“Who wants to go first?” I asked.
With a sly grin, Marco lunged for the water like a sprinter. His rope pulled Aly forward, then Torquin, Cass, and me. Torquin bellowed something I can’t repeat.
I felt myself go under, floundering helplessly. Being tied to Torquin wasn’t a help. His flailing arms smacked against me like boards.
Don’t fight the water. It’s your friend. That was Mom’s voice—from way back during my first, terrifying swim lesson at the Y. I could barely remember what she sounded like, but I felt her words giving me strength. I let my muscles slacken. I let Marco’s body pull me. And then I swam in his direction.
Soon I was passing Torquin. The rope’s slack was long enough so I could open up some distance. I could see Aly’s feet just ahead of me, kicking hard. Her rope was nearly taut to Torquin. She was holding tight to Cass, who chopped the water as best as he could.
There. The circle of tiles, just below us. The strange music began seeping into my brain.
This is going to hurt. Don’t fight it.
I braced myself. I let my body go. I felt the sudden expanding and contracting. Like I was going to explode.
It hurt just as much, felt just as inhuman. But it was the second time, and I was more ready than I expected. I blasted through the other side of the circle, my lungs nearly bursting, my body looser and prepared for the cold.
I was not, however, prepared to be yanked backward.
My rope was taut.
Torquin.
Was this some kind of joke? Was he stuck?
I turned. Torquin had not emerged. It was as if he were pulling me back through. Over my shoulder, I could see Cass and Aly trying to swim away, also pulling at the rope in vain.
It was like a tug of war between two dimensions.
Marco swam next to me and grabbed onto the rope. Fumbling in his pack, he took out a pocket knife. He slashed once . . . twice . . .
The rope snaked outward. It snapped back into the portal.
We tumbled backward. The portal glowed, but its center was pitch black. The frayed ends of the rope disappeared into the darkness.
Where was Torquin? Marco began swimming toward the portal with one arm, waving us up toward the surface with the other. My concern for Torquin’s life lost out to sheer panic. I didn’t have long before my breath would run out. None of us did.
I turned and kicked hard. Aly was pumping toward the surface. I grabbed onto Cass’s length of rope and held tight, pulling him along.
Cass and I exploded through the surface, gasping and coughing. I looked around desperately, expecting to crash into a boulder. But the river was calmer than the last time. “Where’s . . . Aly . . . Marco?” Cass gulped.
A shock of dyed red hair burst through to the sunlight. Aly looked like she could barely breathe. She was sinking under. I had to help. “Can you make it to the river bank on your own?” I asked Cass.
“No!” he said.
“Yeeeeahhhhh!” cried a voice closer to the shore. Marco was thrusting upward, shaking his head, blinking his eyes. In a nanosecond, he was swimming toward Aly. “Go to shore!” he cried out to us. “Did Torquin come through?”
“I don’t think so!” I said.
With powerful strokes, Marco swam Aly to the shallows, where she was able to stand. Then he plunged back the way he’d come. “We have to find him!” he cried out. “I’ll be right back!”
As he disappeared under the surface, Cass and I swam toward Aly. We were in a different part of the river from last time. Shallower. It didn’t hurt that the bad weather had stopped, and the current was calmer.
We reached the sandy soil and flopped next to Aly, exhausted. “Next time . . .” she panted, “we bring . . . water wings.”
Gasping for breath, we waited, staring at the river for Marco. Just as I was contemplating a jump back in to find him, his head broke through. We stood eagerly as he swam to shore. Trudging up to the bank, he shook his head, his lips drawn tight. “Couldn’t do it . . .” he said. “Went right up to the portal . . . tried to look through . . . considered going back . . .” In frustration, he smacked his right fist into his left palm.
“You did your best, Marco,” Aly said. “Even you need to breathe.”
“I—I failed,” Marco said. “I didn’t get him.”
He pushed his way through us and slumped down onto the sandy soil. Cass sat next to him, putting a skinny arm around his broad shoulder. “I know how you feel, brother Marco,” he said.
