Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon Page 22

  “The food is great, you have to admit,” Cass said, pulling another carton of ice cream from the fridge. “Look, they have Chubby Hubby too, my favorite. And I liked the relaxation room. And the lady with the scrambled voice.”

  “Nancy,” I said. “Morgana. Or whatever her fake name was. Or his. They’re just trying to bend our minds. Soften us up.”

  Marco exhaled deeply. He threw his empty ice cream carton across the room and sank a perfect shot into the trash can. Cass offered him the Chubby Hubby, but Marco just set it down on the counter. “I owe you guys. If I were you, I’d be mad at me. But I’m mad, too. At the KI. They’ve been on that island forever. What have they done there? They didn’t know about the vromaski, which almost killed me. Or the maze, which almost killed Cass. They didn’t know enough to warn Jack about the griffin—which almost killed all of us! Then when things get really bad, they send us halfway around the world with some bearded goon who can’t keep himself out of jail.”

  “And then the Massarene tried to kill us in Greece!” I reminded him.

  “That’s because they didn’t know who we were, Brother Jack,” Marco said. “They saw us destroying everything they believed in. They didn’t know we were Select.”

  “We all have the lambda,” I said. “It’s pretty obvious.”

  Marco nodded. “They thought we painted it on, the way they do. They figured we were trying to fake them out, to blend in. When we tried to steal the Colossus, of course they went ballistic. Then Brother Dimitrios saw us flying—and everything changed. He knew we were the real deal. He’s smart, guys. We stay with the KI, we die. Their leadership is bad and they have nineteenth-century ideas. They’re like the hard-core nerds in school who make jokes you can’t understand and ignore you when you try to talk to them.”

  “I’m like that,” Cass piped up.

  “Yeah, but you’re cool, brother Cass,” Marco said, giving his head a good-natured push. “You’re a real person with feelings. I trust you. That’s the thing—I trust these guys, too. They’re going to take care of us, support us. We will find those Loculi twice as fast.”

  “And then what?” I said.

  “They’re close to finding the island,” Marco said. “They almost did. A few weeks ago, there were a series of brooches in the KI firewall.”

  “Breaches,” Cass said. “Brooches are things you wear on a blouse. I think the reason they were able to break through is because Aly had to disable the firewall briefly. That’s because we needed info from the outside. Info about you, Marco.”

  “Cool,” Marco said. “So now when the Massa do locate the island, we’ll be able to bring the Loculi back where they belong.”

  “How is that any different than what Bhegad wants?” I said.

  “Bhegad wants to nuke the Loculi,” Marco said.

  “That’s not what he said,” I pointed out.

  “It’s the Karai Institute, Brother Jack,” Marco said. “Their mission is to do what Karai wanted—which was to destroy the Loculi! Massarym was the one who hid them in the Seven Wonders, so that someday they would be returned permanently. And when that happens, the energy will flow again. Not only will we be cured, but the continent will rise.”

  “Uh, rise?” Cass repeated. “As in, come up from the bottom of the sea, where it’s been for eons?”

  Marco smiled. “Can you picture it? A new land mass, dudes. A place with that awesome energy flow. A hangout for the best minds, the best athletes, the best everyone—all picking up that Atlantean vibe. Imagine what they’ll do. End all wars, solve the fuel crisis, make the best movies and songs. And we’ll all be at the top level. Cass can be Transportation Commissioner, Aly can be Chief Tech Guy. Jack can be something cool too, because Brother Dimitrios will be choosing. He’ll be the chief of staff.”

  “And what about you?” I asked.

  I figured he’d say Chief Food Taster or Sports Czar or Babe Magnet. The whole thing was loony.

  But Marco was grinning like me as if he’d just wandered into an ice cream store on a hot August afternoon. “Brother Dimitrios has big plans for the Immortal One. He says I have leadership ability.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Head court jester.”

  Marco shook his head. “In the new world, you can keep calling me Marco. But to everyone else, I’ll be His Highness King Marco the First.”

