The Fourth Ruby Read online

  Jack’s amazed expression flattened into a skeptical frown. “You mean like tracker Wi-Fi.”

  “Is that so hard to believe?” The professor set the photo down. “Ever heard of a jewel curse? The most terrible crimes and notions of the worst rulers in history, trapped in crystalized carbon and rebroadcast for eternity, infecting all who wear the gem.” He glanced down at Jack’s arm. “Or perhaps a gem can trap something even more substantial. Like a conscious mind.”

  Jack followed the professor’s gaze and saw his own sleeve was shimmering. His shoes were the same, becoming crystalline like the books and spheres and everything else in the office. His breathing quickened.

  “You’re losing your concentration, boy. I believe it’s time to go.”

  “Right. Okay.” Jack knew how to bail out of a spark. He pulled against the vision with his mind. Nothing happened.

  “Oops,” said Tanner. “Something wrong?”

  If Jack didn’t know better, he would have thought the professor was enjoying his growing panic. What would happen if he couldn’t get out? Would his mind be trapped there forever? Would he become a ghost—the legendary curse of the Tanner jewels? That didn’t sound good.

  He pulled again. Still nothing.

  “Your old skills won’t help you, Jack. The moment you stepped out from the observation position, you severed your usual escape route.”

  The crystalline feel of the room grew stronger. A faceted sheet obscured every detail. “Why did you bring me in here if you knew I might be trapped?”

  “In a word? Psychology. If I had warned you of the specific danger, you would have built a mental block. You might never have overcome it.” Young Tanner placed a hand on each of Jack’s shoulders. “But you jumped right in, didn’t you? I am so proud.”

  Jack didn’t feel like celebrating at that particular moment. The faceted covering thickened. He could no longer make out the spheres or the zeppelins.

  Tanner released him. “Remember when I told you to think about moving to another place, rather than leaving?”

  Jack nodded, having lost the capability to speak. Another bad sign.

  “Reverse that command. Think about leaving, Jack. Find an exit. A stairwell, a lift, a doorway—any exit will do.”

  The jeweled mahogany walls lost their color. Ripples of yellow flashed across every surface. Jack’s heart raced, if he even had a heart anymore. His whole body had become crystalline.

  The professor’s calm expression turned dead serious. “I think I’ve pushed you enough for one day.” He took Jack’s hand and it became flesh again, and he leaned back and pulled.

  Jack willed his foot to move, taking a step.

  “Good. You’ve got it. Escape, Jack. Get to the door. Now!” The professor pulled once more, and Jack flew headlong through the doors.

  In the blink of an eye, he was standing at the desk again. The crystalline shimmer evaporated. The office was real. He tore his hand away from the gem and patted his hips and waistcoat. He was real. “You saved me,” he said to Tanner, now old and confined to his wheelchair once again. “You pulled me out of there.”

  “Nonsense. Not in my power.”

  “But you—”

  The professor held up a hand. “I offered some forceful encouragement, as any good instructor must do on occasion. Only you have the power to pull your consciousness out of a spark, Jack. And you did.” He thought to himself for a moment and then looked up at his student. “In fact, I think we should capitalize on your momentum.”

  “My . . . momentum?”

  “Exactly.” The professor tapped his chin with a long finger. “We have to keep moving forward with this line of training, really give you something to see.”

  Jack caught himself nodding. Despite the terror of the last few minutes, he did want to push into another spark. The freedom of movement had been intoxicating, like taking control of a dream.

  The professor nodded with him, rubbing his hands together. “Yes. And I know just the place. Tonight. After tea. I have some errands to run, so I’ll have to meet you there, but it shouldn’t be a problem.” He raised an eyebrow. “Have I ever told you how to get to the Vault?”

  Jack knew about the Keep’s high-security storage levels, but he had never heard anyone refer to them as vaults. He narrowed his eyes. “Which vault?”

  “The Vault, my boy. The one at the Ministry of Secrets—the nightly home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.”

