I LOOKED UP AT ERIC, MY MOUTH OPEN IN SHOCK. “ERIC, THERE’S NO hair.”
“What?” Savannah asked, her eyebrows knitting.
“My dad always seals these files with a hair. That way he knows if someone comes along and tampers with it. There’s no hair on the seal of this file.”
Savannah blinked at me several times, then turned to my brother. “Okay, Eric, I’m officially on your side. This is ridiculous.”
But the color had drained from my brother’s face. “No, Gillian is right. Dad’s nuts about his system. I mean, he might forget to turn off the iron, but he never, ever forgets the hair seal on his files.” I was sure he was already envisioning Dad breaking out the tent and mapping a secret campsite. Eric would go into video game withdrawal. “If he’d shown this to Fiona, the hair would still be there.”
“Eww, really?” Savannah asked. “Whose hair does he use?”
“His,” Eric said, pushing past Savannah to join me at the cabinet. “He almost went bald after the flood when he first set this up.” Eric turned to me. “Is there any way to tell if something’s missing?”
I glanced at the file, the pages and CDs of info contained within. “I don’t know. But I do think I know Fiona’s plan. Savannah said maybe Fiona had somehow bought Dr. Underberg’s diary for my dad, like maybe she thought he’d like some extra information on him.”
“So?” Savannah asked.
“Well, what if it’s exactly the opposite? What if she needs some extra information about Underberg—something that’s not in the diary—and she thinks my dad still has it?”
“And she’s dating him to sweet-talk him into giving it to her?” Eric had definitely dropped the sarcasm.
“Or to get close enough to him so she could get into his office and see what he had left.”
My brother nodded slowly. “That would explain what she sees in him, at least.”
“All her files were named Omega,” I said. “Whatever she’s looking for, it’s called Omega.”
“You could look under O?” Savannah suggested.
Eric snorted. “Dad’s system doesn’t work like that. We’d need to know what Omega means to Dad.”
“Or what it meant to Underberg.” I closed up the filing cabinet and grabbed a copy of Dad’s Underberg book off the shelf. We have loads of copies lying around, ever since the publisher stopped selling them. I turned to the index, looking for any mention of “Omega.”
“Nothing in the book,” I said. “What does Omega even mean?”
“I think it’s a Greek letter,” said Savannah. “My cousin is a Chi Omega at college. Sororities all have Greek-letter names.”
“So maybe Underberg was in a fraternity called Omega?” I asked.
“It also means ‘last,’” Eric pointed out. “Like The Omega Man is a zombie movie about the last human on Earth. And a lot of final bosses in video games are Omega this or Omega that.”
Savannah was already paging through Dad’s dictionary to O. “We’re both right. It’s the last letter in the Greek alphabet, so sometimes people use it to mean ‘last’ or ‘end.’”
“G for Greek?” Eric asked me, turning back to the filing cabinet. “F for foreign languages?”
I smiled at him. Finally, he’d seen the light. I pulled open a drawer. “Let’s try L for Last.” But there was no file marked “Last” in the drawer. Just one marked “Loose Pages.” I lifted it out and opened the waterproof bag, making sure to press my finger over the hair seal to keep it from slipping out.
The file was pretty thick, with all kinds of paper scraps—what looked like everything from old grocery lists to a few notes scrawled on the backs of receipts. A small, yellowed page of lined paper caught my eye and I yanked it out of the stack.
The size and shape matched the scans from Fiona’s computer. The edge was ragged, as if it had been torn from a notebook. The handwriting was Aloysius Underberg’s.
I clutched the page to my chest and ran back to the living room with Paper Clip—who knew quite well never to enter Dad’s office—hot on my heels from the second I hit the hall. The printouts of Fiona’s files were still sitting on the coffee table and I lined the loose page up against the torn edges on the final printout, the one marked “Omega-AU-pg127.”
It was a perfect match.
I heard Savannah and Eric behind me.
