The Mostly True Story of Jack by Kelly Barnhill

points and all lost. I cannot allow it to happen here.
    Mr. Perkins wrote quickly, with a sure, clean hand. He wanted it to be accurate. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to know just a little bit. After all, he
deserved
it.
    Atop the bookshelf, two pairs of glowing yellow eyes blinked through the gloom. Sharpened claws extended and retracted and extended again. The cats were ready.

    Wendy and Jack kept to the shadows. She took him to the side door that the low-level employees were required to use. The front doors were for important people. The side door was next to the Dumpsters and the recycling center. It smelled like old lunches and waterlogged paper. Jack wrinkled his nose.
    “Do you even know where his office is?”
    “Of course I do,” Wendy said. “He’s Avery’s assistant. You go through Perkins’s office if you want to see Mr. Avery. But no one does that unless they have to. This way.”
    They turned from the cracked plaster and peeling paint of the maintenance staff’s rooms into a pretty hallway with limestone walls and dimly lit green lamps stationed every twenty feet.
    “Why are the lights on?” Jack asked nervously.
    “Probably for the security guard.”
    “
There’s a security guard?
” Jack hissed.
    “Yeah, but we don’t have to worry about him. My dad knows him. Nice, but slow. Plus, he drinks.” Jack couldn’t help but notice the lack of assurance in her voice. “And anyway, here we are.”
    They peered through the glass door. Mr. Perkins’s office was dark except for a single desk lamp shining down onto an open book.
    “There it is,” Jack whispered. “And my backpack’s on the floor.”
    They opened the door—
Why isn’t
this
one locked?
Jack wondered—and ran to the desk. Wendy grabbed the book and tucked it under her arm. Jack noticed a stack of writing paper lying facedown on the desk. He was just about to flip them over when he heard the unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing, a faucet running, and a bathroom door opening. Mr. Perkins appeared in the doorway, drying his hands. He dropped the paper towel onto the ground.
    “
You
,” he said, pointing.
    “Run for it,” Wendy yelled.
    Mr. Perkins rushed forward but stopped in his tracks as two alarmingly large cats leaped from the top of the bookshelf and stood in front of him, their muscled shoulders flexed and ready, their hind legs curled under their bodies, ready to pounce. He rested his hand on the desk to steady himself, curling his fingers under the edge of the small stack of papers. He picked them up and held them close to his chest as though they were a shield.
    “You call your cats off,” Mr. Perkins yelled. “Call them off!”
    But Wendy and Jack had already burst through the door and were tearing down the empty hall. As they turnedinto the back corridor and headed for the door, they heard a thud, then a silence, then the scream of the attack.
    Wendy hit the back door at full speed, knocking it open with a crash. Jack, a few strides behind, watched her take the steps three at a time and sprint across the square. She threw her arms up and hooted at the sky. Then she turned and smiled at Jack.
    “Catch!” she called, and threw Clive’s book in a clean arc. Jack ran for it.
    There’s a lot that can happen
, Jack thought later,
between a throw and a catch
. For days after their break-in at the Exchange, he replayed the scene in his mind, trying to pinpoint the moment when the world changed. He never could.
    What he did remember was this: Wendy, running in the dark, the moon and streetlamps lighting the wisps of coppery hair that had escaped the braid; Wendy, halting on her heels, pirouetting with a flourish of scratched knees and sunburned arms; Wendy calling his name and letting the book fly away.
    He caught it, and the ground shuddered under his feet (
a fault line
, he told himself).
    He caught it, and the air shivered with a quick breath of cold that sliced through the thick, humid