M took Jules’s hand and magblasted them off the ground. Her legs and arms flailed like she had jumped from a tall building and was plummeting down, but instead, she was falling in reverse. The next thing she knew, M was perched on the helicopter’s landing skid with Jules in tow and she waved to the pilot, her mother. And this time, her mother opened the door to let M inside.
The beating blades of the helicopter weren’t any quieter on the inside of the cabin. Instead they made a different kind of white noise that rattled the riders. M felt like she had stepped into her own skull, and the memory of her mother was driving. But it was all real. Mrs. Freeman gave her a slight nod, then started to pull away from the museum. M clutched her mother’s shoulder and shook her head no. “Not yet! More friends coming!”
She looked out of the side of the helicopter and watched as the Fulbrights surrounding the courtyard swept forward to collect the survivors. Devon leapt right into their midst and started brawling. From this high up, it was like watching a video game. Devon’s skills were unquestionable. She was whupping real-deal soldiers like they were cardboard cutouts. But there were more coming. There were always more. And from this vantage, M could see that Devon was losing the battle. She was fighting with anger, not her wits.
M’s mother twirled her hand in the air, a signal that meant let’s wrap this up before we have company. So M took aim and blasted the next wave of Fulbrights charging at Devon … and Devon got the message. Devon grabbed Evel and flew straight up, like superheroes taking flight and jumping right out of a 3-D movie screen. Behind and below them, the soldiers were gathering and turning their attention, and weapons, toward the getaway vehicle.
When they landed, the helicopter tipped sideways. M grabbed Evel and pulled him in while Devon created a shield to deflect the Fulbright attacks. Mrs. Freeman shifted the helicopter to the right, leaving the museum behind them. Devon climbed in and shut the door behind her, airtight, and suddenly all the noise of the engine was gone.
“Is that everyone?” asked Mrs. Freeman.
M was stunned, but managed to get an answer out. “Yes.” Then she added, “Isn’t it conspicuous to fly a helicopter that close to a national building?”
“Only if they can see you, dear,” said her mother as she flipped another switch. M watched as the reflection of the helicopter in a midtown building’s windows shimmered, then disappeared. “You can’t find what you can’t see.”
Jules leaned forward. “Mrs. Freeman, I’m Jules Byrd. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Hello, Jules. It’s always nice to meet M’s friends,” her mother said in a chipper voice. “Come to think of it, I haven’t met that many. Hmmm, you may even be the first.”
The helicopter cruised over the city. As M, Jules, Devon, and Evel looked down, the blue lights of police cars flashed through every street. London didn’t know what had hit it. M watched the skies for Fulbrights, but there were none. The only other eyes in the sky were police and reporter helicopters, looking for a great shot of a great story. They flew by them, sometimes incredibly close, but didn’t seem to notice the invisible vehicle.
Her mother continued on, leaving the city behind and heading toward an airier England, with lush green countryside fenced off by stone walls, bushes, and forests. Finally she landed near a small cottage.
“Okay, we’re here,” she announced as she pulled off the set of headphones she had worn during the flight. “Careful getting out. We’re still undercover … and stepping off an invisible landing is harder than you think.”
The others shuffled out, leaving M and her mother in the cabin. “I’m still mad at you, you know.”
“I know.” Mrs. Freeman sat down across from M. Her hair was pulled back and flawless as usual while M’s was an untamed pouf of cotton candy. “You look … frazzled, but healthy.”
“And you look perfectly put together, as always,” said M. “I’m still mad at you.”
“You said that, dear,” her mom reminded her.
“Because you didn’t let me finish. I’m still mad at you, but I missed you.” M let her shoulders sag and felt her body relax at telling the truth. There was a black cloud between her and her mother, charged with enough energy to create bolts of lightning … natural wonder and natural destruction. But that’s what families can do to one another. “Are the moon rocks safe?”
“They’re safe.”
“Do you have any other secrets I should know about?” M asked. “Because we’ve had enough secrets between us.”
