Time Lions and the Chrono-Loop (Time Lions, 1) - Hardcover

Sutherland, Krystal; Seneviratne, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593616324 ISBN 13: 9780593616321

Verlag: Penguin LLC US, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A laugh-out-loud, edge-of-your-seat time-travel adventure perfect for fans of The Last Last-Day-of-Summer and City Spies from New York Times bestseller, Krystal Sutherland.

Twins Pearl and Patrick are no ordinary twelve-year-olds. They’re geniuses, hiding in plain sight, who pull heists all over the world to further their scientific and historical research. Their criminal activity, including grand theft auto and espionage, has made them a regular nuisance to both the CIA and MI5. But it’s all been worth it. They’ve finally achieved their greatest triumph: time travel. Pearl’s Chrono-Loop can take the twins anywhere in time! Their first stop: ancient Egypt, where they even get to see King Tut!

But when they return home, they’re arrested by TIME—The Interdimensional Misconduct Enquiry—a secret organization charged with maintaining the timeline. Turns out Pearl and Patrick didn’t invent time travel, after all—that happened two hundred years ago! And what Pearl did in ancient Egypt—killing a mosquito—could have rewritten history as we know it if not for TIME agents stepping in.

Punishment for disrupting the timeline is 100 years in the Eternal Abyss. But TIME, impressed by the pair, offers them a chance to become agents. Unfortunately, they fail their entrance exam and instead are banned from ever attempting time travel again. Pearl is furious, and when she’s offered another chance at time travel by a rival organization, she takes it! Too late, she realizes she’s been tricked and unwittingly plays a part in replacing the timeline they know with a nightmarish scenario.

Now Pearl and Patrick must clean up the mess they’ve made. But to restore the timeline, they have to go back to the beginning—to Lion Rock—to convince the real inventor of time travel to help them save time and the world.

In this electric time travel adventure steeped in unexplored Sri Lankan history, these whiz kids use their book smarts and a healthy dose of girl power to fight the ultimate villain.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

After marrying in late 2019, Krystal Sutherland and Martin Seneviratne immediately decided to put their vows to the test by collaborating on their debut middle grade series, Time Lions. Martin’s childhood was infused with his grandmother’s magical tales of Sri Lanka’s history and mythology. On a visit to Sigirya, the ancient rock fortress in the heart of Sri Lanka’s jungles, Krystal and Martin began to craft this story of the genius Amarasinghe twins and their adventure back through time. It explores overlooked parts of history and the overlooked geniuses who shape it.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

2

The Heist

Pearl

Approximately five hours later, the whole world was green.

Pearl was crawling through the dusty, narrow air—conditioning ducts of the British Museum with night—vision goggles strapped to her face. An advantage of being young and small was that she and her brother could fit places that no adult could. They slithered through the ducts on their bellies like ninjas in black jumpsuits and balaclavas to hide their faces. Or rather, Pearl slithered like a ninja, and Patrick crawled after her, wheezing and muttering into his earpiece about the dust, the cobwebs, the tight space, and how he’d much rather be in the library with a book open in front of him, thank you very much.

It was just past six p.m. The last visitors had left the museum an hour earlier, and it was now locked down like a fortress for the night, windows shuttered, alarms set.

“Hold,” Pearl whispered, raising a gloved hand. There was movement up ahead in the darkness. Though she couldn’t see Patrick behind her, she could feel that he’d gone still. Squeaking and skittering sounds echoed from somewhere in front of them. Pearl waited and watched—and then let out a breath of relief as a rodent scurried past. “Just a rat,” she said as she started crawling again.

Patrick moaned. “I hate rats,” he said into his earpiece.

Which was unfortunate, considering there seemed to be rats in every building they broke into. Buckingham Palace? Rats. Fort Knox? More rats. Area 51? Genetically modified rats the size of dogs, if you could believe it. Rats were a far bigger part of being an intrepid adventurer than Pearl had ever anticipated (as was breaking and entering). Luckily, rodents didn’t bother her too much, nor did heights, the dark, or tight spaces.

Pearl considered herself to be the best kind of girl: plucky, adventurous, curious, smart, and deeply uninterested in all the silly things her peers seemed to care about, like fashion and makeup and jewelry and social media.

“We’re here,” Pearl said a few minutes later, after a bit more crawling and a lot more grumbling from her brother. She pushed open a grille and caught it with her fingertips before it could tumble the twenty meters to the dark museum floor. “Phew. That was close.”

Patrick looked down through the hole—then promptly scrunched his eyes closed, his skin taking on a slightly green hue. “You first.” (That was another thing Patrick said quite a lot.)

Pearl rappelled down in one smooth drop, bringing herself to a soft stop an inch from the floor.

Next, it was Patrick’s turn. “I bet the president of the Council for British Archaeology doesn’t have to break into the British Museum in her spare time, oh no,” he complained as he clambered out of the duct and shimmied down his rope. “I bet she gets to sit in a quiet library and read about nice old ruins without having to break the law.”

Pearl had once tried to remind her brother that the most famous archaeologists—Howard Carter, Heinrich Schliemann, Indiana Jones—all seemed to have loved going on adventures. Patrick reminded Pearl in turn that Carter and Schliemann—the men who’d “discovered”
Tutankhamen’s tomb and Troy, respectively—were considered reckless and destructive at best, grave robbers at worst, and that Indiana Jones wasn’t even real, let alone someone to look up to. (Patrick’s voice had gone quite shrill at the end.)

Still. Pearl knew that he wanted to be brave, so she tried to offer him opportunities to challenge himself. Maybe, she thought, if he felt bold and daring on their adventures together, he’d feel bold and daring enough to stand up to Digby.

So far, her plan had failed to work.

Patrick landed without a sound. He paused for a second, crouching in the shadows. No alarms were tripped. No security guards came hurtling toward him with Tasers. He really wasn’t a bad accomplice, for a bookworm.

So far, so good.

Pearl did a sweep of their surroundings while Patrick wound up the ropes. They were in a cavernous exhibition hall, surrounded by stone statues and rusty artifacts in glass cases. The twins had visited the museum a hundred times (mainly at Patrick's insistence), but everything looked different after hours. The statues threw enormous mutant shadows onto the walls. The bustle of daytime crowds and camera clicks was replaced by an eerie silence.

“We need to move quickly,” Pearl said as she pulled up a 3D model of the museum on her tablet. “If Owen’s blueprints are correct, there are fifteen security cameras and five motion sensors on the way. We need to tread carefully past the Mesopotamian pottery, turn left at the Rosetta Stone, duck down for precisely thirteen seconds to let the laser beam pass, then sprint to the end of the corridor. Got it?”

“No,” Patrick said. “I do not ‘got it,’ Pearl.”

“Just follow my lead.”

Pearl ducked under one laser alarm, cartwheeled over another, then slid across the polished marble floor just under a camera’s field of view. Patrick followed close behind her, almost as agile, but with a grimace on his face the whole time. Eventually they arrived, panting, in a smaller chamber. The walls here were lined with dark statues that seemed to watch them as they tiptoed in. A huge black falcon, a slender cat with golden eyes, and a man with a jackal’s head holding a spiked scepter that sent shivers down Pearl’s spine.

“Terrifying,” she whispered. “Who is that?” Nothing lifted Patrick’s spirits like talking about some long—dead ancient civilization.

“Anubis,” Patrick whispered back. “Ancient Egyptian god of funerary rights and protector of graves. He carries you to the underworld.”

“Fitting.” Considering who they were here to see.

Pearl crept toward the center of the room, where a gleaming golden mask stood upright on a pedestal in the dim light. It was covered with intricate turquoise and azure stripes. The serene face of a long—lost pharaoh looked down at them. A handsome, boyish face. Its gaze fell on a glass case below, which contained a shriveled, mummified body lying on a bed of bandages.

“King Tutankhamen,” Patrick said as he approached the mummy. “Son of Amenhotep IV. The boy king.”

Pearl stood in silence for a moment as she looked into the hollow eyes of the long—dead teenager. The mummification process had left the flesh of his face sunken and leathery, but he was preserved enough that she could still make out his nose, his lips, his teeth. The museum had dressed him in the traditional funeral jewelry and headdress that were found in his tomb. It was hard to believe he’d been dead for more than three thousand years.

Suddenly an electronic ding sliced through the silence. Pearl’s blood froze as the noise echoed through the marble halls. She held her breath, expecting an alarm to go off at any moment.

When nothing happened, she rounded on Patrick, who was looking very sheepish.

Silent mode! she mouthed, eyes wide.

“Sorry,” Patrick whispered back as he took out his phone and read the message that had arrived. “Amma wants to know when we’re going to be home for dinner. Thatha’s cooking.”

“Tell her we’ll be back in under an hour,” Pearl said, grimacing at the thought of another curry. Their dad was obsessed with “exposing them to Sri Lankan food and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin LLC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593616324
• ISBN 13: 9780593616321
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland