Much to Jack’s frustration, though, his allegations regarding Ignatius Gall remained merely that—allegations. According to Mrs. Hudson, they were unsubstantiated and unprovable, since no one but Jack had witnessed any direct evidence whatsoever of the high-ranking spook’s involvement. The word of a Section Thirteen was not well regarded, and Mrs. Hudson had cautioned Jack to be quite sure of himself before he told anyone else.
Ash had been given a week’s rest, delaying the final round of the Hunt. But when the time came, he had stepped aside in favor of Gwen. Mrs. Hudson, despite an extra-stern scowl, had not forbidden it.
The first levels had gone well for the young team—now the youngest pair ever to compete—but the labyrinth was no less difficult than before, and time was running short.
The two descended the staircase to a second-story rooftop. “There’s no fire escape,” whispered Gwen as they hurried to the edge. She checked her watch. “Three minutes to go, and we’ve no way down.”
Jack stepped up beside her. “We’re not going down. The street entrance is guarded.” He nodded at the goaltending warden beneath the awning, pretending to read a newspaper.
Gwen scrunched up her face. “Who does he think he’s kidding?” She shifted her gaze to the opposite roof, where there was a broad ventilation shaft. “Across, then?”
He nodded.
“Right. And how do you plan to get over there?”
In answer, Jack pulled up his jeans. Tanner’s thrusters were strapped to his ankles. He winked. “Don’t worry. I immersed them both in a bucket of rice.”
His driving had improved. They reached the other side without crashing or otherwise alerting the sentry below, and Jack shed the thrusters while Gwen used a screwdriver to pry open the grate covering the shaft. Seconds later, they dropped into a room filled with umbrellas. There must have been hundreds, lying on tables and stuffed into wooden cubbies and tall brass cans.
“A minute and a half left,” said Gwen.
Jack shook his head and shrugged. “Which one?”
“The biggest. Naturally.” She lifted an inordinately long and unwieldy umbrella from the central table. “This one.”
As soon as Gwen picked the umbrella up, Shaw jumped out from a dark corner, barreling toward Jack and spreading his arms for a tweed bear hug. “Gotcha, Thirteen!”
But Jack had heard the warden’s breathing—smelled him too, Old Spice and stale biscuits. He ducked Shaw’s arms and caught the scarf that Gwen had already thrown. Stealing a page from Ash’s playbook, the two crossed behind the warden, looped the ends to make a knot, and pulled the yak’s wool tight over Shaw’s eyes.
A tiny bell rang. A pair of doors slid open.
“Lift,” said Gwen, and they ran for it. They turned in time to see the blinded warden trip over an umbrella can and go down hard. He slammed into the floor. “Buckles!”
One frilled end of the scarf fell into the gap between the doors, and Gwen yanked it through. “Thank goodness,” she said as light Muzak floated down over them, drowning out the angry shouts falling below. “I was going to have a beastly time getting this back.” She handed Jack the argyle monstrosity. “Presenting the Cloudchaser, the most famous umbrella in golf. A beast to carry, but as long as you drag it around with you, it will never rain.” She finished adjusting her scarf around her shoulders and checked her watch. “Fifteen seconds.”
The elevator doors opened. The two hurried out onto a platform at the center of the arena’s top level, and Jack laid the umbrella on a silver stand an instant before a buzzer sounded. Cheers went up all around.
Mrs. Hudson had been waiting there, and as the stand with the umbrella descended into the platform, a QED flew up beside her, clutching a huge bronze cup in its pincers. She took the trophy and handed it to Jack. “Congratulations, John Buckles the Thirteenth. And congratulations Gwen Kincaid, our newest apprentice quartermaster. After ten years, you have reclaimed the Tracker Cup from the wardens.”
Jack gave Gwen a handle, and together they held the trophy high.
The whispers of Section Thirteen and freak faded. All Jack heard were the cheers.
Chapter Sixty-Five
THAT NIGHT, Jack showed the Tracker Cup to his father. It was hard to see him that way after fighting beside him against Tanner. So pale and thin. All those tubes. He squeezed his dad’s hand and kissed him on the forehead. “I will get you back.”
He set the cup on the nightstand, jostling a shiny object. A dart gun lay next to the candle his mom always kept burning. It wasn’t just any dart gun from his father’s armory. The wooden pistol grip was charred, and the copper barrels were nicked and gouged.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, picking it up. He wrapped his hand around the scarred barrels and closed his eyes to get the answer.
Jack fell. He often fell into his sparks, but this was different. It was part of the vision—a dark, disorienting free fall. He pulled with his mind, slowing everything to a crawl.
