Wade and the Scorpion's Claw (15 page)

Darrell drew up next to us. “The tile? It's at the museum—”

“Not the tile. The tile was merely an entry object into the search for the scorpion. I want the final object. I want his hand.”

“His . . . ,” I started.

A breath of impatience from Wolff. “The hand Feng Yi stole from Mr. Chen after he murdered him on the plane.”

“
He
murdered Mr. Chen?” I asked.

“Please, the hand. It is, I imagine, in the black satchel you have hanging over your shoulder. Mr. Feng's bag.”

My dad glanced at the strap, then slid the bag off his shoulder and held it out to the German. “This is Feng Yi's bag? He said it was yours.”

“He lies.”

“So Mr. Feng is . . . alive?” I asked.

“For the moment,” Wolff said. He pushed Lily toward us. “Take the bag,” he said. Her hands trembled as she took it from my dad. “Now,” he said, “open every compartment.”

“I can't. One has a computer lock,” she replied in barely a whisper. “Which I guess you don't know, since it's not your bag.”

“Ah . . .” Wolff removed his hand from Becca. Dad went for her and Lily, and Wolff let him pull the girls back to us.

“You will wait,” Wolff said. He snapped a picture of the lock with his phone. We heard the whoop that the phone made. Some two or three quiet minutes passed, the crazy arcade lights blinking on all of us but the music now off. None of us moved; none of us spoke a word; no one passed by. Then his phone lit up. He studied the image on its screen, closed it, then tapped several numbers into the combination lock. I heard a small click, and the bag opened.

What had he called them? The Copernicus servers? The computing power that put NASA to shame.

Wolff removed something from inside the bag, and my stomach twisted.

Wrapped in heavy cloth was the prosthetic hand of Dominic Chen.

Its thumb and fingers were nearly extended. Its slightly concave palm was open, as if waiting to hold something in it.

It was obviously not real. It was mechanical, but with something nearly alive about it.

His gun still out and trained on us, Markus Wolff examined the hand carefully as he turned it over and over. It seemed less like a hand than an intricate piece of machinery, made of aluminum and wires.

“Well, then, we are done,” Wolff said finally, inserting the hand back into the satchel. “It is not essential that I remove you here and now, so I will not. But pray our paths do not cross again in San Francisco.”

He bowed his head slightly as he slung the bag over his shoulder, his gun now deep in his coat pocket. “And thank you for your other information, too.” He turned his back on us, and, as he had done before on the street outside the hotel, he seemed to vanish into the crowd of tourists.

“What other information?” said Becca. “We didn't give him—”

“No, stop, no!” Lily cried, staring at her phone. “Look! Look!”

As we watched, every photo Lily had taken at the museum—of the spice box, the poem inside its lid, and everything else—evaporated from the screen, and her phone died.

“Start it again,” Dad said.

She pressed the On button over and over. Nothing. No image appeared, no icons, no home screen. The phone was wiped clean.

“The servers!” I said. “Wolff said the Teutonic Order had incredible computing power. They probably have spyware, satellites, all kinds of tech stuff trained on us and our cell phones. He knew we called the cab. He knew where we stopped for food. Now he has all of our clues. He knows everything we know!”

Dad growled under his breath. “Give me your phones,” he said agitatedly. “We can always buy more if we need them. We know where we have to go, who we have to see tonight. Our flight to New York is at ten tomorrow morning. We know that, and we don't need phones anymore.”

“What about the investigator?” Darrell said, handing him his phone.

Dad jammed his eyes shut, then opened them. “Right. I'll keep mine. I'll just take out the battery until later. Lily, please.”

“But Uncle Roald, how will we . . . ,” she started, but she trailed off, giving her brand-new phone to him. “Okay. I get it.”

Dad removed the batteries from both phones, then dumped them into a trash bin. “We're going off the grid. We're just ourselves now, together every second from here on. Understood? No separating.”

“But what are we going to do?” said Becca. Her voice was hoarse as she looked across the water at the end of the bridge. “Feng Yi and Markus Wolff know about the houseboat. They know what we know.”

