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  Lisa nodded and bolted after the man.

  “You can’t let her go alone,” I said.

  “I can’t promise I won’t give an interview,” Colin said with a grin before he spun around sharply and sprinted away. I hadn’t moved my hand off Colin’s shoulder quick enough and his momentum spun me like a top. I staggered back into the monk as he was fixing his robes; this time when we hit the ground, I heard something crunch.

  I tried to get up, but was tangled in the monk’s robe, and he heaved on it, trying to pull the edge out from under me. I rolled once and then used my crutch to pull myself back to my feet. The crowd grew, and the camera flashes really started going nuts.

  “I’m so sorry.” I reached out to help the monk to his feet only to stop short as a harsh voice shouted over my shoulder. The yell was followed by heavy footfalls.

  I knew it was a guard, but before I could turn and explain, he tackled me. Bolts of pain coursed through my body as we hit the floor and rolled over each other. Twice. When the world stopped spinning, I was on my back, gazing dumbly through the atrium’s glass ceiling, wondering where all the little stars had come from.

  Rough hands hauled me to my feet and dragged me back to the severed head display, where the monk was being helped to his feet by another security guard.

  “W—What’s going on?” I choked out. I tried to shrug off the guards’ hands, but they weren’t having it. Their grip tightened. “Hey, let me go,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  The guard on my right grunted. “That’s not what it looked like to me.”

  “Pounding on a monk,” the other guard muttered. “Pathetic.”

  The monk rubbed the side of his head and glared at me.

  “Pounding on the monk?” I was incredulous. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”

  I remembered that Lisa and Colin had gone after the mystery man, and jerked my head around, scanning the spectators. I spotted them squeezing through the crowd, coming back to me. Lisa looked me square in the eyes and shook her head, indicating she and Colin hadn’t caught up with him. Colin, on the other hand, was inching toward me, his gaze fixed on my leg. I glanced down and realized there was a trail of plaster chunks leading from where I’d been tackled to where I stood. At least a third of my cast was gone, crushed by the guard and reduced to shards. It looked as though my leg had been mauled by a pack of hyenas.

  Colin nodded. “You really need to work on what low profile means.”

  “It was an accident,” I muttered. Not that it did any good. One of the guards thrust my crutches at me and gestured down the hall. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  Chapter 6

  My mom spoke to Mr. Overton for nearly twenty minutes, at least ten of which were spent in the security office watching surveillance footage. I was brought in to watch it too, and I had to admit, it did look like I was pummeling the poor guy. But really it was just awkward movements because of my stupid cast.

  They sent me back out into the waiting area, and when Mom came back, she handed me my crutches and led us to the car without speaking. The number of protestors had doubled, but they either didn’t notice us as we left or they saw the murderous expression on my mom’s face and decided not to chance a confrontation.

  The young monk was around the side of the building, his head hanging as the three ancient monks talked to him with stern expressions. He glowered at me when we rounded the corner but turned away when one of the elderly monks nudged his arm.

  I didn’t even try to fight Becky for the front seat. She smirked but, to her credit, didn’t utter a word. She was a brat, but not a stupid brat. She knew what my mom’s cold expression meant: don’t speak. My mom clearly had something to say, and snark from anyone in the car simply wouldn’t be tolerated until she was done. When the doors were closed, Mom drew a series of shallow breaths and turned to face me.

  “Mom, I just wanted—”

  She held up her finger, cutting me off. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Not a word.” Long seconds passed before she seemed to relax a bit. “Dean,” she said finally, “that was unacceptable.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I saw the footage,” she said. “You three seemed to antagonize that poor boy, and then…well, you saw it, Dean. You elbowed him in the head and practically tackled him.”

  “You did?” Colin asked. He sounded more impressed than surprised, and I was pretty sure that if my mom hadn’t been looking, he’d have raised his hand for a high five.

  Lisa gave me a squinty-faced You did that? look, and I just shook my head.

  “It was an accident!” I turned back to my mom. “I told you that already.”

  “Didn’t look very accidental from where I was sitting,” she said. “Lucky for you, Mr. Overton didn’t seem to think it was on purpose. But to me, it looked like you were really going after him.” She took a breath and forced it out through her nose. “He’s a kid too, Dean. He’s probably not much older than you are.”

  “We didn’t antagonize him,” Lisa said hesitantly. “We really didn’t. We were just looking at the display and he got really upset about it.”

  My mom turned in her seat to face us. “I was just talking to some people about this, and you kids need to understand something. Those monks believe that relic has been stolen. They’ve been protesting its display for a very long time. That head is on loan from a museum in Amsterdam. Those monks followed it all the way here, and they’ll follow it to the next place too. Imagine if there was something you respected and revered so much that you’d follow it around the world hoping that people would return it to you. Now imagine people mocking it. Or gawking at it disrespectfully. How do you think you’d feel?”

  “I think I get it,” Becky said. “I like coprolite, and Dean makes fun of me for it. He’s pretty much made fun of all of my collections.”

  Colin snorted and tried to cover it up as a cough.

