The Legend of the Rift (9 page)

I
HATE WHEN
grown-ups tousle my hair. But old Brutus was working my scalp so hard you'd think he was kneading bread. At least he was happy about the truce. “Big day,” he kept saying. “Big day!”

“So,” I replied, “can we get started—?”

Brutus turned to Torquin for a high five, but the big guy waved him away. “Waste of time.”

There must have been two dozen KI rebels—way less than the original Karai Institute. The time in the jungle had taken its toll. Fritz the mechanic's once-bulging arms had grown thin, and his Harley-Davidson tattoo looked like a crushed tricycle. Some of the others were barely recognizable from weight loss and sickness.

The woman they called Hannelore was directing some of the rebels as they tried to pry open Wenders's chest. “Why are they doing this now?” Cass hissed.

“Because we need all the help we can get,” Marco said. “We talked about this, Brother Cass. Wenders is the man. He covered every inch of this place. If anyone knew how to get in and out of the rift, it was him. So, what if his secrets are in that chest? Sometimes fast is the enemy of smart.”

“Where'd you learn that?” Cass said.

“Fortune cookie,” Marco said.

As the rebels pulled on the warped, waterlogged lid, Eloise clung to my side, openmouthed. I couldn't help looking either.

The hinges squeaked as the top swung open. A smell of rotting fish wafted upward. “Sweet,” Marco said.

Eloise held her nose. “You are so strange.”

Hannelore shone a flashlight, revealing a box inside:

“Greek to me,” Torquin grumbled.

Marco peered closely. “I think it says ‘This belongs to a Weird Bald Tot.'”

“Wenders was German, like me,” Hannelore said, “as is this message. The translation is roughly, ‘Whether you come with greed or with need, whoever opens this will soon be dead.'”

“Doesn't really rhyme,” Eloise remarked.

As Hannelore reached for the box, Marco grabbed her hand. “Whoa. Don't do that.”

“Why?” Hannelore asked.

“‘Soon be dead'?” Marco said. “That's pretty strong.”

“Ach, I am a scientist,” Hannelore said with a little laugh. “This message was the scare tactic of a scared man. Besides, we've already opened this, and everyone survived.”

Marco let go reluctantly, and Hannelore pulled up the box with both hands. It was sturdy and surprisingly heavy looking, like a giant car battery. She laid it on the ground and brushed off the seaweed. Pulling a small crowbar from a tool belt, she pried it open, releasing a soft sigh of air. “Remarkable for its time,” she said, “this box is nearly waterproof. It must have been precision-crafted by the best German metallurgists of the day. But watch . . .”

Inside it was another box, wedged tightly. She pulled that out and opened it, to reveal yet another box. This one was dry and pristine, its oaken sides looking almost new.
“A perfect system of protection,” she said. “The insides of this third box remained dry for more than a century underwater.”

By now the entire crew—Aliyah, her guards, the Massa captives, the rebels, and the rest of us—were gawking silently. Hannelore jimmied open the final box and turned to us with a grin. “Voilà!”

Marco was the first to peer in. The box was packed solid with leather-bound notebooks, jammed side by side. Each spine was labeled with a number and date.

As Hannelore gently pulled one of them out, Eloise gasped. “These are sooo cool.”

“Who's your daddy?” Marco crowed. “Are those Wenders's secret notebooks or are they not? So, what do they say, Brunhilda?”

“Hannelore,” said Hannelore, leafing through the book. “The problem is that they are all written in Latin. Wenders was quite a scholar. He knew his classics, his Latin and Greek. I suppose he used Latin instead of his native German as a kind of code, to keep nosey people from understanding them. Which, unfortunately, would include us.”

“Fiddle knew Latin,” Nirvana added softly.

Great. All this effort and we were stuck with books we couldn't read.

“Wait,” Marco said, reaching down into the chest. “Are you sure they're
all
in Latin?”

I felt Torquin's hand clamping on my forearm. He pulled me away from the chest with one hand and Marco with the other. “We go. To Mount Onyx. Now. She is waiting.”

“But—” Marco began to protest.

“He's right,” I said.

Aliyah was walking toward us, away from the chest. Marco, Cass, and Eloise were close behind.

“Have all three Loculi now,” Torquin said. “Loculus of Flight to get there fast. Loculus of Invisibility to avoid creatures. Loculus of Healing if things go wrong.”

“But even cases of extreme urgency cannot yield to recklessness,” Aliyah said. “Night has fallen, and even if you are using your Loculi to travel, you must be able to see.”

“Too bad we don't have a Loculus of Night Vision,” Marco said.

Aliyah smiled. “You might.”

Now all five of us looked at her blankly.

“If I'm not mistaken,” Aliyah said, “you have visited five sites. But you retrieved Loculi from only four of them—the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the Statue of Zeus. You never found the Loculus of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

I flinched at the thought of our botched visit to Egypt. We'd been taken to the Massa's underground stronghold near the Great Pyramid. They'd tried to brainwash us the way they'd brainwashed Marco, but we'd managed to escape
and return to the island. It was a cell phone in my pocket that allowed them to track us—and eventually invade the island.

My fault. All my fault
. For about the gazillionth time I fought back the voice that had been taunting me since the invasion. “We didn't have a chance to look,” I said. “But after we get Aly, we'll go back. We have to.”

“What makes you think you need to go back?” Aliyah said.

“Because, duh, we need seven Loculi,” Marco said.

Cass held up a hand to shush him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What are you saying, Aliyah? Do you have it?
Do you have the pyramid Loculus?
”

Aliyah turned around. “Follow me.”

“Why can't she ever give us a straight answer?” Eloise mumbled.

I turned back toward the jungle in frustration. In the distance, Mount Onyx was a deep black blot on the blue-black sky. “We don't have any time to waste.”

“And I,” Aliyah said over her shoulder, “am not in the habit of wasting time.”

“S
O, WERE YOU
serious that there was a shark on board the
Enigma
?” Cass asked Brother Dimitrios.

“Hurry,” I warned him.

We were racing into the ruined grand hallway of the building once known as the House of Wenders. The elegant tiled floor was covered with grime. A simple metal pole now lined the grand balcony, replacing the carved mahogany rail. And the destroyed skeleton of Herman Wenders's dinosaur had been piled up carelessly in one corner.

“It surprised us,” Dimitrios said. “It was like something out of a horror movie. I thought we might be eaten.”

“Doesn't happen that way,” Eloise piped up. “Sharks use their stomachs for storage. Stuff can just stay in there,
like, forever. They can choose which items to digest—and digestion happens in the shark's gizzard. That stuff in the stomach? If it starts irritating them or whatever, they just go . . .
bleeahhhh
! They throw it up, right out of their mouth. Their stomach is like this giant rubber slingshot. It's the coolest thing ever.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Cass asked.

Eloise smacked him. “They have school here.”

“Will you stop chatting and step lively?” Aliyah called out.

She and Manolo were already at the elevator just beyond the hallway. It was the first we'd seen of the elevator since the Massa attack. The ornately carved metal door was pitted with shrapnel, but the up and down lights were working and the door slid open just fine.

I adjusted my backpack, which contained the Loculi of Invisibility and Flight. Cass was wearing the sack with the newly reconstructed Loculus of Healing. As we stepped inside, Brother Dimitrios settled against the elevator wall. “I don't believe I thanked you properly, Marco,” he said. “For using the Loculus of Healing on me.”

“No worries, Brother D,” Marco said. “But you owe me one.”

According to the buttons, the elevator descended seven levels underground, to the lowest level. But Aliyah pressed a swift combination of buttons, and it kept dropping.

“Where are we going? China?” Eloise asked.

Torquin, who had been grumbling and scowling the whole way, sighed. “Not hearing her anymore,” he muttered.

“Not hearing who?” I asked.

“Voice,” Torquin said. “Don't know who.”

“Seriously?” Cass said. “Does Asclepius do psychiatry?”

“You look suspiciously healthy, Torquin,” Brother Dimitrios said.

“We used the Loculus of Healing on him, too,” Eloise explained.

Torquin glared at Brother Dimitrios. “You look suspiciously suspicious.”

Dimitrios was the first one out the door when it opened. The air was at least twenty degrees cooler down here. It smelled like my basement in Belleville after a big flood two years ago. Like mildew and dead mouse.

“Phew, did you unwrap some mummies down here, too?” Cass asked.

