Free Riley Clifford by The 39 Clues: Rapid Fire #4: Crushed Page A

look at her brother that would have withered a lesser man. “Like I said, you’d better get a better speech, or I wouldn’t even bother.”
    Ian ignored her. Just because she had her opinions didn’t mean that they were correct.
    Natalie didn’t like being ignored. She snatched up the remote and jabbed at the buttons. The channels on the wall-sized screen flashed from station to station.
    “More Weetabix —”
    “Doctor!”
    “Isabel Kabra —”
    “Downton —”
    “Wait, go back,” Ian cried. Natalie flipped back to BBC1, where their mother’s face was spread across the massive screen. The Kabras leaned forward; Ian’s heart rate ticked upward, as if he were being chased.
    “Known to many as a fashionable fixture in the philanthropic and art scenes, Isabel Kabra shocked the world when she was arrested last year for the murder of Americans Hope Cahill and Arthur Trent. Now we’ve received reports that Mrs. Kabra has been released from the custody of her American prison and will be serving out her parole by heading AidWorks Wonders, a charitable organization. The conditions of Mrs. Kabra’s parole will limit her movements to Boston, the same region where she committed murder eight years ago.”
    Natalie turned the television off, and the Kabras sat quietly for a moment, letting the realization sink in: Their mother was out of jail. Ian went cold, and goose bumps popped up on his arms and neck.
    Just six months ago, there was little Ian Kabra wouldn’t do to gain an edge in the hunt for the 39 Clues: the quest for the secret that would make the finder the most powerful person in the world. The contest had taken the participants, which included Ian and Natalie and Amy and Dan Cahill, to the farthest corners of the globe and had nearly killed them all on multiple occasions.
    Isabel had wanted that ultimate power, and she’d done despicable things in her effort to find the Clues and to win. She’d murdered Amy and Dan’s parents; she’d shot Natalie, her own daughter, in the foot. She’d
shot
her. Ian knew his mother better than almost anyone else could, and even he had trouble believing it had actually happened. But the scar on Natalie’s foot, and the way she curled it under herself as if to protect it, didn’t lie.
    Isabel had expected the Kabras to be the first to find the Clues. She had trained Ian and Natalie since birth to be the ruthless stars of the Cahill family. And at first, Ian had enjoyed it. The Clue hunt was the ultimate test of wits and daring, and there was little Kabras liked better than proving their superiority.
    But the quest had been more heartless than even Ian had expected. With so much at stake, the competitors had started to see each other merely as obstacles, rather than real human beings. Ian and Natalie had been expected to do the same, and they’d seen a side of their mother that no one else in the world should ever have to. She’d almost turned them into killers. And while Ian wasn’t necessarily a do-gooder or a saint, he knew that he wasn’t a murderer.
    It had taken them time — growing a conscience from scratch is hard going — but even Ian and Natalie could see that no prize was worth killing for. So they had, together with their other cousins, given their Clues to Amy and Dan Cahill. Amy and Dan were just kids themselves, but they were the only ones who could be trusted with such power. Those two Cahills didn’t have ulterior motives; they didn’t want to rule the world. Ian suspected they had only kept with the hunt to stop anyone else from winning and then using their power for evil. And to make their late grandmother proud, which was
so
Cahillish that Ian almost couldn’t stand it.
    Isabel had been furious with her children. She and their father had disowned them at the end of the hunt. It was a nasty business, all of it, and Ian found himself shivering at the memory. It wasn’t normal to feel this way about one’s mother. But he very much doubted that