  “Not exactly the same thing, dear,” Mom said, “but you’re on the right track.” She turned back to us. “Now you and that monk aren’t allowed back in the museum for the rest of the summer. In fact, Mr. Overton’s talking about banning all four of the monks just to make sure nothing like this happens again.”

  It took all my willpower not to laugh. Oh, no. What am I going to do with myself if I can’t go to the museum?

  My mom sighed and turned in her seat and started the car. “Put yourself in his shoes, Dean.”

  “Was he wearing shoes?” Colin whispered.

  “I can’t believe you punched a monk,” Becky said. “Who punches a monk?”

  “I didn’t punch him.”

  “Oh, right. Okay, who elbows a monk in the head and then tackles them to the floor? Plus, who gets kicked out of a museum?” She tsked. “It’s a museum, for Pete’s sake. Doesn’t exactly attract the crazies.”

  “Tell that to that mob of protestors,” Colin said. “They seemed plenty crazy.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Becky muttered.

  Lisa laughed, then glanced at my mom and stopped.

  “All right, you guys, that’s enough.” My mom sighed. “Now we have to go to the hospital to get that cast—or what remains of it—taken care of. I’ll let you tell the doctor what happened.”

  Becky turned in her seat and smirked. “Monk Puncher. That’s your new name. Monk Puncher Curse.”

  “Hmm, Monk Puncher Curse,” Colin mused. “Actually, that has a bit of a ring to it. Sort of sounds like a boxer.” He smiled. “You should keep it.”

  I sighed. “Oh, shut up, Colin.”

  ***

  Hospitals always seem to have one of those smells that hit you in the face like a brick and overwhelm your senses so that one second you’re ready to puke, and the next you’re fine. I think the people who run hospitals create that smell on purpose just to distract you from the pain that brought you there in the first place.

  I breathed through my mouth while I waited to see the doctor.

  The only good thing about all
this was finally I’d be getting my cast off. Not that it was really on at the moment. Maybe seventy-five percent was still intact, and if I’d had a pair of garden shears, it would have been off in a flash. When I suggested that to my mom in an attempt to lighten her dark mood she gave me a silent withering look.

  Becky, though, had insisted on staying in the car to go over her coprolite notes and scroll through her museum pictures, which I figured was one of those little silver lining moments that greeting cards always talk about.

  “Take a seat,” Mom said, pointing to the waiting area. “I’ll go fill out the paperwork.”

  Every other time I’d been in the hospital, the waiting room had been packed or very nearly packed. This time, though, there were only three other people. Two of them were asleep, and the third was reading a magazine in the corner. We took seats well away from everyone else and discussed the situation.

  “The guy you saw,” Lisa asked, “are you sure he was at the mall?”

  “A hundred percent,” I said. “He had on white pants and a white button-up shirt.”

  “Like an ice cream man?” Lisa asked.

  “Actually, yeah,” I said. “Exactly like an ice cream man.”

  “We saw an ice cream truck driving away from the museum,” Colin said.

  “Do you think,” Lisa began hesitantly, “that he’s from the Society?”

  “An ice cream man?” Colin said. “No way.”

  I looked at Lisa. “I don’t know. I guess it could be a coincidence.”

  A janitor wearing a faded blue hat and dark coveralls entered the room and set up CAUTION signs around where we were sitting. He pulled a dry mop from his yellow cart and started making his way down the aisle we were in. When he was a couple paces away, he pulled out a scraper and knelt. “Your leg looks like it’s in rough shape,” the janitor said. He kept his head down so I couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded like he was smiling. “I hope you’re okay.”

  “I’ll be fine, thank you,” I said. “I’m, um, getting it, or the rest of it, off today.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Fighting monks will be a lot easier when you’re not in a cast.”

  “I don’t expect that to happen again. Wait—how did you know about the museum?”

  The janitor looked up and smiled. “The name’s Astley, Archer Astley.” He looked a bit different—darker hair, no white clothes—but there was no mistaking his face.

  Lisa gasped. “You’re the guy Dean saw at the mall. The ice cream man.”

  Chapter 7

  Colin gave a frightened yelp, grabbed a magazine, and lightning-fast, rolled it into a tube and held it out like a dagger. “Who are you, and why are you following us?” He inched forward, his arm extended, until he positioned himself bravely between us and the ice cream man—or janitor, I supposed.

  With the man on his knees, it actually seemed as though Colin and his rolled-up magazine had the upper hand.

  The man smiled and sat back on his heels. “Wow, that’s a first.” He turned to me. “You have some good friends, Dean. I’m so glad to see that.” His grin widened when he turned back to Colin. “You three shouldn’t be surprised to see me. I did send Dean a card telling him I’d be in touch.”

  Lisa inhaled sharply and looked at Colin and then back at Archer. “You’re from the…”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“Society?”

  The man nodded and gave a slight bow. “At your service.”