  The words hung in the air. I looked at Cass. He looked at me.

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “Hey, in the old days, thirteen-year-old kings were pretty common,” Marco shot back. “Read your history. Also, Atlantis can only be run by descendants of the royal family if it’s expected to survive, right? So you learn on the job. And you surround yourself with wise advisers, like Brother Dimitrios. And loyal staff. You attract the best minds from all over the world. The coolest artists and athletes. It will be the most awesome country ever!”

  He was beaming. He was also crazy. “Marco, we’re friends—or we used to be friends, before you betrayed us all,” I said. “So I have to be honest with you. That’s the most unbelievably ridiculous thing anyone has ever said. Sorry.”

  Marco’s smile faded. For a moment he just stared down at the table.

  Then he looked up, and I flinched from the flat, hard look in his eyes.

  “You think I’m ridiculous?” he said, his voice as cold and deadly as his expression. “Fine. I’ll do it without you. Go tell Brother Dimitrios. Tell him you want nothing to do with any of this. You’d rather back away from the opportunity of a lifetime. Your loss.”

  “Marco . . .” Cass pleaded.

  Marco stalked into his bedroom. “I’ll celebrate my fourteenth birthday without any of you. Because I’ll be alive.”

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  THE PHONE

  I DIDN’T FALL asleep until three.

  Mainly because I had been arguing with someone who had lost his mind.

  King Marco?

  He was serious. And he had gone off to a sound sleep. Me, I didn’t think I would ever sleep again. But I did, because an alarm woke me up out of a deep dream.

  I looked at the clock on the table: 5:13.

  Two hours.

  I slapped the snooze button, but the alarm kept chiming. I sat up and shook myself awake. The noise was coming from the bed. I could feel the vibrations. I kicked back the sheets. Nothing. I lifted my pillow.

  A smart phone glowed bright blue, beeping, with a screen that announced WAKE UP! in happy yellow letters.

  I swiped at the off button. The place fell quiet, except for the mechanical whir of the lounge refrigerator and the whoosh of the air-conditioning ducts. I held the phone and stared at it. It wasn’t the same make as mine. Besides, I didn’t have a phone anymore. Hadn’t had one since the moment I got to the KI.

  The alarm app had vanished. In its place was some kind of map. A tiny blue dot pulsed inside a small yellow box. I pinched to zoom out. The box was part of a larger circle.

  Dot, box, circle—the phone, this room, the lounge. Outside the lounge was a network of parallel lines leading in different directions—hallways. At the top of the screen, an arrow pointed diagonally to the right. It was labeled “N” for north.

  I pushed open the door of my room, stepped warily into the lounge and the hall. No one was there.

  But someone had been here. While I was asleep. Someone had put the phone under my pillow, knowing I’d find it and see the map.

  Who? And why?

  Keeping my eye on the screen, I walked. I moved back from the hallway into the lounge. The place smelled like banana peels and orange rinds, and Marco’s uneaten container of Chubby Hubby still stood on the counter.

  The blue dot moved into the circle as I walked. I slid my fingers around the screen, examining the maze of pathways. The plan of the Massa hideout revealed it
self. The paths ranged much farther afield than I thought. It was huge, dozens of rooms, a crisscrossing maze of corridors. The map was flat, but if I pressed a button labeled “3D,” it tilted to reveal a three-dimensional cross-section of paths on many different levels.

  I sneaked into Cass’s room and put my hand over his mouth. His eyes popped open in fear, but I quickly put my finger to my lips in a shushing gesture. I flashed the phone’s screen to him, and he bolted up out of bed. “Where did you get this?” he whispered.

  “Under my pillow,” I said. “And I don’t think it was the Tooth Fairy. Somebody here is on our side. Follow me.”

  “Wait,” Cass said. “Find out who this is.”

  I tried to access mail, photos, browser, settings. All of them were locked. “Just the alarm and map are public,” I said. “No. Wait . . .”