Iron grate stairs passed by his shoulder, rushing backward. Above, he saw a tilted rectangle of gray light. Below, he saw a copper transport pod hovering beside a platform. And then he saw the first flash of the bomb. Jack knew where and when he was—the Moscow hyperloop station, moments before Raven and her brother were killed.
Instinct told him to get out of there.
Jack knew he couldn’t be hurt, but this was not a moment he wanted to witness. All the same, he felt a sense of duty to stay and see it through. Perhaps this was penance for a murder he had taken part in, whether intentionally or not.
Raven was holding the dart gun, falling rigid, thanks to the electrosphere still sending its charge through her body. Her brother—the Phantom-slash-Arthur—fell with her, gripping her shoulder and sharing in the shock. His face contorted against it. His eyes shifted. Jack could tell he had seen the flash.
Still in slow motion, the two thieves crashed down on the platform. The impact shook Arthur’s hand free of his sister. His muscles came alive. He rolled to his knees, and Jack saw the stopwatch device—the Einstein-Rosen Bridge—in his other hand. There was still time to activate it. Jack willed him to activate it before the blast could reach him. But Arthur didn’t. He wouldn’t. Instead, he threw his body over Raven’s. The last thing Jack saw before the vision ended was Arthur Spector, the Phantom, backlit by a raging mass of fire.
Zzzap.
“Jack?”
He was back at his father’s bedside. Jack spun on his heels, tucking the weapon behind him as Sadie peeked into the room.
She held out a pillow and a blanket. “I brought you these.”
He gave his sister a halting smile. “Thanks, but I’ll sleep in my own room from now on. If we’re going to be ready to welcome Dad when he wakes up, we need to take care of each other—Mom and Gwen, too. To do that, we need our rest.” He nodded toward the hallway. “Go on back to bed. Pick out a book, and maybe I’ll come read with you like I used to.”
Sadie brightened. “I’d like that,” she said, backing out of the room. “I’d like that a lot.”
“Sadie?”
She peeked back in. “Yeah?”
“Um . . . close the door for me, will you?”
As soon as she had, Jack trained the dart gun on a shadowed corner across the room. “Okay. You can come out now . . . Raven.”
There was a long pause, and then a figure stepped to the edge of the candlelight. Her face remained hidden beneath a hood, but her voice was unmistakable. “I brought you that gun in good faith, yeah? An’ now you’re gonna shoot me with it?”
Jack hadn’t been completely sure he was right. Now that he knew it was her, he had trouble holding his emotions in check. He lowered the weapon. “Raven, I thought you were . . .” He gritted his teeth. “What about your brother?”
Raven stared out from the shadow of her hood for several seconds, then lowered it, exposing the left side of her face to the candlelight. She was blistered and burned from her temple to her chin.
Jack couldn’t help but stiffen.
“Yeah. I know. Would o’ been worse, but for Arthur.” She looked away, toward the window. “He jumped us both to the roof of a building across the canal, but the blast got to him first. He . . . He didn’t . . .” She trailed off, going silent.
Jack couldn’t imagine the scene at the top of that building, the horror Raven must have been forced to endure—rolling her dead brother off her, seeing what Tanner’s bomb had done to him. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t plant them explosives. Tanner did.”
The words were quick, rehearsed, followed by another long silence. The heart monitor at his dad’s bedside beeped in a slow, steady rhythm.
Jack swallowed. “So why did you come?”
“I figured you’d want that back,” she said, nodding at the dart gun. “It’s a family heirloom, innit? What with that seal on the base o’ the grip an’ all.”
Jack turned the pistol over. There was indeed a marking—one he had never noticed before. A falcon and a dragon were etched into the copper baseplate, their wings touching to form an oval seal. The script inside was obscured by soot.
“I figured I owed you, yeah?” continued Raven, lowering her hood. “After what you did to Tanner.”
Jack looked down at his sneakers, shifting his weight. “I didn’t exactly—”
“It’s done, innit? Nuff said.” Raven wiped her eyes with an oversize sleeve and then straightened, as if building herself up for the next part. “There’s somethin’ else, Jack. That spook, Gall, the one who hired Arthur in the first place. He’s got it in for you somethin’ fierce. This whole deal with Tanner and the rubies was only the beginning.” She looked to the window. The Einstein-Rosen Bridge was in her hand. “Watch yourself, yeah? That’s all I came to say.”
“Wait.” Jack reached for her. “Stay. Please. Testify against Gall. You have friends here.”
“Like Gwen, yeah?” Raven let out a sardonic laugh.
“Like me. And Sadie. Gwen will come around. Besides, that device you’re using—the Einstein-Rosen Bridge—Mrs. Hudson says it’s damaging your cells.”
