Linua ran all the way to Eret’s school. It was promising to be a hot day, but Linua liked running. At least once a week the training at the Castle would involve jogging around the gym until they’d clocked up several miles. She liked it when she was running because she didn’t have to think, and also she was no better or worse at it than any of the cousins. Right now felt like she was doing something, and by the time she arrived at the school she felt ready to face whatever was coming. She and Pickle and Anith would save Eret together. Oh, and the red-headed kid. What was his name again? Solly.

But when she got to the school, filled with this new feeling of determination, she realised she’d forgotten the instructions to get to the computer room. Was it the east gate or the west gate? She jogged all around the school, following the pavement on the outside of the fence, and came across a massive pair of iron gates and a large driveway the curved in a loop at the front of the school. Sitting on his moped, directly opposite the gates, was the thief. He was smoking a cigar or something, facing the school.

Was he waiting for the others to come out? When would they come out? From the old-fashioned school books Linua had read, she had the vague idea that at school you got a morning break and a lunch break or something. Or maybe the rules for that had changed in the last fifty years. But the thief clearly had a plan and was waiting for something.

Linua immediately turned around and jogged in the opposite direction, now going anti-clockwise around the outside of the school. There had been something about a gate and an oak tree. She came across a stand of scrubby trees by the school fence, and decided that she might as well search inside the grounds. The fence was eight feet high, which was easy enough to shimmy up, the only problem being the decorative spiky bits at the top. But there was enough room to put her hands between the spiky bits and do a sort of vault over it and jump down.

Landing hurt her feet, and her wrist got scraped by one of the bits of decorative ironwork, but at least she was in. She was standing on a narrow strip of grass with a gravel path running beside the school. She started jogging along it, still going anti-clockwise.

When she turned the corner, the grass stretched out into a wide lawn, although most of it had been worn away by the feet of hundreds of pupils every day, and was just compacted dirt. There was the oak tree, right in the middle of the lawn.

She continued along the path, and spotted a series of bleached and weathered wooden picnic tables on the side of the lawn nearest the school. There was a rusted bin made of wire mesh in the centre of the picnic tables, which had a drift of crisp packets, crumpled cans and sweet wrappers lying in the bottom of it, and the earth all around had been churned up into mud. There was the side door Pickle had mentioned.

She went through it, into a corridor that smelled of sickeningly sweet fizzy drinks, smelly socks and bleach. There was a stairwell that went both up and down, and a long corridor with doors on one side and lockers on the other. To her alarm, she saw a man advancing along the corridor, wearing a dark blue dust coat that labelled him as a janitor. From the pugnacious way he was hunched forward, Linua immediately knew he would be the unhelpful kind of janitor, but it was too late to run, because he had already seen her.

“Here, you!” he said, barrelling towards her.

She could still have run, but she couldn’t remember where to find the computer room from here. Maybe she could pretend to be a student. She channelled being the good, dutiful daughter of House Yi as hard as she could.

“Hi,” she said rapidly, as he approached. “I’m new, I just moved to this school and I’m lost. Please can you help me?”

This immediately threw him off his stride. He came to a stop in the corridor. A name badge pinned to his coat said D. BULLMAN. His expression was suspicious. There was something about him that reminded her of Wai Bing Sheyboh.

“You should be in registration now.”

“My registration teacher sent me to the computer room, but I forgot where that is. Could you give me directions?” Linua asked, still ultra-polite, and intensely radiating a Yi child’s respect for authority.

He looked even more suspicious.

“Where’s your uniform?”

“It…” She’d never worn a school uniform in her life. The closest thing she had were the gi that she wore to training at the Castle. What might have happened to her pretend uniform? When she’d outgrown one set of gi, the castle staff always ordered new ones well in advance, except for that time Linua had put on a growth spurt and she’d had to borrow a set from one of the cousins until the bigger size had arrived. There was her excuse! “It came but the wrong size was ordered by mistake and it doesn’t fit. The right size hasn’t arrived yet.”

The janitor still looked suspicious.

“I had a note from my grandmother,” Linua gabbled on. “But I don’t have it with me, I gave it to the registration teacher. She said it was okay just for today.”

“Who’s your registration teacher?”

Linua had no idea what any of the teachers were called. She chose the most common name in the city.

“Mrs Lee.”

His face cleared a little, as if he recognised the name.

“Please, sir, I’d be very grateful if you could tell me where the computer room is. I got lost and I don’t want to be late.”

