Seven Wonders Book 1: The Colossus Rises (6 page)

M
ARCO HADN’T SAID
a word. Hadn’t even looked at me.

What was I doing with the card key? I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be caught with it. Was this Marco’s plan—to get me in trouble? Why?

I tried to look at him, to get some sort of indication. He was sitting across a crowded table from me, stuffing food into his mouth and carrying on a conversation with some young female staff member whose name tag said Ginger.

The banquet table was enormous, running the length of a vast octagonal room. Chairs were packed close together, and it seemed like the entire Karai Institute was here—fat old men with ZZ Top beards, hipsters in narrow glasses, all kinds of people. Many sported intertwining-snake KI
tattoos on their arms. They all seemed to know each other well, their laughter and conversation hovering like a cloud of sound.

The place was called the Comestibule. Professor Bhegad said it meant “cafeteria,” and he didn’t answer me when I asked why they didn’t call it a cafeteria. Its walls, paneled with blond wood, rose dizzyingly upward to a kind of steeple. All around us were portraits of stern-faced scientists, who seemed to be staring at me like I owed them money.

A great chandelier, made of curled glass tubes that resembled Medusa’s head of snakes, flooded the room with LED light. Across the rafters hung a banner that stretched nearly the length of the room:

Professor Bhegad had made a big deal about the chef preparing quail for dinner. The thought of it made me sick.

Cass leaned over to me and mumbled a long stream of words that made absolutely no sense. “Dude, stop it,” I said. “I can’t do that backward-speaking thing.”

As Cass stared at me, looking annoyed, Marco’s voice boomed out toward a passing waitress. “Excuse me, you got any more food? There isn’t much meat on these things.”

“If you eat one more quail, sir, you’ll fly away,” the girl answered.

“Take mine,” I said.

Marco reached across and vacuumed my plate away.

I kept expecting people to ask me about my Big Talent, but no one did. Fortunately, they all seemed pretty normal. Friendly.

A clinking sound rang out, and Professor Bhegad was on his feet. “Ladies and gentlemen and Scholars of Karai! Our Comestibule is a place of great joy today. We have saved a young life and we continue our adventure with renewed strength and hope. Tonight and over the next few weeks you will all have a chance to meet our newest young genius, Jack McKinley!”

“Speech! Speech!” Marco yelled through the applause.

My heart was ping-ponging. I still couldn’t get used to this.
Weeks?
Here?

I felt an elbow in my side. “Hey, wake up, dude,” Aly muttered. “You’re getting a standing O.”

All around the table, people were rising to their feet and applauding. Staring directly at me. All except Cass, who was doodling on a napkin.

“Stand up!” Aly said.

My chair was heavy and hard to push back. I felt like a dorkus maximus. I waved awkwardly and sat again.

“That was inspiring,” Marco said, his mouth full of quail.

As I sat, I noticed a paper napkin and a pen lying on my chair. “Is this yours?” I asked Cass.

His eyes widened. He glanced up at the Medusa chandelier. I looked into the crazy swirl of glass tendrils, but I couldn’t tell what he was acting so weird about.

Not weird. Scared, maybe. His face was tense and his fingers had the tremors.

I flipped the napkin over and saw a scribbled note. A bunch of numbers.

“The banner is cool!” Cass blurted out. “‘Welcome to your Karai Institute home, Jack!’ Man, I never had something this fancy. I’d remember those words forever. Wow. ‘Welcome to your Karai Institute home, Jack!’”

He was trying to tell me something. I glanced at the note and figured I needed to read it in private. “I—I think I’ll wash my hands,” I said, pushing my chair back.

The men’s room was outside the dining room, across a small hallway with a view of the kitchen. I bolted inside, ran into an open stall, and latched it shut. Carefully I spread the napkin on the wall and looked at the message.

They looked like Lotto numbers. What did they mean? Could it be some kind of code? Maybe an alphabet-number substitution thing. Like
A
= 1 and
B
= 2.

Nope. Didn’t work. Some of the numbers were greater than twenty-six, and there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet.

I sat back with a sigh. What was it Cass had been telling me?
The banner is cool…I’d remember those words forever
. He’d read it aloud. Twice.

Weird.

I wrote the banner’s message across the top of the napkin:
WELCOME TO YOUR KARAI INSTITUTE HOME, JACK.

Staring at it, I wondered if he meant it was connected to the code. I started numbering each of the letters in the banner message.

The first number on Cass’s coded message was 6. That mapped to the
M
in the banner message.

I went one by one with each of his digits: 6, 27, 2, 8, 23, 20, 30, 15, 13, 4, 11, 21, 13, 5, 11, 30, 8, 28, 16, 2, 31, 15, 6, 1, 7, 13, 25, 20, 15, 1, 17, 10.

Meet in Marco’s room. Three
A.M.
we run away
.

I took a deep breath. Then I ripped up the napkin and flushed it into oblivion.

A
S MY BEDROOM
door clicked open, I snapped awake. I didn’t know what time it was. My brain had been dipping in and out of sleep for hours. The night had spooked me. I didn’t trust the smiling, squeaky-clean faces at dinner. Or Professor Bhegad.

“It’s Marco,” came a whisper. “Time to get up.”

The little glowing clock on my bed table read 2:56. My foggy brain was awakening.
Three
A.M.
we run away
.

“You’re early,” I mumbled.

Marco stepped inside. His backpack was slung across his shoulder. “Just wanted to be sure you got up. I’m kind of a control freak. But you probably figured that out. Come on before it’s too late. Aly disabled the bugs.”

I turned to face him. “The
what
?”

Marco gestured toward the banner with the KI symbol. “Wake up and smell the coffee, Jethro. They’ve got a recording device in that banner. And in a few other places, too. Just sound, out of respect for privacy, I guess. The cameras are on the outside of the building. Now come on. Don’t make me carry you out of here.”

