Jake Atlas and the Quest for the Crystal Mountain

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  And then it was over.

  The only sound was our frantic breathing, and the choka, choka, choka growing distant as the helicopter flew away. Pan and I stayed huddled together, shaking from shock and spitting out mud.

  “Are you alive?” I grunted.

  “I … I’m not sure. Are you?”

  The blast had knocked the wind out of me, but I wasn’t really hurt. My sister helped me up and we leaned against each other, staring at the destruction. The centre of the hill had been blown away, as if someone had grabbed at a cake with their fist. Most of the tomb lay scattered around us: collapsed walls, broken statues, metal objects jutting out at odd angles. Beyond, the silhouette of the helicopter grew smaller as it flew into the sun.

  “Pandora! Jake!”

  Our parents raced along the path, their expressions torn between horror at what they were seeing and relief that we were alive. They grabbed us, hugged us, checked us for injuries, and then swapped us over and hugged and checked again.

  At first we let them, too shaken to do much else. But as Dad inspected me again, I spotted something amidst the wreckage. I pulled away and staggered to one of the few surviving trees.

  “There…” I gasped. “It’s there!”

  Stuck in the lower branches was the emerald tablet. It may have been thousands of years old and splattered with mud, but as I pulled it out it gleamed like a freshly cut gemstone. It was just like the others we’d found, covered in script and symbols, and with a carving of a coiled snake eating its own tail. We had thought that was the symbol of the lost civilization, but it was also the emblem of the People of the Snake. The Snake Lady wore it proudly as a brooch. Well, get a load of this, Marjorie!

  I raised the tablet triumphantly, grinning at my family.

  “We did it,” I croaked.

  None of them smiled back. They just stared at the destruction; one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites was now in ruins.

  “What did we do?” Mum asked.

  3

  It was a ten-hour train ride to Beijing. We had a cabin to ourselves, double bunk beds separated by a tiny gap. Pan fell asleep with her hood pulled over her head and guitars blaring from her headphones. She often listened to heavy metal music to get to sleep, which is weird when you think about it, but it’s best not to think about my sister too much or everything seems weird.

  Dad nodded off too, snoring like a hippo, feet hanging over the edge of his bunk. I didn’t understand how they could sleep. I was buzzing like I’d been plugged into a power socket. We had the third tablet! I lay with it clutched to my chest – a laptop-sized emerald slab, carved with ancient script and symbols that we hadn’t been able to decipher. We’d needed one more tablet to crack the code, and this was it. I couldn’t wait to get back to our hideout in Beijing. We’d hoped the tablets would lead us to the lost civilization’s Hall of Records, and now we were about to find out if they did.

  Mum didn’t look so happy about it all. She sat staring at her reflection in the window and stroking her necklace pendant, an amulet of the Ancient Egyptian mother goddess, Isis. It was an artefact she’d stolen on one of her first missions with Dad, over thirty years ago.

  My parents used to be normal archaeologists. But after they learned how many relics were being sold on the black market, they decided to get to them first and make sure they ended up in museums. They’d travelled the world, trained in fighting and technology, and they were good. Go into any major museum and you’ll see at least a dozen things my parents rescued, although I promised I’d never say which.

  When Mum got pregnant they settled down as college professors. But after they learned about the People of the Snake and their plan to let millions of people die, Mum and Dad went to Egypt to stop them. That’s where me and Pan discovered their secret. Since then they’d been training us to become treasure hunters too.

  The training was hard, and it had taken ages for Mum and Dad to trust us. But now we were close to working out where the tablets led. So I didn’t understand why Mum looked so grumpy.

  Outside, the sun was setting, slashing the sky pink as I stared out at the countryside – a muddy river, hazy terraced hillsides, power lines and power stations. I did actually fall asleep. I guess I was too tired not to. When I woke, the train had stopped and the tablet was no longer in my hands.

  I shifted up, rubbing my eyes. Pan was in her bunk, guitar music still blaring from under her hood, and Dad was snoring louder than ever.

