It was about chest high, on a shelf wedged between two volleyball-sized artifacts. “Gotcha,” I whispered, lifting it off the shelf carefully with two hands. As I did, I could feel its energy coursing into my fingertips, through my arms, and up to my brain. “This is it. I got it!”
“Woo-HOO!” Cass yelled. “Emosewa!”
“Brother Jack . . . for the win!” Marco said.
I could hear Aliyah yelling into the hallway for Manolo to turn the power back on. With a thump and a whir, the lights bathed the room so brightly I had to close my eyes.
Cass and Marco were at my side now, thumping me on the back.
“FOUR! FOUR! FOUR! FOUR!” Cass said. “Well, five. But four in our possession.”
I grinned as the Song of the Heptakiklos bounced off the walls. “Don’t you guys hear it?”
“A little,” Marco said. “I think. Like with the volume at one.”
“How come it’s so loud for Jack,” Cass asked, “and we need hearing aids?”
“Because my man is da ruler!” Marco said. “So, what does the Loculus do, Brother Jack?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Are you going to, you know, spin spiderwebs? Climb the House of Wenders in a single bound? Wield a mighty hammer?” he asked. “See in the dark?”
“I can’t tell yet,” I said, “but I definitely don’t think it’s night vision.”
Aliyah was staring intently at the Loculus. “You should know what the power is, am I correct? The other Loculi—did you know right away when you touched them?”
“Well, yeah,” I said with a nod. “With the first one, we flew right away. We knew we were invisible with the second. The Loculi of Strength and Healing were pretty obvious, too. But this one . . . I don’t know.”
“We don’t need to know that now!” Cass said, eyeing the door. “We have it. That’s the important thing.”
“Aly will be happy to know,” I said.
Marco thrust his fist in the air and headed for the door. “To Aly!”
A loud thump echoed through the hallway. Eloise came racing in, then turned abruptly. “Ooops,” she said. “Sorry.”
Manolo limped in behind her, holding a hand to his forehead. “The foul, skinny little brat,” he said. “She is the daughter of a jackal and a weasel, and she deserves to be spanked with broom!”
“Manolo, please,” Aliyah snapped. “That is inappropriate.”
I spun on him. “That’s a little girl you’re talking to, you jerk. Maybe you turned out that way because you got spanked with a broom! Tell him to apologize, Aliyah.”
I glowered at her, but she stared at me as if I’d grown a third arm. So were the rest of them.
“Come on, guys,” I said, turning to go. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait!” Aliyah called out. “How could you have said that to him, Jack?”
“Because he was being nasty to Eloise,” I replied.
“But . . . I didn’t understand a word he said,” Cass said.
“Well, he mumbles,” I replied.
Aliyah shook her head with a curious grin. “Jack, Manolo was speaking in Turkish.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A DIFFERENT SET OF EYES
HE TOLD ME I ate dirty socks for breakfast. Then he called me a fifteen-headed hydra and said I had the brains of a toaster. When he finally started making comments about my haircut, I stopped him. My test was over. I had understood everything Manolo had said in Turkish, I had repeated them correctly in English, and I didn’t need to hear anymore.
“Bravo!” Manolo cried out, clapping his hands. It was the nicest thing he ever said to me, after the nastiest things he’d ever said to me.
“Well done,” Aliyah said.
We knew the power of the fifth Loculus. It gave a Select the ability to understand languages instantly.
Of course, Marco had to jump in and give it a try, then Cass. This gave Manolo a chance to fire off a few more choice insults, which he enjoyed—a lot. But at Eloise’s turn, when Manolo started yammering away, her face crumbled.
“Darling, he just said that you were a very smart girl,” Aliyah said. “Manolo may be crude, but he does not insult small children.”
Eloise shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s that I didn’t understand him, even holding on to the Loculus.”
“Hey, don’t worry, the Massa recruited you because my m—er, Sister Nancy figured out how to determine G7W early. So the gene will kick in when you’re thirteen.” I tried to sound as reassuring as I could, but it felt weird. Because if I could, I would keep her from ever inheriting this ticking time bomb.