“We have.” Her mother reached back, pulled her hair down, then messed it up so that it matched M’s hair nest. M laughed and her mom smiled. “Do you know why I keep my hair back all the time? It’s because your father hated it up. See, when my hair is down, it looks exactly like yours. Wild, tangled, free. He loved that about my hair and he loved it about yours, too.”
“Dad loved my hair?” asked M.
“He loved everything about you,” her mother said, and her smile turned down at the corners, just slightly. “After the accident, my hair reminded me so much of him that I tied it up. Hid it. Did my best to forget it was there in the first place because losing my hair was easier than admitting that I’d lost him. I may have done the same thing to you, M. I’m sorry.”
Tears welled in her mother’s eyes and M gently reached over and touched her knee. Then M said three magic words. “I forgive you.”
They sat in silence for another few minutes. Resting in the truth they had finally shared. M imagined her mother as a young woman in love, a young mother in hope, and a young widow in loss. She’d thought for her entire life that her mother had been cold and calculating, but that wasn’t the case. She was frail and breakable, so like fine art, she put herself behind glass.
M pulled out the Chaucer astrolabe. “Well, at least we got away with this. Thanks to some quick thinking on Evel’s part.”
“What is it?” her mother asked. “What does it do?”
“That’s exactly what we need to find out. Because both Lawless and the Fulbrights are after this thing.” M stepped through the door and felt the ground come up to meet her. She stumbled awkwardly, but wasn’t hurt. Devon, Evel, and Jules were sitting on the grass outside.
“I’m glad you’re here, Devon,” said M as she kneeled down and showed her the astrolabe. “Why is this important?”
Devon stared at the gold disc, then shook her head. “No idea.”
“It’s not time to be tough, Devon, it’s time to tell the truth,” demanded Jules.
“She’s not being tough,” said Evel. “I mean, she is tough, but she’s being honest about the astrolabe. I don’t think she’s ever heard of it in her life.”
“How can you be so sure?” asked Jules.
“Because she’s my sister,” said Evel. He looked at Devon, but she stared off in another direction. She was angry and had every right to be. John Doe had hung her out to dry. “I mean, sure, she threw her big brother into a five-hundred-year-old artifact to get a shot at M. But she didn’t know what she was protecting. If she had, we wouldn’t have it right now.”
Devon’s face shifted slightly from angry to annoyed. “The others knew what to protect,” Devon said, “but they were supposed to be reporting to me. How can someone lower on the totem pole know more than their leader?”
“Because they were going to steal it, too,” insisted M. “Like I was trying to tell you, Devon. You thought you were double-agenting Lawless, but Doe pulled one over on all of us. He’s leading both factions.”
“That’s insanity, Freeman. Did I bump you on the head too hard or something?” said Devon.
“It’s true,” said Mrs. Freeman. “I can tell you more, but let’s get inside first before we draw too much attention.”
As soon as M set foot inside of the cottage, she felt haunted. Or maybe she was the one doing the haunting. Rustic, sparse, and open, the small house was unnervingly similar to the one Madame Voleur had lived in back in the States. The house s
he had died in. The floors even let out similar creaks as they walked through. A shiver ran down M’s spine.
Her mother closed the door and locked it. As if one dead bolt was going to keep the bad guys out. Everyone found a seat and Mrs. Freeman began speaking. “M’s father was a double agent. He discovered the truth about Doe years ago. And he gave his life searching for a way to prove it.”
“He did a bang-up job,” said Devon as she peered outside around a closed curtain. “Because no one seems to know this little tidbit of trivia that would have been life-altering to everyone involved.”
M’s mother nodded in agreement. “He never found a convincing way to prove it. He needed to find the smoking gun to put Doe and Lawless away. He was close. We knew he was getting close when Lawless and Doe both began to chip away at his reputation. People who used to be our friends left our lives … or even tried to kill us. One person succeeded.”
“Mom, it’s okay,” said M. She knew her mother was talking about Ms. Watts, but her mother clearly didn’t know the whole story. “Dad did have proof. He hid it in our house, and he told me where to find it. It was an old yearbook for the first Lawless School class.”
