Wade and the Scorpion's Claw

by Tony Abbott

  “So where’s the real Scorpio?” she asked.

  Before anyone could say anything, Dad gasped and tugged his phone quickly from his pocket, putting it on speaker. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Hello, Dr. Kaplan.” The investigator’s voice sounded hoarse and tired. “I am sorry not to respond before now. My detectives and I located the house outside Rio, and we have just finished searching it top to bottom. I am sorry, very sorry, to report that we found no trace of Sara Kaplan. . . .”

  And my heart crashed through the floor. Darrell began shouting, and the rest was the mumble of words Markus Wolff had predicted.

  “. . . so promising . . . arrived too late . . . wife must have been moved . . . other location . . . dead end . . . sorry . . . very sorry . . .”

  The dark thing we had all kept at bay in the back of our minds had rushed forward and smacked us down.

  After all the hope, Sara was more gone than before.

  The call ended, and my dad fell in on himself. His face went dark with sadness; he jammed his eyes closed, squeezing tears down his cheeks. Darrell tore away from Becca and Lily, who had tried to put their arms around his shoulders, and lunged at Dad, pounding him on the back until he wrapped his arms around him. It was like my dream in the cave: everyone confused, grieving, weeping.

  How long we stayed that way, I can’t even tell you.

  Five minutes. A half hour. Time stopped while we died inside.

  Finally, Dad pulled us all together, his face stone, his eyes wet, his lips quivering. “We’ll figure this out; we have to,” he said. “Sara is out there, waiting for us to find her. We need to get to the airport. Retrieve Vela and the daggers. Get on our flight. Go to New York. Keep searching. Our flight leaves in three hours. Come on.”

  That was all anyone could say. We hurried out of the quiet mission, with Lily and me on either side of Becca, supporting her, Darrell stomping behind us, cursing to himself. The rain was harder but strangely warmer now.

  The weather in San Francisco changed in the blink of an eye. I got that. But then, everything that had happened so far was all about change.

  A wreck of old metal had become a time-conquering machine.

  A happy little family had been struck by tragedy and was becoming a band of fighters.

  Relic hunters.

  Guardians.

  We were shouldering more pain than we thought we could. We were growing closer to one another as we pushed forward into a dark and dangerous future. We were getting tougher, faster, harder, stronger.

  Whether we were better people now than we had been when we’d touched down in San Francisco, I can’t say. Better is a tough thing to claim. But one thing was certain. As we hurried past Feng Yi’s bloody footprints, washing away in the rain, as we pushed on, haunted by the mystery of the Copernicus Legacy and fearing Sara’s fate more than ever, we didn’t stop running.

  And we haven’t stopped running.

  Even now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to a host of people and places, all of who helped (some without knowing it) in the writing of this book. First of all, thanks to Beth Dunfey, my longtime friend and editor, for her invaluable (and under the gun) help in nursing and nudging this story to its completion. Then there is the unlikely case of Kevin Peters, who drove me all around the San Francisco area before he mentioned that his last name was an Americanization of the Portuguese Pires—a name of some significance in the present book, and one which I had already discovered in my research and decided to use. Tomé Pires (not a relation to Kevin, as far as we can tell) is, as are many characters in the Copernicus series, an actual historical figure. Dual shout-outs to my friends at Copperfield’s and Kepler’s, two awesome Bay-area bookstores that made me feel so welcome so far away from home. Finally, a thanks to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for serving as a setting, as well as to the Hotel Vertigo on Sutter Street, known in these pages as the Topaz, a little homage to Alfred Hitchcock, whose cinematic San Francisco swirled around me as I wrote.

  Excerpt from The Copernicus Legacy #2: The Serpent’s Curse

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next adventure in the Copernicus Legacy series in

  THE COPERNICUS LEGACY:

  THE SERPENT’S CURSE . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  New York City

  March 17

  8:56 p.m.

  Twelve hidden relics.

  One ancient time machine.

  A mother, lost.

  Seven minutes before the nasty, pumped-up SUV appeared, Wade Kaplan slumped against his seat in the limousine and scowled silently.

  None of his weary co-passengers had spoken a word since the airport. They needed to. They needed to talk, and then they needed to act, together, all of them—his father, astrophysicist Dr. Roald Kaplan; his whip-sharp cousin Lily; her seriously awesome friend Becca Moore; and his stepbrother—no, his brother—Darrell.

  “Ten minutes, we’ll be in Manhattan,” the driver said, his eyes constantly scanning the road, the mirrors, the side windows. “There are sandwiches in the side compartments. You must be hungry, no?”

  Wade felt someone should respond to the older gentleman who’d met them at the airport, but no one did. They looked at the floor, at their hands, at their reflections in the windows, anywhere but eye to eye. After what seemed like an eternity, when even Wade couldn’t make himself answer, the question faded in the air and died.

  For the last three days, he and his family had come to grips with a terrifying truth. His stepmother, Sara, had been kidnapped by the vicious agents of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.

  “You can see the skyline coming up,” the driver said, as if it were perfectly all right that no one was speaking.

  Ever since Wade’s uncle Henry had sent a coded message to his father and was then found murdered, Wade and the others had been swept into a hunt for twelve priceless artifacts hidden around the world by the friends of the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus—the Guardians.

  The relics were originally part of a machina tempore—an ancient time machine that Copernicus had discovered, rebuilt, journeyed in, and then disassembled when he realized the evil Teutonic Order was after it.

  What did an old time machine have to do with Sara Kaplan?

  The mysterious young leader of the present-day Teutonic Knights, Galina Krause, burned to possess the twelve Copernicus relics and rebuild his machine. No sooner had the children outwitted the Order and discovered Vela—the blue stone now safely tucked into the breast pocket of Wade’s father’s tweed jacket—than the news came to them.

  Sara had vanished.

  Galina’s cryptic words in Guam suddenly made sense. Because the Copernicus legend hinted that Vela would lead to the next relic, Sara would be brought to wherever the second relic was likely to be—to serve as the ultimate ransom.

  Wade glanced at the dark buildings flashing past. Their windows stared back like sinister eyes. The hope that had sustained his family on their recent layover in San Francisco—that Sara would soon be freed—had proved utterly false.

  They were crushed.

  Yet if they were crushed, they were also learning that what didn’t kill them might make them stronger—and smarter. Since their quest began, Wade had grown certain that nothing in the world was coincidental. Events and people were connected across time and place in a way he’d never understood before. He also knew that Galina’s minions were everywhere. Right now, sitting in that car, he and his family were more determined than ever to discover the next relic, overcome the ruthless Order, and bring Sara home safe.

  But they couldn’t sulk anymore, they couldn’t brood; they had to talk.

  Anxious to break the silence, Wade cleared his throat.

  Then Lily spoke. “Someone’s following us. It looks like a tank.”

  His father, suddenly alert, twisted in his seat. “A Hummer. Dark gray.”

  “I see it,” the driver said, instantly speeding up.
“I’m calling Mr. Ackroyd.”

  The oversize armored box thundering behind them did indeed look like a military vehicle, weaving swiftly between the cars and gaining ground.

  “The stinking Order,” Lily said, more than a flutter of fear in her voice.

  “Galina knew our plans from San Francisco,” Wade said. “She knows every single thing about us.”

  “Not how much we hate her,” said Darrell, his first words in two hours.

  That was the other thing. If their global search for the Copernicus relics—Texas to Berlin to Italy to Guam to San Francisco—had made them stronger, it had made them darker, too. For one thing, they were armed. Two dueling daggers, one owned by Copernicus, the other by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, had come into their hands. Wade was pretty sure they’d never actually use them, but having weapons and being a little more ruthless might be the only way to get Sara back.

  “Galina Krause will kill to get Vela,” Becca said, gripping Lily’s hand as the limo bounced faster up the street. “She doesn’t care about hurting people. She wants Vela and the next relic, and the next, until she has them all.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m here to avoid,” the driver said, tearing past signs for the Midtown Tunnel. He appeared to accelerate straight for the tunnel, but veered abruptly off the exit. “Sorry about that. We’re in escape mode.”

  Roald sat forward. “But the tunnel’s the fastest way, isn’t it?”

  “No options in tunnels,” the driver said. “Can’t turn or pass. Never enter a dark room if there’s another way.”

  He powered to the end of the exit ramp, then took a sharp left under the expressway and accelerated onto Van Dam Street. The back tires let loose for a second, and they drifted through the turn, which, luckily, wasn’t crowded. Less than a minute later, they were racing down Greenpoint Boulevard, took a sharp left onto Henry, a zig onto Norman, a zag onto Monitor, then shot past a park onto a street called Driggs.

  Why Wade even noticed the street names in the middle of a chase, he didn’t know, but observing details had also become a habit over the last days. Clues, he realized, were everywhere, not merely to what was going on now, but to the past and the future as well.

  Becca searched out the tinted back window. “Did we lose them?”

  “Three cars behind,” the driver said. “Hold tight. This will be a little tricky—”

  Wade’s father braced himself in front of the two girls. Dad! Wade wanted to say, but the driver wrenched the wheel sharply to the right, the girls lurched forward, and he himself slid off his seat. The driver might have been hoping that last little maneuver would lose the Hummer. It didn’t. The driver sped through the intersection on Union Avenue and swerved left at the final second, sending two slow-moving cars nearly into each other. That also didn’t work. The Hummer was on their tail like a stock car slipstreaming the tail of the one before it.

  Lily went white with fear. “Why don’t they just—”

  “Williamsburg Bridge,” the driver announced into a receiver that buzzed on the dashboard, as if he were driving a taxi. “Gray Hummer, obscured license. Will try to lose it in lower Manhat—”

  They were on the bridge before he finished his sentence. So was the Hummer, closing in fast. Then it flicked out its lights.

  Becca cried, “Get down!”

  There were two flashes from its front passenger window and two simultaneous explosions, one on either side of the car. The limo’s rear tires blew out. The driver punched the brakes, but the car slid sideways across two lanes at high speed, struck the barrier on the water side, and threw the kids hard against one another. Shots thudded into the side panels.

  “Omigod!” Lily shrieked. “They’re murdering us—”

  As the limo careened toward the inner lane, the Hummer roared past and clipped the limo hard, ramming it into the inside wall. The limo spun back across the road, then flew up the concrete road partition. Its undercarriage shrieked as it slid onto the railing and then stopped sharply, pivoting across the barrier and the outside railing like a seesaw.

  The driver slammed forward into the exploding air bag. Lily, Becca, Wade, and Roald were thrown to the floor. Darrell bounced to the ceiling and was back down on the seat, clutching his head with both hands.

  Then there was silence. A different kind of silence from before. The quiet you hear before the world goes dark.

  Looking out the front, Wade saw a field of black water and glittering lights beyond.

  The limo was dangling on the bridge railing, inches from plunging into the East River.

  BACK ADS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

  TONY ABBOTT is the author of nearly a hundred books for young readers, including the bestselling series The Secrets of Droon. Tony has worked in libraries, in bookstores, and in a publishing company and currently teaches college English. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs. You can visit him online at www.tonyabbottbooks.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors and artists.

  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2014 by Bill Perkins

  Logo design by Jason Cook/Début Art

  Cover design by Tom Forget

  COPYRIGHT

  Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THE COPERNICUS ARCHIVES #1: WADE AND THE SCORPION’S CLAW. Text copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers. Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Bill Perkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abbott, Tony, date

  Wade and the scorpion’s claw / by Tony Abbott. — First edition.

  pages cm. — (The Copernicus archives ; # 1)

  ISBN 978-0-06-231472-7 (paperback)

  EPub Edition August 2014 ISBN 9780062325853

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 3. Antiquities—Fiction. 4. Secret societies—Fiction.] I. Perkins, Bill (Illustrator), illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.A1587Wad 2014

  2014010026

  [Fic]—dc23

  CIP

  AC

  * * *

  14 15 16 17 18 OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

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