Read Online The Hangman's Revolution by Eoin Colfer - Free Book Online Page B

on the Blessed Colonel’s business, and I feel you are not taking us seriously.”
    Smart paled, and Chevie felt a kinship with the old man. They were both sinking in the same boat.
    “Yes, of course,” said Smart. “You don’t want to hear about my son’s romantic problems. Why should you concern yourselves, Sisters?”
    “Indeed, we do not.”
    Smart cleared his throat. “In that case, perhaps we could get to the point of your visit. What exactly has brought you here?”
    Vallicose nodded at her partner and grunted.
    The grunt translated as: You take over, partner. Explaining things is your area.
    Witmeyer drew a tin of chewing tobacco from her pocket and took her sweet time bunching a plug and depositing it inside her bottom lip.
    “It’s like this, Citizen. We have an order, passed down from Colonel Box himself, to terminate your life cycle. He was quite specific about the time and date, but not about the method. That has been left to our discretion.”
    I am the method, thought Chevie. I am about to become an instrument of death. An assassin who kills on command.
    Chevie had always known this day would come. After all, wasn’t that what she was being trained for? But now that the day had arrived, she was far from certain that she could be a loyal Boxite and murder this somehow familiar stranger.
    Witmeyer gave her bombshell a moment to penetrate, chewing noisily on the tobacco and spitting a long rope of brown juice in the general direction of Smart’s sink.
    “You shouldn’t spit,” said Smart absently. “Believe it or not, this is a sterile environment.”
    The professor did not seem as puzzled as he should rightly have been. There was no slack-jawed disbelief or raging objection. Smart simply muttered to himself and ran his fingertip in complex zigzags across the tabletop.
    “I did it, then,” he mumbled. “I must have done it. Incredible.”
    Witmeyer snapped her fingers. “Are you still with us, Professor? Would you care to share what you must have done?”
    Smart lifted his head, but his eyes were unfocused. “The only way Colonel Box could know about me would be if we met, or if he knew my work.” A thought seemed to slap him across the face. “Oh my God. Oh no. All those missiles, those futuristic missiles. It’s my fault. I opened the wormhole. It could only have been me.”
    Clover Vallicose’s tiny reservoir of patience was running out. “Citizen, speak plainly. What missiles? Are you building missiles for the Jax?”
    Smart drifted back into the room. “Jax? What? No, of course not. Don’t you see?” He waved his arms wildly. “This. All of this. It’s my doing. It must be. The only way the colonel could have built such weapons is if I opened the wormhole for him. I enabled this godforsaken empire.”
    Chevie felt her heart speed up, thumping palpably in her chest.
    Yes, said Traitor Chevie. Yes. This is it. Now we’re getting somewhere.
    Smart was on his feet, running both hands through his sparse white hair, smoothing long strands backward across his shining skull. “How would it have gone? I built the machine in another timeline, and Box accessed it. He went back with his team and took over the country. With his knowledge, it would have been child’s play. Crazy? Am I crazy? No. It must be.” Smart opened the bread bin and pressed a series of buttons on a panel hidden inside. “So, what then? He’s emperor of all he surveys. The last thing Box wants is someone coming back and taking it all away from him, so he leaves an order that I am to be killed. But he won’t have me executed as a child. He has to wait until the world is his, plus the length of the wormhole, in case he needs an escape route.”
    Smart rushed around the kitchen, flipping switches on circuit boards that had seemed discarded. His eyes were wild; his hair sprang from his skull in an electric halo no matter how he tried to flatten it.
    “Don’t you see?” he shouted. “I did this. All of it. And now