Jack had never heard anyone actually use the word rue before, although he had read it plenty of times. It made him smile.
Kyle smiled, too, but not from anything either Tara or Jack had said. “And we have her,” he said, pointing toward a blue dot flying across the yellow sky toward them.
Cornelia.
Jack felt a rush of relief that the old bird was safe. Maybe, just maybe, she had found Lottie and could tell them where to go.
* * *
Cornelia was parched, and needed to drink from a plant before she could do more than croak. Kyle pinned the brooch to her ankle and looked after her while Tara and Jack took the opportunity to quickly sort through the oddments from the blue room. A lot could be discarded instantly, like the necklace that gave Tara a super-deep voice, or the glove with six fingers that magically created an actual sixth finger when Jack put it on. There was a glass rod that gave the holder owl’s eyes and the ability to see better in the dark when they were holding it. Tara slipped that into her pocket. Anything with even the slightest potential as a weapon against The Evil, Jack put into his embroidered sack. The trick would be remembering what did what.
Outside, the chittering and chattering of bugs was getting louder. Any second now, Jack bet, The Evil would tire of waiting and storm their shelter. He wasn’t in any hurry to meet the army, but if he had to, he wanted to do it on his terms.
Kyle came back with Cornelia, who hopped onto Jack’s shoulder and rubbed her feathered head against his cheek.
“Charlie,” she said.
“You’re talking about Lottie, aren’t you?” said Jack. “Charlotte. Grandma’s sister.”
Cornelia bobbed her head. “Charlie.”
“Did you find her?”
Cornelia tugged at Jack’s sleeve, pulling him to the window. She stretched out a wing and pointed to a faint shape visible on the horizon. Jack squinted. It looked like a tree, but surely it couldn’t be. A tree that far away would have to be enormous.
“So that’s where she is?” Jack asked Cornelia. “That’s where we have to go?”
Cornelia bobbed again.
“It’d be so much easier if we could fly,” said Kyle, peering out the window and swallowing nervously.
“If Jaide was here,” said Jack, “we might be able to. But she’s not, so we’ll have to run.”
“Last chance for a drink,” said Tara, with a menacing glare at the nearest plant. She had daubed her cheeks in mud and tied her hair back. With the sword in her hand she looked less like a suburban girl from Scarborough and more like a dangerous desert warrior, slaughterer of bugs. Hopefully The Evil would see her that way, too.
When they had taken their fill and checked they hadn’t left anything useful behind, they left the window and walked back into darkness, Jack relying on his natural sight and Tara holding the glass owl’s-eye rod. Kyle stood between them, one hand on each of their shoulders so he wouldn’t trip over anything or get lost. Cornelia clung to Jack’s shoulder, rocking gently from side to side.
The plan was to find another way out on the other side of the building, one that wasn’t blocked by the Evil Bug Army. That meant being quiet, but the plants weren’t having any of that. The first tree they came to shook and clattered its fleshy branches, even when Tara threatened it with decapitation if it wasn’t quiet. The next took up the rattling cry, and soon the whole jungle was astir, making a racket that could surely be heard from outside. Abandoning stealth, Tara and Jack broke into a run, with Kyle doing his best to keep up. The sound of him panting was loud in Jack’s ear, even over the jungle’s hue and cry.
Just when it seemed as though the building had no other side, a glimmer of light appeared ahead. Jack changed course for it, holding his bone-scimitar out in front of him in case anything leaped out at them. They reached the door unscathed and stepped out into a long, narrow space between buildings that might once have been a street, although one with no right angles or straight lines. It was now littered with bones and rubble from collapsing walls. The multiple suns cast complex shadows across their path. Cornelia took off to guide them.
Barely had they gone a hundred yards when Cornelia let out a loud squawk and practically flapped backward in midair.
“Avast! Avast!”
Jack had never entirely understood what that word meant, but from the way Cornelia was acting he guessed she was saying, “Stop! Turn back!”
When, from around the next corner, a vast rolling wave of bugs appeared, sweeping down the street like a slow-motion flood of water, that interpretation was dramatically confirmed.