“Maybe Torquin got stuck in the portal,” Aly suggested.
Marco shook his head. “We could fit an ox team through that thing.”
“He might have gotten cold feet at the last minute,” Cass said, “and gone back.”
We all nodded, but frankly that didn’t sound like Torquin. Fear wasn’t in his toolkit. He was a good swimmer. And he had lungs the size of a truck engine. All I could think about were Professor Bhegad’s words: What rules do apply, in a world that one must experience cross-dimensionally?
“Maybe he couldn’t get through,” I said quietly. “Maybe we’re the only ones who can. I mean, let’s face it, we each do have something he doesn’t have.”
“A vocabulary of more than fifty words?” Cass said with a wan smile. Under the circumstances, his joke landed flat.
“The gene,” I said. “G7W. He’s not a Select.”
“You think the portal recognizes a gene?” Aly asked.
“Think of the weird things that have happened to us,” I said. “The waterfall that healed Marco’s body. The Heptakiklos that called to me. The fact that I could pull out a shard and let a griffin through, when others had tried but couldn’t. All these things happened near a flux area, too. The gene gives us special abilities. Maybe jumping through the portal is one of them.”
Cass nodded. “So while we passed through, Torquin just . . . hit a wall. Which means he may be back with Professor Bhegad, safe and sound.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right,” Aly agreed.
We all stared silently at the gently rolling Euphrates, wanting to believe what we’d just agreed on. Hoping our beefy, laconic guardian was all right. Knowing in our hearts and minds that no matter his outcome, one thing was clear.
We were on our own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MATTER AND ANTIMATTER
“GOTCHA!” MARCO GRABBED my hand as I leaped over a narrow trench. It carried water from the Euphrates, up through the pine grove and into the farms for irrigation. I was the last one over.
Cass was crouched low, stroking a palm-sized green lizard in his hand. “Hey, look! It’s not afraid of me!”
Aly crouched beside him. “She’s cute. She can be our mascot. Let’s call her Lucy.”
Cass cocked his head. “Leonard. I’m getting more of a he-vibe.”
“Uh, dudes?” Marco looked exasperated. “I’m getting a go-vibe. Come on.”
Cass gently put Leonard in his backpack. We continued walking toward the city, hidden by the trees. It was the height of the day and the sun beat mercilessly. Through the branches I glanced at the farm. Carts rested on the side of yellow mud-brick buildings. I figured the farmers must have been napping.
Cass sniffed the air. “Barley. That’s what they’re growing.”
“How do you know?” Marco asked. “Were you raised on a farm?”
“No.” Cass’s face clouded. “Well, sort of. I lived on one for a couple of years. An aunt and uncle. Didn’t work out too well.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Marco said.
Cass nodded. “No worries. Really.”
As they walked on ahead, I glanced at Aly. Questioning Cass about his childhood was never a good idea. “I’m worried about Cass,” she confided, lowering her voice. “He thinks his powers are dwindling. And he’s so sensitive about everything. Especially his past.”
“At least he’s got us. We’re his family now,” I said. “That should give him strength.”
Aly let
out a little snort. “That’s a scary thought. Four kids who might not live to see fourteen. We’re about as dysfunctional as it gets.”
Ahead of us, Marco had put an arm around Cass’s shoulder. He was telling some story, making Cass laugh. “Look,” I said, gesturing with my chin. “Dysfunctional, maybe, but don’t they look like a big brother and little brother?”
Aly’s worried expression turned into a smile. “Yeah.”
As we neared the edge of the pine grove, we were all dripping sweat. Cass and Marco had pulled ahead, and they were now crouched by a pine tree at the edge of the grove. We gathered next to them. No one had noticed us. No one was near. So we could take in a long, clear view of the city.
Babylon sprawled out from both sides of the river. Its wall was surrounded by a moat, channeled from the river itself. A great arched gate, leading into a tunnel, breached the wall far to our left. Outside that gate, a crowd had gathered at the moat’s edge. They were almost all men. Their tunics had more folds than ours, with thicker material bordered in a bright color.
