Seven Wonders Book 1: The Colossus Rises (22 page)

I
COULD HEAR
Marco’s voice. Shouting. He was still alive.

The creature’s back was rising and falling. I had to get him. I had to do something.

I dove for the beast’s legs. Fishing a pen out of my pocket, I jammed it into its thick foot. Green fluid spewed out, and the griffin let out a strange sound.

I backed off, scrabbling to my feet. I nearly knocked over Aly, who was standing still, staring.

She pulled me aside, farther to the left, and gestured toward the griffin. My jaw nearly clunked to the ground.

The griffin’s head was stuck in the driver-side door of the olive oil truck.

“What the—?” Aly murmured.

Marco sauntered around from the other side of the truck. “Looks like Red Rooster’s doing some window shopping.” He shrugged, grinning at our astonished faces. “Hey, all I did was dive through the driver’s side window and out the other door. Then I razzed this doofus through the window. It fell for the trick. Came straight for me. Got its head in, and now it can’t get its head out.”

“We—we thought it was eating you,” I said.

“At this rate, it’s going to have to settle for some pretty skanky seat upholstery.” As the griffin roared, lifting the truck and slamming it back to the ground, Marco slapped its haunches. “Good exercise, Tweety. You need to lose that big butt. Now, come on, campers, let’s go check on Darth Vader.”

He ran ahead, down the stairs. Aly and I glanced at the trapped griffin and then followed behind Marco. Brother Dimitrios lay semiconscious at the bottom of the steps. His henchmen had surrounded him. As we approached, they reached for their rifles. “No,” Brother Dimitrios said to the men. “They saved my life.”

I crouched next to him. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer the question, instead leaning in close to Marco. “May I see the back of your head, young man?”

Marco looked warily at him. “Why?”

“Is it painted?” he asked. He grasped Marco’s chin and turned his head to one side. “No, it is real. The lambda.
And you two—you have it also?”

Before I could reply, Aly said, “We have a question for you, Brother Dimitrios. What is that sculpture? And why are you trying to take it away?”

The monk’s eyes flickered, blood trickling from the side of his mouth. A faint smile creasing his lips. “Touch…the flame…”

His henchmen glanced uneasily at one another. Finally one of them picked up the sculpture and brought it to me with two hands. It was nearly as tall as I was. As he set it down in front of me, he groaned with its weight.

“Touch…” Brother Dimitrios repeated.

I reached to the flame, letting my fingers graze it. It had been dented in the fall.

For a long moment nothing happened. Aly and Marco stared, baffled. From above, I could hear the pickup truck thud onto the dirt again.

From below, I heard monks shouting.

Aly turned. “Marco, Jack—look.”

One level down, the greenhouse had started glowing. It was bright enough that I had to squint. And it was getting brighter.

I
TRIED TO
let go of the flame, but it wouldn’t let me.

It was warming to my touch. Brother Dimitrios’s monks backed away in fright. Without really thinking, I cupped both hands around the base of the flame and pulled it toward me. I wasn’t sure why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

The metal flame felt weightless, as if filled with helium. I could lift the whole massive thing without any effort at all. I stood, turned, and walked to the top of the stairs that led to the second level. A crowd of monks had gathered around the greenhouse, which was now pulsing with an eerie light. I saw a swirling from within, like an errant gale.

“Jack?” Aly said. “You’re scaring me.”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Marco glanced down toward the greenhouse. “The disco’s calling you, dude. Better go.”

As I descended, the torch in front of me, I couldn’t feel the stairs beneath my feet. It was as if I were floating. The monks backed away as I neared the greenhouse. It had no entrance from the outside. The only way in, I figured, was through the monastery itself. There must have been an inner door that led into the greenhouse.

Aly and Marco went inside with me. We walked to the right, a short way down a corridor. Three ancient-looking paintings hung on the wall. One was a grand image of the Colossus. Just as Aly had said, it stood at the side of the harbor like a lighthouse. It was all made of burnished bronze, like the flame I held in my hands.

