He also saw the hordes of photographers and spectators behind roped-off police lines. In just a few seconds, he’d be on the ground and everyone would figure out that he wasn’t the Great Falconi.
So he did the only thing he could think to do.
He turned.
He leaned right and steered himself around the plaza, over the reporters, and found himself zooming over the streets and buildings and power lines of Athens. Traffic looked pretty bad down below. Just in front of him, however, he saw a long building with empty bleachers ringing an open track.
It was the Panathenaic Stadium, built in 1896 to host the first modern Olympic Games. It seemed the perfect place to land.
The moment Dan’s feet touched the ground and he ran to a stop, he hit the release on his parachute and waved at the shocked security guards and a group of Chinese tourists.
Then he ran from the stadium and shed his space suit in a hallway.
He couldn’t wait to get back to the others and find out what they’d learned.
Maybe he’d brag to his sister a little bit, too. He’d just set a world record, after all, even if the Cahills would be the only ones he could tell about it.
When he hit the street, he did the most natural thing he could think to do after skydiving twenty-five miles from the edge of space.
He hailed a cab.
“Take me to the Parthenon!” he told the driver. “I’ve got another flight to catch.”
Moscow, Russia
The clock ran down and Nellie watched the gas in the device’s third chamber expand, a swirling white cloud of death. Six minutes left. She struggled with her hands behind her back, trying to imagine the lock on the cuffs as clearly as possible. Sammy chatted nervously beside her.
“The Outcast is really going to destroy the Lucian base?” Sammy asked. “He’ll start a war among the branches.”
“The war’s been going on for centuries,” Nellie countered. “I think he means to finish it. And frankly, I don’t want to be caught up as an innocent bystander.”
With that, Nellie finished picking the lock of her handcuffs with the small implement she always kept under her watch. Lock picking hadn’t been a skill she’d used much in culinary school, but it was mighty handy when looking after Amy and Dan.
“Wow,” Sammy marveled at her. “You really are amazing.”
“And my soufflés never collapse, either,” she said, kneeling down beside him to pick his lock, too.
By the time she’d snapped him free, there were only four minutes left on the clock.
“Can you disarm it?”
Sammy shook his head. “Once that gas is mixed, there’s no going back.”
“Then we need to get this place evacuated.” She looked up at the ceiling and saw a smoke alarm mounted above. She rushed to the desk and opened the top drawer to rummage past pens, pencils, a cell phone charger, and a magnifying glass. There was a stack of official-looking IDs from different governments inside: an inspector’s ID from the Russian Department of Fisheries, a parking pass for the Official Delegation of Maldives to the United Nations, and an analyst’s ID from Interpol, the international police agency. Lucians liked to go wherever they wanted and it seemed they kept stacks of forged IDs lying around. Nellie shoved the whole stack in her pocket, and below it found what she was actually looking for: a lighter.
She grabbed the Nathaniel Hartford file from the desk and held it in the air. Then she took the lighter to it.
“What are you doing?” Sammy cried. “That’s the only proof we have of Grace ordering the hit on her husband.”
“And what good is it?” Nellie said as she watched the layers of paper burn to ash, black smoke rising from them.
“Amy and Dan should know about it,” Sammy said.
“Why?” Nellie snapped. “How does it help them to know that the grandmother they adored, the grandmother who gave them everything … who gave me everything, was a ruthless killer? Ruining Grace’s reputation in her grandchildren’s eyes won’t bring us any closer to catching the Outcast, will it?”
Sammy didn’t answer. She could see by his face how her anger frightened him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that … this is all so …”
The smoke alarm sounded, a loud siren, and then a voice over the loudspeaker in Russian, Spanish, English, and Chinese ordered everyone to evacuate in an orderly fashion.
“Come on!” Nellie said, dropping the burning file in the trash can. Nathaniel Hartford’s face seemed almost to wink up at her before it crisped and smoldered. “Three minutes!”
They burst from the door and ran through the mural room right into two Lucian guards.
“Hey! Who are you?” one of the guards demanded. The other reached for his stun gun, but just then they heard a shattering in the office they’d come from, a loud hiss. The second guard stepped past them to investigate. The air smelled suddenly of rotten eggs.
“What the —” he began, but then began to cough, to choke, and a cloud of gas enveloped him. “AHHH!” he screamed, jumping backward. The sleeve of his shirt sizzled, the skin on his arm burst out in blisters. The other guard rushed forward to help him. “You two stay right there!” he ordered.
“Not a chance!” Nellie shouted as the cloud of gas grew.
The door to the office they’d run out of was bubbling and collapsing. The gas melted metal and plaster along with flesh and bone. The guards were on the other side of it. What kind of monster would set such a device?
“Forget this!” one of the guards yelled. “They’re not worth it!” The two of them ran for the exit.
As the cloud grew toward Sammy and Nellie, their eyes began to water. Nellie’s throat itched.
The cloud of gaseous acid was coming their way, dissolving the floor as it went.
“We need to go!” She pulled Sammy along down the hallway. A group of Lucians in white coats came running from a lab, heading for a set of emergency stairs. Nellie and Sammy followed.
“Who are you two?” one of the lab technicians asked.
“Just visiting,” said Nellie, and she and Sammy raced up the stairs.
“Hey!” another uniformed Lucian guard shouted from behind. “Stop those two! Intruders!”
One of the scientists pulled a syringe from his coat pocket, the skull and crossbones symbol screaming up from its label. “I’ve got them!”
He lunged at Nellie, but Sammy blocked him, knocking the needle from the scientist’s hand and smashing it underfoot. Nellie delivered a swift uppercut to the man’s chin and shoved him backward down the stairs, just as the guard fired his stun gun up at them.
It hit the scientist, who grunted and went limp, falling right into the guard and sending them both tumbling back down the stairs. It took all the guard’s strength to carry the unconscious scientist up the stairs. Nellie and Sammy took the stairs two at a time, escaping from both the guard and the deadly gas at the same time.
Still, as she heard the sound of the ceiling collapsing behind them, she looked back to make sure they were okay. No one deserved to die like this.
The guard and the scientist were still climbing the stairs, and the scientist was waking up. She was glad they were alive. That didn’t mean they’d return the favor if they caught her.
“Run faster!” she urged Sammy.
She and Sammy burst through to daylight outside the high redbrick walls of the Kremlin on a narrow path that ran alongside the Moscow River, from which the city took its name.
Tourists’ day cruises and billionaires’ yachts motored along the river’s chilly surface, oblivious to the secret base turning to a poison death trap below.
The fleeing Lucians were right behind Nellie and Sammy, so they didn’t have time to stop to catch their breath. They ran beside the river. Nellie looked back to see scientists in lab coats burst out from another exit barely in front of a white cloud, choking and rolling on the ground, peeling off their sizzling coats. Part of the historic Kremlin wall
sagged, then collapsed as the structure beneath it was reduced to a sizzling puddle of melted metal and stone.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Two Lucian guards stood from the grass, blistered and gasping for clean air. They pointed to Nellie and Sammy.
“After them!” they yelled. “They did this!”
Sammy grabbed Nellie’s hand and pulled her toward the water’s edge.
“What are you doing?” she said. “We can’t swim it. That water’s too cold!”
“I know!” said Sammy. “Jump!”
Just as one of the Lucians drew his stun gun, Sammy and Nellie leaped from the riverbank and hit the deck of a passing tourist boat. Sammy and Nellie panted on their backs. Nellie’s heart was racing so fast she wasn’t sure how she was still alive. She coughed to clear the tickle in her throat.
A surprised couple in matching neon green parkas stared down at them.
“We didn’t want to miss the sights!” Nellie smiled, standing and helping Sammy up. “Ooh, look, honey,” she said to him, pointing. “Did we just pass the Kremlin?”
The confused tourists shrugged and let them be.
Sammy and Nellie leaned on the edge of the boat, staring idly at the city passing by.
“I hope everyone else got out of there in time.” Sammy sighed.
“Me too,” said Nellie. “Not every Lucian is a murderous goon.”
“Just most of them?”
Nellie didn’t respond. She was still thinking about the file, about Grace Cahill having her own husband killed. She and Amy and Dan had worked so hard to carry on Grace’s legacy and to protect her life’s work. Had they been unwitting accomplices to a murderer for all these years?
The thought was dizzying. Nellie tried to focus on a clearer question, one that she might be able to actually answer: Why would the Outcast want to destroy this particular Lucian base, of all the bases in the world?
Because it held the archives, she decided. Because they’d been on the right track.
“I think we need to go see Vladimir Spasky,” she said.
“In Lefortovo?” Sammy asked. “That’s a maximum-security prison. It used to be a KGB torture chamber!”
“He knew Grace’s darkest secret. He might know even more,” Nellie said. “He might know which Outcast we’re looking for.”
“Are you sure that’s why you want to see him?” Sammy put his hand on her shoulder. “Or do you want him to somehow … I don’t know … explain Grace’s order to kill her husband?”
Nellie shrugged.
She wondered what she would tell the kiddos. How could she explain that Grace had had their grandfather killed? How could she explain that Grace, the woman they all idolized, might not have been a good person after all? The worst thing a person could do was disappoint those who believed in her.
As Nellie stared at the river flowing by in front of her, she wondered which was truly colder, the Moscow River or Grace Cahill’s heart.
Athens, Greece
Amy stood dumbfounded, staring at the crowd of press that had mobbed the Great Falconi the moment the Gas Flight Xtreme docked. Everyone was asking about the teenager who’d missed the landing zone and parachuted to the earth somewhere else in Athens, the teenager who wasn’t Falconi.
“Who was this mysterious teen?” a reporter asked.
“I don’t know,” said the Great Falconi. “But he’s got guts!”
“But why didn’t you jump?” another reporter asked.
“Me?” Falconi said. “I’m almost sixteen now. I’m too old to be reckless.”
Reckless, thought Amy. That’s Dan, all right. Luckily, no one paid the group of teenagers behind the crowd any attention. They didn’t even notice Jonah now that they had a more exciting story. The teens were able to stand idly by the Acropolis Museum gift shop as the press went wild.
“So this is what the paparazzi look like from the other side?” Jonah observed. “I could get used to being a nobody like you guys.”
Amy rolled her eyes at him, then her face lit up.
“What are you staring at?” Dan asked, strolling toward his sister. He had his hands in his pockets, and his hair was tousled, his cheeks red. He looked about as calm and confident as Amy had ever seen him.
“How — how dare you risk your life like that!” she snapped at him.
“Whoa!” Dan held his hands up in surrender.
“Yo, that was sick, Dan!” Jonah gave him a high five. “They say you broke the speed of sound!”
Amy threw her arms in the air. “When your chute didn’t open, my heart almost stopped! You’re the only brother I have, and as annoying as you are, I’d like not to see your guts splattered across Europe.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Amy,” Dan told her. “There was a backup chute. Besides, you can’t yell at me. I just set, like, a hundred different world records.”
“Three.” Amy held up three fingers. “Longest free fall, highest skydive, and youngest person to break the speed of sound. You only set three world records.”
“More than you’ve set,” Dan muttered. “And I had to jump! Melinda Toth was up there, after me. I think she was up there to make sure that ship didn’t get close to the Karman Line.”
“She saw you?” Amy asked.
“She tried to kill me with some kind of deadly hair-needle thing,” said Dan. “But now at least we know that Gas Flight Xtreme isn’t trying to win this thing. They only wanted to do the space-diving stunt.” Dan caught sight of Ian’s torn-up clothes. Ian’s hair looked about as disheveled as Dan’s did. “Uh, Kabra … did you jump from space, too?”
