The Beast in Battle

www.sevenwondersbooks.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One: Death. Toast.

Chapter Two: “The Mistake”

Chapter Three: Incident in Ohio

Chapter Four: Egarim

Chapter Five: Together, We Fell into Darkness

Chapter Six: Peaceful

Chapter Seven: Fresh and Dewy

Chapter Eight: It’s Aliii-ive!

Chapter Nine: A Question of Time

Chapter Ten: Arabic or Aramaic?

Chapter Eleven: Matter and Antimatter

Chapter Twelve: Deep Doodoo

Chapter Thirteen: Pure Awesome

Chapter Fourteen: Later, Gladiator

Chapter Fifteen: Calculations

Chapter Sixteen: The Dream

Chapter Seventeen: The Test

Chapter Eighteen: The Darkness

Chapter Nineteen: Cooperation

Chapter Twenty: A Tangle of Fangs

Chapter Twenty-One: Heroes

Chapter Twenty-Two: If Only …

Chapter Twenty-Three: To the Garden

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Torch and the Vizzeet

Chapter Twenty-Five: Lambda

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Number Seven

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Echoes of Nothing

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Invisible Bars

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Kranag

Chapter Thirty: Traps!

Chapter Thirty-One: Now you See It

Chapter Thirty-Two: A Whip of Blackness

Chapter Thirty-Three: In the Shadows

Chapter Thirty-Four: Again

Chapter Thirty-Five: Lazarus Rises

Chapter Thirty-Six: Pineapple and Grasshopper

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Lethargic Lizard

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Back in Babylon

Chapter Thirty-Nine: His Jackness

Chapter Forty: Missiles of Spit

Chapter Forty-One: Falling Back

Chapter Forty-Two: The Mark

Chapter Forty-Three: The Betrayal

Chapter Forty-Four: You Have to Leave

Chapter Forty-Five: An Explanation of Sorts

Chapter Forty-Six: Headquarters

Chapter Forty-Seven: Resurrection

Chapter Forty-Eight: Fragments

Chapter Forty-Nine: The Beast-Tamer

Chapter Fifty: A Killing Company

Chapter Fifty-One: The Phone

Chapter Fifty-Two: Hack Attack

Chapter Fifty-Three: The Exit at the End of the Hall

Chapter Fifty-Four: Deafening Silence

Chapter Fifty-Five: Push Harder

Chapter Fifty-Six: Mustaches Everywhere

Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Chilling

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

day back from Greece, I no longer smelled of griffin drool. But I still had bruises caused by a bad-tempered bronze statue, a peeling sunburn from a trip around the Mediterranean on a flying ball, and a time bomb inside my body.

And now I was speeding through the jungle in a Jeep next to a three-hundred-pound giant who took great joy in driving into potholes.

“Keep your eyes on the road, Torquin!” I shouted as my head hit the ceiling.

“Eyes in face, not on road,” replied Torquin.

In the backseat, Aly Black and Cass Williams cried out in pain. But we all knew we had to hang on. Time was short.

We had to find Marco.

Oh, about that time bomb. It’s not an actual physical explosive. I have this gene that basically cuts off a person’s life at age fourteen. It’s called G7W and all of us have it—not only me but Marco Ramsay, Aly, and Cass. Fortunately there’s a cure. Unfortunately it has seven ingredients that are almost impossible to find. And Marco had flown off with the first one.

Which was why we were stuck in that sweaty Jeep on a crazy rescue mission.

“This ride is bad enough. Don’t pick the skin off your face, Jack!” said Aly from the backseat. “It’s disgusting!” She pushed aside a lock of pink hair from her forehead. I don’t know where she gets hair dye on this crazy island, but one of these days I’ll ask her. Cass sat next to her, his eyes closed and his head resting against the seat back. His hair is normally curly and brown, but today it looked like squid-ink spaghetti, all blackened and stringy.

Cass had had a much worse time with the griffin than any of us.

I stared at the shred of skin between my fingers. I hadn’t even known I was picking it. “Sorry.”

“Frame it,” Torquin said distractedly.

His eyes were trained on a dashboard GPS device that showed a map of the Atlantic Ocean. Across the top were the words RAMSAY TRACKER. Under it, no signal at all. Zip. We each had a tracker surgically implanted inside us, but Marco’s was broken.

“Wait. Frame a piece of sunburned skin?” asked Aly.

“Collect. Make collage.” If I didn’t know Torquin, I would think he had misunderstood Aly’s question. I mean, the four of us kids are misfits, but Torquin is in a class by himself. He’s about seven and a half feet tall in bare feet. And he is always in bare feet. (Honestly, no shoe could possibly contain those two whoppers.) What he lacks in conversation skills he makes up for in weirdness. “I give you some of mine. Remind me.”

Aly’s face grew practically ash white. “Remind me not to remind you.”

“I wish I only had a sunburn,” Cass moaned.

“You don’t have to come with us this time, you know,” Aly said.

Cass frowned without opening his eyes. “I’m a little tired, but I had my treatment and it worked. We have to find Marco. We’re a family.”

Aly and I exchanged a glance. Cass had been flown across an ocean by a griffin, who then prepped him for lunch. Plus he was recovering from a so-called treatment, and that wasn’t easy.

We’d all had treatments. We needed them to survive. They held off our symptoms temporarily so we can go on this crazy quest to find a permanent cure. In fact, the Karai Institute’s first job is to help us cope with the effects of the G7W.

Not to brag or anything, but having G7W means you’re descended from the royal family of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis. Which is probably the coolest thing about incredibly ordinary, shockingly talent-free me, aka Jack McKinley. On the positive side, G7W takes the things you’re already good at—like sports for Marco, computer geekiness for Aly, and photographic memory for Cass—and turns those qualities into superpowers.