  I’d hit the contacts button. It was showing a list. All the names were in number code.

  “Got it,” Cass said.

  “Got what?” I asked.

  “The numbers,” Cass said. “Committed to memory.”

  “Doesn’t do us much good,” I said. “They look pretty random to me.”

  Cass scratched his head. “This is where we need Aly.”

  He was right. This was going to be impossible. “We have to channel our own inner Aly,” I said lamely.

  “I don’t have the brain for this,” Cass said, staring at it intently and shifting from foot to foot, as if that would help. “Memorize, yes. Analyze, not so much.”

  “It’s an internal code,” I said.

  “Duh,” Cass replied. “So?”

  “So maybe it’s not that hard,” I replied.

  “How does that make sense?” Cass asked.

  I was thinking about something my dad and I talked about, when I was studying American history in school. “Back in World War II,” I said, “the English stole a code machine from the Germans. If they could figure out how it worked, they could break all the enemy secret codes. They got everything except one part. Every German machine operator had to set each machine by keying in ten letters at the top. If they could figure out those ten letters, they could crack the whole thing.”

  “Ten letters, twenty-six letters in the alphabet—that’s like guessing the winning lottery numbers,” Cass said.

  “Worse,” I said. “That’s when someone realized that it was German soldiers who had to pick the letters, not cryptologists. They weren’t going to pick anything too sophisticated, or they’d forget it. Well, the English realized Heil Hitler was ten letters—and it turns out almost all the soldiers had used that!”

  “Really?” Cass said. “You think there are Nazis here? I hate Nazis.”

  “The point is, everyone in this place has to read internal code.” I said. “The leaders and the goons. So think simple. That’s what Aly does. She starts with the obvious, then works from there.”

  Cass and I stared at the numbers on the screen. “They look like email addresses,” he said.

  “And the last part of each address is the same,” I added.

  “After the dot.”

  “Either com, net, or org,” Cass said.

  I nodded. “The first number after the dot is a three. The third letter of the alphabet is c. So I’m thinking that’s a com.”

  I grabbed a pencil and paper from a desk drawer and quickly wrote down a key:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

  “Com is three, fifteen, thirteen!” Cass blurted out.

  “Give me a minute . . .” I said, trying to match all the numbers to letters. “Aly could probably do this in her head. I mean, you don’t know for sure about these double-digit letters. Like a one next to a seven. That could be the first and seventh letters, AG. Or it could mean the seventeenth letter, P. Hang on . . .”

  “Baaron . . . Baddison . . . Salicia . . . Sanna?” Cass said.

  “I’m thinking the B stands for Brother and the S for Sister—like Brother Aaron and Sister Alicia,” I said. “Monkish names.”

  “Sounds like the way Marco normally speaks,” Cass said. “He’s made for this place.”

  “The person who left this wanted us to see it—but why?” I exited out of the app and kept tapping other ones. Each was password-protected. “Great. Can’t open any of these.”

  “Any other great insights from World War Two?” Cass asked.

  Finally I tapped an app marked RS. It opened to reveal an image that made us both jump back:

  “Whoa,” Cass said. “Big Brother is watching.”

  “I’m thinking someone was trying to take a picture but pressed the button that turns the camera backward,” I said, flipping back to the maps app. “Let’s use this and see where it leads us.”

  Cass took the phone, examining the map. “Where do we go if we do escape?”

  “We try to find Aly, if she’s nearby,” I said. “We hack off the iridium arm bands, and hope that the KI finds us before the Massa.”

  Cass’s expression darkened. “You mean, if the KI still exist . . .”

  “We can’t think about what happened at the camp,” I said. “But you heard Brother Dimitrios. He still doesn’t know the location of the island. Whatever his people did to the camp, the KI are going to be fired up. And they will be trying to find us.”

  “So best-case scenario, we leave this prison and go to a nicer one,” Cass said glumly. “I guess I can live with that.”

