Seven Wonders Book 1: The Colossus Rises (9 page)

“S
ORRY
.” T
ORQUIN YAWNED
as he entered my room, his bare feet slapping the floor like dead fish. “Overslept. Come.”

I slid off my bed and followed him down the corridor. It was nearly 7:30
A.M.
on Training Day. Exactly at 6:00, a technician had arrived to take Cass to the media center. Marco had run off with a bunch of jockish-looking guards. And someone had whisked Aly off in a golf cart to the system control center. We were all supposed to have a morning of “skill building,” followed by a classroom lesson at 2:00
P.M.
with Professor Bhegad.

Torquin had been late. “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“Garage,” said Torquin.

Great. Either my gift had something to do with cars, or I was destined to be a world-class custodian.

As we stepped outside into a crisp, sunny day, I realized I had no idea what the weather had been for about twenty-four hours. The previous day had been spent sleeping, arguing, and eating food that Conan had wheeled to the dorm on a cart.

It took a while to fill Aly in, because she’d had no memory of the night’s main events. In the end, we’d all agreed to toe the line. To go along with Bhegad’s plan. Even though I, for one, still didn’t believe his story.

“
Heeee-yahh!
” came a distant shout. At the other end of the compound, way across the open lawn, a group of guards seemed to be in some sort of martial-arts fight. They were dressed in robes, attacking each other with sticks.

No. Not each other. From their midst, one lone figure leaped upward, doing a complete backflip over their heads. Landing behind the line, he plowed into the backs of their knees with his own stick, sending nearly the whole group sprawling.

“Marco?” I murmured.

“Dangerous,” Torquin said, waddling toward the media center. He opened the door and we walked into the huge main room, with its beanbag chairs, monitors, and games.

My heart leaped. “Cool,” I said. “So you were joking about the garage!”

“Shortcut,” Torquin replied. He went through a door at the other side, which led to a long, tiled corridor. As we passed one of the rooms, I could see Cass working at a desk with some scientists. Someone had placed electrodes on his head, which were attached to some machine. He and two KI guys were staring at a massive, highly detailed map of an island. In the middle stood an enormous black mountain, labeled
ONYX
.

“Is that where we are?” I asked.

“We are walking on floor. That is map.” At the end of the corridor Torquin pushed open a door. The smell of hot rubber and grease assaulted us. “Inside. Now.”

We continued across a hangar-sized building with all manner of carts, trucks, and buses being painted and repaired. Mechanics bustled about, some ducking under vehicles, others with heads buried beneath the open hoods. At the other end, what seemed to be a mile away, I saw the submarine that had plucked us out of the sea. It was now more than six feet off the ground atop a car lift. A huge square panel had been cut out of the bottom, to reveal a tangle of broken wires, tubes, and blackened steel. It looked as though it had just been through a fire.

We stopped underneath it. Torquin pointed upward.
“The night we picked you up,” he said. “Hit something. Almost didn’t make it.”

“Looks pretty bad,” I said. Was that why I was here? So Torquin could show the damage we’d caused the sub? Did he expect me to apologize? “Next time we’ll send for a car. Now where do I go?”

Torquin just stood there, staring at me. After a minute or two, he bent down and picked up a wrench off the floor.

“Fix,” he said. “I come back at one forty-five.”

“Woo-hoo!” Marco yelled, nearly bounding across the lawn. “Hiro says I’ll be double black belt in a week!”

Marco the Magnificent was the last person I wanted to see at the end of my morning of torture. Despite the fact that he’d just been deep in martial arts, he was dribbling a basketball toward me. I slumped against the outside of the garage. My face was smudged with grease. Behind me, the submarine was tilted to one side and it looked as if its intestines were hanging out.

I had managed to befriend a mechanic named Fritz, who had his entire face tattooed with the KI snake symbol. He tried to teach me how to use a welding tool and a rivet remover. I burned a hole in the hydraulic lift, managed to yank the sub’s emergency hatch off its hinges, cracked a motherboard and its circuitry, and somehow hammered off one of the propellers. The sub was in worse shape now than
it had been this morning. Fritz was screaming his head off in German. And a team of techs was discussing whether to commission a replacement sub.

“Whoa, what happened here?” Marco asked as he saw my face, and the sub, up close.

“You almost got a black belt,” I said, walking out toward the lawn. “I almost got a
Schlag auf dem Kopf mit einem Schlussel
.”

“Sounds amazing,” Marco said. “What’s that?”

“A smack on the head with a wrench,” I replied.

Across the compound, Professor Bhegad was waving to us from the other side of the oval lawn. He was wearing a faded KI baseball cap that wasn’t quite straight, and he stood at the base of a museum-like structure with wide stone steps topped by seven stone pillars. It could have passed for a courthouse in Washington, DC, but for the distant black mountain rising like a witch’s hat from the jungle behind it.

I began walking across the lawn. My feet were so sweaty they squished in my shoes. My pockets were loaded down with some junk I wanted for my room, which Fritz let me take—pulleys, hooks, rope.

“So, are you some kind of car genius?” Marco asked.

“They must have thought so.” I sighed. “I mean, I’m not stupid. I’m not afraid to try things. But I like to construct things
my
way, which isn’t necessarily the way anyone else
does it. So this afternoon was one big epic fail. I messed up everything.”

Marco’s brow furrowed. “This is called
training
. I think we all have to do a little bit of everything. Expand ourselves. Maybe I’m the one who gets garage duty tomorrow. Come on, brother Jack, pessimism not allowed. What are you great at? When people think of Jack McKinley, what do they say? He’s an incredible…what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I can’t even wake myself up in the morning without smacking myself in the head with a plastic toy.”

Marco nodded. “Okay, that’s pretty pathetic, I admit. But come on—art? Chess? Foreign languages? Angry Birds? Swimming! No, wait, you suck at that.”

As we neared Professor Bhegad, I saw for the first time that the majestic building had a name, carved into a stone block above the pillars:
HOUSE OF WENDERS
.

“Looks like a big typo,” I said, “for House of Wonders.”

Marco snapped his fingers. “There’s your talent—spelling!”

By now Cass and Aly were jogging toward us, laughing at some joke. A breeze had kicked up, and Aly’s hair looked like a pink flame.

“Well, well, looks like you all had a splendid first day so far,” Professor Bhegad called out. “Follow me, please. Jack, there is a men’s locker room down the first set of steps
when you enter. It has showers and fresh sets of clothing.”

We followed Bhegad upstairs and into the building. A grand hallway greeted us, its floors made of polished wood, its walls of bright mosaic tile. At the opposite end, a wide carpeted stair led to a marble balcony that surrounded the hallway and opened onto rooms and offices.

But I could not take my eyes away from the hall’s center, where the ceiling vaulted at least three stories high to accommodate a skeleton that nearly took my breath away. It rose up like some brontosaur on steroids, with a snakelike neck that ended in a fearsome raptor head with saber teeth. It stood on bent legs with clawed feet, and its tail was short with thick bones. “Wow, what do you call that thing?” Cass asked.

“Sir,” Marco said, his head craned upward.

“The skeleton was excavated by paleontologists shortly after the island was discovered,” Bhegad said, removing his baseball cap, “by one of the greatest Scholars of Karai, Herman Wenders, who died in 1897.”

“Oh, well, so much for the spelling angle,” Marco muttered.

“It is only one of the bizarre specimens we have uncovered, as you can see…” Bhegad said.

As I looked around the room, I felt something odd. Like the walls themselves were expanding and contracting
in rhythm. Breathing. The light, too, seemed to be seeping through the pores of the stone, like a draft that could be seen and not felt.

Marco was peering at me oddly. “’Sup, bro?”

“I think I inhaled too many garage fumes,” I said. “See you in class.”

I hurried down to the showers.

Trumpets and drums and quivering violins blasted out of speakers. They echoed through a musty old classroom, where I was sitting at a wooden desk in the second row, behind Aly. An image filled a screen—a glorious castle with a great lawn on which a king and queen greeted subjects while little boys played nearby.

“The kingdom of Atlantis,” Professor Bhegad announced, “existed on this spot for thousands of years. It is unlike other ancient advanced civilizations—India, Italy, Greece, China—because the historical record was completely destroyed. Or so it was thought…”

“Can you cut the sound track?” Marco called out from the back of the room.

Aly leaned forward and pressed the mute button.

“Yes, ahem,” Bhegad said. “A transcription and several images were found by KI archaeologists shortly after the discovery of this island over a hundred years ago. They are said to be based on stone tablets, which we have not been
able to locate. The transcription provided much of the history we know, and this slideshow is based on that. Behold Atlantis’s last rulers, King Uhla’ar and Queen Qalani, along with their sons, Karai and Massarym.”

“The Great Qalani…” I murmured.

He clicked the remote and another image appeared—seven globes, glowing brightly. “A pioneering genius in mathematics and physics, Queen Qalani spent her life studying the source of Atlantean power. She worried about attack from barbarians who would abuse the energy for evil intent. So she sought to analyze the power, perhaps to convert it into physical form. Imagine! It could then be transported, hidden away, kept safe. Over years, using techniques not even imaginable to our scientists today, she isolated this energy into the seven components, each to be stored in a
Loculus
.”

“Like harnessing electricity and putting it in lightbulbs,” Marco said.

“Not exactly,” Professor Bhegad said. “Massarym, who inherited his mother’s curiosity if not her intellect, found something astonishing upon handling the Loculi. Each of the seven power components had a unique property of its own. With one Loculus he could fly…with another become invisible…things of that nature. But the Loculi did not work for just anyone, only those of royal blood.” He looked meaningfully at each of us. “And their descendants, too.
Which would be those carrying the G7W gene marker.”

Aly’s eyes widened. “The Select…”

“I’m a prince?” Marco said, nearly leaping out of his chair.

“Exhilarated by the discovery,” Bhegad continued, “Uhla’ar, Qalani, Karai, and Massarym showed off the powers of the Loculi. Their people were in awe. They began seeing the royal family as gods. Some became envious and tried to steal the powerful spheres. Karai, who had a deep connection to Atlantean fauna, trained one type of giant raptor to protect the Loculi.”

I knew the answer to this one. “The Ugliosaurus!”

The image now changed to a painting of a slavering red creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. “It is known in mythology as a griffin. The fiercest of beasts. When they imprinted on something, they would guard it with their lives. They tore to shreds anyone who came close, the way a hawk captures a rat. Now the game was changing. People began hating the royals. Rebel bands emerged, bent on unseating the family and stealing their magic. Karai realized that the Loculi were not preserving Atlantis but poisoning it. They needed to be destroyed.”

Now we were seeing a fight scene, the dark and fair brothers in a fistfight as the queen summoned a team of burly courtiers. “Massarym would have none of Karai’s talk. He loved the powers of the Loculi. So one night, when the palace was under attack, he slipped away. He commandeered
a fearsome reptilian beast to kill every last griffin, and then he stole away the sacred Loculi.”

The fight scene faded, replaced by a scene of horrific disaster. An explosion blackened the sky as a horrified Qalani cried out in agony. Fire swept through the jungle, and a crack opened in the earth—directly in the path of the fleeing Karai.

The dream
.

I recoiled. My fingers felt scorched. I had the urge to run. My body went rigid with fear.
Fight or flight
.

Marco, Cass, and Aly were staring at me. They’d had the dream, too. Were they feeling the same thing I was?