On the negative side, the cure involves finding the stolen Loculi of Atlantis, which were hidden centuries ago in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

And if that wasn’t hard enough: six of those Wonders don’t exist anymore.

A Loculus, by the way, is a fancy Atlantean word for “orb with cool magic power.” And we did find one. The story involves a hole in time and space (which I made by accident), a griffin (disgusting half eagle, half lion that came through the hole), a trip to Rhodes (where said griffin tried to lunch on Cass), some crazy monks (Greek), and the Colossus of Rhodes (which came to life and tried to kill us). There’s more to it, but all you need to know is that I was the one who let the griffin through, so the whole thing was basically my fault.

“Hey …” Aly said, looking at me through squinty eyes.

I turned away. “Hey what?”

“I know what you’re thinking, Jack,” she said. “And stop it. You are not responsible for what happened to Cass.”

Honestly, I think that girl reads minds as a hobby.

“Torquin responsible!” Torquin bellowed. He pounded the steering wheel, which made the whole vehicle jump into the air like a rusty, oil-leaking wallaby. “Got arrested. Left you alone. Could not help Cass. Could not stop Marco from flying away with Loculus. Arrrrgh!”

Cass moaned again. “Oh, my neelps.”

“Um, Torquin?” Aly said. “Easy on the steering wheel, okay?”

“What is neelps?” Torquin asked.

“Spleen,” I explained. “You have to spell it backward.”

Luckily the Jeep reached the end of the winding jungle path and burst onto the tarmac of a small landing field. We were finally at our destination. Before us, gleaming on the pavement, was a sleek, retrofitted military stealth jet.

Torquin braked the Jeep to a squealing stop, doing a perfect one-eighty. Two people were inspecting the plane. One of them was a pony-tailed guy with half-glasses. The other was a girl with tats and black lip gloss, who looked a little like my last au pair, Vanessa, only deader. I vaguely remembered meeting both of these people in our cafeteria, the Comestibule.

“Elddif,” Cass said groggily. “Anavrin …”

The girl looked alarmed. “He’s lost the ability to speak English?”

“No, he’s speaking his favorite language,” Aly replied. “Backwardish. It’s a form of English. That’s how we know he’s feeling better.”

“Those two people …” Cass muttered. “Those are their names.”

I sounded out the words in my head, imagined their spelling, and then mentally rearranged the letters back to front. “I think he means Fiddle and Nirvana.”

“Ah.” Fiddle looked toward us with a tight smile. “I have been rushing this baby into service. Her name is Slippy, she’s my pride and joy, and she will hit Mach three if you push her.”

Nirvana drummed her long, black-painted nails on the jet’s wall. “A vessel that breaks the sound barrier deserves a great sound system. I loaded it up with mp3s.”

Fiddle pulled her hand away. “Please. It’s a new paint job.”

“Sorry, Picasso,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s some slasher rock … emo … techno … death metal. Hey, since you’re going back to the States, might as well play the tunes that remind you of home.”

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.”

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.

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 32.5417º N,

LONGITUDE 44.4233º 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.

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 Irbl, 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 were 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.

I squinted at the distant ruins. A stone wall snaked around the area. Inside were mounds of rubble and flattened, roped-off areas that must have been archaeological digs. Gazing through a set of binoculars, Bhegad pointed out a small skyline of low buildings near a gate in the wall. Some were flat-roofed and some peaked. “Those are restorations of the ancient city,” he said with a disapproving cluck of the tongue. “Crude, crude workmanship …”

“Where were the Hanging Gardens?” Aly called out.

“No one knows,” Bhegad answered. “Babylon was destroyed by an earthquake in two hundred B.C. or thereabouts. The rivers have changed courses since then. The Gardens may have sunk under the Euphrates or may have been pulverized in the earthquake. Some say it may not have ever existed. But those people are fools.”

“I hope it’s Door Number Two,” Aly said. “Pulverized. Turned to dust. Just like the Colossus was. At least we’ll have a chance for two out of seven Loculi.”

“More than twenty-eight percent,” Cass piped up.

I looked at the tracker panel on the cockpit. Marco’s signal was near the Euphrates River, not quite as far as the ruins. As Fiddle descended, we could see a team of guards outside the archaeological site, looking at us with binoculars.

“Wave! Hi!” Nirvana said. “They’re expecting us. They’re convinced this is a major educational archaeological project.”

“How did you arrange all this?” Cass asked.

“I was a professor of archaeology in another life,” Bhegad replied. “My name still carries some weight. One of my former students helps run the site here. He also happens to be a satellite member of the Karai Institute.”

Fiddle descended slowly and touched down. He cut the engine, threw open the hatch, and let us out.

The sun was brutal, the land parched and flat. The dusty soil itself seemed to be gathering up the heat and radiating it upward through our soles. In the distance to our right, I could see a bus rolling slowly toward the ancient site. Tour groups made their way slowly among the ruins, like ants among pebbles. In between, the sandy soil seemed to give way to an amazingly huge lake.

“Do you see what I see?” Aly said.

Cass nodded. “Egarim,” he said. “Don’t get too excited.”

“Translate, please,” I said.

“Mirage,” Cass replied. “The soil is full of silicate particles. The same stuff glass is made of. When it’s so bright and hot like this, the sunlight reflects off all those particles. At a sideways angle, it looks like a big, shining mass—which resembles water!”

“Thank you, Mr. Einstein,” I said, scanning the horizon. Directly ahead of us, across the yellow-brown desert, was a line of low pine trees that stretched in either direction. The heat-shimmer coming up from the ground made the trees look as if they were rippling in an invisible current. “That’s where Marco’s signal is coming from. The Euphrates.”

Marco was so close!

I checked over my shoulder. Torquin and Nirvana were struggling to lift Professor Bhegad out of the chopper and put him in a wheelchair.

“This is going to take forever,” Aly said. She darted toward Torquin, pulled the tracking-signal detector from his gadget belt, and bolted toward the river. “Come on, let’s start!”

“Hey!” Torquin cried out in surprise.

“Let them go, we have our hands full here!” Nirvana said.

Our footsteps made clouds of yellowish dust as we ran. Closer to the river, the ground was choked with scrubby grass and knots of small bushes. We stopped at the thicket of pine trees that stretched in both directions.

The ground sloped sharply downward. Below us, the Euphrates slashed a thick silver-blue S like a curved mirror through the countryside. To the north it wound around a distant settlement, then headed off toward mountains blurred by fog. To the south it passed by the Babylonian ruins before disappearing into the flatness. I scanned the riverbank, looking for signs of Marco.

“I don’t see him,” Aly said.

I held up the tracker. Our blue dot locator and Marco’s green one had merged. “He’s here somewhere.”

“Yo, Ocram!” Cass shouted. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Rolling her eyes, Aly began walking down the slope toward the river. “He might be hiding. If he’s playing a prank, I will personally dunk him in the water.”

“Unless he throws you in first,” I said.

I glanced quickly back over my shoulder to check on the others. Nirvana was struggling to push Professor Bhegad’s wheelchair across the rocky soil. He bounced a lot, complaining all the way. Torquin had taken off his studded leather belt and was trying to wrap it around Bhegad like a seat belt, causing his own pants to droop slowly downward.

I started through the brush. It was dense and maybe three to five feet high, making it hard to see. As we moved forward, we kept calling Marco’s name.

We stopped at the edge of a rocky ridge. None of us had seen this from the distance. It plunged straight downward, maybe twenty feet, to the river below. “Oh, great,” Aly said.

I looked north and south. In both directions, the ridge angled downward until it eventually met the riverbed. “We’ll be okay if we go sideways,” I said.

I went to the edge and looked over. I eyed the tangle of trees, roots, and bushes along the steep drop. Since Marco had taught us to rock climb, steep embankments didn’t scare me as much as they used to. This looked way easier than climbing Mount Onyx.

“Maybe there’s a shortcut,” I said. Quickly I stepped over the edge, digging my toes into a sturdy root. I turned so my chest would be facing the cliff. Holding on to a branch, I descended another step.

“Whoa, Jack, don’t,” Cass said.

I laughed. “This is ea—”

My foot slipped. My chin hit the dirt. I slid downward, grasping frantically. My fingers closed around branches and vines. I pulled out about a dozen, and a dozen more slipped through my hand. I felt my foot hit a root and I caromed outward, landing at the bottom, hard on my back.

Aly’s face was going in and out of focus. I could have sworn she was trying to hold back a smile. “Are you hurt?”

“Just resting,” I lied.

“I think I’ll look for a path,” Cass called down.

I closed my eyes and lay still, my breath buzzsawing in my chest. I heard a dull moan, and I figured it must have been my own voice.

But when I heard it again, my eyes blinked open.

I sat up. Aly and Cass were just below the crest of the ridge, trying to make their way down. They were both shouting. But my eyes were focused on a thick, brownish-green bush, maybe ten yards away.

A pair of shoes jutted from underneath.

shoes. Size gazillion wide. With feet in them.

I ran to them, grabbed the ankles, and pulled. The legs slid out—Ohio State Buckeye sweatpants—and then a ripped-up KI polo shirt.

From above, Fiddle shouted at me to give him CPR. How did you do CPR? I wished I’d taken a course. All I could think about were scenes in TV shows—one person blowing air into another’s lungs.

As I lowered my mouth carefully, his eyes flickered open from a deep sleep. “Jack? Hey, bro. I didn’t know you cared.”

I sprang back. “What the—how—you were—we thought—” I stammered.

“Spit it out,” Marco said, sitting up. “I’ve got time. I’ve been waiting for you. It gets boring here all alone.”

He was fine. Resting in the shade, that’s all! I helped him up and bear-hugged him. “Woooo-hooo!”

Footsteps pounded the dirt behind me. Aly and Cass ran down a path from the lower side of the ridge. They had taken the long way around.

“Dudes!” Marco yelled. “And dudette.”

As they jumped on him, laughing, and squealing with relief, I stepped back. My initial joy was wearing off as quickly as it had come. Our reaction seemed somehow wrong.

I watched his face, all pleased with himself, all happy-go-lucky returning hero. Everything we’d been through, all the hardship in Rhodes, the abandonment, the awful visit to Ohio—it all began to settle over me like a coat of warm tar. I flashed back to the last time I saw him, in a room at a hotel in Rhodes. With Cass lying unconscious on a bed.

He’d skipped out on us. As if flying off with our only chance of survival was some kind of game. He hadn’t cared about anyone at the Karai Institute. Or how many lives he’d turned upside down.

“Brother Jack?” Marco said curiously, staring out at me from the hugfest. “’Sup? You need a bathroom?”

I shook my head. “I need an explanation. Like, when did you come up with the idea to find a Loculus by yourself? Just, whoosh, hey, I’ll go to Iraq and be a hero?”

“I can explain,” Marco said.

“Do you have any idea what we’ve been through?” I barked. “We just got back from Ohio.”

“Wait. Did you—go to my house?” he asked, his eyes widening.

I explained everything—our trip to Lemuel, the visit to the house, the expressions on his mom and dad and sister’s faces. I could see Marco’s eyes slowly redden. “I … I can’t believe this …” he murmured.

“Jack, maybe we can talk about this later,” Aly urged.

But Marco was sinking against the trunk of a pine tree, massaging his forehead. “I—I never wanted to go home. I remember how painful it was for Aly when she tried to call her mom.” He took a deep breath. “Why did you go there? Why didn’t you just follow my signal here? That’s what I thought you’d do.”

