Going back.
I tried to stop shaking. People back home would be looking for us 24/7—families, police, government. Home meant detection. Re-capture. Not returning to the island. Not having treatments. Not having time to collect the cure. Death.
But without Marco’s Loculus, we were toast.
Death. Toast. The story of our lives.
But with no signal from Marco, what else could we do? Searching for him at his home just seemed like the best guess.
As we stepped out of the Jeep, Torquin let loose a burp that made the ground rumble.
“Four point five on the Richter scale,” said Nirvana. “Impressive.”
“Are you sure you want to do this, guys?” Fiddle asked.
“Have to,” Torquin said. “Orders from Professor Bhegad.”
“Wh-why do you ask?” Cass said to Fiddle.
He shrugged. “You guys each have a tracker surgically implanted inside you, right?”
Cass looked at him warily. “Right. But Marco’s is busted.”
“I helped design the tracker,” Fiddle said. “It’s state of the art. Unbustable. Doesn’t it seem weird to you that his stopped working—just coincidentally, after he disappeared?”
“What are you implying?” I asked.
Aly stepped toward him. “There’s no such thing as unbustable. You guys designed a faulty machine.”
“Prove it,” Fiddle said.
“Did you know the tracker signal is vulnerable to trace radiation from four elements?” Aly asked.
Fiddle scoffed. “Such as?”
“Iridium, for one,” Aly said. “Stops the transmissions cold.”
“So what?” Fiddle says. “Do you know how rare iridium is?”
“I can pinpoint more flaws,” Aly said. “Admit it. You messed up.”
Nirvana pumped a pale fist in the air. “You go, girl.”
Fiddle dusted a clod of dirt off the stepladder. “Have fun in Ohio,” he said. “But don’t expect me at your funeral.”
CHAPTER TWO
“THE MISTAKE”
“I SET YOUR dog on fire and wipe the floor with rags made of the memories of everything I ever did with yooooouu . . . !”
As Nirvana’s mix blared over the speaker, Torquin’s lips curled into a shape resembling an upside-down horseshoe. “Not music. Noise.”
Actually, I kind of liked it. Okay, I left out some of the choice words in the quote above, but still. It was funny in a messed-up way. The tune was taking my mind off the fact that I was a gazillion feet over the Atlantic, the plane’s speed was pushing me back into my seat, and my stomach was about to explode out my mouth.
I looked at Aly. Her skin was flattening back over her cheekbones as if it were being kneaded by fingers. I couldn’t help cracking up.
Aly’s eyes shone with panic. “What’s so funny?”
“You look about ninety-five years old,” I replied.
“You sound about five,” she said. “After this is over, remind me to teach you some social skills.”
Glurp.
I turned away, awash in dorkitude. Maybe that was my great G7W talent, the superhuman ability to always say the wrong thing. Especially around Aly. Maybe it’s because she’s so confident. Maybe it’s because I’m the only Select who has no reason to have been Selected.
Jack “The Mistake” McKinley.
Fight it, dude. I turned to the window, where a cluster of buildings was racing by below us. It was kind of a shock to see Manhattan go by so fast. A minute later the sight was replaced by the checkerboard farmland of what must have been Pennsylvania.
As we plunged into thick clouds, I closed my eyes. I tried to think positively. We would find Marco. He would thank us for coming, apologize, and hop on the plane.
Right. And the world would start revolving the other direction.
Marco was stubborn. He was also totally convinced he was (a) always right and (b) immortal. Plus, if he was home, telling the story of our abduction, there would be paparazzi and TV news reporters waiting at the airport. Milk cartons with our images in every supermarket. WANTED posters hanging in post offices.
How could we possibly rescue him? Torquin was supposed to protect us in case of an emergency, but that didn’t give me confidence.
The events of the last few days raced in my head: Marco falling into the volcano in a battle with an ancient beast. Our search that found him miraculously alive in the spray of a healing waterfall. The ancient pit with seven empty hemispheres glowing in the dark—the Heptakiklos.
If only I’d ignored it. If only I hadn’t pulled the broken shard from the center. Then the griffin wouldn’t have escaped, we wouldn’t have had to race off to find it without adequate training, and Marco wouldn’t have had the chance to escape—
“You’re doing it again,” Aly said.
