They were kneeling next to us in seconds. “We need a lever,” Marco said, running into the woods.
He came back with a boulder about two feet high and dropped it near the widest part of the crack. Then he took the machete from where I’d set it down and jammed the tip into the crack. Resting the center of the blade on the rock, he pressed down hard on the hilt.
The stone started to lift. Marco’s face was red with the effort. Inside the crack was a black hole. “Almost there!” I said.
“Geeeeyaaahh!” Marco grunted. The stone slid off, thudding to the ground.
With a pinging snap, the machete broke, sending the top half of the blade flying over the cliff.
Cass grimaced. “We may find some shish-kebabed toucan on the way down.”
The removed corner of the tub revealed a big hole inside the rock. I pulled a flashlight out of my pack and shone it inside. The hole was thickly fretted with cobwebs, which Aly quickly pulled out. A family of small spiders and one big tarantula scurried over the edge. Cass recoiled with a choked scream.
At the bottom of the hole, covered with dirt, was another small section of rock. My heart began to beat loudly. I reached down and picked it up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ATTACK
“WHAT DOES THIS mean?” Aly asked.
“No idea,” I replied.
“Numbers,” Marco said, scratching his head. “Very dangerous.”
I looked at Cass. His face was bone white. He was looking over my shoulder. “What is it?” I asked.
“Sssh,” Cass hissed.
And then I heard it. A rustling in the bushes among the evergreens. I slipped the rock into my pants pocket.
“Torquin,” Marco whispered. “Let’s surprise him. You guys hide behind the tower. I’ll climb as high as I can go and see if I can figure out exactly where he is.”
He bounded onto the big cement platform that supported the old tower. Cass, Aly, and I ducked behind it.
In about twenty seconds, Marco was up and then back down the metal struts of the tower. “It’s not Torquin,” he whispered. “It’s shorter. And nastier looking. And four-footed.”
I glanced around, in case we needed to bolt. If something came out of the jungle, we had a lot of room to run—but I had no idea which sections of the plateau would be safest to climb down.
Marco jumped off the platform. “Listen up—you’re going to rappel down, all of you. Here’s how: You anchor the rope, tie it around your harness, and lock it into the belay mechanism. When you step over the edge, get your body perpendicular to the rock. That’s the hardest part. Remember. Perpendicular. Once you do that, you’re golden. You walk down, letting out slack as you need it. That’s it. You won’t fall. Got that?”
The command had barely left his mouth when a speeding gray blur erupted from the bushes. It was all sinew and flash, a red-eyed ball of muscle with a wrinkled snout. It let out a gravelly roar, flashing ivory saber teeth that looked like they could slice an elephant to shreds.
A hose-beaked vromaski.
“Marco, look out!” I shouted.
The giant predator leaped. Marco spun away with lightning reflexes, and the beast missed him by inches and crashed to the ground with a grunt. “Run!” Marco yelled, racing for the broken hilt of the machete.
The beast scrambled to its feet and attacked again as Marco grabbed what was left of our machete—the hilt and a jagged section of blade. Marco rolled away as the beast leapt. He thrust the weapon up, impaling the vromaski’s side in midair. It let out a shriek like the scratching of glass on slate.
Aly and Cass were already running for the anchored rope. “He nailed it!” I shouted, bolting after them. I nearly tripped over a rock. The wind decided then to gust, blowing dirt and branches across the plain. I heard footfalls behind me, and Marco shot by.
The vromaski was still alive. The knife in its side only made it angrier. It had managed to shake the weapon loose, and the broken machete now lay in a pool of dark-green fluid.
At a dead sprint, Marco scooped up a branch. He looked around desperately, spotting the rock near my feet.
“Throw me that rock, Jack!” he shouted, drawing the branch back like a baseball bat. “Right down the middle!”
I tossed the rock and ducked. I heard the stick make contact and the rock whistle into the air.