“Your tracker malfunctioned,” I said. “It was off for a couple of days.”

“Really?” Marco cocked his head. “So you risked everything and went to the States? For me? Wow. I guess you’re right, I do owe you an explanation …”

“We’re all ears,” Aly said. “Start from Rhodes.”

“Yeah … that hotel room …” Marco said. “It was hot, the TV shows were all in Greek, Cass was asleep. All I wanted to do was take a break. You know, hop on the old Loculus, maybe scare a few goats and come right back—”

“Goats?” I said. “Cass was in a coma!”

“Dumbest thing I ever did. I know,” Marco said. “I’m a moron. I admit it. But it gets worse. So I’m flying around, and I get distracted by this little island called Nísyros. Looks like a volcano from the air, hot girls on the beach, you know. I swoop in close, make people scream. Fun times. Only when I get back, Cass isn’t in the room anymore. I panic. But you guys are probably already flying away. I figure, great, you’ve abandoned me.”

“Did you actually say ‘hot girls’?” Aly said, her face curdling with disdain.

“So I figure I’ll race you back,” Marco went on. “But how do I get back to the island of the KI Geeks? It’s halfway between nowhere and the Bermuda Triangle. And then I hear something. This voice. And here’s where it gets complicated. And awesome.” He paused, looking around.

“Ahoy, there!” came Professor Bhegad’s voice. Fiddle was pushing him down a sandy path, about forty yards away.

“He’s here?” Marco said, looking confused. “Wait. Four Karai peeps?”

“This is a big deal—that’s why they’re here!” Aly said. “You could have died, Marco. Or been abducted by the Massa. Besides, aren’t you due for a treatment?”

“I don’t need treatments,” Marco said, his voice rushed and agitated.

“This is no joke, Marco, you could die,” Cass reminded him.

“We need to take you back,” Aly said, glancing around. “Where’s the flight Loculus?”

“I had to hide it. People here saw me flying. There was a crowd with cameras.” Marco reached out, gathered us into a huddle, and spoke fast. “I screwed up and I owe you all big-time. But I’ll make it worthwhile, I promise. Look, there’s some stuff I have to show you, okay? I’ve been here awhile, and I’ve found out some amazing things. Like … hold for it … Loculus Number Two.”

My jaw dropped. “You found it already?”

“Not exactly, but I know where it is. Interested? I thought so.” Marco began running toward the river, and of course we followed.

He paused by the bank. Heat shimmered off the water and dragonflies flitted along the surface. Near the opposite bank, a boat floated around a bend with two people lying lazily, their fishing rods slack. “It’s there,” Marco said.

“In that boat?” Cass said.

“No, there—in the water,” Marco replied. “You’re Selects, just like me. Can’t you feel it? You know, that weird music thing that Jack talks about?”

Aly scrunched her eyes. “No …”

The music.

I’d felt it in the center of Mount Onyx, when I found the Heptakiklos. It wasn’t a song, really, not even a sound that you heard through your ears. It was a kind of full-body thrum, as if my nerves themselves were being played by invisible fingers like a harp.

Somehow, I was always the one who felt this most intensely. But right now it was only a suggestion, barely a tickle. It surprised me that Marco felt it, too.

Marco smiled. “No offense, Brother Jack, but you’re not the only one who senses this stuff. It’s in there, guaranteed. The closer you get, the more you feel it.”

“You went into the water to find it?” Cass asked.

Marco nodded. His face was glowing with excitement. “Yup. I haven’t located it yet, but what I found down there will blow your mind. For real. I’m not even going to try to explain. Trust me. You have to see it.”

Cass’s blotchy face was turning a uniform shade of white. “I—I’m happy to wait here. Swimming and I don’t really get along.”

“I’ll hold on to you, brother,” Marco said, taking his arm.

Professor Bhegad’s voice shouted from behind us: “My boy—come here, this wheelchair doesn’t do well on wet sand!” He was close to the bottom now. His wheelchair wasn’t liking the dry sand, either.

Cass struggled to wrench himself away. “We can’t just jump in, Marco! We have to clear this. You may be cool about breaking the rules, but you know the KI.”

“Why are you worried about them?” Marco asked.

“Uh, maybe because they’re the ones in charge of our lives?” Aly said.

Marco groaned. “They’ll require a chaperone, or an official KI submarine, whatever. That’ll take the fun out of it. We’ll do this fast, I promise. You will thank me!”

I stepped closer to the water. Toward the sound. An hour ago we had no Loculi, and now we have a chance at two. Two of seven.

But I stopped short. Bhegad was shouting now. Freaking out. Completely confused by what was going on. Why we were standing by the bank of a river, looking like we were about to go for a swim? Were we nuts?

I stepped back, shaking my head. We needed the KI’s support. Marco’s flight was a huge complication. A good plan was better than chaos. Just because the Song of the Heptakiklos beckoned, I didn’t mean we had to listen right this instant. “Just give me a couple of seconds, Marco,” I said.

As I turned toward Bhegad and the others, I felt a vise-like hand land on my shoulder. And I was flying back toward the water.

“Banzaaiiiiii!” Marco had us all in his grip, our feet off the ground. “Take a deep breath, hang on—and most of all, trust me!”

We had no choice. Together, we fell into the darkness of the Euphrates.

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 the dim ribbons 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.

Marco 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 hole, it let out a deep, threatening buzz. A halo of green-white light shot 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.

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.

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 nodded. “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.

A total freak rainstorm. One moment, hot and dry air. The next, this. Was this normal in the desert?

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 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,” I said.

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

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

“How do you do that?” Aly said.

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 can’t be serious.”

“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. “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. Roared? 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 maybe 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.

“These people are about as low-tech as it gets,” Cass said. “Like, from another century.”

I felt a chill in spite of the hot sun. “From another millennium,” I added.

“M-M-Marco …?” Aly said. “You have some ’splainin’ to do.”

Marco shook his head in wonder. “Okay. I’m as baffled as you are. Lost in the Land of the Big Duh. No idea where we are or how we got here. I wanted to show you, partly because I couldn’t believe it was real. But you see it, right? I’m not crazy, am I? Because I was having my doubts.”

A rhythmic whacking noise nearly made me slip off my branch. We all scrambled down the trees. A little kid’s voice was coming nearer, singing in some strange language. Instinctively we drew closer together.

Strolling up the path toward us was a dark-haired boy of about six, wearing a plain brown toga and holding a gnarled stick. As he sang, he whacked a hollow, dead tree in rhythm, his eyes wandering idly.

He stopped cold when he saw us.

“Keep singing, little dude,” Marco said. “I like that. Kind of a reggae thing.”

The boy glanced from our faces to our clothes. He dropped his stick and darted back toward the main road. We must have seemed pretty strange to him, because he began shouting anxiously in a language none of us knew.

At the road, a caravan of camels turned lazily toward him. A man with graying hair was at the head of the caravan, leaning on a stick and talking to a city guard dressed in leather armor, who had strolled out to meet him. Both of them turned toward us.

The guard had a thick black beard and shoulders the size of a bull. Narrowing his eyes, he began walking our way, a spear balanced in his hand. He shouted to us with odd, guttural words.

“What’s he saying?” Aly asked.

“‘Does this toga make me look fat?’ How should I know?” Cass said.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Fido,” Marco said. “I say we book it.”

He pushed us toward the river. We began running into the woods, down the slope, tripping over bushes and roots. I felt like I was re-banging every bruise I had. Marco was the first to reach the river banks. Cass was close behind, looking fearfully over his shoulder.

“He’ll give up,” Marco whispered. “He has no reason to be mad at us, just probably thinks we’re dressed weird. We hide for a few minutes and wait for Spartacus and Camel Guy to go away. Then when things are quieter, we go find the Hanging Gardens.”

“Um, by the way, it’s Toto,” Aly whispered.

“What?” Marco snapped.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Aly said. “Not Fido. It’s a line from The Wizard of Oz.”

As we crouched behind some bushes, Marco’s eyes grew wide. I looked in the direction of his glance. Over the tops of the trees, a solid black band shimmered across the sky. It wasn’t a cloud cover exactly, but more like a distant gigantic cape.

“And, um … that thing?” Marco said. “That’s maybe the wizard’s curtain?”

I stood and ran to higher ground, to a place where I could see the city. I spotted the guard again and ducked behind a tree. But he wasn’t concerned about us anymore. The guard, the camel driver, the boy, and a couple of other men were hurriedly herding the camels toward the bridge.

“I don’t like this,” Cass said as he caught up to where I was standing. “Let’s get out of here before a tornado strikes. We need to get Professor Bhegad. He’ll know what to do.”

“No way, bro,” Marco protested. “It’s just weather. We need to move forward. And I have about a million things I have to tell you.”

In the distance an animal roared. Birds flew frantically overhead, and a series of crazy, high-pitched screeches pierced the air. This place was giving me the creeps. “Tell us on the other side,” I said, heading back down.

Aly, Cass, and I bolted for the river. It was three against one.

“Wusses. All of you,” Marco said. And with a disgusted sigh, he followed us back in to the river.

It’s aliii-ive! It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s aliiiive!”

It was Aly’s voice. That much I knew. And I had a vague idea why she was sounding so dorky.

I tried to open my eyes but the sun was searing hot. My muscles ached and my clothes were still wet. I blinked and forced myself to squint upward. Marco, Aly, and Cass were leaning over me, panting and wet. Behind them, the cliff rose into the harsh, unforgiving sun.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “It’s a line from a movie.”

Aly beamed. “Sorry. I can’t help it. I’m so relieved. The original Frankenstein. Colin Clive.”

“Welcome to the living,” Marco said, helping me up off the sand. “The original Seven Wonders Story. Marco Ramsay.”

The landscape whirled as I struggled upward. I looked warily up the slope. “What happened to Ali Baba and the camels?”

“Gone,” Marco replied, his eyes dancing with excitement. “We are back to the same spot where we left in the first place. And are you noticing something else? Look around. Look closely.”

I saw the worn path to the top of the ridge. I saw the gray river, placid under the rising sun. “Wait,” I said. “When we left, the sun was almost over our heads. Now it’s lower.”

“Bingo!” Marco said.

“From Bingo,” Cass murmured. “Starring Bingo.”

“Meaning what, Marco?” Aly said. “I’m supposed to be the smart one. What do you understand that I don’t?”

“Hey!” A distant, high-pitched voice made us all turn sharply. Nirvana was sprinting up the beach in loud Hawaiian shorts, a KISS T-shirt, and aviator sunglasses. “Oh … my … Gandalf!” she screamed. “Where have you guys been?”

Marco spun around. “Underwater. ’Sup, Dawg? Where’s Bhegad?”

Nirvana slapped him in the face, hard.

“Ow,” Marco said. “Happy to see you, too.”

“We thought you were dead!” Nirvana replied. “After you jumped? I nearly had a heart attack! Bhegad and Fiddle and the Hulk—they’re all in each other’s faces. ‘How could you let this happen?’ ‘How could you?’ ‘How could you?’ Blah blah blah. Fiddle’s insisting we call nine-one-one, Bhegad says we can’t, Torquin’s just going postal, and I’m Will you guys just take a pill? So we all jump in the river to look for you, except for Bhegad, who’s so mad he’s practically doing wheelies. Finally we give up. All we can do is wait. Soon we assume you all drowned. Torquin is crying. Yes, tears from a stone. It does happen. Fiddle is like, ‘Time to break up the KI and look for a new job!’ Bhegad insists we set up camp. Maybe you’ll come back. Or we’ll find the bodies. So we’ve been sitting here for two days eating beef jerky and—”

“Wait,” I said, sitting up. “Two days?”

