Reynie forced himself to turn from the door. “She’s okay!” he called, trying to sound carefree. “Don’t worry—she’ll be back soon!” To the others, more quietly, he said, “We need to keep in mind that anything Tai ‘overhears’ might end up in Constance’s head as well. They might not be able to help it.”

  “Right,” Sticky said. “So we’re trying to protect multiple layers of secrets. Maybe we should ask Captain Plugg to look after him?”

  “I don’t want to go down there!” Tai cried, running over to them with big eyes. “I don’t know her!”

  “You didn’t know us, either, until a little while ago, squirt,” Kate said. “Captain Plugg is great.”

  “I don’t want—!”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Reynie said quickly. “She isn’t back yet, anyway. I haven’t heard her motorcycle. We’ll introduce you to her later, Tai. Right now why don’t you go back and play with the magnet? Everything’s fine.”

  Tai hesitated. “And Constance is fine, too?” His eyes roamed their faces, which all instantly adopted reassuring expressions.

  “Constance is going to be just great,” Reynie said, which wasn’t exactly what Tai had asked him, but the boy seemed satisfied. With a look of relief, he gave Reynie a hug and wandered back to the bucket by the table.

  The older three all took deep breaths, then turned and huddled together.

  “Okay,” Kate said softly, “you were going to say we should start at the beginning, Reynie. So let’s do that. What does he mean, ‘Where one who stands defies the name’? What name? And who is the one standing?”

  “He might not have meant a specific person,” Sticky suggested. “By ‘one,’ he might have meant ‘anyone.’ You know, any person.”

  “That’s true,” Kate agreed. “So if any random person—or, I guess we don’t know for sure, so it might also be a specific person—but anyway, if some person, whoever Mr. Benedict means, makes some kind of defiant stand…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. What are you thinking, Reynie?”

  “Big feet!”

  This last came from Tai, who trotted back over to them with Kate’s bucket. He was using the magnet, currently stuck to the side of the bucket, as a second handle.

  “Excuse me?” Kate said.

  “Reynie’s thinking about big feet!”

  Everyone looked at Reynie, who sighed. “I was thinking about S.Q.,” he said. “I mean, that’s one of the random things I was thinking about to keep a certain someone from hearing my deeper thoughts. I guess the big feet stood out to him.”

  “He uses big words, but his name is only two letters,” Tai said. He had opened the bucket and was rummaging around in it. “That’s pretty funny. And we like him, right? Even though he used to help Mr. Curtain do bad things, he didn’t really mean to, and he’s a good guy. Right?”

  “That’s right,” Kate said. She reached into the bucket and took out two or three things that, upon further reflection, might not be suitable for a five-year-old boy to play with. She shoved them into her pocket. “S.Q. is our friend. He comes here for dinner all the time. One day, when all of this is over, you can meet him!”

  “And see his big feet?” Tai asked hopefully.

  “Unless he forgets to bring them,” Kate teased. “Now, listen,” she said, with a furtive wink at Sticky and Reynie, “I need to take a break to clear my head. You want to come with me and see my tranquilizer gun?”

  “Oh, yes!” Tai squeaked. “Can I hold it?”

  “Nope,” Kate replied.

  “Okay!” Tai cried, as if even more excited now. He scooped up Kate’s bucket and ran toward the door.

  “Maybe you two will solve it quickly if you don’t have to run interference with the little one,” Kate whispered. “It’s worth a shot, right? I’ll keep him occupied until Captain Plugg gets back.”

  She joined Tai at the door and whispered something to him. He giggled, and together they turned and bowed, then backpedaled until they were out of sight.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Sticky said.

  “Definitely,” Reynie affirmed.

  They were both still looking at the doorway, and neither of them actually felt relieved. Not counting intercom communications from opposite ends of the house, the two hadn’t worked alone together to solve a problem in ages. When Reynie had suggested the plan to sneak off the ship, Sticky had simply agreed to it. When the dangerous chemicals on the rooftop had needed urgent attention, it was Sticky’s chess-notation instructions that made it possible—Reynie had only followed them. So when, Reynie wondered, was the last time they had sat across from each other to figure something out? He wasn’t sure. Sticky would remember, of course, and it occurred to Reynie that asking him would be a way to break the sudden tension.

