Page 87 of Dukes Are Forever
"Oh, you sweet boy," she breathed. "I was running across rooftops before you could even crawl."
Then she was scampering up the wall after Lark as if to prove it to him.
Charlie lunged at the nearby brick wall, his foot striking halfway up it. He pushed off, twisting in midair, and caught the edge of the window on the second story. It took mere seconds to join the ladies on the ledge just below the window Adele had marked out as Hamilton's study.
Lark cracked the window, pausing to see if anyone had heard.
A dog's howl echoed through the neighborhood, but other than that, there was no outcry. Not that he'd expected it. Obsidian was keeping watch on a rooftop across the street and hadn't reported any guards set on the house. Either Hamilton was a bit player in this entire scheme, or too arrogant to believe he'd ever be brought low.
Lark found the sun symbol on the fireplace and pressed it. A faint groan of stone on stone, and then the fireplace swung open, just as Adele had described.
Darkness loomed behind it.
An odd sense of foreboding filled him.
There wasn't a lock that he and Lark couldn't pick, but Gemma was here for one reason and one reason only: with her memory, she could practically reproduce anything she saw on a piece of paper.
"Adele said there were maps," Gemma breathed. "I need light, Charlie."
Charlie shook the phosphorescent glimmer ball to brighten it again. The ghostly green glow cast just enough light across the small private study to see that someone had cleaned the desk.
No map. No schematics.
"He's locked the desk," Lark whispered, already kneeling in front of it with her lock pick. A faint click and she eased the draw open.
There were papers inside. A hollow leather tube to protect something large. Lark handed him the tube, then started rifling carefully through the papers.
He eased a roll of schematics from the tube and unrolled them across the desk. Sharply drawn lines furled across the paper.
It looked like the small control chip they'd removed from Obsidian's head several months ago that had forced him to do Balfour's bidding.
"Is it—?"
"No." Gemma frowned at the specifications. "It's not the neural regulating implant. I examined the one they took from my head. This is different." She ran her fingers across the paper, tracing the name at the top. "The Prometheus Project. I wish we'd brought Kincaid or Jack. They might be able to recognize what it does."
"Can you draw it for them?"
"I should be able to recreate it, yes."
Charlie took a step toward the bookcase, and the floorboard beneath his foot depressed.
Downstairs came the sudden loud bonging of the grandfather clock, just once. Easing his weight back sent the noise crashing through the house again, and he took three swift steps away from the loose floorboard.
All three of them looked at each other, and then Charlie tugged his pocket watch from his pocket. "It's twenty minutes past the hour."
Gemma swiftly rolled the schematics back into place and slid them inside the tube. "He's rigged the study. Hurry. We need to put everything back."
A low grinding sound echoed through the room.
Shit.Charlie lunged toward the fireplace and jammed his boot between it and the wall. Something clicked, as if the mechanism was trying to force it closed.
"Gem," he rasped, wincing as the bones in his foot creaked.
Gemma slid to the ground at his feet, peering down into the solid iron turntable the fireplace rested on. She drove a knife between the cogs, and Charlie managed to ease his foot free as the clockwork mechanism groaned.
"How the hell do we get out of here?" There was no window in the room.
"Can you reverse the clockwork mechanism?" Gemma asked, thrusting the glimmer ball low so he could see the mechanism.
