Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw

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I heard the click of the trigger as the arrow left the bow.

I heard the whoosh in the air …

… and felt the arrow’s razor tip enter my chest …

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“Ahhhh!”

I jumped like a jack-in-the-box. About an inch off my seat. My seat belt was fastened tight and dragged me down hard.

“Ahh … mmmph!”

Darrell had his hand clamped over my mouth. “Dude, really? Screaming in a jet? The pilot’s gonna ask you to step outside.”

I pushed his hand away. I was soaked with sweat, my head was throbbing, my heart was thundering, and everyone was staring. I’d just had … the dream.

“Sorry. Nightmare.” I coughed.

Darrell grunted. “Join the club. Except it’s no dream. We left Guam on Sunday, right? But guess what? It’s Saturday again. We just crossed something called the international date line, which turns today into the day before today. So instead of yesterday, Mom was kidnapped two days ago.”

He slammed his fist on the poor armrest. “Great, huh? We’re going backward.”

“Darrell …” I wanted to tell him that the international date line didn’t actually mean what he said, but what really struck me was that I’d dreamed about a time machine at the exact moment we—sort of—went back in time. Before my dream, it was Sunday. Now it was Saturday. A coincidence?

Except I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.

The plane descended into Honolulu, and it was good to feel the jolt of the wheels touching the ground. Before anyone else could, I grabbed Becca’s bag for her. After Galina had grazed her with the arrow in the cave, we helped Becca in little ways. Her wound was a day old—or two, if you were Darrell—and wasn’t close to healing. I shivered, remembering her lying on the cave floor in my dream. At the very least, Becca needed to see a doctor so we’d know she was really okay.

There was a rush of movement and new air and crammed bodies as we stumbled through the Jetway and entered the terminal, but the moment I set foot in the arrival gate area, I tensed up.

“Do you guys feel that?” I whispered. “Somebody’s eyes are on us.”

Becca glanced around. “I do. I’m pretty sure no one followed us from Guam, but someone’s watching us now.”

“They’re probably hiding inside recycling bins,” Lily muttered. “Or disguised as young moms with strollers. The Order is too smart to be seen, and they have to be, because otherwise everybody would know about them, but no one knows about them except us, of course, which goes without saying, but there you go, I said it anyway.”

That was a perfect Lily kind of sentence. I was getting to like how she got so much in before she ran out of breath and had to stop.

“Kids, look,” Dad said, slowing and facing us. “You’re right to be cautious, but sometimes people are just people, you know? It doesn’t help to see trouble where it isn’t. We have enough to think about without imagining enemies.”

Dad might have been right—he usually is—and by “enough to think about” he probably meant Sara. But ever since we attended Uncle Henry’s funeral in Berlin, we’d been squarely on the Order’s radar. Later, after we’d overheard Galina Krause say, “Bring her to me. Only she can help us now,” we knew that her ugly goons had kidnapped Sara.

What that meant was simple.

Finding the relics and rescuing Sara had become the same quest.

Looking as exhausted as I’ve ever seen him, Dad said, “We have a good bit of time in Honolulu before our flight to San Francisco. I know we’re all hungry, but I want to find a walk-in clinic where someone can take a look at Becca’s arm. Then we’ll get a bite to eat.”

“A clinic would be great,” she said, smiling. “Thanks.”

It was a quick hike past restaurants, souvenir shops, and newsstands to a little clinic, where an intern cleaned and changed Becca’s bandage. After he was done, and Becca gave us the thumbs-up, we headed slowly in the direction of our next departure gate, taking a roundabout route. I mean, we knew the Order would know where we were sooner or later, but we wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them. We started in the opposite direction, doubled back, entered shops and left at different times from different exits. It was probably overkill, but all part of our new way of doing things.

Luckily, there was no rush. Our flight to San Francisco was still several hours away.

I should mention that we’ve learned to travel light. Pretty much all I keep in my backpack are a change of jeans, two shirts, underwear and socks, an extra pair of sneakers, and a baseball cap. In a leather envelope, I carry the celestial map that Uncle Henry gave me on my seventh birthday. It was a major clue in starting us on the search for the relics.

Oh, and I also have two sixteenth-century dueling daggers.

Not your normal luggage, I know. One of the daggers belonged to Copernicus, the other to the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who turned out to be Vela’s first Guardian. I sort of argued with my dad that because he had Vela hidden in his bag, it was smart for someone else to hide the daggers. Besides, the security-evading holster the Guardian Carlo Nuovenuto had given me in Italy was so techie, I’d successfully brought both blades through several security checkpoints. Dad agreed.

Security had become a major priority, for obvious reasons.

Carlo had also given us a new cell phone, but we were pretty sure it had been hacked in Guam, so Dad stopped at a kiosk and bought us three new ones, another part of his plan to throw off the Order. He gave a bottom-of-the-line one to Darrell, kept one for himself, and gave a high-end smartphone to Lily.