“Not both of them, not everything,” Dad said. His forehead creased like it does when he works out a math problem. “They only have everything if they're working together, but they're obviously not.”

“That's right,” I said. “We showed Feng Yi the symbol. He might guess where Papa Dean's houseboat is, but Lily erased the image of the symbol before Wolff could steal it from her phone.”

“And Wolff has Mr. Chen's hand, but Feng Yi doesn't,” said Becca. “Wolff said it was the last piece of the puzzle. Guys, we're still in the game.”

The lights were going out around us. Fisherman's Wharf was thinning out. It was near midnight now, and cold wind was blowing off the water.

“Here's another thing,” my dad said. “I don't know much about prosthetic limbs, but even in the little glimpse I had, I'm pretty certain the synthetic material covering the machinery of Mr. Chen's hand included fingerprints—”

“Ooh, I know why!” said Lily. “To unlock a room or a safe, like Tricia Powell did at the museum! That's what Leathercoat meant when he said the hand was for the last part of the relic hunt.”

“Exactly right,” my dad said. “We still don't know where the relic is, but I don't think they do, either. Let's get over to Papa Dean's place as soon as we can.”

“We can still take a cab to Sausalito, right?” said Becca, shivering in the wind. “If we use cash, no one can track us.”

“Absolutely,” said Dad, heading quickly for the street. “Let's go.”

So it was settled.

We were off the grid and on the move.

B
ecause the Wharf was shutting down and cabs were scarce, Lily came up with the idea of going to a nearby hotel to grab a cab from there.

“Where to?” the driver said as we climbed in.

“Sausalito,” said Becca.

“And where in Sausalito?” he asked.

“Do you have a map?” Darrell asked. “We'll show you.”

“Yeah . . . somewhere . . .” The driver rummaged around under his seat and then passed a wad of crinkled paper over to us.

Darrell studied the map under the seat light. “Here. Liberty Dock.”

The driver flipped on his meter. “Now you're talking.”

The cab whizzed up to the bridge, crossed it, and wound down through the streets on the far side. A few minutes later, it slowed and pulled into a mostly empty parking lot. “This is as close as I can get. You'll have to walk the rest of the way.”

The cab left us there. It was quiet down by the water. The air was so cold my lungs hurt. The sky beyond the bridge was dead black, and the stars seemed on fire.

Where mathematics and magic become one.

Becca shivered again, and I wanted to huddle with her to get warm, but we had no time for anything like that. We saw the sign for Liberty Dock, a long pier that ran straight out from the parking lot. We hurried to it.

“My tracing will tell us which houseboat,” said Darrell. “Wade, your notebook, please.”

Following his artwork, we trotted down the stairs and slipped through an arch to a floating boardwalk that ran the length of the docks.

“I just thought of something,” said Lily. “If Papa Dean has no power in his house, the electronic fingerprints of Mr. Chen's hand don't work on anything there. So whatever it opens has to be somewhere else.”

“Good point,” Dad said. “If we're right, Papa Dean knows where.” He checked his watch. “It's nearly twelve thirty already. I hope he's awake. . . .”

I think we all hoped he was awake. And alive.

If, as Markus Wolff told us, Feng Yi
had
survived his fall from the pagoda, and if he'd figured out that the symbol was actually a map, he could already have found Papa Dean and be long gone. Or he could still be there. “Dad, Feng Yi could . . .”

“I know. Be on your guard,” he said. “Everyone.”

We made our way quietly down to the end, where the dock made the right angle of the upside-down L. The dot on Darrell's tracing showed the inside corner, but there were two houseboats there. One was marked 47; the other one had no number visible.

“It's the red one on the left,” said Becca, studying the tracing.

Darrell squinted. “You know that because I'm such a good artist?”

“I know it because the other house has a light on, but the red one is dark. No electricity. Off the grid.”

The plank was short. We stepped down it as quietly as we could. We listened for a minute. Two minutes. No sound from inside. I knocked once on the solid wooden door. The pressure of the knock sent the door swinging open into darkness.

