The Legend of the Rift

by Peter Lerangis

  “The Loculus!” Marco said. “Get your hands off it, Brother Jack!”

  He was making his way toward me through the fish, part swimming, part crawling. I saw his fingers close over the Loculus—and the next moment it was flying up over the railing of the fishing boat to the utter bafflement of everyone on board.

  “Kaaaachhhh!” A cough exploded from my mouth. I began gasping uncontrollably, taking huge, deep, gulping breaths. I felt like my throat was going to rupture and my lungs explode.

  Marco held tight, coaxing me back. “It’s all right . . . just breathe. . . .”

  “What . . . happened?” I finally managed to croak out.

  “Dude, you have to think like a fish,” Marco said. “The Loculus gives you something they have. You can dance around forever underwater and get your oxygen just fine. But look at them now, right? By next week they’re going to be breaded and formed into tasty little fish sticks. Because they can’t breathe in the air. And when you’re holding that Loculus, neither can you.”

  I thought about it a minute. I felt my lungs expand and contract. I took a deep whiff of fish.

  It was the most beautiful smell I’d ever experienced.

  For some reason, I burst out laughing. Seeing the goggle-eyed expressions on the faces of the fishing crew only made it worse. I began to howl uncontrollably, and that made Cass and Eloise crack up, too.

  As we collapsed into giggles on the deck of the ship, Marco stood up and held out his hand to one of the crew men. “Dude!”

  The guy’s face was tanned a deep brown. He had a thick black-gray mustache and narrow blue-green eyes. “Dude?” he said, shaking Marco’s hand. “So you are American. Tell me, why are you with my fish?”

  That did it.

  Cass, Eloise, and I were rolling on the floor, paralyzed with laughter.

  “Well,” Marco said, putting a hand on the guy’s shoulder, “it’s kind of a long story.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SEE CHOICE ONE

  I GUESS IN the Egyptian fishing community, Crazy Farouk was a pretty familiar name. Because when Marco mentioned it, the entire crew shouted a knowing “Ahhhhh . . . ,” rolling their eyes to the sky. As if the mere mention of the name was enough to explain four kids with a shiny orb showing up in their net full of mackerel.

  Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

  The fishing vessel sped toward the shore. The breeze felt great in my hair, and it kept the fishy stench behind us. I kept the Loculus underneath me, pressed between my legs, taking care not to touch it with my skin.

  Muhammad, the guy with the mustache, radioed someone who radioed Crazy Farouk. It turned out she had returned to her boat. When they reached her, she was crying and hung up on them three times. Finally Muhammad called a fourth time and shouted: “DON’T HANG UP JACK IS HERE I WILL PUT JACK ON THE LINE!” and he shoved the phone to me. “She is crazy,” he muttered.

  “Hey, Farouk?” I said.

  After a moment of silence, I heard a flurry of Arabic words in rhythmic chant like a prayer. And then, “Oh, Jack—oh, I am so relieved to hear your voice! I thought you’d died. You all flew away from me. It was as if you were being summoned. Your friend Twerking was so upset with me.”

  “It’s Torquin,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “He grew very agitated and insisted we come back to shore,” Farouk said. “I will radio him. He will meet you at the dock. I will return, too, but it’ll take a little while. I am halfway back out to the site. I was going to see if I could salvage—er, rescue you. Now, please, tell me what happened?”

  I told her the truth—or, a version of it. I said we had found nearly the entire Lighthouse, but it was being guarded by a fearsome creature that ate people. I didn’t give many details, but that didn’t matter, because she filled them in herself.

  “Yes!” she said. “Oh my dear. Oh wait till I tell SEESAW. This confirms the existence of Xinastra!”

  “Who?” I said.

  “A lizard creature from the star system Alpha Centauri, brought here on a comet in the fourth century B.C.!” she replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  I didn’t disagree. She wished us luck in the future. I just thanked her and said good-bye.

  For a long time, no one said anything. I think we were all still a little shell-shocked. Finally Eloise piped up, “So . . . how’d we get from ‘Loculus of Time Travel’ to ‘Loculus of Breathing Underwater’?”

  “I think we’d need the ‘Loculus of Explaining the Misunderstanding of Words on a Parchment Despite the Use of the Loculus of Language’ to find that out,” Cass said.

  “That one is in the Eighth Wonder of the World,” Marco replied.

  “We’ll have to check those scrolls again when we get back,” I said. But I wasn’t really thinking about that. I knew we were all avoiding the bigger question. And someone was going to have to bring it up.

  “Guys,” I said, “you know, we were counting on this Loculus to take us to Aly.”

