The car swept around the car park and pulled up in front of the main doors to the Observatory building, where Eret and Linua stood. A woman got out. She was wearing light cotton trousers, a shapeless shirt, and bright red and gold tasselled scarf tossed carelessly around her neck. Her hair was auburn and ruthlessly permed, and dangling from her ears were large, chunky, bright green earrings. She had thick blue mascara clinging to her eyelashes in clumps, and her thin lips had a freshly-applied coat of red lipstick.
She smiled brightly at Linua.
“Linua Leylan? Or do you go by Linua Yi?”
Linua had never seen this woman before in her life.
“Who are you?” she asked.
She could feel Eret bristling with suspicion beside her.
The woman smiled even wider.
“I’m so glad I found you. My name is Weela Frune. I’m with the Shinboa Gazette.” While she’d been speaking, she’d been digging in her handbag and bringing out a card wallet. Now she extracted a rectangle of white card and held it out to Linua between her index and middle finger. “I’d like to talk to you, Linua.”
Linua took the card out of automatic politeness, but the moment she had she wished she’d refused, because she knew exactly what this was about.
“Why do you want to talk to Linua?” Eret asked suspiciously.
Weela gave him a quick glance, with one brow arching incredulously. But then Eret didn’t know. Linua had never told him the truth about her parents.
She could feel her breath coming faster and shorter, and there was a sort of ringing panic in her ears. She couldn’t deal with this on top of everything else. It was too much. She couldn’t even bring herself to say anything to the journalist. Eret glanced at her, then frowned and stepped forward in front of Linua protectively.
Weela seemed amused.
“Are you the boyfriend?” She dug a notepad and pen out of her handbag.
Eret halted as if he had run into a wall, and stammered, as if he wasn’t sure. Linua was too full of panic to care. There, that was the car from her car service, pulling in now. She recognised the driver. She grabbed hold of Eret’s hand.
He was momentarily startled, and then his hand closed warmly around hers.
“I want to go home,” Linua said. The words came out stuttered, high and panicky.
“Linua, I just want to ask you some questions!” Weela made as if to step into Linua’s path, but Eret blocked her.
“Come on,” he said to Linua, and shepherded her to the car. Weela followed them, still talking. Eret spoke over his shoulder. “My dad is the senior researcher here. If you don’t go away, I’ll get him to throw you out.”
Eret was so much better at being rude to people than Linua was. He opened the car door for her, and she climbed inside.
“Check the board tonight,” he said urgently, referring to the Academy Club bulletin board. “We’ll talk then, okay?”
Linua nodded.
As the car drove away, it was only then that she let herself cry.
“Cheer up, love,” the driver said. “It may never happen.”
She didn’t know his name, but he usually did the evening runs, and was one of the drivers who liked to chat a bit. He had a daughter a bit older than Linua, whom he talked about a lot.
“Thanks,” Linua said, wiping her tears and trying to control the hiccups. “It’s been a really hard day.”
When she walked into the kitchen, Helged took one look at her face and immediately folded her in one of her special soft hugs.
“Oh, you poor duckie.”
On being confronted with a distressed person, Helged would inevitably offer either tea or food or both. She sat Linua down now in the kitchen, in front of the meal Linua had missed earlier by climbing out of the toilet window. Helged had reheated it in the oven for her.
“I thought I was in trouble,” Linua said.
“I persuaded your grandmother that you needed to have a proper meal before she shouted at you.” Helged sounded a little grim. It was almost like she was on Linua’s side, for all that she had exhorted Linua to be understanding and sympathetic towards Grandmother.
After dinner, Linua went through into the hall and saw Grandmother through the open door of the sitting room, waiting expectantly on the sofa with her cane clasped in front of her. All at once a wave of tiredness rolled over Linua. She had absolutely no interest in what Grandmother had to say.
She went into the sitting room anyway, and sat on the opposite sofa.
“Well!” Grandmother said. “Well!”