It shot toward the beast and hit it square in its drooping nose. With a howl, the vromaski fell to the ground. “Now go!” Marco shouted.
Cass was frozen at the top of the cliff. “I—I can’t,” he said.
“We’re going to be killed!” Aly said.
Cass looked down again. “I—I—” His mouth froze silently. Aly and I looked at each other. In a split second, I realized this was not going to work. Cass was panicked. His body had locked down.
Trying to rappel down was one thing—doing it while carrying Cass would be suicidal.
Marco and the vromaski were near the edge of the pines. He was outleaping the beast, zigging when it zagged. Its nose was a bloody mess. It roared with fury.
I glanced back over the plateau. Our only hope was to run for the far end. The plateau dropped off, but maybe we’d find a footpath. An easier way to get to the bottom. “Go that way!” I said, pointing down the expanse of barren rock. “See if we can climb down!”
Aly urged Cass along. He began to run. I watched them for a moment, hanging back to help Marco. He had dropped his stick on the ground, and I picked it up. “Marco, here!” I shouted, throwing it toward him.
Marco grabbed it in the air, just as the vromaski pounced. In one quick move, he turned and stabbed the jagged edge of the stick into the monster’s eye.
It wailed horribly, writhing on the ground, then wailed again as he pulled the stick out.
“Come on!” I said. “Follow Aly and Cass!”
Marco began to run. With one hand he held the dripping stick, with the other he pulled me along. My feet were moving faster than they ever had in my life.
Aly and Cass raced to the end of the plateau and stopped short. I prayed that they would start walking down, and we could follow them into a wooded path, where we could lose the vromaski. But instead they turned toward us, their eyes wide and frightened. They began waving their hands frantically. “No! Stop!” Aly said.
Marco and I reached them at the same time. We put on the brakes. Below us yawned a deep, bottomless blackness—a crater.
Mount Onyx was a volcano, and we had reached the center.
Marco turned, the stick still in his hand. His teeth were bared.
The beast was dazed and limping. Green blood poured from its mouth as it stalked us, its eyes flashing red. Even at a distance it smelled like rotting flesh. Exactly like in my dream.
Marco backpedaled. He was a few feet from the ridge’s edge now. “Scatter to the sides,” he shouted. “We’re safer if we’re farther apart. Go as far away as you can!”
The vromaski coiled itself, holding still. Then, springing with its last ounce of strength, it hurtled toward Marco like a rocket. Its mouth widened, its teeth glinting in the sun, stained green.
Marco held the stick in front of him. Then, with a sudden motion, he stepped aside.
The beast’s teeth closed around the wood—and Marco’s wrist. With a sharp crack, the stick snapped. Marco bellowed in pain.
The animal’s momentum carried it over the edge of the volcano. The wood went with it.
And so did Marco.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
INTO THE ABYSS
“NO-O-O-O!”
I watched the two figures falling, weightless, like rag dolls. I couldn’t breathe.
The thing about horror—real-life horror, not the kind you see in movies—is that it is so silent. No screaming sound track, no fancy camera angles. Just two bodies vanishing into the shadows. Gravity doing its work.
And then it hits you. Rips into your soul.
Aly leaned forward, screaming, reaching with her arms as if s
he could wave him back up. Cass froze and then began rocking back and forth, staring at the dirt. “This didn’t happen, this didn’t happen, this didn’t happen…”
I turned away and looked back, staring into the abyss. I don’t know why. Maybe I was hoping to see him. Hoping these horrible few minutes, like the vromaski itself, were part of a dream.
But Marco was gone.
He had told us to scatter. He had faced the beast alone. He had taken one for the team.
Marco, the slacker jock. The show-off. The goofball.
He had given his life. For us.
I leaned over, my head in my hands. Tears ran down my cheeks and dropped onto the sandy crags below. A cry welled up from my gut, echoing into the chasm. “Marco…”
But all that came back was a hot, dry wind.
“He was attacked by a what?” Bhegad looked at us as if we were speaking in Gaelic.
We were gathered in his cramped office, on the second floor of the lab building. The windows were grimy, the walls a dingy shade of beige. At least seven stacks of files rose against the wall, joining at the top into one solid phalanx of paper that nearly touched the ceiling. Newspapers were stacked on the other side, paper clips marking pages that were yellowed with age. An old metal fan jutted out from where it had fallen, stuck between a file cabinet and a wall. The blades were so dusty they seemed to be made of gray felt.
Aly and I were standing. I’d given Cass the only available seat, a butt-high pile of magazines topped with New England Journal of Medicine, July 23, 1979.
“He’s dead, Professor Bhegad!” Aly said. “That’s what matters. You didn’t tell us that…thing would be there! It was a vromaski—a real one. Saber teeth, horrible snout. Just the way I dreamed it. How did that happen, Professor? What aren’t you telling us?”
“I didn’t know.” Bhegad was wiping off his glasses. His eyes were red, his skin flushed. “There are no animals at the top of the volcano. It is barren there.”
“Barren?” I exploded. “Tell Marco he was killed by an imaginary animal!”
“We didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye,” Cass said.
Aly shook her head in despair. “Or thank him.”
“But…how did you get here?” Bhegad asked. “How on earth were you able to get back down so quickly?”
“Because he told us how,” I snapped. “He explained how to rappel down the mountain while the animal was attacking him.”
“Extraordinary…” Bhegad leaned heavily forward on his elbows. A pile of papers shifted, sending a small alarm clock to the floor. “…Pushing the physical envelope under attack. Teaching…imparting skills. Fantastic.”
“One of us dies and you call it fantastic?” I shot back.
“That is really cold, Professor,” Cass said.
“Oh my, I meant that only as a—a tribute to this extraordinary young man,” Bhegad said, rummaging through his desk. “Tragic, tragic.”
I hated his response. After what had just happened, I detested everything about the Karai Institute. Bhegad had made it seem like they cared. Like their biggest concern was our lives. Like G7W and possible superpowers were these great gifts from them to us.
They didn’t care about Marco. Marco’s death was another way to gather information. His murder was a new data point.
Well, I didn’t care about them anymore. Or my supposed salvation.
The institute wasn’t the reason I was alive right now. Not the operation or the treatment. Or the fact that I happened to be born with some fatal but magical gene marker. My life could have ended with the snap of a jaw. I was alive because of a friend’s sacrifice. No matter how many more years I had left, I would have to live with that.
“We have to find his body,” Cass said. “Send us down there with Torquin in his helicopter.”
“I daresay Torquin is still on his way back,” Bhegad said. “He radioed me. After he lost you on the mountain, he turned back. He thought you’d fallen asleep or some such. By the time he reached the top of Mount Onyx, it was long after you’d…left. And, my boy, we can’t send a chopper into the caldera. We’ve tried it before. The volcano has been dormant for thousands of years, but still, there are strange updrafts that will knock a helicopter into the side walls.”
“Then we’ll go by foot,” I said. “I’m with Cass. We can’t just leave him there.”
“Jack, the idea is sheer folly,” Professor Bhegad said. “We have no tunneling equipment.”
“There is a way into the volcano.” I pulled the second half of the rock from my pocket. “We found what we were looking for, Professor Bhegad. The second part of Wenders’s message was on Mount Onyx. It talks about an entrance.”
Bhegad peered at the stone. “Random numbers…I fear this is the writing of a madman.”
“The first part of the code made sense,” Aly pointed out. “What makes you think this doesn’t? All these years studying the island, and you have no idea what Wenders was talking about?”
He sank back into his chair, wrapped in thought. “A hundred years ago, a subgroup of Scholars—the Onyxians—hypothesized the center of Atlantis was inside the caldera. There is a mythology of a labyrinth, you know. A maze. Modern theorists know that this is unlikely within the sides of a volcano. The maze must refer to the winding paths of the castle itself, which is certainly underwater. But I will ask a team to investigate—”
“If anybody goes to try to find our friend,” I said, “we’re going with them.”
