Hazel’s eyes widened. “You mean his knowledge?”
“His knowledge. His memories.” Oliver moved his hand so the fingers rested over his heart. “His feelings.”
“Goodness,” Hazel replied, looking shocked.
Just then, Ralph leaned over. “What are you whispering about?” he asked, his voice far louder than the others’ had been.
Several students sitting on the bench ahead of them turned around with angry glares and their fingers to their lips. “Shh!”
Ralph went red with embarrassment and sunk into his seat. He folded his arms, looking miffed at having been kept out of the secret.
The three friends remained throughout the entire lecture. Hazel spent the whole time sitting straight-backed and eager. Ralph, on the other hand, seemed bored out of his mind. At one point, he almost seemed to doze off.
But Oliver himself was filled with a mixture of sensations. Memories and feelings that belonged to Leonardo were being tugged up through him as Galileo discussed his theories of perspective in art throughout the class. It was peculiar, to say the least, and Oliver was relieved when the lecture was finally over.
As the students filed out, the children headed the opposite direction, going down the steps and approaching Galileo.
“Excuse me,” Oliver said, finding the Italian language roll effortlessly off his tongue. “Mr. Galilei?”
“You’re a bit young to be in my class, aren’t you?” Galileo said, looking him up and down.
“We’re not in your class,” Oliver told him. “We’re seers.”
He decided to lay it all out on the table. Professor Amethyst had sent them to this time and place for a reason, and every great inventor they’d met during prior missions had turned out to either be a seer or know about seers. There was little point beating about the bush.
He saw a flicker of recognition in the young man’s eyes. But Galileo played dumb.
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, collecting up his papers.
“I think you do,” Oliver pressed. “We were sent to Florence. By Professor Amethyst. Perhaps you know him? He runs the School for Seers. We’re on a mission to find the Scepter of Fire. Have you heard of it, by any chance?”
By the way Galileo was now shoving papers into his satchel, Oliver could tell that he did, indeed, know something. Something he, for reasons unknown, was not comfortable discussing.
“I’ve never heard of it,” he claimed, no longer meeting Oliver’s eyes.
Oliver strongly suspected that Galileo was lying, though he didn’t know why. Perhaps he wasn’t a seer. But there was certainly something unusual about him.
Oliver decided to be bold. “We’re from the future,” he said.
“Oh really?” Galileo said. He stopped what he was doing. “Then tell me something that’s not yet been discovered to prove it.”
Oliver hesitated. He knew how finely balanced everything was. How cautious they had to be in order not to upset things. How one small misstep could cause a catastrophic reaction.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Hah,” Galileo replied. “Just as I thought. You’re lying.”
“We’re not,” Oliver said. “Challenge me to something else. Something only Leonardo da Vinci would know.”
Hazel tugged at his elbow. “Oliver, what are you doing?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Oliver told her, speaking out the side of his mouth.
“Okay then,” Galileo said, tapping his chin ponderously. “The Duke of Valentinois commissioned da Vinci to draw a map of the town of Imola. In what year?”
Oliver searched in his mind for da Vinci’s memories. “1502,” he said.
Galileo frowned. “A lucky guess.”
“Ask me another,” Oliver challenged. “And I’ll prove it wasn’t a guess.”
“Okay,” Galileo said. “Perhaps a question related to geometry. Tell me about the five terms of mathematicians.” He smiled smugly, as though he believed there was absolutely no way Oliver would be able to answer correctly.
Once again, Oliver tapped into the part of his mind that had been bestowed to him by da Vinci. “The point, the line, the angle, the superficies, and the solid.”
Galileo looked stunned, but also impressed. “And what is unique about the point?”
“Why,” Oliver said, “it has neither height, breadth, length, nor depth, whence it is to be regarded as indivisible and as having no dimensions in space.”
He was directly quoting da Vinci now, pulling forth the inventor’s very words from the recesses of his mind. Hazel looked utterly stunned. Ralph, on the other hand, seemed to be finding it a little disconcerting that Oliver had access to such knowledge, and that he seemed able to draw it out of himself at a moment’s notice.
But that was beside the point, Oliver thought. He looked at Galileo to see if the man had been convinced. He certainly seemed to be pondering the three children.
Finally, Galileo looked intently at Oliver. “And why did you say you’d come here to see me?”
“We’re seers,” Oliver said. “From the future. We believe you can help us find something called the Scepter of Fire.”
Galileo paused for a moment, his eyebrows drawn inward. “Perhaps you ought to come with me,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Professor Amethyst stood in the shaking school. It had been evacuated fully, and now only he was left. But he could not just flee. The sixth dimension was full of scrolls and textbooks, artifacts and weapons. Before he could leave, he had to secure the room and lock it all safely away. If any of the seer technology fell into the wrong hands, it could mean the end of the world.
There was, however, one very large snag. Professor Amethyst had exhausted almost all his powers. From creating the wormhole in the kapoc tree to evacuate his staff and students and the second portal for Oliver Blue and his friends, to then projecting his voice through the vortexes of time and diverging the two paths, the old man had drained himself. And because of the violent tremors of the school as it went through the process of collapsing in on itself, the elevator—supersonic, just as he’d invented it to be—was broken. Professor Amethyst, who was accustomed to being whooshed through all fifty floors in a matter of seconds, would have to take the stairs. He’d have to climb fifty floors to reach the sixth dimension. He had no idea how his frail, ancient knees would handle such an undertaking. But there was no other choice. He had to make sure none of the weapons or inventions were ever released into the world.
He began his ascent. But he’d only made it to the first floor landing when he heard an awful noise come from the foyer below him.
Hurrying to the balcony, Professor Amethyst glanced over and down to the central atrium below. Many of the kapoc’s branches had already broken, as had the walkways they’d previously held up, and the debris lay scattered all over the ground. But there, between the chunks of plaster and concrete and the thick wooden branches, Professor Amethyst saw a glowing, flickering light.
“A portal,” he said aloud.
He knew what that meant. There were only a few seers in existence with such powers, and only one he could think of who’d want to breach the school.
Sure enough, the large portal widened and widened until it was big enough for a stream of students to file out. They were all wearing the recognizable black uniform of Mistress Obsidian’s School for Seers.
Professor Amethyst narrowed his eyes with anger. Magdalena Obsidian had, many years earlier, been his brightest student. Her mind had been powerful and boundless. A mind to rival his own. An intelligence matched only by Newton. By da Vinci. By Oliver Blue. He’d wanted to challenge the young seer, but the missions he’d sent her on caused her mind to balloon. She’d wanted more knowledge, more access, more artifacts, and she’d wanted to take all the knowledge of the future and apply it to the past.