SOGGY AND SORRY-LOOKING, CAS SAT GLUMLY IN THE lobby leading to Headmaster Higgles’s office, waiting for him to return.

Miss Grimbly and her parakeets kept looking daggers at him from behind her desk. “I told you hanging around with that horrible girl would bring you nothing but trouble,” she scolded him, as the parakeets chirped in agreement.

But Cas didn’t have the strength to tell her this had nothing to do with Warrior.

He felt simultaneously tired and wired. He was both buzzing to get back to the Abnormies to discuss how the Master was likely using the Wide West of Wayward to access the sewers, and busy thanking the threads that he hadn’t drowned.

An hour later, Headmaster Higgles jollily strolled into the lobby, belching and munching on his afternoon snack, a custard pastry crown.

“Oh, Cas, my boy!” the headmaster exclaimed, brushing crumbs from his cloak and hauling Cas into a hug. “What’ve you been up to? Did you get in the bath with your clothes still on? Happens to me all the time.” Squished against Headmaster Higgles’s long, spidery frame, Cas felt every one of the teacher’s knobbly joints poking into his ribs.

He would’ve rather taken another round with Puggle the Nuggle.

Miss Grimbly got to her feet and glared disapprovingly. “Madame Aster caught him riding the Wavebreaker Elementie.”

“Not intentionally!” Cas pointed out.

Headmaster Higgles shoved the rest of the pastry into his mouth, looking torn.

“Come in, Darkbloom,” he said shortly, holding his door open. “Let’s see if we can sort this out.”

Cas followed the headmaster inside.

Hopeless Higgles’s office was uninspiringly boring. The walls were painted a muted shade of blue and scattered with still-life paintings of food: a wicker basket full of vegetables, a half-eaten wheel of cheese, and a glorious cherry-topped ice cream sundae complete with sprinkles. The only interesting things in the room were Higgles’s framed degree (Masters in Earthshaping, Fifteenth Attempt, Laughable Standard) and a chaise longue on the other side of his desk instead of a chair.

Cas supposed it was better for napping.

“I’m sure we can let this little indiscretion slide,” said Headmaster Higgles, plopping himself down on the seat and rummaging around in his desk. “I just need to fill out a form, a formality – let me see, where is it – oh yes.”

The headmaster pulled a vast array of useless, hoarded stuff out of his drawer as he searched, bundling it onto his desk: a rubber eraser, a paper-clip ring, a ball made of elastic bands, a heap of multicoloured string, and a metal cog-shaped object.

Cas was just wondering how much it would all be worth at The Mint Exchange when his eyes lit up.

The cog.

His thoughts flew to the Abominable Archives’ door.

“Headmaster,” Cas drawled, feeling inspired, as Higgles dipped his pen in an ink pot and started to fill out the rule-break form. “I think I heard Cook Fiddlepot say that he was going to rustle up some chocolate eclairs for an early supper treat.”

Headmaster Higgles instantly perked up. “Chocolate eclairs?” he said, licking his lips.

“I had one the other day,” said Cas. “They’re absolutely divine. Crisp, golden pastry. Fudgy chocolate. Oozy, gooey cream. I wouldn’t want you to miss out.”

For a brief moment, Headmaster Higgles seemed ready to leap to his feet, but then he checked himself at the last opportunity. “Oh, well … no. No, perhaps later. I really ought to finish this first.”

“Are you sure, sir?” said Cas, acting concerned. “You look a bit peaky.”

The same trick Dr Bane had played on Cas sprang to mind as he focused his attention hard on Higgles, muttering “Caput” under his breath.

“What was that, dear boy?”

Cas’s heart skipped a beat. “Oh, nothing,” he said, and then gasped, feigning concern. “But the voices! Hearing words which aren’t there is a sure sign you need to eat something, sir. Right now.”

Just then, Headmaster Higgles faltered, swaying slightly on his seat. “On second thoughts, perhaps you’re right, Cas. I do feel a bit faint.”

Cas could barely contain his smile. By some miracle, his powers were working.

“Stay here, Darkbloom,” said Headmaster Higgles, pushing back from his desk so enthusiastically that the chaise longue toppled over. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

The moment Higgles lumbered out of view, Cas lunged forward and snatched up the metal cog. He shoved it inside his pocket and turned to go – but he couldn’t resist the urge to quickly riffle through Higgles’s open drawer. There were chocolate bar wrappers, used napkins, a photo of Higgles’s mother who looked like a blobby pink slug in a wig … but also a recent newspaper clipping about the Master of All’s attack on The Tyrannical Terrace and blueprints of the school – maps detailing every tiny passageway, secret tunnel and the routes of the sewers.

Shaking, Cas rummaged further in the drawer until his fingers grazed something curved and silver, wedged right at the back…

It instantly reminded him of the Master of All’s silver mask.

Could Fenix be right? Was Higgles the informant?

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” shrieked Miss Grimbly.

Without hesitation, Cas pulled out his arm and slammed the drawer closed. The secretary lingered menacingly on the other side of the office, eyes slit-like and nostrils flaring. Cas raced towards the door, trying to streak past her towards the library. But Miss Grimbly was unnaturally limber and quick. She threw her brittle body into Cas’s path, blocking his escape into the lobby.

Thinking fast, Cas clocked Miss Grimbly’s parakeets behind her and focused on the crustiest-looking bird in the corner of the cage. This time, Cas didn’t need words to direct his magic. His disbelief at what he had found and burning desire to finally break into the Abominable Archives was enough to spur his powers on.

He channelled all his energy into Polly the parakeet, who suddenly stopped grooming her feathers and began to swell and grow like an inflatable balloon.

“My baby!” Miss Grimbly screeched shrilly.

Forgetting all about him, Miss Grimbly whirled around and dived across the room out of Cas’s way. As she wrenched open the cage door, Cas let the parakeet deflate to its normal size. Then he took off, not stopping or looking back until he was outside the library’s doors.

Slamming into them, Cas rattled the handles, but the doors were shut tight. Common sense told him it would be better to try and get into the Abominable Archives at night, when he was less likely to get caught. But after what he had just found in Higgles’s office, there was no time to waste. Cas bounded up the secret passage to the Attic and flew down the trap-door slide into the room below.

As expected, the library was empty.

Even though she had left the Nurse’s Quarters, Mrs Crane had been keeping an extremely low profile since the attack. Her cuts and bruises hadn’t completely healed and Cas figured she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Ignoring the sound of books shuffling around on the shelves, Cas ripped the tapestry off the wall to reveal the door and jammed the cog into the slot. His breath caught in his throat when it worked. The wheels and mechanisms on the vault began to click, turning and whirring frantically as he heard heavy deadbolts and locks sliding open.

In a matter of seconds, the entrance to the Abominable Archives swung open.

A dark, cavernous room, illuminated only by the backlight flooding in from the library, greeted him like a gaping, open mouth. Obsidian rock walls stretched above Cas in a dome and the room was filled with countless rows of creaking shelves, holding more weird and wonderful objects than he had ever encountered. Some artefacts were locked inside cages or glass boxes, whilst others were inside ruby-encrusted vials or black, padlocked chests. The cavern sloped down to a caved-in dead end at the rear of the room, which looked like it had once led to somewhere deep below the school. A familiar, grimy stench rose from the cracked opening, but Cas didn’t have time to dwell on where the archaic passage had once led.

Focusing on the shelves, he began picking through the relics and artefacts one by one, examining the dusty, scrawled labels tied to each of them. Despite the scribbled names on the labels, it was impossible to tell what many of the objects were. There were words and phrases Cas had never heard of, and some of the objects had labels written in a forgotten language Cas didn’t understand.

Then he came to one that made his heart stop.

[ARTICLE NAME REDACTED]

Entrusted to Wayward School, Wayward, by permission of the Grand Council. Property of Curator Bane.

Something twinged in Cas’s gut.

The label didn’t say seekerthing, but it didn’t need to. Madame Aster had said that nobody except the Grand Council knew what the device looked like or what it was really called, so they weren’t very well going to scrawl it on a name tag.

This had to be what Cas was searching for. It had to be.

Just to be sure, he quickly scouted some other surrounding labels, but everything else was meticulously catalogued in a way the unknown object wasn’t.

The withered, aged label was attached to a plain wooden box with a rusty hinge. Cas pried it open. A deep orange, gilded velvet cushion lined the inside, where a long, rectangular object sat snugly in a round divot in the fabric, sticking out awkwardly at one end. Cas couldn’t see what the object was exactly; it was wrapped in copious layers of cloth. It looked like some sort of kaleidoscope or baton, maybe – but what was odd was that it didn’t look like it fit properly in the box. And whilst the outer box itself was dusty, the dust around the object inside had been disturbed.

As he reached to peel the layers back, a voice rang out behind him.

“You won’t find anything in there.”

Startled, Cas snapped the box closed and spun round. Mrs Crane stood silhouetted in the doorway. She looked both stern and concerned, her arms crossed against her orange tweed dress and one of her pink-slippered feet tapping against the floor.

“I – I wasn’t looking for anything,” stammered Cas, shoving the box back onto its shelf with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop.

Mrs Crane didn’t look angry. She looked disappointed.

Somehow this was worse.