The “sir” did it. She could see the change in his body language the moment the word came out of her mouth.

“Mind you be wearing your uniform tomorrow,” he said officiously. “I’ll be checking up on you. Down the stairs, along the corridor on the left, that’s where they are.”

“Thank you! I promise I’ll be wearing my uniform tomorrow!” She immediately whisked herself down the stairs, not wanting to give him time to get suspicious about anything else.

She had never realised she would be so good at lying.

At the bottom of the stairs she chose the left corridor, which was lit only by fluorescent strip lights and had doors to either side, none of which had labels on. Which one was the computer room? She saw that one of the doors was open a crack and a head with hair sticking up in all directions was peeping around it. She speeded up.

“Pickle!”

He gestured her inside. His face looked like a blob of uncooked pudding. He didn’t look remotely like the calm, competent Pickle she had imagined in the library.

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She felt herself wobbling briefly, like a gyroscope about to fall. No. She firmed her resolve. Pickle had been there for her when she had been panicking and afraid of things spiralling out of control. She would have to be calm and decisive for both of them. For Eret.

“I told Anith to come to the computer room as well,” Pickle said. He was rubbing his hands together as if washing them, over and over. “She’ll be here in a few minutes. Wow, you’re really sweaty.”

“I ran all the way from the library.”

The computer room was a small basement room with narrow windows at the top of the outside wall. There were desks with computers, most of them with dark, silent screens, except for one along the inside wall, which had the Astronomy Club bulletin board showing on the monitor.

“Is it just you?” Linua asked in surprise. “Where’s Solly?”

Pickle made a face.

“I didn’t tell him about this. He’ll be in registration right now.”

There was something wrong with that. Linua felt instinctively that this was a problem that all the Astronomy Club needed to resolve. Solly might be an idiot, but he was their idiot. He needed to be in on this too.

“You’d better get him,” she told Pickle.

“What for? He won’t be any help.”

“Yes, but he’s part of the club and we’re all in this together,” Linua said firmly. “Can you pretend to get him out of registration with a message from a teacher or something?”

“Nah, I can just wait until the bell goes for the first class and find him in the corridor.” Pickle checked the clock on the wall. “Actually, bell’s about to ring. I’ll get him now.”

“I’ll wait here for Anith.” Linua took her Keng Boh Kids backpack off and sat on one of the chairs.

Pickle heaved another sigh, but went out of the room. He hadn’t been gone long when Linua realised she should have told him about the janitor. She hoped the janitor had moved on to somewhere else.

The next person to arrive was Anith, in a cloud of impatience and irritation.

“What’s this about? I’ve already missed registration, and I went through a red light on my scooter to get here in time for first period! What’s Eret up to now?”

Haltingly, Linua told her about the thief and the threat to Eret. Anith’s face got more and more incredulous.

“That can’t be right!” she kept repeating. Eventually she decided she would go to Eret’s next class and drag him down to the computer room so that Linua could see for herself that Eret was at school. At that point a loud bell rang to mark the end of registration, and Anith marched out of the room to look for her brother.

Solly and Pickle appeared shortly after. Linua had to go through the explanation all over again for Solly’s benefit. She told them everything that had happened with the thief, and that she had seen the thief waiting outside the school with his moped.

“The thief will probably come into the school and look for you,” Linua said. “He already infiltrated the Observatory and…” her voice trailed off as she thought about the mysterious way the car battery had run out unexpectedly. “…and maybe he made my car break down.”

“He won’t be able to get into the school.” Pickle sounded confident. “Bully would pounce on him immediately and demand to know what he was doing.”

Bully? Linua remembered the janitor’s name badge had said D. Bullman.

“Yeah, I met him on my way in as well.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get hauled to the school head,” Solly told her.

The way he said it sounded like he wouldn’t have been that sorry to see it, which immediately made Linua like him a little less, but she reminded herself that he was probably still upset at the way she’d put his nose out of joint yesterday.

Her mind circled back to the thief.

The thief might try to pretend to be a supply teacher or something. He hadn’t looked like a supply teacher earlier that morning, but he must be used to donning disguises, because he’d done it to visit Eret and Anith’s house twice, and pretended to be a janitor at the Observatory. Or maybe he would pretend to be an older brother of one of the pupils.

Her train of thought was disrupted when Anith clattered into the room, her eyes huge.

