“I feel like gnicnad,” he groaned.
Aly shot me a smile. Cass, we knew, was going to be fine.
“I brought you some clothes,” I said, laying out a T-shirt, pair of shorts, underwear, and flip-flops I’d bought in town. “Greek sizes. I hope they fit.”
“Anything’s better than what I had,” Cass said. “It was embarrassing flying over the KI in Simpsons boxers.”
Aly looked around. “Where’s Marco?” she asked.
“Was Marco here?” Cass asked.
“Marco brought you here,” I said. “With the Loculus. And now we have to go. Torquin’s waiting outside.”
I stood and glanced around the room. The only sign of Marco was a plate with chocolate crumbs and three candy wrappers. I figured he was out getting a soda or something.
“Jack?” Aly said. “Where’s the Loculus?”
My body stiffened.
I looked under the bed. I pulled open every drawer. I checked the bathroom.
No Loculus.
“What are you guys talking about?” Cass demanded. “We have a Loculus?”
As Aly explained what had happened, I sank onto the bed. Marco’s words were spinning in my head. How do you know I won’t take it for a spin back to Ohio?
Could he have done it?
Marco the Immortal…the Kid Who Faced Down Death…
“Jack…?” Aly said. She and Cass were both staring at me now.
“Marco thinks he’s okay,” I replied. “Immortal. He doesn’t believe what Bhegad said about the finger prick. He isn’t scared about missing the treatments anymore.”
“You think he…?” Aly said.
“Gamed us,” I said, staring out the window into the blue Greek sky. “Yes.”
“I don’t believe it, Jack,” Aly said. “What if he just decided to fly back to the Karai Institute on his own? To race us. That’s his style.”
“How would he know where the island is, Aly?” I asked. “Even Cass couldn’t find it.”
“Maybe I could,” Cass said. He sat up, the washcloth falling from his head. “Oww.”
“Get dressed, brother Cass,” I said softly. “We have a long ride back.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
SOLDIER, SAILOR, TINKER, TAILOR
“HE’S WHAT?” PROFESSOR Bhegad was ashen in his wheelchair. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. Tired and sweaty, I stared at the tarmac.
“Gone,” I said. “With the Loculus.”
“Why did no one tell me?” Bhegad demanded. “Why the radio silence until now?”
Torquin glanced guiltily away. “Technical difficulties.”
“Our difficulties have just begun. All of us.” Bhegad spun around and began wheeling himself back toward the campus, ignoring the hospital orderlies who scurried along on either side of him. “Come.”
“We’re…glad you’re feeling better, Professor,” Aly offered weakly.
Bhegad looked over his shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “And I’m glad Cass is alive and well. How are you feeling, my boy?”
“Peachy,” Cass said with a weak smile.
“Good,” Bhegad snapped back, “because I am going to need all your brainpower to track down Marco. If he is indeed headed home, it could destroy us. It could undo centuries of work.”
“This is my fault,” I blurted out. “I lost Marco. It was my plan to leave him in the hotel room while we went to get Torquin out of—”
“HRRRMMMM!” Torquin belched.
“I’m the wrong guy for this,” I barreled on. “You picked someone who had no talents, Professor Bhegad. I don’t deserve to be here, because I can’t contribute like the others. I will volunteer to go find Marco. If I miss a treatment and drop dead, what’s the difference? I’m no help here, anyway. I only mess things up—”
Professor Bhegad stopped short and stared at me coldly. “Do you really believe that?” he asked.
“That’s ridiculous!” Aly said, stepping in front of me. “You were the one who brought the Loculus to life, Jack. And you rescued Cass. And defeated both the griffin and the Colossus. You gave me good advice—which I didn’t follow. And whenever the rest of us couldn’t figure out what to do, you were the one who made a plan.”
Bhegad sighed. His eyes softened. “You know, here at the KI we have nicknames for you four. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Marco was—is—the Soldier, the bravest and most fit. Cass is the Sailor, who can navigate in a blind fog. Aly is the Tinker, the one who can understand how anything works and fix it.”
“And I’m…the Tailor?” I asked. “I sew?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Bhegad said. “You, Jack, are the one who puts it all together.”
I laughed. But when I looked up, no one was laughing with me.
My headache was coming on strong. I needed sleep badly. The sky was pitch-black but I had no idea what time it was.
Cass. “What time is it?” I blurted out. “Cass is due for his treatment!”
“Yes, we know. It’s ten forty-five,” Professor Bhegad said calmly. He glanced up at the orderlies. “Please take the young man to the hospital. And make sure he gets to bed immediately afterward. We need him, rested and ready.”
Aly and I gave Cass a hug. “Thank you,” he said softly to me. “You are my oreh.”
As the workers escorted him away, Bhegad began to wheel himself back toward his cottage. “As for you two, I trust you slept on the plane,” he said as we followed along. “Because I expect you in my office in a half hour for a planning session. So change, shower, do what you need to do. We must find your friend immediately and bring him back before he’s done any damage.”
“And if he has?” Aly asked fearfully.
“Eliminate,” Torquin growled.
We stopped. As Torquin padded after the professor, the old man didn’t say a word.