  “Hey,” he said, turning toward Sticky, “when did—”

  “I guess—” said Sticky at the same moment. “Sorry, you go first.”

  “No, you go ahead,” Reynie said. If Sticky had an idea, Reynie was determined to let him speak first. “What were you thinking?”

  Sticky, who had only been going to suggest that they sit down, suddenly felt self-conscious. What if Reynie had already figured out Mr. Benedict’s message? That wouldn’t be unlike him. The last thing Sticky wanted was to say he was ready to get started, only to discover that Reynie had already finished. That shouldn’t matter, he chastised himself. The important thing is that we make progress.

  What Sticky said out loud, when he sensed Reynie waiting uncomfortably for a response, was this: “I was just going to say that I guess you’ve probably already figured it out. Have you?”

  “Mr. Benedict’s message?” Reynie said, caught off guard. How could he possibly have concentrated enough to figure that out yet? “Uh, no. I just…” He was about to suggest that they sit down and get started, but then he worried about seeming bossy. He didn’t think it would seem bossy—it was a natural suggestion, given their history of sitting down together to work things out—but lately he’d had a hard time gauging his friend’s feelings, and he didn’t want to mess this up.

  “You just what?” Sticky prompted. It wasn’t like Reynie to hesitate so much, and Sticky’s mind was racing, trying to figure out what the problem was.

  Reynie realized he wasn’t looking Sticky in the eye. That was no good, he thought. First things first. Look your friend in the eye. And so he raised his gaze to meet Sticky’s—but then hesitated again, unsure what to say.

  Sticky, disconcerted, cleared his throat and made a pretense of glancing at the clock. It occurred to him that Reynie was hesitating to speak because he didn’t like what he was about to say. And what would that be? Sticky felt a wave of embarrassment wash over him. He thinks I’m a distraction, too!

  “You know what?” Sticky said quickly, rubbing his scalp. “I should go up and deal with the mess on the roof. Why don’t you work on this, I’ll do that, and we’ll get back together in a little bit?”

  “I’ll help you!” Reynie cried, taken aback. What had he done to offend Sticky? “We can talk while we’re cleaning!”

  “No, that’s okay,” Sticky said, already moving for the door. “Honestly, you’ll probably get to the answers faster this way. Just—let me know if you need anything. I’ll be back down soon. It won’t take long.”

  Reynie opened his mouth to protest, but it was too late. Sticky was gone. Reynie closed his mouth. And then his eyes. He stood there alone in the dining room. How in the world was he supposed to concentrate when one of his best friends was upset with him?

  They were supposed to have been prepared for a day like this, yet now that it had arrived, it was not going the way Reynie had imagined it would. Not at all.

  Down on the first floor, in Kate’s room, Tai Li was jumping on the bed, something he had never been allowed to do in the orphanage. It was an especially springy bed with an especially sturdy frame, and with every jump, Tai thought he might be able to reach the ceiling with his outstretched fingers.

  “You’re not even close,” Kate said from where she sat at her desk. “You realize that, right?”

  “How close,” said Tai, bouncing breathlessly, “am I getting?”

  Kate watched him a moment. “Nine inches,” she said, returning to her work. Arrayed on the desk before her were two dozen darts, ampoules of tranquilizer serum, and what resembled a very large water pistol. One by one, Kate was inspecting the ampoules, snapping them into their corresponding darts, then slipping the darts inside her jacket.

  “Aren’t you,” Tai panted, “going to put the darts… into the gun?”

  “With you in the room? No.”

  “How many… can you… put in there?”

  “Six at a time,” Kate said, then added under her breath, “I wish it were thirteen.”

  “Me too!” Tai said. “One for each… of the bad men.”