  Mum was gone.

  Maybe she needed the loo? But why had she taken the tablet?

  I felt it again. A tingle, an instinct. Something was wrong.

  I opened the cabin door and stepped into the train corridor, blinking in the glare of its flickering strip light. Rubbing mist from a window, I could just pick out some details in the dark. We had stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere, with a single platform and a few rusty cargo trains. The door at the end of the corridor was open, and the train guards outside were squabbling. Beyond them, something darted between the trains.

  “Mum?” I breathed.

  I waited until the guards weren’t looking, and jumped out. The cold chased away the last of my sleep. I wished I’d put on my coat. Stars shivered in the coal-black sky, but I couldn’t see the moon.

  Double-checking that no one was watching, I ran across the tracks to where I’d seen Mum disappear between the trains. Beyond was rough countryside, and I could just see her trail through the long grass.

  I followed her to the edge of a small lake. She stood staring across the starlit water, the emerald tablet in her hand. She seemed to be in a trance, like a sleepwalker. I was about to call to her, when she stepped back and raised the tablet as if to throw it into the water!

  “Mum!” I shouted.

  She whirled around, suddenly alert.

  “Stay right there!” she snapped.

  Icy wind swept from the lake, but a fire was rising in my belly. What was Mum thinking?

  “Go back, Jake.”

  “Not without that tablet,” I replied.

  “You don’t understand. This tablet is a curse. They all are.”

  “A curse? What do you mean?”

  “We’ve searched the world for these, Jake, and where have they led? On a path of destruction.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You destroyed the Terracotta Army, Jake.”

  I had known this was going to come up, but I hadn’t expected it to be so soon. If there had been any other way to get that tablet I’d have taken it. But what we were trying to do was too important to fail. The end justified the means, even if the means were pretty crazy.

  “If I hadn’t done that we’d have been caught,” I said. “We’d be in a Chinese prison right now.”

  The tablet trembled in her hands. “But the Terracotta Army would still be in one piece. And the emperor’s tomb.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I shot back. “Not compared to our mission. We’ll be able to decipher them now, to find out where they lead.”

  “Jake, have you ever considered that maybe they lead nowhere?”

  “That’s not true,” I insisted. “The Snake Lady wouldn’t be going to so much trouble if it was. She just blew up a tomb to protect that secret.”

  “Stop reminding me!”

  “But, Mum—”

  “The Terracotta Army, Jake! The emperor’s tomb! The tomb beneath the Great Pyramid, the Temple of Isis, the Aztec tombs in Honduras. They’re all gone.”

  She raised the tablet again.

  “No, don’t!” I cried. “If we don’t follow where that tablet leads, then all that destruction will have been for nothing. And then Marjorie will win. Something wiped out that lost civilization and it might come back. The People of the Snake will keep that secret, Mum, if we don’t find the Hall of Records first. You know they will.”

  She sighed, but lowered the tablet. Ultimately, that artefact was one of the things she had sworn to protect. And also,
she was a treasure hunter and this was the greatest treasure hunt in history. She couldn’t walk away from it.

  Behind us, the train driver blew the whistle, urging anyone who had left to hurry back. Mum walked past me and placed the tablet by my feet.

  “Take it,” she said. “I don’t want to see it for a while.”

  I snatched it up a little too eagerly. “Don’t worry, Mum,” I called. “We’re doing the right thing.”

  “Are we, Jake?” she replied.

  4

  We’d been planning the mission at the emperor’s tomb for two months and we needed a break, but we weren’t about to get one. Now that we had the third tablet, we could finally decipher the artefacts’ signs and symbols – and discover where they led.

  We’d been hiding out in Beijing, which is a bonkers place. There should be another word to describe Beijing, something more than just city. It’s a super city. It makes London look like a village.

  The streets were crammed with more cars than I thought could exist, and people wore masks over their faces so they didn’t breathe the fumes that hung in a grey veil.