Aly crumpled to a small bench against the airport building.
I couldn’t look at her. My blood was running cold.
Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Tailor.
The night was cloudless and moonless. Stars spread across the sky like spattered blood. My thoughts raced. Somewhere up there, I knew, was Marco.
I scanned the horizon, looking.
CREDITS
Cover illustration © 2013 by Torstein Norstrand
Cover design by Joe Merkel
COPYRIGHT
SEVEN WONDERS BOOK 1: THE COLOSSUS RISES
Copyright © 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers
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 ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 ebooks.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lerangis, Peter.
The colossus rises / Peter Lerangis. — 1st ed.
p. cm.—(Seven wonders ; bk. 1)
Summary: Teens Jack, Marco, Aly, and Cass begin a quest to find seven pieces of Atlantis’s power that were hidden long ago and that will, if returned to Atlantis, save them from certain death due to the genetic abnormality that also gives them superior abilities.
ISBN 978-0-06-207040-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-06-224939-5 (international edition)
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Ability—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Atlantis (Legendary place)—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L558Col 2013
2012025334
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
* * *
12 13 14 15 16 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
r /> FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition © January 2013 ISBN 9780062070425
Dedication
FOR MY AMAZING FRIENDS AT THE NATIONAL BOOK STORE AND MPH, AND THE GREAT READERS THEY SERVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD.
Map
The Beast in Battle
Contents
Dedication
Map
Chapter One - Death. Toast.
Chapter Two - “The Mistake”
Chapter Three - Incident in Ohio
Chapter Four - Egarim
Chapter Five - Together, We Fell into Darkness
Chapter Six - Peaceful
Chapter Seven - Fresh and Dewy
Chapter Eight - It’s Aliii-ive!
Chapter Nine - A Question of Time
Chapter Ten - Arabic or Aramaic?
Chapter Eleven - Matter and Antimatter
Chapter Twelve - Deep Doodoo
Chapter Thirteen - Pure Awesome
Chapter Fourteen - Later, Gladiator
Chapter Fifteen - Calculations
Chapter Sixteen - The Dream
Chapter Seventeen - The Test
Chapter Eighteen - The Darkness
Chapter Nineteen - Cooperation
Chapter Twenty - A Tangle of Fangs
Chapter Twenty-One - Heroes
Chapter Twenty-Two - If Only . . .
Chapter Twenty-Three - To the Garden
Chapter Twenty-Four - The Torch and the Vizzeet
Chapter Twenty-Five - Lambda
Chapter Twenty-Six - The Number Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Echoes of Nothing
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Invisible Bars
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Kranag
Chapter Thirty - Traps!
Chapter Thirty-One - Now you See It
Chapter Thirty-Two - A Whip of Blackness
Chapter Thirty-Three - In the Shadows
Chapter Thirty-Four - Again
Chapter Thirty-Five - Lazarus Rises
Chapter Thirty-Six - Pineapple and Grasshopper
Chapter Thirty-Seven - The lethargic Lizard
Chapter Thirty-Eight - Back in Babylon
Chapter Thirty-Nine - His Jackness
Chapter Forty - Missiles of Spit
Chapter Forty-One - Falling Back
Chapter Forty-Two - The Mark
Chapter Forty-Three - The Betrayal
Chapter Forty-Four - You Have to Leave
Chapter Forty-Five - An Explanation of Sorts
Chapter Forty-Six - Headquarters
Chapter Forty-Seven - Resurrection
Chapter Forty-Eight - Fragments
Chapter Forty-Nine - The Beast-Tamer
Chapter Fifty - A Killing Company
Chapter Fifty-One - The Phone
Chapter Fifty-Two - Hack Attack
Chapter Fifty-Three - The Exit at the End of the Hall
Chapter Fifty-Four - Deafening Silence
Chapter Fifty-Five - Push Harder
Chapter Fifty-Six - Mustaches Everywhere
Chapter Fifty-Seven - The Chilling
Credits
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
DEATH. TOAST.
BY THE THIRD day back from Greece, I no longer smelled of griffin drool. But I still had bruises caused by a bad-tempered bronze statue, a peeling sunburn from a trip around the Mediterranean on a flying ball, and a time bomb inside my body.
And now I was speeding through the jungle in a Jeep next to a three-hundred-pound giant who took great joy in driving into potholes.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Torquin!” I shouted as my head hit the ceiling.
“Eyes in face, not on road,” replied Torquin.
In the backseat, Aly Black and Cass Williams cried out in pain. But we all knew we had to hang on. Time was short.
We had to find Marco.
Oh, about that time bomb. It’s not an actual physical explosive. I have this gene that basically cuts off a person’s life at age fourteen. It’s called G7W and all of us have it—not only me but Marco Ramsay, Aly, and Cass. Fortunately there’s a cure. Unfortunately it has seven ingredients that are almost impossible to find. And Marco had flown off with the first one.
Which was why we were stuck in that sweaty Jeep on a crazy rescue mission.