Mrs. Freeman paused. “M, we need that proof. Hard, undeniable proof. Where is it?”
M shook her head. “I don’t have it anymore. Bandit took the page that showed Jonathan Wild as the founder. He’s John Doe. I don’t know how it’s possible, but it is. I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Well, this just gets sadder and sadder, doesn’t it?” said Devon. “You’re lucky I’m in a bad mood, or else I’d turn you all over to the Fulbrights.”
Evel reached over and put his hand on Devon’s shoulder. She didn’t pull away. M knew how much that meant. The sister who had given up her choice in life to save the family for Evel’s decision was now treating him like a brother again. He smiled.
“If it helps,” Evel said, “I’ve seen both sides try to take out M and her friends. They’re scared of her. And I’m backing anything that they’re scared of. You should, too.”
“They should be scared of me,” hissed Devon.
While they were talking, a door somewhere moaned open slowly. M and Devon trained their magblasts on the direction the sound came from. “Mom, it’s an old house, but doors don’t open by themselves.”
“Hold your fire,” Mrs. Freeman said and she stepped in front of the girls. “I have guests. And you might not like seeing them, but they were the ones who convinced me that you needed help in London.”
A hand stuck out from behind the door and waved a white flag made out of cloth tied to a stick. “Easy, easy, M. You don’t want to blast your old roomie, do you?”
Out stepped Zara and Foley. Foley was holding a box with both hands.
“You.” M spit the word out of her mouth like phlegm. “Ditch me and run back to my mom?”
“Sure, it looks bad, but we were in a bad way back in the forest,” sputtered Zara. “And you were getting into some weird ideas. Using the Ronin to fight, I mean, c’mon.”
“Except it worked, Zara,” said M matter-of-factly as she pulled out the Chaucer astrolabe and flashed it to the others. “Ronin helped us steal this.”
Foley’s eyes lit up. “Is that what I think it is?”
“If you think it’s a six-hundred-year-old device that can map the universe, then yeah, it’s exactly what you think it is,” said M. “Now, what’s in the box?”
“Moon rocks,” admitted her mother.
“The moon rocks from Dad’s old hideout?” asked M. “And you gave it to them?”
“For safekeeping,” said Zara. “Look, I was wrong to abandon you guys …”
“It’s behind us now.” M surprised the room by letting Zara off the hook. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the astrolabe?”
“I’ve never heard of that thing before,” said Zara. “Honest. You figured this one out on your own.”
“But you still sent my mom to help us?” M asked, suspicious.
“The underground lit up,” said Foley. “We could tell that something was going on, we just didn’t know what. But it had M Freeman written all over it.”
M lifted the astrolabe to study it against the ceiling. She tried to remember how Keyshawn had described the anatomy of the astrolabe. Twisting the latch on the back, M removed the three main pieces. The outermost one was thin and ornate.
“That’s called the rete,” mumbled Foley.
“It tells the position of the stars in the sky, doesn’t it?” said M.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Foley sounded surprised. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve been paying attention.” M flipped the next disk over in her hands. Swiping lines blossomed out, etched into the heavy metal. “This is the plate. It represents the position of Earth. And this” — she held the back piece where the plate nested — “is the mater. The question is, Foley, why do you know so much about astrolabes?”
“I was a geek in a previous life,” he joked.
“News flash, you’re a geek in this life, too,” said Devon. “So what makes this astrolabe so valuable? They were all built the same, right?”
“They’re similar enough that the other astrolabe I grabbed fooled your friend Cal. I found that one on my way to room forty, but it’s at least a couple hundred years older than Chaucer’s.”
“Nice work, Evel,” Jules said, beaming. “Looks like M is rubbing off on you.”
“They’re similar, but not identical,” argued Foley. “The rete, the plate, and the mater are all usually pretty alike. But the key is on the back of the mater. If you look, there’s another set of etchings. Those are scales for calculations involving the sun. But they’re specific to the location of the person who used the astrolabe. Someone in London would have a different scale of where the sun rises and sets than, say, someone from California or Russia.”
“And these scales were created by Geoffrey Chaucer,” said M as she rubbed her hand over the astrolabe’s back. “But that still doesn’t tell me why it’s important. I mean, this plus the Mutus Liber, it’s all unsolvable.”
“Maybe it’s a map?” suggested Jules. “Maybe the astrolabe and the book are supposed to be used together to lead us to a … um … a treasure?”
“A treasure?” echoed M. “I don’t think so.”
“Let’s take it one step at a time,” suggested Mrs. Freeman. “Start with the astrolabe. What does it do?”
“Tells time,” said M.
“Maps the sky,” said Foley.
“Predicting.” M put the pieces back together and slid them around with her fingers. Then she looked up at the others. “Predicting, that’s it. This predicts the position of the sky. Sunrise, moonrise, and where the stars will be at any given time of year.”
“So how does that help us?” asked Zara. “Explain a little more — we’re not all living inside your head, M.”
“What if,” started M, “there was a celestial event that happened during Chaucer’s time — say, a comet that passed through space? Once the comet became part of the night sky, it could have been mapped.”
“There are always comets and asteroids in space,” said Devon. “How would this Chaucer guy know the difference between it and a star, or an airplane in the sky?”
“Well, there were a lot fewer airplanes in the thirteen hundreds,” said Mrs. Freeman.
“And don’t comets have paths, or orbits, that they travel?” asked Jules. “Like Halley’s Comet, it passes Earth every seventy-five years. Astronomers had been noting it since, like, 239 B.C.”
Everyone stared at her. “What? I have a lot of time on my hands since Doe stole my abilities. And I lived in a traveling carnival. The night sky was my ceiling, so after enough stargazing I did a little reading. It’s not like M owns all the rights to knowing random facts.”
M shrugged. It was true.
“Anyway,” continued Jules, “people didn’t realize that there was a pattern to the comet’s approach until som
e guy named Halley in the seventeen hundreds. I think the comet has even appeared in an old tapestry of a battle. Apparently comets were seen as a sign of change or disaster back then. I mean, it must have looked like a broken star to people who didn’t have telescopes. Like the sky was falling.”
“Wait,” interrupted Evel. “Comet? There’s a comet that’s heading past Earth right now.”
A sick feeling rose in the pit of M’s stomach. “Comets can make meteors as chunks fall off. What if this comet hurling our way was the source of the meteorite that caused the black hole that destroyed the Lawless School?”
The room fell silent until Foley broke the spell. “That comet is thousands of miles from us in deep, deep space. The chances of a chunk of it breaking off and landing where Doe could get it are slim to none. It’s completely laughable. I think we’re spiraling down a delusional path, which is exactly what Doe wants. What if that astrolabe doesn’t do anything? What if he’s just sending us in circles, tying us up with meaningless mysteries while he’s making bigger moves?”
Again, M held up the astrolabe. “He doesn’t want to get a chunk. He wants the whole thing. You don’t know this guy, Foley. He’s crazy. He’s smart and he’s insane. Doe created the good guys and the bad guys, and I have no idea why. But I can make an educated guess about what he wants. If he had this astrolabe, he’d know the path of the comet.”
“So he’d know the comet’s path, whoopty-doo,” argued Foley. “What good would that be to him?”
“If he knows the path, he knows the trajectory,” explained M. “And if he knows the trajectory, he could try to alter its course.”
“How?” asked M’s mother. “What on Earth could cause a comet to change direction?”
“A missile?” suggested Jules.
“A satellite?” said Devon.
“A laser?” added Evel.
“A magnet?” guessed Zara.
“No,” M said slowly. “A black hole.”
“You are all officially crazy,” snapped Foley. “I mean, listen to yourselves. Black holes, comets, trajectories, what do you know about any of this? I’m telling you, this has misdirection written all over it. You’re falling into Doe’s trap.”
Mayhem Page 18