“I feel like a spy,” she said, admiring its features. “I guess we make only essential calls and searches?”

“Exactly,” my dad said. “No way are these a gift. We need to take our situation seriously. We’ll keep only each other’s numbers, and every few days, we’ll get new phones. It’ll be expensive, but safer. It’s just one way to stay ahead of the Order.”

Near our gate I saw a place called the Diamond Head Pineapple Snack Hut, and my stomach grumbled. Because of the time difference between Guam and Honolulu, not to mention the date line, it was by now late afternoon local time, but our internal clocks were so messed up that we pretty much ate whatever we wanted whenever we could. Pancakes and pizza, grilled cheese and fried eggs, sodas and hot chocolate.

While Darrell and Dad went to order, the rest of us sank into our chairs and spread our junk on the table. Since I’d been writing down clues and riddles in my dad’s college notebook, it had sort of become mine, and it was becoming as valuable as anything we had.

After I scanned the tables around us—everyone sitting at them seemed like passengers as tired and grumpy as we were—I leafed through my latest notes while Lily searched for an outlet. She is an awesome online searcher, which is why she got the best phone. She can take a blobby mess—sometimes all we can come up with—and create a search term that will—boom—get the exact answer we need.

Looking both ways, Becca dropped her hand into her bag. “Guys,” she whispered like a conspirator, “I want to show you what I found in the diary.”

A ripple of excitement shot through me with the speed of Galina’s arrow. As good as my notebook is, and as awesome a searcher as Lily is, there is nothing like the book Becca slid onto the table and quickly covered with her arm.

The secret diary of Nicolaus Copernicus.

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The Copernicus diary’s actual title is The Day Book of Nicolaus Copernicus: His Secret Voyages in Earth and Heaven.

The old book was started in 1514 by the astronomer’s assistant, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hans Novak. It ended about ten years later, penned by Copernicus himself.

Because Becca is a total language expert, having learned Spanish, Italian, German, and bits and pieces of other languages from her parents and grandparents, she’s been translating the entries into a red Moleskine notebook.

“On our flight here, I found eleven passages at the end of the diary,” she told Lily and me. “All of them are coded. We tracked Vela a different way because it was the first relic, but I think each of these eleven passages might be about one of the other original Guardians and his or her relic, but I need a key to decode them. Actually, I need eleven different keys, because they all seem to be coded differently.”

“Do you think the key words are somewhere in the diary?” I asked.

Becca shook her head. “Not the key words, but there’s this.”

She gently slid her finger down a single page at the end of the diary. Unlike most other pages, its outside edge wasn’t ragged, but straight.

“That looks different,” said Lily. “Was it cut or something to make the edge straight?”

“I thought so, too,” Becca said. “But no.” She ran her finger between that page and the facing page, deep into the gutter of the book. There, with a slender fingernail, she peeled the page back, revealing that the straight edge was in fact a fold. The page’s flap was inscribed with a large square of letters.

“It’s a cipher, but I don’t know how it works yet,” Becca said.

“I’ll tell you!” Lily bounced up, tugged her phone from the charger, and immediately started tapping on its screen.

“How do you even know what to search for?” I asked.

Lily snorted. “Because while your brain is going ‘huh?’ mine is going ‘aha!’”

I glanced over my shoulder. Darrell and Dad were loading up their trays.

“It’s called a tabula recta,” said Lily. “It’s a ‘letter square,’ created by a cryptological guy named Trithemius in the sixteenth century.” She flipped her phone around and widened an image with a swipe of her fingers. It was almost identical to the hand-inked square Becca had found in the diary.

“You did it again, Lily,” I said.

She gave a little bow. “Trithemius’s square includes twenty-four cipher alphabets, so each time you code a letter—say L, for Lily—you give it a different letter. It’s nearly impossible to figure out without the key word. Trithemius was all about improving codes.”

Dad and Darrell wove through the food court with two trays full of food. I trotted over to help and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were red. I knew right away that he and my dad had had a time-out.

“Until we get to New York, we’re not going to make much headway,” Dad was saying.

“I get it,” said Darrell. “I just wish it were all happening faster. I keep thinking of Mom in some dark place with no food—”

“You can’t go there, Darrell,” Dad said. “You’ll only twist yourself up in knots, and we don’t know anything real yet. Look, let’s eat; then we’ll call Terence Ackroyd, all of us. Get the latest. Okay?”

“Good. Yeah. Let’s do that.” Darrell settled his tray in the middle of our table. While he stuffed a pineapple spear into his mouth, Becca showed him and Dad the letter square and one of the passages.

Darrell snorted. “Beefy kahillik buffwuzz ifgabood?”