The next image was of a young man dressed in a fancy tunic, sitting on a translucent white ball. He was handsome and buff, surrounded by adoring friends, mostly girls. I had to look twice to see that he was actually floating.

Next to that painting was one of an old man, his skin wrinkled and sagging. Although his eyes were deep with suffering and his hair a tangle of white wisps, he radiated a powerful dignity.

I noticed an identical bronze plaque beneath each of the two portraits:
MASSARYM.

Marco’s hand was on the doorknob, but he backed away. His face was taut. “I’m not sure about this, brother Jack,” he said.

“I’m not either,” I said shakily.

His eyes darted toward the paintings. “This is, like, Team Massarym here. We’re in the belly of the enemy. Brother Dimitrios
wants
you to do this. Doesn’t that seem like a reason not to?”

“How do you know they
are
the enemy?” Aly snapped. “How do you know Bhegad and the Scholars of Karai aren’t the bad guys? They’ve lied to us and manipulated us all along!”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” I said. “Please, open the door.”

Aly stepped forward and jiggled the knob. “It’s locked,” she said.

Marco leaped, launched into a spinning kick, and whacked the door open in one flying move. “Now it’s not.”

We stepped in. The glow from the piles of rock was so bright I had to shield my eyes. It was a kind of giant workshop, with tables placed randomly about and narrow pathways winding through the rubble. From somewhere deep in one of the piles I could hear a sound, a faint song like the one from the caldera. “Do you guys hear that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Marco said dubiously.

I held the flame high and wound through the pathways, searching for the giant hand I’d noticed before. It was
sitting askew atop one of the piles. But up close I saw that it was made of stone, not bronze. And it was nowhere near big enough to grasp this torch.

Below it were dozens of other sculpted hands, made of stone, bronze, marble, or wood. Some of them were attached to arms. They were thin and thick, feminine and masculine, childlike and wizened.

Aly moved to another pile and picked up the broken stone bust of a bull. “This is crazy. It’s like a statue morgue. We could search this place for months trying to find the right pieces.”

She was right. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of statues here—people, gods, animals. If the Colossus were among them, it was impossibly buried.

The spot on the back of my head was beginning to throb again. The edges of my vision were fuzzing over. The glowing, the sound—what did it mean?

I heard the griffin shrieking in the distance. It could shake itself loose from the truck any moment. If Cass was still alive, his minutes were numbered. We didn’t have time to search for the Colossus right now. That would have to wait until after we rescued our friend.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

I tossed the bronze flame onto one of the piles. I couldn’t carry it up and down the side of a cliff.

It didn’t fall, though.

It just hung. In midair.

Aly, Marco, and I stood gaping and the bronze began to pulse. It was changing, growing translucent, as if it were paper.

Something was trapped inside. I leaned closer to see what it was. It didn’t seem solid or even liquid—just a swirl of bright, jagged objects hurtling around of their own power against the bronze flame’s inner structure. They boiled and vibrated, circling so fast that they became a kind of plasma.

Before our eyes, something was being born inside. Something oblong, delicate, like a giant egg.

A long seam formed down the length of the bronze flame. Then another.

And like the petals of a flower, it began to open.

T
HE BRIGHTNESS WAS
like a punch. Squinting, I fell back. Marco and Aly were yelling at me, but I couldn’t make out the words. The hum was excruciating. It snaked into the folds of my brain like a liquid.

The sides of the bronze flame peeled downward. Inside, a giant globe of plasma rose. It circled slowly over the piles of rubble, which began to swirl. Pieces flung themselves away against the glass, as if being thrown by an invisible hand. As we ducked to the ground, the greenhouse wall began to shatter.

Some of the shards—maybe one in a thousand—had a different fate. They rose more slowly.

One by one, they were sucked right up to the plasma
ball. They stuck to its side like skin grafts. They were forming a shell, whipping upward and locking into place like a jigsaw puzzle solving itself, until an entire sphere had formed—a sphere of bronze, about half again as large as a basketball. It hovered above the remains of the flame.

“The Loculus!” I said.