“That’s four years from now!” Eloise replied.
“If I touch the Loculus, and then I touch you,” Cass suggested, “the power will flow through. Right now.”
Eloise made a sour face. “I’ll wait.”
There was barely enough space in my backpack for the Loculus of Language. Marco helped me zip it up, while the others headed into the hallway. “This is sick, Brother Jack,” he said. “They brought the Loculus to us. And it’s a good one. When we’re back in Ancient Atlantis, we’ll be understanding everybody, instead of listening to King Uhla’ar recite lines from Everybody Loves Raymond.”
“Yeah, but we still have no clue how to get there,” I said.
“We don’t need a clue,” Marco said proudly. “We had no clue for any of our adventures. We just went.”
I looked at my watch—9:47. “Aliyah doesn’t want us to travel to Mount Onyx in the dark. We can use this time to brainstorm.”
Marco yawned. “Right. Or maybe sleep.”
“How can you sleep at a time like this?” I said. But I was dragging, too.
“I know, I know,” Marco said. “But what can we brainstorm with? There’s no instruction book.”
As I hooked the backpack to my shoulder, I thought about the group of Karai and Massa we’d just left. Right now they were poring over Wenders’s notebooks, hoping to find something that someone could understand.
“Maybe,” I said, “there is.”
I could hear the sound of slasher metal when we were halfway to the hospital. Through the open door we could see the Massa gathered on one side, the Karai on the other, all of them on the floor poring over Wenders’s notebooks. Well, almost everyone. Nirvana was jumping up and down to some pop punk tune, her hair whipping around wildly. Despite the sound, some people on both sides were fast asleep—which looked like a great idea.
Nobody looked too happy about Nirvana’s music choice. Nobody looked too happy at all. The truce was great, but it was going to take a long time for these two groups to become BFFs. As we walked inside, Fritz the mechanic touched an iPod dock and the music stopped. “Efferyone gets ten minutes! Zat vass eleffen minutes. But it felt like four days.”
The sound of accordions and tubas filled the air. As Fritz began clicking his heels and yodeling, people threw food at him. At least both sides were united about that.
“I beg your pardon!” Aliyah bellowed.
Fritz spun around and turned off the music. “Zorry,” he said, brushing a banana peel from his shoulder. “I got carried avay.”
“It’s lovely to see you all get along so well,” Aliyah said drily. “Any progress?”
“A few interesting maps,” Hannelore said, holding out a stack of papers toward her. “Some parts of the labyrinth that none of us recognize. Drawings, too—mystical, religious. Altars, priests, that sort of stuff. But Wenders was careful. Everything was either coded or in Latin.”
As Aliyah took the papers, Cass, Marco, Eloise, and I knelt by the stack of notebooks. All three of them looked just as exhausted as I felt. I unhooked my backpack and took out the Loculus of Language.
I could hear a few gasps at the sight of the luminescent orb. Immediately Aliyah began explaining to the others what had just happened. Ignoring all that, I placed the Loculus on the floor and sat on it. Because I was wearing shorts, the backs of my calves made contact with the Loculus surface. Wit
h both hands free, I picked up the notebook marked Number 1 and began reading.
My eyes were heavy. It took all my concentration to focus. For a moment the Latin looked . . . well, Latin. Total gobbledygook.
The next moment, everything began moving. I blinked, thinking I was just too tired. But the ink was breaking up into blue-black filaments, spinning and colliding, scurrying around the page like cockroaches. A numbness rose from my feet and prickled up the sides of my body, until I felt like bees had been let loose in my brain.
“Jack, are you okay?” Cass asked.
“You look like you bit into a lemon,” Eloise said.
I hung tight. Understanding what you heard and understanding what you read were different things, and I guess the reading part was more complicated. So I waited until the words came back into focus.
When they did, they were exactly the same.
But I wasn’t.