She snorted, that same flippant snort Jack remembered from Moscow. For a split second it was a return to something a little less horrible. But then her face went dark. “Thing is, Jack, I don’t care if it kills me.” She raised her hood, stepping back into the shadows. “An’ it ain’t Raven no more. It’s Ghost.”
Zzzap.
She was gone.
Jack let out the half breath he had been holding the whole time. He turned the pistol over again and rubbed the soot from the falcon-dragon seal, careful not to spark on the copper. He didn’t need to see that vision again. The script inside read Familia in Aeternum. The ministry had pelted him with enough Latin for him to know the translation—Forever Family.
A dragon and a falcon. Trackers and dragos. Forever Family.
Were the Buckleses related to the dragos somehow? It seemed likely, considering the flaming sword and the fireballs he had conjured during the fight with Tanner. Still, all of that had merely been part of a grand spark.
Jack set the weapon down, and his gaze fell on the candle. The brush of air from his arm made the flame dance. He thought of his dream beside the fire barrel.
Maybe it wasn’t a dream after all.
Forever Family. Trackers and dragos.
Tentatively, Jack poked a finger at the candle. The flame didn’t move. He tried again, this time waving a hand over it. He got a flicker, but that was just the movement of air like before.
He sighed, glancing toward the bed, as if his dad might have seen all that foolishness. If he had, he would have laughed and rubbed Jack’s shoulders, lightening the moment by saying something both wise and sarcastic at the same time. Jack wished he knew what it would be.
But the candle still burned in the corner of his eye. Jack had always been fascinated by fire, long before he had chased the Ember across London. This was something he couldn’t let go. He tried again, going for broke, and shoved his hand directly into the flame. It was too much. The fire burned his palm and he jerked back, knocking the candlestick to the floor.
The fall snuffed out the flame, and Jack was grateful, because setting the floor or the bed on fire would have been a lot worse than simply sitting there in the gloom, feeling alone and foolish.
Of course, his hand still hurt.
As his eyes adjusted, Jack saw a faint glow within his closed fist. He caught his breath. It might have been a trick of the sudden dark—a lingering illusion caused by staring at the candle too long. But maybe . . .
Jack turned his fist over—afraid of what he might find, yet still hoping to find it there. One at a time, he uncurled his fingers and laughed out loud at what he saw.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My wife, Cindy, reads every chapter I write the moment it is written, and she steers me back to safety whenever I am headed for disaster. More than that, she is my sounding board—absorbing, reflecting, and generating ideas before my fingers ever hit the keyboard. Without her, this and all my books would not exist.
I am grateful to David Gale for being both editor and advocate, and to Amanda Ramirez, Jen Strada, and all the others at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers who have employed their considerable expertise in developing this series. I am also grateful for my agents, Harvey Klinger and Sara Crowe. I could not ask for more wonderful human beings to be the champions of my work.
Finally, there are a number of volunteers to thank. These have shaped this book through critiques, encouragement, and advice. Rather conveniently, they also all come in pairs: John and Nancy, Seth and Gavin, Danika and Dennis, Chris and Melinda, Scott and Ethan, James and Ashton, Rachel and Katie, Steve and Tawnya, Nancy and Dan, Randy and Hulda, and—of course—the Barons.
Thank you all for everything.
About the Author
James R. Hannibal is no stranger to deep dark secrets or hunting bad guys, having served in the US Air Force as a stealth bomber pilot and a Predator mission commander. Like Jack Buckles, James “suffers” from synesthesia, an intersection of the senses that was once considered mental illness and often causes hyperobservance. If you bake him a cake, he might tell you that it smells blue and sticky—and you should take it as a compliment.
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Also by James R. Hannibal
The Lost Property Office
(SECTION 13, BOOK 1)
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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 © 2017 by James R. Hannibal
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The text for this book was set in Weiss Std.
Library of Congress Ca
taloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hannibal, James R., author.
Title: The fourth ruby / James R. Hannibal.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2017] | Series: Section 13 ; book 2 | Summary: Jack Buckles, a thirteenth-generation tracker whose senses are on the fritz, and Gwen Kincaid, a clerk hoping to become an apprentice quartermaster, are framed for stealing a legendary jewel—one of a set of rubies thought to bring the owner loyalty, knowledge, and power—and they must locate the remaining rubies before the thief does or risk his unleashing a reign of terror worse than Genghis Khan’s.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053567|
ISBN 9781481467124 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481467148 (eBook) | Subjects: | CYAC: Stealing—Fiction. | Secret societies—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H3638 Fo 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053567
The Fourth Ruby Page 23