I snapped back to attention. “Doing what?”
“Blaming yourself for the griffin,” Aly replied. “I can tell.”
“It crushed Professor Bhegad,” I said. “It took Cass over an ocean and nearly killed him—”
“Griffins were bred to protect the Loculi,” Aly reminded me. “This one led us to the Colossus of Rhodes. You caused that to happen, Jack! We’ll get the Loculus back. Marco will listen to us.” She shrugged. “Then maybe you can let six more griffins through. They’ll lead us to the other Loculi. To protect us, I can help the KI develop . . . I don’t know, a repellant.”
“A griffin repellant?” Cass said.
Aly shrugged. “There are bug repellants, shark repellants, so why not? I’ll learn about them and tinker with the formula.”
Tinker. That was what Bhegad called Aly. We each had a nickname—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Aly was the Tinker who could fix anything, Marco the Soldier because of his strength and bravery, Cass the Sailor for his awesome navigational ability. Me? You’re the Tailor because you put it all together, Bhegad had said. But I wasn’t putting anything together now, except pessimism.
“DIIIIIIIIE!”
Nirvana’s sudden shriek made us all spin around. Torquin bounced upward and banged his head on the ceiling. “What happened?” I asked.
“The end of the song,” Nirvana said. “I love that part.”
“Anything good?” Torquin said, scrolling through the tunes. “Any Disney?”
Cass was staring out the window, down toward a fretwork of roads and open land. “We’re almost there. This is Youngstown, Ohio . . . I think.”
“You think?” Aly said. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I—I don’t recognize the street pattern . . .” Cass said, shaking his head. “I should know this. I’m drawing a blank. I think something’s wrong with my . . . whatever.”
“Your ability to memorize every street in every place in the world?” Aly put her arm around him. “You’re nervous about Marco, that’s all.”
“Right . . . right . . .” Cass drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You sometimes make mistakes, right, Ally?”
Aly nodded. “Rarely, but yes. I’m human. We all are.”
“The weird thing is,” Cass said, “there’s only one part of Marco that isn’t human—the tracker. And those things don’t just fail—unless something really unusual happens to the carrier.”
“Like . . . ?” I said tentatively.
Cass’s eyes started to moisten. “Like the thing none of us is talking about. Like if the tracker was destroyed.”
“It’s inside his body,” Aly said. “He can’t destroy it.”
“Right. Unless . . .” Cass said.
We all fell silent. The plane began to descend. No one finished the sentence, but we all knew the words.
Unless Marco was dead.
CHAPTER THREE
INCIDENT IN OHIO
“HEY!” AS CASS turned and jogged up the street toward me, I whipped my two hands behind my back.
“So, are we there?” I asked nonchalantly.
Cass looked at me curiously. “What are
you doing?”
“Scratching,” I replied. “A lottery card. Which I found.”
“And how will you collect if you win?” He burst out laughing. “Come on. The house is just ahead. Number forty-five Walnut Street. The green porch.”
I’m not sure why I didn’t tell him the truth—that I’d found a piece of burned wood and a gum wrapper on the ground, and now I was using them to write my dad. Maybe because it was a dumber idea than entering a lottery. But I couldn’t help it. All I could think about was Dad. That he was just one state away.
I shoved the note into my back pocket. We jogged up the road to Torquin and Aly, who were in the entrance to a little cul-de-sac in the middle of Lemuel, Ohio. Torquin had parked our rented Toyota Corolla in a secluded wooded area down the block, to avoid being seen. As I joined Cass and Aly, we stood there, staring at the house like three ice sculptures.
Torquin waddled ahead, oblivious.
“I can’t do this . . .” Aly said.
I nodded. I felt scared, homesick, worried, and nine thousand percent convinced we should have let Bhegad send another team to do this. Anyone but us.
The house had a small lawn, trimmed with brick. Its porch screen had been ripped in two places and carefully repaired. A little dormer window peeked from the roof, and a worn front stoop held a rusted watering can. It didn’t look like my house, but somehow my heart was beating to the rhythm of homesickness.