It was as if I had grown a different set of eyes. As if instead of seeing a bunch of nonsense I was actually reading. Recognizing.
A daily journal of the woebegone crew of the ship Enigma, including observations fantastical and dangerous . . .
“Wow,” I muttered.
“What? Are you seeing the words in English?” Marco asked.
“No, it’s more like an optical illusion,” I said. “You know—you think you’re looking at a tree but if you look at it a different way it’s really an old woman’s face?”
“You’re seeing an old lady’s face?” Eloise said, peering at the text.
“No!” I said, scanning the page. “I mean, the words are the same, but I can understand what they mean. Wenders began writing this after his son, Burt, died. ‘It has been three weeks since we buried him, and only now have I the strength to write.’”
“‘But write I must,’” Cass spoke up. He startled me, until I realized he’d dropped to his knees and was touching the Loculus with his hand. Around the room, both Massa and Karai were gathering around us, listening. “‘Many of the crew have also perished, some have become feeble of brain or body. Others, I fear, are planning a mutiny and upon repair of my ship will attempt to return without me. If that is the case . . .’”
Now Marco was touching the Loculus. “‘I shall be sure that this record travels with them,’” he read, “‘hidden in a place unknown to any crew member but Burt, and in a language none of the crew will understand, hoping that someday, some kind scholar will record this for posterity. . . .’”
“‘In nomine Patri fili et spiritus sancti blah, blah, blah,’” Eloise said, scowling with frustration.
“That’s a sacred prayer, watch it,” Cass said.
“Hmmph,” Eloise replied. She flopped onto the floor with her hands under her face like a pillow. “Good night.”
Aliyah found someone’s jacket on the floor, rolled it up, and placed it under Eloise’s head. “We have a few hours before sunrise,” she said. “Rest will do us all good.”
“Nema,” Cass said with a yawn.
“That means ‘amen,’” Marco said. “And I didn’t even need the Loculus of Language.”
A few more of the Massa and rebels had already curled up against the walls of the hospital lobby. Some of the sicker ones were in the rooms off the balcony, being treated by Brother Asclepius.
But as wiped as I felt, I couldn’t stop. It was as if the words were leaping off the page to me, like prisoners sprung from jail. They kept me awake, beckoning me deeper and deeper into Wenders’s story, into his observations and theories. “Just a few more minutes,” I said.
The hospital clock behind us chimed eleven.
Bong . . .
Bong . . .
Bong . . .
No. It couldn’t be.
Bong . . .
Four o’clock. What was I thinking?
I rubbed my eyes. I was the only one still awake in the lobby. Even Brother Asclepius was sprawled out on a gurney like a dead man.
I had just read about Herman Wenders’s toenail fungus and his opinions about proper mustache grooming. The guy must have been totally bored all alone in this hot place.
But I also learned about secret passages in Mount Onyx and tunnels that ran through the jungle. I saw a list of all the creatures that Massarym had assigned to protect the Loculi. Supposedly the protector of the Pyramid Loculus was none other than the Sphinx, but maybe I’d read that one wrong. That old statue, as far as I knew, was still standing.
I’d copied some of the stuff down and ripped out pages of the journal to take with me in case we needed them. Still, as far as any clue about the rift, any hint about rescuing Aly, I had come up blank.
I would have been better off sleeping.
The room was spinning. Even if I slept now, the others were going to wake up in an hour or two. Me? I was going to be a basket case.
“Arrrghh . . .” I picked up one of the journals and threw it against the wall in frustration. It hit with a thud, and Cass woke up with a start.
“What are you doing?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
“Go back to sleep,” I said, plopping myself on the floor. “I’m fine.”
Cass scrambled to pick up the journal. “Did you find anything useful?”
“No,” I grumbled, shutting my eyes tightly. “Good night.”
“Well, I’m awake now,” Cass said, leafing through the pages. “If you give me the Loculus, I can pick up where you left— What the—?”
I let one eye pop open. Cass was staring at a page in the journal. “Did you see this?”
