M tucked the astrolabe back into her suit. The birds were chirping outside and the sun was beaming across the grassy meadow. Hearing those birds reminded her of being on her first assignment at the Lawless School, while she was hiding in the woods waiting for Foley, of all people, to get out of his class so that she could plant the deep freeze on him. Then she remembered the secret underground tunnel that she chased him through, and the underground hallways at the Fulbright Academy.
“It’s always been a trap,” said M. “All of it. Doe’s trap. The Lawless School, the Fulbright Academy, they’ve trapped us all into thinking that we’re on different sides. We’ve been fighting one another instead of focusing on the real problem.”
“Recruit them young,” said Zara with venom pulsing in her voice. “Teach them to hate one another. One group follows orders while the other breaks the rules. We’ve been brainwashed.”
Mrs. Freeman nodded. “It’s not something we could just tell people because it’s not what people want to hear. M’s father, Madame Voleur … we needed proof.”
“Seems like your need for proof has cost a lot of lives,” said Devon.
“No, she’s right,” said Evel. “Without concrete evidence, it would seem like another trick. Another trap. It’s genius. Disgusting, but genius.”
“But none of this helps us if we don’t know Doe’s next move,” said M. “What does he need?”
“If it’s a black hole he’s after, he’ll need more of that meteorite,” said Zara. “But we destroyed it all.”
“But what if you didn’t?” asked Jules. “What if he has more?”
“No, I stole the last chunk from him,” M said confidently. “The way he reacted when I took it, it was like I ripped his soul away from him. If there’s more of that meteorite out there, then it’s hidden where he can’t find it.”
“One thing isn’t sitting right with me,” said Devon.
“One thing?” said Foley. “How about everything?!”
“Can it, Foley, and let her talk.” Zara’s face was deadly serious. She’d worked a long time and lost a lot to get to this point. Everyone had. Zara motioned for Devon to continue.
“Who’s hiding this stuff?” Devon’s question was one that M hadn’t considered. She’d been too busy searching for these cursed trinkets to stop and consider the history behind each hiding place. The cane from Scotland Yard. The buried Mutus Liber in Prague. Maybe even the moon rocks from around the world that her father had destroyed. They were all hidden, and that meant someone other than Doe knew their value.
Before anyone could guess at an answer, a shrill ring cut through the tense discussion. Everyone froze.
“Has that phone ever rung before?” M asked her mother.
“I didn’t even know it was working,” she said. “I’m certainly not paying any phone bill.”
“Looks like someone really wants to talk to us,” said Zara as she reached out and answered the phone. “Secret undercover ops residence, how may I direct your call?”
A smirk spread across her face. “Big surprise, M, it’s for you.”
All eyes fell on her as she took the phone from Zara. “Hello?”
“It’s Merlyn,” the voice on the line said.
M smiled. “How did you get this number?”
“I just answered that question, weren’t you listening?” he said buoyantly. “It’s Merlyn. That’s how I got this number. And I had some help from Sercy. Well, a lot of help from Sercy. She can leap sprawling mainframes in a single hack. Listen, we’ve got another major flare-up over here. My parents are on their way to London.”
M’s smile faded just as fast as it had appeared. “Why are they doing that?”
“There’s something going down at another London museum. The Hunterian Museum. Tonight. My parents usually don’t go to these things, but it’s going to be crawling with Lawless grads. You should go, too. It’s a swanky high-society deal, though, so you’ll need to get dolled up and carry a big stick. I promise you’re going to need it.”
M nodded into the phone. “I get it. Contact Ben, let him know where we’ll be.” Then without waiting for a good-bye, she hung up and pulled the plug out of the wall. “That was Merlyn. We don’t have much time. There’s another target in London, at a party of some sort. Get out your credit card, Mom. We need to go shopping.”