“We didn’t get the garb right,” Aly said.
“We look like the poor relatives,” Cass remarked.
“It is what it is,” Marco said. “Let’s walk like we belong.”
As we stepped out from the trees, I noticed that Cass was chewing gum. “Spit that out!” I said. “You weren’t supposed to bring stuff like that.”
“But it’s just gum,” Cass protested.
“Hasn’t been invented yet,” Aly said. “We don’t want to look unusual.”
Cass reluctantly spat a huge wad of gum into the bushes. “In two thousand years, some archaeologist is going to find that and decide that the Babylonians invented gum,” he muttered. “You making me spit that out may have changed the future.”
We all followed Marco out of the trees and onto the desert soil. As we approached the city wall, the crowd grew loud and raucous. They’d formed a semicircle with their backs to us, shouting and laughing. Some of them scooped rocks off the ground. Three men stood guard, facing outward, looking blankly off in to the distance. They wore brocaded tunics with bronze breastplates and feathered helmets. They looked powerful and bored.
“Behold Babylon,” Marco whispered.
“Just past Lindenhurst,” Cass whispered back. “That’s the Long Island Railroad. Babylon line. Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst, and Babylon. I can do them backward if—”
A horrible scream interrupted Cass. It came from the center of the crowd, and a second later, the men all roared with approval. Instinctively we stopped. We were about sixty or seventy yards away, I figured, but no one was paying us any mind. I could see a couple of boys racing toward the crowd with armfuls of stones. As the people ran to grab some, a gap opened in the semicircle. Now I could see what was inside—or who. It was a small, wiry man in a ragged tunic with a thick purple border. He was cowering on the ground, covering his head with his hands and bleeding.
The color drained from Aly’s face. “They’re stoning him. We have to do something!”
“No, because then they’ll stone us,” Cass said, “and we’ll be dead before we’re born.”
Staggering to his feet, the bloodied man shouted something to the crowd. Then he took a step backward, yelped, and disappeared—downward, into the moat.
I heard a splash. Another scream, worse than any we’d heard so far. The crowd was standing over the moat, peering down. Some bellowed with laughter, continuing to throw rocks into the water. Some turned away, looking ill.
From behind us I heard the sound of wheels crunching through soil. The men in the mob began turning toward the sound, falling silent. A few dropped to their knees. We did the same.
A four-wheeled chariot rolled into sight along the packed-dirt road. It was pulled by four men in loincloths, and the driver wore a maroon-colored cloak. Behind him, on a cushioned throne, sat a withered-looking man dressed in a brocaded robe. He wore a fancy helmet encrusted with jewels, which made his thin face and pointed beard look ludicrous.
As the chariot neared the moat, the crowd and the guards bowed to the ground. The slaves trotted the vehicle over the bridge, the king glancing briefly down into the water as he passed.
If he saw anything horrifying, it didn’t register on his face. He yawned, leaned back into his seat, and waved lazily to the crowds who dared not look at him.
“Is that King Nascar Buzzer?” Marco asked.
“Nebuchadnezzar,” I said. “Maybe.”
“I don’t think so,” Aly said. “I think it’s Nabu-na’id. I did some calculations. This ripping apart of time had to start somewhere. Before the split, our time and Ancient Babylon time were in sync. And I figure that was around the sixth century B.C. Which is about the time that the Hanging Gardens were destroyed. During the reign of Nabu-na’id. Also known as Nabonidus.”
“Okay, maybe this is a dumb question, but why are there ruins?” Marco said. “If Babylon time-shifted, wouldn’t the whole city have just disappeared? So what are those rocks we see back in the twenty-first century?”
“It must be like matter and antimatter,” Aly said. “The two parallel worlds existed together. Babylon continued to exist at regular speed and at one-ninetieth speed. And we are the only ones who can see both of them.”
As the king disappeared through the gate, a guard rushed out toward us. He shouted back over his shoulder, and another two followed.
Soon six of them were racing our way. “Look unthreatening,” Marco said.