As he reached for the phone, Bhegad shook his head. “Absolutely not. I sent you on a simple hike and you turned it into an alpine rock climb. You separated from Torquin and lost one of your closest friends. One of the Select. I plan to place you under the strictest house supervision!”
He shot us all an accusing glance, picked up the phone, and pounded a number. “Torquin? You are to assemble a search team, pronto. It will include you, me, and your three best people.”
A tear made its way down Aly’s cheek. Cass put his arm around her. As Bhegad moved to hang up the phone, Aly let out a sniffle.
“Now get out of here!” the professor shouted. But his voice had lost its bite and his glasses were fogging up.
None of us moved.
Bhegad’s eyes flickered briefly and he coughed. Yanking the phone back to his ear, he barked, “And, Torquin…you will include the three remaining Select…No, you do not have a say in this. And, no, Torquin, I do not believe they need to be taught a lesson. I will see you in a half hour, or I will force you to work for a full month straight…in shoes.”
I grinned. He wasn’t such a lizard after all.
“Thank you…” Aly said.
Professor Bhegad put the phone down and hung his head. He flipped through a messy leather datebook and ran his fingers along today’s date. “Don’t thank me yet. We can’t start this until break of day tomorrow. And at midnight the day after that, Cass is due for his next treatment.” He looked at Cass. “I cannot send you, my boy.”
The color drained from Cass’s face. “But that’s two whole days!” he protested. “We’ll be back in time.”
“Professor Bhegad, even your best people are no match for Cass’s sense of direction,” I said. “We can set a limit. If we don’t reach the center by a certain time, one of the team can take Cass back.”
“No to that,” Bhegad said, drumming his fingers on his desk. “I have responsibilities.”
“Marco used to call me brother Jack,” I said. “It annoyed me. I teased him about it. Told him it made me sound like a monk. But now I understand. He really did see me—and Aly and Cass—as his family.”
Cass nodded. “We have a responsibility, too, Professor. To our brother.”
“To your—but that makes no—” Bhegad sat wearily in his chair, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. His brow was knotted in a way that broadcast no, but his eyes were soft. “May the power of Atlantis,” he finally said, “be always with you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
<
br /> THE DREAM CHANGES
The dream again.
The fire.
The beasts of air and land, in their panic, are a tangle of torsos and teeth. They’re all around me, slithering, swooping, skittering. They fear the inevitable.
The end of all that’s known.
A voice calls, as it always does in the scene: Run! RUN!
But this time I see a new person. Silent. Still. Someone I believe I know.
WHO ARE YOU?
I move closer but the face is shrouded, the features blurred as if seen through a dirty lens.
I’m tempted to run away, but I don’t. I know where running leads. To the hole. To death.
I know I can no longer fear.
So I turn to the center of the destruction, where smoke billows blackly. Its tendrils shoot toward me, twining around my neck like curled fingers. It is at one moment sweet smelling, the next sharp and acrid. But I keep walking until I see the shaft rising from the center of the circle. It glows brightly, beckoning somehow.
Around the shaft is a circle of light. Spinning. There are objects embedded in the circle, and I must take them.
The smoke is clearing and I know I must work fast. I kneel to the circle, fighting indecision. Driving out the demons inside. What I will do—must do—defies all that I have ever stood for.
The fire rages, coming closer, licking the edges of the valley. I reach through the smoke to grab what I need.
But what I see instead is a head.
Marco’s head.
It’s laughing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IF MISERY BE THINE
“JACK, I THINK I know how to get us through it,” Cass said, panting as he struggled to keep up with the search team.
The sun blazed with a special fierceness that morning, and it was hard to keep up a conversation. “Through what?” I asked.
“The ezam,” he said.
“Beg your pardon?” came Professor Bhegad’s voice from behind us.