The 39 Clues [Cahills vs. Vespers] 05 - Trust No One (23 page)

“Not me,” Jake said. “I’ll be standing right outside the door, baby bro.”

Atticus worked his way through the dense Latin text on the page with the sketch of the ring. Many letters were illegible, and even those he could read were difficult to string together into words.

Have to find it, whatever it is. It’s up to me. . . . Dan and Dr. Siffright were hurt because of me. . . .

After half an hour, the muscles in his neck and shoulders felt like they had been macraméd by tension and strain. He sagged in the chair.
This is taking way too long — we don’t have this kind of time. I need to get through it faster somehow. Brainstorm ideas, that’s what Mom would say if she were here.

Atticus’s insides contracted a little at the thought of his mom. At the same time, he was comforted by the thought of her cheering him on.

Atticus took the hotel pen and pad from the desk drawer and made some notes.

— astrolabe

— ‘Apology’

—
Book of Ingenious Devices

— Voynich folio

— Madrigal ring

These were the things Vesper One had ordered them to turn over. Atticus then did some quick research online about each item.

Vespers 101B, the refresher course,
he thought to himself grimly. He also investigated a few sites about Archimedes and related topics.

After this brief respite from the grainy images of the Palimpsest itself, Atticus was ready to go back to it. Only a few minutes in, he was having much more success than he had earlier.

Then he came to some words that took his breath away as effectively as a gut punch.

Machina . . . fini . . . mundi . . .

“No,” he croaked aloud. “Oh, no . . .”

In the coffee shop, Amy was sitting facing the door, so she was the first to see Atticus shuffle in almost as if it was hurting him to walk. His face was wan and his eyes dark with shock. Amy’s stomach rippled with sudden nausea.

Jake was right behind him. As they neared the table, he stopped a passing waitress.

“Coffee,” he said, “very milky and lots of sugar, please.”

Amy had never seen Atticus drink coffee, but maybe Jake thought his brother needed it now.

Atticus sat down and said nothing for a few moments. Amy looked at Jake and saw a combination of impatience and dread on his face, exactly what she herself was feeling. Atticus had apparently not told him anything yet.

The coffee arrived and Atticus downed half of it in a few scalding gulps. Then, still gripping the cup tightly, he began speaking, his voice raspy with tightness.

“The stuff they made us steal,” he said, “most of it has to do with Archimedes. And his devices. And besides those things, other stuff has gone missing. Some super-powerful magnets. And the Antikythera itself — a replica was stolen from a museum a few months ago.”

He paused and peered into the coffee cup as if hoping to find one of the missing objects there.

“I figured out some of the words on the page with the ring —
magnet
, and
Earth’s crust
and
disaster
. Archimedes was theorizing that if you focused on subduction zones — places where the earth’s crust is unstable — and used a device equipped with really powerful magnets, you could create disasters like earthquakes and volcano eruptions.”

He turned the cup nervously in his hands. “He writes that he’s planning to make the device based partly on the workings of the Antikythera. And then it says ‘
machina fini mundi.
’”

Atticus blinked a few times and swallowed hard. “It means ‘machine for the end of the world.’ Otherwise known as a doomsday device.”

He looked up at Jake, his expression almost pleading — as if maybe his big brother could make it all go away.

“The Vespers have been stealing plans and parts to make Archimedes’ doomsday device.”

Amy pressed her hands to her temples, hard, but she couldn’t stop the visions of massive disasters parading through her mind. Earthquakes, tsunamis, collapsing skyscrapers and highway bridges, raging fires. Hordes of people running and screaming, bloodied from injuries, blank-eyed in shock and desperation. Dead bodies tangled in mass graves, or clogging rivers, or laid out in endless lines under shrouds . . .

That’s what I’ve done. That’s what I’ve given them the ability to do.

Amy felt the burning acid of bile rise in her throat.

“The ‘final piece,’” she said, choking out the words. “Grace’s ring. The last thing they needed to finish the doomsday device. And I just gave it to them.”