“I had my own challenges on board a dirigible,” Ian said.
“What happened?” Cara asked him.
Ian took a deep breath, then clenched his jaw. “I had a brief and unpleasant encounter with my father,” he said.
“Your father?” Cara gasped. Amy noticed her hand go to Ian’s and squeeze it. “Are you okay?”
Ian looked down at her hand on his own and seemed to momentarily forget how to speak. He stared at the two hands touching for a second, then pulled his hand away and brushed imaginary dirt from his shoulder. “Of course. I am perfectly fine,” he said.
“But, uh, Ian?” Amy gestured at his tattered clothes. “What happened to you?”
“Simple,” said Ian. “I boarded the airship without incident and made a cursory inspection of the systems. The crew moved with ruthless efficiency, as would be expected, and I was able to avoid detection. I made it to the cockpit, where I listened to a group of senior officers discussing their flight plan and their intention to dominate the competition.”
“So the Lucians really do want to win?’ Amy asked. “Could they be the target?”
“They always want to win,” said Ian. “But my father is in league with the Outcast. So no, I do not believe they are the target. I overheard them talking about the student airship. Your airship, Amy. The captain called it their greatest threat. My father assured them that the SCA would not be a problem. He said he had plans in place to neutralize them.”
“Neutralize always means kill in Lucian-speak,” said Dan.
“So now we know,” said Amy. “We have to warn them.”
“We can’t simply make an accusation like that,” said Ian. “We need proof.”
“Did your father say what their plan was?” Cara asked.
Ian shook his head. “Unfortunately, I was discovered at that precise moment by his bodyguards and … well …”
Ian bit his lip. Cara touched his back, but he shrugged her away. “My father ordered me removed from the ship,” he said. “We were not quite yet on the ground when he had me removed. I fell into a hedge.”
“A hedge?” Amy wondered.
“Some kind of shrubbery.” Ian grunted. He looked away, and Amy could see tears glistening in his eyes. It wasn’t only his fancy pants that had been shredded.
Amy realized that the Outcast’s poem hadn’t been about Dan. It was abo
ut Ian, tossed out of an airship by his own father. The Outcast was a step ahead of them the whole way.
“Did your dad say anything else?” Amy wondered. “Anything about what was going on here?”
Ian’s jaw clenched. “He called me a profound disappointment, but I don’t believe that’s relevant to our current predicament.”
Amy fought the urge to comfort Ian. He wouldn’t want her sympathy and he’d probably say something offensive if she tried to offer it. Still, Ian was basically an orphan himself.
“When I finally got myself untangled from the shrubbery,” Ian continued, “I made my way back here. I saw my father get into a town car and leave.”
“So he’s not on board the Lucian airship anymore?” Amy asked.
“No,” said Ian. “There were other Lucian leaders on there, some executives from the board of Omnia Industries, a warlord or two. Top people. I also recognized the captain and some of the crew. They’re all mercenaries. The paramilitary goons my father hires for the most unpleasant work, things like clearing villages near oil pipelines in Burma or escorting nuclear waste trains through civilian towns. They’re expensive killers and they follow his orders without fail.”
“Orders like causing an aerial disaster over Greece?” Cara asked.
Ian nodded.
“He’ll probably be reporting back to the Outcast now,” said Amy. “Between Jonah’s press conference, Dan’s escape from Melinda Toth, and your father seeing you, we won’t have much time to stop the disaster. We have to get aboard the MIT airship and prevent them from taking off.”
Ian agreed. “All of us won’t be able to sneak on without help.”
“Yo, I don’t think I can pull off another press conference,” Jonah said. “The art of mime only goes so far.”
“I can get you on board,” said Eriele Cienfuegos, stepping from behind a tourist information kiosk.
“Who is this person?” Ian snapped. “Has she been eavesdropping?”
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