  Kate looked up, her mouth drawn tight. She had never liked it when Constance read her thoughts, and she did not like it any better when this little boy did. Even though, she had to admit, Tai Li was infinitely more agreeable as a little boy than Constance had been as a little girl. Anyway, he certainly wasn’t doing it on purpose, and so she said nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” Tai asked, having either seen or sensed Kate’s annoyance. “Do you want me to stop jumping on the bed?”

  “What? No, have at it,” Kate said, returning to her work. “You’re really good at it.”

  “But what… if I break… the bed?” Tai panted, having been cautioned about such a disaster in the past.

  Kate shrugged. “I’ll fix it.”

  “But what… if I… fall off?”

  “I’ll catch you,” Kate said.

  “But you’re way over there! And you’re… sitting down!”

  Kate shrugged again. “I’d still catch you, bouncy boy.”

  The rumble of a motorcycle sounded outside. Kate listened long enough to be sure it was Captain Plugg returning (Kate was thoroughly familiar with the guard’s throttle patterns as she navigated the squeaky courtyard gate and then around to the back of the house). Satisfied, Kate held up one of the ampoules. “Did Constance tell you about these?”

  Tai climbed down from the bed and went over to the desk. “They knock you out.”

  Kate snapped her fingers. “Just like that,” she said, and as Tai tried in vain to snap his own fingers, she went on. “Rhonda Kazembe invented this particular formula. You know about Rhonda, right?”

  “She’s Constance’s sister!”

  “That’s right, she and Number Two were Mr. Benedict’s assistants, and he ended up adopting both of them, just like Constance. Well, among other things, Rhonda is an expert chemist, and she came up with this stuff so that Milligan could avoid hurting bad guys any worse than he had to. It was Sticky who whipped up this particular batch. Evidently, there’s nothing he can’t do these days.”

  Tai asked if he could hold one of the ampoules, and Kate gave him one. He held it up to the light, admiring the amber-colored liquid inside it. “Is it like duskwort?”

  Kate raised her eyebrows. “What do you know about duskwort?”

  “Constance told me that you went on a big adventure to find some, but there wasn’t any left, only a plant called thwartwort”—Tai pronounced this word with some difficulty—“which doesn’t do anything except glow in the dark. But then she said that for one of your projects you and Milligan went on an exposition—”

  “Expedition.”

  “—expedition, and you hung from ropes on the side of a cliff for two whole days, and you found some duskwort! And you brought it home, but then it turned into dust, and it was the last in the world!”

  “Let’s have that back, mister,” Kate said, for Tai was gesturing excitedly with the ampoule. He handed it over. “That’s all true. It was Reynie’s idea. He and Sticky—George—dug through scads of books, and based on what we already knew about duskwort, and what George already knew about climate, geography, botany, and I don’t know what else, they narrowed the possibilities down to a few locations around the North Sea. Then they showed me what they’d figured out, I took it straight to Milligan, and a month later I was a hundred feet above the ground, surrounded by screaming cliff swallows, scouring jagged rocks for duskwort in a freezing rain. It was amazing!”

  “And now it’s all gone?”

  “Yep. It’s fragile stuff,” Kate said. “I mean, it was. And George is now the only person in the world who ever saw it under a microscope. Not even Mr. Benedict got a chance—he wanted George to get the first crack at it.”

  “Wow,” Tai breathed. “What did Constance do in the project?”

  “Constance declared herself official project chronicler. She wrote a poem about it.”

  “That’s how I know about it! She told me the poem!”

  Kate snorted. “I’m sure she did. Well, I have to admit, it wasn’t a bad poem. There were some tricky rhymes. It was a little insulting, and I don’t see why she had to make the entire last stanza about the importance of the poet in such endeavors, but we’re all used to that sort of thing. It’s funny if you take the right angle on it.”

  “I loved it!” Tai said, laughing. Then he grew serious. “Aren’t you going to miss doing projects together?”

  Kate narrowed her eyes. “So you’ve heard things are changing around here, have you?” She sighed. “Of course I’ll miss our projects. That platform you like riding on so much? Well, the roof was leaking and there were rotten boards in the attic, and it was all going to have to be repaired anyway. So Mr. Benedict suggested we could use a little hands-on experience in hydraulics and construction. The boys and I built that platform ourselves!”

