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“There is only one circumstance under which a Warden will surrender her name,” Lottie said. “And that is to become the Warden of Last Resort.”
“What does that mean?” asked Jack, leaning forward. Lottie was proving to be a veritable fire hose of information. “Why won’t anyone talk about it?”
“Only the Examiner knows,” Lottie said. “And the Warden herself. People say it is supposed to be horrible, a fate worse than death, and I believe they may be right…. Oh, Lara Mae, what have you done?”
“If it’s so bad, why would she do it?” asked Tara. She had been sitting contentedly by while Jack and his great-aunt caught up on family and Warden business, but this new mystery had her hooked.
Instead of answering, Lottie held up one wrinkled finger. The tip flashed with a bright, silver light. Jack was immediately drawn to it, and so were Tara and Kyle. The silver light was cool and at the same time oddly penetrating. It seemed to drill through the back of their eyes, right into their brains.
“You will not remember,” Lottie said in a soft voice. “I conceal this information from you, until such time as you have need of it. Until then, it is forgotten.”
Her finger curled into her fist and the light went out. The children stayed as they were for a moment, eyes blank as their minds rearranged themselves to tuck away the preceding minutes.
Then Jack blinked. What had they been talking about? His mind had wandered off for a moment. He was clearly more tired than he thought. Lottie was feeling the toll of the excitement, too. She seemed to have aged another ten years.
“We’re going to take you home,” he said firmly.
“With your youth and my knowledge, I’m sure we’ll find a way,” the old woman said with a determination that belied her frailty. “Let’s gather our strength as we make our plans. We will need both if we hope to succeed.”
The sound of a storm-warning siren curled eerily over Portland’s tiled roofs and along its deserted streets. It was dawn on Thursday morning, and the Hawks were making their move. The tent was a whirlwind of people coming and going, many of them via lightning. Above the town, thick clouds were gathering, piling higher and higher into the stratosphere. The strange weather had ordinary meteorologists scratching their heads and ordinary citizens boarding up their windows.
But Aleksandr and his Hawks weren’t the only conspirators on the move that morning. In the passenger seat of a flame-daubed Austin 1600, with her knees up to her chest, Jaide Shield stared sleepily at the townsfolk passing by. The streets were as packed as she had ever seen them. Traffic on the roads to Scarborough and Dogton was down to a crawl. From above came the steady whocka-whocka of her mother’s helicopter. Susan’s paramedic team was there to lend credence to the fake state of emergency that the mayor had declared overnight. Depending on who heard the news, the warnings were either of a storm front or a chemical spill, or whatever theory sounded most credible to them. Jaide wondered if Kyle’s father and his fellow Portland Peregrinators were imagining UFOs, or perhaps a Sasquatch uprising.
School was canceled. The hospital was being evacuated. A pall seemed to fall across Portland as the bruise-colored sky deepened even further to greenish black. Even the cats were evacuating, urged by Kleo and Ari to prowl elsewhere for the day. By midday, the town was expected to be completely empty.
In the meantime, Jaide and Grandma X were parked on the corner of River Road and Station Street. They had been there for an hour.
“What are we waiting for, exactly?” Jaide asked her grandmother. “How big is this thing?”
“Look for a removal truck or something similar,” Grandma X said. She was peering through a pair of binoculars at the traffic inching by, lowering the glasses occasionally to wipe the mist off the windshield. “You’ll know it when you see it. There’s only one lodestone big enough to hold the energy Aleksandr will need. It has to be the one from Avak.”
Jaide was a little fuzzy on what the Avak Lodestone was, or how it was going to be used in their plan. It was an ancient meteorite, she gathered, or a large chunk of one, secretly unearthed by Wardens a long time ago. It could store huge amounts of lightning energy, and then release it all at once, at its controller’s command. There had been talk about tapping into that power, but that was where Jaide had gotten lost. They had been making plans well into the night, and she had started the night tired after the third Examination. Her father was involved. That was all she was sure of.
Grandma X had made her go to sleep for a few hours, but she didn’t think anyone else had stopped to rest. On being woken before dawn, she had found the blue room cleared and the cross-continuum conduit constructor sitting at its center. There was no sign of the professor: Someone had stolen back into the tent and put him where he was supposed to be, so Aleksandr wouldn’t know that he had ever gone missing. Grandma X had been a whirlwind of activity … but now here they were sitting in the car, waiting for Portland to empty and a big rock to drive by. Stefano got to hang out with Hector.
