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Rennie agreed with her.
“What about your duty as a parent? As a human being? This is how The Evil will defeat you all, if you’re not careful: by making you shadows of itself, all emotion eroded away by decisions like this. It’s love that makes this fight worth fighting. Not hatred of the enemy, to which all else is sacrificed. You are making a grave mistake and risking too much. I cannot bear to watch it.”
“Are you revoking your role as Living Ward of Portland?” Aleksandr asked, and even without seeing his face Jaide understood the question for the challenge it was.
“No,” said Rennie. “I would never do that.”
Jaide didn’t stick around to hear any more. It sounded like the argument would continue all night, and it upset her to think of her father being like this. She was sure it wasn’t easy for him to make this decision, but at least he could have tried to argue with Aleksandr. At least he could have sounded sad about it.
She stepped out of her hiding place and moved quickly through the corridors, peering at tent flaps until she found the one she was looking for, decorated with a familiar four-pointed star. It was behind this flap, she was sure, that the professor was hidden. If anyone could teach her how to use the cross-continuum conduit constructor in Grandma X’s basement to rescue Jack, it would be him.
Pulling the beanie low over her forehead, she lifted the flap and went inside.
She had feared guards, but all the room contained was a table and several empty chairs arranged in a semicircle. On the table was a metal mesh cage with no door or lock, just bars. Inside the cage, on a wooden frame that looked a bit like an easel, was the death mask she and Jack had found in Rourke Castle, a plaster cast of the face of the real Professor Olafsson, who had died hundreds of years earlier. Along with his face, the plaster retained an impression of his personality and knowledge. He looked exactly the same except for a long crack down the middle of his face, like a jagged scar, that was visible no matter how carefully he had been glued back together. His eyes were closed. Jaide didn’t think he slept, but that was exactly what it looked like he was doing at that moment.
She stepped softly into the room. Behind her, the sound of Rennie arguing with Aleksandr and her father rose up above the hum of activity in the tent. That was good, Jaide thought. It would cover any sound she made. Her plan was simply to talk to the professor, but seeing him caged made her want to rescue him. Why would Aleksandr lock him up like that? It wasn’t as if the death mask had any means of moving on its own.
Then she realized he was caged for his own protection. The Evil’s minions had already stolen him once before. Perhaps they would try again.
She crossed the room and came as close to him as she could without touching the cage. It might have been rigged to sound an alarm.
“Professor?” she whispered. “Professor, wake up!”
“What? Where am I?” The plaster eyelids opened, revealing plaster eyes that darted left and right. “Oh, well. Still here. Haven’t you tired of asking me questions to which there are no … Wait, you’re not him,” he said on seeing her. “You’re Jaide! Goodness, child, it has been a long time. Not years, though, or else you would be significantly taller, unless your growth has been unnaturally stunted. Has it? What brings you to my dungeon of tedious interrogation?”
“I’m, uh, growing normally,” she said. “I’m sorry about this, but I need to ask you some questions, too.”
“Well, it’s different with you. I like you. Perhaps we could move our conversation to a more comfortable environment. Somewhere with a view of the ocean?”
“I’d like to, but you see I’m not really supposed to be here, so I don’t know how to open the cage. If I try they might catch me.”
“Oh, well, that’s easily fixed,” he said. “You simply change the metallic structure of the bars by means of Lu Shu’s Mental Elemental Transmogrifier, if you have one handy.”
“I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Ah. How about Aaron Smythe’s Invisible Hand?”
“Again … and I don’t really have time to go back to look for one….”
“Then I must resign myself to continued imprisonment.” The professor rolled his eyes in theatrical despair, then froze, staring up at the canvas ceiling. “Oh my!”
Jaide followed the direction of his gaze and saw a shadowy figure drop through a tear in the canvas ceiling. She got out of the way just in time to avoid being landed on. Her Gifts awoke automatically, given the thought still fresh in her mind that The Evil might attempt to steal the professor. The canvas walls flapped in a sudden wind. A cry for help was on the tip of her tongue when Jaide noticed something very strange about this unexpected thief.
