Book 1: Chapter 4

The boy who was the leader of the Astronomy Club—the tall bossy one—was waiting outside the lecture room when Linua came to clean it. She didn’t know much about him, except that his dad was one of the trustees, and regularly used the Observatory for his research. He had a mop of curly brown hair and light, almost translucent skin, intense grey eyes with long, dark eyelashes, and elegantly arched brows over a narrow, bony nose.

“How do you know about the conjunction of Ishtar and Marduk?” he asked.

He had an argumentative tone, as if Linua had deliberately been hiding hitherto unsuspected astronomical powers. Linua clutched her broom. This was going to turn into another Linua-is-weird conversation.

“Because I’m good at astronomy,” she said sharply. Thanks to Grandmother, it was the only thing she was good at.

He looked her up and down, as if he found the idea hard to believe, then fixed his gaze on her broom with a supercilious lift of his eyebrows. Linua felt impelled to explain a little more thoroughly.

“My grandmother wants me to learn about astronomy, so she sends me here to volunteer in the evenings.”

“Sweeping floors isn’t going to help you learn.” He put quite a lot of disdain into the words ‘sweeping floors.’

“I get home-schooled.” After a moment, she added defensively, “But I don’t actually like astronomy.”

That broke through his sardonic act.

“What? How can you possibly not like it?”

“That’s not against the law.”

“Yes, but…”

“I just don’t,” she said sullenly.

“What, you like cleaning better?”

She liked spending time with Alnan better, and it so happened that this involved cleaning. But she wasn’t going to explain that. She decided to go on the offensive instead.

“Why are you talking to me?”

He looked briefly non-plussed.

“Why shouldn’t I talk to you?”

“You never have before.”

Unexpectedly, he flushed.

“Well, I am now, aren’t I?”

This was a stupid conversation. She tried a different tactic.

“Are you going to tell me what you were all secretive about yesterday?”

The boy stiffened and gave her a suspicious glance. She wished she could be this direct and confrontational at the dojo, but for some reason it only seemed to happen at the Observatory. At the Castle she was always overcome by her Yi child persona; polite and deferential and never questioning of authority. At home, with Grandmother, she had to be precocious and intelligent and talk only about astronomy. But at the Observatory, at least, she could be who she wanted.

“No, I didn’t hear what you were talking about,” she said now, to the boy. “No, I’m not going to tell on you. Was that what you wanted to know?”

Despite her bluntness, he recovered his equilibrium.

“Thanks,” he said, in a lofty way that seemed to convey a great deal of expectation and very little gratitude.

She rolled her eyes and went back to sweeping. Instead of going away, he stood and watched her. A prickle of annoyance started in the middle of her shoulder blades and crept its way all up to the back of her neck until she couldn’t bear it anymore. She paused mid-sweep.

“Do you have a name?”

He blinked, as if surprised that she didn’t already know.

“Eret.”

He was named after one of the early stargazers of Ancient Kāru. Ancient history wasn’t one of the subjects Grandmother had chosen for Linua to study, but she’d seen a display board about it in the museum. The original Eret had been one of the Babilim, but from his pale colouring this boy was pure Keretu.

“Why are you here when it’s not Astronomy Club night?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said, in the same lofty tone as before. He seemed to realise he had been hanging around and making a pest of himself for several minutes too long. “Anyway, I’d better get going.”

“To do what?” Linua asked, with interest.

“That’s need-to-know only, I’m afraid.” And with that, he backed out of the room.

Linua resolved to clean the museum next. She finished up in the lecture room, and started walking toward the museum with her broom in one hand and the dustpan and brush in the other. Before she got there, she heard a shout and the museum door banged open.

A man in a janitor’s coat sprinted out of the museum and along the corridor, pursued by the various members of the Astronomy Club. Eret was in the lead, and the other teenagers in the Club were strung out behind him in order of athleticism. There were various cries of “Stop him!” all echoing with a note of futility.

The man was no-one Linua had ever seen—he certainly wasn’t the replacement janitor the agency had sent, who was currently clanging about with the outside bins.

The man was in his twenties, so he was properly grown up, but not old old. No matter how fast the children in the Astronomy Club were, they weren’t going to be able to catch up with a slim, athletic adult. Was he a thief? The expression on the man’s face was amused and incredulous, as if to say Am I really being pursued by KIDS? His eyes flicked to Linua, standing quietly to one side with her broom, and flicked away again, dismissing her.

So, as he passed by, she dropped her dustpan and brush, and stuck her broom between his legs, sending him tumbling head over heels.

What she expected to happen—what probably would have happened if this had been wushu practice—was for him to make a controlled fall and turn the tumble into a full forward roll. She would then have been able to jab the broom just so, turning his controlled forward roll into an uncontrolled one. At this point he would have been on the ground and she would have been standing over him still holding the broom—hopefully enough of an advantage to offset the fact that he was an adult male who was both bigger and stronger than her.

Instead, what actually happened was that the moment his legs became entangled with the broom handle, he sprawled gracelessly at her feet. After that it was a simple matter of dropping the broom and slithering into place for an arm bar submission. She had him locked down before he fully realised what was happening.

He was clearly not a wushu expert.

She looked up as the members of the Astronomy Club came to a stop in a stunned gaggle around her. Now that they had caught up with their target, they didn’t seem to know what to do with him.

“He had better be a real thief,” she said warningly.