PRAISE FOR LOLA BENKO, TREASURE HUNTER
“An accessible, colorful romp that ends with an alluring hint of another treasure hunt to come.”
—Kirkus Reviews
For Emelia Von Ancken—
there are amazing adventures out there waiting for you, and I can’t wait to see what happens.
THREE MONTHS AGO
To: Agents Star and Fish, International Task Force for the Cooperative Protection of Entities with Questionable Provenance, Washington, DC
Subject: Reassignment Notification
We hereby inform you of your reassignment to Siberia. Yes. We know Siberia is very cold this time of year—well, it’s cold ALL year—but this is not to be considered punishment. All Task Force treasure hunters eventually draw a hardship posting. We have just accelerated yours. Siberia happens to be an excellent place to think, and perhaps you might want to reflect on whether you made good choices regarding the Pegasus project. But we repeat, this is not punishment.
And to be honest, we hope you will not embarrass yourselves and beg to stay where you are. It will not work. Remember, begging is beneath the treasure hunters of the International Task Force for the Cooperative Protection of Entities with Questionable Provenance. At the very least, we ask for what we want politely and, let me tell you, that is not going to cut it in this disaster… we mean, situation.
A final bit of advice. Pack warm clothes.
And perhaps extra socks.
Sincerely,
The governing body of the International Task Force for the Cooperative Protection of Entities with Questionable Provenance
CHAPTER 1 BLAME THE FLYING HORSE
IT’S BEEN EXACTLY THREE MONTHS since a mythical flying horse and his stupid bejeweled necklace ruined my life. Yes. You heard that right. Things were going fine. We had saved the famous globe-trotting, treasure-hunting archaeologist Lawrence Benko, who is also my dad. Better yet, I no longer had to live out of a suitcase while I followed him around on his crazy adventures. I had my own room, plastered with cute kitten posters, at Great-Aunt Irma’s place. I went to an okay school (as far as schools go), but, most importantly, I had friends. Real ones! Friends are not easy to make and keep when you’re living out of a suitcase. Like I said, everything was fine. But in zooms the flying horse, who rudely stomps all over my life, reminding me I am nothing special.
For any of this to make sense, let’s backtrack a year to the botched burglary of a valuable statue. I would never have entered the thieving business, except my father was missing. Everyone said he was dead, but knowing that was impossible, I was intent on finding him. However, a search and rescue mission required resources I didn’t have. Enter the ugly statue of spindly ballerinas worth a million bucks, which would have funded my exploits for quite some time… until I broke it with my butt falling out a window.
They could have sent me to the slammer for crimes committed against my fellow citizens and innocent works of art, but instead the judge decided on a different sort of punishment. I was enrolled at Redwood Academy, a fancy private school in the Presidio. It was to be my second chance (or third or fourth or fifth, but who’s counting?) to be a good law-abiding citizen. But Redwood turned out not to be any sort of punishment at all. At Redwood, I met my best friends, Jin and Hannah, and it’s a good thing I did because life got so much more interesting when they showed up.
Together (kind of by accident, if I’m being honest), we discovered that my father had been kidnapped by an insane person who wanted help finding and using the Stone of Istenanya, a magical rock from an old Hungarian folktale, which was not supposed to exist. But the rock turned out to be real. (Believe me, we were surprised too.) And to make matters worse, whoever possessed it had the power of mind control. Not okay, especially when you factor in that insane person I mentioned. We called her “Lipstick,” and she was pretending to be a supernice, generous billionaire tech genius named Benedict Tewksbury (actually, she was a tech genius and a billionaire, but she was not nice). Her goal was to use a chat app she’d invented called EmoJabber, along with the stone, to control the minds of all her chatting minions. Had she succeeded, it would have been a real problem.
But she didn’t! We stopped Lipstick, rescued my dad, and retrieved the stone. Yes, you heard that right. We saved the world. Sometimes when you are a kid, you feel like things are happening to you, without your permission or anyone even asking your opinion. It doesn’t matter if you yell or scream or protest—the adults get the only vote. When we were treasure hunting the stone, however, it was the complete opposite. We were making things happen.