“We’re kids,” Aly replied.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Cass said, his entire body shaking.
“Confidence is key,” Marco said. He smiled at the approaching soldiers, waving. “Yo, sweet tunics, guys! We’re looking for Babylon?”
The guards surrounded us, glaring, six spears pointed at our chests.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DEEP DOODOO
I DIDN’T NEED to understand Aramaic to know we were in deep doodoo.
The guards’ leader was maybe seven feet tall. An evil, gap-toothed smile shone through a black beard as thick as steel wool. He jabbered orders to us, waited while we stared uncomprehendingly, then jabbered something else. “I think he’s trying out different languages,” Aly murmured, “to figure out which one we speak.”
“When does he get to English?” Marco asked.
Trembling, Cass lifted his hands over his head. “We. Come. In. Peace!”
The men raised their spears, tips to Cass’s face.
“Never mind,” he squeaked.
The leader gestured toward the city, growling. We walked, our hands quivering fearfully over our heads. As we reached the bridge over the moat, I peered downward. The moat’s water churned with the action of long, leathery snouts. It was muddy and blood-red.
“C-c-crocodiles,” Cass said.
I closed my eyes and breathed hard, thinking of the man who had jumped in. “What kind of place is this, anyway?” I murmured.
“Definitely not Disney World,” Marco replied.
The city’s outer wall towered over us. The entrance gate was more like a long entrance chamber, tiled with bright blue brick. Every few feet there was a carved relief of an animal—oxen, horses, and a fantastical beast that looked like a four-legged lizard. As we trudged through the tunnel, people backed away, staring. On the other side, we emerged onto a narrow dirt street lined with simple mud-brick buildings. Next to one building, a man sheared a sheep while a boy giggled and held tufts to his chin, baahing.
The guards pushed us to move fast. The city was vast, the streets narrow. As we walked silently on pebbly soil, I could feel the glare of eyes from windows all around us. After about fifteen minutes, I could feel myself slowing down in the noonday sun. The heat was unbearable, the closely packed mud-brick houses seeming to trap it and radiate it back into our faces. We stopped to drink from a barrel, and a carriage trundled by, pulled by a wiry slave and carrying a round-faced man wit
h a big belly. From here, I could see another high wall, leading to some inner part of the city. The great tower was beyond that. “Is that the Tower of Babel?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Aly said. “But I don’t think they’d take us there. I think it’s some kind of religious place.”
“Religious places were sacrificial sites,” Cass piped up. “Where living things were slaughtered in public!”
“Brother Cass, you are a glass-totally-empty kind of guy,” Marco said.
A gust of desert wind brought the smell of fried meat straight down the city road. I could barely keep the drool inside my mouth.
The guards prodded us to move faster. It became clear that the smell was coming from the other side of Wall Number Two, which was looming over the houses now. It was much taller and fancier than the outer wall, maybe four stories high. The bricks were glazed shiny and seemed to be made of a smoother, finer material. “The high-rent district,” Marco whispered, as we followed the guards over another moat bridge.
“Where the awilum live,” Aly remarked.
The guards nodded.
“Show-off,” Cass said.
The bridge was jammed with wealthy-looking people. We nearly collided with a Jabba the Hutt lookalike and a lackey who followed him with a platter of food. Chariots creaked to and fro.
On the other side of the gate the delicious smells hit us like a thick slap. We emerged into a circular plaza about three city blocks wide, packed with people—women with urns on their heads, hobbling old men, turbaned young guys arguing fiercely, barefoot kids playing games with pebbles. The awilum obviously liked to protect their market by making sure it was inside the wall. The people behind the stalls, the deliverers, even the wealthy patrons were not much taller than I was. Stalls sold every kind of merchandise—food, spices, animal skins, knives, and clothing. Despite the wealth and the abundance of food, a clutch of ragged-looking people begged for money along the edges of the crowd.
Not far from us, a barrel-chested guy cried out to customers as he grilled an entire lamb on a spit. The head guard gestured toward it. “Souk!”