“Torquin was crying?” Cass said.

Over Nirvana’s shoulder, I could see Fiddle pushing Professor Bhegad toward us. Torquin was waddling along beside them, his beefy face twisted into a pained expression that looked like indigestion but probably was concern. About twenty feet behind them was a camp-type setup—three big tents, a grill, and a few boxes of supplies.

When had they set that up?

“By the Great Qalani!” the old man cried, holding his arms wide. “You’re—okay!”

No one of us knew quite what to do. Professor Bhegad wasn’t exactly a huggy kind of guy. So I stuck out my hand. He shook it so hard I thought my fingers would fall off. “What happened?” he asked, his eyes darting toward Marco. “If I weren’t so relieved, I’d be furious!”

Marco’s face was flushed. He blinked his eyes. “My bad, P. Beg … shouldn’t have run off like that … whoa … spins … mind if I sit? I think I swallowed too much river water.”

“Torquin, bring him to the tent. Now!” Bhegad snapped. “Summon every doctor we have.”

Marco frowned, drawing himself up to full height with a cocky smile. “Hey, don’t get your knickers in a twist, P. Beg. I’m good.”

But he didn’t look good. His color was way off. I glanced at Aly, but she was intent on her watch. “Um, guys? What time is it? And what day?”

Fiddle gave her a curious look, then checked his watch. “Ten-forty-two A.M. Saturday.”

“My watch says six thirty-nine, Thursday,” Aly said.

“We fix,” Torquin said. “Busted watches a KI specialty.”

“It’s still working, and it’s waterproof,” Aly said. “Look, the second hand is moving. We left at 6:02, our time here in Iraq, and we were back by 6:29. Exactly twenty-seven minutes by my watch. But here—actually in this place—almost two days passed for you!”

“One day and sixteen hours, and forty minutes,” Cass said. “Well, maybe sixteen and a half, if you count discussion time before we actually dove.”

“Aly, this does not make sense,” I said.

“And anything else about this adventure does?” Aly’s face was pale, her eyes focused on Professor Bhegad.

But the professor was rolling forward, intent on Marco. “Did no one hear me?” he said. “Bring that child to the tent, Torquin—now!”

Marco waved Torquin away. But he was staggering backward. His smile abruptly dropped.

And then, so did his body.

As we watched in horror, Marco thumped to the sand, writhing in agony.

‘It’s alive,’ I will pound you,” Marco said.

His eyes flickered. Professor Bhegad exhaled with relief. Behind him, Fiddle let out a whoop of joy. “You are a strong boy,” Bhegad said. “I wasn’t sure the treatment would take.”

“I didn’t think I needed treatments,” Marco replied. A rueful smile creased his face as he looked up at Aly, Cass, and me. “So much for Marco the Immortal.”

Cass leaned down and gave him a hug. “Brother M, we like you just the way you are.”

“Sounds like a song,” said Nirvana, who was clutching Fiddle’s and Torquin’s arms.

I glanced at Aly and noticed she was tearing up. I sidled close to her. I kind of wanted to put my arm around her, but I wasn’t sure if that would be too weird. She gave me a look, frowned, and angled away. “My eyes …” she said. “Must have gotten some sand in them …”

“Aly was telling me about your adventure,” Bhegad said to Marco. “The Loculus seeming to call from the river … the weather change … the city on the other side. It sounds like one of your dreams.”

“Dreams don’t change the passage of time, Professor Bhegad,” Aly said.

“It was real, dude,” Marco said. “Like some overgrown Disney set. This big old city with dirt roads and no cars and people dressed in togas, and some big old pointy buildings.”

Fiddle nodded. “Hm. Ziggurats …”

“Nope,” Marco said. “No smoking.”

“Not cigarettes, ziggurats—tiered structures, places of worship.” Bhegad scratched his head, suddenly deep in thought. “And the rest of you—you all confirm Marco’s observation?”

Nirvana threw up her arms. “When Aly talks about it, you assume it’s a dream. But when Marco says it, you take it seriously. A little gender bias, maybe?”

“My apologies, old habits learned at Yale,” Bhegad said. “I take all of you seriously. Even though you do seem to be talking about a trip into the past—which couldn’t be, pardon the expression, anything more than a fairy tale.”

“So let’s apply some science.” Aly sank to the ground and began making calculations in the sand with her finger. “Okay. Twenty-seven minutes there, about a day and sixteen-and-a-half hours here. That’s this many hours …”

“Twenty-seven minutes there equals forty-and-a-half hours here?” I asked.

“How many minutes would that be?” she said. “Sixty minutes in an hour, so multiply by sixty …”

Aly’s fingers were flying. “So twenty-seven minutes passed while we were there. But twenty-four-hundred thirty minutes passed here. What’s the ratio?”

“Ninety!” Aly’s eyes were blazing. “It means we went to a place where time travels ninety times slower than it does here.”

Fiddle looked impressed. “You go, girl.”

“Whaaat? That’s impossible!” Cass shook his head in disbelief, then glanced at Professor Bhegad uncertainly. “Isn’t it?”

I desperately tried to remember something weird I once learned. “In science class … when I wasn’t sleeping … my teacher was talking about this famous theory. She said to imagine you were in a speeding train made of glass, and you threw a ball up three feet and then caught it. To you, the ball’s going up and down three feet. But to someone outside the train, looking through those glass walls …”

“The ball moves in the direction of the train, so it travels many more than three feet—not just up and down, but forward,” Professor Bhegad said. “Yes, yes, this is the theory of special relativity …”

“She said time could be like that,” I went on. “So, like, if you were in a spaceship, and you went really fast, close to the speed of light, you’d come back and everyone on earth would be a lot older. Because, to them, time is like that ball. It goes faster when it’s just up and down instead of all stretched out.”

