“What the actual…” Henry panted as we slumped into our seats.

“I have no clue. That guy was a fruitcake and a half.”

“You shouldn’t have told him anything about your dad.”

“You’re the one who told him we found the coin at my house!” I flopped back against the roughly upholstered seat, exasperated. “What was I supposed to do? He was all up in my face with his nasty-ass breath! And he knew my dad, and about the coin. He might have known where it came from. And what else was he on about? A key?”

“Gee, I dunno, do you want to go back and ask him?” Henry suggested snidely.

“Of course not. And I think we’d better find another train to take to school if that weirdo’s going to be there every morning.”

“No kidding. I just hope he doesn’t know where you live, dude.”

I hadn’t thought of that. He obviously had known my dad, but I didn’t know how well. The thought of Emil turning up on my doorstep was enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. I pulled up my palmtop’s phone app just to make sure it had emergency services saved on speed dial.

This stupid coin was causing me nothing but trouble. Maybe my mom was right—I should have let the whole thing go. But it was too late now. I was in it up to my neck.

Chapter 5

Possibly the worst part of this whole weekend detention thing, I decided as I rolled blearily out of bed Saturday morning, was losing my two days of sleeping in. It was obnoxiously unfair to have to get up at 6:00 AM seven days a week.

The valley was blanketed in a thick fog as I walked to the train station—I was going to the one on Port Street now, a full kilometer farther to walk, but hopefully one that would be free of Freaky Emil. Henry was waiting for me when I got there, wearing a green short-sleeved t-shirt with no jacket, even though it had to be close to freezing out. This one said Freedom is life’s great lie in white text, and he’d crossed that phrase out with black Sharpie and written DISSENT in capital letters below it.

I don’t know why I was ever surprised by anything he did, at this point.

We caught Tamara up when we transferred to the high-speed maglev terminal on Sparta Island. The maglev had a direct line to Kimbal University, over in Curiosity Bay on the far side of the peninsula. It was kind of out of the way, but we didn’t have a way to get to the dig site on our own, and since Erick’s project was being run through Kimbal, there was a shuttle to take the college students out to the site every morning.