  I took a deep breath. “It’s all we’ve got. Think about what Dimitrios did, Cass. He knew what would happen when we took the Loculus. He didn’t care about all those people. About Daria. She gave her life for us. At least Professor Bhegad tried to do something. Shelley didn’t work, but he spent time and money to create that thing. Both organizations have lied to us. But for all its weirdness, only one cares enough not to kill innocent people. And that’s the one I plan to stick with.”

  Cass’s eyes wandered out to the common area. “Okay,” he said softly. “I’ll go wake Marco.”

  “What?” I grabbed his arm. “No, Cass. Not Marco. He’ll rat us out.”

  “He won’t,” Cass said. “Seriously. He brought us here. He knows we’re a family. He wants us to stay together.”

  “Cass, I’m sorry, but you are in a fantasy world—” I said.

  Cass jerked his arm away. His face was beet red. “Fantasy? Is that what you’d say if I told you, weeks ago, you’d be trying to find the Seven Wonders? Real is real. We break up and we die. Nothing is more important than staying together, Jack—nothing!”

  From inside Marco’s room, I heard a sudden snort. I leaned in to look. He was fast asleep on his back, snoring.

  “Cass, listen to me,” I hissed. “when this is over, we will go back to different places. Yeah, maybe when we’re old we can move to the same town. But maybe not. Because you make new families when you’re old. Real families. This is about survival, Cass. If we tell Marco, we’re giving up. Betraying Aly. Deciding to stay here and become the kind of zombie that they’re making Marco into. If that’s your definition of family, you can have it. But give me a chance to escape on my own.”

  Cass’s eyes burned into mine. The sides of his mouth curled downward and for a moment I thought he was going to spit, or scream.

  Instead, his eyes rose to a small, spherical camera wedge into a corner of the ceiling.

  He grabbed the container of Chubby Hubby ice cream that had been sitting out all night. Unscrewing the top, he heaved the container toward the mirror.

  A lump of brownish goop flew through the air, saturating the camera. “Promise me that if we get out, we’ll come back for him,” Cass said.

  “Promise,” I replied.

  Without looking at me, he headed for the door. I grabbed the first things I could get my hands on and threw them into a plastic bag: a knife, a flashlight, a canister of pepper, a bottle of vegetable oil, and another tub of ice cream from the
freezer.

  I glanced back into Marco’s room one last time. His back rose and fell.

  Silently, I slipped out after Cass.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  HACK ATTACK

  “I DON’T LIKE this,” Cass whispered. “It’s too quiet.”

  “We’re in an enclosed stairwell,” I said. “Stairwells are quiet.”

  I jammed the kitchen knife into a small, square metal door on the wall, about eye level. The lock wouldn’t give, but the door bent outward enough for me to peer under it with the flashlight. “Circuit breakers,” I said.

  Cass nodded. “Aly might be able to hack into their system,” he said, “but you’re MacGruber.”

  I slipped the knife into the box, said a prayer, and began sliding it right to left. The angle was bad, the torque was weak, but I managed to flip most of the switches from on to off. “Either I just shut off some lights,” I said, “or I disabled the washing machines.”

  We pushed open the door from the stairwell to the hallway. It was pitch-dark. “Hallelujah,” I said. “The security cameras won’t pick us up. I think we’ll be okay if we stick to the light of the phone.”

  Cass eyed the map app, staring down the long hallway. “At least I know the dimensions of this hallway. I memorized them. The map is showing a lot of closets in this area of the compound. Small rooms. Mostly supplies, I’m guessing. We’re far away from the main corridors—the control rooms and all. That’s also where the exits are. I’m thinking we can wind around back, where it looks like there’s a delivery exit.”

  Cass led the way. We wound our way through darkened hallways, zigging right and then left twice. The reach of the circuit breakers ended there. We were entering an area lit by fluorescent lights above. I looked around for overhead cameras and saw nothing here. “We go right next, and we’ll be close,” Cass said.