Книга - The Curse of the King

The Curse of the King
Peter Lerangis


The fourth book in the thrilling SEVEN WONDERS series.“A high-octane mix of modern adventure and ancient secrets… I can’t wait to see what’s next.” Rick RiordanTHREE BATTLESThirteen-year-old Jack McKinley has fought impossible odds to save himself, his friends, and the world. Having already defeated the Colossus of Rhodes, hunted through Ancient Babylon, and outfoxed legions of undead, the Select have recovered three of the lost Loculi hidden in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only to lose one of them in order to save a life. They must now find a way to undo what has been done, to save themselves from the power that will overwhelm them-and destroy the world.TWO RIVALSNot only do Jack and his friends have to unearth these seven ancient wonders, but they also have to contend with the Massa, an organization bent on using the Loculi for evil. The Massa have taken over the Karai Institute and convinced former friend Marco to switch sides. Outnumbered, underequipped, and growing weary, Jack, Cass, and Aly come upon their greatest challenge yet-the long-lost Statue of Zeus.ONE ENEMYAs time runs out, our heroes must confront gods, relive old battles, and face-down their own destiny. Old enemies become new friends and sudden victories turn to certain defeats as the time nears for everything to change.












The Tides Turn


















Copyright (#ub35ba3d4-69bd-5425-acdb-c1f9d9ddb3ea)


First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers Inc in 2015

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers, 2015

Cover art © Torstein Norstrand, 2015

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007586554

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007586561

Version: 2015-02-05


FOR MOM AND DAD,

WHO HAVE READ EVERYTHING

SINCE THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE








Contents

Cover (#ud8cbef99-b2a8-5679-ab56-a5f995892a59)

Title Page (#u29fd29ba-46ab-50d6-a4d8-5042c6fb48ec)

Copyright

Dedication (#u5b2f3eb5-5ae2-5b99-a292-37e400c16f87)

Chapter One: The Wrath of Yappy

Chapter Two: Twerp Perps, Snalp, and the Fat Lady

Chapter Three: The Enemy of Interesting

Chapter Four: The Barry

Chapter Five: Shard Luck

Chapter Six: Aly-Bye

Chapter Seven: Down and out in LA

Chapter Eight: The Humpty Dumpty Project

Chapter Nine: Mausoleum Dream

Chapter Ten: If it Looks Like a Hoax …?

Chapter Eleven: God of Couch Potatoes

Chapter Twelve: Biiiig Trouble

Chapter Thirteen: The Fourth Loculus

Chapter Fourteen: Escape from the Nostril

Chapter Fifteen: The Dream Continued

Chapter Sixteen: A Goat Moment

Chapter Seventeen: Battle on the Mount

Chapter Eighteen: Loser, Loser, Loser

Chapter Nineteen: Deifirtep

Chapter Twenty: In the Matter of Victor Rafael QuiÑones

Chapter Twenty One: Slipping Away

Chapter Twenty Two: Massa Island

Chapter Twenty Three: Good Enough for the Cockroaches

Chapter Twenty Four: The Illusion of Control

Chapter Twenty Five: In Hexad de Heptimus Veritas

Chapter Twenty Six: Lifeline

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Seventh Codex

Chapter Twenty Eight: His Jackness

Chapter Twenty Nine: What’s a Few Million Lives …?

Chapter Thirty: Esiole

Chapter Thirty One: The King of Toast

Chapter Thirty Two: Reunion

Chapter Thirty Three: Preposserous

Chapter Thirty Four: My Sister the Monster

Chapter Thirty Five: Goon Number Seven

Chapter Thirty Six: Pull my Finger

Chapter Thirty Seven: The Meathead Starts Over

Chapter Thirty Eight: Ambush

Chapter Thirty Nine: Fiddle and Bones

Chapter Fourty: The Labyrinth and the Tapestry

Chapter Fourty One: Is not Gorilla

Chapter Fourty Two: The Teflon King

Chapter Fourty Three: Braggart, Traitor, Deserter, Killer?

Chapter Fourty Four: The Sword and the Rift

Chapter Fourty Five: Something Much Wors

Epilogue

About the Publisher







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HAVING LESS THAN a year to live doesn’t feel great, but it’s worse when you’re in a cop car that smells of armpits, cigarettes, and dog poop. “Don’t New York City cops ever clean their cars?” Cass Williams mumbled.

I turned my nose to the half-open window. Aly Black was at the other end of the backseat, but Cass was stuck in the middle. Outside, music blared from a nearby apartment window. An old woman walking a Chihuahua eyed us and began yelling something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Okay, what do we do now, Destroyer?” Cass asked.

“‘Jack’ is still my name,” I said.

“‘The Destroyer Shall Rule,’ that was the prophecy,” Aly replied. “And your mom pointed at you.”

“We were invisible! She could have been pointing at …” My voice trailed off. It was after midnight, but the way they were both glaring at me, I felt like I needed sunglasses. I was beginning to think throwing that last Loculus under a train might not have been a great idea. “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. But I had to do it, or everyone would have died. You would have done the same thing!”

Aly sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s just … an adjustment, that’s all. I mean, we had a chance. And now …”

She gave me a sad shrug. We’re dead, is what she didn’t say. A genetic mutation was on target to kill us before the age of fourteen. And I had sabotaged our chance to be cured. Seven Loculi was what we needed. Now one of them was in pieces under a train.

I sank back into the smelly seat. As the car slowed to a stop in front of a squat brick police station, our driver called out, “Home sweet home!”

She was a tall, long-faced woman named Officer Wendel. Her partner, Officer Gomez, quickly hauled himself out from the passenger side. He was barely taller than me but twice my width. The car rose an inch or so when he exited. “Your papa’s inside, dude,” he said. “Make nice with him and make sure we don’t see you again.”

“You won’t,” Aly replied.

“Wait!” cried the old woman with the Chihuahua. “Those are devil children!”

Officer Gomez paused, but another cop waved him in. “You go ahead,” he said wearily. “We’ll take care of Mrs. Pimm.”

“I recognize her,” Aly whispered. “She’s the person who shows up in movie credits as Crazy New York City Neighbor.”

As Officer Gomez rushed us inside and down a short, grimy hallway, I eyed my backpack, which was slung over his shoulder. The Loculus of Flight and the Loculus of Invisibility formed two big, round bulges.

He had peeked inside but not too carefully. Which was lucky for us.

Officer Wendel walked ahead and pushed open the door to a waiting room. Dad was sitting on a plastic chair, and he stood slowly. His face was drawn and pale.

“Officers Gomez and Wendel, Washington Heights Precinct,” Gomez said. “We responded to the missing-persons alert. Found them while investigating a commotion up by Grant’s Tomb.”

“Thank you, officers,” Dad said. “What kind of commotion? Are they in trouble?”

“Healthy and unharmed.” Gomez unhooked the pack and set it on a table. “We had reports of noises, people in costume—gone by the time we got there.”

Officer Wendel chuckled. “Well, a few weirdoes in robes near the train tracks, picking up garbage. Guess the party was over. Welcome to New York!”

Dad nodded. “That’s a relief. I—I’ll take them home now.”

He reached for the backpack, but Officer Wendel was already unzipping it and looking inside. “Just a quick examination,” she said with an apologetic look. “Routine.”

“Officer Gomez did it already!” I pointed out.

Before Gomez could respond, a sharp barking noise came from the hallway. The old lady was inside, with her dog. Officer Wendel looked toward the noise.

I reached for the pack, but Wendel pulled it away. She opened my canvas sack and removed the basketball-sized Loculus of Flight. “Nice …” she said.

“A world globe,” I blurted. “We have to … paint the countries onto—”

“What the …?” Officer Wendel’s hand had hit the invisible second Loculus.

“It’s nothing!” Cass blurted out.

“Literally,” Aly added.

Wendel tried to wriggle the Loculus out. “Is this glass?”

“A special kind of glass,” Dad said. “So clear I’ll bet you can’t see it!”

“Wow …” Wendel said. She lifted her hands high, holding up … absolutely nothing. Nothing that the human eye could see, that is. “I can feel it, but I can’t—”

“I am not crazy stop treating me like I’m crazy, I saw them, I tell you—they were floating like birds!” Mrs. Pimm’s voice was rising to a shriek—and I remembered where I’d heard her voice and seen her face.

An open window, a dim light. She had been staring at us as the Shadows from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus lifted us through the streets. She’d been one of the only people who’d noticed the flurries of darkness, the fact that we were being borne down the street in the invisible arms of Artemisia’s minions.

