CHAPTER ONE

The first letter was easy to dispose of. Benjamin crumpled it up and hid it in the trash under the remains of last night's dinner.

The second letter, this one bedecked with gold trim, embossed lettering, and a proper sticker-seal, was torn up before Benjamin had even finished reading his own name. The pieces were flushed down the toilet and only nearly discovered when the old thing spat them back out.

Soon the letters were coming in such numbers, and so regularly, that Benjamin had to find...creative...places to hide them.

He took to stashing Holworth Academy's letters in the can of tuna he set out for the neighborhood stray each morning. It provided a strange sense of satisfaction to see Mr. Tinkums lick up the last scrap of paper; even when they started spotting very odd looking hairballs on the back doorstep from time to time.

The papers from St. Filbert's usually found their way into the oven, taped to the bottom of casserole dishes and baking pans. Though once they sent such a large packet that he had to tear it up into the stew. Everyone agreed that it was the best stew Mrs. Casey had ever made.

He was eventually found out by his grandfather when he was caught sticking a particularly large letter between the floorboards. But rather than scolding Benjamin, Grandfather crouched down beside him and helped shove it through.

Between the two of them they had no trouble hiding, destroying, or otherwise getting rid of the rest of the correspondence. Little did Benjamin know that it would be a letter—though a very different letter for a very different person—that was about to cause a great deal of trouble.

Benjamin skirted up the stairs between boxes of discarded radios and empty fire extinguishers. He stopped to pick his way around a particularly complex patch of trip wires and ended up with his nose in a box of pickled something-or-others.

“Ugh!” He ducked aside and tried to rub the smell away. That was new. Or very old and probably forgotten.

“Grandfather?”

He plopped into the last piece of half-decent furniture, an overstuffed armchair, and had to bat away the cloud of dust that puffed up around him. Finger-like needles emerged from a mechanical box under his feet and started prodding and probing his sneakers, feeling for the laces.

Piles of junk and abandoned experiments were strewn in attic corners, stacked on tables, and spilled out of boxes. The walls were a patchwork of roughly constructed cabinets. They were battered and scorched and stained from years of putting up with his grandfather's experiments.

Normally, holiday lights crisscrossed through the beams above his head, lighting the room with a cheery, uneven glow.

But today the room was cast in darkness.

The oversize porthole window, usually glowing with blue morning light at this hour, was swathed in what seemed like acres of homemade curtains. The skylights had been blocked up with masking tape and scraps of cardboard. Only the most worn slats in the rafters let in slivers of light to let them see.

His grandfather, like the light, was nowhere to be seen. There was, however, an odd shuffling, scratching sound coming from the far corner.

Benjamin squirmed around in the musty seat and craned his neck until he caught sight of a tuft of familiar white hair. Meanwhile, the longest of the spidery appendages were busily trying to tie his shoelaces, but like most of Grandfather's inventions, were doing it in the most complicated way imaginable.

The rest of his grandfather appeared from behind a large stack of boxes, crawling on hands and knees with a broken odometer in one hand and a chisel in the other, which he appeared to be using to gouge out the cracks between the floorboards.

Now that his laces were woven into a kind of delicate crochet, Benjamin yanked his foot from the box and went over. He was given a second chisel and silently instructed to join.

“What's this for?”

Grandfather cringed and put a finger to his lips. He pointed to the floor and whispered, “They're listening.”

“Wait, who's listening?”

Grandfather flinched again and refused to say anything more about it until the room was adequately checked for listening devices.

Benjamin crawled to the other end of the room and scraped between boards until he felt like his fingernails were prickling with splinters. He didn't find anything other than a few dried beetles and something that might have once been a battery but seemed to have melted.

Grandfather double-checked under the worktable, and then, apparently satisfied, suddenly ran down the stairs at a pace that made Benjamin worry that he might break something. He put his eye to the keyhole for a second and then stuffed a wad of tissue into it. “Never can be too careful!” he said. He piled some of the boxes up under the knob in a barricade, just to be sure.

The walls of the old house were so thin Benjamin hardly thought hidden microphones were necessary had someone really wanted to overhear an attic conversation. Just now he could hear his father whistling as he walked to the mailbox three stories below.

While his grandfather continued to poke around with boxes, Benjamin crossed to the porthole to peek outside. A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth just before he was snatched away from the window and the curtains pulled shut so violently that one of the corners frayed.

His grandfather took a turn plopping into the armchair. He wrestled a crinkled envelope out of his jacket pocket. “I got a letter.”

Benjamin flailed his arms in front of his face to clear the air. “Oh. You too? It's nothing to worry about. I can let you borrow my shovel.”

“It's crooked,” Grandfather said.

“What?”

“Your daffodils are crooked.”

This time Grandfather allowed him one peek through the curtains. From up here, the row of daffodil mounds did look crooked. But Benjamin only rolled his eyes. “Are you going to tell me about your letter?”

“Oh, right.” Grandfather tapped his finger on the end of his chin. “I find that I don't feel like talking about it after all.”

“Oh, come on!” Benjamin said as he stuffed it away.

“Nope.”

He pursed his lips and proceeded to shout “La, la, la!” above anything else Benjamin had to say about it.

“Fine, fine!” Benjamin said, waving his arms to stop his grandfather's shouting. “But I did actually come up here for a reason. Aaron's been acting especially obnoxious lately.”

Benjamin had three siblings. Two overactive, brutish older brothers, who were overly fond of reminding him just how scrawny he was, and one younger sister who's favorite thing was to pretend he was some kind of disgusting gnat. But at least being treated like a gnat was tolerable. The noise his brothers made, however, was not.

“I don't have a cure for obnoxious,” Grandfather said, “unfortunately. However, I do have a box of poisonous iris bulbs somewhere around here if you're interested.” He shook dust balls from his shoulders and peeked under the seat cushion. He found a half-dozen marbles and a hearing aid, which he pocketed.

“Oh please, Aaron has the stomach of a horse. You don't have any super-strength earplugs do you?”

A car door slammed outside. Grandfather jumped and his hand went to his pocket. He took a turn peeking out the window. “I could probably scrounge something together.”

They went to his cabinets to rifle through them for a box of old wax ends Grandfather swore he'd saved somewhere. There were certainly lots of other things stored in there like old wind up toys, always unusual creatures like spiders and rats and oversized crickets that never behaved as they were supposed, and an old box of instant-oobleck. Benjamin nearly tipped over a jar crawling with insects but Grandfather slapped his hand away and hid it on a higher shelf.

It was just as he reached up to place the jar safely out of reach that Benjamin, pretending to reach for a magnifying lens, plucked the letter from inside his jacket pocket.

“What? Give—me—that!” the two wrestled for the letter a moment before Benjamin snatched it away with a triumphant wave over his head and scurried to read it by the window.

His smile faltered as he read.

“Expiration...submit...paperwork...Grandfather!” he flapped the paper around in the air. “It's just a couple of forms!”

“Gimme those!”

Benjamin gladly let his grandfather grab them back. He shuffled through the papers. “Oh...oh, just these.” He looked a little confused and checked in his other pockets. “I'd thought...”

“I never knew your birth certificate could expire,” Benjamin said.

Grandfather was looking under the seat cushions again. He straightened up and frowned down at the packet. “Mm. They're probably more worried that I've expired and no one's gotten around to reporting it. But I have plans for at least a couple more years. After all, who else is going to solve your hearing problem?”

He did seem to have spotted something behind his shoelace-tying contraption and let out an, “Aha!” A shoebox was dragged out from under the chair and shaken so that a handful of stubby candles rolled out.

“I knew I'd put these somewhere.” He tried to go to the workbench but Benjamin stopped him. “When did they send those papers?”

“Oh,” Grandfather waved his hand airily. “Just a couple of months ago.”

“Grandfather!”

“What?”

Benjamin took the papers back. Grandfather had no trouble letting him this time. “These are due tomorrow!”

“Or what?” Grandfather said. “They're going to fine me?”

“Yeah, that's exactly what they're going to do.”

“Oh.” Grandfather seemed skeptical for a moment before saying, “I'll tell you what. You fill out those thingamajigs, and I will start on these earplugs.”

He rattled the box of wax ends as if that would somehow make the suggestion sound more enticing.

It must have worked to some degree, because Benjamin eventually agreed and sat down opposite him at the worktable. He had to write with his arm bent at an odd angle between the complex system of magnifying lenses and microscopes clinging to the table with metal arms. Grandfather was the opposite of helpful.

He adamantly demanded to know exactly why each piece of information was of vital importance, and sometimes outright refused to give it. Benjamin had a hunch that he didn't really mind all that much, he'd just forgotten most of it himself.

The paperwork was eventually, though rather spottily, filled out.

All that was required was the old birth certificate.

“What, they're gonna take that too?” Grandfather snapped. He didn't even look up from the molten wax he was pouring. He waved one arm towards a filing cabinet in the back. “It's somewhere in there.”

At some point as he wended he way toward the back of the attic, Benjamin stubbed his toe and dropped the packet. The envelope hadn't been sealed, so the pages naturally spread out like a great fan all over the attic floor.

He scrabbled on his knees to gather them up, praying that he hadn't lost one between any of the wider gaps in the floorboards. But as he gathered up the last of the pages and stuck the only somewhat-crinkled papers back in the envelope in the right order, he spotted one page he hadn't seen before.

This one had gotten shoved at the bottom of the envelope and was even more crumpled than the others. He smoothed it out on the edge of the nearest piece of half-broken furniture. It was blank aside from a large, silver seal stamped in the center of the page.

It was a rounded shield split down the middle, one half darker than the other. In the middle of the shield was a set of balanced scales. It was crowned with the infinity loop and a pair of laurel or fig leaves curled along the bottom. That was it.

There were no letters or titles. It looked like a single sheet of letterhead.

The longer he squinted at it, it almost seemed to shimmer. Grandfather, who had sneaked over very quietly, suddenly snatched it away.

“Hey!”

“Get away from there!” He yanked the rest of the papers from Benjamin. “That is a private letter,” he snarled. He tucked it into his jacket, and then thinking better of it, stuck it in his end of his shoe and jammed his foot in after it.

“Letter? It was blank!”

“Irrelevant. It's mine and I will do what I want with it.”

He would hear nothing more about it. He tried to immediately eject Benjamin from the attic, but Benjamin refused to leave without his earplugs. Grandfather went back to pouring wax, but insisted that he sit with both hands flat on the table where he could see them.

Benjamin was hardly paying attention anyway. He'd recognized that seal. He had seen it somewhere—he was sure of it.

But where?

They did finally manage to produce a pair of sound-proof earplugs but Benjamin was useless. He nearly got himself skewered and spilled the melted wax—twice. He would have had to spend the next half-hour scraping wax off the table if Grandfather hadn't been so unusually eager to see him go.

Even when he was back in the room he shared with his two brothers, he couldn't seem to get the image of that seal out of his head.

After all, who would be searching for his grandfather? He wasn't a criminal. Sure, some of his experiments bordered on arson, and maybe some of his chemicals weren't exactly legal in an all fifty states. But his grandfather wasn't really the criminal type. Strange maybe, a little off his rocker, borderline insane, yes, but criminal...no.

Still, as long as Benjamin could remember, he couldn't think of ever having seen Grandfather talk to a friend. Or neighbor. Or even on the telephone.

In fact, now that Benjamin thought about it, he couldn't remember Grandfather ever leaving the house.

Surely he just hadn't been paying attention.

But then there was the tacked over skylight, the heavy homemade drapes, the floorboard checks; they were all certainly odd, even for him. And then there was the strange seal.

Where else had he seen that seal?

He got up from where he'd been sitting, enjoying the newfound silence his super-strength earplugs provided, and went to the window. There were no heavy drapes to pull aside here. They didn't even have blinds, not after David's latest skateboarding catastrophe.

The lawn was yellowing from lack of water, and the bushes had dropped their leaves early so that he could see his the crooked row of dandelion mounds. The crooked row of dandelion mounds.

The letters!

He'd seen that seal on one of his letters.

He had to look at it again.

If only he could sneak down there right away without getting caught. But he had run out of daffodil bulbs and he still had a letter in his pocket that he needed to be rid of.

It was then that he discovered the downside to his newly-discovered silence as a shoe smacked him square between the shoulder blades. One of the earplugs popped out of his ear and he was bombarded with the shrill whine of his brother's voice.

“Professor Benjamin!”The fire pole to which Aaron clung squealed and squawked as he readjusted his grip after launching his other sneaker in Benjamin's direction. His face was red from the exertion, and he had to take a couple breaths before saying, “Mom's said you've got to show us how to do fractions or something. Hey! Are you listening?”

“Of course I'm listening,” Benjamin said. “Just give me a second. You don't want these getting stuck in my ears permanently, do you?”

“I don't know. Might be an improvement.”

“I'm starting to think it would be,” Benjamin muttered. “Right.” He stuffed the plugs in a big envelope and stuck it in the back of his desk drawer to minimize the chances of their getting ruined before he had the chance to use them again. “Be right there.”

Aaron dropped out of sight and landed with a thump.

The fire pole was the one accident that had turned out to be worth the lifelong grounding he'd gotten. It had been cheaper to install than to have the floor rebuilt after the small explosion blew a hole in it, and it only ever got annoying when his mother decided she was in need of some midnight folding. It usually involved singing. And even occasionally dancing.

Fortunately the sessions had shortened dramatically now that Benjamin had convinced her to use his converted paint roller to speed up the process. Two or three swipes to fold a tee shirt. Four for a pair of jeans. And it even usually worked.

Benjamin went to follow Aaron, thought better of it, and then ran out into the hall to the top of the stairs. He removed the loose cap on one of the banisters and stuffed that day's letter into the hollow. There. That would have to do for now.

His mother disappeared soon after Aaron complained that numbers made him constipated, and was only seen a couple of hours later taking a large white pill. After that, Benjamin was commandeered to keep lookout for Miriam while his brothers played a gory video game.

Mr. Casey nearly caught them, but only because no one noticed he'd come home until, at some point in the evening, he dropped the newspaper he'd been hiding behind and they accidentally made eye contact from across the room. Everyone hastily pretended they hadn't in order to avoid awkward conversation, and went back to pretending to play educational videos and reading the paper, respectively.

Benjamin's best chance to sneak out didn't come until long after dark.

It was nearing midnight when he opened his eyes and stared up at the light-striped ceiling. The streetlamps outside lit up the inspirational posters on the wall with their peeling corners now revealing the rock bands hidden underneath.

Benjamin borrowed one of his brother's black hoodies and pulled it over his pajamas. He dropped down the fire pole and padded through the front hall and out to the lawn.

He knelt in the soft dirt and twirled the spade in his fingers. Where to begin?

He picked one of the daffodil mounds in the middle and dug. The paper was soiled brown and ready to fall apart in his hand. If he squinted hard, he thought he could still make out who'd sent it. St. Josephs Academy. Nope. Not that one.

He stuck it back in its hole and tried to pat the earth down as neatly as he could.

Half the flowerbed was dug up before he found anything promising. He unfurled a particularly soggy envelope and was about to discard it when he caught a snatch of something that shimmered.

