Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw

First published in paperback in the USA

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014

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Text copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Illustrations copyright © Bill Perkins 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014, Jacket art © 2014 by Bill Perkins, Logo art © 2014 by Jason Cook/Début Art, Front cover design by Tom Forget

Tony Abbott asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007581870

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007581887

Version: 2014-08-05

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean

Sunday, March 16

3:51 a.m.

It was only a dream—a dumb, exhaustion-fueled dream.

But knowing me, the way I hold on to stuff forever, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’ll probably always remember it as thedream.

To begin with, my name is Wade Kaplan. I’m thirteen years old and kind of a math geek. I live in Austin, Texas, though I haven’t been there for a very long week. At the exact moment I was having the dream, my family and I were squished on the first of three endless flights from the tiny island of Guam in the South Pacific to New York City.

We were on our way to meet someone who could help us understand what had happened yesterday—the day my stepmom, Sara Kaplan, was kidnapped.

More on that later.

To go back a bit, Sara married my astrophysicist dad, Roald Kaplan, three years ago, and her son, Darrell, became my new stepbrother and absolute best friend. While I was in the middle of the dream, Darrell was crammed into the row right next to me. Dad sat three seats beyond him, across the aisle. Sandwiched between were Lily Kaplan, my cousin on my dad’s side, and Becca Moore, her best friend.

They were the last people I saw before I closed my eyes somewhere between Guam and Hawaii and my dumb dreaming brain took over.

I was in a cave. No, scratch that. I was in the cave—the cave where we had found the first of the twelve relics of the Copernicus Legacy.

Yep, that’s what I said: the Copernicus Legacy.

You see, five hundred years ago, in the early sixteenth century, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus went on a secret journey and uncovered the remains of a large astronomical instrument.

This ancient device, a kind of oversize astrolabe—with seats in it—contained twelve amazing objects that gave the machine its unbelievable power.

Power to travel.

In time.

That’s right. The past, the future, the whole spectrum of time from the beginning to, well, I guess, the end of it.

Anyway, Copernicus’s mortal enemy, a guy named Albrecht von Hohenzollern, learned about the astrolabe. Albrecht was the Grand Master of the superpowerful, incredibly secret, and seriously evil Knights of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.

Copernicus knew that if Albrecht and his Order got hold of the time machine, they’d use it to rip the fabric of our universe to shreds.

So Copernicus did the only thing he could do.

He took the astrolabe apart and asked twelve friends around the world to hide and protect its twelve powerful relics. These men and women were called Guardians.

Okay, back to the dream.

Every detail of the cave’s stony walls had been downloaded onto my brain’s hard drive—the rough limestone, streaked with yellow and red, the constellations painted on every surface all the way up the tapering walls to the opening at the top, the blue handprint that pointed the way to the first relic, and, above all, the incredible silence of the stone. The cave seemed nothing less than a kind of temple from another world.

So I was standing in the center of the cave, when—whoosh—there he was, with a cape and a velvet hat, and a sword longer than your arm.

Nicolaus Copernicus, the revolutionary astronomer who proved that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. He was standing not ten feet away from me next to his awesome machine—a large sphere of iron and brass and bronze, in the center of which sat a pair of tufted seats.