I darted toward the door and looked out.

Yiiiii! The Chihuahua saw me first. He wriggled out of her arms and skittered down the hallway toward me, baring his teeth.

“There—those are the wicked children!” Now Mrs. Pimm was heading our way, followed by two burly cops. “They were floating above the ground … talking to spirits! Come back here, Yappy!”

I sprang back into the room as Yappy clattered inside, yapping away.

Officer Wendel let go of the backpack. She and Gomez surrounded Yappy, reaching for his collar. Mrs. Pimm began lashing at them with her cane. Two other cops grabbed at her shoulders.

“Where’s the Loculus?” Aly whispered.

There.

I couldn’t see it, but I saw a perfectly rounded indentation in the sack on the table—a logical place where an invisible sphere might be resting. Shoving my hand toward the air above it, I felt a cool, round surface.

Now I could see the Loculus. Which meant I was invisible. “Got it!”

Aly sidled close to me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Just before she disappeared, Cass reached for her, too.

Dad stood there against the wall, looking confused. Now Cass and Aly both had hands on the Loculus, so I let go of Aly and reached toward Dad with my free hand. “If you touch us,” I said softly, “the power transfers.”

He flinched when I took his arm. But it was nothing like the looks on the faces of Mrs. Pimm and the group of police officers. Their jaws were nearly scraping the floor. A cup of coffee lay in a puddle below them.

I could hear Yappy heading for the entrance as fast as his little legs could carry him.

We followed after him, but we didn’t rush.

Even the NYPD can’t stop something they can’t see.







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DAD’S DISGUISE WAS a porkpie hat and a fake, glued-on mustache that made him sneeze. Aly’s hair, colored blond with cheap spray-on hair color bought at Penn Station, was bunched into a baseball cap. Cass wore a hoodie and a fake scar on his cheek, and I opted for thick sunglasses, which were now hurting my nose.

Dad and Aly sat on one side of a narrow table, Cass and I on the other. We were the only ones in our little train compartment, which made our disguises kind of ridiculous. At least I thought so.

None of us had been able to sleep. Now the countryside was aglow with the first hints of the morning sun. “We are two hundred forty-nine miles into Pennsylvania, fifty-four point three miles from the Ohio border,” Cass announced.

“Thank you, Mr. GPS,” Aly said.

“Seriously, how can you do that?” I asked. “The angle of the sun?”

“No,” Cass replied, gesturing out the window toward a narrow post that zoomed by. “The mile markers.”

Dad covered his mouth. “Ahh-haaaa-choo!”

“Guys, maybe we can take off the disguises?” Aly said. “I’ve been checking news sites, feeds, social media, and there’s nothing about us.”

“What if we’re America’s Most Wanted?” Cass asked. “What if our pictures are in every post office from here to Paducah?”

Wincing, Dad pulled off his mustache. “Cass, let’s examine that word—wanted. The best way to predict how people will act is knowing what they want. One thing the New York police don’t want is the press to know that four people vanished from under their noses.”

“‘Tonight’s headline: Twerp perps pop from cops! Details at eleven!’” Cass said.

Aly pulled back her newly blond hair into a scrunchie. “When we get to Chicago, I’m washing out this disgusting color.”

“Your hair was blue before this,” Cass remarked.

Aly stuck out her tongue.

“I think it looks nice,” I said, quickly adding, “not that blue wasn’t nice. It was. So was the orange.”

Aly just stared at me bewildered, like I’d just said something in Sanskrit. I turned away. Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut.

Cass cracked up. “Maybe she can borrow the red coloring from your skin.”

“Once we’re in Chicago, Aly, you’re getting on a plane to Los Angeles,” Dad said. “To see your mom.”

“What am I going to tell her?” Aly asked.

“The truth,” Dad replied. “She has to know everything. And she has to keep what happened to you a secret—”

“She won’t do that!” Aly said. “I mean—I vanished for weeks. She’s going to open a federal investigation!”

Dad shook his head. “Not when she realizes what’s at stake. That there’s still a hope of curing you kids. Our job now is to create an airtight alibi, which we all will use. It has to explain why three kids disappeared and then slipped back weeks later, all at the same time. We have to somehow contain this. People in our hometown are going to ask questions. Yours, too, Aly.”

“So … um …” Cass said uneasily. “How do I figure into these snalp?”

“Snalp?” Dad said.

“Plans,” I translated. “It’s Backwardish. Remember? He uses it when he’s feeling silly. Or nervous.”

“Or deracs,” Cass added.

Dad looked him straight in the eyes. He knew about Cass’s background. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what Cass was thinking. Mainly because I don’t know what’s it’s like to have two parents in jail on a robbery conviction. What I did know was that he’d be sent back to child services until he was eighteen. Which meant, under our circumstances, forever.

“Of course I have plans,” Dad said. “Don’t you y-worr … wy-orr …”

“Yrrow?” Cass said. “As in, worry?”

Dad was already scribbling on a sheet of legal paper. “Exactly,” he said.

“Okay then, I won’t,” Cass said, looking very, very worried.

* * *

“Next station stop, Chicago, Illinois!”

As the conductor’s voice echoed in the train car, the sun burned through the window. Aly and Cass had fallen asleep, and I was almost there, too.

Dad’s eyes were bloodshot as he put the final touches on the list we’d been working on for hours. I read it for about the hundredth time.

“Um,” I said.

Aly sighed. “Complicated.”

“Out of our minds,” Cass added.

“I think we can make it work,” Dad said with a deep breath.






“I like the ‘hardened street tough’ part,” Cass said.

“Now for your story, Aly,” Dad went on. “We need something your mom can jump on board with.”

“Mom and I are no strangers to alibis,” Aly said. “I’ve been working with covert government groups for a long time. We can say I was on a CIA project. Much less complicated than your epic lie.”

Dad removed his porkpie hat and ran his fingers through his steadily graying hair. “One thing you need to know, guys. Your disappearances have been in the news. Luckily for us, the reports have stayed local. Three separate communities, three separate disappearances, three different times. Well, four, including Marco. Now three of you are showing up at once. Up to now, no one has connected the disappearances. That’s our task—containing the stories. Keeping them strictly local news.”

“No publicity,” Aly agreed, “no photos on the web, play it down on social media.”

Dad nodded. “Ask—insist—that your friends not blab about it. For privacy’s sake.”

“I will keep the news away from hardened-street-tough circles,” Cass said.

“Contain, concentrate, commit—that’s the only way we are going to solve this genetic problem,” Dad said.

No one said a word. We were all trying our hardest to avoid the great big fat imaginary elephant in the room—and on its side was an imaginary sign that said HAPPY FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY crossed out in black with a skull underneath.

“This may be the last time we see each other,” Aly said in a tiny, weak, unAlylike voice.

“I will die before I let that happen to any of you,” Dad replied. His face was grim, his eyes steady and fierce. “And I won’t rest until my company finds a cure.”

“What if they don’t?” I asked.

Dad gave me a steady have-I-ever-let-you-down? look. “You know the McKinley family motto. It ain’t over …”

“Until the fat lady sings.” I couldn’t help smiling. There were about a dozen McKinley family mottoes, and this was one of Dad’s favorites.

“La-la-la,” Aly sang, smiling.

Dad laughed. “Sorry, Aly, you don’t fit the bill.”

Cass, who hadn’t spoken in a long time, finally piped up softly. “Mr. McKinley?” he said. “About number seven on your list …?”

Dad smiled warmly. “That’s the only one we don’t have to worry about. Because it’s the only item that’s one hundred percent true.”







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“IT MEANS A soprano,” I said, scrolling through a Wikipedia page on my trusty desktop. We’d been home for ten busy days, buying a bunk bed and a desk and a bike and clothes for Cass, catching up with teachers and friends, telling the alibi over and over a thousand times, buying hair dye to cover up the white lambda shape on the backs of our heads, blah-blah-blah. Today was going to be our first full day in school, and I was nervous. So of course it was a perfect time to procrastinate—like looking up Dad’s odd saying about the singing fat lady.

“I hated that show,” Cass called out from the top bunk.

“What show?” I asked.

“The Sopranos,” Cass said. “My last foster family binge-watched all seventeen years of it. Well, it felt like seventeen.”

“No, I’m talking about ‘the fat lady,’ ” I said. “It means a soprano—like, an opera singer. It’s a way of saying the opera’s not over until the soprano sings her big showstopping tune.”

“Oh,” Cass said. “What if she’s not fat? The show keeps going?”

“It’s a stereotype!” I said.

Cass grunted and sat up, dangling his legs over the side of the bed. “I hate stereotypes, too.”

Since returning, Cass had been a thirteen-year-old curly-haired version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Half the time he was his bouncy self, thanking Dad a zillion times for agreeing to adopt him. The other half he was fixated on our … timetable. Our predicament. Dilemma.

The fact that we were going to die.

There. I said it.

I’ll admit, I hated actually putting that idea into words. I tried not to think of it as a fact. Or even think of it at all. Hey, the fat lady hadn’t sung, right? Dad was trying to keep the show going.

I had to stay positive for Cass and me.

“It’s weird,” Cass murmured.

“What’s weird?” I said.

“G7W,” Cass replied.

“Of course it’s weird,” I said. “It sits in DNA for generations and then, bam—it shows up in people like you and me.”

“No, I mean it forces us all into stereotypes,” Cass said. “That always bothered me. You know, like when P. Beg called us Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Tailor. It’s like another way of saying Jock, GPS-Guy, Geek, and … whatever Tailor is supposed to be.”

“The one who puts it all together,” I said. “That’s what Bhegad said.”

“He slices … he dices … he figures out ways to find Loculi in ancient settings! But wait, there’s more! Now the new improved Jack is also the Destroyer!” Cass let out a weary laugh. “How does that make any sense? It doesn’t. At first this whole thing seemed so cool—we were going to be superhumans, woo-hoo! But the last few weeks have been like this bad dream. Don’t you wish we could be normal—just kids like everybody else?”

“Cheer up, Cass,” I said, scooping stuff up from my desk. “Normal is the enemy of interesting.”

I dumped my pen, phone, change, and gum into my pockets. The last thing I picked up was the Loculus shard.

It was my good luck charm, I guess. For ten days I’d been carrying it with me all the time. Maybe because it reminded me of my mom. I really did believe that she had dropped it at my feet on purpose, no matter what Cass or Aly thought.

Besides, it really was awesome to look at. It felt smooth and cool to the touch—not like metal exactly, or plastic, but dense and supertough. I held it up to the sun for a quick glance:






“You’ve been wearing that thing out,” Cass said. “It looks like it shrunk.”

“Shrank,” I corrected him.

“Thunk you.” Cass hopped down from the bunk. “Anyway, you’re much more Tailor than Destroyer. That description fits Marco.”

“Now who’s stereotyping?” I said.

Cass giggled. “Somewhere in this world, the Massa are training Marco Ramsay to be the new king of Atlantis, while you, me, and Aly are going off to seventh grade. I think we get the better deal.”

As he disappeared down the hall and into the bathroom, I heard the front doorbell ring—which seemed kind of weird for 6:39 A.M. Dropping the shard into my pocket, I glanced out the window. I saw a white minivan parked at the curb. The van’s sides were emblazoned with the call letters of a local TV station WREE-TV.

Uh-oh. So much for keeping things under the radar.

“Sorry, no interviews.” Dad’s muffled voice echoed upward.

“We think the nation will want to hear this brave story,” a woman’s voice piped up. “It’s got heart, grit, pathos—”

“I appreciate that,” Dad said firmly. “Look, I know your station owner, Morty Reese. He’ll understand as a father, we’d like our privacy.”

The woman’s voice got softer. “If it’s compensation you’re concerned about, we are prepared—”

“Compensation?” Dad shot back with a disbelieving laugh. “Wait. Morty asked you to bribe me?”

“Mr. Reese has your best interests at heart,” the woman said. “This story could lead to awareness of traumatic brain injury. Hospitals will realize they need to increase security—”

“I’m sure Mr. Reese can donate directly to the hospitals if he’s so concerned,” Dad replied. “My private life is not for sale, sorry. Between you and me, he should learn how legitimate news organizations operate.”

“Mr. Reese is an excellent newsman—” the woman protested.

“And I’m an excellent trapeze artist,” Dad shot back. “Thanks but no thanks.”

I heard the door shut firmly.







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“SO, DID HE work there before or after you were born?” Cass said as we walked up the street toward school.

“Did who work where?” I asked.

“Your dad, in the circus,” Cass said. “Did you get to see him?”

Trapeze. It took me a moment. “Dad was being sarcastic,” I explained. “He doesn’t like Mr. Reese.”

“Your dad has a weird sense of humor,” Cass said.

“Reese is like the Donald Trump of Belleville,” I said. “Except with normal hair. Dad says he owns half the town, but still Mr. Reese wants to be a media mogul. He’s the head of Reese Industries, the Bathroom Solutions People.”

“Whoa. As in ‘Reese: The Wings Beneath Your Wind’?” Cass asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “Those little plastic toilet thingies that attach the seat to the bowl. Everyone has them. That’s billions in profit. And billions in profit buys local TV stations. Anyway, the most important thing is that Dad’s trying to protect us. To keep our faces out of the news so he can work on saving our lives.”

“Hope springs eternal,” Cass said, kicking a stone up the sidewalk.

I smiled. That was the first positive thing Cass had said all day. “You know, that’s one of my dad’s favorite sayings.”

“That’s a sign!” Cass said with a grin. “I do belong in your family!”

I put my arm around his shoulder, and we walked quietly along a wooded area.

When Cass spoke again, his voice was soft and unsteady. “It’s so hard to stay optimistic. How do you do it?”

“I try to list all the good things,” I said. “Like number one, I have a new brother.”

“Is there a number two?” Cass asked.

“We both feel healthy,” I suggested. “We haven’t needed treatments yet. Your turn.”

“Um …” Cass replied. “Number three, it could be that this whole thing will blow over? I mean, it’s possible the Karai Institute was lying to us—you know, about needing those Sesulucol?”

“Ilucol,” I corrected him.

Cass laughed. “Number four, you are getting really good at Backwardish!”

I veered off the sidewalk onto a dirt path that led into a tangle of trees that sloped downward to a creek. “Come on, this is a tuctrosh … tushcort … shortcut.”

“Wait—what? There’s a stream down there!” Cass protested. As he walked, his foot kicked aside a busted-up baseball glove, festooned with a banana peel. “This is disgusting. Can’t we take Smith Street to Whaley and then the jagged left-right on Roosevelt? Or bypass Roosevelt via the dog run?”

“Even I don’t even know my neighborhood that well!” I said over my shoulder.

“Wait till I learn to ride a bike,” Cass grumbled. “Then we’ll have great options. And I won’t seem like such a doofus.”

“You’re not a doofus,” I said.

“I am the only kid in the country who can’t ride a bike!” Cass replied.

“Yeah, well …” I said. “You had a different kind of childhood.”

“As in none,” Cass said. “You try growing up with criminal parents.”

WHOOOOO … WHOOOO! An eerie call made me stop in my tracks.

“Cool,” Cass said, bumping into me from behind. “An owl?”

Slowly a plaid shirt appeared among the rustling leaves—and then the moonlike, grinning face of Barry Reese. “Whooooo do we have heeeere?”

He jumped in front of us—well, if you consider slowly moving nearly two hundred pounds of well-fed and expensively dressed flesh into a narrow dirt path jumping.

“Not owl,” I said. “Foul. Cass, meet Barry Reese.”

“Son of Donald Trump?” Cass said.

Barry ignored the comment, or maybe he was too busy thinking up his next move. Barry had a hard time doing two things at once. He held up three pudgy fingers to my face, then five, then one. “How many fingers? I heard you had some mental problems, like losing your memory. Just want to test to see if you’re okay, Amnesia Boy.”

There were approximately three hundred middle-school kids in Belleville who would be quaking in their boots at this kind of bullying. But after facing up to killer zombies, sharp-taloned griffins, and acid-spitting vizzeet, I wasn’t bothered by Barry Reese. “Stick two of them into your eyes and I’ll count slowly,” I said.

He shoved both of us backward. His face was covered with a sheen of sweat as he grinned sadistically at Cass. “Look! It’s Cash! The hardened LA stweet tough who still wides a twicycle!”

“Wait, how did you know that?” Cass said.

“Um, maybe because you just announced it to the world?” Barry replied. “Can I have your autograph? It’s okay if you want to use cwayons.”

I lunged forward and gave Barry a shove. “It’s Cass. And he only gives autographs to people who know how to read.”

Unfortunately pushing a guy of Barry’s bulk was like trying to move a boulder. He bumped me hard with his belly and grabbed my backpack straps. “That was disrespectful, McKinley. The Barry sent you to the hospital once and he can do it again. Now give me your phone.”

“My phone?” I said. “Doesn’t the Barry have a phone?”

His beefy fingers were already in my jeans pocket. As I wriggled to get away, the pocket popped inside out along with Barry’s hand. All my stuff spilled out onto the ground, including the Loculus shard.

Cass and I scrambled to grab it, but Barry was shockingly fast when he was excited. “What’s this?” he asked, scrunching up his face at the shard.

“Nothing!” I blurted.

“Then why did you both grab for it first?” As he lifted it upward, the shard glinted in the sunlight. “What’s that weird star shape on it? A symbol from a secret nerd society?”

“Mathletes!” Cass said. “It’s … a club. Of math people. We talk about … pi. And stuff like that.”

“I like pies, too … but I don’t like lies!” Barry snickered at his own idiotic joke. “Especially lies about anti-American world-domination cults that kidnap kids for weeks at a time!”

Cass was shaking now. “Jack, is he going loony tunes on us? Should we be calling nine-one-one?”

Barry stepped closer, his beady eyes shifting from me to Cass. “You’re not a street tough, Casper, are you? And, Jack, you didn’t lose your memory and travel across the country. Your little story? It’s full of holes. My dad thinks your dad has connections with terrorists. Where does he fly all the time? What’s with all the long trips to Magnolia?”

“Mongolia,” Cass corrected him.

“Wait—terrorists?” I said. “There are no terrorists in Mongolia!”

“Ha—so you were there!” Barry said.

“My dad runs a genetics lab there,” I replied. Barry’s face went blank, so I added, “That’s the study of genes, and not the kind you wear.”

Barry grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He cradled the back of my head in his right hand. “Where’s the white hair, Jack?”

“What?” I squeaked.

He let go of my head and spun me back around. “That day you fell into the street—I saw this, like, upside-down V shape on the back of your head. Now it’s gone. It means something, doesn’t it? A secret symbol from some hidden organization?”

Cass’s eyes were huge. Leave it to Barry, the dumbest person I knew, to come the closest to the truth.

“Uh …” Cass said.

“I’m right, huh?” Barry barked. “Go ahead, tell the Barry he’s right!”

Let your enemy give you the lead.

Dad had recited that one to me at least a thousand times. And now, in this moment, I finally understood it.

I stepped right up to Barry and refused to blink. Then I took a deep breath and spoke fast. “You want the truth? Okay. My hair and Cass’s? Yup, it did go white in the back, in the shape of a Greek lambda, which is their letter L. Now our hair is dyed. The lambda means we inherited a gene from a prince who escaped the sinking of Atlantis. See, the gene unlocks part of our DNA that turns our best ability into a superpower. But it also overwhelms the body, and no one who’s ever had it has lived past the age of fourteen. In the last year of life, the body begins to break down. You get sick every few weeks. You can stay alive for a while if you get certain treatments, but eventually you die. We learned this from a group called the Karai Institute on this island that can’t be detected. They told us we can be cured if we find seven magical Loculi that contain the power of Atlantis, which were hidden centuries ago in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. As you know—well, maybe you don’t—six of the Wonders don’t exist anymore. The thing in your hand is a piece of a destroyed Loculus.”

“Jack?” Cass mouthed, as if I’d just lost my mind.

Barry’s mouth was sagging. His eyes narrowed, as if he were still stuck on the second sentence. Which he probably was.

Would he try to repeat his own mangled version of what I’d just said to his dad? I hoped so, because any sane human being would send him straight to a psychologist. And he knew it.

“Well, that’s everything,” I said, reaching to grab the Loculus from Barry’s hand.

He pulled it back.

“Okay, so if you’re supposed to get sick every few weeks …” he said quietly, “how come you’re not sick?”

“The fresh, rejuvenating Belleville air?” Cass said.

Barry’s face curled. “You guys are playing me. That was the obvious-est lie! I’m going to get to the bottom of this. You watch, I’ll find out the truth.”

“Great,” I said. “Meanwhile, will you give me that back?”

“Why should I give you a piece of a destroyed Oculus?” Barry asked. “It might be worth something.”

“Loculus,” Cass said. “With an L.”

“Trust me,” I said, “it’s worth absolutely nothing to you.”

“Awwww, really?” Barry said. “Nothing?”

With an exasperated sigh, Barry held out the shard to Cass. Both of us reached for it at the same time.

Before our fingers could touch it, Barry spun away. With a grunt, he tossed it far into the scrubby, trash-strewn woods.

“Fetch,” he said. “With an F.”







(#ulink_2d16df30-4c6c-50c6-9881-20347b947824)


“WHAT HAPPENED TO your face?” Dad stared at me oddly, standing in the front door.

I peeked past him to the sofa, where a strange man dressed in black was rising to his feet. “Thorns,” I said, touching my cheek, where the edges of thin gash peeked out from behind a Band-Aid. “We lost something in the woods.”

I didn’t want to mention the shard in front of a stranger. It had taken us about a half hour on our hands and knees in the woods to find it. Which made us very late for school. The cool thing was, no one seemed to care. Cass and I were like returning war heroes. Everyone was nice to us. The nurse cleaned us up and gave me a whole box of Band-Aids. The principal herself, Mrs. Sauer (pronounced Sour), brought a Welcome Back cake into homeroom. Barry ate most of it, but it was still nice. I even had a session with the school psychologist, who said she was screening me for PTSD. At first I thought that was some kind of a sandwich, like pastrami, turkey, salami, and dark bread, but it means post–traumatic stress disorder. The only stress I felt was from thinking about the great sandwich I wasn’t going to eat.

“Jack … Cass,” Dad said, “this is Mr. Anthony from Lock-Tite Security. After that strange little visit from the TV station this morning, I figure we’d better make ourselves safe from intrusions, wiretaps, recording devices. Somebody in this town—who shall remain nameless—thinks he’s going to win an Emmy Award for investigative journalism.”

Cass nodded. “I understand, Mr. McKinley. I met his son. I don’t blame you.”

“We’ll go upstairs,” I said.

We raced each other through the living room and up the back stairs. Cass reached the second-floor landing first. He quickly tossed off his shoes and socks before walking on the Oriental rug that lined the long hallway. “I love the way this feels. This house is so cool.”

“You could have a whole room of your own, you know,” I said. “We have a lot of them. There’s more on third floor, too.”

“We already decided we were going to share,” Cass said. “Are you changing your mind?”

“No!” I said. “I just thought … if you ever felt like you needed space. It’s a big house and all.”

Cass shook his head, his face darkening. “Besides we have to be prepared. We can’t be separated if it happens …”

“It?” I said.

“You know … it,” Cass repeated. “Dying.”

I leaned over, softly banging my head on the wood railing that looked out onto the first floor vestibule. “I thought we talked about this. We’re going to stay positive, remember? We’re feeling good so far, Dad is on the case—”

“Right,” Cass said. “But doesn’t that first part seem scary to you? About us feeling good?”

“Dying is scary, Cass!” I said. “Feeling good is not scary!”

“But we shouldn’t be feeling good!” Cass replied. “By now, both of us—or at least you—should have had an episode. Which would mean we’d need a treatment. No one knows how to give us one!”

“Dad is working on it,” I said.

“He has no contact with anyone in the KI, so how can he figure it out?” Cass said. “I’ve been thinking all day about what Barry Reese said. Why are we still healthy, Jack? We shouldn’t be!”

“Uh, guys?” Dad’s face appeared directly below me. He was scowling. “Can you please take it inside?”

Cass and I ran into our room and shut the door tight. I emptied my pockets onto the desk, yanked off my ripped pants, and quickly pulled on a pair of sweats I’d left on the floor. That was another agreement Cass and I had made. I could keep my side of the room as messy as I wanted.

Feeling more comfortable, I began pacing. “Okay, let’s think about this. The intervals are irregular. Always have been. We know that.”

“Yeah, but the older we get, the closer they should be,” Cass said.

I couldn’t argue that. Professor Bhegad had warned us exactly that would happen as we neared the Day of Doom.

Closer. Not farther away.

“I think it’s the shards,” Cass said. “Remember, it was the Loculus of Healing. It was supposed to restore life to the dead.”

“You mean shard,” I said.

“Shards.” Cass shrugged. “I took one, too.”

I looked at him. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was important,” Cass replied. “I just took it as a souvenir. It’s not as nice as yours. No designs or anything. I thought it was just a busted, useless piece of junk. But now …”

He went to his desk and pulled open a drawer. From the bottom he took out a hunk of material maybe three inches long, wrapped in tissue. “It’s kind of ugly.”

I heard a rustling noise from my pile of junk on my desk and jumped away.

Cass dropped the shard. “Whoa. Did you bring in a mouse?”

The rustling stopped. I darted my hand out and pushed aside some candy wrappers. No critters there.

Just my shard.

“Pick it up, Cass,” I said softly. “Your shard.”

Cass swallowed. He lifted the little disklike thing from the floor. On the desk, my shard began to twitch like a jumping bean. “Whoa …” Cass said.

I leaned over, peering closely at my shard, then Cass’s. “They’re not two random pieces,” I said. “It looks like they may have broken apart from each other.”

“It feels warm,” Cass said.

“Hold the long side toward me,” I said.

As Cass angled his arm, I reached out to my shard and turned it so its longest side faced Cass’s.

“Ow—it’s like a hundred degrees!” Cass said.

“Hold tight!” I said.

I felt a jolt like an electric current. As I pulled my fingers away from the shard, it shot across the room toward Cass.

With a scream, he dropped his relic and jumped away.

Bluish-white light flashed across our room. As Cass fell back on the lower bed with a shriek, the two shards collided in midair with a loud DZZZZZT and a blast that smelled like rotten eggs.

Flames shot up from the carpet as the pieces landed. I raced to the bathroom for a glass of water and doused the small fire quickly. I could hear Dad yelling at us from downstairs.

But neither Cass nor I answered him. We were too busy staring at what remained in the singed, smoking patch of carpet.

Not two shards, but one.

They had joined together, without a seam.







(#ulink_6b203b35-1b3e-5097-8544-2f65eeb3e672)


“WAIT, THEY JUST flew together and joined in midair,” Aly said, “like snowflakes?”

Her hair was purple now, her face pale on my laptop screen. Belleville, Indiana, may have been overcast, but the Los Angeles sunshine was pouring through Aly’s bedroom window.

“It was more like massive colliding spacecraft,” Cass said. “Only … tiny. And not in outer space.”

I held up the joined sections. Together they formed one larger shard. “You can’t even tell where they were separated.”

“That’s awesome,” Aly replied, as her face loomed closer to the screen. “Absomazingly ree-donculous. It means that—” Aly turned away from the screen and let out a loud sneeze. And then another.

Cass’s eyes widened. “Are you okay?”

“A cold,” Aly said.

“Because Jack and I were wondering, you know, about the treatments,” Cass went on. “It’s been a while since your last episode …”

“It’s a cold, that’s all,” Aly said, clacking away at her laptop. “Let’s get down to business. I’ve been doing research. Tons. About the Seven Wonders. About Atlantis.”

“Why?” Cass asked.

“Because what else am I going to do?” Aly said. “I know you’re feeling bad, Cass. But I refuse to give up. We start by trying to get back in touch with the KI. They’re lying low, but I’m betting they’ll want to be in contact with us. Which means we need to protect our alibi. So I pretended to be, like, an evil spy searching for clues to break our story. All kinds of things didn’t add up. That doctor friend of your dad’s? His employee records showed he was in Mexico the day he supposedly treated Cass. And the convenience store where Marco was last seen? Its video feed showed a seven-foot-tall, red-bearded barefoot guy who bought three peanut butter sandwiches and a dozen doughnuts. The owner was suspicious, so he sent the feed to the local cops, who ran a primitive facial ID scan. They came up with three hundred and seven possible suspects. Including one Victor Rafael Quiñones.”

“Who’s that?” Cass asked.

“Tor from Victor, quin from Quiñones,” Aly said. “I’m figuring Torquin is a nickname.”

“Wait. His name is Victor?” Cass said.

“So of course I deleted the footage of Torquin from the FTP servers,” Aly said. “Even the backups. And I altered the doctor’s hospital records, too. I even hacked into his Facebook account and deleted the pictures of Mexico. I am covering our tracks so the alibi is clean. But the point is, I can’t do everything. Things can go wrong. What if there are off-line copies of the originals? Arrrrrghh!” Aly shook her fists in frustration. “Okay. Okay, Black, stay calm and hack. I will try to locate Torquin or anyone who seems connected to the KI.”

“Is that possible?” Cass asked.

Aly shrugged. “Anything’s—” She broke off in a fit of coughing, swinging away from the screen. All we saw now was her bookcase.

“Aly?” Cass said.

Something thumped. I heard a choking noise. A pounding on the floor. “Mo-o-om!” came Aly’s voice.

A blur passed across the screen—a woman with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She passed from top to bottom, falling to her knees and out of the screen. “Aly? Aly, wake up!”

I was on my feet now. “ALY!”

The image on the screen juddered. And then all went black.







(#ulink_70090453-f3bc-5d99-8081-3665f0e5f39c)


“GALLUP, MCKINLEY!” CASS said, staring out the window of the jet.

“I’m not piloting this plane, Captain Nied is,” Dad replied. “And he’s going as fast as he can.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Cass gestured to the distant ground below, which was clearly visible even in the dimming sunlight. “That little town near the river? It’s called Gallup, New Mexico. Right near the Arizona border. It also happens to be in McKinley County. So it’s Gallup, McKinley.”

I took a deep breath. I could barely focus on what Cass what saying. Except for the “Gallup” part. Because my heart was galloping.

“I think it’s named for US president William McKinley,” Cass said. “He was shot. But he didn’t die right away. He died because no one got to him in time.”

“That’s cheerful,” Captain Nied said.

“Cass,” Dad said softly, “we’re doing the best we can. We’ll get to Aly. She’s with the best doctors in Southern California. Dr. Karl has promised me she’ll see to her personally.”

Dr. Karl was another college friend of Dad’s. She was the head of emergency medicine at St. Dunstan Hospital, where Aly had been taken. I was becoming convinced Dad knew at least half the doctors in the United States. In my left hand I clutched my phone. Before leaving, I’d sent Aly three unanswered texts. There was no cell reception up here, but that didn’t stop me from looking at the screen for about the thousandth time.

In my right hand I turned the shard around and around as if it were a magic charm. As if I could somehow massage it to full size. “I wish we were taking her a whole Loculus of Healing.”

“That wouldn’t cure her,” Cass said. “Or us. It takes seven of these things to do that.”

“Yeah, but it would buy some time,” I said.

“You and I are feeling fine without a Loculus of Healing,” Cass remarked with a deep sigh. “Why us and not her? Why does she get the bad luck?”

I stopped turning the shard. My hands felt warm. My first thought was body heat.

My second thought was, Are you crazy?

Spoons and forks didn’t heat up in your hands when you fiddled with them. Neither did joysticks, worry beads, action figures, whatever.

I handed it to Cass. “Notice anything?”

“Whoa,” Cass said. “Do you have a fever or something?”

“It’s warm, right?” I said. “Like, unnaturally warm?”

Cass turned it around curiously. “It looks smaller to me.”

“Cass, what if that heat isn’t just heat?” I said. “What if it means something—like, it’s active in some way?”

“Like, alive?” Cass said.

“No!” I said. “It’s the shell of a Loculus that’s existed for thousands of years, right? What if it absorbed some of that healing power? Maybe that’s what’s keeping you and me from having episodes.”

Cass’s eyes were as wide as baseballs. Dad was staring at the shard, too, from the copilot’s seat. Together we looked at Captain Nied.

He yanked back the throttle, and the jet began to dive. “Fasten your seat belts, gents. And welcome to LA.”

* * *

It is amazing what $200 will do to a Los Angeles cabdriver.

As we twisted and turned through the city streets, palm trees and white stucco houses zoomed by in a blur. We could see the freeway in the distance, the cars at a total standstill. “Freeway is not free!” the cabdriver said in an accent I couldn’t quite figure out. “Is prison for cars!”

No one laughed. We were too busy keeping our stomachs from jumping through our mouths. Dad was on his cell phone with the hospital the whole way.

According to Dr. Karl, Aly was alive, but it wasn’t looking good.

As the taxi screeched to a stop in the hospital parking lot, we pushed our way out. I hooked my backpack around my shoulders and sprinted after Dad. He flashed his ID left and right, fast-talking his way past guards. In a moment we were on the fifth floor, barging into the intensive care unit. It was a massive room, echoing with beeps and shouts and lined with curtained-off areas.

