Sorry I'm a little late today, guys! It's been kind of crazy around here lately. Cat the second needed surgery and I'm still in a leg brace for tendinitis (exercise, they said, it's good for you, they said) and I have homework and work work and ughhhhhh...

But! I am here and still mostly on time!

Enjoy the chapter!

Despite his apparent despair for the state of things, Bentley had quite clearly prepared for them anyway, given the fact that I had my own room when we reached Hong Kong. I still wasn't allowed out without supervision, but I was fine with lazing around most of the day, due to my new iPod, the bathtub the size of a small pool, and the frankly recklessly large bed.

"Are you going to get out from under the covers at any point today?"

I cracked one eye open and regarded Sly, standing at my bedside and looking amused, with far less surprise than I should have, considering the door was supposed to be locked. "I'm having a bed day. It is a day where you spend a really long time in the bathtub getting clean, then appreciate beds while you're super relaxed. So sorry, moving isn't on the schedule for the day."

Shrugging, Sly hopped up on top of the covers. "Don't you get bored?"

"I take it you've never had a bed day before."

"It's hard to relax when you don't have your own room."

I stretched my legs under the covers, giving up momentarily on the whole 'relaxation' thing. "You guys really need to get a non-portable Safehouse so you can have rooms. And beds."

"I'm sure it's in Bentley's plan." Sly produced a large paper bag from nowhere. "Now get up, I brought food."

That got my attention. I sat up, tucking my feet under me and pulling the glorious robe that I'd stolen from the closet more tightly around my shoulders. "Whatcha got?"

Sly was spreading several containers across the bedspread and I took a moment to mentally apologize to whoever was going to have to launder the blankets. I could already smell the grease and I doubted we'd be able to keep it from getting everywhere. "Can you use chopsticks?"

"Yup." I took the utensils he offered. "Speaking of Bentley, how long do you think it'll take for him to talk to me again?"

"He'll probably be fine by the time we get back to Paris. The guy can't hold a grudge to save his life." He opened one of the containers and passed it over. "Try the dumplings."

I took the container gamely, sniffing at the contents before giving Sly a suspicious look. "What's in them?"

"I have no idea." He reached out and stole one, popping it in his mouth. "They're delicious, though," he said around a mouthful of dough and filling. Swallowing, he asked, "You have allergies?"

"Not to food." I plucked up one of the dumplings and bit into it. There was definitely meat in there, but it was slightly sweet, which was weird. Not a bad weird, though. "Not bad."

"Let me guess, you're more of an eggrolls girl."

I brandished my chopsticks at him. "Hand over the eggrolls and no one gets hurt." Laughing, Sly complied and his expression was so light that I had to say, "You seem like you're in a good mood."

Shrugging, he took back the container of dumplings. "I don't know. I'm not really used to things going right. I never really thought past getting my family's book back. But now I've nearly done that and Bentley's starting to talk about 'after', he has plans, apparently, for 'after'. I didn't ever really consider an 'after', but now I'm starting to and there's... there's a lot that can happen."

I thought about that, about having the means to go anywhere, to do anything, to have the complete freedom Sly, Bentley, and Murray would have. "It's... overwhelming."

Sly's smile was thoughtful, but genuine. "In a good way."

Given the fact that, a few weeks ago, Sly had been volunteering to launch himself out of suspect cannons into the blimps of mechanical maniacs, his change of heart was relieving in more ways than one. I found myself returning his smile. "I bet."

"What about you?"

I'd just taken a huge bite of eggroll, so I gestured violently at him for a few seconds until I could swallow enough to reply, "What about me?"

He had the good grace not to laugh at me, not out loud, anyway. "What are your plans?"

I poked at my food with my chopsticks. "I dunno. I mean, that's not something I really get to pick for a while yet. I don't get to legally be totally person for a few more years and I have to finish high school. After that..." I sighed, flipping my chopsticks in my hand. "I don't know. Running around all over the world and seeing how much more there is to it makes the idea of going home and sitting in classrooms for several more years sound like a special kind of torture."

"I remember high school," Sly said darkly. "Bentley made me finish."

"Sounds like him." I waited a few seconds, because Sly looked like he was about to say something before he decided against it. "So which ancestor did you get this time?"

Sly put his chopsticks aside and reached over the side of the bed to grab his backpack, hauling it up onto a clean patch of bedspread. Reaching inside, he pulled out the cover of the Thievius Raccoonus, which contained the still-loose pages he'd managed to collect. He flipped it open and spread the pages out before picking up some of the newer-looking ones.

"Otto van Cooper," he said, handing them over. "He wasn't so great at the athletic parts of thieving, but he was a brilliant inventor, so he built vehicles and used them for thieving instead."

"I don't understand any of this," I admitted, flipping through the pages of blueprints. Otto's page featured a portrait and an illustration of him flying a plane. I'd wanted to read the entry about his life, those were always the most interesting parts of the pages, but I was distracted by something in the illustration. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Sly asked, leaning to look at the pages I tilted toward him.

"That," I pointed to a spiky silhouette in the sky. "That's not a cloud."

Frowning, Sly took the page. "You're right. It looks like some kind of bird. I wonder why that's in the picture."

"It has to be deliberate," I said, shifting until I was sitting cross-legged. "It's an illustration, not a photo."

"Yeah," he agreed, turning back to the other pages. He shuffled them around, coming up with Tennessee 'Kid' Cooper's page. "Here, it's in this one too."

I took the page and, sure enough, there was the same silhouette. "Is it in all of them?"

"No." Sly was quickly dividing the pages into two categories, messing up the chronological order they'd been in before. "Look, it's not in Salim al Kupar's illustration. But most of these..."

There were three or four ancestors without the outline of the bird, but the stack with the silhouette dwarfed the one without considerably. Rioichi, Slytunkhamen, Tennessee, Thaddeus Winslow III, they were all in the silhouette pile.

"What are the odds that that's a friendly bird?" I asked, without much hope.

"You remember when we were running from Carmelita and found those clues written in owl script that Bentley said he couldn't decode?" Sly asked. His tone was flat, his earlier good mood gone like it had never been.

"Yeah?"

He took a deep breath. "When I was a kid, my dad told me that, if I ever saw a big, silver owl, I was supposed to run. I was supposed to run as fast as I could until I either found him or a safe hiding place. And I saw that silhouette out the window right before he hid me in the closet the night he was killed."

"But..." I looked at all the pages, representing hundreds of years of Sly's family line. "How could he have been a problem for your family for so long? He couldn't have lived that long, could he?"

"I don't know." Sly gathered up the pages quickly, but very, very carefully. "I have to go- I need to talk to Bentley about this. Bentley can figure it out."

And then I was left alone, in an empty room, with far too much Chinese food and a sinking feeling.

Back in Paris, the train car had been moved into some kind of warehouse by the time I came around.

Sly had gone from calm and optimistic to reserved and withdrawn, like he'd regressed completely to the way he was at the beginning of the summer. I'd have brought it up with Bentley, but, well, the turtle wasn't looking much better.

When I wandered out of the train car and into the warehouse, Murray had copies of Otto's blueprints drawn out on a chalkboard and was elbow-deep in machine parts and something that looked unsettlingly like heavy ammunition. I kind of wanted to ask him about it all, but I also wanted to keep all my fingers, so I steered clear.

Sly and Bentley were hunched over a table (Bentley having to stand on a chair to accomplish this) and talking in low, strained voices. Even from my distance, I could make out the Thievius Raccoonus pages and at least three different police files.

The duo went quiet as I approached and Sly stalked away, eyes down, avoiding my gaze.

Bentley sighed, slipping off his glasses to rub at his eyes. "He'd been doing so much better."

"What going on?" I asked, looking over my shoulder at Sly's retreating form.

Sighing and putting his glasses back on, Bentley gestured to the spread of papers. "We're not really turning up anything we can use on this guy."

I took Sly's empty place, bracing my hands on the table and looking down at the pages. "No information coming up?"

"I didn't say that." Bentley adjusted his glasses. "I said there wasn't much of use. All we know is where he is and that his name is Clockwerk."

Nodding, I said. "I remember reading his name in a file on the Fiendish Five."

"Right. Well, I've been trying to do research on him, but what's coming up is mostly exaggerated hearsay." Bentley sighed, dropping down to sit in his chair. "In some circles, he's a legend, in some, he's a nightmare. But no matter what, there's mentions of a 'mechanical owl' going back hundreds, maybe thousands of years."

"'Mechanical'?" I asked, crossing my arms. "Are you saying he's a robot?"

"I don't know, that would be an incredibly complex A.I. if it were true." Running a hand over his bald head, he sighed. "But that can't be right. That technology can't have existed hundreds of years ago, I doubt it exists now."

"Prosthetics, maybe?"

Bentley shook his head, then paused, considering. "It wouldn't explain the mentions through history, but prosthetics would be easier to believe than someone coding an A.I. that advanced. And it would explain the pseudonym. I just wish I could dig up more information on who exactly this is. It might give us an edge."

"You seem... more nervous than usual." I was trying for casual, but missed it by a mile.

"There's no information!" The turtle threw his hands up. "With the other Fiendish Five members, at least we kind of knew where they were coming from, even if where they were coming from was totally inane. We knew their M.O. and their motives, we knew how to approach the situation. Clockwerk is- he's nothing! He's a ghost, a story. He wasn't the machinist or the demolitions expert, he supplied the machinist and demolitions expert. Even without the fact that it looks like he has history with Sly's family, I'd say he's going to be tougher than the rest of the Fiendish Five combined."

"That... does not inspire confidence," I admitted.

"Of course it doesn't!" Dropping his head in his hands, Bentley scrubbed at his face and visibly counted to ten. "And all we know about his history with Sly's family is based on the images in the Thievius Raccoonus and that night ten years ago. Some of the legends say something about a feud with or a grudge against a thieving family, but there's nothing about it actually recorded." Another deep, slightly wheezy breath. "I'm going to go do some deep breathing exercises. Please go talk to Sly and try to calm him down."

"What makes you think I'm capable of doing that?" I asked, a little taken aback.

Bentley gave me a flat look. "I have faith in your endless creativity. Just go talk to him."

Holding my hands up in surrender, I backed away from the table and followed Sly's path out of the warehouse.

The train yard was fairly deserted and, honestly, a little creepy in the setting sun. Most of my view was blocked by abandoned trains and cars, the tracks overgrown by weeds until they were just complete tripping hazards, so we were probably either right outside the city or on the outskirts.

It wasn't hard to guess where Sly had gone, though. Amidst all the rusted trains and metal panels was one pole that looked sturdy and was strategically placed for roof access.

Getting up the pole was a little awkward since I was not a raccoon with inhuman body strength, but I managed to avoid falling to my death, so I called it a net win.

Sly was sitting at edge of the roof, his legs dangling off into space as he stared out at the setting sun as it painted the sky half a dozen colors and glinted off the Eiffel tower.

He opened his mouth as I settled next to him. "Bentley fill you in?"

"For the most part."

Silence reigned for a few moment before he spoke again. "Did he tell you that we think the silhouettes in the illustrations are indicators that the ancestor in that illustration was killed by Clockwerk?"

I thought about the huge stack of pages that had been separated out and swallowed hard. "No. No, he didn't."

"We don't really know what's going on here," he admitted. "But we can't stop now, not when we're so close to ending this. We can't put it off again. We know where he is and we have to go after him before he moves."

"Right," I agreed tentatively, watching him to see where he was going with this.

Sighing, he finally turned to meet my eyes. "I want you to know what's going on here so you have all the information to decide with."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Decide what?"

Huffing, he sat back, looking out at the sun and the city of lights. "None of us really think you'd say anything if you went back at this point. And this place, it's temporary. We're planning to move somewhere more permanent, after... well, after. But we trust you. It's dangerous, and if you want to go back-"

"No."

The look he gave me for that was a little annoyed, verging on actually angry. "This isn't something you can watch on the sidelines- we're going to have to go in there."

"I know." I straightened and met his eyes. "I want to stay."

His face cycled through a few new and interesting expressions before he hung his head, the brim of his hat and the sunset creating deep shadows to hide his eyes. "Bentley says it's not possible. But I remember what my dad told me, what the Thievius Raccoonus says, and I just know. This isn't some random criminal driven by greed. He didn't come to our house for loot. There wasn't any, I don't have any idea where my dad stashed it all. All that was there was us... and the Thievius Raccoonus. It was personal."

I looked out, squinting against the last red streaks of the sun, letting Sly have a moment. "And you don't have any idea why?"

"No."

We sat in silence until the sun dipped below the horizon and the light started to rapidly fade.

"I want to come with you anyway," I told him, trying to make my voice strong and confident. It was scary, the idea of this giant, powerful unknown. But I didn't want the gang going to face him by themselves. Sly had Bentley and Murray for support, but I wanted to help too. I wanted to be there for him, for all of them, if I could.

Sly looked over at me, his eyes tired, but his smile fond. "Don't you have any self-preservation at all?"

"Oh, I am not taking that from you, Mr. Cannons-Are-Awesome."

He laughed softly, looking up at the emerging stars. "Do me a favor?"

That got my attention in a hurry. Sly didn't really seem like the type to ask for help- not for himself, anyway, not from someone who wasn't in his gang. "What?"

"Just," he hung his head, "tell me it's going to be over soon. My family's deaths aren't going to be hanging over me for my whole life. I'm going to end it for them, and for me, and for my children, and for their children. It's going to end here. Just- could you please tell me that? Even if it's a lie, I really need to hear that right now."

In that moment, he looked so young. It really struck me that he wasn't that much older than me, that he was far too young to be taking on the responsibility he was willingly shouldering, the responsibility to make his entire family safe from a threat that had hounded them for as long as they'd known.

I don't know what made me do it, but I reached out and slipped my hand into his, holding it tightly and forcing him to look up and meet my eyes before I started talking.

"Sly," I said, forcing myself to sound more confident than I ever would have thought I could, "you can do this. We can do this. You're not alone, you've got Bentley, who's a freaking genius, and Murray, who's building what looks like a cannon in the warehouse. And you've got everything your ancestors had, every skill they had to give. It's going to end here because you're going to end it."

For a few seconds, he kept eye contact and just seemed to focus on breathing. "And you?" he finally asked.

I raised one shoulder in a helpless shrug. "Moral support?"

That seemed to take him by surprise. He snorted in amusement, but his hand clenched reflexively to mine when he looked up at me again. "That's actually more helpful than you think," he said, and there was a weight to his words that I wasn't sure how to interpret.

"I live to serve." I covered his hand with both of mine, looking down at the tangle of fingers. "It's going to end. And I want to stay and watch it happen and make sure you're okay- all of you."

He shifted to face me, bringing his free hand around as well, until we were both holding the other's hands. "I hope you'll forgive me for letting you."

Looking up at him, I smiled. "I hope you'll forgive me for making you."

Shaking his head, he let go and stood, offering me a hand up. "How about we'll forgive each other once we're back safe?"

"Deal." I took his hand.

"Okay," Bentley said, adjusting his glasses on his nose as he tried to keep the old projector he'd found in the abandoned office in the warehouse from overheating, "the plan."

Kaia's hand immediately went up.

If they all survived this slideshow, it was going to be a miracle. "Yes, Kaia."

"Is the plan 'improvise'?"

... why was she even still there? "Not... entirely."

The hybrid looked deeply skeptical.

"Look, it's hard to know anything for certain. I can usually get some idea of what we're going in to using satellite imagery, but Clockwerk's location makes it difficult to determine anything, really." After fiddling a little with the machine, Bentley managed to project a fuzzy satellite image. "All we know for certain is that we need to get past a gate and a path leading up to the mountain, both of which will likely be heavily guarded.

"No problem!" Murray pounded a fist into his palm. "That turret Sly's ancestor made packs a punch! I bet it can handle anything that gets thrown at it!"

"Okay, good. I'm sure we'll need all the firepower we can get."

"And then after that, we improvise?" Sly asked, a ghost of a grin making its way across his somber countenance.

Bentley shrugged helplessly. "More or less."

Sly and Kaia exchanged identical looks of conspiratorial amusement and Bentley did not throw them out of the warehouse because he was the mature one in the gang. It was definitely not because the sense of deep foreboding had temporarily paralyzed him.

"Clockwerk's been relatively quiet for the last decade," he continued. "But my sources say that large amounts of machinery supplies have started moving through that part of the world. It's not a direct link, but the correlation shouldn't be ignored."

"So no waiting around, then," Sly said. His posture was deliberately relaxed, his legs crossed in front of him, slumped in his chair, his arms folded over his chest, but it did little to disguise the fact that he was a livewire of tension.

Bentley shook his head. "No. It's hard to gather what's going on from the shipments, much less which shipments are actually going there, if any, but any combination of the materials passing through that part of the world has the potential to be deadly."

"Do we have travel plans?" Kaia asked, leaning forward and bracing her elbows on her knees. She didn't look any more comfortable than Sly, but she was clearly trying to move past it while Sly was just hoarding all his nervous energy to direct at the situation causing it.

Sitting down, Bentley gestured at Murray. "It'll be a long drive, but we should be able to cover the journey in the van. It's a good thing it's summer, though."

"Yeah, I had enough of the cold in China. Russia in the winter is not something I ever want to experience."

"Also, y'know," Murray chimed in, "he's in a volcano."

"That too."

Murray dragged Kaia off to chat all about the turret he was building and Bentley seized the opportunity to corner Sly.

"What is she still doing here?" he demanded in a low voice. "She can't come with us, it's too dangerous!"

To his credit, Sly looked at least a little guilty. "She wants to come, Bentley."

"Oh, well if she wants to launch herself headlong into a situation where she'll be virtually helpless and there's a real possibility she'll be killed if we're noticed, then who am I to stop her?"

"Look," Sly took off his hat to run his fingers through the tragedy on top of his head that he called hair, "I know. You're right. I know you're right. But- it's... you have to admit, things are better when she's here, and if we take her back now-"

"You're scared we won't ever see her again," Bentley finished, feeling a throbbing headache start to build behind his eyes. He got where Sly was coming from, he really did, but this whole thing was difficult in the extreme- not in the least because he enjoyed Kaia's company too, not to mention the calming effect she had on Sly.

Or, well, he wasn't sure he'd call it calming, when those two got along, they were a feedback loop of enthusiasm and poor ideas and enthusiasm for poor ideas. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what it was. For as long as Bentley had known Sly, there had been a quiet darkness in him that the turtle had always assumed had to do with the trauma he'd been through and the fact that he had never really been able to properly address it. As time had gone on, that darkness had grown and grown, until Bentley had been terrified that Sly would be lost within it.

Whatever the effect was, it helped bleed off the darkness, the negativity, the poison. It had given Bentley the chance to see and talk to his real friend for the first time in months.

So yeah, he could see why Sly wanted Kaia around. He just wasn't sure either of them could really justify it.

"She has to go back sometime." He tried to make the statement gentle, but there was no real way to do that when Sly was already shaking his head.

"I know, I do, I just." The raccoon took his time putting his hat back on his head and adjusting it before finally saying, "I don't know. It's just like she helps me get out of my own head."

Alright, Bentley had already lost the debate.

"If we take her with us," he said slowly, watching Sly's head snap up, "we have to make sure she gets out. That's our responsibility, if she comes with us. She has to come back out, we have to get her home safely."

"Yes," Sly said. Just that, just pure, complete, unreserved agreement.

It was going to take a lot more than that, but Bentley resigned himself to the fact that it usually did and Sly always managed to somehow make up the difference when he needed to.

Now all they needed to do was track a legendary immortal villain to his volcanic lair.

Great.

Alrighty, boys, girls, and other. Just one more chapter and an epilogue after this! The next story is nowhere near done, but I'm working on it and I have something else planned to fill in the time between now and when the next story is done. As always, feel free to check out the blog and I will see you in a couple of weeks!