The 39 Clues: Cahill Files: Silent Night (12 page)

Dak finished by pulling in a long, satisfied breath. He looked around the room and saw nothing but blank faces staring back at him. Lots of blinking.

“Thanks for listening,” he finally said. Then he held up his water glass and yelled, “Cheers!”

His mom fell out of her chair.

The next day brought the field trip he’d been looking forward to for months. For someone who loved history as much as Dak did, going to the Smithsonian was better than getting locked in a candy factory overnight. He planned to gorge himself on information.

On the bus ride there, he sat by his best friend in the whole wide world. Her name was Sera Froste, and so far no one had given them any flack about being such good friends. Well, except for the occasional “when’re you gonna get married” jokes. And the “Dak and Sera, sittin’ in a tree” songs.

Okay, so they’d received plenty of flack.

“What exhibits are we going to see before lunch?” Dak asked her after he’d gone over the museum’s floor plan with fluorescent highlighters. “And which ones after?”

Sera looked up from the electronic book that she was reading on her SQuare tablet, fixing him with the sort of stare she usually reserved for a bug in a jar. Her long dark hair made her expression look even more severe, as if it were on display in a picture frame. “Would you relax? Let’s just play it by ear, roam around. I don’t know, actually
enjoy
ourselves.”

Dak’s mouth dropped open. “Are you
insane
?” And he really meant it — she obviously didn’t comprehend the opportunity they were about to be given. “We need to plan this to the second — I’m not taking any chance of missing something cool.”

“Oh, for the love of mincemeat,” was her only response before she returned her attention to
String Theory and Other Quantum Leaps in Quantum Physics
.

Sera was a nerd in her own right, almost nerdy enough in stature to compete with Dak himself.
Oh, who am I kidding?
Dak thought. She had him beat by a mile.

This was the girl who had recently convinced him to attend a Saturday afternoon thesis reading at the local university — “convinced” him by threatening to scream out in the middle of lunch that she was in love with him if he said no. Dak had fiercely protested because he’d wanted to see the guy at the state fair who swore he was so old that he’d been Mussolini’s foot doctor during World War Two. (The man evidently had toenail clippings to prove it.) But Sera
swore
that it’d be more exciting to hear a three-hour presentation called “The Effect of Tachyon Generation on Ambient Wellsian Radiation.”

It wasn’t.

Sera had finally agreed to leave the presentation early, but only because the speaker kept using the words
baryon
and
meson
interchangeably when, according to Sera, everyone knows that’s not proper.

Suddenly Dak had an idea. He ran his fingers through his sandy blond hair and stared intently at his color-coded floor plan. “I guess we can skip the Hope Diamond exhibit if we’re short on time. It’s supposed to be cursed, which is cool. I’m not sure what it means by ‘an exploration of the biogeochemical processes that give minerals their unique properties,’ though. It sounds like a total snooze fest if you ask me.”

“Who asked you?” said Sera, putting her SQuare down. “Let me see that map.”

By the time Dak and Sera marched off the bus, Dak’s heart was giddy with excitement.

They had two hours and forty-seven minutes before the earthquake that would almost kill them.