A kid with an overstuffed backpack was shambling toward a house across the street, where his mom was opening a screen door. It brought back memories of my own mom, before she’d gone off on a voyage and never returned. Of my dad, who met me at school for a year after Mom’s death, not wanting to let me out of his sight. Was Dad home now?
“Come!” Torquin barked over his shoulder. “No time to daydream!”
He was already lumbering up the walkway, his bare feet thwapping on the gray-green stones. Cass, Aly, and I fell in behind him.
Before he could ring the bell, I heard the snap of a door latch. The front door opened, revealing the silhouette of a guy with massive shoulders. As he stepped forward I stifled a gasp. His features were dark and piercing, the corners of his mouth turned up—all of it just like Marco. But his face was etched deeply, his hair flecked with gray, and his eyes so sad and hollow I felt like I could see right through them.
He glanced down at Torquin’s feet and then back up. “Can I help you?”
“Looking for Marco,” Torquin said.
“Uh-huh.” The man nodded wearily. “You and everyone else. Thanks for your concern, but sorry.”
He turned back inside, pulling the door shut, but Torquin stopped it with his forearm.
“Excuse me?” The man turned slowly, his eyes narrowing.
I quickly stepped in front of him. “I’m a friend of Marco’s,” I said. “And I was wondering—”
“Then how come I don’t recognize you?” Mr. Ramsay asked suspiciously.
“From . . . travel soccer,” I said, reciting the line we had prepared for just this occasion. “Please. I’m just concerned, that’s all. This is my uncle, Thomas. And two other soccer players, Cindy and Dave. We heard a rumor that Marco might be in the area. We wondered if he came home.”
“The last time we saw him, he was at Lemuel General after collapsing during a basketball game,” Mr. Ramsay said. “Then . . . gone without a trace. Like he ran away from everything. Since then we’ve heard nothing but rumors. If we believed them all, he’s been in New York, Ashtabula, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Manila, and Ponca City. Look!” He grabbed a basket of snapshots off a nearby table and thrust it toward me.
“I—I don’t understand,” I said, sifting through pixelated, blurry shots of jockish-looking teens who were definitely not Marco. “Why would people lie about seeing him?”
“People want the reward,” Mr. Ramsay replied wearily. “One hundred thousand bucks for information leading to Marco’s return. It’s supposed to help. Instead, we’re just bombarded by emails, letters, visitors. All junk. So take my advice, kid, don’t trust rumors.”
As Marco’s dad took the basket back and returned it to the table, two people emerged from inside the house—a trim, red-haired woman and a girl in sweats. The woman’s slate-blue eyes were full of fear. The girl looked angry. They were both focused on Torquin. “I’m . . . Marco’s mother,” the woman said. “And this is his sister. What’s going on? If this is another scam, I’m calling the police.”
“They’re just kids, Emily,” Marco’s dad said reassuringly. “You guys have to understand what we’re going through. Today it was a repair guy. Flashed some kind of ID card, said he was going to inspect the boiler. Instead he snooped through our house.”
“Bloggers, crime buffs,” Mrs. Ramsay said. “It’s like a game to them. Who can find the most dirt, post the most photos. They have no idea what it is . . . to lose . . .” Her voice cracked, and both her husband and daughter put arms around her shoulders.
Torquin’s phone chirped, and he backed away down the stoop. Aly and Cass instinctively followed. Which left me with the three Ramsays, huddled together in the semidarkness of their living room.
The feeling was too familiar. After my mom died, Dad and I hardly ever left each other’s sides, but each of us was alone, locked in misery. Our faces must have looked a lot like the Ramsays’.
I was dying to tell them what had really happened to Marco, the whole story of the Karai Institute. Of their son’s incredible heroism saving our lives, of the fact that he could swoosh a shot now from clear across a campus lawn.
But I also knew what it was like to lose a family member. And if Cass was right, if Marco’s tracker silence meant he was dead, I couldn’t get their hopes up.
“We . . . we’ll keep looking,” I said lamely.
As I began backing away, I felt Torquin’s beefy hand on my shoulder, pulling me down the stairs. His face, which wasn’t easy to read, looked concerned. “Thank you!” he shouted. “Have to go!”
