Orion rose groggily from his bed in the bunkhouse. He had barely gotten three hours of sleep, and he only got that much after Angela had stopped him searching the castle for his rookery sister and demanded that he get at least a few hours of sleep before he had to go to school. He had headed back down to the rookery begrudgingly, only after she promised to find Sister and talk to her.
Angela had been right, Orion realized. Even with the limited rest he had gotten, he was still exhausted. It had been a rather exhausting night. After Sister had disappeared, Orion had been left alone to handle the younger rookeries for hours. He had managed, through coercion and threats, to keep Fleet and the twins from traumatizing the hatchlings with their story about Blaze, Thorn, and Linnet abandoning the clan. It had been no small feat, and Orion had been compelled to stay on Fleet's loose mouth like a prison warden on a particularly bold and ill-tempered inmate, even as he practiced the alphabet with the hatchlings and read them their story.
Lyra had been a great help, holding and consoling Bonnie, who had ceased her tears but still peeked out from beneath her older sister's wings with a heartbroken expression over the loss of Adelpha. It was Lyra that thought up the idea that Orion ought to record Bonnie singing her "good-night song" on his phone and send it to Alexander. Lyra assured Bonnie that Alexander would show it to Adelpha and that would make her very happy. This cheered Bonnie up immensely and her single recording quickly expanded into a veritable variety show of hatchling performers, all demanding a turn to record a song, story, or trick. The young ones then begged these videos also be sent to Adelpha, Goliath, Elisa, Brooklyn, Mr. Xanatos, and Owen, who the hatchlings all agreed looked as though he might benefit from a jaunty tune. The project was great fun for the little ones, but the pages all sat at their tables, gazinging forlornly and uncomprehendingly at the blank notebooks in which they were supposed to be writing.
At last, Angela, Ophelia, and Linnet entered the rookery, accompanied by Coldfire, and then nothing could contain the pages, who descended on them with shouting, tears, and threats of insubordination.
The adult sisters were quite taken aback by this aggressive barrage, but soon understood that the children's eves-dropping had only gained them part of the conversation and they quickly reassured the children that no one was leaving the clan and Adelpha would return to them just as soon as she finished whatever task Alexander required of her.
"Really?" Orion whispered to Angela, outside of the younger ones' hearing, "It's alright? Brooklyn says she can come home?"
"Don't you believe me?" she asked with a smile.
"It's just…" Orion paused awkwardly. Of course, he trusted Angela, but there was something about this situation that just didn't seem right, "I don't think Adelpha would have wanted to leave us without talking to us first…and Sister said she didn't want to go."
"It would not have been easy for her," Angela agreed with him, "To leave without saying goodbye."
"Do you think Brooklyn forced her?" he asked anxiously and Angela took a long pause before answering.
"No. Not really," Angela finally replied, "I think she agreed to go with Alex, even though she didn't want to. I think she is trying very hard to trust Brooklyn and trust does not come easily to her."
"How long will it take?" Orion asked begrudgingly, "When will she be able to come home?"
"I'm not sure," Angela replied truthfully with a bit of disdain in her tone, "I have a question or two for Mr. Alexander Xanatos myself!"
Orion smiled, not because he took any particular pleasure in his rookery mother's anger, but because her frustration meant that he was not alone in his. And maybe because he knew that if any of the grownups could gently squeeze information quickly out of Alexander, it was his clever and feisty older sister.
Now, Orion slowly rose from his bed and collected his barings, finally taking a delayed swipe at the blaring alarm clock on the bed stand. He peeked over at the lower bunk across the aisle, where a pile of Adelpha's gargoyle dolls lay scattered and abandoned by Bonnie, who must have risen before him and went off in search of breakfast. The perfectly stacked sheets on the other beds indicated that Lyra had never made it to bed.
Orion felt a pang of guilt. Despite her being a bit mature for her years, Lyra was just a kid. With all the day-walking members of the clan now out of town, most of the care of Bonnie during the day had fallen to her. Anxiously, Orion wondered if he even ought to be going to school in these circumstances. Perhaps he should ask Brooklyn if he could take a break so he could stay home and help his sisters, if only until Adelpha or Elisa returned. Orion grimaced at the thought of missing his days at Holman Academy. There was so much he was looking forward to there, and he had made good friends with many of the other students. But if his clan needed him, he resolved, he would stay home and do online courses with Sister.
His thoughts turned to Sister as he hurried into his school uniform. He wondered if Angela had been able to convince her that Adelpha had not been banished. She had been so upset the night before, too much so to even speak to Orion when they had returned to the rookery after her argument with Brooklyn. But he had sat with her and tried to console her, until the pages had burst in and made everything worse. Orion had no idea what his distressed rookery mate had intended to do, but he hoped that Angela had found her before she began anything too reckless!
"Ori?" Lyra voice called through the open door that led into the main room of the rookery.
"I know, I know," Orion called, "The car's probably already waiting for me. I'll be down in a minute."
"No, that's not it," Lyra cried frustratedly as her head peeked around the door frame, "I can't find Bonnie anywhere!"
Orion sighed in exasperation. During the night, when Bonnie was among the clan, her gargoyle instinct seemed to compel her to stay safely among her siblings, but daybreak often seemed to inspire a desire to wander and explore. Finding a small girl in an enormous castle could be a challenge. In the past, she had made it all the way into the elevator and gone down to the lobby floor of the Eyrie Building to look at the immense tropical fish tank and count the clown fish. Another time, the sunrise had found her lounging on the steel cross beam that reinforced the high ceiling of the north tower common room, requiring Owen to order a ladder be brought up so they could rescue her impatient human form.
"Come on," Orion assured his sister, "She's probably in the kitchen, looking for Lucky Charms."
"I already looked there!" Lyra argued and Orion stopped with a furrowed brow.
"What about the TV room?"
"There too."
"The courtyard?"
"Of course."
Orion thought hard, trying to imagine the most likely place Bonnie would hide.
"Did you check the north tower? Maybe she decided to sleep in her gargoyle form today?"
"I looked, but I didn't see her."
"Did you check under all the grownup's wings? Maybe she was tucked underneath?"
"No?" Lyra replied uncertainly.
"Well, let's check there first!"
They hurried through the castle to the tower and quickly climbed the stairs. One by one, they checked all the elders whose wings weren't extended, but Bonnie wasn't underneath any of them, in either her stone or human form.
"Angela isn't here either," Lyra remarked, "I didn't notice before."
Orion considered this and an idea came to mind.
"Do you suppose she went to sleep in Adelpha's room?" Orion asked.
"Oh, yes!" Lyra replied, her face brightening, "I didn't even think of that! I bet that's exactly where she is!"
The two young ones hurried together down the tower stairs, until they were interrupted by a gruff, threatening voice.
"Who is there?" it demanded, bringing them to a sudden halt.
"It's only us, Coldstone," Orion replied hesitantly, "Orion and Lyra."
They turned around the spiraling steps and revealed themselves to Coldstone, who looked at them suspiciously.
"Orion and Lyra," he repeated, eyeing their human forms, "What are you doing here?"
"We're looking for our sister," Orion explained, "Bonnie. Have you seen her?"
"We haven't seen her," Coldfire replied, coming up the stairs from behind her mate.
"Oh. Okay. Um…thank you," Orion replied as they inched their way past them and hurried down the rest of the staircase.
"They might have at least offered to help us look for her," Lyra grumbled, "I don't think they like us!"
"I'm sure they like us just fine," Orion lied, and he quickly led her to the elevator and up the corridor toward Adelpha's room. They didn't make it there before Bonnie came running up to them, holding her Friend and looking quite alarmed.
"Something crashed!" she told them anxiously.
"Uh oh! What did you break, Bonnie?" Orion asked her, peering down the corridor dreadfully. Bonnie was infamous for epic crashes.
"I didn't do it!" she squealed, stomping her foot indignantly, "I was resting in Adelpha's room when I heard the noise and I went to see what it was. Lexington's lab was all crashed up! And there's a broken window!"
Orion and Lyra glanced at one another skeptically.
"I didn't do it!" Bonnie objected emphatically, grabbing Orion by the hand, "Come look, Ori!"
Orion and Lyra followed their sister through the corridor to the smashed door leading to Lexington's laboratory.
"Whoa!" Orion exclaimed in horror as he gazed through the doorway at the chaos inside.
"I told you!" Bonnie declared triumphantly.
"Did you see what happened?" Orion asked her.
"No, but I heard a big blast, like a rocketship! It went past Adelpha's room and then I heard a huge crash when it went through the window."
They followed the little girl's pointed finger down the hall and around the corner, where they saw the shattered glass of the destroyed window.
"Ori? What happened?" Lyra asked anxiously, "I don't think even Bonnie could make this mess on her own."
"I didn't do it!" Bonnie squawked again, placing her hands defiantly on her hips, "It was one of Lexington's robots!"
"What makes you say that, Bonnie?" Lyra asked. Bonnie looked at her sister incredulously, then waved her small arms around the room, as if it was obvious to any halfwit what had happened.
"Just look!" she commanded, "The robot broke out of that cabinet and destroyed Lexington's lab, then it escaped out of that window to go do bad stuff."
"Lexington programs his robots himself," Lyra told her, "What kind of bad stuff do you think his robots want to do?"
"Steal bikes," she told them confidently, as if she had already put a lot of thought into the subject.
"I don't think robots ride bikes, Bonnie," Orion told her.
"They break the bikes up and build bigger robots," she told him with a serious expression, "With lasers. Then they go around and do crimes for the mafia!"
Lyra gasped in horror.
"Come on, Lyra! You can't make laser-robots out of bikes!" Orion informed her sanctimoniously.
"Can too!" Bonnie replied snidely, but Lyra wasn't paying attention to either of them. She had discovered a dark green journal, lying open on the corner of the desk, just next to a laptop with familiar stickers on the case.
"Ori!" she cried, "Sister had this with her last night! We got it from Xanatos' library!" Lyra gasped again, then slowly looked down at the floor.
"What?" Orion demanded, "What happened? What is this?"
"It's a notebook," Lyra replied ashamedly, "It was hers."
"Sister?"
"No…Demona's!"
"Demona's?" Orion cried in outrage, "Why in the world would Sister want it?"
Lyra looked like she might cry.
"She thought it might have some spells that she could use to help Elisa get better, so she and Goliath could come home."
"Sister was trying to do sorcery?" Orion cried, "Why didn't you say anything?"
The girl looked even more wretched.
"I didn't want her to get into trouble and…I didn't think she would be able to do any real magic without a talisman."
"Did she blow herself up?" Bonnie cried in dismay, "Maybe she made herself really tiny…or invisible!" She looked around anxiously for signs of Sister, as if she expected to see her stone form peeking out from the rubble in the room. Orion was also studying the violently destroyed laboratory with a renewed sense of alarm.
"Oh, Sister!" he whispered, "What have you done?"
"I'm sorry!" Lyra moaned pitifully, but Orion drew his breath sharply.
"Come on," he said, "We need to find her!"
They ran through the corridor, toward the elevator, and almost crashed into Coldfire and Coldsteel.
"Oh, you found her!" Coldfire exclaimed, "We wanted to make sure before we went into our daily hibernation."
"Yes," Orion replied, "But now we need to find Sister! There's been some sort of explosion in Lexington's laboratory!"
"Explosion!" Coldstone replied in a shout that startled the children.
"Yes," Orion continued, "And we found Sister's laptop and this book that Lyra says-
"Quickly!" Coldstone bellowed over him and, in an instant, both he and Coldfire had engaged their rockets and shot past the children so quickly that Lyra was inclined to yank Bonnie by the tail to safety. She and Orion exchanged a less-than-confident glance and they followed to the two cyborgs, who were already exchanging mechanical roars of frustration.
"He escaped!" Coldstone erupted, "How is this possible?!"
"Who escaped?" Orion asked.
"Our brother, Coldsteel!" Coldfire cried in dismay and the children's eyes widened in fear.
"Hurry!" Coldstone ordered, "We must trace him! We must find him before he gets too far away!"
"But what about…?" Lyra began, but they had already rushed off down the corridor.
"Hey, wait!" Orion cried angrily, racing after them at breakneck speed as they reached the shattered window, "What about Sister?!"
"Brooklyn can deal with her when he awakens," Coldfire told them absentmindedly, "We must hurry after Coldsteel and stop him before he wreaks any more havoc and destroys any more innocent lives!"
With that, the pair blasted out of the window and the children watched in a mixture of disbelief and outrage as they shrunk away to nothing in the distance.
"They're not being responsible!" Bonnie accused bitterly and Orion had to agree with her assessment.
"I guess I'm not going to school today," he grumbled, opening his backpack and taking out his phone, "They could have at least called me in so I don't get a demerit!"
"Who are you calling?" Lyra asked him.
"Mr. Xanatos," Orion replied.
"Uncle David's in London!" Bonnie reminded him and he grimaced as he hung up the phone.
"...And so are Fox and Owen," he remembered.
"What about Mr. MacMoray?" Lyra asked hopefully, and Orion quickly dialed that number, only to hear a recorded message stating that Luach MacMoray would be out of the office for three days and to leave a message with his secretary in the case of an emergency.
"Ori! There's no grownups left!" Lyra exclaimed with a sense of horror, "What do we do?"
Orion took a deep breath and sighed, trying desperately to think.
"We find her ourselves!" he resolved, "Come on!"
With that, he led them back downstairs to get their things.