCHOENHERR G . P. P U T N A M ’ S S O N S An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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G. P. PU TNAM’S SONS An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2013 by Maile Meloy. Illustrations © 2013 by Ian Schoenherr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility 18p for author or third-party websites or their content.

Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

Design by Ryan Thomann. Text set in Adobe Caslon.

The art was done in ink and acrylic paint on Strathmore Aquarius II paper.

19p

Comp: Please us to the text meas than the text mea a narrower meas narrower than the

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meloy, Maile. The apprentices / Maile Meloy ; [illustrated by Ian Schoenherr].

20p pages cm Summary: “Two years after parting, Benjamin and Janie reunite via magical communication to prevent a global catastrophe”ÐP rovided by publisher.

[1. AlchemyÐ Fiction. 2. MagicÐF iction. 3. Adventure and adventurersÐF iction. 4. Voyages and 21p travelsÐ Fiction. 5. Southeast AsiaÐ HistoryÐ 1945Ð Fiction.] I. Schoenherr, Ian, illustrator. II. Title.

PZ7.M516354App 2013 [Fic]Ðdc2 3 2012048715 ISBN 978-0-399-16245-9 22p 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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PART ONE

Separation 1. the action or state of being moved apart 2. the process of sorting and then extracting a specified substance for use or rejection

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CHAPTER 1

Grayson Academy

T

he space between the stone library of Grayson Academy and the red brick science building created a ferocious wind tunnel, in any decent wind. Janie Scott ducked her head and leaned forward into the blast, on her way to dinner with her roommate’s parents in the town of Grayson, across the street from the school. It was November of 1954, and a cold autumn in New Hampshire. Janie wore a warm wool peacoat, but the wind cut through her clothes. It made its way under and over the wraps of her scarf. It found the vulnerable gap between the peacoat’s sleeve and her glove, where her wrist lay bare.

She had found the coat in her closet in London, when she was still at St. Beden’s School, and it had a strange combination of smells: seawater, smoked meat, and something sweet that Janie couldn’t identify. A girl from school named Sarah Pennington had said the coat belonged to her. But then she had taken one sniff, raised her eyebrows, and said that Janie could keep it.

Sarah Pennington also said that Janie and a boy named 1

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Benjamin Burrows had borrowed a necklace from her, with a little gold heart pendant. Sarah said they had melted the necklace down, and were supposed to bring it back whole, as some kind of science experiment. Janie had no memory of borrowing anything from Sarah, but it seemed doubtful that she could bring a melted necklace back. Three weeks of her life had been erased from her mind, and she had lost so many important facts and experiences that she wouldn’t have listed the coat or the necklace among the ones that mattered.

But Benjamin BurrowsÐ that name had nagged at her.

Sarah Pennington said he had sandy-colored hair, and was stubborn and defiant. Janie had concentrated, feeling the memory like something deep underwater, so deep it was lost in darkness. Before she went to sleep each night, she willed the memory to come up to the surface. After months of struggle, she thought she knew the shape of Benjamin and the sound of his voice. She couldn’t remember exact conversations, but she had a sense of him. Fragments started to come back, things he had said. She began to remember a flight over water. A plunge into bitter cold. The fear that Benjamin was dead.

Then a parcel arrived at her parents’ London flat, wrapped in brown paper: a diary in Janie’s own handwriting, with a note from Benjamin saying that he thought it was safe for her to read it now. The diary entries explained what she had lost, and some of her memories came back flooding and whole.

Some came in scraps and wisps that vanished when she tried to focus on them.

2

THE APPRENTICES

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Now she was sixteen, and had recovered most of her memoriesÐo r thought she had. It was hard to know.

She had been on a journey by boat to Nova Zembla, an island off the northwestern coast of Russia, with Benjamin Burrows and his father. Benjamin’s father wasn’t an ordinary apothecary who sold medicine. He was trying to make the world safe from nuclear war. He had a book called the Pharmacopoeia with hundreds of years of secrets in it: alchemical secrets, elixirs made from plants, and ways of altering matter and transforming the human body.