It seemed like she didn’t even know where to start. That made it easier for Linua to lean forward and the throw the card from Weela Frune on the coffee table.
“There was a journalist outside the Observatory. She wanted to speak to me.”
Grandmother stared at her in shock. She had already been sitting bolt upright but now she seemed to puff up in outrage.
“There was a what?” Her gaze snapped down to the card on the table. She heaved herself forward and clawed at it until she could get a grip on it. Then she had to hunt for her reading glasses and put them on the end of her nose. “Her!” she said explosively.
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“Did she try to speak to you before?”
“She has been pestering me for several months now, asking for an interview with you.” Grandmother’s brows plunged down over her nose, in a V-shape resembling a hawk’s wings. “I sent her away with a flea in her ear! The cheek! The press have no respect these days.”
“I don’t want to talk to her,” Linua said.
“And so you shouldn’t! I’ll deal with her.” Grandmother sounded satisfied that she had a target for her ire. Better that she aim it at Weela. Linua hoped she had distracted Grandmother sufficiently and stood up.
Grandmother’s brows immediately snapped into another frown.
“I haven’t finished speaking to you, young lady.”
Linua crossed her arms and girded herself. It was exactly as bad as she had expected. There were demands to know what she had been thinking, how could she have been so irresponsible, why had she suddenly turned from such a nicely brought up child to this. And each time Linua thought Grandmother was running out of things to say, she somehow managed to talk around to the beginning again and repeated herself, until Linua was so fed up she just wanted to walk out of the room and never speak to Grandmother again.
She didn’t. She knew that would just make things worse, so she sat and endured.
“There will be no more Observatory visits,” Grandmother ended, setting her mouth. “Exposing you to such badly behaved children was a mistake. It’s my fault. I have not been as vigilant as I should. I should have checked up on what you were doing more, and made sure you were pursuing valid lines of research, not messing around in the museum vault—which I only found out about tonight! However, my health hasn’t been what it used to be, and I wasn’t paying enough attention. I have made my position clear to the Observatory staff. You will not go there again.”
She paused to gather her thoughts and take a breath.
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?” Linua asked incredulously. “All I said was that I wanted to buy some jeans—”
“It’s not about that any more Linua,”
“It is for me! I wasn’t asking for a lot!”
Grandmother tried to interrupt.
“This is about your attitude—”
“I’ve done everything you asked since I was seven! Everything! I wasn’t asking for much in return! Why couldn’t you just have said yes? It’s not fair!”
Grandmother banged her cane on the carpet for emphasis.
“Everything I have done has been for your benefit—”
“No, it hasn’t,” Linua yelled. “This is all what you want, not what I want!”
There was a ringing silence. Grandmother was breathing rapidly and she put a hand on her chest as if to calm it down.
“Y...you don’t mean that, Linua! You can’t mean that!”
Linua had never heard Grandmother sound so distressed. She felt queasy and shaky all over again. She ran out of the room and shut herself in her bedroom.
She thought how different her life was from the other members of the Astronomy Club. When Eret and Anith asked their parents about doing something in the evening, such as meeting up with their friends, it was mostly a token thing. As long as they had done all their homework, of which they seemed to have a measly amount, compared to Linua, they could just walk out of the house and catch a bus, or—in Anith’s case—take off on her scooter. It seemed even easier for Pickle, whose parents had an astoundingly relaxed attitude to his whereabouts.
It helped that everyone lived near the centre of Herkow, instead of being stuck halfway up a mountain. Irrespective of the difficulty in getting permission to go anywhere and do anything that didn’t involve astronomy, Linua was stranded here unless Grandmother ordered her a car service.
The Kung Fu Kids had a supersonic shuttle which piloted them everywhere they needed to be, except for in the sixth book where it had been shot down and they’d had to ride around on bicycles until they could repair it with scrap parts in an abandoned motorbike repair shop.
