Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon (5 page)

M
UCK
G
RAY-GREEN THICK
, weed-choked muck.

No wonder Marco couldn't find the second Loculus. You couldn't see three feet in front of your nose.

As I swam, trying to keep up with him, noodle-like shapes slimed my face. Marco was holding tight to Cass. The fluorescent strip on Cass's backpack flashed occasionally in dim bursts of light that somehow broke through the water. I was getting colder by the second. With my clothes and shoes, I felt heavy like a whale.

Down . . . down . . . how far was this thing? It was practically black now. The light was way too far over our heads

As far down as you go, you will need an equal amount of air to swim back up
. It's what I learned in summer camp. I learned to sense when I was half spent. And I was way past that. Already my head felt light and my heart seemed about to explode.

I wished I could call out to Marco. He wasn't slowing a bit. Aly banged me on the shoulder. She was gesturing, urging me to go back up with her. I knew she was right. Marco was going to kill us. How far were we supposed to go? What exactly were we going to see—and where?

Ahead of me, Marco had stopped swimming. He still held tight to Cass, who was now hanging limply in the water. The two of them were silhouetted by a weird, dull yellow glow below them.

As I swam toward them, I realized I was gaining speed.
An undertow
.

I tried to pull back but I couldn't. The glow was intensifying, looming closer. It was a circle of bright tiles with a center of solid black. In front of me, Marco seemed to be changing shape—blowing out to an amorphous humanoid blob, then shrinking to clam-size.

What's going on?

My head snapped back, and suddenly I was surging into the black hole as if sprung by a giant rubber band.

As I passed through the black hole, it let out a deep, threatening buzz. A halo of green-white light jolted sparks from its circumference into my body. My mouth opened into an involuntary scream. I collided with Marco and Cass, but they felt porous, as if our molecules were joining, passing through one another. My left leg smacked against something hard, and I bounced away.

I was spinning with impossible speed, as if my head were in ten places at once. And then I felt myself catapulted forward, and I thought my limbs would separate into different directions.

But they didn't. I flattened out, decelerating. The water's temperature abruptly dropped, and so did its texture. All at once it had become clear and cool—and I was whole again. Solid. But the change had unsettled every biological function inside me. My brain registered relief, but my lungs were in chaos. As if someone had reached inside and squeezed them with a steel fist.

Aly . . . Marco . . . Cass. I spotted them all in my peripheral vision, rising. But Cass's legs hung like tentacles, undulating with each of Marco's powerful thrusts. Those two would reach the surface first. I pushed with all remaining strength, fighting to stay conscious. Aiming toward a dull, flat-gray surface glow above us.

I was losing my sense of direction. My arms slowed . . . then stopped.

I felt myself traveling to a dream world of bright sun and cool breezes. I was floating over a field of waving grass, where a white-robed shape stood from a circle embedded in the ground.

As she turned, I could see the seven Loculi, glowing, revolving. They seemed to blend together, so their shapes merged into a kind of circular cloud.

The Dream
.

No. I don't want it now. Because I'm not asleep. Because if I have the Dream now, it might be because I'm dead
.

“I knew you would come.”

The voice was unfamiliar, yet I felt it was a part of me. I knew instantly who the figure was. She turned slowly. Her eyes were the color of a clear tropical ocean, her face gentle and kind, ringed with a floating mane of glorious red hair.

Her name was Qalani.

Whenever I'd seen her, it had been in a ring of explosions, some kind of strange flashback to the destruction of Atlantis. In the Dream, I came close to death but always woke up.

Here, she had come to meet me. As always, her face looked familiar. She resembled my mom, Anne McKinley—and now, deep under the Euphrates, it was more than a resemblance. It was a beckoning, a welcoming.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“I've been waiting,” she said with a knowing smile. “Welcome to have you back.”

I couldn't help grinning. Our old family saying! I'd blurted it out to Dad once, when he returned from a business trip to Manila. From then on, we always used it as our own private joke.

I felt strangely peaceful as she reached toward me. I would be fine. I would finally be meeting her, in a better place.

Her hand gripped my shoulder, and darkness quickly closed in.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“GAAAH!”
MY FACE
broke through the water's surface. Air rushed into my mouth like a solid projectile. I sucked in huge gulps.

She was gone.

“Mo-o-om!” I shouted.

“No! Marco!” a voice shouted back.

I blinked water from my eyes. I could see Marco rising and falling on a wild current. He let go of me, swimming toward Aly, pushing her toward the bank. I could see her struggling to stand, grabbing onto Cass's arm.

I was too far into the middle, the deeper water. I struggled to push myself high enough above the surface for a proper breath. As I went under again, I fought to stay conscious.

“Hang on, brother!” Marco shouted.

His fingers locked around my arm. He was swimming beside me, pulling us both toward the bank. His arms dug hard into the frothing current. Aly and Cass were struggling onto the shore, staring over their shoulders at me in horror.

Marco and I bounced downstream in a helpless zigzag. We careened around a jutting rock that rose up between us, forcing Marco to let go of me. Directly in our path was a downed tree. I kicked hard and up, opened my arms, and let it hit me full force in the chest. My legs swept under the wood as I held tight.

“Marco!” I yelled.

“Here!” Marco clung to the tree about three feet to my left, closer to the riverbank. We both hung there, catching our breaths. “How's your grip, Brother Jack? Steady?”

I tightened my grip. “I think . . . I can make my way to the shore!”

“Good—see you there!” Marco swung up onto the wood, stood carefully, and scampered toward the shore like an Olympic gymnast. Jumping onto the bank, he began calling for Aly and Cass.

