Scorpia Rising

housekeeper forever, and the longer she stayed, the harder it would finally be to break the bonds with Alex. She would still be his friend, visiting whenever she could. But it was definitely time to move on.
    And then the news had come of Ian’s death, the funeral, the first meeting with Alan Blunt, and the almost incredible truth that Ian had been a spy, working for MI6 all along. That was when Alex had been recruited. And what had persuaded Alex to risk his life that first time, investigating the Stormbreaker computer? He hadn’t done it for his country. He hadn’t done it out of respect for his uncle. No—MI6 had threatened to expel Jack from the country, and he had agreed to help them in return for a permanent visa so that she could stay.
    How could she abandon him after that? As far as Jack knew, Alex had no living relatives. She had tried to find some trace of his grandparents, but it seemed that all four of them had died young. There were no uncles or aunts. The closest relative she’d been able to dig up was a cousin living in Glossop, and she couldn’t quite imagine Alex starting a new life there. And so she had stayed. She was almost the only person in the world who knew his secret. So long as he was involved with MI6, nobody could take her place.
    All that seemed to be behind them now. The last time she had seen Mrs. Jones, it had been a few days before Alex’s fifteenth birthday at St. Dominic’s Hospital in north London. Alex had just gotten back from Kenya—badly hurt—and that was when she had finally put her foot down and insisted that there would be no further missions, that from now on MI6 would leave him alone. Mrs. Jones had made no promises, but Jack had sensed that maybe she had won the argument. Certainly, she had heard nothing since.
    In truth, Alex was probably too old for them now. He didn’t look like a child anymore. Jack remembered how he had once crawled up a chimney when he was training with the SAS. He wouldn’t be able to manage that again. There were probably SAS men who were smaller than him now.
    But if Jack was relieved that this part of their lives was behind them, there was one side effect that she hadn’t foreseen. Alex didn’t need her so much now. That was what it all boiled down to. He wasn’t going to come home wounded with burns or bullet holes. There was no need to protect him. And the two of them were growing apart. Recently Alex had begun spending more and more time without her, with his friends. Take this weekend, for example. He’d casually mentioned that he was taking off with Tom Harris and hadn’t even stopped to consider that he would be leaving her on her own. It was the same last spring, when he’d been away for two weeks with Sabina. Jack didn’t mind. It was how it should be. He was a teenager. But she didn’t feel wanted. And that told her that—at last—it was time to move on.
    All she had to do was tell Alex. She would leave at the end of the summer vacation and together they would find someone to take her place. Of course he’d be sad. He’d probably argue with her, but in the end he’d see it her way. Jack got up and set about clearing the breakfast things. She had put it off too many times already, but her mind was set. She would talk to him when he got home tonight.

    “Okay. We’re going to start with a warm-up.” Grant Donovan, head of math at Brookland School, pressed a button and six geometric shapes appeared on the whiteboard. Each one had an angle marked x . “In three of these diagrams, x equals forty-five degrees,” he explained. You’ve got five minutes to tell me which, and the first person to finish gets this week’s bonus prize.”
    “I hope it’s better than last week’s bonus prize,” someone called out.
    “The last one of you to finish gets a page of negative multiplications to take home.”
    There was a general groan and everyone put their heads down.
    Alex tried to concentrate on the shapes, but they were just floating in front of him, refusing to come into focus. All the triangles looked the same to him, like one of those puzzles in a “spot the difference” magazine. It had been the same in English Lit an hour before, trying to make sense of a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “If music be the food of love . . .” Or was it “the love of food,” and what did it mean, anyway? He was finding it hard to think. He could see the words on the page, but they refused to come together to