Harley threw a screwdriver across the room. It hit the wall, bounced off the floor, and ricocheted off Jasper’s feet.
“May I be of assistance, sir?” Monti’s service clockwork asked.
“I can’t get this stupid thing to work,” Harley said. “I’ve checked it a thousand times. The connections are solid, most of the parts are new, and I tested the old ones to make sure they aren’t faulty. It should work!”
“Perhaps some tea to calm your nerves?” Jasper said.
“No, thanks,” Harley said as he turned the scanner over in his hand. He made a slight adjustment before plugging it back into his test equipment. The moment he did, data started to roll on the monitor, but the results looked the same as before.
Harley’s eyes grew heavy, and he yawned. It was getting close to ten thirty, and he needed to get home before his mom got back from her late-night shift at the diner. He shook his head, trying to focus, but it wasn’t long before his eyes closed. After it happened a second time, Harley decided to call it a night.
“Will you require an escort to the subway depot?” Jasper asked, his eyes lit up against the dark backdrop of the workshop.
“I’m okay,” Harley said as he reached over to turn off the monitor, but something caught his eye. He hit the cursor so the screen would page up, and he paused. There was some kind of anomaly in the data. What should have been static wasn’t. Or at least it didn’t look like static.
“What is it, sir?” Jasper asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Harley said. He opened a drawer and pulled out a set of headphones, sliding them over his ears and plugging them into the test equipment. There was a tone that Harley couldn’t place, but he knew it was significant. It had to be.
Harley walked over to a shelf on the wall next to his workbench. After shuffling through components and boxes of spare parts, he found what he was looking for. Harley blew a layer of dust off the recording device, and set it on the table to hook it up to the machine.
“This better work,” he said.
He flipped a button, and the recording device powered up. He began recording. Once he captured a sample, Harley brought the file into a sound-editing program on his DE Tablet. He adjusted the sound waves, clearing out as much static as he could.
As he played the sound back, Harley’s eyes lit up. He recognized the melody of the song, but he didn’t know which song it was.
“Have you heard this before?” Harley asked as he played it a second time.
“I’m afraid not,” Jasper said.
Harley played it a third time, while running a music recognition program. The results were immediate: The words TCHAIKOVSKY’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 were displayed on the screen.
“I got you,” Harley said. He was so focused that he didn’t hear Monti walk up behind him.
“What are you still doing here?”
“I was getting ready to go, but I think I found him.”
“Von Strife?” Monti said. “How?”
“It was a fluke,” Harley said. He explained what happened with the sound anomaly. Monti asked a few questions, and by the end he was smiling.
“All we need to do is break the encryption so we can translate the song,” Monti said. “Once we do that, we’ll be able to pinpoint Von Strife.”
Harley sighed as he pulled at his hair. “Even if we ran that song through the Difference Engine, it could take months.”
“If you were Von Strife, what would you use for a password?” Monti asked.
Harley frowned. “Wait, are you serious? We’d have a better chance at getting struck by lightning.”
“Maybe, but we don’t have much of a choice.”
“I don’t know,” Harley said after a sigh. “What about his daughter’s name?”
“It’s a bit obvious, but why not?”
Harley input Sophia’s name into his DE Tablet, but it didn’t work.
“Not to worry,” Monti said. “I think you’re on the right track. Von Strife is anything but random. He’s going to use something important… something with great meaning.”
Harley and Monti tried more than seventy-five combinations over the next hour. Some were complex and some simple. They exchanged numbers and symbols for letters, and they flipped some of the words around. Nothing was working.
“Von Strife is obsessed with changelings, right?” Harley asked as he paced the floor.
“That’s a safe assumption,” Monti said.
“What if the passkey has something to do with that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… maybe a changeling power, or even a type of changeling. What kind of changeling was his daughter?”
“Nobody knows,” Monti said. “He kept that a secret.”
“Didn’t Ernie say that the two of them shared a similar strain of changeling blood?”
“Holfessen-Streigsin.”
“If you tell me how to spell it, I’ll plug it in,” Harley said.
Monti did just that, but it didn’t work.
“What about a genetic code?” Harley asked.
Monti’s eyes shot wide. “Not bad. Can you do a search for any kind of a common genetic sequence shared by all changelings?”
Harley typed the words into a search feature on his DE Tablet and then entered the answer into the decoder.
“Bingo.”
As soon as he hit Enter, the computer started to decrypt the song. Within the hour they knew where to find the Paragon Engine, which meant that they knew where to find Von Strife.
IN HIS DEFENSE
By the time the Zephyr arrived at Iron Bridge Academy the next morning, a dozen Templar military airships had assembled in the skies overhead. There were destroyers, battleships, and aircraft carriers, but instead of patrolling the high seas, they were hovering in the air as the rumble from their Merlin TECH engines made the earth tremble.
There was talk of canceling school, but Iron Bridge was the safest place in New Victoria, and probably in the world. The Zephyr had been crawling with Templar soldiers assigned to protect the students, and as Max stepped out of the subway depot and onto the front lawn, he saw soldiers stationed at every door.
Clusters of students stood with necks craned so they could watch the spectacle in the sky. Sprig was resting comfortably as a chinchilla in Max’s jacket pocket. She stirred when he accidentally knocked into Winston Ainsworth, the boy who had asked Max for his autograph after Max had helped save the six changelings from slavers.
“Sorry,” Max said.
“No problem,” Winston said. His eyes were focused on the sky like everyone else’s.
Max weaved through the throng, trying not to bump into anyone else. It wasn’t easy. With all the fog, it was hard to see.
“Does anyone know why there are warships flying over our school?” Max heard Todd ask. He was standing in the middle of a flower garden while an angry garden gnome attempted to push Todd’s boot off a patch of tulips.
“Maybe they’re looking for Strange,” Ross said.
“With the navy?” Todd asked.
Ross shrugged.
“Wait,” Todd said as his eyes lit up. “Maybe we’ve been attacked by an army of clockworks. Did you bring the camera?”
“Yeah,” Ross said. “Let’s go.”
Max shook his head as the Toad brothers ran toward the school, hoping to take snapshots of invading clockworks on the rampage when they probably should have been running for their lives.
“There you are,” Harley said, sounding out of breath.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked.
“Ernie’s in trouble.”
“He’s here?”
Harley nodded. “The changelings have him cornered near the fountain by Sendak Hall.”
Max didn’t wait for Harley to finish. He took off, with Harley right behind him. They skirted the crowd and ran up the hill that led to the building where the changelings spent most of their time. Sprig wasn’t happy about getting jostled.<
br />
“What’s going on?” she asked as she poked her head out of the pocket to look around.
“It’s Ernie,” Max said. “We might need your help.”
Sprig yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth with her tiny paw. She skittered out of the pocket and up Max’s jacket to sit on his shoulder. “I can’t see them, but Sprig can feel the anger,” Sprig said.
Max couldn’t feel the anger, but he could hear the shouting. He twisted the ring on his finger to activate his gauntlet as Sprig leaped out and turned into a white tiger in midair. Max watched her tail undulate as he followed her up the path. Then he saw them.
Twenty changelings had gathered around Ernie like a pack of wild dogs. Many of them were even snarling as they pressed in. Natalia stood protectively in front of Ernie. Her eyes were narrowed as she exchanged verbal jabs with the changelings. She didn’t have any powers, but she wasn’t backing down.
Sprig roared, and the sound reverberated through Max’s chest. Changelings stumbled to get out of the way as the predator cat ran toward them. Sprig threw herself in the middle of the chaos. Her ears were pinned back, and her teeth were bared as she pawed at the air in warning.
“Get back!” she warned, her voice rising above the others.
“What’s going on?” Max asked as he pushed to reach Ernie. Someone shoved him in the back, and Max stumbled before he could see who it was. When he turned around, he was half expecting to see Smoke. Instead, he saw Tejan Chandra glaring at him.
Max paused. He had always gotten along with Tejan, but something had turned the changelings into an angry mob, and it looked like Ernie was the first target on their list.
“He’s a traitor!” someone shouted.
“Yeah, he’s just like Smoke!” another voice called out.
There was so much commotion that Max couldn’t tell who was talking, not that it mattered. It was clear that the changelings were of one voice. Yi was there, and so was Denton. Then Max saw Nadya and Geppetto. The only changeling Max didn’t see was Raven.
“Are you okay?” Max asked.
Ernie nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
Someone shoved Max into Natalia as Harley pushed through the crowd. Harley slipped past Max and grabbed Yi by his jacket collar. “What’s your problem?”
“You!” Yi said as his eyes sparked with flames.
Sprig roared as Nadya closed in.
“This is crazy,” Max said.
“I’m sorry,” Ernie said. “I didn’t mean to get you guys involved.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Natalia said. Her eyes were frantic, but she was standing her ground.
“Yeah, right,” Yi said. “He’s working with Von Strife, just like Smoke was.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Natalia asked.
“Then how do you explain what happened in Bludgeon Town? He led us into a trap.”
“Ross and Todd found those slavers, not Ernie,” Natalia said. “So are they working for Von Strife, too?”
“Probably.”
“I think you’ve fried your brain,” Natalia said.
Fire ignited in Yi’s hands.
“Knock it off, both of you!” Max said.
“Tell us where they are,” Tejan said through clenched jaws.
“Yeah, where’re Hale and Strange?” Laini, a changeling with bright pink hair and what looked like butterfly wings, cried out.
“We have to do something before this gets out of hand,” Max said.
“I think it’s too late for that,” Harley said.
Sprig threw her head back and roared.
“It’s going to take more than a tiger to beat us,” Yi said as he stood in the morning haze like a human torch.
“We don’t want to fight you,” Max said, “but we’re not going to let you hurt Ernie. Besides, why would we help Von Strife? Ernie’s a changeling, and he’s our friend. I’d like to think that we’re your friends, too.”
“How am I your friend?” Yi asked.
Max rubbed his forehead. “You’ve never given us a chance.”
