by Tony Abbott
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Acknowledgments
Back Ads
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
London, England
Thursday, March 27
11:14 p.m.
My name is Becca Moore, and I’m—tick, tick—a time bomb.
Now, if I were a funny person, just saying I’m a time bomb would be pretty hilarious. Like ha-ha-ha and your head falls off. But I’m not a funny person.
To prove it, I’ll tell you what I did today. Straight from the beginning, through the bloody noses, the actual heads coming off, the mysterious black BMW, the blind man with a torch, and all the way to the falling man. Men. Falling men.
Unfunny. Truly.
Except maybe for the exploding rental car. That was a minor riot. Not for Archie Doyle, of course, but then, he was trying to kill us at the time, so he probably deserved it. Anyway, you decide what’s funny and what’s not. It’s nighttime now, but I’ll start with this morning, a little more than twelve hours ago, and the old boat by the river.
London. End of March. Ten thirty-something a.m. Gray sky. Cool, not cold, with a light, sprinkling rain. But it’s England, so what do you expect? Sunshine was promised for later, and it came eventually. But not here, not this morning.
They were all with me—Wade Kaplan; his cousin Lily; his stepbrother, Darrell; Darrell’s mom, Sara; Wade’s father, Roald. Next to my family, these are the people I love most in the world.
Julian Ackroyd was there, too. Julian is the son of the superrich writer Terence Ackroyd, who is helping us search for the relics. Julian was the one who met us at Westminster Abbey this morning and told us about the boat they dug up at the river. And how Galina Krause’s personal archaeologist, Markus Wolff, was spotted snooping around it.
I know I’m telling this way too fast. That’s because my heart is hammering my ribs, I’m shaking like a leaf, and I have to get the story out before it’s too late. Except that by now, after staring down from the top of an old church tower at night, I know that it’s already too late, though it wasn’t yet, not this morning.
I know, I know, I get it. This is a mess. I’ll try to slow down.
Breathe, Becca. Breathe.
So . . . Julian’s limo dropped us off on Lower Thames Street, not too far from the Tower of London. If you look at a map, you’ll see where I’m talking about. We were near the Cannon Street Underground station. We hadn’t seen the black car yet. We eased down the gentle slope of streets between the financial buildings to a place named Hanseatic Walk. There are lots of “walks” along the river. This one meant nothing to me this morning. It meant everything later on.
By the time we reached the Thames, a big crowd had gathered on the embankment. The river is a wide green snake that slithers through the heart of London, splitting it in two. You can see that on maps, too.
“How did they discover the boat?” Wade asked Julian as we pressed closer.
“A city repair crew testing the drains uncovered the remains yesterday,” Julian told us. “They called archaeologists right away, who have already found traces of amber. First report is that the cargo might have been amber from the Baltic. Maybe early sixteenth century.”
Julian is a few years older than us, seventeen, has long blond hair, is handsome, and is very techy, like Lily. As if to prove it, they each took out their phones and tablets and snapped pictures while the rest of us just gawked.
The narrow stretch of sand below the embankment wall had already been transformed into a makeshift archaeological site. A waist-high wall of sandbags was set around the site to keep the water back, while inside the perimeter a grid of wooden stakes had been pounded into the ground, with strings woven among the stakes to form a section of perfect squares. The tidiness of the past.
Tidiness? Maybe I am funny. Ha-ha.
“Slews of city officials, government types, and sightseers have all swarmed down here to see what’s been found,” Julian said, jostling for a better view.
“It might have been a flat-bottomed boat discovered here,” Roald said, trying to see over the heads. Between us and the dig site there could have been two hundred people or more. “Barges are a big part of Thames traffic, aren’t they?”
“Absolutely,” said Julian. He knew because he’d lived in London. “Larger ships dock downriver. Barges have always brought cargo to and from the city.”
Darrell nodded slowly. “Copernicus lived on the Baltic Sea. If Markus Wolff is interested in this barge, then Galina Krause and the Order are interested. And if they’re involved, it’s got to be part of the relic hunt.”
Relic hunt? Markus Wolff? Galina Krause? Copernicus? The Order?
Sorry. Time for some background. The basic facts are simple enough.
Five hundred years ago, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus discovered, rebuilt, rode around in, and then took apart an amazing machine, a kind of large astrolabe with seats. Why? Because the astrolabe had the power to travel through time. If you don’t believe that yet, you will.
When Albrecht von Hohenzollern, the Grand Master of the murderous Knights of the Teutonic Order—you’ll hear that name a lot—got wind of his time travels, Copernicus set out to hide the twelve most important parts of the astrolabe—he called them relics.
The main reason we know all of this is because a couple of long weeks ago we discovered Copernicus’s secret diary in a private fencing school in Italy. The diary is written in several languages as well as a ton of codes and riddles. Thanks to my grandparents, I know a few languages, and I’ve been able to translate some of the words. The codes are more Wade’s territory.
Anyway, for five long centuries, Copernicus’s friends the Guardians (and their friends and descendants) kept the twelve astrolabe relics pretty well hidden.
