Pursued

by Gary Urey

  Thanks to their scientist parents, Axel Jack and Daisha Tandala have what no one else in the world has—the ability to go anywhere in seconds with the push of a button on their GeoPorts. But the GeoPorts come at a high price. The billionaire Dr. Lennon Hatch wants the units for his own agenda, namely world domination, and he’ll stop at nothing to get them. When he sends his henchmen, the Pursuers, after the GeoPorts, Axel and Daisha find themselves on the run across the globe.

  Axel and Daisha need to destroy the GeoPorts before the Pursuers can get their hands on them. To do that, they need the help of the mysterious Magnes Solace, but all they have are partial coordinates to find him or her. As the Pursuers close in, Axel and Daisha make a mad dash to escape and end up separated. Now they must risk everything to find each other again, reach Magnes Solace, and save the world.

  ALBERT WHITMAN & COMPANY

  Publishing award-winning children’s books since 1919

  www.albertwhitman.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Jacket art copyright © by Scott Brundage

  For Melissa

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  data is on file with the publisher.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Gary Urey

  Cover illustration copyright © 2017 by Scott Brundage

  Published in 2017 by Albert Whitman & Company

  ISBN 978-0-8075-6684-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-8075-6686-2 (paperback)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Chapter One

  AXEL

  Axel Jack exploded out of thin air and hit the concrete with a bone-crunching thud.

  His head throbbed, and his body ached from the sudden blast through the Satellite Warp. He shook off the impact, lifted his head, and saw the shoes of passing pedestrians—sneakers, high heels, loafers, wing tips, sandals. A set of dirty bare feet walked directly toward him.

  “You Houdini?” a grizzled voice asked.

  A gnarled, arthritic finger touched Axel’s shoulder.

  Axel clutched the GeoPort unit in his jeans pocket and sat up on his knees, every muscle tensed to run. The old guy towering over him had a long beard and a pockmarked face, and smelled like he’d just urinated all over himself. Relief swelled in Axel’s chest. The man definitely wasn’t a Pursuer. He was safe—for the moment.

  He stood up and stared at the strange surroundings. Hundreds of people clogged the busy sidewalks. Honking yellow taxis whizzed down the street. Skyscrapers soared into the clouds like giant man-made mountains.

  “I’m in a city,” Axel said. “A big freaking city.”

  “New York City,” the man mumbled. “You a magician or something?”

  “Huh?” Axel grunted back.

  “One minute I’m drooling over a sweet hunk of carrot cake in that deli window, and the next I see you. A loud boom like a car backfiring and then a big puff of smoke like you was in a magic show or something.”

  “I wish it were magic. You said I’m in New York City, right?”

  “The one and only Big Apple. Got a dollar?”

  Axel reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill. “Here you go. Sorry, it’s Vietnamese dong. That’s where I just came from.” He hoisted his backpack over his shoulders and sprinted down the street.

  The weather was warm, but not like the oppressive humidity of Vietnam where his last chase had taken place. He took off his jacket, tied it around his waist, and headed toward a patch of green in the otherwise gray urban landscape. The GeoPort vibrated in his pocket. He quickly took the palm-sized, twenty-first-century version of the Holy Grail out and read the coordinates.

  40.7420° N, 73.9876° W

  “Madison Square Park,” Axel said aloud. “Homeless people never lie. I’m smack-dab in the heart of New York City.”

  Axel slipped the GeoPort back into his pocket, his eyes nervously scanning the faces in the crowd. He knew the Pursuers back in Vietnam had a short window of opportunity to find the Warp with their trackers. If they sniffed it out, some extremely nasty men would soon materialize in front of the deli with the carrot cake in the window.

  A bright yellow sun beamed high in the sky. Axel knew from the sun’s position that it was noon on a hot June day. If the Pursuers were able to follow him, he’d have to run and hide for the next nine hours or so. Until the sun went down and the Pursuers’ solar tracking device could no longer pinpoint his location. He grabbed a spare shirt from his backpack, wiped the sweat off his flushed face, and jogged down the street.

  One thought raced through his mind as he dashed in and out of the throngs of walkers choking the sidewalks: Daisha, her look of surprise and shocked horror when the Pursuers had burst into the Café Gac Hoa at 92 Pham Ngoc Thach in District Three of Ho Chi Minh City.

  Their peaceful, relaxing lunch of spring rolls and iced tea had suddenly exploded into glass breaking, tables overturning, and angry shouts in the dialect of the Pursuers. The chaos was so intense that he and Daisha hadn’t had time to synchronize their GeoPorts. All Axel remembered was frantically pushing buttons, blindly setting new coordinates on their GeoPorts, and then disappearing into the temporary safety of the Warp.

  Moments later, the Warp dumped him on a street in New York City and Daisha was…

  He had no idea because he hadn’t seen her coordinates on the GeoPort. She could be in Spain, Alaska, Tel Aviv, or Timbuktu.

  A loud groan came from the pit of his stomach. The Pursuers had ruined his lunch in the Ho Chi Minh City café. He scrounged around in his backpack for money. Besides the forty-two thousand in Vietnamese dong, equaling about two US dollars, he had a handful of change in US currency. The beefy scent of hot dogs drifted inside his nostrils. He crossed the busy street and ordered one from a place called the Dog House.

