Everyone turned and looked at Solly.

“What kind of a car?” asked Eret.

That was a stupid boy question! What did it matter what kind of car it was? The important thing was who was in it.

“It was a blue Berin Onager, five years old,” Solly rattled off.

Clearly, Linua was going to have to ask the actual important question.

“Who was driving it?”

Solly blinked at her, as if the idea of checking out the driver had never occurred to him. Linua rolled her eyes and traded glances with Anith.

“It could just have been a coincidence,” Pickle said. “I mean, statistically the chance of someone also wanting to travel from the centre of Herkow all the way out to the Observatory isn’t that low—”

Anith interrupted him.

“Where is the car now, you clods?”

Actually, that was also a good question. Linua went to peer through the double doors out into the parking lot, although it was a futile exercise since she had no idea what a Berin Onager looked like. There were no blue cars in the car park though.

“It’s not here,” she reported.

“No, it stopped off in the layby before the squiggly bend.”

That was only a few minutes’ drive from the Observatory.

The only person that Linua could think of who might want to follow them was the treasure hunter they had outsmarted last year. He had kidnapped Eret in exchange for electronic files, and the information they had given him had been altered sufficiently that he wouldn’t have been able to use it. When he had let Eret go he had promised to come after them if they had cheated him. If he had subsequently realised that what they had given him was unusable—although it was possible he hadn’t—then maybe he had sent the car to spy on them. Linua didn’t want to suggest this to the rest of the group, because Anith would get upset, and she had a feeling that Eret would dismiss the idea out of hand. Maybe she could speak to Eret privately about it later.

“It could have been anything,” Eret said at last, in his usual decisive way. “It might have been following us but it might just be pure coincidence. If we see it again, we can start to worry about it. Come on. They’re actually going to let us try out the controls of the new telescope!”

The upgrades to the telescope had been completed last month, and this would be the first time any of them had visited it since then. The Astronomy Club were going to be allowed—under strict supervision—to adjust the telescope's tilt so that it was pointing to the right area of the sky.

The boys were hugely excited at the prospect. It was almost enough to distract them from possibility of being followed by a mysterious car.

They clattered out of the building and up the iron staircase that had been bolted to the side of the cliff. About a hundred feet above them was a small flat ledge where the massive dome of the telescope sat.

Anith and Linua hung back as the boys charged ahead.

“Nice outfit,” Anith said. “You decided you don’t want to wear a school uniform anymore?”

Linua heaved a sigh, and related the whole clothing war, right from the jeans incident at the start, including the fact that she’d escaped out of a window to get here. Anith’s eyes widened in horrified sympathy. Linua couldn’t help noticing that Anith was wearing a pair of nicely shaped jeans with a slight flare at the calves, and pink and purple embroidered flowers curling up from the hem. This was paired with a lilac top that had a scoop neckline edged in fluffy little lilac feathers and silver sequins. She looked elegantly casual, as usual.

“Wow, your gran really is harsh.” Anith looked thoughtful. “Hey, if that’s all you have to wear right now, I can probably lend you some stuff.”

With the hundred shekels Uncle Wai Ren had given her to buy clothes, and some of Anith’s cool, pretty outfits, Linua could stop wearing pyjama bottoms and cutting up her shirts. That would be a huge relief.

“Thanks! I would really love that.”

Linua still hadn’t told the rest of the Astronomy Club about the missing artefact in the vault. The boys had collected at the top of the cliff where the telescope was situated, and were waiting for the researcher who would supervise them while they operated the machinery. Now would probably be a good time to tell them.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

She had to speak sharply several times before they all stopped babbling excitedly about the telescope and turned to listen to her.

“You know how I was doing that project in the museum vault?” She spoke rapidly, eager to get to the important bit. “Checking through the inventory?”

Eret’s eyes sharpened.

“You found something.”

“Not quite. One of the artefacts is missing.”

She pulled a piece of paper from her backpack, on which she had written out all the information the inventory book had on the artefact, and handed it to Eret.

“It was probably just removed for repair. Or cleaning or something,” Solly said loudly.

That had occurred to Linua too, but for as long as she had been coming to the Observatory no-one had bothered with the collection, whether for inventory, restoration, or research.

“I mean, is it actually valuable?” Solly went on, finally giving into curiosity and peering at the piece of paper Eret held.

Eret and Pickle seemed to think she was on to something—they ignored Solly completely and peppered her with questions. What was the artefact? Was it valuable or significant? Who had discovered it? Who last accessed it?