But then I threw the stone into the San Francisco Bay and everyone got really mad at me, especially Lipstick. In my defense, that stone was bad news, and humanity doesn’t always make good choices. All you have to do is look at history to know that.
In the process of saving the world, I discovered a few things. First, I like having friends. It gives me a buzzy feeling inside that is hard to explain. And second, my father works, on occasion, for the International Task Force for the Cooperative Protection of Entities with Questionable Provenance. I know! What a name! Don’t even try to say it when you are sleep-deprived. Your tongue will end up in knots. Called the ITFCPEQP for short (not much of an improvement, if you ask me), the Task Force hunts for artifacts that might possess qualities “uncommon on Earth.” You know, magical stuff that is not supposed to exist, things that us flawed humans can potentially find and use to make a mess of things. Dad says if you give people unexpected otherworldly power, they go berserk. Us humans like to believe the world is a certain way, and if suddenly that’s not true, things get complicated. The Task Force is meant to stop the chaos before it happens.
I’m not inclined to argue with him after seeing what happened when the Stone of Istenanya turned out to be real. But I did argue that he never should have kept his Task Force treasure hunting a secret for, well, let’s see, my entire life. He apologized all over himself, but only later did I realize he never promised he wouldn’t do it again.
Parents. What are you going to do?
So there we were, world-saving, fearless-in-the-face-of-evil rock stars. But what next? Once you get a taste for missing magical mythical potentially dangerous treasure hunting, you cannot go back to the life of an ordinary middle school student for all the doughnuts in the world. And let me be clear, I love doughnuts.
Of course, that was the exact moment Agents Star and Fish, Task Force treasure hunters, swooped in and asked us to come on board as honorary, temporary, supplemental members, specifically to help find another treasure.
And that was just the opening the flying horse and his fancy jewelry needed to ruin my life.
CHAPTER 2 IT DEPENDS ON YOUR POINT OF VIEW
IT’S DAY SIXTEEN OF SUMMER vacation. It was supposed to be a summer of treasure hunting and having outrageous amounts of fun. Instead, me, Jin, and Hannah are tucked into the Maker Lab, a tiny studio behind Jin’s San Francisco house, created with loving care by his mom, who apparently likes to build robots when she can’t sleep. The lab is chock-full of unbelievable stuff for inventing things. And, occasionally, blowing them up. But usually that part is unintentional.
We are the team that won the STEM fair grand prize back in March with an ugly yet powerful electromagnetic pulse device that effectively scrambles anything that requires electricity or a communication signal. But since the Pegasus disaster, we are all wrong. Dad says I should stop calling it a disaster.
“Change your point of view,” he keeps saying. “Look at it as a situation, a learning opportunity.” Maybe, but this is the first time I’ve seen Hannah since school ended more than two weeks ago, so I’m thinking more disaster and less situation.
Hannah is draped across the couch, making spitballs and launching them at Jin, who, in turn, is sucking helium out of a balloon and saying all of Yoda’s best lines from Star Wars. I dragged everyone here today because we are supposed to come up with new ideas for the regional STEM competition, right around the corner, but instead we are spitballing and Yoda-ing.
And I do mean dragged. Before Pegasus, we could not wait to hang out together. We were treasure hunters! We were a team! Now Hannah is obsessed with adrenaline, adventure, and Bodhi, and Jin is obsessed with Paul, Paul, and Paul. I’m a total afterthought, a discarded toy that used to be fun but now is a drag. When I think about it, it clogs up my throat and I can’t swallow right.
“You guys!” I bark from my seat at the wide worktable, tapping my watch face for emphasis. “Time is passing! Brainstorm! Exciting solutions to our problem of what to make for the competition include… GO!”