* * *
The limo pulled up in front of the Hunterian Museum promptly at eight p.m. M could not stop fidgeting with her outfit. The black lace dress left her arms exposed, the ballerina flats had a slick bottom, and the silver clutch couldn’t fit anything she really needed inside it. If they weren’t walking into a trap, M was sure dressed in one. Still, her mother had convinced her to play the part. Devon, on the other hand, had needed no convincing and was perfectly suited for black-tie attire. Her silver cocktail dress shimmered under every streetlamp they passed and her black hair looked flawless. Zara also seemed quite at home in her dress, a royal-blue satin piece with wraps and straps, while Jules wore a ruby-red dress with ruched, airy fabric that floated around her. The boys wore tuxes, though Evel was struggling with his tie as if it were an assassin trying to choke him.
Just before the door to the limo opened, M realized that this might be as close as she would ever come to a normal life. It was like they were going to prom, instead of a mission. And then the cameras began to flash.
Photographers were outside of the car, calling out to the kids. “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you wearing?” Luckily Mrs. Freeman was posing as their publicist. She told the press that they were American interns for Doctors Without Borders. That called off the photo hounds, who quickly moved on to the next, more glamorous guest arriving behind them.
Inside, the guests were impeccably dressed and every bit as bubbly as the champagne the waiters served alongside a nonstop buffet of appetizers. Their mingling voices mixed with the quartet of musicians playing classical music. Nothing out of the ordinary there — it was just as M imagined a black-tie charity event would be. Boring.
But the real shocker was the museum itself.
Bones. Everywhere, there were bones behind glass, human skeletons of every size, animals sliced open and pickled in jars, even veins, arteries, and nerves splayed out and pasted onto wooden boards and displayed like art.
“What is this place?” asked Devon.
“The Hunterian Museum collection was established by John Hunter, a doctor who advanced modern surgery techniques and anatomical education by leaps and bounds in the eighteenth century,” Jules read off of the pamphlet one of the staff had handed to her as she entered. “The charity event tonight is celebrating his contributions to medicine and raising money for medical organizations around the world.”
“A surgeon’s museum? What would Doe want here?” M whispered before addressing the others. “Okay, here’s what we know. There’s something here that Doe wants. Should we have spent more time researching this museum than getting dressed for the event, yes, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and at least we fit in. Let’s split up and see what stands out. Meet back here in twenty minutes; this place isn’t the Louvre, we should be able to make the rounds by then.”
The team scattered. Mrs. Freeman was on door duty, watching the guests arrive and looking for anyone suspicious — or anyone she recognized from her former double life. Jules grabbed a mini lamb chop with a mint glaze from a passing waiter but couldn’t even take a bite. She and M walked into a display called the Crystal Gallery. It was filled, wall-to-wall, with a gruesome A to Z of anatomy. Fetuses floating in jars, severed spines with nerves still attached, every organ of the human body, bleached and preserved and put on display.
Jules handed the lamb chop back to another passing waiter. “Ugh, I think I just went vegetarian.”
“Not your average run-of-the-mill museum,” agreed M. “So what could be valuable in here? Is there a secret code etched into one of these … things?”
Jules peered closer to study a human skull that wa
s misshapen due to a tumor growth. “Doe has a weird concept of what makes something valuable. I would have stolen gold.”
They continued on through a gallery that showcased the history of surgeons’ instruments. Scalpels, clips, retractors, and scissors through the ages, designed to open, hold, and slice into the human body to cure it. To pull out the evil inside and fix what was broken. The tools reminded M of the sick bay at the academy, when Cal had been stitched up. She shook at the memory of the cold metal instruments clattering on the floor and the creepy collection of eyeballs hidden under the cabinet. But slowly a connection was starting to form. There was a link here somewhere, M knew it.
In the art gallery, a group of professors and doctors were chatting about John Hunter. M and Jules faked being interested in a piece of art to listen to their discussion.
“I disagree,” said a gray-haired gentleman. “If the Irish Giant wanted his remains buried at sea, then he should have been buried at sea. Not living out his afterlife as a bone display.”
