by Stuart Gibbs
Dante noticed there was a curious lilt to Milana’s voice as she spoke, like she wasn’t saddened by this news. He looked at her curiously.
Milana nodded subtly toward the bottom of the ravine in the distance. Like she didn’t want to say anything out loud, because there were other CIA agents around, and any one of them could be listening.
At the bottom of the ravine, there was a gouge in the snow. At first there didn’t appear to be anything unusual about it to Dante. It looked like a natural indentation, as though a rock had tumbled off the cliff and rolled along.
But when Dante thought about it, he realized that it looked vaguely like the track of a snowboard. Or something that a very talented athlete was using as a snowboard.
The track led down the steep ravine until it disappeared into a stand of trees. And beyond the trees, not so far in the distance, was the sprawl of Los Angeles, where there were probably a billion places for a clever young genius to hide.
Milana turned to him and, not wanting to make a sound, mouthed the words:
She’s alive.
And for the first time that day, Dante smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sometimes it takes quite a while for an idea for a book to come to fruition. In this case, it was more than a decade. I actually had the idea for this book well before I wrote Belly Up, the first book I got published. At the time, I had imagined that this would be a book for adults. In the first imagining, Charlie Thorne was older—and a man. But things change. I had success writing for young readers and realized that the story might work well with a younger protagonist. And by that time, I had created many young male heroes, so I thought it would be nice to make the smartest person on earth a girl.
My wife, Suzanne, rooted this project on from the very beginning. As I have noted in the acknowledgments of other books, she passed away very suddenly in 2018, right while I was in the midst of writing this, so she never got to see the final version. I wish she could have. I am so thankful for all the support she gave this story (and me) through the entire long process of creating it.
I also have to thank lots of people at Simon & Schuster for their help with this book. I originally pitched the idea to Kristen Ostby Hoyle, who left the company before I could write it (for the best of reasons: She wanted to spend more time with her kids). The amazing Liz Kossnar oversaw the project after that.
In addition, I am indebted to everyone else on my incredible team at Simon & Schuster: Justin Chanda, Anne Zafian, Lucy Cummins, Milena Giunco, Sarah Woodruff, Michelle Leo, Audrey Gibbons, Lisa Moraleda, Jenica Nasworthy, Chrissy Noh, Anna Jarzab, Devin MacDonald, Christina Pecorale, Victor Iannone, Emily Hutton, Caitlin Nalven, and Theresa Pang. Also, thanks are due to Kelly Heinzerling for keeping my life running smoothly while I wrote this book. And this book—as well as my entire writing career—would never have happened without my amazing agent, Jennifer Joel.
And now, a funny story about quirks of fate. Just before I was about to start writing the first draft of this, I happened to be at a book festival with my dear friend, the incredibly talented author Sarah Mlynowski. Sarah asked what I was going to do next, and I mentioned that I was doing something that would partially be set in Israel. Sarah asked if I knew there was a group called PJ Library that was planning to take twenty authors on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel the next March. This was news to me. A few seconds later, Sarah forwarded me the e-mail with the application. The Israel trip happened to overlap exactly with the very dates that my in-laws wanted to take my children on a spring break trip. If it had been off by a week—or even a few days—I couldn’t have gone. But the timing was perfect. So I applied . . . and got accepted.
The trip was amazing. Until it happened, I was only going to draw on distant memories of visiting Israel, but thanks to everyone at PJ Library, the scenes in this book are very much based on the experiences I had on that trip. So huge thanks to Harold Grinspoon for his incredible generosity, and to everyone else in the PJ family: Winnie Sandler Grinspoon, Catriella Freedman, Danny Paller, Meredith Lewis, Chris Barash, Tasha Flagg, and Pnina Solomon.
Particular thanks must be given to our guide, Jonty Blackman, who put up with me sitting next to him at the front of the bus and pestering him with hours of questions—and to the great writer Alan Silberberg, who accompanied me on my attempt to explore every square inch of the Old City of Jerusalem. (We didn’t see all of it, but we sure saw an awful lot.) But I also had a great time hanging out with Kim Brubaker-Bradley, Mara Rockliff, Elena K. Arnold, Lin Oliver, Erica Perl, Marla Frazee, Jamie Kiffel-Alcheh, David Adler, and Gail Carson Levine (who would honestly do push-ups any time you challenged her to, no matter where you were).
Of course thanks are due to Sarah Mlynowski, who not only got me on that Israel trip, but who also was kind enough to read an early draft of this book to make sure Charlie Thorne was a believable young woman.
Finally, thanks are due to my incredible family, for their continued support through what has been a difficult year: Ciara Howard, Suz Howard, Darragh Howard, Barry Patmore, Carole Patmore, Alan Patmore, Sarah Cradeur, Jane Gibbs, Ronald Gibbs—and the two most special people in my life, Dashiell and Violet, who accompanied me to explore many of the places in this book. In fact, one of the first excursions I ever had with Dashiell was loading him into a baby carrier and hiking around the spot where the finale of this book takes place. (I told you I’d had this idea for a really long time.) Every time I worked on that sequence, I would think back to that day. It’s amazing to see what incredible people my children have become since then.
Dash and Violet, I love you more than words can say.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STUART GIBBS is the NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of the FunJungle, Moon Base Alpha, and Spy School series. He has also written screenplays for movies, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, and researched capybaras (the world’s largest rodents). Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at stuartgibbs.com.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Stuart-Gibbs
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster, New York
Also by Stuart Gibbs
The FunJungle series
Belly Up
Poached
Big Game
Panda-monium
Lion Down
The Spy School series
Spy School
Spy Camp
Evil Spy School
Spy Ski School
Spy School Secret Service
Spy School Goes South
Spy School British Invasion
The Moon Base Alpha series
Space Case
Spaced Out
Waste of Space
The Last Musketeer
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Stuart Gibbs
Jacket design and illustration by Lucy Ruth Cummins,
copyright © 2019 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibbs, Stuart, 1969– author.
Title: Charlie Thorne and the last equation / Stuart Gibbs.
Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2019] | Series: Charlie Thorne ; 1 | Summary: The CIA forces twelve-year-old Charlotte “Charlie” Thorne, a rebellious genius, to use her code-breaking skills on an epic global chase to locate Einstein’s last equation before dangerous agents discover it and unlock the solution to harnessing energy.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018050572 (print) | LCCN 2018060315 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534424760 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534424784 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Genius—Fiction. | Spies—Fiction. | Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Racially mixed people—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.G339236 (eBook) | LCC PZ7.G339236 Ch 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050572