I stumbled after Torquin, Cass, and Aly. Soon we were all running down the street toward our rented car, top speed. I had never seen Torquin move so fast.
“What’s up?” Cass demanded.
“Got . . . message,” Torquin said, panting heavily as he pulled open the driver’s side door. “Marco found. Get in. Now.”
“Wait—they found him?” Aly blurted. “Where?”
Torquin handed the phone to her. Cass and I came up behind, looking over her shoulder as we walked:
TRACKER ACTIVE AGAIN. RAMSAY NOT IN OHIO. STRONG SIGNAL FROM LATITUDE 32.5417° N, LONGITUDE 44.4233° E
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“It can’t be . . .” Cass shook his head.
“Cass, just tell us!” Aly said.
“Marco,” Cass replied, “is in Iraq.”
“What?” I cried out.
But the other three were already at the car, climbing in.
Quickly, while they weren’t looking, I pulled out my note to Dad. And I tossed it down a storm drain.
CHAPTER FOUR
EGARIM
THE CHOPPER BLADES were so loud, I thought they’d shake my brains out through my ears. “Are you sure you read the tracker right?” I shouted toward the front seats.
Professor Bhegad didn’t even turn around. He hadn’t heard a word.
We’d met him and Fiddle at the airport in Irbīl, Iraq. They’d flown separately from the Karai Institute when Marco’s signal was finally picked up. Now the whole gang—Bhegad, Torquin, Fiddle, Nirvana, Cass, Aly, and I—was crammed into the front seat of a chopper winging over the Syrian Desert. Our shadow crossed a vast expanse of sand, dotted by bushes and fretted by long black pipelines.
The cabin was stifling hot, and sweat coursed down my face. Cass, Aly, and I huddled together in the backseat. On the long flight from Ohio, we’d had plenty of time to talk. But the whole thing seemed even more confusing than ever. “I still can’t understand why he would come here!” I said. “If I we
re him, I’d go home. No-brainer. I mean, we all want to see our families again, right?”
I could practically feel Cass flinch. He had bounced from foster home to foster home; he didn’t have a family to go back to. Unless you counted his parents, who were in prison and hadn’t seen him since he was a baby. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that . . .” I said.
“It’s okay, Jack ‘Foot-in-Mouth’ McKinley,” Cass replied with a wan smile. “I know what you mean. Actually, I’m happy Marco is alive. I just was wondering the same thing you were—why Iraq? What’s there?”
Professor Bhegad slowly turned, adjusting the heavy glasses that slid down his sweating nose. “It’s not what is there, but what was there,” he said. “Iraq was the site of Ancient Babylon.”
Cass’s eyes widened. “Duh. The site of one of the Seven Wonders—the Hanging Gardens!”
“He decided to go on a rogue mission to find a Loculus all by himself?” Aly said. “Without my tech skills, or Cass’s human GPS? If I were Marco, I’d want to do this as a foursome! All of our lives are at stake. Going solo makes no sense. Even to an egotist like Marco.”
“Unless,” I said, “he isn’t trying to go solo.”
“What do you mean?” Cass asked.
“I mean, he may not know that his tracker is busted,” I said. “Maybe, when he left Rhodes, he figured we’d pick up the signal and follow him. Maybe he just wanted to force things, to speed the mission up.”
Aly raised an eyebrow. “How do we know he didn’t disable and re-enable it on purpose?”
“You’d have to be a genius to do that!” I said.
“I could do it,” Aly said.
“That’s my point!” I replied.
Aly folded her arms and stared out the window. Cass shrugged.
Now Professor Bhegad was shouting, his face pressed to the window. “The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers! We are approaching the Fertile Crescent!”
I gazed down. I knew that Ancient Babylon was the center of a bigger kingdom called Babylonia. And that was part of a larger area known as Mesopotamia, which was Greek for “between two rivers.” Now we could see them, winding through the desert, lined with thickets and scrubby trees that looked from above like long green mustaches. Everywhere else was dusty, yellow, and dry. The area sure didn’t look fertile to me.