A dark-haired woman with huge eyes peered out from behind one of the curtains. “How is she, Cindy?” Dad asked, marching across the room as if he were a regular.

“Breathing,” Dr. Karl said, “but unresponsive. Her fever is spiking around a hundred four.”

I pulled the shard out of my pocket and held tight. I almost didn’t recognize Aly. Her skin was ashen, her eyes were only half-open, and her hair was pulled back into a green hospital cap. A breathing tube snaked from her mouth to a machine against the wall, and a tangle of tubes connected her arm to an IV stand with three different fluids.

Over her head was a screen that showed her heartbeat on a graph.

Aly’s mom was holding her daughter’s hand. Her face was streaked with tears, and her narrow glasses had slipped down her nose. She looked startled to see us. “Doctor …?”

“Sorry,” Dr. Karl said, “I’m going to have to ask the kids to stay in the waiting room. Standard procedure for intensive care.”

“I have to speak to her,” I insisted.

“She won’t hear you,” Aly’s mom said. “She’s completely unresponsive.”

“Can I just touch her?” I said.

“Touch her?” Mrs. Black looked at me as if I were crazy.

“This is way beyond ICU protocol,” Dr. Karl said. “If you don’t leave now, I will have to call security—”

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Cass and I jumped back. “Are they coming to get us?” Cass asked.

“It’s not a security alarm. It’s something to do with Aly!” I said. Aly’s monitors were flashing red. Her eyes sprang open and then rolled upward into her head. She let out a choking sound, and her body began to twitch. As three nurses came running from the center of the room, Dr. Karl strapped Aly’s arms down.

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

“Febrile seizure!” Dr. Karl said. “Clear the area!”

“But—” I said.

A nurse with a barrel chest and a trim beard pulled me back, and I nearly collided with Cass. As the hospital staff closed in around Aly’s bed, we both stumbled back toward the entrance.

“They’re killing her, Jack!” Cass said. “Do something!”

I dropped my pack. “I’m going invisible. It’s the only way I can get to her.”

“There’s no room for you,” Cass said. “If you barge in, they will feel you, Jack. It’ll freak everybody out. Total chaos, and it won’t be good for her.”

“Any other ideas?” I said.

Cass nodded. “Yeah. I’ll distract them. Give me three seconds.”

“What?”

But Cass was already running away, heading toward the table that contained the medical equipment and monitors.

One …

I reached into the pack and lifted out the Loculus of Invisibility.

Two …

As I stepped forward, the loud beeps stopped. I looked toward the monitors. They were dark. Aly’s equipment had shut down completely. Cass was scampering away from the wall socket, where he had pulled out the plugs.

Three!

I heard a shout. Two nurses broke away from Aly, scrambling toward the equipment, leaving her right side wide open. I raced toward her, clutching the Loculus of Invisibility with one hand and the shard with the other. Dr. Karl was injecting something into her left arm, concentrating hard.

Aly’s chest was still. She wasn’t breathing. I placed the shard on her stomach, just below her ribs.

“The pads—now!” Dr. Karl shouted. “We’re losing her!”

“Come on …” I said under my breath. “Come on, Aly. You have to live.” Aly’s eyes stared upward, green and bright, dancing in the light even in her unconsciousness. I felt like I could talk to her, like she’d answer me back with some kind of geeky joke. I wanted to see her smile.

But there was no reaction. Not a fraction of an inch of movement.

A doctor was racing toward Aly with two pads strapped to his hands. They were going to try to shock her alive. I pressed the shard harder into her abdomen. I guess I was crying, because tears were falling onto her face.

Aly’s mom bumped into me and screamed. It wouldn’t be much longer before my invisible presence was going to be a big deal.

“We have power!” a voice barked. With a soft whoosh, the monitors fired up and the lights blinked on. The heartbeat graph showed a long, horizontal, flat line.

Dead. A flat line meant dead.

The doctor placed the pads on either side of Aly’s chest but I did not take my hand away—not even when they shot electricity through her, and her body flopped like a rag doll.

It wasn’t working.

Aly was ghost white and still. Her chest wasn’t moving. As Dr. Karl finally called off the electric shocks, I pressed harder than ever, leaning toward her face.

“I’m … I’m so, so sorry,” Dr. Karl said to Aly’s mom.

I had failed.

She was the first to die. One of us would be next, then the other. And then there would be none.

I brushed my lips against her cool forehead. “Good-bye, Aly,” I whispered. “I—” The words clogged up in my brain, and I had to force them out. “I love you, dude. Yeah. Just saying.”

I let go of her and walked away toward the center of the room. I felt numb. My eyes focused on nothing.

“Jack?” Cass whispered, wandering toward me, looking all teary and confused. “Where are you?”

I picked up the backpack and slipped the Loculus of Invisibility back inside. As I became visible, I noticed I was next to two doctors who must have seen me materialize out of thin air.

But they hadn’t seemed to notice. They were both staring over my head toward Aly. Gaping.

Cass turned. His jaw dropped. “What the—?”

As I wiped away tears, the first thing I noticed was Aly’s mom. She was on the floor, fainted away.

The second thing I noticed was Aly sitting up, staring straight at me.

“You love me?” she said.







(#ulink_9deca072-1f84-5d1b-923c-d7382cacfc76)


SHE WAS ALIVE.

Half of me wanted to jump with joy. The other half wanted to sink down and melt into the linoleum. Dad and Dr. Karl stood by the bed, gaping as if their mouths had been propped open by invisible pencils.

“I heard you say it, Jack McKinley!” Aly laughed as if nothing bad had happened. “You said, ‘I love you’! I heard it!”

My mouth flapped open and shut a couple of times. “The shard …” I finally squeaked. “It worked.”

Aly’s smile abruptly vanished. She looked around the ICU. “Wait. Jack?Cass? What are you doing here? Why am I in a hospital? Why is Mom on the floor?”

I rushed over. Dad and I both lifted Mrs. Black to her feet. Her eyes puddled with tears. As she hugged her daughter, the place was going nuts. Cass was screaming, pumping his fists. The hospital staff high-fived each other like middle school kids. Dr. Karl looked bewildered. I thought I could see some tears on her cheeks as Aly’s mom hugged her, too.

“You are a miracle worker, doctor,” Mrs. Black said. “Thank you.”

“I—I’m not sure what did it,” Dr. Karl said. “I guess … the pads?”

Aly pulled me closer. “What happened?” she whispered. “I had an episode, right? And you guys flew out to see me.”

“Um, yeah,” I whispered back.

“So how did the doctor figure out—?” she asked.

“She didn’t,” I replied.

“Wait—so you did it?” she said. “You saved my life?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

Aly smiled. Her eyes moistened. “Backsies.”

“What?”

“About what you said,” she said, “into my ear …”

I felt my face heating up. “That’s because I thought you were dead!”

Doofus. Idiot.

She was looking at me like I’d just slapped her. But before either of us could say anything, the crowd of medical people began elbowing me away. Dr. Karl was shouting orders. All kinds of tubes were being hooked up to Aly’s arms.

I backed away, standing with Cass. “Boj emosewa,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I took a deep breath. I felt a million things. Happiness. Relief. Embarrassment. Pride. I could finally feel my body relaxing. That was when I opened my clenched palm and looked at the shard.

It was the size of a quarter.

And the only thing I felt was scared.

* * *

“What if it just … vanishes?” Cass paced back and forth in our hotel room. Behind him was a huge picture window. The sunset looked like an egg yolk spreading on the Pacific Ocean. “We use up its power, it gets smaller and smaller, and then, poof, it’s gone?”

“I wasn’t expecting it to shrink like that,” I said.

“Jack, it’s been getting smaller all along,” Cass said. “I tried to tell you that back home. It must be like a battery. You and I used up some of its power. Aly used up a lot more.”

“We have to preserve it somehow,” I said. “But we can’t exactly hide it away. It’s buying us time.”

“I wish we could contact the KI,” Cass said with a sigh. “I wish we hadn’t been cut off like that. Don’t you think that’s weird—they take Torquin away and then … radio silence?”

“Maybe they’ve given up on us,” I said.

Cass flopped on one of the double beds and stared out the window. “Now you sound like me.”

I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket. Aly was calling. “Hello?” I said.

“I’m bored,” Aly’s voice piped up.

I put her on speaker. “Hi, Bored. I’m Jack. Cass is here, too. How are you feeling?”

