In the seat in front, a woman lifted a newspaper, shifting it backward and forward as if trying to focus. Alex read headlines over her shoulder without taking them in: a new discovery about black holes, an old painting stolen from a Cambridge museum, a cat who had become a billionaire and was being sued by its owner. He sighed and gazed out the window.

He wondered what Kenzie wanted. But not enough to stay and find out. In the past, there had been plenty of times he had run from Kenzie to avoid getting a fist in the face. But his former bully left him alone now. In fact, Kenzie had grown oddly quiet in general.

The turning point had come not long after Alex had returned from his trip with his grandfather: the unexpected journey that had become a desperate adventure as he somehow found himself caught in a mad race across Europe, trying to prevent dark forces from resurrecting a medieval monster, a magical creature of clay known as the Golem of Prague. Four months had passed since that demented episode. Four months without a word from the old man who had started it all.

Alex had been dumped back into his humdrum routine so abruptly the normality had hit him like a shock. But a storm of questions had been set raging in him, and his mind was still stuck back in those impossible days, playing it all over. Part vivid dream, part frantic nightmare, it almost felt like it had never happened at all.

Except he still had the robot as proof that it had. His weird souvenir of another, wilder, unseen world. His link back to it. If he could only work out how to make the connection again.

Alex stared at the little toy, picturing the great secret locked within, a hidden cargo he had glimpsed only briefly but which had burned itself onto his mind.

Concealed inside the robot lurked what looked like a lump of dusty old clay. In fact, he sat cradling a powerful fragment of a myth from centuries before. The few who knew the story referred to this ancient clay tablet as the name of God—a mystical artifact imbued with a devastating, unearthly force that had once given the golem life.

Just a crazy old fable. But Alex had seen it all spring to life around him and had encountered people prepared to go to desperate lengths to capture the tablet, wielding uncanny powers of their own.