Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon Read online

  We kept to the outer wall, staying in the shadows. Not far away, we sped by the soldiers’ truck. As I passed, I noticed a set of keys flung into the cup compartment. “Have you ever tried driving?” I asked.

  “Yup,” Cass piped up. “On the farm.”

  We jumped in. Cass put the truck in gear, and we lurched away in a cloud of foul odor.

  * * *

  The streets of Nazlet el-Samman were a relief. They smelled of cinnamon and frying meat. We had ditched the truck just off the highway, far away from here, and jogged the rest of the way.

  “Police?” I asked whoever would listen. “Do you know where the police are?”

  “How about a girl, about our age?” Cass said. “Really smart?”

  We looked around desperately for cops and for Aly, but it was hard to see. The street was packed shoulder to shoulder. On the one hand, this might help shield us from the Massa, but on the other hand, we could barely move. I had to grab Cass’s arm to keep from being separated. Every hat looked like a Massa lambda cap to me. Every person looked like a Massa. I saw at least seven men who were dead ringers for Brother Dimitrios. Mustaches were everywhere.

  It was getting close to lunchtime and vendors stirred up food in great big pots. A kid in a striped T-shirt raced in and out of slow-moving tourists. “Hahahaha!” he cackled, easily evading a pursuer who must have been his younger brother. A girl walked purposefully by us, pulling two goats on tethers. Voices rang out loudly in all kinds of languages: “Over here . . . ella tho . . . kommen sie hier bitte . . . bienvenue . . . the best!”

  “Jack, I’m starving,” Cass said.

  “No,” I said. “Just no. We have to get out of here.”

  “This is fast food,” he said. “We can eat and run.”

  “No!”

  We wound our way past tables full of plastic pyramids in Day-Glo colors; arrays of T-shirts that said MY PARENTS TOOK ME TO EGYPT AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS DUMB T-SHIRT; and an artist with a beret who was painting a portrait of a patiently smiling grandfather on a canvas labeled PYRAMID OF GEEZER.

  I pulled Cass into a narrow side street. Even in full sunlight, the alley was dark. An angry-looking chicken stood in a doorway, scolded us, and then lost interest and went back in.

  “What do we do now?” Cass asked.

  “I say we get away from this place,” I said. “The farther the better. They’ll come after us. They’ll see the truck and cover the whole area. We can stay invisible but that’s not going to help us in the long run. We’ll keep an eye out for a hardware store so we can wrench these iridium bracelets off, and hope the KI picks us up.”

  “What about calling home?” Cass asked.

  I thought about Aly’s disastrous phone conversation with her mom in Rhodes. But I knew the sound of Dad’s voice would be pretty amazing. It was tempting. “I’ll think about it.”

  Cass gazed back into the street. “It’s easier to think on a full stomach.”

  I rubbed my forehead. It ached. And not the weird, G7W kind of pain that meant I needed a treatment. It was pure hunger.

  I looked left and right. The alley was empty. No one watching. Quickly I placed the invisibility Loculus in the empty box, closed it, and put that into the empty sack. “Keep your eyes open,” I said.

  We walked out the alleyway and into the bustling street. In the shadows of the nearest building, a skinny cat and two skinnier kittens eyed us warily. I stepped on an errant chunk of pita bread and kicked it toward them. As they pounced, a fat guy with a thick mustache grinned at us from behind a long, hissing grill. “Bueno! Bon! Primo! Ausgezeichnet! Oraio! The best!”

  He held out a chunk of shish-kebab meat on a toothpick, which Cass scarfed right down. “Ohhhhh, he’s right,” Cass said with a blissful smile. “It’s amazing. I’ll have a full one, sir.”

  I pointed to a delicious-looking hunk of meat, roasting on a stick. “Whatever that is.”

  “Ahmed! Shish-kebab, shwarma!” the guy called out. His partner, a tall guy with a darker mustache and chiseled arms, doled out Cass’s dishes first. Then he cut five slices of the shwarma meat and laid them on a fluffy piece of pita bread with onions, peppers, and steaming rice.