“M
r. Dean?” Dad whispered. “Papa Dean?”

No answer. It was cold inside the floating house. Dad didn't want to use the flashlight app on his phone, so the room was pitch-black.

“Hold on,” Darrell whispered. He crossed the room with short, careful steps until he came to a wall. He felt around with his hands and found a table. “I thought so. A candle.” He moved his hands over on the tabletop. A second later there was a scratch, and a flame lit in his fingers. He lighted two candles.

The orange glow pushed into the room, which was messy, as if there'd been a struggle. Papers were scattered all over the place.

“Uh-oh,” said Lily. “This is not a good sign.”

“Mr. Dean?” I said. Again, no answer. The front room was small. Taking one of the candles, Becca moved into the small kitchen, then to the bedroom. She let out a soft scream. “Omigod! Get in here!”

We rushed into the bedroom. I nearly threw up.

Papa Dean lay sprawled on the wooden floor, his face twisted in pain, his cheeks and forehead bruised. He was pressing both hands hard on his stomach. Blood pooled under his fingers and on the floorboards beneath him.

Dad was immediately next to him. “Darrell, find someone to call 911.”

Darrell ran out onto the dock. I heard him banging on the door of another houseboat.

“Hold on; help will be here soon,” my dad said softly.

The grizzled man lifted one of his hands away. In its palm was a bloody throwing star. “You again?” he growled.

“Did Feng Yi do this to you?” I asked.

“Of course he did. You sent him here.”

“Sent him? No,” my dad said, pressing the wound with towels that Lily brought from the kitchen. “What do you mean?”

“Feng Yi played you
so
well,” the man breathed out. “He threw his stars around and you coughed up your secrets to him. The moment he came here demanding the relic, I knew he had fooled you. It was all a decoy: his Star Warriors, his faked death, his oily words, all that was so you'd show him the map to my house. Thanks for nothing.”

Darrell was back. “They called for an ambulance.”

“You could have helped us at the airport,” said Lily.

“I didn't know you,” he said. “And I don't like you. I've been fighting the Order for thirty-five years. Then you come in? Don't expect Guardians to like you or help you. This relic cost me everything.”

“We're sorry,” my dad said. “We got involved because—”

“You don't know enough to be sorry,” the man snapped. “You're just a dumb family. This is war.”

Which every single person along the way had insisted on telling us. Maybe that was nothing to argue about. We
are
a family, just a family, but I couldn't stop myself.

“You know what, fine. You're right,” I said, my chest heaving. “Maybe we shouldn't be Guardians. But we lost someone, too. We lost our mom, and now finding the relics and finding her are the same thing for us.”

Ignoring me, Papa Dean grabbed my father by the collar. “He doesn't have the hand, does he? Tell me Feng doesn't have it.”

“Markus Wolff has it,” my dad said.

We heard sirens. “Then get out,” he said. “There's only one chance now. You don't want to be here. Take the . . . take the . . .” He stretched out a bloody hand to a bookcase by the bed. He tugged a slender paperback from it. Its pages tore as his fingers smeared and fumbled them. He finally seemed to lose all his strength and simply whispered, “Page seven. Get out . . .”

Sirens overlapped other sirens now. They were getting closer. They were almost on top of us now.

“The EMTs will help you,” my dad said, taking the bloody book. “I'm sorry for everything. Kids, we have to go!”

L
ights were coming on in the neighboring houseboats as the sirens wailed to a stop in the parking lot and unloaded their personnel.

My stomach twisted in knots. My throat was thick. I felt like puking from fear. So much blood. So many lies. We
had
sent Feng Yi here. We
were
in the middle of something violent and real and unlike anything we'd ever thought possible. But we had to keep going, didn't we? We had to, to find Sara. We were in too deep to stop.

“The other way,” Becca said. “Down the other arm of the dock. We can't let the police find us!”

She was right. The number of times we'd been near a tragedy, an attack, a dead or dying person was far beyond normal. As frightening as it all was, we had to run, even from the good guys.