  Chapter Eleven

  THE MINISTRY OF TRACKERS had not been content with imprisoning and training Jack. They also felt it necessary to absorb him into the collective. According to Mrs. Hudson, all trackers and quartermasters started out as clerks, and Jack was no exception. When he wasn’t training with the professor or attending his academic courses, which had been suspended for the holidays, he had a list of menial tasks to accomplish.

  Jack’s clerk duties took him up and down the Keep, from taking inventory in the low-security storage on Sublevel Twenty-One to sorting unclaimed socks in the Lost Property Office at street level. And he never had to worry about getting lost in between. Whenever he came to some shadowed stair or secretive hallway where a Section Thirteen wasn’t allowed, a QED appeared to shepherd him back to the right path.

  Lunch would be a prawn sandwich and crisps, which Jack still called potato chips, eaten at his dad’s bedside. And after that, it was back to work or school until teatime. His post-lunch duties had been suspended for a while so that he could train with Ash for the Hunt, making him feel at least a little like a real live tracker. But that was over now.

  At the end of the day, Jack reported to the Matching Room beneath the Lost Property Office, where he and Gwen would be matching lost-item forms with found-item forms. It was a duty they had shared nearly every day before his doomed hiatus. Gwen’s desire to become a quartermaster was no secret, and she had treated Jack’s departure as a betrayal. She hadn’t spoken to him since. Now that Ash had dropped him and he had to go crawling back, things were going to be all kinds of awkward.

  QEDs buzzed about, carrying labeled plastic bags filled with the day’s take of lost items, while three stories of movable filing cubbies shifted and rotated around one another, propelled by a single QED at the center, restocking the rainbow of forms. Gwen was already there, seated at a large oak desk on the sorting floor, separating white Lost Property forms and green Enquiry forms into two stacks.

  Jack sat down next to her and began organizing the green forms by category. He kept quiet, hoping she would speak first.

  She wouldn’t. Not Gwen. Her honey-blond hair fell like a curtain between them. It smelled a bit like strawberries. He didn’t mind.

  After a long silence, covered only by the hum of the drones and the rather pointed flap of Gwen’s papers, Jack couldn’t take it anymore. “So . . . Ash—”

  “Dumped you.” Gwen pounced on the opening like a cat on a laser dot, throwing back her hair and scowling at him. “He tossed you like yesterday’s kippers. I know.” She slapped a white form down between them. “Purse.”

  “What?”

  “Missing. Purse.” Gwen rapidly tapped the form with her index finger. “Blue paisley. If you’re back, then you’re back to work, right?”

  Jack sifted through his wallet-purse stack until he found a matching green enquiry form—filled out by the owner of the blue paisley purse. He placed it on top of Gwen’s.

  She slapped another form on top of that one. “Scarf. Yellow. Green stripes. Mrs. Hudson made me your guide, Jack. We were supposed to be a team, you know?”

  Jack nodded, unwilling to risk actual words, and placed the corresponding enquiry on the pile. During the night, long after Jack and Gwen were gone, the QEDs would match the pairs of forms to the actual purse, the actual yellow scarf, and all the rest of the lost items. And six to ten weeks later, each would make it back to its owner. It would take that long for no other reason than that was the proper time period for the return of lost items.
/>   In the meantime, Gwen laid down another lost property form, one for a stocking cap. “But you wanted to run off with Ash You wanted to be the hero of the games.”

  “None of that was my idea.” Jack laid down a green enquiry from the stocking cap’s owner. “I didn’t ask to be on Ash’s team. He asked me.”

  “Well, you jolly-well didn’t say no, did you?”

  Their individual stacks shrank. The combined stack between them grew. And every once in a while, they paused as one or the other filled in the blanks missed by the civilian—Gwen’s term—who had filled out the form. Mrs. Hudson had made that necessity quite clear. Ministry regulations, volume three, section one, rule ninety-seven: All forms, once initiated, must be completed.

  “I am glad to be back, though,” said Jack, offering an olive branch after what must have been a half hour of silence.

  “Really? Are you?”

  Jack got the feeling there was no right answer. “Um . . . yes?”

