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The Forbidden City
The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City

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The Forbidden City
John McNally

Get shrunk! Humour and high-stakes combine in the action-packed Infinity Drake series. A BIG adventure with a tiny hero!Infinity Drake – Finn for short – is STILL only 9mm tall. But before his crazy scientist uncle can figure out a way to return him to his normal size, a new threat emerges on the other side of the world.Supreme villain, Kaparis, plans to release an army of self-replicating nano-bots – a hardware virus that will give him total control of global communications.Finn and his gang of bullet-sized heroes find themselves on a deadly mission: to stop the bot infection before it conquers mankind…Nano-bots: prepare to be cut down to size.

Copyright (#u6979ecb6-e348-5f95-9619-23eb60dc6081)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

Copyright © John McNally 2015

Cover illustration © Paul Young

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015

John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007521654

Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780007521647

Version: 2015-05-27

To my mother and father, with love

and thanks for all the books.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.

Exodus 8:16-19

Carbon will take over.

Mildred Dresselhaus

Contents

Cover (#ua2e97ef6-2480-5eb6-8201-454582a10bde)

Title Page (#u21e26d1a-e18a-56e1-9fb4-a9179ea9bea0)

Copyright

Dedication (#u1c5e2c4b-8566-5937-b460-ce9029f56757)

Epigraph (#ud05e61eb-d6d4-5972-ab2e-72500c934ba2)

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Footnotes

Books by John McNally

About the Publisher

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(#u6979ecb6-e348-5f95-9619-23eb60dc6081)

September 28 23:58 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.

Midnight in the heart of England. The witching hour. In the woods an owl screeched, then ripped through a mouse, beak blood-wet in the moonlight.

The great old house of Hook Hall stood empty. It had not been used as a home since the day it had been requisitioned by Her Majesty’s Government to become the top secret headquarters of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee

. It lay now at the heart of a complex of modern laboratories and military installations that spread around it in the darkness like the still, silent courtiers of a grand old lady.

The silence did not last. A low hum penetrated the dark and along the great drive the largest of the buildings began to glow.

Inside the cathedral-like space, the massive Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), power surged and a great stone circle of particle accelerators, each the size of a shipping container, came to life.

“My Henge,” as Dr Al Allenby, the dishevelled genius behind the machine, called it. “Everyone should have a Henge.”

From the windows of a laboratory overlooking the henge a very small boy sent up a mad private prayer.

Finn (full name Infinity Drake) was about to turn thirteen. He had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (like his father’s) and deep blue eyes (like his mother’s). He had been orphaned two years before. He was into gaming, mad science and most lethal pastimes, like any other boy. But unlike any other boy, thanks to getting caught up in Operation Scarlatti

the previous spring, Finn was now only 9. 8mm tall.

With a deafening electrostatic crack and hum, white lightning began to spin like candyfloss around the core, the hoop of accelerators whipping up a cyclone of pure energy. With one last push they would form a perfect subatomic magnetic field.

Perched above the Henge, crammed into his cockpit command pod, Dr Allenby (known to all as Al), recited the snatch of poetry he used to remember the crucial sequencing equations he kept secret from the world –

“But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity …”