Wade and the Scorpion's Claw Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Copernicus Legacy #2: The Serpent’s Curse

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean

  Sunday, March 16

  3:51 a.m.

  It was only a dream—a dumb, exhaustion-fueled dream.

  But knowing me, the way I hold on to stuff forever, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’ll probably always remember it as the dream.

  To begin with, my name is Wade Kaplan. I’m thirteen years old and kind of a math geek. I live in Austin, Texas, though I haven’t been there for a very long week. At the exact moment I was having the dream, my family and I were squished on the first of three endless flights from the tiny island of Guam in the South Pacific to New York City.

  We were on our way to meet someone who could help us understand what had happened yesterday—the day my stepmom, Sara Kaplan, was kidnapped.

  More on that later.

  To go back a bit, Sara married my astrophysicist dad, Roald Kaplan, three years ago, and her son, Darrell, became my new stepbrother and absolute best friend. While I was in the middle of the dream, Darrell was crammed into the row right next to me. Dad sat three seats beyond him, across the aisle. Sandwiched between were Lily Kaplan, my cousin on my dad’s side, and Becca Moore, her best friend.

  They were the last people I saw before I closed my eyes somewhere between Guam and Hawaii and my dumb dreaming brain took over.

  I was in a cave. No, scratch that. I was in the cave—the cave where we had found the first of the twelve relics of the Copernicus Legacy.

  Yep, that’s what I said: the Copernicus Legacy.

  You see, five hundred years ago, in the early sixteenth century, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus went on a secret journey and uncovered the remains of a large astronomical instrument.

  This ancient device, a kind of oversize astrolabe—with seats in it—contained twelve amazing objects that gave the machine its unbelievable power.

  Power to travel.

  In time.

  That’s right. The past, the future, the whole spectrum of time from the beginning to, well, I guess, the end of it.

  Anyway, Copernicus’s mortal enemy, a guy named Albrecht von Hohenzollern, learned about the astrolabe. Albrecht was the Grand Master of the superpowerful, incredibly secret, and seriously evil Knights of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.

  Copernicus knew that if Albrecht and his Order got hold of the time machine, they’d use it to rip the fabric of our universe to shreds.

  So Copernicus did the only thing he could do.

  He took the astrolabe apart and asked twelve friends around the world to hide and protect its twelve powerful relics. These men and women were called Guardians.

  Okay, back to the dream.

  Every detail of the cave’s stony walls had been downloaded onto my brain’s hard drive—the rough limestone, streaked with yellow and red, the constellations painted on every surface all the way up the tapering walls to the opening at the top, the blue handprint that pointed the way to the first relic, and, above all, the incredible silence of the stone. The cave seemed nothing less than a kind of temple from another world.

  So I was standing in the center of the cave, when—whoosh—there he was, with a cape and a velvet hat, and a sword longer than your arm.

  Nicolaus Copernicus, the revolutionary astronomer who proved that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. He was standing not ten feet away from me next to his awesome machine—a large sphere of iron and brass and bronze, in the center of which sat a pair of tufted seats.

  To be honest, the dream Copernicus looked a lot like my dad, with a beard and glasses. That was weird enough. But everyone else was in the cave, too, and they were all sad, like someone had just died.

  Lily was sobbing like a baby. “Oh, Wade,” she said. “Oh, Wade!”

  Like Lily, Darrell was crying but also shaking his head and stomping around like an angry bull. (That’s actually kind of what he’s been doing ever since he heard about his mother, and I don’t really blame him.) Finally I saw Becca, lying on the floor of the cave, not moving, her arms over her chest. I probably dreamed that because Becca was wounded in the cave in real life. But here she looked, you know, the opposite of alive.

  “Becca?” No answer. “What’s going on? Somebody tell me!”

  Nobody told me anything. Then Copernicus-Dad came over to me.

  “Vela,” he said, his face dark under his hat. “I need it now.”

  Just so you know: Vela is the relic of the astrolabe that we found in the cave.

  For the last five centuries, followers of the original Guardians have kept the relics safe, using codes, clues, riddles, and mysteries that would twist your brain into a pretzel.

  Until last week.

  Galina Krause, the Teutonic Order’s freaky-beautiful new leader, ordered the murder of the communications chief of the modern Guardians, an old man named Heinrich Vogel.

  To me, he was Uncle Henry, my father’s college teacher and friend.

  Don’t ask me how we did it, but following a number of clues Uncle Henry had left for us, we found the first relic before Galina did—a small blue stone called Vela—in that cave in Guam.

  At that moment, we became Guardians of the Copernicus Legacy. I guess one part of that means having crazy dreams like this one. Another part is that members of your family get taken away from you.

  “Wade, please . . .”

  I handed Vela to Copernicus-Dad. He attached the triangular blue stone to the time machine.

  “You see,” he said. “All things are possible. . . .”

  I knew it was my own mind saying that. I mean, it was my dream, right? But it felt like Copernicus-Dad was telling me, too. “Cool,” I said.

  Suddenly, the big wheels of the time machine began to turn, and the cave became hazy around me.

  “All things are possible, Wade,” he said. “Except one . . .”

  “Wait. What?” I said.

  Then she was there—Galina Krause with her nasty crossbow, the one she used to wound Becca. “Where is the twelfth relic?” she demanded.

  I looked around frantically, but now I was alone. Darrell, Lily, Becca, even Copernicus-Dad had vanished. Galina closed in, her crossbow aimed dead at me. I tried to yell, but the oxygen in the cave was sucked away. I couldn’t breathe. The cave went pitch-black and as silent as a tomb, until Galina spoke.

  “Die, Wade Kaplan, die!”

  I heard the click of the trigger as the arrow left the bow.

  I heard the whoosh in the air . . .

  . . . and felt the arrow’s razor tip enter my chest. . . .

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Ahhhh!”

&n
bsp; I jumped like a jack-in-the-box. About an inch off my seat. My seat belt was fastened tight and dragged me down hard.

  “Ahh . . . mmmph!”

  Darrell had his hand clamped over my mouth. “Dude, really? Screaming in a jet? The pilot’s gonna ask you to step outside.”

  I pushed his hand away. I was soaked with sweat, my head was throbbing, my heart was thundering, and everyone was staring. I’d just had . . . the dream.

  “Sorry. Nightmare.” I coughed.

  Darrell grunted. “Join the club. Except it’s no dream. We left Guam on Sunday, right? But guess what? It’s Saturday again. We just crossed something called the international date line, which turns today into the day before today. So instead of yesterday, Mom was kidnapped two days ago.”

  He slammed his fist on the poor armrest. “Great, huh? We’re going backward.”

  “Darrell . . .” I wanted to tell him that the international date line didn’t actually mean what he said, but what really struck me was that I’d dreamed about a time machine at the exact moment we—sort of—went back in time. Before my dream, it was Sunday. Now it was Saturday. A coincidence?

  Except I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.

  The plane descended into Honolulu, and it was good to feel the jolt of the wheels touching the ground. Before anyone else could, I grabbed Becca’s bag for her. After Galina had grazed her with the arrow in the cave, we helped Becca in little ways. Her wound was a day old—or two, if you were Darrell—and wasn’t close to healing. I shivered, remembering her lying on the cave floor in my dream. At the very least, Becca needed to see a doctor so we’d know she was really okay.

  There was a rush of movement and new air and crammed bodies as we stumbled through the Jetway and entered the terminal, but the moment I set foot in the arrival gate area, I tensed up.

  “Do you guys feel that?” I whispered. “Somebody’s eyes are on us.”

  Becca glanced around. “I do. I’m pretty sure no one followed us from Guam, but someone’s watching us now.”

  “They’re probably hiding inside recycling bins,” Lily muttered. “Or disguised as young moms with strollers. The Order is too smart to be seen, and they have to be, because otherwise everybody would know about them, but no one knows about them except us, of course, which goes without saying, but there you go, I said it anyway.”

  That was a perfect Lily kind of sentence. I was getting to like how she got so much in before she ran out of breath and had to stop.

  “Kids, look,” Dad said, slowing and facing us. “You’re right to be cautious, but sometimes people are just people, you know? It doesn’t help to see trouble where it isn’t. We have enough to think about without imagining enemies.”

  Dad might have been right—he usually is—and by “enough to think about” he probably meant Sara. But ever since we attended Uncle Henry’s funeral in Berlin, we’d been squarely on the Order’s radar. Later, after we’d overheard Galina Krause say, “Bring her to me. Only she can help us now,” we knew that her ugly goons had kidnapped Sara.

  What that meant was simple.

  Finding the relics and rescuing Sara had become the same quest.

  Looking as exhausted as I’ve ever seen him, Dad said, “We have a good bit of time in Honolulu before our flight to San Francisco. I know we’re all hungry, but I want to find a walk-in clinic where someone can take a look at Becca’s arm. Then we’ll get a bite to eat.”

  “A clinic would be great,” she said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  It was a quick hike past restaurants, souvenir shops, and newsstands to a little clinic, where an intern cleaned and changed Becca’s bandage. After he was done, and Becca gave us the thumbs-up, we headed slowly in the direction of our next departure gate, taking a roundabout route. I mean, we knew the Order would know where we were sooner or later, but we wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them. We started in the opposite direction, doubled back, entered shops and left at different times from different exits. It was probably overkill, but all part of our new way of doing things.

  Luckily, there was no rush. Our flight to San Francisco was still several hours away.

  I should mention that we’ve learned to travel light. Pretty much all I keep in my backpack are a change of jeans, two shirts, underwear and socks, an extra pair of sneakers, and a baseball cap. In a leather envelope, I carry the celestial map that Uncle Henry gave me on my seventh birthday. It was a major clue in starting us on the search for the relics.

  Oh, and I also have two sixteenth-century dueling daggers.

  Not your normal luggage, I know. One of the daggers belonged to Copernicus, the other to the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who turned out to be Vela’s first Guardian. I sort of argued with my dad that because he had Vela hidden in his bag, it was smart for someone else to hide the daggers. Besides, the security-evading holster the Guardian Carlo Nuovenuto had given me in Italy was so techie, I’d successfully brought both blades through several security checkpoints. Dad agreed.

  Security had become a major priority, for obvious reasons.

  Carlo had also given us a new cell phone, but we were pretty sure it had been hacked in Guam, so Dad stopped at a kiosk and bought us three new ones, another part of his plan to throw off the Order. He gave a bottom-of-the-line one to Darrell, kept one for himself, and gave a high-end smartphone to Lily.

  “I feel like a spy,” she said, admiring its features. “I guess we make only essential calls and searches?”

  “Exactly,” my dad said. “No way are these a gift. We need to take our situation seriously. We’ll keep only each others’ numbers, and every few days, we’ll get new phones. It’ll be expensive, but safer. It’s just one way to stay ahead of the Order.”

  Near our gate I saw a place called the Diamond Head Pineapple Snack Hut, and my stomach grumbled. Because of the time difference between Guam and Honolulu, not to mention the date line, it was by now late afternoon local time, but our internal clocks were so messed up that we pretty much ate whatever we wanted whenever we could. Pancakes and pizza, grilled cheese and fried eggs, sodas and hot chocolate.

  While Darrell and Dad went to order, the rest of us sank into our chairs and spread our junk on the table. Since I’d been writing down clues and riddles in my dad’s college notebook, it had sort of become mine, and it was becoming as valuable as anything we had.

  After I scanned the tables around us—everyone sitting at them seemed like passengers as tired and grumpy as we were—I leafed through my latest notes while Lily searched for an outlet. She is an awesome online searcher, which is why she got the best phone. She can take a blobby mess—sometimes all we can come up with—and create a search term that will—boom—get the exact answer we need.

  Looking both ways, Becca dropped her hand into her bag. “Guys,” she whispered like a conspirator, “I want to show you what I found in the diary.”

  A ripple of excitement shot through me with the speed of Galina’s arrow. As good as my notebook is, and as awesome a searcher as Lily is, there is nothing like the book Becca slid onto the table and quickly covered with her arm.

  The secret diary of Nicolaus Copernicus.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Copernicus diary’s actual title is The Day Book of Nicolaus Copernicus: His Secret Voyages in Earth and Heaven.

  The old book was started in 1514 by the astronomer’s assistant, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hans Novak. It ended about ten years later, penned by Copernicus himself.

  Because Becca is a total language expert, having learned Spanish, Italian, German, and bits and pieces of other languages from her parents and grandparents, she’s been translating the entries into a red Moleskine notebook.

  “On our flight here, I found eleven passages at the end of the diary,” she told Lily and me. “All of them are coded. We tracked Vela a different way because it was the first relic, but I think each of these eleven passages might be about one of the other original Guardians and his or her relic, but I nee
d a key to decode them. Actually, I need eleven different keys, because they all seem to be coded differently.”

  “Do you think the key words are somewhere in the diary?” I asked.

  Becca shook her head. “Not the key words, but there’s this.”

  She gently slid her finger down a single page at the end of the diary. Unlike most other pages, its outside edge wasn’t ragged, but straight.

  “That looks different,” said Lily. “Was it cut or something to make the edge straight?”

  “I thought so, too,” Becca said. “But no.” She ran her finger between that page and the facing page, deep into the gutter of the book. There, with a slender fingernail, she peeled the page back, revealing that the straight edge was in fact a fold. The page’s flap was inscribed with a large square of letters.

  “It’s a cipher, but I don’t know how it works yet,” Becca said.

  “I’ll tell you!” Lily bounced up, tugged her phone from the charger, and immediately started tapping on its screen.

  “How do you even know what to search for?” I asked.

  Lily snorted. “Because while your brain is going ‘huh?’ mine is going ‘aha!’”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Darrell and Dad were loading up their trays.

  “It’s called a tabula recta,” said Lily. “It’s a ‘letter square,’ created by a cryptological guy named Trithemius in the sixteenth century.” She flipped her phone around and widened an image with a swipe of her fingers. It was almost identical to the hand-inked square Becca had found in the diary.

  “You did it again, Lily,” I said.

  She gave a little bow. “Trithemius’s square includes twenty-four cipher alphabets, so each time you code a letter—say L, for Lily—you give it a different letter. It’s nearly impossible to figure out without the key word. Trithemius was all about improving codes.”

  Dad and Darrell wove through the food court with two trays full of food. I trotted over to help and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were red. I knew right away that he and my dad had had a time-out.

  “Until we get to New York, we’re not going to make much headway,” Dad was saying.

  “I get it,” said Darrell. “I just wish it were all happening faster. I keep thinking of Mom in some dark place with no food—”