CHAPTER 62

We spent a very long day and night in Viktor Zolin’s apartment.

Even though the walls were lined with TV screens hooked up to awesome, super-high-tech gaming devices, it wasn’t a fun sleepover. Video games have never really been our thing. Beck and I had spent three-quarters of our lives living on a ship. We were having too much fun going on real adventures to let avatars made out of pixels have all the fun for us.

Mom suggested that we all do our best to keep Zolin “extremely busy.”

“If you guys keep bugging him,” she whispered when we had ten seconds alone in a seventh-floor bathroom (one of at least fifty in Zolin’s ten-story apartment), “he won’t have time to drag any major masterpieces down to the furnace before your father gets here.”

“Then what’s the plan?” I asked.

“When your father arrives—”

Mom couldn’t finish her answer. Our armed guards found us.

“Here you are!” said one of the unmasked goons who had menaced us on the icebreaker trip north. “Viktor wants you upstairs in the game room. I think he wants to play with you some more.”

We did as we were told. But we also filled Viktor’s day with a lot of stupid and annoying diversionary tactics.

For instance, Beck and I did three Twin Tirades. In a row.

Storm bored Zolin with more Russian tour-guide trivia.

And Tommy broke the thumb controllers for Zolin’s prototype PlayStation Six playing Batman: Arkham Knight.