Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw. Tony Abbott
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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.
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.”
“He’s with the Order,” Darrell said, raising his eyes to the man.
Becca shivered and twisted away in her seat. “At least he can’t do anything to us out here in the open …”
“I agree with Darrell,” I said. “Everyone’s with the Order—”
A baby laughed suddenly.
“The baby, too?” Lily asked with a smirk.
“Probably in training,” I said.
The baby’s laugh was full-throated, and so was his mother’s. The reason was a middle-aged man, one of the passengers