“So, let me get this straight,” she said, striding over to Cas and guiding him out of the vault. He cast one last, longing look behind him before the door whirred, buzzed and clicked shut, locking again behind them. “You just happened to stumble across the key to the Abominable Archives, which only the Headmaster has in his possession; and you just happened to find the library closed but accidentally found your way in anyway; and, let me guess, you tripped and fell, which made you put the key into the lock, opening the vault, and it was all a big misunderstanding that I found you nosily riffling through its contents.”

Cas swallowed hard. “Um … oopsie?”

Mystified, Cas stared at Mrs Crane as she chuckled. “Look, I love stories, Casander. But that’s a stretch to believe, even for me.”

There was no point trying to hide it any more.

“I just wanted to find what the Master of All was looking for,” Cas told her honestly. “The Grand Council don’t believe that he’s not after me. He’s searching for something else now. I thought that if I could get to whatever it is first, I could keep it safe … stop the Master getting hold of it … at least until everyone took me seriously. Anything to prevent him coming back and hurting anyone else. It’s my duty. I’m the Foretold.”

In the blink of an eye, Mrs Crane looked very guilty. “No, Cas, it’s not,” she said considerately. “You’re only a boy. A boy with an immense, unimaginable destiny, but it’s still your job to learn and grow. Yes, you might be the Foretold. And one day you might defeat the Master. But you need to learn how to do it first and you don’t need to do it alone.” She paused, her slightly crooked front teeth clamped on her lip. “I know it’s my fault that you feel this way, after what you saw him do the last time he broke in, but … sometimes bad things happen to good people, Cas. We can’t stop them. We just have to be strong, pick ourselves back up and carry on.

“That’s how we don’t let the bad people win.”

They stopped moving and Mrs Crane pivoted Cas to face her.

“The Master is not coming back, Cas,” she said, holding fast to his shoulders and sounding more as if she was trying to convince herself than him.

“But he is—”

“He’s not.” Mrs Crane tightened her caring grip. “And even if he does, you, and anything else you think the Master of All might be after, are safe here. We’ll protect you. It’s not your place to protect me.”

Mrs Crane released him and held her hand out for the key. Reluctantly, Cas turned and pried it out of the door.

“Just tell me one thing,” he said, eyebrow quirked brazenly, before handing it back. “Is the seekerthing in there?”

Mrs Crane’s mouth dropped open and her wild hair seemed to puff to twice its usual size. “The seekerthing?” she spluttered, taken aback. “No – I mean, it isn’t – it’s merely a rumour…”

Cas decided to take a leap of faith. “I know it’s not,” he lied. “Bane told me.”

It was a huge gamble. A risk. But moments later, it paid off.

“Look, I couldn’t tell you even if it was,” concluded Mrs Crane. “Everything that belongs in that vault is classified information between the Grand Council and its keeper.”

“Do you mean Dr Bane?”

Mrs Crane pursed her lips. She wasn’t denying that the seekerthing was real, nor was she denying that it had been in the vault. This was a half win at least.

“Yes, Dr Bane holds on to all the most powerful artefacts at Wayward,” she said warningly, as if this would somehow put Cas off. “They remain watched and guarded, either in the Archives or his office, which is precisely where this is going.” Mrs Crane plucked the key from between Cas’s fingers. “I knew Higgles should’ve never been trusted with it. I doubt you’ll have the same luck sneaking it off my brother. But don’t you dare think about going poking around his office for this or anything else either! Not only is it rude, but he couldn’t tell you what or where half the stuff is in there anyway. I look after the decorating – my brother wouldn’t know good taste if it bit him on the backside.”

Cas knew Mrs Crane was trying to distract him by talking about sprucing up Bane’s office.

But he was hardly listening.

His mind was still trapped inside the Abominable Archives. All he knew was that he had to protect the seekerthing – whatever it took.

By some miracle, Cas managed to make it to his last class of the day – Twisted Tongues and Languishing Languages – on time. He sat alone in class, still reeling from the afternoon’s events. Once class had finished, Cas and the Abnormies trundled up to the Attic, fed-up and weary – but not too tired for Cas to tell them everything.

The Abnormies sat and listened with bated breath as Cas relayed all that had happened since leaving the lake.

“At least you didn’t get in trouble for riding the Nuggle,” said Paws, offering him a silver lining.

“Yeah,” said Warrior, lying with her head hanging upside down off her bed. “If it was me, Aster would’ve made sure I got kicked out. Especially if Miss Grimbly nabbed me riffling through Hapless Higgles’s belongings too.”

Cas felt his heart deflate like Grimbly’s gnarly old parakeet. He hadn’t even thought about the repercussions from running away from Higgles’s office, let alone whatever punishment would surely be added on top when the headmaster found out Cas had stolen the key to the Abominable Archives.

What if being the Foretold didn’t get him off this time?

“Now that we know the seekerthing is at Wayward School, we need to protect it from the Master of All,” said Cas resolutely, concentrating on what was most important.