Linua had to answer I don’t know or no to each question.

“We can go through the records later,” Eret said. “They’re in the archives section. It would tell us how it got into the collection. There’s also a visitor’s book that should have a list of all the visitors from the last, oh, five years or so.”

Pickle broke in eagerly.

“If we get a picture of the artefact from the records, we can post it on a forum somewhere and ask about it.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Anith held up her hand. One by one they all turned and looked at her. “Do you not remember what happened last time we got involved in something like this? Eret got kidnapped! And now you want to go haring after something that might have been stolen. Are you sure we should be meddling like this?”

There was a long pause.

“It’s a cold case,” Eret said at last. “It might not even be that it got stolen. Maybe it was just taken for cleaning, or sold to another collection and someone forgot to write that in the inventory.”

Anith took in another breath to expostulate, but they were interrupted by Eret’s dad, who had just come up the staircase.

He said, “Linua, I need to speak with you privately.”

Dread curled in Linua’s stomach. She exchanged a glance with Anith and followed him down the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Anith jabbing Eret and pointing after her. Eret came clattering down a moment later.

“What’s happening?” he asked. There was a trace of belligerence in his voice, as if he knew that this was going to be something bad, and was getting ready to fight it, but didn’t know precisely how.

Eret’s dad sighed, but didn’t otherwise reply or try to send Eret away. At the bottom of the stairs, he pushed open the door that led into the Observatory offices. They were on the second-floor balcony, overlooking the entrance hall. Here, Eret’s dad paused.

“Linua,” he said, and his tone was gentle and sympathetic. “We’ve had a call from your grandmother and I’m afraid Lady Leylan has asked you to return home. She’s sent a car for you and it should be arriving shortly.”

Linua had been expecting this the moment he’d asked to speak to her. She’d been hoping to have a bit more time with the Astronomy Club.

“Oh,” she said forlornly. “Okay.”

“What?” Eret asked. “Why does she need to go home?” He sounded as if this was the most outrageous thing he had ever heard of.

“Because her grandmother has asked that she do so,” Eret’s dad said, patiently. He added, a little more acidly, “I can’t refuse to send her home when her legal guardian insists on it.”

“That’s not fair!”

Eret’s dad continued to regard his son with his mild, pleasant air. Eret flushed.

“But can’t you do something?”

Eret’s dad heaved a sigh, as if Eret’s question had been a rhetorical one.

“Why don’t you go and sit with Linua while she waits for the car?”

Eret would have stayed to argue, but Linua tugged at his sleeve, and after a moment of resistance, he followed her.

They went and sat outside, because the evening air at the top of the mountain was cool and pleasant, and there was a magnificent view right down the valley to the sea. You couldn’t see Herkow from here, because there was a mountain in the way, but that was deliberate—the Observatory needed as much distance as possible from the city because of the light pollution. The telescope was too small and too old to be useful for cutting edge research, but it was regularly used as a teaching Observatory. The University of Herkow had an extremely good astronomy department. It was one of the reasons Grandmother had been reconciled to the idea of moving to Herkow, after the custody battle had been settled.

Linua slumped dejectedly on the front step. Eret sat down hesitantly beside her.

“This is really draff,” Eret said.

“Tell me about it. I’m probably going to be grounded now.”

Linua had never been grounded in her life before, mostly because, up until she had joined the Astronomy Club, everything she did was decided by Grandmother and she hadn’t had any hobbies or friends or interests of her own. Eret and Anith seemed to get grounded at least once a month, usually because of some crazy thing Eret had decided they would do. It never lasted long, and their parents seemed resigned to the fact that their efforts never made much of an impression.

Weirdly, the prospect of being grounded almost make Linua feel like a normal teenager. But Grandmother didn’t treat Linua with the sort of exasperated affection that Eret’s mum and dad used on their errant offspring when they were in trouble. Grandmother would insist that everything be done her way, and her way only. There was no room for what Linua wanted.

“Am I … I mean, will we get to see you again?” Eret asked. “Will you be able to come to the Club meetings?”

“Yeah. I don’t know when, but she can’t keep doing this forever.” Or so Linua hoped. She heard the crunch of wheels on gravel and looked up.

“That must be the car service now.” She stood up.

Eret stood with her, then put a hand on her arm.

“Wait. That’s a Berin Onager.” It was also blue.

“Is that the car Solly said was following us?”