NC #2: Excess Baggage

During lockdown Jacob and I released Full Battery — after almost 5 years of scribbled notes, napkin diagrams and late-night rewrites, Nikolai Chan finally skated out of our heads and into readers' hands. We honestly thought the story was finished. Nik disagreed.

Excess Baggage picks up six weeks after the science fair incident. Crawford has its tidy official version of what happened — a drifter, a gas leak of a story, a local hero with a medal — and Nik has the real one, which is why he isn't sleeping. His routines are shot. He sees a purple suit in every crowd. So a school trip to Seattle sounds like exactly what he needs: five days, a museum full of airplanes, and Gabby Hernandez one seat over.

Cherub has been waiting for him to leave home.

When lunch in Chinatown turns into an ambush — and a stranger with impossible red eyes turns dim sum into a demolition derby — Nik doesn't fly home with his class. Instead he makes a choice no thirteen-year-old should have to make: he becomes bait. A slow road home across Idaho and Montana with two federal agents, a chess-playing dry cleaner, and a suspiciously shiny Airstream, dangling himself in front of the world's most dangerous contract killers so the fight happens in empty country instead of on Main Street.

But out past the last cell tower — no phone, no Chance, no voice in his ear — Nik has to rebuild himself the old way, with blisters, horses, and his mother's training. Which is when the convoy discovers it isn't being chased at all. It's being studied. By someone with a very long rifle, endless patience... and red hair.

Getting home is the easy part. Home is where the storm is: a town that needs warning, a family owed one hundred percent of the truth, a treehouse command center, a twelve-year-old with a notebook full of booby traps — and a question Nik has carried for three years, now waiting for him on a ridgeline above Crawford.

Some baggage you check. Some you carry.

This one's for everyone who asked what happens next.