Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw. Tony Abbott
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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
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 the dream.
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,