“Good,” she replied. “Too good to be sitting here in the dark in a hospital room. The doctors have finally stopped coming in and gawking. They’re talking about releasing me tomorrow. I’m like the Miracle Girl. I feel like an exhibit at the Museum of Natural Hysteria, and I’m tired of talking. So it’s your turn, Jack. You know what happened to me, and I want you to tell me now.”

I explained it all—the shards, the shrinkage, the healing power, the trip to LA, and my stunt with the Loculus of Invisibility.

When I was done, the phone fell quiet for a long moment. “Um, are you still awake?” I finally said.

“That silence,” she said, “is the sound of my mind being blown. Do you realize what this means? If your two shards fused like that, we may be able to put the whole thing together again.”

“Like Humpty Dumpty!” Cass added.

“Which means we have to get to the other pieces,” Aly went on.

Cass hopped off the bed. “Yes!”

“Whoa, hold on—the Massa took the other pieces,” I said. “They’re probably back on the island right now, trying to fit them together.”

“Exactly,” Aly said. “So there are two possibilities. They manage to do it, and they realize there’s a piece missing. In which case they will be coming after us.”

“Or?” I said.

“Or they won’t be able to do anything with those shards at all,” she said, “because you guys are G7W and they’re not. Don’t forget, the Loculi get their power from us. Without us, there’s a good chance those shards will just be shards.”

“You are a genius,” Cass said.

“How do we get to the island?” I said. “My dad can get us anywhere from Chicago to Kathmandu in a private plane. But even he can’t get to an island shielded from detection. Torquin’s the only person who can get us there, and he’s gone.”

“It’s findable by the KI, and by the Massa,” Aly said. “If they can do it, so can we.”

“How?” Cass asked.

“I’m thinking,” Aly said.

I was thinking, too. I was thinking about Brother Dimitrios and my mom, heading across the ocean. Dimitrios was probably happy to have the Loculus pieces. Maybe the Massa couldn’t fuse the shards, but they could try to fit them together like puzzle pieces. Would Dimitrios find out that Mom had dropped one? What would happen to her if he did?

I began to sweat. Even now, I wasn’t sure which side Mom was on. She seemed to want to help us. Which would make her a mole inside the Massa organization. But she had left Dad and me to join them—faked her own death and kept it secret all these years. How could I trust her? How could I not trust my own mom?

My mind was firing in all directions. I pictured Mom on a plane with the Massa, staring out the window, scared.

“The Massa,” I said. “Somehow we have to get the Massa to take us there.”

“Are you crazy?” Cass said. “We just risked our lives escaping them!”

“Jack, we don’t know where they are,” Aly said.

Something Dad had said on the train was still echoing in my head. The best way to predict how people will act is knowing what they want.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But we know what they want. And it’s the same thing the KI wants.”

“World domination?” Cass asked.

“Loculi,” I replied. “And we still have two of them. At some point—probably after the heat is off us—they will come after us.”

“We don’t have time to wait,” Aly said. “It may take them weeks, or months. That shard is going to shrink to nothing.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We have to make that happen ourselves. We have to make them find us. There are four likely places they are monitoring right now—four places that have the unfound Loculi.”

“The four remaining Wonders of the World!” Aly blurted out.

“I’ll work on my dad,” I said. “You work on your mom, Aly. Explain that it’s a matter of life or death. We get ourselves back to the island and find Fiddle. He’s hidden away with some KI operatives. They’ve got to be planning something. They’ll help us. The moment you get out of the hospital—”

“Wait,” Cass said. “We’re supposed to sneak away, travel to one of the sites, and look for the Massa?”

“No.” I shook my head. “All we need to do is go there. And let them come to us.”







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I LOOK OVER my shoulder. He is not here yet. But he will be.

WHO?

All I know, all I recognize, is that I am back in Bodrum. The last place in the world I want to be. The place where we failed to find the Loculus. Our last stop before NYC, where all our hope was lost—

The others—Dad, Cass, Aly, Torquin, and Canavar—are nowhere. The hotels and houses are gone, too. I’m wearing sandals and a robe. My mind goes from confusion to panic. Before me is an expanse of blackness, the contours of surrounding hills lit only by moonlight.

Bodrum is Halicarnassus. I am in another time. And my Jack thoughts are being crowded out of my head.

In rushes a flood of other, more distant memories. Of beauty and pain. Of deep-green forests and smooth blue lakes, happy laughing families, scholars teaching children, athletes wrestling deadly piglike vromaskis, sharp-clawed red griffins swooping overhead.

Of smoldering clouds and raging fires, blackened corpses and shrieking beasts.

Over my shoulder is a leather sack. Inside is a sphere. It looks like the Loculus of Healing, but I know it’s not. It is fake. I planned it this way. I am also heading in the wrong direction—away from the distant silhouette of the great half-finished structure in the distance. The Mausoleum.

I planned that part, too.

I hurry onward quickly, keeping the sea to my left.

I know now. I am Massarym. And I have a plan.

Not far ahead, maybe a half mile, is a hill. Trees and thick bushes. A team of mercenaries awaits there. They will take me to safety. After my plan is fulfilled.

I want to be found before I reach them. I must be found. The plan depends on this. My mind conjures up an image: the real Loculus, I see, is safe underground. Or so I hope.

I am scared. But I slow my steps, deepen my breaths.

When the explosion happens, I am barely prepared for the blast of light, the cloud of dirt like a giant fist. I stagger back. I fall to my knees.

Then the cloud begins to lift, and a tall, bearded man emerges. He wears a white, gilt-edged robe. Although his hair is gray, he stands straight, like a warrior, his shoulders thickly muscled. His body radiates power, but his face, which is familiar to me, is etched in sadness.

Part of me wants to run to him, to hug him. But those days are over. The lines have been drawn. He is my enemy now, because he is an enemy of the world.

“I am hoping you have come to your senses,” he says deeply, forcefully.

I am both comforted and repulsed by the sound of my father’s voice.

As the old man comes nearer, his robe snaps in the sea-thick wind. I see the hilt of his sword, his prized possession, jutting from its scabbard. But the scabbard’s leather is frayed and ragged looking. I know Father must not be happy about this indignity. Slowly I sidestep closer to the edge of the cliff. Below us, the waves crash against the shore.

“My senses,” I say in a voice with false confidence, a voice that isn’t my own, “have never been lost, Uhla’ar.”

The old man’s face softens slightly into a rueful smile. He holds out a powerful arm, his palm extended.

I step closer and then turn. With a swift, sure thrust, I toss the Loculus into the sea.

I watch the sphere turning and growing smaller in the dull light of the moon. My father’s eyes bulge. His mouth becomes a black hole.

As he dives into the raging churn below, his scream slices me like a dagger.







(#ulink_189f749b-196d-573f-9f01-bfdebf8f818d)


TWO DAYS.

That was how long it took the doctors to release Aly. I thought about the dream a lot during that time. But neither Cass nor I could figure out what it meant.

The more important thing was convincing Dad about our plan. He tried hard to act like we were happy beach-going tourists in la-la land, but we pounded him with logic and pleading, to no avail. I’m surprised he didn’t drop us both into the La Brea Tar Pits.

When Aly was released, we had a great reunion, on two levels. On the top floor of her house, Aly, Cass, and I pored over her research materials, trying to figure out where to get ourselves captured.

On the first floor, her mom and my dad were having lunch. And arguing. Well, okay, discussing.

“My dad doesn’t love the idea,” I said.

“He’s gone from ‘Are you out of your minds?’ to ‘Can we change the subject?’” Cass said.

“I think Mom is willing,” Aly said. “I told her this was the only way to keep me alive. She said she’d already seen me die and didn’t want it to happen again. Give her a chance. She can be very persuasive.” Her fingers clicked over the keyboard. “Okay, take a look at this.”






“Looks like Torquin on a bad hair day,” Cass said.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

“Stay with me,” Aly said. “I thought this was cheesy, too, but there was something about it. So I did a little digging around. And I found this.”

Now she was clicking away to another page:






I took a deep breath. “If it looks like a hoax and the experts say it’s a hoax …”

Aly clicked the back button and returned to the Routhouni website. “Take a look at the thing in the statue’s hand.”

She zoomed in to the image:






“A bowling ball?” Cass said.

Aly smacked him. “What if it’s a Loculus? Think about it. The Seven Wonders were built to protect the Loculi. When we found the Colossus, he tried to kill us. What if the statue of Zeus came to life, too?”

“So it went after somebody who tried to take its Loculus, stabbed him, then went back to being a statue?” Cass asked. “Who would try to take a Loculus? Who would even know what it was?”