“I think you added some letters there, but either way, without the key word, it means nothing,” Becca said.

“Unless you’re an ifgabood,” he said.

Aside from the funny nonwords, Darrell wasn’t into it. He calls ciphers “word math,” which is actually a clever way of describing them. Darrell doesn’t plod through stuff. He’s an improviser. Tennis. Guitar solos. He has to jump from one thing to another, one thought to another, one move to another, just to compete. All that moving sometimes makes him hard to follow and jumpy.

Sometimes it makes him plain brilliant.

Dad perused the diary. “Eleven passages. One for each of the other relics …”

“I think so,” Becca said, twisting her lips as she often did when she was deep into translating. “We have to find the key words, but I don’t think they’ll come from the diary. I think they’re out there. In the world. We just have to be smart enough to find them.”

“Good thing we’ve got such a smarty-pants like you in our gang,” said Lily, winking at her.

Becca smiled. “Thanks, but you better save the compliments, at least for now. Breaking the code is going to be super challenging.”

The rest of our brunch-lunch-dinner passed pretty much in silence. I could tell from Darrell’s dark looks that he was going where my dad had told him not to go. Thinking about his mother trapped in a cold dark place with no light, no heat, no food … now I was doing it.

Finally, Dad keyed in Terence Ackroyd’s number, and we all went quiet. He was about to put it on speaker when it apparently went to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message and looked at his watch. “It’s nighttime there. Maybe he’s out. He’ll call back.” He stood abruptly. He scanned the concourse in both directions, looking for what, I wasn’t sure. Teutonic Knights? I glanced around, too. No one seemed overly suspicious. Which, of course, made me more suspicious.

“Okay, team, good lunch,” he said, trying to smile but not quite making it. “We need to keep moving.”

I got what he was doing. Dad had done this my entire life—taking all the danger and scary stuff into himself so that no one else would worry or feel bad or be afraid.

If only it were that easy.

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After we spent almost three more tiring hours zig-zagging among the airport’s hundreds of shops, being tricky but not really seeing anyone we could identify as being from the Order, we headed to the gate to rest and wait. The Honolulu-to–San Francisco flight was still a little over an hour and a half away, but I was surprised to find that the gate had already begun to fill with passengers from Hong Kong, whose earlier flight was joining ours. We found five seats together and settled in, then I went to look out the window.

It was evening now and the sky had darkened enough for the first stars to be visible, even over the brightly lit airstrips.

“Where math and magic join up, right?” whispered Darrell, sidling up to me. “What Uncle Henry said about the sky?”

I turned to him. “You do listen when I tell you stuff.”

“Sure,” he said. “Just not all the time.”

Where mathematics and magic become one was the way Uncle Henry had once described the sky to me. It was a magical place of stars and constellations and planets, always in motion, an area where science and mysticism wove into each other. Except now the sky had become something even more. It had become our way of life.

“You should try to sleep,” I told him as we headed back to the others. “We all should. We have another hour at least before we can even board.”

“I can’t sleep,” Darrell said, slumping into a seat next to Becca, stretching out, then hunching over, ready to bolt up. “Sleep is for other people. I hate waiting here. It’s dead time.”

“Have you tried humming a lullaby inside your head?” Lily asked, probably hoping a joke might distract him from his mother’s disappearance.

He groaned. He wasn’t taking the bait.

Sara is Darrell’s actual mom, so of course he was in worse shape than the rest of us, probably even Dad. Not knowing the fate of someone you love is crushing. I love Sara, too. We all do. But for Darrell it’s definitely the hardest. She’s his mother, the one who fed him and read to him and nagged him and held his hand when he had nightmares. It was kind of amazing he wasn’t even more of a wreck than he was.

“If I fall asleep,” Darrell said, staring at his hands as if wondering what they were for, “will it mean I’m not thinking about Mom?”

“That’s so not possible,” I said, and then added, “but I get it. No one’s going to be right until Sara’s back.”

Becca grabbed my sleeve. “Him. On our left.”

I think I actually shuddered when she said him and was instantly on edge. I turned my head slowly and saw a tall man in a long black leather coat striding into our gate. He carried no luggage, and his hands were driven deep into his coat pockets. He paused, pulled one hand out to glance at his phone, and then pocketed it.

“He’s German,” Lily whispered. “You can tell by his shoes.”

I believed her. Lily knew fashion backward and forward and usually got it right about stuff like that.

The man couldn’t have been more than ten years older than my dad, but his hair was as white as snow and cropped very short. I could see his face was weathered, as if he’d spent a lot of time outside.

“Plus, he’s totally overdressed for Hawaii,” Lily added. “Which makes him too suspicious not to be evil.”

“Lily,” said Dad softly, eyeing the tall man. “Don’t go overboard.”

She frowned. “Okay, but just in case, my code name for him is Leathercoat.”