  “Three fifty,” said the man behind the cash register.

  Axel dumped his change on the counter. “I have three dollars and five cents,” he said.

  “Dog is three fifty. Better come up with another forty-five cents.”

  As Axel was scraping away his change, a woman with dyed purple hair shouted from behind him. “Just give the kid a hot dog,” she said. “I’ll cover him.”

  The man shrugged and handed Axel a hot dog. He was just about to douse his lunch with mustard when he saw two very familiar-looking men standing on the opposite corner of the street. One was tall and muscular. The other was slightly shorter and heavier but just as athletic looking. Both wore their short blond hair in a military cut. They had on black pants and matching black suit jackets with white shirts.

  The taller of the two men pulled a round electronic device the size of an Oreo cookie from his pocket. He pointed it toward the Dog House. The GeoPort in Axel’s pocket throbbed to life, buzzing and vibrating like an angry wasp trapped under a glass.

  The Pursuers had found him.

  The chase was on.

  Chapter Two

  DAISHA

  Daisha Tandala landed face-first in the dirt. She let out a loud groan and checked her extremities for injury. Besides a dizzy head and nauseous stomach from her sudden plunge into the Satellite Warp, she felt okay. She stood up, wiped the grime and muck from her face, and scanned her location. She was right in the middle of a flowing sea of green.

  “I’m in a huge field of
corn,” she mumbled.

  The sunny June sky above her head was bright blue and cloudless. That meant if the Pursuers back in Vietnam had found their opening, they would burst through the Warp exactly where she had fallen moments ago. And they’d have lots of sunshine for their solar trackers. She reached into her pocket, pulled out her palm-sized GeoPort, and read the coordinates.

  40.4150° N, 82.4603° W

  “I have no idea where I am,” she growled.

  Thick woods surrounded the perimeter of the cornfield. She grabbed her new satchel off the ground—the one Axel had bought for her at the Binh Tay Market—and made a dash toward the trees. Her arms pumped furiously; her strong legs powered her between the rows of corn.

  A dog barked behind her. A voice called out, “Who the heck are you?”

  She stopped running and saw a big, black mutt with a white spot on its chest and a scruffy boy no older than eight or nine emerge from a row of corn.

  “This is my dad’s farm,” the boy said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Where am I?” Daisha asked.

  “I told you…It’s my dad’s farm. Well, really it’s my grandpa’s farm, but it’ll be ours when he croaks.”

  “No. I mean what part of the country. You speak English just like me so I’m assuming it’s the United States.”

  The boy and the dog cocked their heads and gave her a confused look. “Ohio,” he said. “Don’t you even know where you are?”

  Daisha looked past the boy to where she had landed in the cornfield. “Some days I do,” she said with a shaky voice. “Some days I don’t.”

  “Did you hear the thunder and see that smoke?” the boy asked, stroking the dog’s head. “It scared Moxie here half to death, and there ain’t a rain cloud in the sky.”

  She couldn’t tell the boy what he had really heard and seen: a sonic boom caused by a very frightened girl hurtling through the Warp faster than the speed of sound. The smoke was from the massive discharge of electrical energy.

  “You have funny hair,” the boy said.

  “What do you mean funny?” Daisha asked.

  “Looks like you haven’t washed it in a year.”

  “For your information, they’re called dreadlocks. I’m half Jamaican and half Kenyan.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I don’t have time for this. What town am I near?”

  “Mount Vernon. Fredericktown is farther down the road.”

  “How far away is Mount Vernon?”

  “About a mile.” The boy pointed east into the trees. “You can get to town by going that way. A path through the woods leads to a creek. There’s a fallen tree over the creek, and you can walk across it like a bridge. The path leads to the water park. The town center isn’t far from there. How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” Daisha said. “Thanks for the information. If you run into some strange men, don’t tell them you saw me.”

  “What strange men?” the boy asked.

  Daisha didn’t answer him. She turned and started running toward the woods in the direction of the path.

  The cornfield seemed to stretch forever, the trees like a mirage in the distance. A tiny part of Daisha was glad Axel wasn’t with her this time. She was a much faster runner than he was. He would have just slowed her down, making their odds of capture that much greater. But what Axel Jack lacked in foot speed, he more than made up for in brainpower. The kid was hella smart and an expert at fooling the Pursuers.

  A loud rumbling sound stopped Daisha in her tracks. She quickly hit the ground, lowering her head below the silky tassels of corn. The sound had come from the exact spot where she had burst through the Warp. A thick plume of smoke rose over the field.

  “They’re here,” she whispered under her breath.

  Daisha peeked over the tops of the cornstalks, and her heart nearly exploded in her chest. She could see two men walking in her direction. They were dressed in black suits with white shirts. The taller of the two men reached into his pocket and pulled out a round electronic device. Daisha knew instantly that it was a solar tracker. The man scanned the cornfield and then pointed the tracker in her direction. The GeoPort vibrated in her pocket.