“Another Select, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

“So Zeus the statue came to life and went after the thief,” Aly said. “He actually transformed into Zeus the god. And he chased the thief until he caught up to him. After killing the thief, Zeus turned back into a statue.”

Cass gave her a dubious smile. “Okay, that’s one possibility. What about the other Wonders?”

“Well, there’s the Lighthouse at Pharos,” she said, “but that’s in Alexandria, which is a big bustling city—too exposed. The Temple of Artemis is in a big tourist area—Ephesus, Turkey. We’ve been to the Pyramids, and we know the Massa cleared out of there. I think Zeus is our best shot. Look, the question is not Is this convincing? The question is Would the Massa think this is convincing? I’m betting yes. I’m betting they have this thing staked out.”

Before she finished the sentence, I could hear footsteps on the stairs.

We froze. Dad and Mrs. Black appeared in the doorway. Their faces were grim and drawn. Dad had his phone in his hand. I could practically read the no in their eyes.

I decided to talk first.

“January, August, April, July,” I said. “Those are the months Aly, Marco, Cass, and I turn fourteen. I know what you’re going to say, Dad. MGL is hard at work on a cure. But—”

“We had a setback at McKinley Genetics Lab,” Dad said. “Our team was developing a shutoff mechanism. But it doesn’t work. The gene mutates, Jack. When you attach anything to its receptors, they change shape. It’s like a beast that grows a new heart after you kill it.”

“That so totally sucks,” Cass said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

Dad sighed. “It means we’ll need six months of new research, maybe a year …”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “We don’t have that time.”

Aly’s mom ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “No, you don’t.”

Dad nodded. “We’re going back to the hotel. How long will it take you to be ready, Aly?”

“Five minutes!” Aly shot back. “Maybe four.”

Dad turned toward the door and said the words I hadn’t expected to hear. “Wheels up in one hour. Wherever you guys want to go.”







(#ulink_efbe8b6c-9a4f-57d1-af17-92a1cd5a8519)


LEAVING THE LOCULI at home was out of the question. Dad and I were both paranoid the Massa—or some snoop hired by Morty Reese—would break in and steal them. So we took them with us on Dad’s jet. For protection. We also packed flashlights and supplies in our packs and made sure our phones were charged.

The ride was bumpy. We argued for six hours about how to proceed. Aly was still thin and quiet from being sick. But by the time we reached the Kalamata International Airport, we had a plan. Cass, Aly, and I would grab a taxi. Alone. Bringing Dad with us, we decided, would make the Massa suspicious. Plus, it would do us no good if he wound up captured along with us.

So Dad and the Loculi stayed behind with the plane.

I was a nervous wreck. The taxi had no air-conditioning and there was a hole in the front passenger floor. Rocks spat up into the car from the road as we sped noisily across Greece. Soon the mountains of the Peloponnese rose up in the distance to our right, and Cass had a revelation. “Whoa,” he cried out, looking up from his phone. “The meaning of Routhouni is ‘nostril’!”

“Is geography!” our driver said. (Everything he said seemed to come with an exclamation point.) “Just north of Routhouni is long mountain with—how do you say? Ridge! To Ancient Greeks, this looks like straight nose! Greek nose! Strong! At bottom is two valleys—round valleys! Is like, you know … thio Routhounia … two nostrils!”

“And thus,” Cass announced, “Routhouni picked its name.”

“Cass, please …” Aly said.

Cass began narrating like a TV host. “Our car develops a moist coating as it enters the rim of the Routhouni. It is said that the people here are a bit snotty, tough around the edges but soft at the core.”

“Ha! Is funny boy!” the driver exclaimed.

Cass gestured grandly out the window. “Exotic giant black hairs, waving upward from the ground and dotted with festive greenish globs, greet visiting tourists as they plunge upward into the—”

“Ew, Cass—just ew!” Aly said. “Can we leave him by the side of the road?”

On the outskirts of town, goats roamed in vast, sparse fields. Old men in ragged coats stared at us, their backs bent and their hands clinging to gnarled wooden canes. Black-clad old ladies sat knitting in front of rickety shacks, and a donkey ignored our driver’s horn, just staring at us in the middle of the street. I felt strangely paranoid. I clutched the backpack tightly.

As we drove slowly through a flock of squawking chickens, I read the English section of a big, multilingual road sign:

YOU ARE APROCHING ROUTHOUNI

THE PRID OF THE PELOPONNESE!!!

“Prid?” Cass said.

“I think they mean ‘pride,’” Aly answered.

Where on earth were we?

“Maybe we should have brought Dad along,” I said. “This is pretty remote.”

“We want the Massa to think we’re alone,” Aly said. “That was the plan. If we need to, we can call him.”

I nodded. Dad had promised to hire a chopper if necessary, if anything were to go wrong. Which seemed weird, considering that “going right” meant being captured.

I tried to imagine Brother Dimitrios and his gang actually traveling to this place. I couldn’t imagine anyone in his right mind traveling here.

We rounded a bend, following a narrow alley lined with whitewashed buildings. The car began swerving around potholes, bouncing like crazy. “Who paved this road,” Aly grumbled, “Plato?”

“Is funny girl!” the driver barked.

He slowed to ten kilometers an hour as we crept toward the town center. I knew we were getting close by the sound of Greek music and the smell of fried food. Soon the dark, tiny street opened up into a big cobblestoned circular plaza surrounded by storefronts. We paid the driver and got out. I don’t know what they were cooking, but I had to swallow back a mouthful of drool.

Did I say I was starving?

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten in five hours.

Most of the shops were shuttering for the evening, but the cafés and restaurants were jumping. People strolled across the plaza, slowly and aimlessly, arm in arm. Kids chased each other and played catch. In the restaurants, stray cats wove around people’s legs, looking for scraps, while entertainers in flowing costumes sang and played tambourines, guitars, and strange instruments that sounded like oboes. Old men sat silently outside the cafés at backgammon tables, sipping coffee and amber-colored drinks. An outdoor bar called America!! had two huge flat-screen TVs, one blaring a soccer game in Greek and the other an old rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond in English.

In the center was Zeus.

Or something Zeus-ish.

The statue glowered over the surroundings like a creepy, unwanted party guest. No one seemed to be paying it much notice. Its face and shoulders were peeling and pockmarked, like it had a skin disease. Its eyes were pointed in the direction of a flat-screen TV. Over time the eyeballs had eroded, so it looked like a grown-up Child of the Corn. In its raised hand was a big soccer ball–like thing, but I could barely see it under a dense crowd of birds.

“Behold, the Loculus of Pigeon Droppings,” Cass mumbled, as we slowly walked around the plaza. “Held aloft by Zeus, God of Couch Potatoes, now approaching his record two millionth consecutive hour of TV viewing.”

“Can’t you be serious for once?” Aly hissed.

I could feel the curious eyes of the café-dwelling old men. One of the musicians moved toward us through the crowd—a girl about our age, maybe a little older. The hem of her skirt was raggedy, but the fabric was a rich patchwork of reds, purples, and blues, spangled with bright baubles. Her ankles and wrists jangled with bracelets. As she caught my eye, she smiled and then said, “Deutsch? Svenska? Eenglees?”

“Uh, English,” I said. “American. No money. Sorry.”

One of the café waiters came running toward us, shouting at the beggar girl to chase her away. As she ran off, he gestured toward the café. “Come! Eat! Fish! Music! I give you good price!”

Now customers and coffee sippers were staring at the commotion. “This is bad,” I whispered. “We don’t want to attract public attention. This is not how you stage an abduction. Kidnappers need quiet.”

“Don’t look now,” Cass said, “but they’re here. Other side of the plaza. We’re six o’clock, they’re twelve. Just to the left of the big TV!”

The TV was no longer playing Everybody Loves Raymond but an old black-and-white episode of I Love Lucy. Sitting at a small round table were four men in brown monk robes.

The Massarene.

I couldn’t tell if they were the exact same goons who’d tried to kill us in Rhodes. We were too far away. Those pious robes hid a gang of thugs who would shoot at thirteen-year-old kids from helicopters.

“What do we do?” Aly asked.

“They tried to murder us once already!” Cass said.

“That was before the Massa knew who we were,” I said. “Remember, they need us.”

“So we just walk up to their tables?” Cass asked. “Like, ‘Yia sou, dudes! Can we offer you some baklava for dessert, or maybe a kidnapping?’”





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