The Dark Giants Read Online Free PDF Page A

cliffs.
But all Amelia could think about was Lady Naomi and Tom searching the bush for a
rogue scientist, Leaf Man disappearing into the Nowhere on some mysterious quest,
Grawk lost and who knew where, and up ahead – worst of all – Sophie T, whom she had
abandoned at the hotel without any warning or explanation.
    Would she still be there? Amelia wouldn’t blame her if she’d called her mum and asked
to be picked up.
    With a heavy heart, she opened the main doors and stepped into the lobby. Mum was
making a phone call at the reception desk, but when she saw Amelia she smiled and
pointed to the library.
    Amelia braced herself and opened the library door – totally unprepared to find Sophie
T sitting wide-eyed on the sofa, seemingly entranced as James explained one of his
gadgets to her.
    ‘It’s based on Napier’s Bones,’ he was saying, showing her a set. ‘You see how you
can arrange the rods in any order and use them to multiply or divide any numbers
with up to nine digits? Well, imagine if instead of using rods to construct a two-dimensional
matrix, you used a combination of spheres and cogs to make a three-dimensional system.’
    Sophie T’s eyes flicked to the door, saw Amelia, and then flicked straight back to
James. ‘And what would you use it for?’
    James hesitated. Amelia knew he couldn’t tell Sophie T he’d been trying to invent
a machine to calculate the distortion in the gateway’s pattern of wormhole movements.
‘Err … it’s for – sort of for – that is …’ He looked and smiled broadly at the sight
of his sister. ‘Amelia! Charlie! Where have you been? Sophie and I have just been,
er, waiting for you.’
    ‘Yeah, Amelia,’ Sophie T said in an ominously sweet voice. ‘Where have you been?’
    Amelia pulled a face. ‘I’m so sorry for disappearing on you, Soph, but one of the
guests wandered off into the bush and we had to, uh, stop him from getting lost.’
    Sophie T looked from Amelia to Charlie, and back to Amelia, uncertain. ‘Right. So
do you often have to run off and rescue random guests?’
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Charlie, so wearily that Amelia almost believed him herself. ‘Not
the Australian ones, of course. They know we’re not kidding about spiders and snakes
and paralysing ticks and goannas that’ll run up your leg and claw your face off.
But the overseas ones … whoo. We’ve got to look out for those guys.’
    Sophie T, desperate to know whether she was being fooled with, looked to James. He
shrugged modestly and nodded. ‘It’s like I told you, Sophie – I didn’t know what
Amelia and Charlie were up to, but there’s always some little emergency that needs
to be dealt with straight away.’
    Amelia saw Sophie T’s shoulders hitch up toward her ears, and her fingers curl into
the fabric of her skirt. She was staring at James, waiting for some signal in his
face of whether he was telling her the truth.
    James gazed back, unruffled, and then Sophie T smiled and let out a deep breath.
‘Of course. I knew it was something like that.’
    ‘Well.’ James got to his feet. ‘Nice talking to you, Sophie. I’ll tell Mum you’re
ready for that movie now, Amelia.’
    ‘Thank you,’ she said, meaning more than just the movie.
    ‘What are we going to see?’ Sophie T asked, eagerly taking up the change in subject.
‘Is it on DVD or Blu-Ray? Oh – do you have a 3D TV?’
    ‘Actually,’ Amelia said, ‘we don’t have a TV at all.’
    ‘Really? Oh.’ Sophie T was unperturbed. ‘So you just watch everything through your
laptops?’
    Charlie laughed. ‘They don’t have any computers either.’
    Sophie T narrowed her eyes. Despite deciding to accept their excuse for running off
on her, she was clearly still worried that they were laughing at her somehow. ‘OK
then, smarty, so how are we supposed to watch a movie?’
    ‘On that,’ said Amelia, pointing to the old reel-to-reel film projector that was
sitting on its trolley beside the rolled-up projection