++We see you, troubletwister!++ cried The Evil. ++We see you!++
“Go back,” Jack said to Tara and Kyle, pushing them behind him. “It’s me it wants. I’ll hold it off while you escape.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Tara, holding the sword in front of her with both hands. “You can’t take it on alone.”
“Yes, I can. I have all this stuff.” He jiggled his embroidered sack. “And I have this.”
He poked his toe into the nearest shadow, and felt the familiar all-over tingling sensation of becoming Shadow Jack. The world went flat and dark, and Tara and Kyle seemed to tower over him like giants. They spun around, looking for him. He swept along the shadow, crossed over into another one, then popped up ten feet away.
“See?” he said. “I’ll be okay. Now, go! Stay inside and I’ll catch up with you later.”
Kyle pulled at Tara’s arm. “He’s right. And we don’t have time to argue.”
Tara looked up at the approaching swarm and nodded. Together, they ran back inside, out of danger.
Jack squared up to face the swarm and narrowed his eyes.
++Yes,++ said The Evil. ++Stay with us, Jackaran Kresimir Shield. We have watched you for so long. We have always known that you would join us. You have always been the one!++
He didn’t waste his breath replying. He put his hand inside the embroidered sack and felt around for a small ceramic dog that he and Tara had found in the junk from the blue room. Bringing it out into the light, he breathed on it and set it down on the ground. The Evil rose up and around Jack, insects crawling and merging into shapes too hideous to describe, while the pressure on Jack’s mind rose up, too, threatening to subsume him completely.
With a chipper bark, the pottery dog sprang into motion and ran in a cheerful, brainless circle. Jack vanished into the shadow and The Evil crashed down, right where he had been standing. The dog yapped and yapped, but as it was a Warden artifact, The Evil couldn’t take it over. The Evil’s roar of frustration followed Jack as he fled to the other side of the street, where he popped up again and waved his bone-scimitar over his head.
“You missed me. Over here!”
The grotesque mass of The Evil swept around to face him. It was made of many small, quick-moving parts, but as a whole it was slow and lumbering.
++Do not run from us,++ The Evil hissed into his mind, stopping his legs so he couldn’t move. ++It is most unnecessary.++
Jack didn’t need his legs to flee through the shadows, and he did so again before the insects could come down on him en masse.
In another spot, legs working again, his questing fingers found another object in the sack. This one was a lump of milky crystal that, when activated, froze everything around it for a minute. He and Tara had discovered its power by accident, and had spent an uncomfortable and terrifying sixty seconds unable to draw breath before the effect had worn off. Jack waited until The Evil found him again before throwing the crystal into the thickest part of the swarm. Then he vanished again, aiming for a shadowed patch closer to the entrance to the building into which Tara and Kyle had fled.
The steady splat of insects dropping to the ground greeted him when he returned. The Evil’s wrathful scream filled his ears. A mental fist hit him hard, and this time it wasn’t his legs that were affected. His vision snuffed out, and with that went his ability to see what was attacking him, or where he was going. He cou
ld only vanish back into the shadows and hope for the best.
He emerged, blinking away the darkness, right in the middle of the billowing swarm.
++We have you now!++
Before he lost all control of his body, Jack threw a handful of blue room items into the air and vanished once more. Behind him, streamers of smoke, showers of duplicate coins, and ghostly, dancing shapes that might have been people dressed in monks’ robes kept The Evil swarm momentarily occupied.
Figuring that he had confused The Evil as much as he would be able to, and at sufficient risk to his own life, Jack retreated through the shadows to the entranceway and vanished inside. Darkness led him swiftly to the far side, where Tara and Kyle were anxiously waiting.
They jumped when he appeared beside them, and Cornelia took off. Ahead was nothing but empty desert.
“Okay,” said Jack breathlessly. “Let’s go.”
Following Cornelia’s bright blue tail feathers, they ran as fast as they could for the heat-shivering horizon.
Jaide put her head in her hands and groaned. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take.
“Please, let it end soon,” begged Stefano beside her, a perfect reflection of her own despair. “If this is what it takes to become a Warden, I don’t want to be one!”
“One more minute,” said Alfred the Examiner, with relentless patience. Jaide had learned the hard way that this didn’t mean “one more minute to go.” Instead, it meant that the ornate minute hand on the antique clock sitting between them was put back one mark, so their day became a whole sixty seconds longer.
“Be quiet!” she hissed across the table to Stefano. “You’re not helping.”
He moaned and returned to his task. They were in the restored blue room, sitting at the mahogany desk. Between them, open wide, were two complete Compendiums — special Examination editions, they had been told, containing certain errors and omissions designed to trip up incautious readers. The task for each of them was to follow a trail of accounts back through history in order to identify the first time The Evil had attempted a particular tactic, and then write an essay detailing what had worked then and what had not worked, and how that past practice could be adapted to the present day if The Evil tried that tactic again. Every step had to be recorded. Every conclusion had to be explained — all written by hand, using ancient pens that required them to dip nibs into a bottomless inkwell.
The third Examination was homework. And none of it was multiple choice.
Jaide put her head down and forced herself to press on. She didn’t know how long she and Stefano had been at it, but her stomach was gurgling as bad as Jack’s did, and her hand was sore from writing so much. Who cared what had happened in Newtown 1664, when The Evil had impersonated a local money merchant and seeded the community with some kind of Evil fungus that looked like tarnished silver coins? How was that ever likely to happen again, in these days of online banking and ATM cards? It was all pointless and confusing. The history of the Wardens was so deep and complicated that it was hard to tell what was real and what was a lie. If this is what life as a full Warden consisted of, as Stefano said, she could do without it. She longed for the day to end so she could concentrate on Project Thunderclap, rescuing Jack and the others, and fighting The Evil for real.
She wanted to ask how much time was left, but she didn’t dare. Alfred the Examiner was sitting at the far end of the table, wearing reading glasses and slowly turning the pages of a very large, very old book, which appeared to be completely blank. The slightest hint of rebellion cost both her and Stefano another minute. They were lumped in together, but couldn’t help each other. It wasn’t fair.
Yes, yes, just like life, Jaide wanted to say. The lesson was so obvious. She was beginning to wish she had gone with her mother to Scarborough instead of staying in Portland for the Examination. Susan had held her twice as tightly and twice as long as normal before leaving that morning, and made her promise to call the second they learned anything about Jack, no matter what that news might be.
Finally, after what felt like a week crammed into one very long day, Alfred closed the book, stood up, and removed the clock from the table.
Stefano glanced up, blinking like someone waking from a very deep sleep. Jaide hoped he hadn’t actually been asleep. If he had been, and she failed because of him, she would wring his neck.
“Is that it?” he asked. “Are we done?”
“Let me see your work.” Alfred held out his hands. Jaide gathered up her pages in ink-stained fingers and nervously handed them over. She couldn’t believe the Examination was over. Part of her had expected to be trapped in it forever.
Her back made popping noises as she stretched. When she went to get up to unkink her knees, Alfred raised one long index finger and, without looking up from their notes, both of which he seemed to be reading simultaneously, said firmly, “Not yet.”
Jaide lowered herself back into her seat and exchanged a worried glance with Stefano. What if their work wasn’t good enough? Would they have to keep going, perhaps even start all over again? That thought was almost too horrible. She imagined The Evil bursting into the blue room on a tide of glowing, hideous leeches and carrying the Examiner away. Part of her would have been relieved.
“Your handwriting is appalling,” Alfred said. “I don’t know what you’re taught in school these days. Also, you have made several mistakes in your research. Stefano, you should have noted that the black sweat of Pippinedda the Sicilian was a natural exudation. Jaide, a chiliarch is not an ancient refrigerator. On the whole, however, I find your work acceptable. You have passed the third Examination.”
Jaide just stared at him, not entirely believing it.
“But,” she said, “we made mistakes….”
