Lottie
‘We need to recap everything we know,’ I said, when Mo walked into the room with a plate of cheese on toast. ‘I said cheese slices! Why can’t anyone around here follow simple instructions?’
‘I don’t understand Sadie, remember?’ Mo huffed. ‘And you could always go and get your cheese slices yourself.’
‘Cheese on toast will have to do,’ I said as Schrody dragged a slice off the plate and started licking it.
‘I’m closing the curtains,’ Mo said, shuffling on his bottom over to the window with a piece of cheesy toast hanging out of his mouth. ‘The Junkers seem to be watching us wherever we go, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a telescope set up so they can spy on us through the windows.’
‘I was going to suggest that myself,’ I said. ‘From now on, everything we do must be kept completely secret. We’ll only talk openly about the competition, Hector and the Junkers when we are in this room with the door shut and the curtains closed.’
‘Stealth mode,’ Mo nodded.
‘So: the Junkers know about Hector.’
‘And got him arrested,’ Mo said. ‘They must have known he was helping us and wanted to get rid of him.’
‘But if the Junkers wanted to make him disappear,’ I said, ‘Why not just junk him?’
‘They can’t, remember? They need to wait for a Class X solar flare.’
‘Oh yes, the solar flares. If we knew when they were going to be, we’d have a much better idea of when we’ll be in the most danger.’
‘But we can’t possibly know when a flare is going to happen.’
‘The list!’ I gasped. ‘The one Sadie stole from Lorelai! Didn’t that say something about occurring Xs?’
‘It had dates from the past and the future!’ Mo said. ‘You’re right, Lottie.’
‘But we don’t have it – I told Sadie to throw it away. I thought it was worthless. What did you do with it, Sadie?’
Mo jumped up and ran to his bed. ‘I keep telling you, Lottie. Nothing is worthless. Everything is valuable to someone. That’s why I keep the things I find.’
He rummaged around in his secret box and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper.
‘How?’ I asked, bobbing up and down with excitement.
‘Sadie dropped it. I found it and I couldn’t throw it away.’
‘Oh, Mo – you wonderful, awesome, weird little hoarder – I love you!’ I hugged him. Usually, he stands there awkwardly when anybody touches him, his arms down by his sides and his back all stiff. But this time he actually hugged me back.
We unfolded the paper and put it on the floor in front of us. You can find it in the box, labelled Exhibit N.
Class X Occurrences 2000-2020
| Year | Month | Date | Time of Peak | Class |
| 2000 | December | 8th | 15:45 | X 3.12 |
| 2001 | April | 9th | 06:28 | X 1.87 |
| 2001 | July | 30th | 00:18 | X 24.51 |
| 2002 | March | 26th | 22:43 | X 6.82 |
| 2002 | November | 12th | 23:22 | X 19.22 |
| 2003 | February | 27th | 17:09 | X 8.64 |
| 2003 | December | 15th | 12:36 | 50.6938N |
| 2004 | October | 18th | 02:01 | X 29.55 |
| 2005 | March | 3rd | 00:56 | X 6.85 |
| 2005 | April | 14th | 13:16 | X 1.21 |
| 2005 | July | 9th | 14:53 | X 5.98 |
| 2006 | July | 26th | 09:55 | X 28.66 |
| 2007 | January | 8th | 10:52 | X 13.11 |
| 2007 | May | 22nd | 08:30 | X 7.72 |
| 2007 | June | 21st | 18:07 | X 9.12 |
| 2008 | August | 5th | 15:12 | X 5.78 |
| 2008 | August | 5th | 16:09 | X 6.21 |
| 2009 | February | 1st | 16:42 | X 11.12 |
| 2009 | June | 19th | 07:47 | X 18.65 |
| 2009 | December | 26th | 07:15 | 1.3047W |
| 2010 | May | 12th | 21:28 | X 4.42 |
| 2011 | March | 4th | 20:04 | X 8.99 |
| 2012 | September | 18th | 21:24 | X 12.53 |
| 2013 | April | 29th | 17:19 | X 17.12 |
| 2013 | April | 30th | 11:33 | X 3.32 |
| 2014 | November | 18th | 09:19 | X 1.18 |
| 2015 | May | 5th | 22:41 | X 1.43 |
| 2016 | July | 26th | 08:23 | X 1.98 |
| 2016 | November | 11th | 10:00 | X 2.66 |
| 2017 | February | 5th | 00:52 | X 12.65 |
| 2017 | February | 20th | 04:40 | X 17.88 |
| 2017 | May | 20th | 14:37 | X 1.99 |
| 2018 | April | 6th | 03:13 | X 22.98 |
| 2018 | October | 31st | 18:42 | X 4.56 |
| 2018 | October | 31st | 20:56 | X 3.87 |
| 2019 | February | 10th | 03:47 | X 9.91 |
| 2019 | June | 28th | 15:05 | X 6.59 |
| 2019 | June | 28th | 16:04 | X 7.29 |
| 2020 | September | 9th | 22:22 | X 15.39 |
‘This is brilliant,’ Mo said. ‘We can see when they’re likely to make their move.’ He pointed at a place on the list. ‘Look – on the 31st of October there are going to be two powerful flares, at 6:42pm and then at 8.56pm. That will be it! That’s the date they’re waiting for!’