Linua didn’t have a supersonic shuttle, but maybe she could get a bicycle.
It was 2am when Linua crept downstairs to use Grandmother’s computer in the library. She had never asked for permission to use it, primarily because when she’d first started using it last year, it had been behind Grandmother’s back. It had always seemed easier to continue using it late at night when everyone was asleep than explain. Also, she had felt sure that Grandmother would want to see what she was posting, and would disapprove when it turned out to be mostly jokes, and things she would probably refer to disparagingly as teenage nonsense.
Now Linua was glad she had never asked Grandmother about using the computer, because then she would have known to cut off that avenue of communication too.
Grandmother had a helpful habit of writing down all her passwords in a little black book in the top drawer of the computer desk, so Linua had no problem logging in. First, she checked Grandmother’s emails. Grandmother still corresponded regularly with people she had known when she was still working as an astronomy. Linua saw a few emails from the astronomy department at the University of Herkow. She skimmed further back and found several emails from Weela Frune, the journalist.
Grandmother’s replies had been short and terse: not interested! Linua could safely leave that fight to Grandmother.
Next, she opened the browser and logged into her emails and the Astronomy Club bulletin board. She skated through the messages on the bulletin board, and put her hands over face in dismay.
Sometimes Grandmother was just really awful.
Apparently, after discovering Linua’s absence, and while Linua was still on her way in the car with Eret and the others, Grandmother had called up the Observatory and demanded to speak to the Head of the Observatory. As she was not available, Grandmother had been put through to one of the junior researchers, who had been of no help whatsoever, and had simply taken a message and said that Dr Ayleorc, who was Eret’s dad, would call her back. Upon arriving at the Observatory, the message had duly been delivered and Dr Ayleorc had returned the call, and been entirely taken aback to discover that first, Linua did not have permission to attend the Astronomy Club meeting that evening, and second, that its members had been corrupting Linua and negatively influencing her behaviour.
Grandmother had informed Dr Ayleorc in no uncertain terms that Linua would not be volunteering at the Observatory anymore, or attending any meetings of the Astronomy Club. Furthermore, she was very disappointed both in the lack of management and supervision of the Astronomy Club, and in the sort of members it allowed in.
At that point Eret’s dad had politely but icily informed her that the founding members comprised two of his own children. He had questioned why Grandmother thought they had been a corrupting influence and received a lengthy diatribe in reply.
Since Grandmother was Linua’s legal guardian, Dr Ayleorc had had no choice but to send Linua home, much as he regretted having to do so. Anith and Eret had overhead him repeat the conversation word for word to their mum later that evening, with asides as to his own thoughts on the matter, which boiled down to the fact that he considered Grandmother a wholly unsuitable guardian for Linua.
Linua was covered with mortification. She hadn’t thought that her dramatic escape would get Dr Ayleorc into trouble too, or that Grandmother would say such awful things about the Astronomy Club.
Everything was unravelling out of control.
That was the first new thread which had been posted that evening, and was full of comments of sympathy for Linua, and outrage on her behalf. She wasn’t sure whether to be more embarrassed or touched by it all.
The second new thread was about the artefact. After the others had finished being shown the upgraded telescope, they had asked if they could check on Linua’s project in the museum vaults, and verified for themselves that the object was definitely missing, and not in any of the drawers. They had then gone into the archives, a fancy name for a storage room on the ground floor full of metal shelves which held boxes of paper. There they had found the old visitors’ books to the vaults, but there hadn’t been anything helpful in it. They had, however, lucked on an archaeological report of the dig where the item in question had been found. Pickle had smuggled that one out under his shirt.
Dr Ayleorc had apparently been very unhappy at the state they had left the archives in, and was taking Anith and Eret back the following evening to tidy it up. Linua felt genuinely sad that she wouldn’t be there. Not that she any desire to tidy up a mess in the archive room, but it would have been fun to be with Eret and Anith again.
She scrolled down to see what they had found.