“This ride is bad enough. Don’t pick the skin off your face, Jack!” said Aly from the backseat. “It’s disgusting!” She pushed aside a lock of pink hair from her forehead. I don’t know where she gets hair dye on this crazy island, but one of these days I’ll ask her. Cass sat next to her, his eyes closed and his head resting against the seat back. His hair is normally curly and brown, but today it looked like squid-ink spaghetti, all blackened and stringy.
Cass had had a much worse time with the griffin than any of us.
I stared at the shred of skin between my fingers. I hadn’t even known I was picking it. “Sorry.”
“Frame it,” Torquin said distractedly.
His eyes were trained on a dashboard GPS device that showed a map of the Atlantic Ocean. Across the top were the words RAMSAY TRACKER. Under it, no signal at all. Zip. We each had a tracker surgically implanted inside us, but Marco’s was broken.
“Wait. Frame a piece of sunburned skin?” asked Aly.
“Collect. Make collage.” If I didn’t know Torquin, I would think he had misunderstood Aly’s question. I mean, the four of us kids are misfits, but Torquin is in a class by himself. He’s about seven and a half feet tall in bare feet. And he is always in bare feet. (Honestly, no shoe could possibly contain those two whoppers.) What he lacks in conversation skills he makes up for in weirdness. “I give you some of mine. Remind me.”
Aly’s face grew practically ash white. “Remind me not to remind you.”
“I wish I only had a sunburn,” Cass moaned.
“You don’t have to come with us this time, you know,” Aly said.
Cass frowned without opening his eyes. “I’m a little tired, but I had my treatment and it worked. We have to find Marco. We’re a family.”
Aly and I exchanged a glance. Cass had been flown across an ocean by a griffin, who then prepped him for lunch. Plus he was recovering from a so-called treatment, and that wasn’t easy.
We’d all had treatments. We needed them to survive. They held off our symptoms temporarily so we can go on this crazy quest to find a permanent cure. In fact, the Karai Institute’s first job is to help us cope with the effects of the G7W.
Not to brag or anything, but having G7W means you’re descended from the royal family of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis. Which is probably the coolest thing about incredibly ordinary, shockingly talent-free me, aka Jack McKinley. On the positive side, G7W takes the things you’re already good at—like sports for Marco, computer geekiness for Aly, and photographic memory for Cass—and turns those qualities into superpowers.
On the negative side, the cure involves finding the stolen Loculi of Atlantis, which were hidden centuries ago in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
And if that wasn’t hard enough: six of those Wonders don’t exist anymore.
A Loculus, by the way, is a fancy Atlantean word for “orb with cool magic power.” And we did find one. The story involves a hole in time and space (which I made by accident), a griffin (disgusting half eagle, half lion that came through the hole), a trip to Rhodes (where said griffin tried to lunch on Cass), some crazy monks (Greek), and the Colossus of Rhodes (which came to life and tried to kill us). There’s more to it, but all you need to know is that I was the one who let the griffin through, so the whole thing was basically my fault.
“Hey . . .” Aly said, looking at me through squinty eyes.
I turned away. “Hey what?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Jack,” she said. “And stop it. You are not responsible for what happened to Cass.”
Honestly, I think that girl reads minds as a hobby.
“Torquin responsible!” Torquin bellowed. He pounde
d the steering wheel, which made the whole vehicle jump into the air like a rusty, oil-leaking wallaby. “Got arrested. Left you alone. Could not help Cass. Could not stop Marco from flying away with Loculus. Arrrrgh!”
Cass moaned again. “Oh, my neelps.”
“Um, Torquin?” Aly said. “Easy on the steering wheel, okay?”
“What is neelps?” Torquin asked.
“Spleen,” I explained. “You have to spell it backward.”
Luckily the Jeep reached the end of the winding jungle path and burst onto the tarmac of a small landing field. We were finally at our destination. Before us, gleaming on the pavement, was a sleek, retrofitted military stealth jet.
Torquin braked the Jeep to a squealing stop, doing a perfect one-eighty. Two people were inspecting the plane. One of them was a pony-tailed guy with half-glasses. The other was a girl with tats and black lip gloss, who looked a little like my last au pair, Vanessa, only deader. I vaguely remembered meeting both of these people in our cafeteria, the Comestibule.
“Elddif,” Cass said groggily. “Anavrin . . .”
The girl looked alarmed. “He’s lost the ability to speak English?”
“No, he’s speaking his favorite language,” Aly replied. “Backwardish. It’s a form of English. That’s how we know he’s feeling better.”
“Those two people . . .” Cass muttered. “Those are their names.”
I sounded out the words in my head, imagined their spelling, and then mentally rearranged the letters back to front. “I think he means Fiddle and Nirvana.”
“Ah.” Fiddle looked toward us with a tight smile. “I have been rushing this baby into service. Her name is Slippy, she’s my pride and joy, and she will hit Mach three if you push her.”
Nirvana drummed her long, black-painted nails on the jet’s wall. “A vessel that breaks the sound barrier deserves a great sound system. I loaded it up with mp3s.”
Fiddle pulled her hand away. “Please. It’s a new paint job.”
“Sorry, Picasso,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s some slasher rock . . . emo . . . techno . . . death metal. Hey, since you’re going back to the States, might as well play the tunes that remind you of home.”