Tony Abbott - The Forbidden Stone

“What else?” He spied the starfish paperweight on his desk. It was no more than a cheap beachside souvenir. A sea star— Asterias, its Latin term—molded in glass.

Asterias. The name he’d called his hand-picked group of students so long ago. All that was over now. He gave the paperweight a pat, then took up a framed photograph. It was of himself two decades before, with three young men and two women standing under the blue glow of a café’s sign. They were all smiling. Professor and students. Asterias.

“My friend,” Vogel whispered to one of the faces. “It is all in your hands now. If only you will take the challenge—”

Something snapped sharply on the street below the apartment. Vogel’s heart thumped with dread. A door creaked and footsteps thudded up the stairs. “No, no. It is too soon—”

He threw the photograph in the fire and the door burst open. Three thick men in dark suits pushed their way in. They were followed by a shrunken man with wire glasses and flat hair and a woman young enough to be a student herself.

“Who are you?” Vogel cried, dragging the glass paperweight off the desk and clutching it tightly. He knew too well who they were. The enemies of man.

The first thug knocked him down. Vogel stumbled hard to his knees, then to the floor. “Murderers! Thieves!” he screamed, while the other two men fanned out into the small apartment, turning over everything in sight. The woman stood by the door as calm and silent as a coiled snake. What was wrong with her expression? She was beautiful. Like an angel, even.

And yet … those eyes.

Was she the one?

The men tore the books from the shelves. Tables crashed to the floor. Upholstered chairs, his bed, his pillows, all sliced open. His priceless collection of musical instruments tossed aside as if they were worthless toys.

“Brutes!” the old man cried out. “There is nothing here!”

The bent man with pasty skin and spectacles perched on his nose like a second set of eyes leaned over him.

“Your associate in Paris gave you up,” he snarled at Vogel. “You have the key to the relics. Give it to us.”

Adrenaline spiking his old veins, Vogel gripped the starfish paperweight and slammed it hard against the temple of the pale man. “There is the key. There, on your head!”

The pale man pawed his bleeding temple. “What have you done to my face, you fool?”

“Improved it!” Vogel snapped.

One of the thick men knelt and wrapped his massive hand around the old man’s neck. He grinned as he brought his fingers together.

“Breathe your last, old fool!” shrieked the pale man.

Vogel burst out with a cold laugh. “No. Not last …”

The woman glared at Vogel, then at the hearth. “He has told someone! There is something in the fire—get it!”

Without thinking, the pale man thrust his hand into the flames, screaming as he dragged the smoldering hard drive onto the floor. The photograph was already ash.

“Discover who he has told,” the woman said coldly. “I should have known. The key was never here. Finish him. Drop his body in the streets. Leave no clues—”

Choking, Vogel flailed frantically. He knocked over a music stand, hoping to grip its shaft. Instead, all that came to his hand was a battered silver pitch pipe.

As life ebbed swiftly from the old man, Galina Krause stared at him from two different-hued eyes. One blue. One silvery gray.

“Go ahead, Vogel. Play for us. Play your swan song …”

Austin, Texas

March 9th

8:03 a.m.

Wade and Darrell took turns yanking on the door of the observatory at the University of Texas.

It wouldn’t budge.

“And that’s why Dad gave you the key,” Wade said.

“Which I gave to you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I’m pretty sure I did,” said Darrell.

“When?”

“Before.”

“Before when ?”

“Before you lost it.”

Wade grumbled. “ I didn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose it because I saw Dad give it to you. In his office. When he dropped us off to run Sara to the airport.”

“Sara. You mean the lady I call Mom?”

“Sara lets me call her Sara,” Wade said. “Which is beside the point. The key? Remember, Dad took it from his desk drawer? He handed it to you? Do any of these images ring a bell?”

Darrell patted his pockets. “No bells are currently ringing, and I still don’t have the key.”

“You must have left it on his desk.” Wade shoved Darrell aside and retraced his steps down the narrow iron staircase to a small office on the third floor of Painter Hall.

Wade’s father—Darrell’s stepfather—was Dr. Roald Kaplan, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Texas in Austin, and Painter Hall was the home of an eighty-year-old observatory housing one of the largest telescopes that still operated by an intricate system of cranks and pulleys.

Wade sighed. “Darrell, you have to see this telescope. I can’t believe that after what, three years, we haven’t brought you in here. It’s total steampunk, all winches and gears and levers and weights.”

A flicker of interest flashed across Darrell’s face. In typical fashion, he responded off center. “I do enjoy the punk which is called steamy.”

It being spring break, both boys were looking ahead to a long week of no school. Which to Wade meant nine days of reading astronomy textbooks and nine nights of studying stars from the university’s observatory. He was pretty sure that to Darrell vacation meant some strange combination of hibernating and nonstop eating.

Or thrashing his Stratocaster at maximum volume.

Darrell had been trying to form a band for months with no luck. Wade felt there were two reasons for that. First, Darrell wanted to call his band the Simpletones, which was supposed to be ironic but maybe wasn’t. And second, he only wanted to play surf-punk, which Wade was pretty sure was not a thing.

They pulled up to their father’s office. Wade grabbed the knob, tried to turn it. That door was locked, too.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Dad won’t be back from the airport for another half hour. I have to show you this scope. I wonder where Campus Security’s office is. They’ll let us in—”

“Don’t move. I think I grabbed a campus map,” said Darrell, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets. “If Security is even up yet. It’s only … eight-ish. Which for some reason reminds me I’m hungry.”

“You ate a muffin an hour ago.”

“Exactly. One whole hour. You think Dad will let us go for an early lunch? How long do you think all this will … oh.”

“‘Oh,’ what ?”

Darrell slid a dull brass key out of his pocket. “Is this what we’re looking for?”

“I knew it,” Wade growled. “Come on.”

“Fine, but are we still talking about nothing to eat?”

Wade laughed. “Sorry, bro.”

Darrell mumbled something, then hummed a raucous guitar solo as they made their way back up to the dome. Good, thought Wade. This is what Darrell did when he was more or less happy. Obsess about food and hum riffs.

Five minutes later, the boys pushed through the door of the old observatory, and the atmosphere of the large room washed over them like a wave of the past.

Darrell whistled. “You weren’t kidding, steampunk!”

Centered directly below a huge copper dome stood the famous Painter Hall telescope. A twelve-foot-long iron tube built in 1933, it was poised on a brick platform and was meticulously balanced by a giant weight, making it easily maneuverable into any position. Wade explained that the scope’s lens measured a mere nine inches across—compared to, say, the McDonald Observatory’s scope, whose mirror was thirty-six feet across. But this was a historical instrument, and Wade loved that. He loved the places where science and history crisscrossed. There was something exciting about lenses and gears and mechanisms that made exploration that much more, what was the word, human .