Troubletwisters by Garth Nix, Sean Williams Page A

with your father —’
    ‘I mean, why find the coins? If it’s a game, it isn’t a very good one.’
    ‘How about if I say what you find, you keep?’ said Grandma X. ‘There’s a sweet shop on the main street. They make their own licorice and lollipops. I’ll take you there when it stops raining.’
    Jaide and Jack exchanged another look. Homemade licorice and lollipops were not something they could get excited about. While Jack liked food, he didn’t have a sweet tooth, and Jaide didn’t have the patience for anything that took too long to eat. A lollipop would just annoy her.
    Still, money always came in handy. They didn’t have to spend it on sweets. The twins loped off to search, riffling through books, upending cushions, and scrabbling around on the floor to see under the couches.
    The coins were: (1) under the corner of the rug; (2) on the windowsill behind the velvet curtains; (3) behind an antique clock that had long lost its tick; (4) tucked out of sight beneath the easy chair; (5) sitting out in the open on the mantelpiece; and (6) between pages sixty-four and sixty-five of Travels, Travails and Toilets of Tibet , about a man and his pet pig who visited that country in the 1930s.
    The twins returned with three coins each, somewhat reassured that the exercise hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
    ‘Look what turned up while you were distracted,’ said Grandma X, pointing.
    Right out in the open, where the shadow of a chair cut an elongated line across the floor, lay the missing card.
    ‘How did we miss that ?’ asked Jaide, amazed.
    ‘Good question. Can you guess the answer?’
    Jack studied his grandmother closely, wondering if she had placed the card there herself in order to trick them. Why would she do something like that? He didn’t know, and the uneasy feeling grew stronger.
    ‘You’re testing us, aren’t you?’
    ‘Yes, but not in the way you think.’
    Grandma X snapped her fingers again. The smell of chocolate was fading, and the effect it had on the twins was weakening with it, but Jack’s brow smoothed and he looked around, wondering momentarily what he was doing.
    ‘Here you go,’ he said, picking up the card and giving it back to his grandmother. ‘It should go with the others, shouldn’t it?’
    ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, slipping it onto the pile. ‘All things have their place. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder to find it.’
    Jaide was staring at the coins in her hand, wondering where they had come from.
    ‘Were we going outside somewhere?’ she asked.
    ‘I had hoped so,’ said Grandma X. ‘But the prospect of lollipops seems more remote than ever.’
    One glance out the window confirmed that impression. What the clouds had threatened earlier had finally arrived in full force. The rain was falling in steady sheets.
    Jaide’s spirits immediately fell, too. She liked bright, warm days, and hated winter. Jack was the opposite. He loved dim, cloudy weather and disliked the heat and glare of high summer. Jaide’s idea of a perfect afternoon was to be at the beach under a hot sun. Jack preferred the dusk of a cool evening, or a still night with just a sliver of a moon.
    ‘Still, there’s lots to do in here,’ their grandmother said. ‘Come into the drawing room. I’ve got a bunch of . . . interesting objects . . . in there that you might like to see.’
    Puzzled, the twins followed her into the drawing room and watched as she unlocked the desk and rolled back the cover to reveal all manner of contraptions. There was a spark gap generator that sent a bright blue jolt of electricity shooting between two metal points, especially when Jaide pulled the trigger. An old compass spun wildly as they passed it from hand to hand, pointing every direction other than north. There was a small box that Grandma X assured them was an old camera, with no LED screen and a shutter that clicked solidly behind the lens’s glass eye. When Jack clicked the button, he saw