Jin sucks in some helium. “Can I leave yet?” he asks, sounding a lot like Minnie Mouse. “I have to meet Paul for Minecraft in four minutes.” Paul. Ugh.
Aiming her spitball straw at my head, Hannah concurs. “I’m meeting Bodhi at the climbing gym. It’s a speed workday. We think we want to free solo El Cap in Yosemite. That would be wild, right?”
Her eyes sparkle in anticipation and my heart sinks. This is not my first attempt to bring us back together, but my friends have new friends who are somehow better. Paul is Jin’s old best friend who ghosted him when he moved to New York. I mean, he disappeared, vanished, poof, gone without a trace.
But right after we won the STEM competition, Paul reappeared. He sent Jin this woven friendship bracelet embedded with a tiny computer-chip charm, the kind of thing you are forced to make at summer camp, and Jin loves it more than anything, even cake or his little brother. But it’s just an ugly bracelet, not an apology or a promise to do better! After the bracelet, Paul started texting Jin as if nothing had happened, as if no time had passed, and everything was exactly as it was, except the geography.
And Jin defends him, like he’s been brainwashed. According to Jin, Paul was going through a “transition” when he went radio silent. It was really hard for Paul to move away, and his new private school, Chappaqua Prep or Chadwick or Cheesehead or whatever, was socially tough and he needed time to get his feet on the ground, blah, blah, blah.
But why would you take back a friend who has treated you badly, especially when you have better options right in front of you? Unless those options suddenly don’t seem so good? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think I’d want to be friends again with someone who pretended I was dead.
And don’t get me started on the boyfriend, Bodhi! Hannah met him at the climbing gym, where she began hanging out right after the Pegasus disaster… I mean, situation. She can’t go very long without doing something thrilling or she gets cranky, and we were obviously much too boring. I mean, she didn’t say that exactly, but we got it.
And we know Bodhi is her boyfriend because she makes sure to remind us at every opportunity. Of course, that would be much more annoying if we ever saw her. Which we don’t. Bodhi has filled her calendar with an array of thrilling adventures—rock climbing, white-water rafting, scuba diving in Monterey, backpacking the Sierra Nevada—all sorts of thrills I cannot hope to match. Apparently, Bodhi belongs to a family of thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies who have welcomed Hannah with open arms. Or something like that.
Sure, Bodhi is nice enough and hangs on Hannah’s every word. And he has an enviable head of curly hair and rich dark eyes and cruises around San Francisco on a long board, which makes him… something, I guess. He even took Hannah on a date to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, and they shared a pot of tea and it was so romantic. Barf. But I can’t like him because he’s completely replaced us. I’m not sure Jin has even noticed, but I sure have.
It’s bad. I can’t even lure Jin and Hannah to the ice-cream shop, and they both would sell their own mothers up the river for a good cone. I have nothing to offer that compares with Paul or Bodhi. We aren’t treasure hunters. We aren’t a team. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that we aren’t best friends anymore either.
And I blame Pegasus. You know the one I’m talking about, mythical winged horse, Zeus’s sidekick, eventually tamed by Athena, the goddess of war. What you might not know is that Athena gave Pegasus a necklace. Maybe because Pegasus favored sparkly bling or maybe it was more like a collar with a tag—If you find this horse, please send him home to Mount Olympus. But the point is that the necklace is not supposed to exist, and yet, as seems to happen lately with alarming frequency, it does.
When the necklace suddenly appeared on the Task Force’s radar, Star and Fish were put on the mission. As it turns out, if a human wears the necklace, she can fly. The necklace needed to be found fast, before someone ended up as the lead story on the local news and there was pandemonium. People don’t react well to the unexpected. Again, I refer you to history.
But finding the necklace wasn’t so easy. All of Star and Fish’s hot leads went cold. They spun in circles, chasing their tails. And the more they struggled, the more panicky they got. They needed a win. Desperate, they called us. We had found the Stone of Istenanya with only our wits. Imagine what we could do with actual resources behind us? They bet on us working our magic twice.