  I could barely control my drool before biting in. “Ah, hungry boys!” the man said. “American dollars? Only six!” He smiled. “Okay, for you—only two-fifty!”

  Money.

  In the preparation for the time-rift, I hadn’t thought to bring any. “Um . . . Cass?”

  “I left home without my American Express card,” Cass said.

  I peered up at the food vendor. He was tending to another customer, a fat guy with an Indiana Jones hat, plaid shorts, white socks and sandals, and a family of four.

  Invisibility could come in very handy. I swung my bag around and pulled open the box.

  “Hahahahaha!” With a piercing laugh, the kid in the striped T-shirt sped past. He knocked my arm hard. The box toppled onto the street.

  “The Loculus!” Cass cried.

  I dove for the box, scooping it up off the pavement. I felt inside, praying it was still there.

  Nothing. I could hear the music. I knew it was around somewhere. But I couldn’t see it. “It’s gone,” I said.

  Cass was on his knees, feeling around for it. I dropped down to join him. People screamed in surprise as we pushed them away.

  “Hey!” the shish-kebab guy shouted.

  I turned. Ahmed, his partner, was catapulting over the counter. “You thief!” he said. “You pay!”

  Tourists were turning to stare. A gray-haired guy with an ice-cream cone snapped a photo. A little girl began to cry.

  “Stop them!” Ahmed shouted.

  No time to think. I sprinted into the crowd. I knocked over a basket, upsetting a snake charmer who tried to smack me with his oboe. As people gathered around to look, I tripped over a pair of baby goats who were lapping water from a puddle. They bahhed angrily as I tumbled onto the stones. I landed in front of a trio of break-dancers in flowing white garb. “Excuse me,” I said, ducking into an alleyway.

  My back to a dark wall, I caught my breath. I looked around frantically for Cass.

  Where was Cass?

  I stepped back toward the street. “Cass!” I called out. “Cass, where are you?”

  “You!” I spun around at the sound of the gruff voice.

  Ahmed was approaching from behind, his fists clenched.

  I ran back into the crowd. Ahmed’s assistant was waiting, a grin on his face and his arms wide.

  The two baby goats stared up from the puddle and scolded me. I knelt down, scooped up one of them, and flung it toward the man.

  He looked startled. Instinctively he caught it. I swerved around his stand and into the thick of the crowd. I ducked low, threading my way through the people, hoping against hope I’d run into Cass.

  I ducked under an archway that led into a courtyard. Sprinting across to the other side, I came into a wider, less touristy street, with boxy buildings, a bus stop, and a gas station. “Cass?” I called out.

  A car screeched to a halt at the curb. The driver called out, “Taxi? Taxi?”

  “No!” I said.

  The cab door opened hard, as if kicked. I backed away, nearly falling to the pavement. I saw a mass of white fabric, a huge pair of sunglasses, and a beard. A red beard.

  A beefy hand clapped the back of my neck and shoved me into the backseat, headfirst.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE SIRENS

  “HAVE ONE. NEED the other.”

  I unfolded my twisted body from the floor of the taxi. I knew the voice. “Torquin?”

  My captor pulled a white hood from his bush of red curly hair. “Better if you sit,” he said.

  I stared at him in numb disbelief. “How—?”

  To my left, another voice chimed in
. “He’s here because I got a hardware store guy to cut off my iridium bracelet.”

  I spun around. I’d been so stunned to see Torquin, I hadn’t noticed who was sitting with me in the backseat. Aly grinned. “You can hug me. It’s okay.”

  I threw my arms around her, squeezing her hard. “I was worried about you!”

  “You were?” Aly said.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, pulling away. “Look, we can talk more later. Listen, Aly. Marco is lost to us. He’s with the Massa and I don’t think he’s coming back. Cass is somewhere back there, on the main drag. We got separated. Let me run back and see if I can find him.”