“That’s because we don’t trust you,” Yi said. “You’re not one of us.”
“Ernie is, and he’s our friend,” Max said. “And you didn’t second-guess him when he helped you capture the other slavers, so why are you doing it now?”
“We didn’t know he was working for Von Strife,” Yi said. The comment was met with a murmur of agreement from the other changelings.
“Do you have any proof?”
Yi glared at Max, but he didn’t say anything. Max looked at the other changelings, waiting for them to give an account, but no one could.
“This is just what Von Strife would want us to do,” Max said. “We’re not going to bring him down if we’re fighting one another.”
“You don’t know what we’ve been through,” Nadya said. “I can’t go anywhere without wondering if someone is going to try to kidnap me…. None of us can. And how do the Templar decide to protect us? With these,” she said, pulling her hair back to show Max the inhibitor just above her ear. “They try to snuff out our powers so we can’t even protect ourselves.”
“That’s not Ernie’s fault,” Max said. “Neither are the kidnappings.”
“He’s right,” Raven said as she walked down the front steps of Sendak Hall to stand next to Max.
“What, you’re on their side?” Yi asked as the flames grew in his hands.
“Don’t be such a hothead,” Raven said, earning a smattering of laughter from the changelings.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Yi asked.
“You’re doing a good enough job making a fool of yourself without me,” Raven said.
There was more laughter.
“Standing around here and arguing isn’t going to get Hale or Strange back,” Max said.
“He’s right,” Denton said, earning a reluctant murmur of agreement from a few of the others.
“Then if it wasn’t Ernie, who set us up?” Yi asked. He had supporters as well.
“We’re not sure, but we know where Von Strife is,” Harley said. “That’s why the ships are here. We’re going to war.”
Yi looked up to the sky. “Then they’re not here for us?”
“What? For the changelings?” Max asked.
“Yeah,” Yi said.
Max put one arm around Ernie’s shoulder and stroked Sprig’s neck. “They’d have to go through us first.”
EAVESDROPPING
“I don’t get it,” Ernie said as he walked with the other Grey Griffins to their homeroom. “Why did you do that for me?”
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
“It’s just that I’ve been kind of a jerk lately, but… I don’t know. You stood up for me anyway.”
“Why wouldn’t we?” Max asked as Sprig padded behind them as a white tiger. “Isn’t that what Grey Griffins are supposed to do?”
Ernie smiled, though not for long. “So does that mean we’re friends again?”
“We never stopped being your friend,” Natalia said as she linked arms with Ernie. “We still love you, even when you act like a jerk.”
“Thanks,” Ernie said. “For everything.”
The second bell had already rung. Dr. Thistlebrow and a few other teachers were on the front lawn wrangling curious students who couldn’t stop watching the airships hovering in the sky.
“Hey, is that Logan?” Harley asked, pointing to a man in a black duster jacket.
“I can’t tell,” Max said.
“It is,” Ernie said, confirming Harley’s suspicion.
“What’s he doing here?” Harley asked.
Max shrugged. “Beats me,” he said, “but I bet it has something to do with those warships.”
“Let’s go find out,” Harley said. He headed toward the door Logan disappeared through.
“What about class?” Natalia asked.
“It’s just homeroom,” Harley said. “All we do is sit there and listen to announcements.”
“I don’t know.”
“You can do what you want, but I’m going,” Harley said.
“Me too,” Ernie said.
“Sorry,” Max said, before following the other two.
“Fine,” Natalia said. “Wait for me.”
They followed Logan into the building until they came to a set of double doors that led to an off-limits area controlled by the Sciences Council. Even though most of it was still under construction, some of the teachers had offices there. It was also home to a research facility, a small publishing house for academic books, and, from what Max had heard, a library that rivaled the Templar Library off the coast of Iceland.
“They’re not going to let us in there,” Max said when he saw armed guards stationed at the doors.
“Can’t you call Logan?” Harley asked.
“If he wanted us in there, he would have told us about it.”
“I might be able to help,” Ernie said. He reached into his pocket to pull out a small brass mechanism with dials and a lever.
“What is it?” Harley asked.
“It’s called an Interdimensional Phase Adjuster,” Ernie said.
“Wait, that’s an IPA?” Harley said, a smile creeping across his face. “How did you get one?”
“Are you two going to let us in on your little secret, or are we just going to stand here?” Natalia asked.
“Those things make you invisible,” Harley said.
“Actually,” Ernie said, “it vibrates your molecules so you can be in two dimensions at the same time. It’s kind of like being invisible, but you can walk through walls and stuff like that. You can even scream and nobody will hear you.”
“That’s what you did to escape the slavers’ net, isn’t it?” Harley asked.
“Yep.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about it before?” Natalia said.
“I couldn’t,” Ernie said.
“Where’d you get it?” Max asked.
Ernie hesitated. His eyes went from Max to the floor, but eventually they landed back on Max. “Look, I shouldn’t say anything, but… well, Obadiah gave it to me.”
Grey Griffins: The Clockwork Chronicles #2: The Relic Hunters Page 20