Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw. Tony Abbott
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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.
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