Unfortunately, a crazy woman named Galina Krause—the nineteen-year-old current leader of the Teutonic Order—murdered a major Guardian, who turned out to be Wade’s old uncle Henry. Now we’re Guardians, too.
“Becca, you’re rocking again.” Lily held my arm to steady me.
Right. I’d found myself rocking on my heels a lot lately. It calmed me. Lily calmed me. Wade is an intense math guy and star lover like his father, and Darrell has flashes of brilliance in the middle of certifiable looniness, but Lily is, of all of them, closest to me. Not only is she an amazing tech brain, with a superquick mind, but she cares about me and from the start has always been there for me.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m still recovering from Greywolf.”
Greywolf? Now we’re getting to the time-bomb thing.
Twelve days ago, Galina Krause kidnapped Darrell’s mom, Sara Kaplan. Galina smuggled her into Russia and caged her inside the Order’s own experimental time-travel device, Kronos, a scary machine based on Galina’s design. I know, a nineteen-year-old building a time machine? But Galina is brilliant and she did. I found out the hard way that Kronos sort of actually
worked.
“You’re going to have to tell me exactly what happened at Greywolf,” Lily said with a noticeable shiver. “Every detail. Because you changed. I know you don’t want to think you changed, but you did. I mean, you’re still great and all, but you’re different. Quieter, if that’s possible. Farther away. Since Greywolf.”
“But you don’t have to worry about it—”
“I get to worry if I want to,” she snapped, her eyes locked on mine like a pair of laser beams. That’s the other thing. I really can’t lie to her. She can always tell.
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“And stop apologizing!” she growled. “It’s me, remember?”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean that. I’m sor . . . not sorry.”
“That’s right you’re not. Now, help me get closer.” She nudged forward.
At Greywolf Galina tried to use Kronos to zap Sara back to the sixteenth century to check on Copernicus and find out where the original Guardians hid the twelve relics. Insane, sure. But Galina’s plan nearly worked.
Luckily, we rescued Sara at the very instant Kronos went off.
Unluckily, the machine blasted Helmut Bern full in the face. He’s one of the Order’s scientists. Instantly, both Bern and the machine vanished.
Unluckiest of all—for me, at least—was that I was zapped by Kronos, too.
Now I’m able to see Helmut Bern five hundred years in the past. Bizarre, I know. I mean, I’m not going physically into the past with him.
I’m only going back in time in my mind.
And only in blackouts.
Only.
Since Kronos blasted me, I’d clocked out a few times. I hadn’t told anybody, because I kept hoping the blackouts would just go away.
But they weren’t going away. After the last time in Westminster Abbey this morning, it was clear that they were getting worse. And I couldn’t seem to tell—tick, tick—when they’d happen again and blast me into the past.
So you see . . . I’m a time bomb.
“It would be great to spy on Markus Wolff for a change,” Wade whispered. As he scanned the crowd, he ran his fingers through his rain-sprinkled hair, then dried his hand on his jeans. “But we can’t see anything from here.”
“Mom, Dad,” said Darrell, “can we sneak in for a better look at the dig?”
“I think we need to, Uncle Roald,” said Lily. “If you-know-who is involved.”
Roald and Sara were a few feet behind us, talking quietly to each other. He stood on his tiptoes and searched the crowd for suspicious faces.
“Don’t go far,” he said. “Julian, please go with them. We’ll be right here.”
The crowd was too thick to let Sara through, so Roald stayed, holding tightly to her wheelchair handles. She’d been in the chair since the hospital yesterday. Her kidnapping had exhausted her. But she was getting her strength back.
“Kids, be careful,” Sara said. “Use your alarms and we’ll come running. And rolling.” Sara had bought us each a souvenir at the abbey gift shop, a key chain of a stained-glass window that we could beep if we felt threatened. Of course, after the boys had hooked the alarms on their belt loops, they’d kept pressing them until Sara snapped, “They’re not toys!”
“Okay, Mom,” Darrell said now. “We’ll be smart, even Beep. I mean Wade.”
Darrell and Julian pushed carefully ahead through the bunched-up spectators. Wade tagged along with Lily and me. He wasn’t smiling.
Does he already know that something’s going on with me? He’s always looking at me. I’ll have to tell everyone sooner or later, but later sounds good.
Not until I have to.
“The Romans settled London,” Julian said over his shoulder. “They called it Londinium. This neighborhood here is now the financial heart of the city.”
Which was useful to know, but as we wormed away from the Hanseatic Walk, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the faces. Everyone we passed seemed suspicious. I checked each face against my memory of a killer we called Umbrella Man. He was a doughy guy who wore disguises and used a poison-tipped umbrella to murder Guardians. I scanned the throng for a toupee or fake mustache.
“I can see the boat!” Lily pointed over the embankment to a framework of black planks in the sand. “Uncle Roald was right. It does look like a—”
I didn’t hear the rest. The moment I actually set my eyes on the remains of the barge, a bolt of rainy light flashed off the water, and I felt a chill run up my back.
No, please no. I’d felt the same chill before each blackout. My breath left me, and my vision darkened and narrowed, as if I were going to faint. My head began to pound. I pressed the balls of my feet hard against the ground and clutched at Lily’s arm to keep hold of myself, but it was too late.