  Gwen knit her eyebrows together. “Huh. Because it seems to me that you ran off with a real quartermaster first chance you got.” At the word real, she made quotation marks with her fingers. “And I was left down here, slaving away with no one to help.” Gwen lifted the finished center stack above her head and two drones flew in with pincers ready, each taking half. Hands empty, she folded her arms across her chest. “No one at all.”

  The QEDs flew off to match the paired forms with the bagged items, and Jack looked down at the desk. On most days, at that point, it would be clean. But one form remained, an enquiry without a matching lost property form. He scanned the handwritten entries. “Missing wallet. A Russian archeologist named Lazarev. Says here he’s a visiting professor at Cambridge.”

  Gwen nodded, still fuming. She snapped her fingers and waved a QED over. The drone took the form back to the moving cubbies, inserting it into the next day’s cycle.

  The desk was empty. Jack stood to go, but Gwen touched his hand, and for a moment, he thought she might say something nice.

  He was wrong.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked as another QED flew in and laid a single paper on the desk. “We have to fill out the O-dash-ninety-six.”

  “Right.” Jack slumped down in his chair again. “The O-dash-ninety-six. Sure.”

  Several months earlier, whatever undersecretary oversaw the QEDs had decided he or she should track the drones’ customer service and instituted the O-96 QED Critique Form. Not to be out-formed, another undersecretary—the one in charge of regulations—had added a new subsection that dictated precisely how the O-96 should be filled out, lest someone inadvertently offend the drones and thereby reduce efficiency. Thus, any clerk who worked with QEDs had to fill out the O-96, but had to fill it out in exactly the same way every time.

  “Response time?” asked Gwen, pen ready.

  “Fast.”

  She checked a box on the first line and moved to the next. “Files and stacks?”

  “Neat.”

  “Workload?”

  “Average.”

  “Attitude?”

  “Seriously?” asked Jack. “You people know they’re just drones, right?”

  Gwen’s freckles flattened into a stern frown. “Att-i-tude?”

  He sighed. “Friendly.”

  “Which is more than I can say for yours.” She checked yet another box. “Drone condition?”

  “Good.”

  “Yes.” Gwen made the appropriate mark. “We’re quite well polished today, aren’t we?” She held the pen over the final box. “Total performance?”

  Jack glanced at the drone. It inched closer, camera aperture expanding and contracting nervously. He rolled his eyes. “Good.”

  “I agree.” Gwen checked the box and held out the form. The QED snatched it up and flew away.

  Chapter Twelve

  JACK FOUND A FREESTANDING CLOCK on Oxford Street, right where Tanner had said it would be. The hands marked teatime, half past six in the evening. He took a left, passed through a gap between stores barely wide enough for a grown man’s shoulders, and entered a pedestrian plaza lit with blue and green Christmas lights.

  A few minutes earlier, Jack had walked right out the front door of the Lost Property Office. He. Jack Buckles. A Section Thirteen. The Section Thirteen.

  No alarms had gone off. No QEDs had come flying in to stop him. Shaw had not come lumbering down the street with a net or an electrosphere. The professor must have made special arrangements. Jack had felt a twinge of guilt at the realization that the professor had gone to additional trouble, especially because Jack had traded his uniform for a T-shirt and blue jeans. But it was his first time out of the Keep in a while, and he didn’t feel like walking around London in a waistcoat and wool britches.

  Jack found a red telephone booth at the edge of the plaza, next to a man with no legs making chalk drawings. The artist nudged an upturned fedora with the back of his hand, jingling the few coins inside.

  “Oh.” Jack patted his jeans. He had not brought any change. After a moment’s indecision, he removed a platinum card from his back pocket, one that simply read JOHN BUCKLES, and showed it to the artist, keeping it half-hidden in his palm. He glanced left and right to see if anyone on the plaza was watching. No one was.

  The artist frowned, walked himself over to the red telephone booth with his fists, and gave the side of it a good pound.

  The door opened.

  Jack stepped inside, trying not to look as out of place as he felt—a wally, as Gwen would say—and the artist pounded the side again. The floor dropped away.