  But I loved Beijing. We’d rented a house in an old part of town, among a tangle of lanes called hutongs, full of steamy dumpling shacks, stalls selling fish, people hanging out washing, kids kicking footballs. This sprawling maze was a perfect place to disappear.

  The hutongs weaved among traditional Chinese homes that were over five hundred years old. You could tell from their curving tiled roofs and brass door knockers that the houses had once been grand, but those days were long gone. Now their interiors were mostly crumbling walls and broken windows, while outside stood greasy extractor fans, generators and air conditioning units belching smoke.

  The bungalow we were staying in was derelict, with three rooms surrounding a smashed concrete courtyard. We’d turned one of the rooms into mission HQ. Its walls were covered in satellite photos and blueprints of the Terracotta Warrior Museum. In the middle, a flat glass screen lay on a trestle table – a cool bit of kit called a holosphere.

  Mum pressed her thumb against it, and a keyboard appeared on the glass. A second later two holograms beamed from the screen – pin-sharp 3D images of the emerald tablets we’d found so far. We’d left the real ones in a hiding place in London, with instructions for them to be sent to the British Museum if we were caught.

  “Here they are,” Dad said, in his ‘serious scholar’ voice. “The tablets from Egypt and Honduras. Each found in a tomb of someone from a much older civilization that was wiped out. Its survivors spread around the world and established new cultures. They were remembered as gods, buried in crystal coffins decorated with the same symbol – a snake eating its own tail. In each coffin was one of these emerald tablets, which we believe lead to a lost store of knowledge detailing the history of this civilization, known as the Hall of Records. We hope to learn where the people were from, what happened to them, and when the destruction will happen again. We’ve not been able to decipher the script with just two tablets. Now we have a third, and a chance.”

  “We know all of this,” Mum muttered. “Why are you telling us?”

  “Just sounded good,” Dad replied.

  “It sounded silly,” Mum said. “Jake, bring the tablet over.”

  I clutched it tighter to my chest. My dad and sister didn’t know that Mum had almost thrown it away last night, and I didn’t plan to tell them, but I wasn’t sure I trusted her not to try it again. I think she sensed it, because she smiled and held out her hand.

  “Let’s see what it says, shall we?”

  She took the tablet and laid it on the holosphere screen. Lasers rose from the glass and scanned the artefact, changing colour as they mapped its markings. After a few seconds, another hologram beamed up – a perfect image of the third tablet.

  Mum slid the actual tablet back to me across the table.

  “You can chuck that now,” she said.

  She was joking, but not smiling. Her jaw was locked, her eyes fixed on the holograms.

  “John,” she ordered, “run cross-checks on word frequency distribution on all three tablets, a full lexical analysis. Pan, check for phonographic graphemes, and watch out for silent determinatives. I’ll look for repeating syntax and typographic ligatures. And, Jake?”

  She glanced at me. “Make us a cup of tea.”

  I’d have flipped at her for that once, but I was cool with it now. My strength definitely wasn’t lexical analysis, whatever that meant. Even so, I didn’t want to make tea. I’d miss this moment, the big unveiling of the script.

  “Well?” I asked, impatiently. “What do the tablets say?”

  They all looked away from the holograms, and to me.

  “You know this is going to take a while, right?” Pan said.

  “What, like a few minutes?”

  Pan shook her head.

  “A few hours?” I asked.

  She shook her head again.

  “Well, how long, then?”

  “A few weeks, Jake.”

  I stared at her, and then at my mum and dad, who nodded, agreeing with the timeline.

  “Really?” I groaned. “I thought you’d press a button and something clever would happen.”

  Pan turned back to her work, tapping her head. “The clever stuff is happening in here, Jake.”

  Yeah, but slowly. I guessed I’d be making a lot of tea. But we were still ahead of the People of the Snake, so we were in no rush. And we could all use a little time to recover from that last mission.

  “Tea, Jake,” Mum snapped.