Jaide wondered what Jack was doing. She had tried teeping him several times as she lay tossing and turning, haunted by the empty bed in her room. He hadn’t replied once. She had even tried texting his phone, but the messages had all bounced back, undeliverable. Mentally, and sometimes physically, too, she crossed her fingers and hoped with all her heart that he was safe.
Her wandering gaze caught sight of a familiar face driving by.
“Hey, isn’t that Doctor Witworth?” she said, pointing.
“Indeed it is.” Grandma X seemed unfazed by the reappearance of the woman who had drugged her and then stolen the professor, six months ago. “The Evil’s minions are everywhere. It is not surprising they suspect something. There has never been a gathering of lightning wielders like this, not in all of Warden history.”
“Do you think she’ll try to stop us?”
“Undoubtedly, if she learns what we’re planning.” Grandma X sat up higher in her seat. “Ah, here it is, just as I expected.”
Jaide saw a big white truck lumbering toward them down the road. It sat low on its rear tires, as though carrying something very heavy. Jaide watched it go by Station Street and signal to turn at Gabriel’s Auto Sales. It was definitely heading for the tent.
“Now what?” asked Jaide.
“One moment.” Grandma X’s eyes were closed. “I am just speaking with Hector.”
Jaide waited, with only mild impatience. Ever since she had been inducted into the conspiracy no secrets had been kept from her for long. The answer would come eventually.
Grandma X’s eyes opened. She started the car.
“Now we go join your father,” she said. “It’s time for the lightning wielders to present yourselves at Project Thunderclap.”
* * *
Hector was waiting for Jaide with Stefano when the Austin 1600 pulled up by the oval. He had something hidden under his pullover — either that, thought Jaide, or he had eaten an astonishingly large breakfast.
“All’s ready?” he asked Grandma X. Something passed between them through her open window. It looked like a large, flat black stone, rough on one side, smooth on the other, and Hector’s stomach had returned to normal.
“It is now,” she said. Glancing behind her to make sure Jaide and Stefano were away from the car, she pulled away from the curb and drove home.
“What was that?” Stefano asked as they headed for the tent.
“A piece of the lodestone,” said Hector. “Magnetic meteorites have special properties. We have this small piece here and the large piece in the tent, but for a while it’ll be as though they were never separated. What happens to one will happen to the other. And what goes into one we can take out of
the other.”
It was like an extension cord, Jaide thought. Aleksandr was charging up a giant battery in the tent, and Grandma X could draw from that battery in Watchward Lane. Professor Olafsson had been clear that it would take more than three lightning wielders, two of them troubletwisters, to ensure the safe operation of the Bridge to the realm of The Evil. If they were going to do it safely, they would need to steal from Aleksandr.
At the entrance to the tent, they were greeted by two Warden guards who waved them through. The interior of the tent seemed even bigger than it had been the previous night. Many of the canvas partitions had come down to form a wide central space at the center of which loomed a tall obelisk-like object. The Avak Lodestone, Jaide presumed. Mr. Carver would have approved. It was attached by thick wires to a single metal pole that stuck vertically out of the ground and poked right up through the highest point of the tent. Next to the lodestone was a cross-continuum conduit constructor that Jaide recognized as the one they had found in Rourke Castle, now repaired and shining as new. A crowd of Wardens was assembling around the lodestone and the bass cylinder, some of whom Jaide recognized from the Grand Gathering. Some were in statue form, or paintings, presumably the relics Grandma X had referred to. There was even a tree with a human face carved into the wrinkles and knots of its ancient bark.
Jaide, Hector, and Stefano joined the throng, and moments later Aleksandr stepped up onto a podium to call everyone to order.
“This is a historic day.” His deep voice embraced the crowd and drew everyone in it to his bosom. “Today, our long labor, and the labor of our forebears, will end. Today we usher in a new era of peace and security for all of humanity. Today we defeat The Evil once and for all!”
The crowd cheered.
“Famous last words,” Stefano whispered in Jaide’s ear. “At least, they will be if he’s wrong.”