  “And did Constance write a poem about it?” Tai asked hopefully.

  “She did.”

  Tai giggled. “Tell me the other projects!”

  “Honestly, there’re too many to tell you all of them right now, but we put in the intercom system ourselves, and some special trick windows, and we used Mr. Curtain’s technology to build a little machine that I nicknamed the Husher—a noise-cancellation device that makes everything around it perfectly silent. You can imagine the pranks we played on one another with that.…”

  “Constance says it was just you who played the pranks! Until everybody begged you to stop scaring them.”

  Kate frowned and considered this. “Huh. That might actually be true.”

  She had finished her dart preparations now and was double-checking that everything was in its proper place. She had a feeling that she was going to need to use the tranquilizer gun in the near future, and it was a nervous thought, even for her.

  And yet, Kate realized, the nervous feeling was actually a relief, because it took her mind off the other feeling, the one prompted by Tai’s question.

  Aren’t you going to miss doing projects together?

  The melancholy feeling.

  Kate much preferred the nervous one.

  Tai was edging around the desk to get closer to the empty tranquilizer gun. Kate slid it out of reach. Tai began edging around the desk in the other direction.

  “Are you as good as Milligan with that?” he asked.

  “These days I’m even better,” Kate said matter-of-factly. Then, upon a moment’s reflection, she added, “I don’t know if he realizes that, though. I used to be amazed at how fast and accurate Milligan was with his.”

  “But you aren’t anymore?”

  “Well, like I said, I’m faster and more accurate than he is now, and it doesn’t seem quite the thing, you know, to be amazed at one’s own abilities.”

  Tai’s face took on a crafty expression. “I’ll bet you really aren’t as good as Milligan is.”

  Kate gave him a look. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “Show me, Kate! Please!”

  Kate took a deep breath. Not because she didn’t want to give Tai a demonstration—she already felt as though she would do anything for this little boy—but because she knew her instinct was to make choices that others found rather less than careful. She wanted to be sure of her choice now.

  “Okay, get down here behind the desk,” Kate said. Tai eagerly complied. “Now peek over the top of it and look at that spot above the door—do you see it? Where there’s a hole in the plaster about the size of a nickel? Good. Now get back down behind the desk again. We’re going to be on the extra-safe side, you and me.”

  “Okay!” Tai exclaimed. He covered his ears.

  “You don’t need to do that. It’s pretty quiet. Now look,” Kate said, showing him a dart. She removed its ampoule of serum. “See that? Now I won’t waste serum on a poor old wall that never hurt anybody.”

  “Right!” Tai said, grinning. He still had his hands over his ears, but Kate wasn’t going to insist.

  “So now I just load the dart like this,” Kate said, showing him. “And then—” She moved so quickly that Tai uttered a startled squeak and fell backward. When he recovered his balance a moment later, the tranquilizer gun was resting on the desk, and Kate was regarding Tai with crossed arms. “And that’s how I do it!”

  “Did you shoot the dart?” asked Tai.

  “What do you mean, did I shoot the dart? You saw me!”

  Tai slowly stood up and gaped at the tiny hole in the plaster above the door. It seemed to have bloomed feathers. He gasped.

  Kate smiled. Her own eyes went up to the ceiling, above which, she presumed, Reynie and Sticky were busy solving the message from Mr. Benedict. You should be up there, she thought. And then: Or no, actually, you need to get used to this. It’s good. It’s all fine.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Kate lowered her gaze and discovered Tai looking up at her with an expression of concern. She put on a frown. “Are you kidding me? Nothing’s the matter! Didn’t you see that shot?”

  Tai cocked his head uncertainly. “But now you’re thinking about S.Q.’s big feet! Like Reynie did when he was trying to keep me from hearing his thoughts.”

  “Good grief,” Kate said, shaking her head. “Can’t a person think about somebody’s big feet sometimes?” She made as if to tickle Tai, who giggled and leaped away. She took a deep breath and said, “I do believe that bed needs more jumping on. Can you help it out?”

 

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