“Everyone does, Jaide,” Alfred said in a kinder voice. “No one is perfect. Not me, not your father, not the Compendium, not the Grand Gathering. We all fail sometimes. We all make mistakes, yet you’ll notice we are all still here. It’s never the end of the world.”
“But one day it might be,” said Stefano. “The end of the world, I mean. If someone makes a big enough mistake.”
“That’s why we have the Warden of Last Resort. If called upon, they alone are required not to be in error.”
Jaide’s ears pricked up.
“I’ve heard of that,” she said. “The Warden of Last Resort. That’s Grandma, isn’t it?”
Alfred’s expression didn’t change.
“One day, if you exercise sufficient will,” he said, “you will know the truth.”
He raised his left hand and snapped his fingers. Something eased in the air, a tension Jaide hadn’t been aware of until it was gone. The secret panel leading to the rest of the house opened. It looked starkly functional now, without the tapestry that had once concealed it from view, but its opening seemed wonderful enough as it was. As did the two feline faces that pushed through and ran down to join her.
“It’s over?” meowed Ari, tail twitching. He trod a wide arc around the Examiner to rub his left side against Jaide’s elbow. “It’s done?”
“Of course it is. Otherwise, why would the door be open?” said Kleo. She gave Jaide a lick on the hand, then stuck her tongue out. Ink had turned the tip of it black.
“We passed,” said Stefano, and this time Jaide didn’t hear boastfulness in his declaration, just relief.
“Poor Jack,” she said.
“He will be Examined upon his return,” Alfred said, packing up their copies of the Compendium and slipping them into a broad leather case.
“If he returns.”
“Don’t think that way,” Kleo told her. “You have to stay positive. He’ll know if you give up hope. Twins are always connected, deep down.”
Jaide wasn’t so sure. She had tried teeping again, but nothing was getting through. It was hard not to wonder if he was dead. That was the one good thing about the Examination: It had kept her mind off what might be going wrong elsewhere.
&
nbsp; “There’s a feast waiting for you upstairs,” said Ari excitedly. “A feast of celebration.”
“What if we’d failed?” asked Stefano.
“Then it would have been a feast of consolation. Come on.” He scampered down from the table and ran halfway up the stairs to the secret panel, where he stopped and turned to look at them, wondering why they weren’t following.
Jaide had started to ask Alfred if he was joining them, but once again the Examiner had disappeared. Resolving never to fall for that again, she followed Stefano and the cats out of the blue room and down to the kitchen.
* * *
She had hoped her father might be there, but he had gone away, Grandma X told her, to avoid any complications caused by their Gifts. That made sense, she supposed. The day had been hard enough without having to deal with that possibility. She felt exhausted now, so exhausted she almost wasn’t hungry. Only with effort did she force down a plateful of stew she would normally have found delicious, Jaide’s favorite, particularly when Grandma X cooked it, followed by ice cream with strawberry sprinkles. Stefano dived in with gusto, while Ari watched in awe. There was very little conversation.
“That so-called teacher of yours called,” said Grandma X at one point during the meal. “He wanted to know why you two missed soccer practice. I told him you had more important things to do, but would attend tomorrow.”
“Isn’t Project Thunderclap tomorrow?” asked Jaide.
“It is. And if it’s successful, practice will go ahead the day after.”
“And if it’s not?” asked Stefano around a huge mouthful.
“Then I suppose very little will change, and practice will also go ahead. Either way, your teacher seemed reassured, despite losing two of his best players.”
“And Kyle, too,” said Jaide. “How’s the story holding up?”
Grandma X had visited both Kyle and Tara’s families to explain that their children were staying over for a couple of nights and that there was no need for concern. She brought friendly gifts of chocolate cake to both households, which she had assured Jaide would leave them not forgetful, exactly, but not overly mindful of the deviation from their usual routine. By such means did Wardens move through the complex terrain of everyday life without raising suspicion. One day it would be Jaide’s turn to bake cakes like that, or to choose another means of drawing attention away from herself.