  Colin slapped his paper weapon into his palm. “I knew it!” He pointed at me and then Lisa. “I told you they’d be in touch soon, didn’t I?” He laughed again and then he stopped and his eyebrows nearly touched each other as he turned back to Archer. “Wait, you’re from the Society and what, you sell ice cream and clean hospitals on the side? That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Not really,” Archer said. “This…”—he nodded at us—“you three, are a rather unique case for us. How does an adult approach a couple kids and invite them into a millennia-old society? We have pretty strict rules about who knows about us, but those rules kind of fly out the window when we’re talking about kids.” He smiled. “Frankly, we needed to watch you guys. We needed to figure out who you were going to tell and how committed you are to our cause.”

  “Then you saw us today?” Colin asked.

  Archer nodded. “Amazing job, guys. Your teamwork was incredible.” He smiled at me. “Good job spotting the nuts. I’m sure I would’ve missed that.”

  Colin dropped into one of the seats and blew out a breath. “So you’re the contact.”

  “I’m the contact,” Archer said.

  “This is crazy,” Colin added. “I feel like I’m in a movie.” He glanced over his shoulder and then leaned forward so his face was almost at the same height as Archer’s. “Are there secret handshakes we need to learn?”

  “Huh?” Archer shook his head. “No. No secret handshakes, Colin.” He glanced around the room. One of the men who’d been sleeping was awake and eyed the four of us with interest. “You three need to just sit back in your chairs. Don’t make it seem like we’re having a conversation.”

  “Oh, right,” Colin said excitedly. “I bet there are other secret societies who want to kill you, right?”

  “Uh, no. But when your mom comes back, if she sees a forty-year-old janitor chatting with her kids, she’s bound to ask what we were talking about. A degree of cloak-and-dagger is probably best until we can work out a better system.” He nodded to me. “Meeting face-to-face is a necessity in our society, though. You’ll be meeting everyone else soon enough.”

  Questions flooded my head and threatened to come charging out of my mouth, but I pressed my lips together. “Excited fear” was the best description for what I was feeling, and I didn’t want to ruin what Archer would think of me by acting like a little kid. Colin and Lisa seemed to have the same thought, and the three of us did as we were told, sitting back in our chairs and looking as normal as we could manage. From our reflections in the window, we resembled criminals trying not to look like criminals.

  Archer laughed and went back to scraping gum from the floor. “That’ll do, I guess. It is good to finally meet you three. Especially you, Dean. You’ve been the topic du jour for some time. Youngest member we’ve ever had. There are a couple apprentices your age, but full members with the gift? Nope, you’re the youngest by several years.”

  My questions grew by the second, and I bet I had a list as long as my crutch, but now wasn’t the time to ask them all.

  Archer grabbed a spray bottle and rag and started cleaning the chairs around us. “We’ll have more time later, but for now, you need to know the basics.” Colin moved to speak, but Archer shook his head. “We’ll meet again somewhere else. The park by your house, perhaps. I’ll answer your questions then.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out three business cards and slyly dropped them on my lap. I handed one to Lisa and one to Colin.

  “My number’s on the back.” The front of the card was white with a symbol of a red circle—only not quite. It wasn’t a complete circle. It stopped just short of a complete circle in the upper left portion. On the flip side were the initials “A.A.” followed by a phone number.

  “This is so cool,” Colin said.

  “You guys seem to know a bit about how things work, but let me clarify a couple things before we get interrupted,” Archer began. “The most important thing to remember, Dean, is that this is a gift.” His words felt like a badge that he was pinning to my chest. “An amazing gift, and you need to remember that. The Congragatio de Sacrificio has existed for a very, very long time. Now you are part of it.”

  I suddenly became very conscious of how I looked, especially with the partly demolished cast on my leg.

  “Given that you saved your sister,” Archer continued, “and Mr. Peanut earlier this morning, I suspect you realize how remarkable this gift is.” He drew a breath and seemed to be thinking about what to say next. For someone who belonged to an ancient s
ecret club, he seemed to be making things up as he went. I wondered why they didn’t have the “welcome to the Society” speech ironed out. But then maybe my entrance into the Society was far from the norm. Receiving the gift in a back alley from a beat-up Society member probably didn’t happen too often. There’d been no time to prepare.

  “As for the visions,” he said after a brief pause, “you’ll only have them of people you’ve physically touched, and only if their death is preventable. So this is really important, Dean. When someone touches you, look at them. Do what you can to learn their names. It’s not always easy to do. It’s especially difficult in crowds or when people are moving fast, but you need to try. Understand?”

  Look at them? Learn their names? I understood what he was saying, but all kinds of questions burst into my head: What if I was at a concert and I touched a thousand people? What if I went to a wedding and had to shake hands with everyone there? What if I did everything right but just didn’t remember who they were by the time I had a vision of them? I didn’t want him to think I was stupid, but I had to at least ask. “Sir, what if I forget who they are?”

  “Forget them?”

  “Yeah, what if I bump into someone in the grocery store, get their name, and then don’t have a vision of them for a year?”

  “Or twenty years,” Lisa added. “Dean’s not exactly known for his memory. But even people with the best memories don’t remember random people weeks, months, or years later.”

  Archer smiled. “You might forget a name, but you’ll never forget a face. It’s part of the gift. We’re not sure how, but it does change you. I bet you recognized peanut-allergy man from when you touched him, right?”