CHAPTER 30

cOLUMBUS Circle

I woke up the next morning to Bones sitting at my desktop, surfing the web. He was writing stuff down and banging the keyboard as he typed in his searches. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t even eight, so I threw one of my pillows at him and nailed him in the head. The long lummox just picked up the pillow where it landed and flung it back at me without looking.

“Bones, what are you doing? Go back to bed!” I knew it was useless, but he was banging around at the desk like he was typing the last pages of a murder mystery.

“Lump, I’m getting close to figuring this out.” He had way too much energy for it being not even eight in the morning. “I think Stevie is trying to give us clues about where the last engineer is located.”

“That’s dumb. Why wouldn’t Stevie just tell us? What’s with the Chinese messages?”

“Maybe he thought he was protecting us by not telling us. You know, in case those suits found us and tortured us or something.”

“You know what I think? I think I need to go back to bed.” As much as I wanted to believe his crazy theories, I wanted more to get some sleep. We only had one week until school started, and that meant getting up at 6:30 a.m. Talk about torture.

I rolled over and fell asleep. When I woke up an hour later, Bones was gone.

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