“Eret’s not in class,” she said breathlessly, her words stuttering over each other. “He’s not in class, no-one has seen him this morning. Oh Nimras, he’s been kidnapped.” She grabbed hold of Linua’s arm. “You need to come with me.”

Linua repressed the urge to twist out of Anith’s grip, but put a hand on the other girl’s wrist, ready to throw her off if she tried to drag Linua out of the room.

“Why?”

“We need to call the police and you’re a witness.”

“We can’t call the police. The bad guys might k … uh, it might put Eret in danger.”

“This is not something we can sort out ourselves.” Anith sounded dangerously close to hysteria.

“All they want is the storage stick.”

Anith swivelled to face Pickle, still holding on to Linua.

“Where is the storage stick? Give it to me!”

“They might take it and … and not give Eret back,” Pickle said rapidly and nervously, backing away from her. “How do we know we can trust them?”

Linua hadn’t thought of that. From the way Anith drew in a huge breath, she hadn’t either.

“I’ll go with the thief and hand in the storage stick myself,” Linua said. “I’ll make sure they give us Eret in exchange.”

Anith whirled on Linua, her hand tightening around Linua’s arm.

“You’re fifteen! You’re a kid! You can’t fight adult men.”

Linua started to protest that she was actually fourteen, but realised it wouldn’t help her case. And Anith was right. No matter how much training the Castle had given her, she couldn’t beat the thief and his boss in a fight. She wasn’t some kind of super wushu fighter with Guardian-like powers. She wasn’t Mitan in Keng Boh Kids who could beat up a roomful of adults.

Still, she had to do something.

“I can’t let you go!” Anith announced. “It’s too dangerous.”

Linua twisted easily out of Anith’s grip.

“You can’t stop me!”

They glared at each other.

“What we need to do,” Solly said into the charged silence, “is put the storage stick in a box with a bomb, and then tell the thief where it is, and then we tell the thief to give back Eret or we’ll blow the storage stick up before he can get to it.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

“You know, like in Keng Boh Kids that time when Hacktra was kidnapped.”

Anith’s mouth opened and closed several times before she found her voice.

“Solly, you … you clod! Just shut up! We don’t have time for this!”

Linua frowned.

“Why is the storage stick so important? It’s not even the actual artefact they were looking for, it’s a photo of it. Why did they kidnap Eret? They could just break into the Observatory again.”

They all thought about this.

“It might not be that easy,” Anith said at last. She paced up and down. “After the thief got caught last week, they put a new security system in on Nimrasday. And they’re hiring a security guard to patrol the grounds at night. I suppose if the thieves were really determined to get in they could, but it would be harder than before.” She clenched her hands. “They must have thought it was easier just to kidnap Eret! Oh Nimras…!”

Linua thought it through.

“It’s a map. And probably fragile if it’s that old. All they need is the images of it anyway if they want to find whatever it points to.”

Anith whirled on her.

“Is any of this important? My brother has been kidnapped … it doesn’t matter why they want it.”

Pickle cleared his throat.

“We can’t put it in a box with a bomb, because although theoretically I do know how to make a bomb … anyway, that’s not important. We don’t need a bomb. What I can do instead,” he said triumphantly, “is encrypt the storage stick!”

After that, there was a lot of arguing, and disagreements, but in a fairly short time they had a plan hammered out. Anith took Linua aside while Pickle was tapping on the computer and doing mysterious things to the storage stick.

“Aren’t you meant to be at school?” she asked quietly. “Which school do you go to? Will you be in trouble for missing it?”

“I’m meant to be in my training session at the Castle, but I sent them an email from my grandmother’s email to say I was sick.”

“Would it help if I followed that up with a phone call? Do they know what your grandmother’s voice sounds like?”

Linua boggled at the thought of Anith trying to sound like her grandmother.

“You could pretend to be Helged,” she said. “My grandmother’s housekeeper. They probably don’t know her voice very well.”

Anith nodded sharply.

“Come on, there’s an extension in one of the rooms at the end. After that I’ll do your hair.”

Anith put on a slightly posher accent when she called the Castle to tell them about Linua being sick, and she did actually sound a little bit like a much younger version of Grandmother. Normally Grandmother had the same middle-class Keretu accent as Anith, but she also had a special extra-posh phone voice that she put on in exactly the same way. Maybe Grandmother had been very like Anith when she was younger. Linua wondered what it would be like to have such boundless self-confidence.

Within a few minutes, they were all ready.

“Good luck,” Pickle said to Linua, who took a huge breath and nodded.

“Thank you.”