I crawled to his side. The journal was open to a page that showed all seven Loculi arranged in the Heptakiklos. Under it was a numbered list that included the words VOLATUS and INVISIBILIS. From the hours of reading, I remembered enough to know the first meant flight, and the second was obvious. Invisibility.
I grabbed the Loculus of Language and stuck it between us. Both Cass and I held onto it and waited for the words to become clear.
I read aloud an inscription at the top of the page. “‘Although my memory fades, I must attempt to reconstruct the seven fantastical orbs and their powers, told to me by Burt, as told to him by a magical priest hidden in the mountain. Although I took these to be part of the delirious ramblings of a fevered mind, I now believe that he did indeed encounter some manner of being in that godforsaken catacomb. And so, should anyone ever desire to research further, I pray I accurately record the list of magical powers bestowed on these relics, whether real or imagined.’”
We fell silent, skimming over the list. He hadn’t gotten them perfectly right. The Loculus of Flight “allowed the bearer great powers of leaping.” The Loculus of Language “rendered the screeching of primates into the King’s English.” But the basics were there. Flight, invisibility, strength, healing, language—all five were on that first page.
“Turn it!” Cass said.
We stared, goggle-eyed, as I flipped to the next page and read the Latin translation in a whisper:
“‘The sixth Loculus conveys upon the bearer the most unusual form of travel, whereupon the thought of a new location, combined with the desire to be located therein, results in the instantaneous achievement of this goal. . . .’”
“Beam me up, Scotty. . . .” Cass said.
“Huh?” I replied.
“Star Trek, the original,” Cass replied. “Jack, this is teleportation! Your atoms vaporize and are reassembled in a different place!”
I nodded. But I wasn’t really listening. Because my eyes were stuck at the description at the bottom of the page.
Forward is the thrust of growth
That makes us human, gives us breath
To travel back can now be done
Where death is life and life is death.
“Cass,” I said, “I think we may have the answer to finding Aly.”
“Whaaat?” Cass jumped to my side and I pointed to what I’d just read.
“The seventh Loculus—see?” I said. “It’s time travel.”
r /> CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
THE ONLY THING more frightening than an angry leader of the world’s most ruthless organization is an angry leader of the world’s most ruthless organization who’s been awakened from her sleep.
“Let me get this straight . . .” Aliyah paced the hospital lobby like a ghost in a country cemetery. Her voice was about an octave lower than usual, and if you weren’t looking you might have thought Torquin was speaking. “You are proposing that instead of opening that rift, you just—whoosh—travel back in time to Ancient Atlantis and get Aly directly.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Using the Loculus of Time Travel,” Aliyah said.
“Right,” I answered.
“Which you do not have,” she said.
“But—” Cass, Marco, and I said together.
She cut us off with a red-eyed zombie stare.
“We’re good at this,” I squeaked. I meant it to sound brave, but it came out kind of lame.
“Even if so, even if you did have it, how do you know you can reach Aly?” Aliyah asked. “Will you be able to pinpoint the time travel so accurately?”
“The Loculi have a way of telling us how they work,” Cass said.
“That’s assuming a lot,” Aliyah drawled.
“You’re right,” I said. “But I also assume this—if we just pull the sword from the rift, a humongous and not very friendly green blob will pop out to greet us and possibly have us all for dinner. Or if we’re lucky, before he has the chance, the island will rise and sink and turn upside down, killing everyone on it. So . . . sword or Loculus? Pick one.”
As Aliyah looked away, Marco elbowed me in the ribs. “Nice, Jack.”
She walked slowly away, rubbing her forehead. Around her, sleepy guards, rebels, and monks were beginning to rouse. Although it was still dark outside, I could hear the first cawing of jungle birds. The sun would be up soon, and we would have to move. Fast.
Finally Aliyah spun around toward us again. She looked about a hundred years old. “You have two sites left, if I’m not mistaken—one in Turkey and the other in Egypt.”
I nodded. “The Temple of Artemis and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.”