Using the Pharmacopoeia, Janie and Benjamin and their friend Pip had become invisibleÐ actually invisibleÐa s they tried to rescue the apothecary from his enemies. They had become birds: Benjamin a skylark, Pip a swallow, and Janie an American robin. They had found the apothecary’s colleagues: a beautiful Chinese chemist named Jin Lo and an exiled Hungarian count named Vilmos Hadik de Galántha.

Together, they had stopped a Soviet nuclear test that would have killed or sickened the people who lived in Nova Zembla, and the reindeer and fish that kept them alive.

Janie’s trusted Latin teacher, Mr. Danby, had turned out to be a Soviet spy. He had taken Janie prisoner in Nova Zembla, with the help of an East German agent they knew only as the Scar. Benjamin had become a bird again to try to rescue her.

But it was dangerous, too soon for his body to repeat the transformation, and he couldn’t keep his shape. She had watched him plunge sickeningly from the sky into the Barents Sea. A

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man in a kayak rescued them both from the freezing water and took them back to Benjamin’s father.

In the meantime, not surprisingly, Janie had fallen in love with Benjamin.

But then something happened that she couldn’t quite forgive: Benjamin and his father had erased her memory with a glass of drugged champagne. The apothecary said that Janie was only fourteen and had to stay with her parents, in school.

So, fine: Benjamin and his father got to be mysterious, magical peacekeepers, while Janie had to memorize French verbs and eat institutional English food. Was this a fair arrangement?

No, it was not. Not according to Janie. She had received exactly three letters from Benjamin after the diary, all with blurred postmarks from locations that she couldn’t make out.

The letters didn’t say anything about where he was or what he was doing.

In London, Janie’s parents had been working as writers on a television program about Robin Hood. They had moved there from Los Angeles to escape investigation for being Communists, which they weren’tÐ that was another thing that hadn’t been fair. But now they were in Michigan, teaching at the university in Ann Arbor, without fear of U.S. marshals showing up at the door with a subpoena. The tide was turning against Senator McCarthy, who had never produced a single Soviet spy for all his insistence that he had a whole list of spies.

Her parents had been given the drugged champagne, too, and their memories of Janie’s vanishing were gone, which was good. It would have worried them too much. They would 4

THE APPRENTICES

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have made her come to Ann Arbor with them, which she didn’t want to do. Instead, they had settled for letting her board at Grayson Academy.

The original founders of Grayson had been Quakers, and the school prided itself on its progressive attitude toward women. It admitted a few girls every year, at a time when most girls’ boarding schools were training young ladies to become suitable wives. Janie wanted to study chemistry.

She’d become preoccupied with chemistry at St. Beden’s, and had won a school prize there, and had gotten a scholarship to Grayson.

She couldn’t imagine going back to Hollywood High nowÐt he easy, sunshiny school she had once missed so much. Hollywood High was the place to be if you wanted an agent to spot your blond hair and your violet eyes and put you in movies. But Janie knew enough about show business not to want that, and besides, she didn’t have blond hair or violet eyes. She had what Benjamin Burrows had called “American hair,” by which he meant there was a lot of itÐb rownÐa nd it was a little out of control. In the chemistry lab, she tugged it back in a ponytail so it wouldn’t dangle in the hydrochloric acid or sizzle into smelly ash in the Bunsen burner.

Jin Lo, who was Janie’s role model, wore her hair in a long, smooth braid down the back of her neck. Sometimes Janie tried to braid her own hair like that, but wayward wisps escaped around her face by lunchtime, and the braid was never as perfect and smooth as Jin Lo’s.

The peacoat was Janie’s best reminder of everything that GR AySoN ACA dE m y

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had happened. It had been cleaned, sadly, and no longer had its strange smell, but it convinced her that Benjamin and his father and their friends were real, that they had taken that long journey north together and returned, against terrible odds. It made her feel safe.

Her roommate at Grayson was a girl named Opal Magnusson, and on that windy night, Opal’s parents had invited the girls for dinner at Bruno’s, the Italian restaurant across the street from the Grayson campus. Janie leaned into the wind, peacoat clutched tight at the neck, and crossed the street into town. She pulled open the restaurant’s glass door and was enveloped in the cozy smell of tomato and garlic. The sudden warmth made her cheeks tingle, and the soft light from sconces on the walls made her blink.

Bruno, the owner, called out “Buona sera!” and the whitecoated waiters turned and beamed at Janie. She thought they must be tired of serving Grayson students by nowÐs o many of the kids were spoiled and entitledÐb ut the waiters were always kind.

“Janie!” Opal’s father said, standing from his table. Mr.

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Magnusson had thick, wild, white-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a ready grin. He held out his big arms to welcome her.

His wife, Opal’s mother, was tiny and dark-skinned, with wide dark eyes. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a chignon at the nape of her neck. She gave Janie a demure smile and a nod. She had been a Malay princess, as Janie understood it, the youngest daughter of a powerful sultan. Mr. Magnusson had vast holdings in Southeast Asia, and had met the princess there and whisked her away. The war had been inconvenient for him, but after the Japanese were defeated, he had become richer than ever.

Opal gave Janie a wan smile, looking sick of her parents already.

Janie took the empty chair at their table, and a waiter tucked it under her. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, unfolding her napkin. “I was in the chemistry lab.”

“On a Sunday?” Mr. Magnusson asked.

“The teacher gave me a key.”

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“Such devotion to your studies,” Mr. Magnusson said.

“Opal could use some of that.”

Janie cast around for some response. Mr. Magnusson was infuriating because he made his disappointment with Opal the subject of every conversation. “It’s just something I’m playing around with,” she said.

“But it shows you have real purpose and drive,” Mr. Magnusson said. “Unlike some young people I could mention.

Now let’s order some food.” He waved to the waiter.

Janie caught Opal’s eye and mouthed, “Sorry.”

Opal just gave a tiny shake of her head and rolled her bread into round pellets. Opal had long silken brown hair, green eyes, and honey-colored skin. She made Sarah Pennington, who’d been the prettiest girl at St. Beden’s School, look ordinary: just another blonde. Opal was so beautiful it was hard to look at her, and she seemed to know it, so she hid behind heavy, clunky glasses she didn’t need. It was as if she were in disguise, like Clark Kent.

“So,” Mr. Magnusson said, after they had ordered. “The great experiment. Tell me everything.”

“Well,” Janie said, glancing again at Opal, “I’m trying to find an efficient way to desalinate large amounts of seawater. To take the salt out, and make it drinkable, without using a generator. So that the ocean could be a water source more easily.”

Mr. Magnusson’s blue eyes grew wide. “But this is magnificent,” he said. “It could alleviate so much suffering.”

“I hope so,” Janie said, tearing off a piece of warm bread.

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“Wars will be fought over water,” Mr. Magnusson said. “It will be the great commodity. Cheap, large-scale desalination would change everything.”

“I haven’t done it yet,” Janie said.

“But you’re close?”

“I think so.”

“Who gave you the idea?”

Janie nearly choked on her bread. “Sorry?” she asked.

“Well, it’s not an idea that a schoolgirl has on her own.

Am I right?”

Janie felt her cheeks getting hot. Why had she had to brag about the project? She couldn’t say anything about Jin Lo or the Pharmacopoeia. “I justÐfig ured it out by working on it,” she said, which was sort of true. “It’s been a slow process.”

“But how did you become interested in chemistry?”

All Janie could think of was Jin Lo, who was not a normal chemist in the way that the apothecary was not a normal apothecary. “In London,” she said. “I had a good teacher. I won a prize there, and that got me the scholarship here.”

“Remarkable!” Mr. Magnusson said. “I’ll be your first customer! I can use your desalination in the islands. I predict, Janie, that you will do great things.”

Janie smiled, uncomfortable. “And so will Opal.”

Mr. Magnusson waved the idea away. “Oh, Opal will inherit a lot of money,” he said. “She might do good things with it. And she could marry a very rich man, if she stops making herself ugly.”

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“Daddy!” Opal said.

“Seriously, though, Janie,” Mr. Magnusson said, leaning forward. “I would like to buy your experiment.”

“It’s not for sale,” Janie said. “Anyway, it isn’t finished.”

“When it’s finished, then,” he said. “I insist.”

There was a silence. Opal crossed her arms and slumped in her chair, her heavy glasses sliding down her nose. Her mother took up her wineglass and glanced at Janie like a frightened rabbit.

Food arrived, carried by a teenage busboy, and Mr. Magnusson made a big production of making sure there was room for everything on the table. Then he kept up a steady stream of anecdotes, so there was no room for other conversation.

Janie turned her attention to her plate of spaghetti. It was delicious, and she’d been hungrier than she knew. She concentrated on twirling the noodles on her fork and not splashing sauce onto her shirt.

But then her reprieve was over. Mr. Magnusson asked, “How soon do you think you’ll be finished with your experiment?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She meant to stop there, but he looked at her encouragingly, waiting. “It all depends on the recrystallization process,” she said, “and perfecting my seeding method.”

Opal yawned in protest. “This is so boring I’m going to cry!”

“Your capacity to be bored is the stuff of legend,” her father said.

“I’m tired, too, Magnus,” his wife said quietly.

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“Raffaello!” Mr. Magnusson called to the busboy. “May I have the check? I must get these ladies home to bed.”

They were gathered by helpful hands into their coats. Mr. Magnusson held open a vast black fur cloak for his tiny wife, ready to swallow her up. As she backed into the fur, the princess shot Janie the frightened rabbit look again, and this time Janie thought it contained either a plea or a warningÐ or both.

Janie walked back with Opal to their room in Carleton Hall.

The wind had died down and wasn’t so cutting, especially now that Janie had a belly full of food. They were silent for a while, and Janie was trying to think what to say that wouldn’t embarrass them both, but Opal burst out first.

“Why do you try to show me up with Daddy?” she asked.

Janie was startled. “I don’t!”

“He’s my father, you know.”

“Of course he is.”

“He’s not yours.”

“I have my own father.”

“When you act all smart with him, it makes him think I’m stupid.”

“I wasn’t trying to act smart,” Janie said, though she kicked herself for not shutting up. “I just answered his questions.”

“He said that all I can do with my life is marry someone rich!”

He had said that. Janie couldn’t deny it. She thought of her own father, who had always been so supportive and encouragingÐ when he wasn’t teasing her and joking. Her parents had

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talked to her as if she were an adult, and played games with her as an equal, for as long as she could remember. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to have none of that confidence behind you. She said, “I think your dad was just making a joke.”

“No,” Opal said, shaking her head. “He meant it.”

“He said you’d do good things with the money,” Janie said.

“It takes skill to be a good philanthropist.”

“It’s not like being a scientist.”

“So be a scientist, then,” Janie said, losing patience. “Show him he’s wrong.”

“I’m failing math!”

“Then let’s go over some problems. I’ll help you.”

“Don’t you dare patronize me, Janie Scott!” Opal said.

“I wasn’t!”

Opal marched ahead, the heels of her expensive boots striking the pavement, and Janie followed helplessly.

Their room in Carleton Hall was barely big enough for two narrow beds pushed against opposite walls, two desks, two dressers, and a single closet, but still Janie and Opal managed to get ready for bed without speaking. They stepped around each other with cold constraint. Janie wanted to bring up tomorrow’s math test, but she didn’t dare.

In bed, she lay looking at the ceiling, listening to Opal toss back and forth on her pillow, just a few feet away. She tried to think of something to say to apologize, but could only imagine Opal shooting it down. Then Opal’s restless rolling stopped, and her breathing became steady.

If she could sleep, then Janie could, too.

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