I was on my feet. I hadn’t changed out of my clothes since dinner, so all I had to do was slip my feet into my Chucks.

Marco flung the door open. Conan was slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, snoring. “Aly hacked into the medical-supply security and liberated some sleeping pills,” Marco explained as we walked toward his room. “Horse strength for Conan. Not that he really needed it. Sleep is his natural state.”

Marco’s room was the second door to the right. Cass and Aly were already waiting inside, looking grim and worried. The little smiles that had always been plastered on their faces were gone.

“We owe you an explanation,” Aly said, talking very quickly. “You think we’re idiots.
Children of the Corn
zombies. We had to act enthusiastic. We’re under surveillance, indoors and out, twenty-four seven. I’ve been trying to hack into the system since day one. The encryption makes the US government look like amateurs, but I finally did it.”

“So…everything you’ve been telling me…about how
happy you are here, how much you like this place…” I said.

“Lies,” Cass said. “At dinner I wanted to whisper the plan to you, but that chandelier is full of unidirectional mikes. Then I tried to talk to you in Backward, but you outed me. Sorry about the code. It was my only choice. If I had my way, we would all be talking in code, just for the fun of it. Naem I tahw wonk uoy fi.”

“I’m adjusting to the idea that you’re all normal. Don’t spoil it.” I smiled. “So I was right—they’re evil; they’re fooling us.”

“We’ll talk later, bro,” Marco said. “We have to move, before they notice the system is down.”

“I replaced their live feed with a recording,” Aly explained. “It’s showing an hour-long endless loop of what happened from about one
A.M.
to two
A.M.
If they’re listening to Marco’s room now, they’re hearing him snore, all curled up with his toy sheep, Daisy.”

“Leave Daisy out of this,” Marco grumbled.

Cass was peering out the window. “At two o’clock, they switch to only one guard on duty outside. We’ve been watching him for the last week, and he always sneaks off for a snack by five after three—at the latest. M&M’s and Diet Dr Pepper. He’s like clockwork.”

“That’s it?” I said. “Just one guard? For such a high-tech place?”

“It’s
because
of the high-tech security they don’t need so many guards,” Marco said. “You get past the guards, and the electric eye zaps you anyway.”

I must have turned green, because Aly immediately added, “They disabled it when you escaped, Jack.”

“They
knew
?” I said. “But—but no one stopped me!”

“Until…?” Marco said.

“This monkey appeared in the middle of nowhere,” I murmured, “with a set of keys…”

“Led you to a clearing in the woods, right?” Marco said. “A big chopper just waiting, with ol’ Sweet Cheeks in the pilot seat? Same thing happened to me. They
let
you go, Jack, and then manipulated your return. To teach you a lesson. Wear you down. That’s the way they operate.”

I felt as if I were emerging from a fog. For the first time since I got here, I was actually hearing things that made sense. “What about all that junk about the superpowers? How’d you make that basket from three miles away, Marco—invisible ropes?”

“He really did that,” Aly said, gently taking my arm. “Look, I think the G7W marker is real. With each treatment, we get smarter, stronger, more whatever we are.
That’s
what I think their goal is, Jack—to make some race of superpeople, not save us from death. They want us supercharged so we can help in their crazy missions. After this
Atlantis thing, who knows what’s next? Maybe finding the abominable snowman.”

“Aly’s supposed to be having her treatment right now,” Cass said. “She went in at eleven o’clock and is supposed to stay hooked up to machines all night. But when the docs left, she rewired the hospital monitors so it seems like she’s still there.”

Aly smiled. “And look at me. Skipped the treatment and I feel great! Body feels good, mind is sharp. Ask me to recite the opening lines of
Star Wars
Five
.”

“When we bust out of here, I’m heading for the NBA draft,” Marco said.

Cass had taken twelve sheets of loose-leaf paper from under the rug and carefully taped them together. On the combined sheets was a map drawn in exacting pencil strokes. A miniature replica of the campus was at the bottom, each building labeled. At the top right was a cloud of dense trees with a dotted-line path ending at a clearing. Cass had drawn a key and a monkey on the path, and a helicopter at the end of it. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

“We have outings, nature walks,” he replied. “Sometimes the guide lets us go off the beaten track. I remember it all. If I have enough data, I can mentally map a larger area according to the size and variety of the vegetation
and the dispersion of light. Also spoor deposits. Patterns of animal poop can be geographically significant. Also, by the way, poop is a palindrome. The same backward and forward.”

“Thank you,” I said numbly.

Cass traced his finger along a path through the jungle on the upper left, a different direction from the path to the helicopter. At the very top of the map was a shoreline with a dock and a boat. “We’ll head here, to a beach the guards use. Which has a boat.”

On the way, his finger had crossed a line with jagged markings. “Is that the electric fence?” I asked.

Aly shook her head. “Not a fence. Filaments. Thin as cobwebs. You don’t know you’ve been through them until you’re on the ground, wriggling. They don’t kill you, but you’ll wish they had. The filaments were de-electrified and dropped to the ground during your escape attempt.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Active again,” Aly said, shaking her head. “And hard to disable. The security system is decentralized. I managed to hack the recording devices and cameras around the dorm. But the other campus cameras are still live, and so are the filaments.”

“Dora the Explorer here knows where all the surveillance cameras are,” Marco said, gesturing toward Cass.
“We’re going to take a route to the control building that avoids the guards’ sight lines.”

“Once we’re there, I will get to work on the security system,” Aly said.

“How will we get in?” I asked.

All three of them smiled at me.

“Dude, you’ve got to have
some
kind of talent, right?” Marco said.