  The two men smiled and then slapped a high five.

  The Pursuers had found her.

  Chapter Three

  DOCTOR STAIN

  Doctor Lennon Hatch stared at the two giant monitors with the intensity of a fox ready to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse.

  “The boy has a chance in the city,” the Doctor said. “But the girl is as good as ours in the middle of an Ohio cornfield.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Pinchole, the Doctor’s DSWS—director of Satellite Warp science. “But at least we’ve got them separated this time.”

  “Yes. Our men in Vietnam did a masterful job of surprising them in that café.”

  Each monitor was a high-resolution, incredibly detailed topographical satellite map. Three fast-moving blips on each kept the Doctor’s eyes fixed to the screens. Two deep red blips represented the Doctor’s men, rough and ready soldiers he had handpicked from faraway places like Austria, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Two fluorescent blue blips symbolized the kids—Axel Jack and Daisha Tandala.

  And at this moment, the Doctor hated them both.

  “What’s the weather report on the East Coast today?” the Doctor asked.

  Pinchole punched a key on his computer. “Our meteorologist reports nothing but sun and blue skies for the next three days from Ohio to New England. That means lots of solar energy for the tracking devices.”

  The Doctor glanced at Pinchole and let out an audible grunt. The fact that his men’s GeoPort trackers only worked with solar energy irked him to no end. Pinchole and his Satellite Warp technicians had been working for months to figure out why the trackers’ batteries completely drained when the Pursuers followed Daisha and Axel through the Warp. All of their attempts at a fix had met with failure.

  The Satellite Warp—or just the Warp, as they called it—was the Doctor’s grandest achievement. The program had begun as an experiment to detect gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time as predicted by Albert Einstein. Hardly anyone—chiefly the Doctor himself and the former research scientists he had funded, Stanford professors Roswell Jack and Jodiann Tandala—knew that Einstein’s theory of a rotating mass distorting the space and time around it could also transport a human being to any location on the planet. Simply by harnessing the power of the solar wind and using GPS coordinates.

  Precisely, one needed GPS coordinates and a hand-held geographical transportation system—GeoPort for short. Professors Jack and Tandala had made only two, both of which were now in the hands of their rogue children.

  Pinchole pointed to the monitor. “It looks like the boy and girl are slipping away.”

  Both watched as the two blue blips distanced themselves from the four red blips. Soon the blue blips disappeared altogether, and the red blips fell hopelessly behind.

  The Doctor tossed his hands up in disgust. “This was our chance!” he roared. “The girl’s GeoPort plopped her into a desolate cornfield, for crying out loud!”

  “The day isn’t over yet,” Pinchole said, glancing at his watch. “Night won’t fall for another eight hours and thirteen minutes. The Pursuers can easily pick up their trail.”

  “That is so reassuring,” the Doctor said sarcastically. “It will be just like when the Pursuers picked up their trail in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Liechtenstein, and a half dozen other places. How can two thirteen-year-old kids be so hard to hunt down?”

  “You’ve often said it yourself, Doctor. The boy and girl have their parents’ brains and…”

  The Doctor slapped his flat palm on the desktop. “That’s enough from you! Just get those trackers to work on batteries so we can hunt them at night. If those kids find this Magnes Solace before me, heads will roll.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pinchole said and walked out of the Monitoring Room. The Doctor instructed a
new SWT—Satellite Warp technician—to expand the topographical view. The farther the kids moved away from the Pursuers, the worse the contrast on the monitors became.

  As the Doctor was about to scold the SWT for expanding the view too fast, a burning sensation flashed across the left side of his face. He reached up and felt his cheek. His skin was hot, almost scorching to the touch.

  The Doctor immediately left the Monitoring Room and burst into the nearest bathroom. His heart raced in his chest, his hands shook, and the left side of his face flamed even hotter. He turned on the faucet, filled his cupped hands with cold water, and splashed his face. The sensation gave him a glorious but temporary reprieve. After a moment, the heat and uncomfortable burning sensation returned in full fury. The Doctor took a deep breath and looked into the mirror. No matter how many appointments with dermatologists and therapists, the simple act of looking at his reflection in a bathroom mirror almost always sent him spiraling into a panic attack.

  Nevus flammeus, the scientific name for the large port-wine stain covering the left side of his face since birth, stared back at him.

  “Doctor Stain,” he whispered to himself. “Those idiots think I don’t know what they call me behind my back.”

  The Doctor ran his finger around the edges of the stain, tracing the elongated peanut shape that he had since childhood. All of his Silicon Valley billions and twenty-two-thousand-square-foot mansion couldn’t take the shame away. The bright-red birthmark was both his god and devil, fueling his drive to succeed and humiliating him at the same time. He would not allow Axel and Daisha to destroy his plans. The chase for the GeoPorts was not a high-tech game of hide-and-seek, but a war for control of everything—money, culture, politics, and power.

  The Doctor’s skin was slowly returning to a normal temperature, but the anger in his heart was still raging. He dried his dripping face with a towel and went back to the Monitoring Room. The dash to catch the kids and get back the GeoPorts was a game he did not want to miss.