  Jack dropped with it for a good three stories before jolting to a stop. He stepped out on unsteady legs onto a black granite floor and headed for a line of bronze turnstiles. He had not gone far before he noticed a familiar black-and-purple scarf on the other side. “Gwen?” His voice echoed across the station.

  Everyone in the place cast a shocked scowl his way. A guard in a three-piece suit, wearing an armband that read MINISTRY EXPRESS, lowered his newspaper and glared. Jack had forgotten. The transportation service of the Elder Ministries demanded utter silence, a matter of avoiding cross talk between the secretive agencies.

  Gwen’s eyes grew wide for a fraction of a second before narrowing again in frustration. She tried to reverse course through a turnstile, but it locked, making a clamorous rattle, and the guard shifted his glare. She glared right back, waving a copper card similar to Jack’s platinum version and rattling the turnstile again for good measure. The guard sniffed in displeasure, reached beneath the rim of his box, and pressed an unseen switch. The turnstile clicked.

  Gwen pushed her way through and stormed over to Jack. “What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered, shoving him back toward the phone-booth elevator with the tips of her fingers. She leaned left and right, trying to see around him. “And where is your escort? You know you can’t leave the Keep by yourself.”

  Jack shrugged. “Apparently I can.”

  “Oh. You think this is funny?” Gwen checked over her shoulder.

  The guard was watching them, one eye peering over his newspaper.

  Jack lowered his voice. “It’s fine. The professor—”

  There was a pronounced whoosh as a cylindrical train pulled in to one of the platforms beyond the turnstiles, all gleaming bronze and steel beneath the purple glow of the huge maglev rings that formed its track. Gwen grabbed Jack’s hand and pulled him along, whispering through clenched teeth. “It is not fine. And you’re going to explain yourself as soon as we’re on that train.”

  The station’s four tracks were divided among two levels of open platforms. The bronze rings of the two upper tracks were suspended from the ceiling, so that the trains flew through them ten feet above Jack’s head. The rings of the lower tracks rose up in arcs from beneath the floor, so that arriving trains surfaced like submarines bursting from the depths and dove down again once they were full. Jack and Gwen hurried toward one of those.

&n
bsp; A trio of dragos—agents of the Ministry of Dragons—shuffled toward the next carriage over. All three were looking at Jack, their red scarves and the burn scars on their faces making their glares all the fiercer.

  Gwen yanked him into their own car and pulled him down beside her onto a seat padded with sky-blue velvet. As soon as the door hissed closed, she folded her arms. “Spill it.”

  “What? I’m meeting the professor for some training.”

  “Don’t ‘what?’ me, Jack. Section thirteen, rule nine: ‘A Section Thirteen cannot leave the ministry without an approved and qualified escort.’ ” She opened a drawer beneath her seat, selected a pink glass bottle, and handed it to Jack. “Drink. You look dehydrated.”

  “I don’t need an escort,” he countered, accepting the drink. He took a swig and coughed. Burning, fizzy liquid bubbled out his nose. “That’s . . . not water,” he wheezed. “Tastes like . . . carbonated perfume.”

  Gwen recovered the bottle before he managed to drop it. “You do realize that you are English, don’t you—despite your parents’ little American charade? Eventually you’re going to have to learn to like our food.” She sat back and took a drink from the same bottle. “It’s elderflower cordial. The Express has been stocking it for months. Where’ve you been?”

  “Locked. Up.”

  Gwen touched her nose. “Exactly. Because you’re a Section Thirteen, and a Section Thirteen can’t leave the Keep without an escort.” She slapped the bench with each of those last few words.

  The two of them leaned left as the train whipped to a stop. Tiles that read TOWER STATION came into view outside the portal window. “This is my stop,” said Jack, standing up.

  Gwen returned the bottle to its place and stood up beside him, kicking the drawer closed with her boot. “Then I guess it’s mine, too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE ELEVATOR that brought them up from the station was concealed within a tiny cylindrical building marked LONDON HYDRAULIC POWER COMPANY. And that cylinder stood at the edge of the open plaza beside the medieval castle known to the world as the Tower of London. Jack pushed open the iron door, turned north, and kept on walking.