And being honorary, temporary, supplemental members of the Task Force was great! It was everything we imagined. Excellent snacks! Lightning-fast computers! First-class airfare! Not only that, but finding the necklace turned out to be no big deal. Seriously. That part was easy.
There is a reason why kids make the best treasure hunters. Adults are stuck in one point of view, and once it solidifies, they cannot see all the gray between the black and white. Changing your point of view is critical if your job is to consider the fantastical.
Jin interrupts my thoughts. “Ow!” He pulls back his hand.
“Huh?”
Jin points down at the circuit I’ve been carelessly welding, unaware of a long tail of wire coiled right up to where Jin’s hands rest on the table. “You electrocuted me!”
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I was thinking.”
“About electrocuting me?” Jin blows his floppy bangs out of his eyes.
“Not exactly.”
We started our hunt with Jin’s idea to dig deep into social media posts about flying people. Yup. And with the computer power we suddenly had at our disposal, it didn’t even take very long. Star and Fish lingered around us, offering advice and tips, but mostly we ignored them. Team LJH had this totally under control. We were going to be legends. Bigger than Phoenix and Gryphon, but without the, you know, murder and insanity part.
In less than two weeks, Jin found a boy in Rome who swore he’d seen a man soaring above the Colosseum. For real! Wild, right? Once we made contact with the boy, we grabbed the thread and followed it from lead to lead, post to post, kid to kid, until we uncovered Amira, a woman who sold housewares at a charming outdoor market in Marrakech, Morocco, a small African country across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. In addition to pots and pans and plastic storage containers, Amira would sell the occasional magical artifact, a trade she had learned from her father, apparently.
And Amira had the necklace. She intended to take it and sell it to the highest bidder because that is how it is done in the magical-object world of commerce. But as soon as she got over the fact that a bunch of middle school kids had figured out her secret, she was willing to make a deal. After all, with the full backing of an enormous global agency, we had resources.
We were Morocco-bound within hours, our freshly printed Task Force passports, with the purple cover and the gold lettering, clutched in our hands. Things were happening. We all agreed this was our destiny, what we were meant to do with our lives. It was totally fun.
When we arrived at Amira’s market stall as planned, she claimed she did not have the necklace with her because she expected us the next day. “Come ba
ck tomorrow with the payment,” Amira told us, “and the necklace is yours.” She even offered to throw in some knockoff Adidas sneakers as a gesture of goodwill.
We should have known something was up. We should have seen the signs. We had a deal and now that deal had changed. Sure, it was a minor hiccup, but as Dad would say, the devil is in the details. And we were too full of ourselves to notice.
Hubris is one of those words that sounds like what it means. Excessive pride or self-confidence. In other words, believing there is no way you can fail. The necklace practically in our hands, with victory all but assured, we made the mistake of reporting our success to Star and Fish. We told them we had the necklace.
Without verifying, which is kind of their fault, Star and Fish turned around and told everyone in the treasure-hunting universe that the necklace was secure. There would be no more trouble from flying mortals. They were so excited by their own brilliance in using us that they even told the big bosses. And the big bosses told the presidents and the prime ministers. The presidents and prime ministers said, “Yay!” and agreed to continue funding the Task Force forever and ever. Mission accomplished.
But it wasn’t.
When we returned the next morning, with the sun beginning to rise, Amira politely informed us a better offer had materialized and, being as she was a businesswoman, she took that offer. The necklace was gone. She didn’t even apologize. This shocking new reality came with the distinct sensation that we’d been had. And as it turns out, I was right. Lipstick was paying us back for stealing the Stone of Istenanya from her and throwing it into the San Francisco Bay. She wanted us to know how failure felt. And now we did.
Star and Fish had to unravel the whole mess, and at the bottom of the mess was us. As quasi team leader, I tried to take the blame. But Star and Fish were humiliated and angry, and all heads had to roll.
The Midnight Market Page 1