  “OK! I need a wee first.”

  “Don’t go far.”

  I left them fiddling with their holograms and headed out into the hutongs to find a toilet. There were no street lamps, so at night the lanes relied on light from the shops, bare bulbs and flickering neon signs. My stomach grumbled as I passed my favourite food stall, Mr Chi’s Dumplings, and smelled steamed fish and fried meat. Close by, a gang of men squabbled over how to fix a motorbike. A woman painted Chinese letters on a wall, while a really fat man watched from a tiny plastic stool. With each new sight I felt better about how long it would take to crack the code. A couple more weeks hanging around these lanes would suit me fine.

  Further along the alley, a woman selling Hello Kitty balloons had fallen asleep on the job. I crept closer and tied the balloons to a drainpipe so they didn’t float free. Right then, someone passed behind me – a tourist in a baseball cap. I didn’t know why, but something made me notice him. As I watched, the guy stopped to check a guidebook in a shop light, and then touched his ear.

  Was he wearing a comms bud?

  Maybe it was a headphone or a hearing aid, but I couldn’t ignore that tingle in my belly. The man wore sunglasses too, which was strange at night. Unless they were special sunglasses…

  I followed him back the way I had come. He stopped again outside Mr Chi’s Dumplings, and I caught a glimpse of his face. It was all angles and bone structure: a military face. He touched his earpiece again – three quick taps.

  My senses were on full alert; I’d even forgotten that I needed a wee.

  The man stopped again at a junction between two hutongs, where a couple of boys booted a football off the walls. I ducked into an alley and watched from a distance. Two other figures appeared from the opposite direction – a man and a woman, also in caps. To anyone else they looked like friends meeting up for dinner. To me, they were big trouble.

  We’d been found.

  My heart was thumping as hard as the football against the walls. I darted down the alley to a climbing frame of rubbish bins and extractor fans, and scrambled up onto the roof of one of the houses. Staying low, I moved along the tiles, spying on the bad guys below. They’d stopped outside one of the houses. The two men guarded its entrance, while the woman went inside.

  I crept higher up the roof so I could peer over the front wall of the house opposite. In one of its rooms I saw my family around the holosphere, studying the
hologram tablets.

  I remained as still as a gargoyle as the woman gave several hand signals. A dozen more figures appeared from the shadows. They sprang over walls and slid down from the roofs, all armed with crab-claw plasma guns.

  Then they launched their attack.

  5

  I crouched lower on the tiles, watching the Snake Lady’s mercenaries storm the house on the other side of the hutong. A door was kicked open, a window smashed, and a dozen of the goons charged into the room where my mum, dad and sister stood around the holosphere. None of my family turned as the thugs opened fire, strobe-lighting the room with energy blasts. The holosphere screen flipped up and smashed against a wall. That many shots would have knocked my actual family out for a week. But, come on, do you really think I’d just sit there and watch that happen?

  We had a plan.

  We hadn’t just rented one house, but also the house on the other side of the alley. We’d rigged it with a trilateration scrambler, a gadget that redirects tracking devices to its location. It led the mercenaries there, where they saw holograms of my family hard at work in the house opposite, the one from which I was watching.

  I scrambled to the other side of the roof, slid down a drainpipe to the courtyard and charged to the room where my family was really working.

  “Mercenaries just hit the decoy house,” I cried.

  My family turned and stared.

  “Did you get the tea?” Dad asked.

  “What? Are you joking?”

  They were, thank God.

  “There’s no need to panic,” Mum assured me. “They have no idea where we are. I’ll gather our things. John, set the chargers. Jake, keep watch. We leave in five minutes using the tunnel, as planned.”

  “Five minutes?” Pan protested. “This decipherment programme needs days. We’ve got nothing from the tablets so far.”

  “We don’t have a choice, Pandora,” Mum snapped, shoving our belongings into duffel bags. “We can’t be here any longer.”

  Pan shot me a look for support. “Jake?”