Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon (2 page)

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.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“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.”

Tinker
. That was what Bhegad called Aly. We each had a nickname—
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
. Aly was the Tinker who could fix anything, Marco the Soldier because of his strength and bravery, Cass the Sailor for his awesome navigational ability. I wasn't sure why I was the Tailor.
Because you put it all together
, Bhegad had said. But I think he was just being polite. I wasn't putting anything together now, except pessimism.

“DIIIIIIIIE!”

Fiddle's sudden shriek made us all spin around. Torquin, who had been fast asleep, jumped upward and banged his head on the ceiling. “What happened?” I asked.

“The end of the song,” Nirvana said. “I love that part.”

“Anything good?” Torquin said, scrolling through the tunes. “Have any Disney?”

Cass was staring out the window, down toward a fretwork of roads and open land. “We're almost there. This is Youngstown, Ohio . . . I think.”

“You
think
?” Aly said. “That doesn't sound like you.”

“It's weird. I—I don't recognize the street pattern . . .” Cass said, shaking his head. “I should know this. I'm drawing a blank. I think something's wrong with my . . . whatever.”

“Your ability to memorize every street in every place in the world?” Aly put her arm around him. “You're nervous about Marco. We all are. Sorry, Cass, you may be a superhuman G7W, but deep down you're human like the rest of us.”

“Right . . . right . . .” Cass drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You sometimes make mistakes, right?”

Aly nodded. “Rarely, but yes. Also Marco.”

“The weird thing is,” Cass said, “there's only one part of him that isn't human—the tracker. And those things don't just fail—unless something really unusual happens to the carrier.”

“Like . . . ?” I said tentatively.

Cass's eyes started to moisten. “Like the thing none of us is talking about. Like if the tracker was destroyed.”

“It's inside his body,” Aly said. “He can't destroy it.”

“Right. Unless . . .” Cass said.

We all fell silent. The plane began to descend. No one finished the sentence, but we all knew the words.

Unless Marco was dead
.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“H
EY
!” A
S
C
ASS
turned and jogged up the street toward me, I whipped my two hands behind my back.

“So, are we there?” I asked nonchalantly.

Cass looked at me curiously. “What are you doing?”

“Scratching,” I replied. “A lottery card. Which I found.”