Free The Secret War (Jack Blank Adventure) by Matt Myklusch Page B

shuffling of the streets. Home was in a different place for Jack in more ways than one. He was on his way back to an apartment that had literally moved on from where he’d left it the day before. Somehow, Jack still knew which way to go. He didn’t have a special map of Cognito, and no one had ever told him the secret of how to navigateits shifting streets, but he always knew how to find his way home. He even knew the precise hour at which the borough’s streets were scheduled to move. It happened at different times each day, and that day it was scheduled to take place a few hours before sunset. Jack had meant to ask Stendeval how he could have known stuff like that, but he was always so busy with the School of Thought and his work on the virus that he never got around to it. Jack remembered that Jazen had once told him that only the locals knew their way around Cognito. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that, thanks to Stendeval, he was now a local too.
    Cognito was the perfect place for Jack. He needed a hideout every bit as much as he did an apartment. He needed a place to escape the unwanted attention and admirers he’d picked up as the hero who had defeated Revile. No one in Cognito ever made a big deal about Jack and his exploits. No one in Cognito was ever around to begin with. The entire borough was made up of heroes and villains who were trying to maintain secret identities, as well as other, more cryptic, groups of people like the Secreteers and the Mysterrii. The Secreteers were neverseen on the streets of Cognito, so Jack didn’t think they really counted as neighbors, even if they did own most of the property in the borough. The Mysterrii, on the other hand, were always out and about, but kept completely to themselves, so Jack decided they didn’t count either.
    Jack didn’t know much about the Mysterrii other than that they were the native population of Cognito. He passed a small band of them on his way back to the apartment. They were all no more than three feet tall, dressed in white clothing with red cloth bandages wrapped tightly around their heads, feet, and hands. Bright yellow eyes glowed behind the red wrappings that covered their faces. Jack thought they looked like mini mummies. As always, they scattered as soon as they saw him. Crimson strands of bandages flew wildly in the air as the Mysterrii sprang into action.
“Hup hup!”
one of them said as it jumped on another one’s shoulders and then scampered up over a wall.
“Ho-pahhh!”
said another Mysterrii as it used its hands as a springboard to launch a friend through a high window and safely away. They executed backflips and front flips, darting away in every direction. The last few disappeared into an open manhole. Before Jack even hada chance to say hello, they were gone. He didn’t take it personally. They did that to everybody.
    Jack walked in the door of his apartment and collapsed into a chair. From the outside his building looked like every other structure in Cognito—white stone walls with no markings of any kind, and open windows carved out in random, irregular places. Inside Jack’s apartment it didn’t look much different. He had put up no decorations, and the apartment was barely furnished. Jack didn’t waste time setting up creature comforts in the living area of the apartment, since he spent most of his time downstairs in the lab.
    The mission to the Real World combined with the Inner Circle meeting had completely wiped Jack out, but he felt guilty just sitting there in his chair. Jack never felt like he had the right to be tired, not when there was so much work to be done and he was the only one who could do it. He looked over at the door that led down to his workshop and thought about the project that was waiting for him downstairs. The real secret project that Allegra had nearly spilled the beans on—finding a cure for the Rüstov spyware virus. Jack knew he should really head down tothe lab and get some