  “Massa coming,” Torquin said, reaching for the door. “Can’t let you. Torquin go.”

  In the distance I could hear sirens. I turned to see a police car screech to a halt beside a public bus. Out of the car walked a man in a police uniform, along with Brother Dimitrios.

  “Drive!” Torquin said.

  I sank out of sight. The taxi driver put the car in gear. “Englees?” he said. “Where we go?”

  Before anyone could answer, the door next to me flew open. I felt something smack against me, and I fell against Aly.

  As the door shut again, Cass materialized out of thin air on the seat next to me. “All present and accounted for,” he said, dropping two sacks onto the floor of the taxi. “Including Loculi.”

  Aly screamed. She reached across me toward Cass, and I felt myself scrunched up into a big hug sandwich. “Are you okay?” she said.

  “The shish-kebab gave me gas,” Cass said. “Otherwise, I’m gnileef doog.”

  “Airport,” Torquin snapped.

  I could see the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, like two white lanterns, as he slammed on the gas pedal.

  “Well, well, the mad bomber returns!” Fiddle called out as we stepped from the jet onto the KI tarmac.

  A woman with a shaved head ran toward us and wrapped me in a hug. It took me a moment to realize it was Nirvana. “Long time,” she said. “Longer than you know.”

  Professor Bhegad was walking toward the ladder with only the slightest limp. His tweed coat looked a little more ragged, his hair grayer and more sparse. “Where are they?” he called out.

  I stepped down the ladder, pulling the bags around to my front. “They’re in here, Professor,” I said.

  He snatched them away with a big grin. “Marvelous! Marvelous!”

  “Uh, we’re fine too,” Aly said. “Thanks for asking.”

  Professor Bhegad set down the bags, then turned sheepishly toward us. He thrust his hand toward mine and I shook it. “Well, Jack, you don’t look a week older. Which makes perfect sense. Aly . . . Cass . . . so good to have you all back.”

  “We—we lost Marco,” I said softly. “He’s with the Massa.”

  Bhegad’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, well, I was afraid of this. We will deal with this. But let’s not dwell on the negative now. We have you, we have the Loculi. Only five to go now.” He leaned down, investigating the contents of the bags. Then he pulled open the top box, the one with the invisible Loculus. “This second one appears to have nothing in it . . .”

  “Its power is invisibility,” I said.

  “Extraordinary . . .” he said, peering closer. “The boxes appear to be lined with iridium . . . it shields the Loculi from transmitting powers. How would they know that?”

  “They know a lot,” Aly said.

  Bhegad nodded. “And they will know more, now that they have Marco. We will have to act fast.” He wiped his brow and smiled wearily. “But first, a little celebration at the Comestibule. Everyone has missed you. Come. Your rooms are waiting. Take a shower, settle in, freeze up . . .”

  “The term is chill out, Professor,” Nirvana said.

  “Impossible to keep up with the hep lingo,” Bhegad said, walking briskly toward campus. “Dinner begins at seven. A Seven Wonders theme meal. Colossal beef stew, pyramid flan, hanging garden salad, and such. So, my children, we will see you after your chilling.”

  I glanced and Aly and Cass.

  I wanted so badly to feel good about being back.

  I almost did.

  “What the heck is pyramid flan?” Cass asked, plopping down on my bed. His hair was still wet from the shower, his KI clothes crisp and bright white.

  Aly walked in behind him. “Flan is like custard. My mom always orders it at restaurants.”

  I was still getting dressed and hadn’t yet pulled up my pants. “Will you please?”

  “I won’t look,” Aly said, turning away.

  I zipped up and belted. From my dresser I grabbed the cell phone, which I had transferred out of my Massa custodial outfit.

  Cass was staring at it. “Wait. You still have the phone?” I nodded. I wondered if it still worked. Pressing the button at the bottom, I saw a warning flash on the screen: LOW BATTERY.

  I pressed okay and the giant eye stared up out of the screen. “Who the heck is that?” Aly asked.

  “The reason we got out,” I said.