“So you’re thinking you guys were like the spaceship?” Nirvana said. “And that place we found—it’s like some parallel world going slower, alongside our world?”

“But if we both exist at the same time, why aren’t we seeing them?” Marco said. “They should be on the other side of the river, only moving really slow a-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-d speeeeeeeeaki-i-i-i-i-ing l-i-i-i-ke thi-i-i-i-s …”

“We have five senses and that’s all,” Aly said. “We can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Maybe when you bend time like that, the rules are different. You can’t experience the other world, at least with regular old physical senses.”

“But you—you all managed to traverse the two worlds,” Bhegad said, “by means of some—”

“Portal,” Fiddle piped up.

“It looked like a tire,” Marco said. “Only nicer. With cool caps.”

Bhegad let out a shriek. “Oh! This is extraordinary. Revolutionary. I must think about this. I’ve been postulating the existence of wormholes all my life.”

Torquin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Pustulate not necessary. See wormholes every day!”

“A wormhole in time,” Bhegad said. “It’s where time and space fold in on themselves. So the normal rules don’t apply. The question is, what rules do apply? These children may very well have traveled cross-dimensionally. They saw a world that occupies this space, this same part of the earth where we now stand. How does one do this? The only way is by traveling through some dimensional flux point. In other words, one needs to find a disruption in the forces of gravity, magnetism, light, atomic attraction.”

“Like the portal in Mount Onyx,” I said, “where the griffin came through.”

“Exactly,” Professor Bhegad said. “Do you realize what you were playing with? What dangers you risked? According to the laws of physics, your bodies could have been turned inside out … vaporized!”

I shrugged. “Well, I’m feeling pretty good.”

“You told me you could feel the Loculus, Jack,” Bhegad said. “The way you felt the Heptakiklos in the volcano.”

“I felt it, too,” Marco said. “We’re Select, yo. We get all wiggy when we’re near this stuff. It’s a G7W thing.”

“Which means, unfortunately, you will have to return …” Bhegad stated, his voice drifting off as he sank into thought.

“Yeah, and this time without the twenty-first-century clothes, which make us stick out,” Marco said. “I say we hit the nearest costume shop, buy some stylish togas, and go back for the prize.”

“Not togas,” Aly said. “Tunics.”

Professor Bhegad shook his head. “Absolutely not. This is not to be rushed into. We must return to our original plan, to finish your training. Recent events—the vromaski, the griffin—they forced our hand. Made us rush. They thrust you into an adventure for which you were not adequately prepared …”

“Old school … old school …” Marco chanted.

“Call it what you wish, but I call it prudent,” Professor Bhegad shot back. “Everything you’ve done—Loculus flying, wormhole traveling—is unprecedented in human history. We need to study the flight Loculus. Consult our top scientists about further wormhole visits. Assess risk. If and when you go back through the portal, we must have a plan—safety protocols, contingencies, strategies, precise timing to your treatment schedule. Now, turn me around so we can get started.”

Fiddle threw us a shrug and then began turning the old man back toward the tents.

“Yo, P. Beg—wait!” Marco said.

Professor Bhegad stopped and looked over his shoulder. “And that’s another thing, my boy—it’s Professor Bhegad. Sorry, but you will not be calling the shots anymore. From here on, you are on a tight leash.”

“Um, about that flight Loculus?” Marco said. “Sorry, but you can’t study it.”

Professor Bhegad narrowed his eyes. “You said you hid it, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but—” Marco began.

“Then retrieve it!” Bhegad snapped.

Marco rubbed the back of his neck, looking out toward the water. “The thing is—I hid it … there.”

“In the water?” Nirvana asked.

“No,” Marco replied. “Over in the other place.”

Bhegad slumped. “Well, this makes the job a bit more complicated, doesn’t it? I suppose you do have to go sooner rather than later. Prepared or not. Perhaps I will have to send the able-bodied Fiddle along to help you.”

“Or Torquin,” Torquin grunted indignantly, “who is able-bodied … er.”

Fiddle groaned. “This is not in my job description. Or Tork’s. We were told one Loculus in each of the Seven Wonders. Not in some fantasy time warp—in the real world.”

“The second Loculus, dear Fiddle,” Bhegad said, “is indeed in one of the Wonders.”

“Right—so we should be digging, not spinning sci-fi stories,” Fiddle said. “You see those ruins down the river—that’s where the Hanging Gardens were!”

“But our Select have gone to where the Hanging Gardens are.” Bhegad gestured toward the water, his eyes shining. “I believe they have found the ancient city of Babylon.”

hidden compartments?” Professor Bhegad asked, reading off a list of supplies. “Leather sandals?”

“Check,” said Nirvana. “Soaked in the river and dried out, for that ancient worn-in look. And you have no idea how hard it was to find size thirteen double E, for Mr. Hoopster.”

“Sorry,” Marco said sheepishly. “Big feet mean a big heart.”

“Oh, please,” Fiddle said with a groan.

“Tunics?” Bhegad pressed onward. “Hair dye to cover up the lambdas? Can’t let the Babylonians see them, you know. Their time frame is close to the time of the destruction of Atlantis, almost three millennia ago. The symbol might mean something to them.”

“Do a pirouette, guys,” Nirvana said.

We turned slowly, showing Bhegad the dye job Nirvana had done to the backs of our heads. “It was a little hard to match the colors,” Nirvana said. “Especially with Jack. There’s all this red streaked in with the mousy brown, and I had to—”

“If I need further information, I’ll ask!” Bhegad snapped.