I yanked myself onto the fallen tree. Lying there, I felt my chest beating against the slippery wood. I didn't dare try to stand. Slowly I reached out toward the shore, gripping farther along the branch. In this way I managed to shimmy along at a snail's pace until I finally reached the bank and flopped onto the mud.

Farther upstream, Aly had made it to solid ground. Marco was back in the river, helping Cass out of the water. I struggled to my feet. My legs ached and rain pelted my face, but I hobbled toward them as fast as I could in the soggy soil.

That was when I began thinking about the rain. About the fact that moments ago the air was hot and dry. That the weather had changed drastically from the time it took to swim from one side of the river to the other.

What was going on here?

“Jack!” Aly threw her arms around me as I arrived. Her face was warm against my neck. I think she was crying.

“Behave, you two,” Marco said.

I pulled away, feeling the blood rush to my face. “What just happened?” I said.

Cass was staring across the river, looked dazed. “Okay, we jumped into the river. We hit a rough patch. We came out the other end. So . . . we should be staring across the river, at the place we left from, right?”

“Left,” Marco said. “Right.”

“So where is everything?” he asked. “Where are our peeps—Torquin, Bhegad, Nirvana? They should have made it down here by now.”

Aly and I followed Cass's glance. “Looks like we were carried pretty far downstream,” Aly said.

“Yeah, like a zillion miles away,” I said.

“That,” Cass said, “would be geographically elbissopmi.”

A dense cloud cover made it hard to see north and south, but I could see no sign of human life—no settlements, no Babylonian ruins, no KI people. Just swollen river in either direction.

“We can't waste time—come on!” Marco was already heading up the slope into a thick pine grove.

Cass, Aly, and I shared a wary glance. “Marco, you're not telling us something,” I said. “What just happened?”

Marco scampered through the trees without an answer, as if our near drowning, our battering against the rocks, had never happened. Cass looked at him in disbelief. “He must be kidding.”

“Chill is not in that boy's vocabulary,” Aly said.

We followed behind as fast as we could. My legs were bruised and my head bloody. My arms felt as if I'd been bench-pressing a rhinoceros. The slope wasn't too steep, really, but in our condition it felt like Mount Everest. We caught up with Marco at the edge of the pine trees. Here, everything seemed a little more familiar. Just beyond the grove I could see a vast plain of dirt to the horizon. The clouds were lifting, the water-soaked ground quickly drying. Scrubby bushes dotted the landscape, which was crisscrossed by a network of wide paths cut through the plain.

“Check it out,” Marco said, gesturing to the left.

A giant rainbow arched through the sky, sloping downward into a city of low, square, yellow-brown buildings—thousands of them, most with crown-like sandcastle roofs. The city rose on a gentle hill, and if I wasn't mistaken, I thought I could see another wall deeper inside the city. The outer wall contained a mammoth arched gate of cobalt-blue tiles. In the center of the city was a towering building shaped like a layer cake. Its sides were ornately carved, its windows spiraling up to a tapered peak. The city's outer wall was surrounded by a moat, which seemed to draw water from the Euphrates. Closer to us, outside the city limits, were farms where oxen trudged slowly, plowing the fields.

“Either I'm dreaming,” Aly said, “or no one ever told us there was a phenomenally accurate ancient Babylonian theme park on the other side of the river.”

“I don't remember seeing this from the air,” I said, turning to Cass. “How about you, Mr. GPS—any ideas?”

Cass shook his head, baffled. “I'm totally turned around. I don't know where we are. Sorry. Clueless.”

“It's not a theme park,” Marco said, ducking back into the trees. “And it's not the other side of the river. Follow me, and keep yourselves hidden by the trees as long as possible.”

“Marco,” Aly said, “what do you know that you're not telling us?”

“Trust me,” Marco said. “To quote Alfred Einstein: ‘a follower tells, but a leader shows.'”

He slipped back into the trees, heading in the direction of the city. Aly, Cass, and I fell in behind him. “It's
Albert
Einstein,” Aly corrected him. “And I don't believe he ever said that.”

“Maybe it was George Washington,” Marco said.

We trudged through the brush. The river roared to our right. The same river that minutes ago showed no signs that it could ever roar. Okay, it was swollen by the rain—but how long could it have rained, five minutes?

The tree cover seemed a lot denser than I'd remembered seeing it from the other side. It partially obscured our view of the city, save for a few glimpses of distant yellowish walls.

As the rain clouds burned away, the temperature climbed. We may have walked for ten minutes or an hour, but it felt like ten days. My body still felt creaky from our little swim adventure. All I wanted to do was lie down. I could tell Cass and Aly were hurting, too. Only Marco still seemed fresh and dewy. “How far are we going?” I called ahead.

“Ask George Washington,” Aly mumbled.

Marco took a sharp turn and stopped short at the edge of the trees. He peered around a trunk, signaling us to come close. With a flourish, he gestured to his left. “Abracadabra, dudes.”

I looked toward the city and felt my jaw drop. The tree cover completely ended here. Up close, I could see that the city spilled directly to the banks of the Euphrates.

Marco was climbing a pine tree and urged us to do the same. The branches hadn't been trimmed, so it was easy to get ourselves fifteen feet or so above the ground.

From this vantage point we could see over the outer wall and into the city. It was no theme park. Way too vast for that. It wasn't a city, either. Not like the ones I knew—no power wires, no cell towers, no cars. The roads leading into the city were hard-packed dirt. On one of them trudged a group of bearded men in white robes and sandals, leading swaybacked mules laden with canvas bags. They were heading toward a bridge that led over the moat and into the city gate. From the lookout towers, guards watched them approach. I craned my neck to see what the place was like inside, but the walls were too high.