  “We had a helper,” Cass added. “A elom. Or, I guess technically, an elom.”

  “Wait. There’s a mole inside the Massa?” Aly asked.

  My brain was kicking in now. Going back over our capture. The rescue had been thrilling, and I hadn’t wanted to think about the bad stuff. Marco. Daria.

  Even thinking about them now gave me a sudden pang in the chest.

  But the eye seemed to being staring into me, as if it were alive. As if it knew me. “Yeah,” I said. “A mole.”

  “Do you know who she is?” Aly asked.

  “No,” I said. “How do you know it’s a she?”

  “The lashes,” Aly replied. “They have mascara on them. Looks like there’s some eyeliner underneath, too.”

  I thumbed away from it and brought up the contacts app. “There’s a name at the top of this list,” I said. “Probably hers. I mean, they’re her contacts. It’s in code like the rest of the names.”

  We stared at the number: 19141325 61361291411.

  I grabbed a pencil, then found the sheet where I’d written the number-substitution code.

  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

  Then, slowly, I matched the numbers to letters:

  SNANCY EMELINK.

  “Sister Nancy . . .” I said. “Nancy Emelink. The person whose voice we heard in that room with all the pillows. The boss of the Massa.”

  “That was a woman?” Cass asked.

  “And she told you her name?” Aly added. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Or me,” Cass said.

  I thought back to that day. To what the woman had said. The words were so strange. “There was another name, though. Morgana . . . Margana? It’s not here in these numbers, but she mentioned it to me.”

  “Huh,” Cass said, his head cocked. “Which, by the way, is ‘huh’ backward. But here’s the weird thing. Margana? Did she really say that? Because that’s anagram spelled backward!”

  An anagram.

  The person—the weird voice—had added the word to the end of her name. Why?

  I wrote out the name NANCY EMELINK in big, block letters. Immediately Aly went to work. I could see her writing AMY CLENKINEN, LYNN MCANIKEE, and a bunch of others.

  But I could not bring myself to pick up a pencil. The letters seemed to be dancing on the paper, rearranging themselves in my own mind.

  I felt a sharp sting of cold at the base of my spine, running up to my neck.

  “Stop,” I said.

  Aly looked up. “Say what?”

  “I said, stop!”

  I grabbed the pencil from her. My hand shook as I separated out the letters that I was seeing.

  “What?” Aly said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Cass peered over my shoulder. “There are some letters left,” he said. “N, A, E, N . . .”

  They danced around in my head, t
oo. And as they did, I felt the blood draining from my body to my toes. “Give me the phone,” I said, my voice dry and parched.

  “Jack . . . ?” Aly said.

  “Just give it to me!” As she handed it to me, I tapped the screen. The big eye was still staring up at me. The iris that got us into the secret room. The reason we were here, safe and sound.

  I put my thumb and index finger on the screen and pinched in. A forehead and nose appeared. I pinched again—the eye zoomed downward and became part of an entire person. A woman in an elegant dress. She was standing in a group, with Brother Dimitrios, Yiorgos, and Stavros.

  She was smiling. I knew the smile.

  It can’t be.

  I pinched outward again, slowly, enlarging the woman until only she filled the screen.

  Welcome to have you back.

  The head of the Massa had said that. She had used those very words. It hadn’t been easy to understand, and I’d been so angry I hadn’t really listened closely.

  It was a phrase I’d only heard one person use.

  My fingers slackened. The phone slipped out, falling to the floor. I tried to move my mouth to talk, but I couldn’t. The eye had belonged to the person in the photo. A person who couldn’t have been there. Someone who died many years ago.

  “It’s Anne—the letters spell Anne McKinley . . .” I said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to continue. But Cass and Aly were staring at me in total bafflement. The words needed to be said aloud. I swallowed hard.

  “The head of the Massa,” I said, “is my mom.”

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETER LERANGIS is the author of more than 160 books, which have sold more than five million copies, including two books in the New York Times bestselling series The 39 Clues.

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