“We’re supposed to
take
that thing?” Aly asked.

Marco moved closer. “Earth to Jack and Aly. Don’t just stand there. Grab it!”

He began climbing one of the piles. The sphere was whirling around the greenhouse now, faster and faster, whipping the mass below into a cyclone.

“
Marco, get down from there!
” Aly screamed.

A flying piece of stone clipped the side of his head and he toppled downward. Aly and I ran to his side.

“Have no fear!” Marco sat up, shaking his head. “The Immortal One takes a minor tumble. This Loculus has a mind of its own. It’s going to fly off to Pluto before we can figure out how to get it to—”

A shadow passed across his face and he fell silent.

We all looked up toward the glass dome. And we heard the griffin’s keening, bloodthirsty caw.

“How did it get loose?” I asked.

As it descended, I could see the mangled pickup door around its neck. It had torn it loose from the truck.

“Run!” Aly shouted.

As we scrambled toward the exit, the greenhouse roof exploded.

The red beast plunged downward. Its body seemed to fill the airspace. It flapped its wings frantically, cramped by the four walls. The door had dug into its skin and formed a nasty, featherless ring around its neck. The griffin’s yellow, segmented eyes were lined with black. They settled on Marco, and the beast growled.

I tried to shield Marco with my body, but he lifted me off my feet and ran me to the door as if I were a football. Aly was already through, and she pulled at Marco’s arm.

The griffin smacked against the door frame. It was too big to fit. Weakened by the battle with the pickup truck, it fell backward.

And the flying Loculus whacked it on the head.

The beast seemed finally shocked out of its rage. It glanced up at the object it had been trained to protect.

The glowing orb rose higher over the debris. The rocks below swirled furiously, battering against the griffin. The lion-bird rose again, roaring in pain.

With a burst of light, three gleaming bronze shards shot up from the pile and fused in midair. Then four more, then a dozen, until the walls echoed with a fusillade of sound.

High above us, the Loculus stopped moving. The cloud of bronze shards spun around it like planets orbiting the sun. I caught sight of the Colossus’s flame among them,
still opened like a blooming lily.

The griffin, looking broken and confused, perched on an edge of the jagged roof to watch.

The air itself seemed to have become a shade of bronze as pieces vacuumed upward with impossible speed. They slammed against one another, fusing into shapes.

A base began to form at the bottom of the flame. It grew steadily downward, sucking up pieces large and small. It sprouted a handle, and then fingers to twine around it, followed by a palm. A wrist. A forearm. Shoulders.

At the bottom of the vortex, two enormous bronze feet expanded upward—from toes to heavy sandals to ankles and calves. Thighs became a torso, and slowly the top and bottom began to fuse together.

A gargantuan warrior of bronze, easily a hundred feet tall, stood over us. It was pocked with holes that were filling quickly as shards of bronze found their places. Its head rose higher than the shattered glass dome. Slowly it gained a face—a chiseled warrior’s face with closed eyes, as if asleep on its feet.

“By the great Qalani…” Marco murmured.

In moments the work was complete. The Loculus zoomed upward, and for a moment I thought Marco had been right—it wouldn’t stop until it reached the outer limits of the solar system. But it stopped abruptly, somewhere in the afternoon sky above the statue.

Then, slowly, it lowered itself into the flame atop the torch. Which began to close.

At that—at the sight of the Loculus disappearing—the griffin howled. It lunged off its perch toward the statue. Extending its talons, it attacked.

“What’s it doing?” Marco asked.

“It wants the Loculus,” I said. “Its job was to protect it—way back before the destruction of Atlantis. It doesn’t know about the Colossus. It thinks the Colossus is the enemy.”

Claws clanked against the statue’s bronze arm and the griffin bounced back. The weight of the truck door around its neck was playing tricks with its balance. It flailed its wings, trying to steady itself in midair. It landed on a broken splinter of glass that stuck up from the wreckage of the wall. The glass buried itself deep in the bird’s side.

At the sound of the beast’s deathly cry, the Colossus’s eyes opened.