Brother Dimitrios and Manolo shone flashlights into a cramped, dirt-walled cavern. The ceiling was not much higher than my head, and occasional stalactites dripped water onto the ground. Both Marco and Torquin had to stoop to walk.

Along the walls, four narrow tunnels had been dug. We followed Aliyah into one of them. Her flashlight outlined a long passageway with detours off to the sides. In the
distance was a steady rhythmic banging.

“Th-th-this is scary,” Cass whispered. “What if this is a dungeon?”

Aliyah turned. “Sorry about the noise. We are about to pass the auxiliary power room. We are forced to use it until the main power station is repaired. It was built by the Karai. I must give them credit.”

Just next to the power room, Aliyah stopped before an unmarked door. Leaning low, she stared into a green-glowing metal plate. In a moment, the door swung open. “Iris recognition,” she explained.

Manolo leaned inside and flicked on a light switch. I had to blink at the sudden harsh fluorescent light. As my eyes adjusted, I choked back a gasp.

The little room was actually a vast chamber at least fifteen feet high and stretching the length of a tennis court. Tables had been shoved against the walls, and shelves rose practically to the ceiling—every surface jammed with ancient artifacts. They were dull gray, jewel-encrusted, metallic, rocklike. The smallest was the size of a softball, and the largest approximately the circumference of Torquin's head. A couple had fallen to the dirt floor, and one lay smashed like a fallen Christmas tree ornament.

Every single one was in the shape of a sphere.

“Who-o-o-oa,” Cass said, his head angled upward to take it all in, “this is an orb museum.”

“Pah,” Torquin said. “Looting. Illegal.”

“We are all archaeologists and scholars,” Aliyah said, “and we plan to return everything. Well, everything that is not a Loculus . . .”

I stepped inside, and it all became clear to me. When Aliyah said she and her people had found the Loculus, she'd been stretching the truth. They couldn't really
know
. They weren't Selects. “So . . . you found everything that
might
be a Loculus,” I said. “And you brought it all here.”

“We are reasonably certain
one
of these is the Loculus,” Aliyah replied. “We took them from a hidden tomb that was not discovered by looters. Fragments of writing, presumably from Massarym, assure us that the Loculus was kept in the tomb, not in the Great Pyramid itself. Perhaps the pyramids, which had existed for millennia before Massarym arrived, were not deemed safe from looters. Whereas a hidden tomb . . .”

The Dream.

The memory came rushing back. The stone marker—the stele—had indicated the entrance to a hidden underground place. Lydia the farm girl had gone there to help Karai escape, only to be discovered by Massarym. “Karai and Massarym were both down there. . . .” I said.

“The writings do not mention Karai,” Aliyah said. “But there have been rumors his body was buried under the tomb, with the Loculus beside it. Personally I think it's all bunk.”

“Aliyah,” I said, “the Loculi are all protected by creatures. If you did take the real one, you would have been attacked . . . by something.”

“Perhaps,” Brother Dimitrios said, “the Loculus must be activated in order for the creature to be summoned?”

I shrugged, looking around the room. The ancient jewels spat sharp beams of reflected light that danced against the walls. “Aliyah, there are hundreds of objects,” I said.

“Can't you just wander around and listen for the Song of the Streptococcus?” Eloise asked.

“Heptakiklos,” Cass said.

As I looked from orb to orb, the designs danced in the harsh light, distracting my concentration. I closed my eyes, but the fluorescents were giving off an annoying, high-pitched buzz, and the floor shook with the booms and thrums of the power station next door. How was I supposed to hear anything in this racket?

My foot jammed against something and I tripped, stumbling to the floor. “Nice move,” Marco said.

“What do you hear, Jack?” Aliyah insisted.

“I can't do it,” I said. “I need quiet. Less distraction.”

“Manolo, can we move these to a more sealed location,” Aliyah said.

“Will take days,” Manolo said.

“Too long,” Torquin grumbled.

“What if this is a wild-goose chase?” Marco said.

I looked desperately around the room, trying to ignore the sounds, the light, and now the bickering, which was starting to annoy me.
“STOP IT!”
I shouted at the top of my lungs.

The voices stopped. A moment later so did the other noises. And then a moment later, so did the lights.

Eight stories underground, we were plunged into total darkness.