He turned it this way and that to catch the light, and...there! The crest. His thumb brushed across the silvery image of the scales. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching and tried to tear open the envelope. He needn't have bothered. The paper fell apart in an ink-streaked mess.

There was only one phrase he could make out. The Council.

Hmm. Well, it was something.

The line of daffodils was even more askew that before and some of the flowering weeds that had made a home there were looking decidedly wilted. He tried rearranging the broken stems as best as he could before sneaking back inside.

“What exactly do you think you're doing?”

He looked up from the closet where he was storing his muddy sneakers. His mother stood at the bottom of the stairs. Her hair stuck out in all directions and she squinted at him without her glasses. She had a flashlight in one hand but she had forgotten to switch it on.

“Oh...nothing.”

“Oh. You're Ben.” She squinted at him harder. “What's that?”

Benjamin looked down at the wad of paper in his hand. Before he could stop himself, he blurted, “Bread!” He pressed his lips tight and looked down at the mess in his hand. “It's...bread,” he said again. And, as if to assure her, crammed it in his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed. He grinned toothily at her and bounded away up the stairs before she could hear his protesting stomach.

Benjamin lay back in his bed, with the sound of his brothers snoring next to him and the loud throb of a midnight load of laundry, and couldn't help feeling excited. Or it might have been the indigestion. But either way, he had a name. The Council.

Grandfather knew this “Council”, but he didn't want Benjamin to know about them. But whoever it was, or whatever it was, it had tried to get in touch with Benjamin.

***

He was going to have to get a better look at Grandfather's letter.

But how?

His grandfather had taken to wearing his shoes at all times, laced so tightly that his knees were starting to look a little blue from where they could be spotted above his high socks. Admittedly, Benjamin wasn't sure if this was a new development or not. He had never really paid attention to his shoes before.

He supposed he was just going to have to take a chance. He had to search the attic, and he had to do it during the only time his grandfather ever left the attic.

Grandfather popped his head into Benjamin's room at half past seven the following evening.

“Sure you're alright Benjamin? I could always whip something up--”

“No. No, I'm fine!” Benjamin said, a little too hastily. He added a couple coughs for good measure. His legs were cramping from staying in bed all day and he felt like he might be starving a little by now—but aside from that, he was just fine.

“I didn't know you had a cough. You're mother said it was a stomach ache.”

“Oh,” Benjamin frowned. “It's getting worse.” He coughed again and tried to make himself look pathetic.

He played his part a little too well.

Grandfather insisted on giving him a tiny bottle of stuff that smelled like spoiled licorice and tasted twice as bad. Benjamin swore to himself that he would never be sick again—real or pretend.

As soon as he was gone, Benjamin fished the spare attic key from behind the fake electrical socket in the hall and made sure not to set off any of his grandfather's homemade tripwires on the way up the stairs. He hardly should have bothered. He was sure the whole house had heard him, what with the way each step seemed to let off an ear-splitting creak.

But no one came running to see what he was up to.

Now that he stood up there under the eaves, he had no idea where to start. He'd been through those old cabinets and boxes dozens of times and had never come across so much as an envelope. Probably because anything made of paper that his grandfather might have once owned had long since been used as kindling, accidental or otherwise.

He hesitantly picked through his grandfather's bedsheets and gum wrappers stored between the mattresses. The walls around his grandfather's bed were scribbled with blueprints and half-finished drawings. He tried looking through the papers that were tacked to the walls, but that crest didn't stand out on any of them.

Some of the old boxes he opened had papers in them, but they were mostly old newspaper clippings of odd contraptions that never took off, or “new” appliances like toaster ovens and electric irons that had.

He stopped tugging out the teetering boxes and tried to remember where is grandfather had gone to get his birth certificate. Right, the filing cabinet. He'd thumbed through the hanging files earlier and found nothing, but it was worth another look.

This time he made it to the back without dropping, knocking over, or making a mess of anything. The drawer opened on squeaking, rusty wheels, but no one was there to listen.