She was dressed all in black, just like Jaide, apart from a pair of silver-tipped cowboy boots.
“What are you doing here?” they asked at exactly the same moment.
“I should say that’s perfectly obvious,” said the professor. “Hopefully one of you has the means of extricating me from this tedious predicament.”
Grandma X pulled off her black hood, releasing a flood of unruly white hair. With a look that said to Jaide as clearly as words, We will discuss this later, Grandma X turned her attention to the cage. Her hands made a complicated gesture, and then she suddenly reached through the metal as though it wasn’t there and removed the death mask from its captivity.
“Very nicely done,” the professor said with a grin. “I’m grateful to you, my good lady. By what means did you effect the transformation?”
“Tantalo’s Telekinetic Pilferer, but let’s not stand around discussing the finer details of my technique. Here.” She gave the professor to Jaide, then waved her left hand at someone waiting above them. Through the hole in the ceiling dropped an exact replica of the sleeping death mask.
Four reflective eyes peered down from the night sky.
“Hi, Jaide,” said Ari. “Nice night for a bit of cat burgling.”
“Shush,” said Kleo. “This isn’t a game.”
“No, but you have to give me that one. Cat burgling, yes?”
Grandma X placed the fake death mask in the cage, so no one would know the real one had been taken, and slipped the professor into a pouch at the front of her black top.
“Right,” she said, turning to Jaide. “I think it best you come home with us. Hector and Rennie are doing their best to distract Aleksandr, but if you’re caught, suspicion will immediately fall on them. Put your arms around my waist.”
Jaide did as she was told.
“Dad’s part of this?” she said, feeling a huge flood of relief. “I knew he wasn’t really going to abandon Jack, Tara, and Kyle.”
“Of course not.” Grandma X pulled the hood back over her face. “Your father is a Shield and therefore stubborn beyond all reason.”
Jaide felt that was directed at her, too, and might have been at least partially a compliment, but before she could say anything, a disconcertingly empty sensation rose up in her stomach, and she rose up with it, up through the hole in the ceiling and then onto the top of the tent, where a section of the canvas had become as solid as rock, allowing them to wal
k across its gentle billow and swell without falling through.
The guards didn’t see them as they slid down the side and onto the ground. One guard heard a strange noise in the bushes that required investigation, while the other thought he saw a suspicious figure cross the pool of light below a streetlight at the end of the block. By the time they returned to their posts, the two black-clad burglars and their four-footed accomplices had vanished into the night.
* * *
Nothing was said until they returned home, where Stefano was slumped over the kitchen table next to a half-drunk mug of hot chocolate. He jerked upright when Grandma X snapped her fingers, and stared first at her, then the sack containing the professor, then Jaide.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ve missed something important, haven’t I?”
“Explain,” Grandma X said, putting Jaide in the seat next to him and taking one of her own opposite them both, her expression unamused. Kleo sat on the table next to her, and she looked just as stern. Ari, on the other hand, sprawled on the sideboard, head turning from side to side as though he was watching a game of tennis as the words flew back and forth.
“You deceived me and placed yourself in unacceptable risk,” Grandma X accused Jaide.
“Yes, well, you deceived me, and if you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have needed to do anything at all,” Jaide retorted. “What happened to ‘no more secrets’? Have you been planning to rescue Jack all along? And Lottie, too?”
“Not Lottie,” said Grandma X, shifting in her seat. It wasn’t often Jaide saw her grandmother looking caught out. “I promised not to rescue her. But that didn’t stop me thinking how someone might attempt a rescue … someone like Hector, for instance….”
The front door opened and closed, and Jaide turned in her seat, hoping to see her father walking up the hallway into the kitchen.
It was indeed him, and his eyebrows almost jumped off his forehead when he saw his daughter and his mother sitting at the table in almost identical black outfits.