“Well, excuuuuuse me for talking.” Nirvana folded her arms and plopped down on the floor of the tent, not far from where I was studying.

We were feverishly trying to learn as much as we could about Babylon and the Hanging Gardens. Professor Bhegad had been tense and demanding over the last couple of days. “Ramsay!” he barked. “Why were the Gardens built?”

“Uh … I know this … because the king dude wanted to make his wife happy,” Marco said. “She was from a place with mountains and stuff. So the king was like, ‘Hey babe, I’ll build you a whole mountain right here in the desert, with flowers and cool plants.’”

“Williams!” Bhegad barked. “Tell me the name of the, er, king dude—as you so piquantly call it—who built the Hanging Gardens. Also, the name of the last king of Babylon.”

“Um …” Cass said, sweat pouring down his forehead. “Uh …”

“Nebuchadnezzar the Second and Nabonidus!” Bhegad closed his eyes and removed his glasses, slowly massaging his forehead with his free hand. “This is hopeless …”

Cass shook his head. He looked like he was about to cry. “I should have known that. I’m losing it.”

“You’re not losing it, Cass,” I said.

“I am,” he replied. “Seriously. Something is wrong with me. Maybe my gene is mutating. This could really mess all of us up—”

“I will give you a chance to redeem yourself, Williams,” Bhegad said. “Give me the names the Babylonians actually called Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Come now, dig deep!”

Cass spun around. “What? I didn’t hear that—”

“Nabu-Kudurri-Usur and Nabu-na’id!” Bhegad said. “Don’t forget that! How about Nabu-na’id’s evil son? Marco, you take a turn!”

“Nabonudist Junior?” Marco said.

“Belshazzar!” Bhegad cried out in frustration. “Or Bel-Sharu-Usur! Hasn’t anyone been paying attention?”

“Give us a break, Professor, these are hard to remember!” Aly protested.

“You need to know these people cold—what if you meet them?” Bhegad said. “Black—what was the main language spoken?”

“Arabic?” Aly said.

Bhegad wiped his forehead. “Aramaic—Aramaic! Along with many other languages. Many nationalities lived in Babylon, each with a different language—Anatolians, Egyptians, Greeks, Judaeans, Persians, Syrians. The great central temple of Etemenanki was also known as the …?”

“Tower of Lebab—aka Babel!” Cass blurted out. “Which is where we get the term babble! Because people gathered around it and talked and prayed a lot.”

“Cass will fit right in,” Marco said, “speaking Backwardish.”

Bhegad tapped the table impatiently. “Next I quiz you on the numerical system.” He plopped down a sheet of paper with all kinds of gobbledygook scribbled on it:

“Memorize these numbers,” Bhegad said. “Remember, our columns are ones, tens, hundreds, et cetera. Theirs were one, sixty, thirty-six hundred, et cetera.”

“Can you go slowly,” Marco said. “Like we have normal intelligence?”

“Those, my boy,” Bhegad said, pronouncing each word exaggeratedly, “may perhaps resemble bird prints to you, but they’re numbers. Start from that fact … and read! We will have a moment of silence while you attempt to learn. And I attempt to settle my roiling stomach.”

As Fiddle pulled him back toward a table where his medicines were set up, I slid down to the ground with a book in hand, next to a pouting Nirvana. “Dang, what did he eat for breakfast?” she mumbled.

“He’s just worried, that’s all,” I said. “About us being in a wormhole.”

Across the tent, Cass and Aly huddled over a tablet, studying research documents the professor had downloaded—histories, ancient–language study manuals, reports on social behavior norms. “Okay, so the upper class dudes were awilum,” Cass was saying, “the lower class was mushkenum, and the slaves were …”

“Wardum,” Aly replied. “Like wards of the state. You can remember it that way.”

“Mud-raw backward,” Cass said. “That’s easier.”

“What? Mud-raw?” Marco slapped the table. “This is ridiculous. Yo, P. Beg, this isn’t Princeton. We can’t learn the entire history of Babylon in two days. We’re not going there to live. Let’s just pop over and bring this thing back.”

I thought Professor Bhegad would freak. For a moment his face went beet red. Then he sighed, removing his glasses and wiping his forehead. “You know, in the Mahabharata, the Hindus wrote of a king who made a rather quick journey to heaven. When he returned the world had aged many years, people were feeble and small. Their brains had rotted away.”

“So wait, we’re like that king?” Marco said. “And you’re the world?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Bhegad said.

“I never metaphor I didn’t like,” Marco said, “but dude, your brain won’t rot away. It’s preserved in awesome.”

“I may be dead by the time you return. I am concerned about the passage of time. And I do have a plan.” Bhegad looked each of us in the eye, one by one. “I am giving you forty-eight hours. That will be six months for us. We will continue to maintain a camp here and wait patiently for the five of you. If you are as marvelous as we think you are, that will be enough time to find both Loculi. When the time is up, no matter what happens, you will return. If you need another voyage, we will plan it then. Understood?”

“Wait—you said the five of us,” I said warily. “Fiddle is coming?”

“No, you need protection, first and foremost,” Professor Bhegad looked at Torquin. “Don’t lose them this time, my barefooted friend. And keep yourself out of jail.”

* * *

“Step … step … step … step …”

Torquin called out marching orders like a drill sergeant. He had tied us together at the waist with long lengths of rope, which dragged on the sand between us as we walked. We were lined up left to right—Marco, Aly, Torquin, Cass, and me.

“Is this necessary?” Aly asked as we reached water’s edge.

“Safety,” Torquin said. “I lose you, I lose job.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Professor Bhegad, Nirvana, and Fiddle were waiting and watching, near a big, domed tent.

“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.

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.

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.

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