“But great things came from his remains,” argued a woman in a burgundy dress. “And while the lengths Hunter went to in procuring the remains were highly illegal by today’s standards —”
“Highly illegal!” the man barked. “I should say so. The Resurrection Men were a disgrace to the sanctity of our profession. Glorified tomb robbers is all they were.”
“Still, there was no other way to gain access to cadavers during Hunter’s time,” the woman continued. “Even criminals were off-limits.”
M’s mind was racing now. Criminals, surgeons, museums — her seemingly random world was suddenly growing smaller and smaller. “Excuse me,” she interjected. “I couldn’t help but overhear your discussion. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Of course not, dear,” the woman said.
“You mentioned the Resurrection Men. Who were they?” asked M.
“Well,” began the woman, “when Hunter was practicing back in the seventeen hundreds, people were not willing to donate their bodies to science. So a group of people saw an opportunity to make money. They would procure bodies after people had passed and sell them to Hunter for his surgical experiments.”
“Procure!” The man laughed. “That’s a kind way to say ‘dig up bodies from the grave and sell them without the families’ consent.’ Here, follow me.”
They moved the conversation out of the art gallery and stopped in front of a giant skeleton. It was almost eight feet tall and kept a creepy watch over the rest of the room.
“This gentleman is Charles Byrne, also known as the Irish Giant.” The man crossed his arms and shot a look at the woman. “Mr. Byrne knew full well that Hunter wanted his bones as a trophy. But he’d spent his life being gawked at, and he wanted some peace in death. He expressly wrote in his will that he wanted to be buried at sea. And yet here he is, thanks to the Resurrection Men.”
“Ah, but it’s only because Mr. Byrne is here that we’re able to understand and treat the medical anomaly that causes this type of giganticism,” countered the woman. “Without him, we would never be able to help those who suffer from the same issue.”
Sensing a rekindling of their argument, M changed the subject. “You mentioned Hunter’s experiments. What were they like? Was he operating underground, in private?”
“Oh goodness no!” both the woman and man agreed.
“Hunter’s surgeries were akin to the performance of a Shakespeare play,” said the woman. “He always had an audience. The idea was to record and share the information from the surgery with the world. Every procedure led to a better understanding of the art of saving lives.”
“Thank you,” said M suddenly. Then she grabbed Jules and the two made their way back to the meet-up point.
“What’s going on, M?” asked Jules.
“The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt!” M rushed to try to connect the dots for Jules. “It’s a painting of surgeons dissecting a corpse. That corpse was a criminal named Aris Klindt. And that painting used a technique called the umbra mortis, the same name of the black hole created by the Fulbrights. And now we’re here, in a surgeon’s museum, filled with the remains of people, many of whom may have been criminals, or may have been stolen by criminals … It’s all connected somehow. We’re missing a clue and I’ll bet it’s right in front of us.”
“Oh no,” gasped Jules and she jumped back as if she’d seen a ghost, nearly crashing into a waiter. But Jules didn’t notice the waiter. Her eyes were glued across the room and she pointed over M’s shoulder with a shaky hand.
M turned to see what was waiting behind her. Her blood turned to ice, like she’d been submerged in the Hamburg River again, and her legs grew rooted to the floor. People were moving around her like a river and she was a rock, holding her ground yet lost at sea.
A skeleton stared back at her: the last last remains that she would have expected to find on display in a museum.
Devon was the first on the scene. “What’s the deal, you two?”
Zara and Foley came next. “Nothing out of the ordinary to report … Well, you know what I mean. What’s up with M and Jules? They seem more haunted than they usually do.”
“Those bones,” said M. “That’s what … I mean, who … I mean, what Doe is after.”
The plaque beside the display read: Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker.
“But Jonathan Wild is the founder of both the Lawless School and the Fulbright Academy. He’s John Doe. I was sure of it,” said M. “This can’t be him.”
M felt an arm clasp around her neck.
“Stop it, M,” said Foley. “I told you it’s impossible. He’s dead. His bones are right there.”
