Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon Read online

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  A Mighty Foe

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  DEDICATION

  [DEDICATION TK?]

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Death Toast

  Chapter Two: “The Mistake”

  Chapter Three: The Last Time Art Tk

  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

  Chapter Ten: Arabic or Aramaic?

  Chapter Eleven: Matter and Anti-Matter

  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: Zigzagging

  Chapter Thirty: Careful!

  Chapter Thirty-One: Don’t Let Go

  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: Air Sick

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: His Jackness

  Chapter Forty: Missles 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: Safe and Comfortable

  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: The Safety Catch

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Sirens

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

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  CHAPTER ONE

  DEATH TOAST

  BY THE THIRD 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.

  Okay, not an actual physical bomb. 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—Aly Black, Cass Williams, Marco Ramsay. 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.

  So we were on a desperate mission to find him. Which was why we were stuck in a sweaty Jeep driven by a red-bearded giant known as Torquin, who had a particular talent for joyously running over potholes.

  “Picking skin off your face, Jack? Really?” said Aly from the backseat, as our Jeep jounced down a jungle path. 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 Williams 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. “Oops.”

  Torquin’s 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.

  “Frame it,” Torquin said distractedly.

  “Wait. Frame a piece of sunburned skin?” asked Aly, shielding her head as the Jeep bounced again.

  “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, let’s face it, 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 already pale face grew practically ash white. “Remind me not to remind you.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for this just to be a sunburn,” Cass said.

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

  Cass frowned without opening his eyes. “Don’t even think of doing this mission without me. I’m a little tired, but otherwise perfect.”

  “Are you sure?” Aly said.

  “I had my treatment,” Cass replied. “It worked. We have to find Marco. We’re a family.”

  Aly and I exchanged a glance. It was bad enough that Cass had to deal with the aftereffects of being flown across an ocean by a griffin, who then prepped him for lunch. But we also knew how long it took to recover from these so-called treatments.

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

&n
bsp; 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, hitting another pothole.

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

  Luckily the Jeep reached the end of the winding path through the jungle 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 . . . hippie and Goth girl . . .” Cass muttered. “Those are their names.”

  “He also remembers everything,” I said. 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.”

  The man named Fiddle looked toward us with a tight smile. “Ah. That’s ‘ha’ backward. 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 smiled, drumming 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 couldn’t believe we were doing this. Up till now, going home had been unthinkable. People there 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.

  At this point, with no signal from Marco, we were desperate and clueless. Searching for him at his home just seemed like the best guess.

  As we stepped out of the Jeep, Torquin stood in the sun, stretched, and let out 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 clot of dirt off the stepladder. “Have fun in Ohio,” he said. “But don’t expect me at your funeral.”

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  CHAPTER TWO

  “THE MISTAKE”

  “I SET YOUR dog on fire and wipe the floor with rags made of the memories of everything I ever did with you . . .”

  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. Gravitationally compressed dorkitude. Maybe that was my great G7W talent, the superhuman ability to always say the wrong thing. Especially around Aly, and I don’t know why. 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 a clump of spires that must have been Manhattan. A minute later the sight was gone, replaced by the checkerboard farmland of what must have been Pennsylvania. This jet was going to get us to Ohio in no time.

  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. Marco was not only the best athlete I’d ever met, but 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? Professor Bhegad had told us he had a plan for extraction in case we were caught. But I had a feeling the plan consisted of one ingredient: Torquin. And that didn’t give me confidence.

  The events of the last few days raced in my head on auto-playback: 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 and singing like a choir—the Heptakiklos.

  If only I’d ignored the sound. 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—”

  “Hey, I’m alive, right?” Cass said with a wan smile.

  “Griffins were bred to find and protect the Loculi,” Aly reminded me. “This one led us to the pile of rocks that turned into the Colossus of Rhodes. You caused that to happen, Jack! We’ll get it back. Marco will listen to us. Honestly, it would help us if you let six more griffins through!”

  Cass blanched. “Let’s not get crazy now . . .”

  “Seriously,” Aly said, “if we could make that happen, I’d 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’d just take a look at the ingredients, adjust the dosages, tinker with the formula. We’d follow each of those red birds to a Loculus.”