‘Georgia is Morgan Moreau,’ coughed Zac, pale and panting, pushing himself up on one elbow. ‘We have to get out of here. Sera won’t be able to hold her off forever.’
‘My mother?’ said Luke, his senses threatening to pack up and leave again.
He watched Seraphina face the monster, green light streaming from her fingers and rippling through the air like flame before meeting Georgia’s blood-red lasers in a deluge of sparks and lightning-like flares.
Samantha seemed to be frozen to the spot, staring with fixed concentration at the fireworks.
‘Samantha, I’m fine,’ Seraphina yelled. Luke didn’t think fine was quite the right word. ‘Please, Sam, you don’t have to help me. Save your energy. Help the boys. Luke – get into that cupboard now!’
Samantha was helping Seraphina? How? Luke stood, swaying a little on his feet. He knew that he had died – he’d felt the sword puncture his lungs, pierce his heart. And the pain. He had never felt anything like it. He had no idea how these things could be happening, but right now he was thankful for the total numbness that overtook him whenever things were out of control. He squinted in the glare of the flame-battle. Yep, this would definitely meet that category.
The giant-Georgia countered a laser of light hurled by Seraphina; the energies met in an explosion of brilliance.
The mutant metal dragon thing sat on its hideous haunches, watching the lightshow. From its malformed mouth hung a clump of blood-matted hair left over from the mess of the swordsman on the ground. After one glance downwards, Luke kept his eyes above floor-level. That dude didn’t have a scar any more. He didn’t have a face, either. He wondered why Georgia-Morgan didn’t sick her freak mutt onto Seraphina to end the battle once and for all.
Right then Zac tugged desperately at his arm and Luke turned towards the wardrobe. He’d rather be in there than out here if the doggie-dragon did decide it was up for seconds.
‘Locked,’ said Zac weakly, trying to stay upright. ‘You have to use your tools. You’re the only one who can do it. It all makes sense now.’
‘Oh yeah. It all makes perfect sense, Nguyen,’ Luke said. ‘This is all completely understandable.’
Luke picked the lock in three seconds flat, grabbed Samantha’s hand, and stepped through the door.
Status: Logged in User: Intellice
Are you there?
Oh my God. None of us can believe this has happened! And that Morgan Moreau is alive and kicking. I’m still in shock.
The battle’s over. My source says Morgan vanished when the kids portalled out of there. And Seraphina’s okay.
Morgan set that whole meeting up – we know that for certain. She wanted to bring the kids together. I mean, it’s not as though my source could have that part wrong. Although I’m betting Kirra’s appearance was a bit of a nasty surprise. And Seraphina probably wasn’t part of the plan either.
What is Moreau up to?
At least we know now that she doesn’t want the twins dead. She could have compelled her dragon-daemon to take them all out. But she protected them, healed Luke, and it looks as though Zac might have been lucky enough to catch some of that magic too.
Whatever you do, though, don’t go thinking that Morgan’s found religion or something. She brought those kids into being for a purpose, and I promise you that it’s not to play happy families one day.
Something big is coming. And Morgan’s had centuries to plan for it.
Hell, there are so many spybots in here; this place is crawling with them. I’ve gotta go down low. If I can’t reach you again for a while, keep your ears open, for Gaia’s sake.
Out.
Clarens, Lake Geneva, Switzerland
On his twenty-third lap of the twenty-metre swimming pool, Jake Grey decided that he was definitely not going to enrol in his PhD this year. Nor maybe the next.
For the next five laps, he tried to figure out how the hell he was going to explain this to his uncle.
His decision had nothing to do with the fact that he’d only just completed his Masters degree in Neuroinformatics. He wasn’t the slightest bit fatigued by all the study. The program at the Institute of Technology in Zurich had been great, and his dissertation concentrating upon the development of a computational model to map human emotions was fascinating.
And even though his uncle would assume it was all because of George, that wasn’t it either. Sure, he was sick of having that big ape following him everywhere around campus, but he knew that the university would never have allowed him to board there if he hadn’t been chaperoned. Even with his uncle guaranteeing that George would be constantly by his side, it had been difficult to persuade the Dean that he was emotionally mature enough at age eleven to begin his first degree at the university. Now, at age fourteen, he and the Dean were firm friends, and he could probably have convinced him over a chess game that he no longer needed a bodyguard.
The Dean was another person who would not take this news well. Dean Bachmann would definitely feel the loss of their weekly game over dinner in his private dining room, but Jake was under no pretence that what he would miss more was the funding and study grants that Jake’s research attracted.
As he climbed out of the pool after his fiftieth lap, he felt more certain than ever about his decision. He towel-dried his dark-blond hair, and slicked his too-long fringe back out of his blue eyes.
He was beginning to conclude that formal academia was just too one-dimensional and constrained. When he’d put the very basics of his idea for his next project to two of his professors, they’d laughed. When they’d realised he was serious, they’d wasted the next hour of his life trying to tell him how unattainable his plans were. During their three thousand and eighty-eight words, he’d counted the term ‘impossible’ seventeen times.
And that was the very hour when this ridiculous notion arose. That Jake Grey would not enrol in his doctoral studies upon immediately attaining his Masters was unthinkable. He’d completed primary school by age seven, high school at ten, and had his undergraduate degree in neuroscience under his belt by twelve-and-a-half.
But when he’d begun unwittingly counting the number of words his professors spoke, he knew that he was bored. It happened whenever his mind was under-stimulated – it would just begin recording things of its own accord: the licence plate of every car in a carpark, the number of acorns on a tree, the chapters of the book he was speed-reading.
He climbed onto the ancient sandstone wall behind the pool and stared down the wooded hillside out to Lake Geneva. Even though this view was permanently etched into his brain, he never tired of looking at it. Today, in the middle of summer, the lake, bordered by the Swiss Alps, was a seamless, shimmering mirror, its blue brilliance reflecting endlessly the flawless, cloudless sky.
Suddenly starving, he headed back up to the house.
In his uncle’s family for six hundred years, the house could be best described as a mansion, although with its multiple sandstone wings and turreted roofs and spires, many people mistook it for a castle. Some tourist websites, promoting the region, took advantage of this and advertised it as such, but Jake stuck to the literal definition of a castle. He’d traced the building’s history and it had never been used by royalty, nor had it served for protection of the realm.
But he never forgot how lucky he was to call it home. If his uncle hadn’t taken him in when his parents had died in a car accident, who knew where he’d be right now. Maybe in an orphanage. His uncle wouldn’t speak to him of his brother, Jake’s father, telling him only that his parents had had a brief relationship before they’d both been killed in the collision.