She had traded the lives of thousands, maybe
millions
of innocent strangers, for five of her family and friends.

Five.

If she had known about the doomsday device, would she have given up the ring? Or would she have hung on to it, hidden it, maybe even destroyed it, to save the rest of the world — losing Nellie and Fiske and the others forever?

The blister on her neck seemed to be pulsing; she’d been picking at it again. She gave it yet another scratch.

It burst.

A tiny painful explosion of blood and pus left a loose flap of skin, with the tender flesh underneath exposed and raw.

Oblivious to the wound that was seeping drops of blood onto her collar, Amy rose from her chair and walked toward the door of the coffee shop — not the door to the hotel lobby, but the one that opened onto the street.

Jake got up and followed her. He reached for her hand, but she shook him off without looking at him.

She pushed open the door and stepped outside. It was chilly, and she wasn’t wearing a jacket, but she didn’t feel the cold.

Cold didn’t stand a chance against the horror and despair she was drowning in. There was no safe place left, not inside herself, not anywhere in the world.

Amy turned and ran. Dodging pedestrians, crossing streets and turning corners randomly, leaving a trail of honking cars in her wake, she kept running.

Running anywhere, as long as it was
away.

Jake came back to the table. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Amy’s empty chair. “She didn’t take her phone,” he said. It was on the table.

The concern in his eyes was a reflection of Dan’s own worry. Dan picked up the phone, and the three boys went up to their rooms.

“Pack your things,” Dan said. “We’re going to Attleboro. As soon as she gets back.”

She
will
come back,
he told himself fiercely.

Dan called Evan, who told him there was still no progress on the location of the hostages.

“Keep going,” Dan said.

What other choice was there?

Evan wanted to talk to Amy, but Dan told him the truth: that she was in no shape to speak to anyone. Then he asked Evan to check on the quickest way for them to travel to Attleboro.

“Make the reservations or whatever and then text me,” Dan said and hung up.

He felt as calm as he had ever felt in his life. It was a weird kind of calm, as if everything inside him had crystallized into a cold-eyed clearheadedness. He didn’t feel a single shred of doubt: The Vespers had made the decision for him.

There was only one possible way to combat a doomsday device.

Dan picked up his backpack, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. He took out a cardboard box, opened it, and removed a smaller Styrofoam packing case.

The case protected a test tube filled with a cloudy amber liquid, the result of three hours of work — undetected by Amy or the Rosenblooms — at the Columbia chemistry lab. Dan uncapped the test tube carefully and stared into the depths of the solution.

No one else dies on my watch.

He poured the mixture into a glass and toasted himself in the mirror.

“Here we go, Dad,” he said. “Cheers.”

Without hesitation, Dan raised the test tube to his lips and drank.

Sneak Peek

The race to stop the Vespers continues with more dangerous heists to perform, historic treasures to find, and hidden traitors to unmask. Stay one step ahead of your enemy and help save the kidnapped Cahills by following Amy and Dan's next adventure.

Turn the page for a sneak peek! (Just keep your eyes peeled for Vesper spies . . .)

The etched glass goblet sat on an exquisite marble countertop. The countertop was in the bathroom of a luxurious hotel room. The hotel room was in New York City, where luxurious hotel rooms are fairly common. The goblet looked like a reproduction antique that one might find in an eight-hundred-dollar-a-night deluxe room at the Ritz-Carlton.

Only the goblet wasn’t a beautiful reproduction. The hotel hadn’t placed it there. Someone else had.

And the goblet wasn’t empty. It was, in fact, about to be used.

The boy reached down and gripped the goblet. In it was the potion he’d completed, a mass of reddish-green liquid that pooled in the glass container like a deadly slime about to be unleashed on the world — a description that was not so far off the mark. He lifted the goblet and touched it to his lips, and then tipped it back. The contents slipped past his lips, entered his mouth, and washed down his throat and into his belly. He gave a small shudder as the foul concoction landed firmly in his gut and his taste buds roared their disapproval.