Chapter 1 1.
10,000 Feet Above the Pacific Ocean

“FIVE MINUTES.”

The voice came from the cockpit, through the magic of radio waves, straight into our helmets. (Milo, my good friend and fellow R.A.P.T.O.R. junior agent, also known as the Prof for his knowledge of things, had once explained how radio waves work. I had decided that it was basically magic.)

We stood up. In case you didn’t know—and how could you, the book’s only just started—we were wearing skydiving jumpsuits, two parachutes (one main, one reserve), and helmets. We unclipped our operation backpacks from under the bench and clipped them onto our fronts, leaving them hanging from the harness. From side pockets we fished out our skydiving goggles and put them on.

“Keear!” Artemis, the sixty-five-million-year-old microraptor we had kept safe from evil hands in our previous mission, laughed.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You can fly, we look like dorks, blah, blah, blah.”

“Keear!”

She must have thought we looked ridiculous needing 106 pieces of equipment just to drop in a straight line, whereas she could perform the most amazing air maneuvers with nothing.

“I still don’t understand why we need to parachute to Nausicaa,” I said.

Milo explained. “It is the quickest way to get there, and given that things are developing quite fast—”

“It was a red oracle question.”

“Rhetorical.”

“Three minutes,” said Special Agent Edgar Young, code name Koala, our chaperone on this second mission.

We had arrived at Seoul’s international airport about five hours earlier and, courtesy of our Korean R.A.P.T.O.R. colleagues, gotten onto this military transport airplane. If you could call it that. A flying machine without comfy seats, without movies, without pretzels, and without food service is not an airplane. It’s a creation of Satan himself.

Yellow lights flashed inside the fuselage. (That’s the main body of a plane, in case you’re wondering. Milo said it earlier. Not a clue what a fuse has to do with it. Unless it means that if you stay for too long in here you blow a fuse. Dad joke, forget about it.) The hatch at the back opened and came down steadily. A wind of -7,000 degrees Celsius blew in. We saw the purple-orange horizon of the morning, and ten thousand feet below, the Pacific Ocean said hi.

“Where exactly are we?” I asked.

Milo swallowed hard.

“Are you all right, Prof?” I asked, putting my arm around his shoulders, knowing that traces of his acrophobia were still around. Although he had fought it in our previous mission.

He took a few deep breaths and said in a slightly trembling voice, “Eleven point thirty-seven degrees north, one hundred and forty-two point fifty-nine degrees east. Right where Nausicaa is waiting for us.”

“Confirmed,” said Edgar, checking a tablet on his forearm. “Everyone ready?”

I looked at Milo. Taking one last deep breath, he nodded.

I glanced at Artemis. She was perching at the end of the hatch door, enjoying the wind on her face and her feathers, her raptor senses in full mode.

“Ready,” I told Edgar.

“Gray-Faced Buzzard and Himalayan Rubythroat,” Edgar said on his mic, “thanks for the ride.”

“You’re welcome, Koala,” the pilots replied.

Cool names. Everyone has cool names. Whereas mine is…

“Sparrow! Go!”