She tried to shrug him off, but Foley’s grip was painfully solid.
“Hey, Foley, what gives? Let her go, this is big news.” Zara tried to push him away from M, but Foley knocked her clear across the room with his free hand. She crash-landed into a group of adults, spilling drinks and shattering a plate of food. All around the museum, a tense quiet arose. Everyone had quieted down to see what was going on.
“No, Zara,” said Foley. “This is big news.”
Devon, Evel, Jules, and M’s mother rushed forward to help M, but strangers in the crowd grabbed them.
“Merlyn did tell you that this was a Lawless-inspired event, didn’t he?” Foley’s mouth twisted in a malformed laugh. “It’s always good to be prepared.”
“What are you doing, Foley?” screamed Zara. “This isn’t you!” She turned and kicked, and the men holding her back fell moaning to the floor. Zara stepped over them and kept her eyes trained on Foley.
“It’s the new me,” he sneered. “I think you’ll grow to like it in time.”
As Zara advanced, a hissing sound came through the air vents, followed by puffs of yellow gas. The non-Lawless guests started screaming and running for the exits, clawing and pushing one another out of the way. But then they stopped. A calmness came over the guests, and M watched in terror as the crowd became zombie drones under the power of the Lawless gas.
Even Zara was overpowered. She slowed her purposeful march across the room and then just stopped. Likewise, Devon, Evel, and M’s mother all stood casually in place as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The men holding them back released their grips but no one moved. A pair of the Lawless thugs still secured Jules, who remained conscious. M was still alert, too.
“Why isn’t the gas affecting us, M?” asked Jules in a panic.
“Because you’ve both received such a high dosage of it in the past, it doesn’t work the same way on you anymore,” answered Foley. “Same goes for me.”
“You don’t have to do this, Foley,” pleaded M.
“And what do you think I’m doing?” he asked.
“Doe’s not worth it. Whatever he’s offering you, he’s lying.” M grimaced as Foley dug his fingers deeper in her neck. She went to swing her arms, but his grip was immobilizing, like he had her nervous system on lo
ckdown.
“Oh, I think he’s worth it, M.” Foley smiled and whipped her around to face him. “See, I’ve invested my whole life in him, so he’d better be worth it.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Jules. “Let her go!”
Foley obliged and M dropped to the floor. She tried to stand, but her legs wobbled out from underneath her. The blond-haired boy left M and circled Jules.
“Do me a favor, Jules,” said Foley as he grabbed her cheeks and cradled her face violently. “Don’t call me Foley anymore. Foley’s dead. He died that night in Hamburg when you scatterbrains left him behind. Isn’t there a rule about never leaving a teammate behind? Wait, is that a Lawless rule or a Fulbright rule? I could never remember.”
“So what do you want us to call you … Doe?” M hadn’t finished the sentence before she launched herself at him, but she was tackled savagely by two of the zombies: her mother and Zara. They looked at her through dead eyes.
“Oh, don’t call me Doe, either,” he said. “That name has worn out its welcome, hasn’t it? Let’s try my old name back on for size … I hope it still fits. Call me Jonathan. Jonathan Wild. Thief-Taker. And that’s what I intend to do.”
Wild pointed with his left hand. “You, bring me that,” he commanded, and another guest smashed open a glass display to get a bottle, which he carried over to his master. “Isn’t it just like a doctor to keep chloroform out in the open? With kids around, even. Tsk, tsk.”
He uncorked the bottle and poured its contents onto a cloth napkin. Then he covered Jules’s mouth. Her legs kicked in defiance and then went limp. Wild let loose a sick grin that really didn’t belong on Foley’s face.
“How?” asked M. “How are you still alive?”
“I’ll admit it wasn’t easy at first.” Wild paced back to M and waved to zombie Zara and Mom to let her up. “I was caught, sentenced to death by hanging, but I was rather attached to my neck. So I took a potion, a special elixir that I’d gotten my hands on.”
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