The papers he found were standard, if outdated, tax files, denied patent requests, and a couple interesting, though entirely unrelated, letters from some of Grandfather's old colleagues. Those he resisted the urge to filch, for now.

Instead, he allowed himself one quiet, audible chuckle, tugged out the hanging folders, found the lip to the false bottom of the cabinet, and pried it up.

He thought that maybe he should warn his grandfather that it wasn't such a good idea to stick “Top Secret” stickers on his hiding spots, even if they did come in handy for easy remembering.

His breath came out in a whoosh.

Benjamin spread the papers out in front of him and flicked on his penlight.

The seal.

It was on everything.

And yet, aside from the seal, all the pages were blank.

He thought he heard something and froze. He listened for any other sounds. There was some mumbling from far below, but soon the only sound was Benjamin's own breathing.

He picked carefully through the pages, checking front and back. All blank.

That is, all but one.

Two lines were scrawled across the bottom in red ink.

You can't turn your back on The Council if The Council wants you back. Remember: there's only one time three can keep a secret—and that's if two of them are dead.

So. What was this “Council”? Like, some kind of overprotective country club? Or...or committee? Had he been a member? He must have left—and they didn't seem very happy about it.

Not happy about it at all.

Benjamin muttered the last line aloud to himself. “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

So...a secret group? A secret group was sending his grandfather threats.

That must be why he'd never seen grandfather leave the house! He was being watched, threatened.

But why the sudden paranoia? He must have gotten these letters here, at his mother's house, years and years ago. Grandfather had lived here for as long as Benjamin could remember. He lived here since before Benjamin was born.

They would still remember he lived here.

But perhaps it had to do with something else? He'd gotten that weird notice about his birth certificate. Maybe it had been a kind of...signal.

His heart beat faster. Of course! An expiring birth certificate?

It might as well have been a death threat.

Papers crackled as he shifted through the pages again. He paused. He thought he'd heard something. Now it was his turn to be acting paranoid.

“What are you doing!”

Or maybe not. He scrabbled to his feet, his grandfather gawping at him from the top of the stairs.

He was frazzled, his hair an even untidier mass of white, his socks mismatched and pulled up to his knees beneath the frayed hem of an old bathrobe. He had an odd contraption in one hand. It looked something like a child's play magic wand, but with a red hot coil of wire on one end.

“I just came back up here to get the meat heater, you know your mother's cooking, and I find you here...” he saw the letters and trailed off. “You didn't touch the seal, did you? Did you? I told you not to look—” His voice was raised to the point of near-hysterics.

“I had one. Addressed to me.”

Grandfather waved the burning poker dangerously close to Benjamin's nose as he grabbed a hasty armful of the letters and stuffed them back in the cabinet. He grabbed another armload, paused before shoving them in as well, and then dropped everything and dashed to the window.

The poker was left on the workbench. Benjamin quickly switched it off before something caught fire.

“But don't you understand, Grandfather? They're threatening you again!” Benjamin set the tool down and followed him over to the window. “Are you paying any attention? That letter they sent you?”

“What are you talking about?” Grandfather said. “Who's coming to get me?”

“The Council!” Benjamin said. “We have to do something about it!”

Thunder cracked outside. Grandfather's eyes flicked to the window. “It's too late.”

“What do you mean it's too late?”

“They're already here.” Rain hit the window like a violent slap.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Someone was knocking on the door.

Benjamin felt the color drain from his face.

Twice, he nearly fell as he flew down the stairs. “Don't answer the door!” he shouted. He skidded down the hall, the runner tangling beneath his feet. He slid down the bannister and right off into the opposite wall.

Everything hurt. One of his elbows was bleeding and some of his hair had snagged on his way down.

His vision was spinning as he stumbled down from the landing.

“Don't...answer the...door,” he gasped.

His mother stood, her mouth gaped, the door was flung wide behind her.

Two men stepped inside, the silver crest of The Council glinting off their lapels.