“This is what she’s looking for,” I whispered, holding up the matching pages. “It’s the missing last page of Underberg’s diary. It must have fallen out and gotten lost with Dad’s stuff before the rest of the diary was stolen.” I dropped back on the couch.
“So Omega means the last page of Dr. Underberg’s diary?” Savannah asked.
“I guess.”
“Wait, no,” said Eric. “That doesn’t make sense. All Fiona’s files are named Omega, not just the one for this page.”
“True.” So if she wasn’t looking for this one piece of paper, what was she looking for? Paper Clip leaped up beside me and scratched her cheek against the edge of the page. “But then what is it?”
“Well,” prompted Eric, plucking the page out of my hand. “What does the magical page say?”
I tried to grab it back, but he held it out of my reach, vaulting over the back of the couch.
“A whole lot of gibberish,” he said with a shrug. “Typical Underberg stuff.”
I lunged for the page and snatched it back. And, though I hated to admit it, Eric was right. Because this is what it said:
I find I cannot be so cruel as to destroy my greatest creation, despite the cruelty of those I trusted. Very well. For those who trust me it shall not be difficult to reach safety, for you know my heart:
You know who I am, and the heavenly body that heralded my arrival. IX marks the spot.
You know where I’m from, and the gifts I have left there. And even if the sun sets on this Earth, you can use it to start your journey.
Follow the path I’ve laid for you, in the direction marked by the birth of ice.
When you find my twin, you will find my treasure.
Underneath that, in a different shade of pen, like it was written later, was what looked like a phone number:
x=5906376272
And then a line, with more numbers underneath:
0.05=1391000
“Are either of you planning on telling me what it says?” Savannah asked. She was still holding the dictionary open to O for omega.
“Eric’s right.” I sighed. “More gibberish.”
Savannah leaned over my shoulder to read. “What’s all that stuff about heavenly bodies? Hey, you said Dr. Underberg was a NASA scientist, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that other sheet said something about the stars, and this one is all about ‘heavenly bodies’ and the sun and the Earth. Maybe Omega is some sort of space thing. A . . . moon or an asteroid or something.”
“You know who might be able to tell us?” Eric said. “That kid at school. The one who’s obsessed with NASA?”
“Eww,” said Savannah. “Howard Noland? He’s such a dweeb. Nobody talks to him on purpose.”
Eric nodded. “But he knows everything there is to know about space. We have PE together and it’s the only thing he’ll talk about.”
“Exactly,” said Savannah. “Literally the only thing. He’s our age, but he’s only in fifth. They held him back in first grade, you know, because he was such a freak.” She twirled her finger around her ears.
Like people didn’t say that every day about my dad.
“And we’re just as crazy if we actually encourage him on his whole space obsession. He’ll talk your ear off.”
“If he can help me figure out what Fiona is up to, I’ll risk both my ears. I don’t know what’s going on, but someone was willing to ruin Dad’s life over this Underberg thing last year, and Fiona is definitely involved now. I can’t let anyone hurt Dad like that again.”
Eric was staring at me. “So you don’t think we should tell Dad what we found?”
“We can try,” I said, “but if he gets paranoid, you know what that means.”
Eric shuddered.
“What does it mean?” Savannah asked.
“Best-case scenario?” my brother said. “We’re all eating packaged foods and drinking bottled water for a week. Worst-case? He takes us off the grid until things calm down.”
“Off the grid?”
“Camping,” I explained. “No phone, no TV, no internet, no footprints if he’s feeling especially cautious.”
I’d never forget what Mom told Dad the morning she left the campsite. We’d done a full month of it when the scandal had first hit, and lost our mom in the deal. What would we lose if Dad started down that road again? Paper Clip? The house?
“Okay. Let’s keep it a secret until we know if we’re dealing with anything at all. Who knows?” I forced a smile. “Maybe Eric’s right and this is all in my head.”
But I don’t think even Eric believed that anymore.