PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1

When the Relic Hunters missed their check-in, Dr. Thistlebrow, Ms. Merical, Ms. Butama, and her spriggan were sent to look for them. They found the students huddled inside the temple with a raging bonfire just outside the doorway to keep the beasts of the jungle at bay. Needless to say, the teachers were shocked by the news of their colleague’s disappearance.

Word of Obadiah Strange’s abduction had spread through the Templar community long before the article appeared on the front page of the Chronicle the next morning. The fact that Von Strife was brazen enough to take a teacher from Iron Bridge Academy was one thing, but to take one as renowned as Strange was another.

Panic spread as people wondered whom Von Strife would take next. Some went into hiding while others bought weapons. There was talk of clockwork armies marching through the streets of New Victoria under Von Strife’s banner, rounding up people to place in camps until their souls could be harvested to power his strange machines.

Ernie was inconsolable in his grief. He refused to go to school, much less answer his phone. Dealing with Robert’s death had been difficult, but losing Strange had put him over the edge. When Natalia rode her bike to his house, he refused to answer the door.

Like the others, Harley was upset as well. Instead of sulking, though, he went to work. It had been three days since Strange’s disappearance, and Harley had spent every waking hour in Monti’s lab, forsaking his classes in order to finish the portal scanner so they could find Strange, as well as Hale.

Harley threw a screwdriver across the room. It hit the wall, bounced off the floor, and ricocheted off Jasper’s feet.

“May I be of assistance, sir?” Monti’s service clockwork asked.

“I can’t get this stupid thing to work,” Harley said. “I’ve checked it a thousand times. The connections are solid, most of the parts are new, and I tested the old ones to make sure they aren’t faulty. It should work!”

“Perhaps some tea to calm your nerves?” Jasper said.

“No, thanks,” Harley said as he turned the scanner over in his hand. He made a slight adjustment before plugging it back into his test equipment. The moment he did, data started to roll on the monitor, but the results looked the same as before.

Harley’s eyes grew heavy, and he yawned. It was getting close to ten thirty, and he needed to get home before his mom got back from her late-night shift at the diner. He shook his head, trying to focus, but it wasn’t long before his eyes closed. After it happened a second time, Harley decided to call it a night.

“Will you require an escort to the subway depot?” Jasper asked, his eyes lit up against the dark backdrop of the workshop.

“I’m okay,” Harley said as he reached over to turn off the monitor, but something caught his eye. He hit the cursor so the screen would page up, and he paused. There was some kind of anomaly in the data. What should have been static wasn’t. Or at least it didn’t look like static.

“What is it, sir?” Jasper asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Harley said. He opened a drawer and pulled out a set of headphones, sliding them over his ears and plugging them into the test equipment. There was a tone that Harley couldn’t place, but he knew it was significant. It had to be.

Harley walked over to a shelf on the wall next to his workbench. After shuffling through components and boxes of spare parts, he found what he was looking for. Harley blew a layer of dust off the recording device, and set it on the table to hook it up to the machine.

“This better work,” he said.

He flipped a button, and the recording device powered up. He began recording. Once he captured a sample, Harley brought the file into a sound-editing program on his DE Tablet. He adjusted the sound waves, clearing out as much static as he could.

As he played the sound back, Harley’s eyes lit up. He recognized the melody of the song, but he didn’t know which song it was.

“Have you heard this before?” Harley asked as he played it a second time.

“I’m afraid not,” Jasper said.

Harley played it a third time, while running a music recognition program. The results were immediate: The words TCHAIKOVSKY’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 were displayed on the screen.

“I got you,” Harley said. He was so focused that he didn’t hear Monti walk up behind him.

“What are you still doing here?”

“I was getting ready to go, but I think I found him.”

“Von Strife?” Monti said. “How?”

“It was a fluke,” Harley said. He explained what happened with the sound anomaly. Monti asked a few questions, and by the end he was smiling.

“All we need to do is break the encryption so we can translate the song,” Monti said. “Once we do that, we’ll be able to pinpoint Von Strife.”

Harley sighed as he pulled at his hair. “Even if we ran that song through the Difference Engine, it could take months.”

“If you were Von Strife, what would you use for a password?” Monti asked.

Harley frowned. “Wait, are you serious? We’d have a better chance at getting struck by lightning.”

“Maybe, but we don’t have much of a choice.”

“I don’t know,” Harley said after a sigh. “What about his daughter’s name?”

“It’s a bit obvious, but why not?”

Harley input Sophia’s name into his DE Tablet, but it didn’t work.

“Not to worry,” Monti said. “I think you’re on the right track. Von Strife is anything but random. He’s going to use something important… something with great meaning.”

Harley and Monti tried more than seventy-five combinations over the next hour. Some were complex and some simple. They exchanged numbers and symbols for letters, and they flipped some of the words around. Nothing was working.

“Von Strife is obsessed with changelings, right?” Harley asked as he paced the floor.

“That’s a safe assumption,” Monti said.

“What if the passkey has something to do with that?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know… maybe a changeling power, or even a type of changeling. What kind of changeling was his daughter?”

“Nobody knows,” Monti said. “He kept that a secret.”

“Didn’t Ernie say that the two of them shared a similar strain of changeling blood?”

“Holfessen-Streigsin.”

“If you tell me how to spell it, I’ll plug it in,” Harley said.

Monti did just that, but it didn’t work.

“What about a genetic code?” Harley asked.

Monti’s eyes shot wide. “Not bad. Can you do a search for any kind of a common genetic sequence shared by all changelings?”

Harley typed the words into a search feature on his DE Tablet and then entered the answer into the decoder.

“Bingo.”

As soon as he hit Enter, the computer started to decrypt the song. Within the hour they knew where to find the Paragon Engine, which meant that they knew where to find Von Strife.