‘Halloween,’ I said, feeling excited. ‘That’s a great day to be doing something evil.’
‘Don’t look so happy about it, Lottie. The evil thing they’re going to be doing is abducting one of us and sending us to a scary place that we can never come back from.’
‘I know, but you have to appreciate the timing.’
‘So, we know when it’s going to happen,’ Mo said. ‘What we don’t know is exactly how it’s going to happen.’
‘And that takes us back to Hector and his clues…’
‘The cube thing he drew,’ Mo said, walking over to his desk and opening his laptop. ‘I’ve seen it before, and not just on the armband.’
‘The questions we asked Hector were all about time-jumping and junking,’ I said. ‘So it must have something to do with that.’
‘Did you notice he also said a load of stuff about two separate cars?’ Mo didn’t look up from Google. ‘It seemed a bit weird at the time, but I think it was another clue. Remember we asked him if the time-jumping and junking was done the same way? I think that was his way of telling us that they involve separate ways of travelling.’
‘You worked that out from his crazy ramblings?’ I said. ‘It’s really lucky that you speak nerd.’
‘And I think I’ve found out what the mystery cube thing is.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a tesseract.’
‘That means absolutely nothing to me,’ I said, disappointed.
‘It’s a four-dimensional hypercube.’
‘Still nothing.’
‘It’s really complicated,’ Mo said. ‘But I think it must have something to do with how the time-jumping works. How fascinating.’
He started clicking away on his laptop. I waited for at least twenty minutes while he read through pages of stuff, the silence broken only by mousepad clicks and his ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’. I have to tell you, it was very boring. He tried to explain some of it to me, but it was all geometry and maths and, to be honest with you, none of it really mattered to me at that point.
‘Yes, extremely fascinating,’ I said. ‘But the important thing right now is to work out what it means to us.’
‘It means time travel is possible, Lottie. I don’t know exactly how, but just the idea of it is mind blowing!’
‘Mo,’ I said, pulling the laptop away from him and closing the lid. ‘Focus! The only thing we need to understand is how we can use this information to help us. Halloween is next week. Evil people are going to try to junk one of us – probably me…’ (Mo rolled his eyes.) ‘And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen. Not just for ourselves but for the good of the world and the future and the human race.’
‘Right,’ said Mo. ‘Sorry.’
‘The tessa-square is on that armband that Jax stole from us. He also drew it on the competition poster. We know it’s important.’
‘I think the armband is one of the timejumping devices.’
‘You think the time-machine is a bracelet? How would that work? You put it on and it zaps you through space?’
‘It could only work for one person,’ Mo said. ‘And the Junkers left it behind, remember? They went back to the future without it.’
‘So it must be the junking device,’ I said. ‘The main time machine that they use to transport all of them backwards and forwards is something else.’
‘Something we haven’t seen yet. Something that can transport more than one person at a time.’
‘But that means we had our hands on the junking bracelet and we let Jax steal it!’ How terribly upsetting. ‘If we’d known it was that important, we could have stashed it in Gringott’s instead of in a cardboard box under your bed.’
‘It was a secret box, Lottie.’
‘Like that would make a difference to anyone except you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mo looked annoyed.
‘It means that everybody in this house has looked in everybody else’s secret boxes.’
‘What?’
‘You’re the only person who respects the secrecy rule, Mo.’
‘You mean you’ve looked in my box?’ His cheeks were red.
‘Of course! I’ve looked in your box, Sadie’s box, Dad’s box and Emma’s box. What on earth did you expect?’
‘Oh, I don’t know… FOR MY PRIVACY TO BE RESPECTED!’
‘We’re going off topic again,’ I said. ‘Do you think we should have another go at breaking into the Junker house to see if we can find the junking bracelet?’
‘It’s a big risk, Lottie. It went pretty badly last time,’ Mo said. ‘And we looked everywhere but didn’t find it.’
‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to put myself through terrible danger, but only for good reason.’
‘I say we avoid going to that house unless we absolutely, one hundred per cent, have to.’
‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘So we only have one other option and, I’m afraid, you’re not going to like it.’