Whilst he was sure he wasn’t strong enough to defeat the Master one-on-one yet, it was the best he could do until the Grand Council took him seriously and reinforced the protection around it themselves.

“We need to plan a brilliant new heist to rescue it,” said Warrior, her voice dreamily excited. “Personally, I think your plan only failed because I wasn’t involved.”

The only trouble was, two gnawing suspicions were still niggling away at Cas.

The first was what he had discovered in the drawer.

“Of course Higgles would have maps of the school,” said Paws rationally. “He’s the headmaster. It’s part of his job.”

“Same with the, erm, newspaper,” agreed Fenix. “He has to know what’s going on near his school.”

“As for the silver whatever-it-was you felt,” said Warrior, “it could have been anything.”

“But don’t you think it’s odd that such a bumbling buffoon is in charge of Wayward School?” speculated Cas. “No, I know you said Dr Bane put Higgles up for the job so that he could do as he pleases,” he interjected quickly, when Warrior shot him a look that implied they already knew the answer to this, “but if it wasn’t only about Bane keeping the Grand Council sweet, it would be the perfect cover, wouldn’t it? Nobody would suspect Higgledy-Piggledy Higgles of being the Master’s informant.”

“Then why would the seekerthing still be in the Abominable Archives? If Headmaster Higgles had the key, surely it would be long gone by now?”

That brought Cas on to his second suspicion.

“Except I don’t think the seekerthing is in the Abominable Archives.” He recalled the disturbed dust and how the long, rectangular device had looked like it didn’t fit. “Or at least, it’s not in the box it’s supposed to be in.”

The others merely gawked at him.

“So, what?” said Warrior, flipping the right way up on her bed. “Are you saying Bane switched the containers in case someone on the inside was working with the Master? Or the Master ever broke in himself?”

“Maybe. Either that or the seekerthing has been taken out of the Archives altogether.”

“Then where is it?”

They all pondered long and hard but came up with nothing.

“Perhaps we’re barking up the wrong tree?” suggested Fenix. “Perhaps the Grand Council still have the seekerthing or it isn’t what the Master is searching for at Wayward after all.”

Cas hummed, unconvinced. “No, it makes sense that the Master wants the seekerthing – he needs the conduits to take the other Orders’ powers. And I’m guessing that if he knew where the conduits were, he would’ve taken them already – which means he needs the seekerthing to find them. It has to be here. You should have seen the look on Mrs Crane’s face when I fibbed and told her I knew it was. If the Grand Council still had it or it was stashed elsewhere, Mrs Crane wouldn’t have been so alarmed. All she did was refuse to tell me where it was. She simply said that Dr Bane keeps everything valuable either in the Abominable Archives or in his office.”

“Well, let’s go and raid Bane’s office then,” said Warrior, leaping to her feet and pulling on her blazer.

“No, don’t you see?” implored Cas, sitting down in the bay window. “Our next chance to get the seekerthing might be our last. We have to be sure of its whereabouts first. If Higgles is working with the Master then it won’t be long before he figures out that I’m onto him, or he finds the seekerthing himself. Even a blind squirrel stumbles across a nut every once in a while. Besides, if we get caught again, we all risk being expelled.”

Cas was so preoccupied and disappointed in his earlier efforts that he was unable to meet the grey, purple-flecked eyes of his own reflection. Instead, he gazed into the distance as too many thoughts to count raced through his head. He needed a new plan.

One that would succeed this time.

So, he had to decide: which was going to be his next point of attack?

The Abominable Archives again or Dr Bane’s office?

Was the seekerthing under lock and key? Or hidden in plain sight for all to see?

At first thought, the idea of the seekerthing being on display in Bane’s office was ludicrous. But maybe it was a plot that was brilliant in its simplicity. Neither the Master nor his informant would think that such a valuable artefact would be placed out in the open for anyone to gape at. Unless, of course, it was still in the Abominable Archives, stowed away under the wrong label to befuddle anyone who might try to steal it…

The problem was, now that it was in Bane’s possession, there was only a slim chance of Cas getting his hands on the key again – and an even slimmer chance he would ever have enough time to sort through and decipher the other containers one by one.

The twinkling windows of the shops in Wayward Town were just visible over the horizon, glittering relentlessly, as if egging Cas on. They glimmered and sparkled like a constellation of fallen stars that had toppled down to the Balance Lands and never bothered to get back up. Cas refused to stop staring at them until he had made up his mind.

“Hey—”

Cas opened his mouth to tell the others his plan, but the words never left his lips. Something at the boundary of the school made the syllables die on his tongue.

Seconds later, he didn’t need to explain.

The usually pearly wards had turned bright crystalline red as blaring sirens split the air.