The silver light rippled across the river again, then winked out entirely. I was plunged into darkness as if somebody flipped a switch. The buzz of the crowd vanished. The traffic’s roar shut off. I heard hooves—horse hooves!—clomping up the streets behind me. Men called out in English and German.
I spun around, gasping. “Lily, Wade, I—I—”
But it was too late. Tick.
They couldn’t hear me. Tick. Tick.
I wasn’t there anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
Light flared violently on the wet sand below me. A torch. A face materialized behind it. The flame moved, and two more torches were born. I watched the first one bob up away from the water and vanish into the streets. All this time there were voices of men shouting, grunting in labor.
A flat-bottomed boat—this same barge, the one we’d been studying seconds before—was no longer a skeleton, but was hulled and half decked and stacked with cargo and crawling with men in britches and tunics and boots and cloaks. Among the barrels and crates, a shape twitched. His face caught the moonlight.
My heart stopped. I knew him. “Omigod . . .”
It was Helmut Bern. Victim of Kronos. Scientist of the Teutonic Order.
I so wanted Lily, Wade, and Darrell to see all this with me, but they weren’t here. I wasn’t clear if anyone I saw could see or hear me.
Bern clawed his way from the boat, crying out in inarticulate German. His eyes were jammed closed, as if he were tortured by a headache as piercing as mine. His arms, visible through his shredded robes—he was dressed a little like a monk—were all wounds and sores. Boils, maybe? I don’t really know what boils are.
Then—I have no idea how—I was on the sand next to him.
This is soooo insane! I told myself. I have to wake up! Becca, wake up! Someone—wake—me—up!
But the more I tried, the more I couldn’t wake up. Huge, modern London had simply disappeared. No more clogged traffic and skyscrapers and steel office buildings and banks and luxury hotels. Now there were sloping fields of grass, and trees and timbered houses poking up where big buildings had just been, and dirt and cobblestoned paths in place of paved streets, and the deep darkness of a sky filled with more stars than I had ever seen.
In the near distance stood the famous Tower of London. It’s still there today. Back then—the year Kronos was set to travel to—the Tower was the largest structure for miles, a massive block of white stone with corner towers, surrounded by a high wall. It loomed over the whole rambling city, an oppressive presence. Not the palace I’d read it began life as but a horrible, sorrow-filled prison.
Helmut Bern convulsed on the sand and rolled over onto his hands and knees. He lifted his head to the moonlight and gave out a cry like a dying animal. Ignoring him, the other boatmen climbed, grunting, into the streets behind me. They called to one another—also in German.
Bern was teetering on his feet now and stumbling from the barge toward a path sloping up from the river, staggering from wall to wall to keep from falling.
“Helmut Bern?” I found myself saying. It was weird. Bern was the only person I knew there. And even though he had tried to kill Sara—and me—his was a face I knew. It’s funny how a familiar
face means more when you’re lost.
I moved toward him, raising my hand to get his attention—“Bern? Helmut?”—when a man barreled past, accidentally brushing my arm where Galina had shot me with a crossbow. It ached for a second, and it startled me that I could feel anything in this dream, but I shook off the pain.
The man who had rushed by was tall and broad-shouldered. He wore a long, thick cloak, forest green, and a black velvet hat. I remembered seeing him in an earlier blackout, when Bern and I were being sick over the side of the sailing ship. This man now slid his arm under Bern’s shoulder, spoke to him in German. “Lassen Sie mich Ihnen helfen. Bitte kommen Sie mit.” (Let me help you. Please come with me.)
They struggled up and away from the water to where I’d heard the horses clomping and wagon wheels screeching. A thick smell like an open sewer filled my nose. It was awful, but I followed after the men, knowing—somehow—that I wasn’t really going anywhere. I’d discovered that while I blacked out, I didn’t actually leave the place where I was. And no matter how long my visions seemed to keep me in the past, pretty much no time passed in the present.
A child’s voice called out suddenly in the night. A girl’s voice.
“This way, please. Father is waiting for you!”
The girl stood at the end of a lane, holding a lantern. She wore a shawl over her shoulders, and when a sudden breeze ruffled her bonnet, the ends of her hair coiled up behind her. “This way!” I glanced at the signpost nearest me. Allhallows Lane. I hurried to keep pace with Bern and the green-cloaked man. The girl waved to them. Her face told me she might be eleven or twelve years old. Nearly my age. The lantern’s light shone warmly on her cheeks.
“Meg,” boomed a man I couldn’t see. “Meg! Where are you?”
“Here, Father!” The girl—Meg—turned and vanished, drawing the wobbly light of her lantern around the corner of Allhallows. Still unseen, I followed the men street after street until we came to a short cobbled passage.
I read the signpost. “Bucklersbury,” I said aloud. My voice was muffled.
The other sailors had split off. It was only the girl and the three of us—if I could even think of myself as one of them. We went left onto Bucklersbury, and I saw the girl on the doorstep of a long, low, rambling building. “Our house is called the Old Barge, sirs. You see why!” The door opened from the inside.