  Cass’s shoulders slumped. “There goes my fizzy mood. Down the niard.”

  “What do we do now, O King of Future Kings?” Marco said.

  “As I see it,” I said, “we have two choices. Choice One: pull out the sword, go into the rift, and hope it magically takes us back to where and when we need to go.”

  “And Choice Two?” Marco said.

  “See Choice One,” I replied.

  We all leaned on the railing. In the distance we could see the marina. The people on the dock were all sticklike figures from here, except for one that looked like an animated tree with red and white leaves.

  Torquin was waving to us.

  We waved back. As the boat cut its speed and drifted toward the dock, we all stared straight ahead in total silence.

  I can’t see her.

  All I can see is water.

  The Dream isn’t supposed to be like this. Am I too late? Has Atlantis sunk? I look for Aly. I am airborne and I’m not sure where to go. I scream out her name.

  Aly . . .

  ALY!

  “Jack, wake up!”

  My eyes sprang open, and the Dream dissipated into droplets of black. I was slumped in the plush leather of Slippy’s passenger seat, my head jammed against the window. Cass was shaking me by the shirt.

  I sat up straight, forcing myself awake. “Sorry!”

  “You were calling Aly’s name,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Wow. I was back in Atlantis. Or flying over it, I guess. But I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t find where I was supposed to land. Because the island was submerged already.”

  Cass’s face turned about three shades whiter. He glanced over his shoulder. Marco and Eloise didn’t look much better. They were staring at me like refugees from the underworld at Bo’gloo. “What’s up?” I said. “You guys look like you just took your zombie pills.”

  I could tell we were descending. But unlike Torquin’s usual habits, our angle wasn’t totally nose down. We seemed to be on a gentle decline. “Not sure what to do,” he muttered.

  That didn’t sound good.

  Right now the bag that contained our new Loculus was strapped into the copilot’s seat. We had picked it up in Alexandria, a thick, touristy shoulder bag that said MY PARENTS WENT TO QUITBAY CITADEL AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TOAT BAG. Mainly so we could carry the Loculus without touching it. And also because of the bad spelling.

  I set it gently on the floor, sat in the seat, and looked through the copilot window. We were in the middle of a tropical downpour. Through the windshield wipers, I saw what looked like a lake surrounded by trees. “That is . . . airport,” Torquin said quietly.

  “Where?” I asked.

  He trained a set of spotlights so I could see more clearly. A helicopter was floating on the lake. “Underwater,” he said.

  He banked the jet to the right. We flew over a set of roofs, arranged in an oval shape, all peeking up above a sea of water.

  “No . . .” I s
aid.

  Below one roof was a set of columns, topped by a familiar marble carving:

  HOUSE OF MASSA

  CHAPTER FORTY

  WHERE DEATH IS LIFE AND LIFE IS DEATH

  “HAAAAANG ON, SLIPPY, Slippy hang on!” the voice sang over Torquin’s console.

  I knew exactly who it was. “Nirvana!” I shouted. “We’re over the airport! What happened?”

  “Hey, that must be Jack!” Nirvana said. “The reception sucks, but I know it’s you because of the full sentences.”

  “Not funny,” Torquin said. “Can’t land.”

  “Yeah, well, we had a little seismic event while you were gone,” Nirvana replied. “When last we saw you, we’d determined the island was . . . shall we say, unstable? Kind of like a dreidel when it loses speed—you just don’t know which way it’s going to fall? Okay, maybe that’s not the best analogy, but suffice it to say the island has . . . tilted. In the other direction. I’d never been in a flood before. It’s pretty scary.”

  My stomach knotted up. All I could think about was Mom. “Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Not a soul, thank goodness,” Nirvana replied. “But the Enigma is back underwater playing with its old fishy friends. Way underwater. So far underwater that the opposite side of the island has risen up like the White Cliffs of Dover.”

  “Who?” Torquin said.

  “The Palisades?” Nirvana tried.

  “Huh?” Torquin asked.

  “They rose really high, okay?” Nirvana said with exasperation. “Tork, are you pilot enough to pull off a water landing?”

  I could see the hairs of Torquin’s beard angle upward. “Whoa, what’s happening to your face, Torquin?” Eloise asked.

  “He’s smiling,” I murmured.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Cass replied.

  With a loud “PAH!” Torquin yanked back the throttle and left our stomachs somewhere over the flooded compound.

  The only thing worse than being on a plane with Torquin is being on a plane with Torquin during an emergency.

  Well, there is one conceivably worse thing. You could crash and die. But this comes close.

  He lowered the pontoons with such force I thought they’d drop into the ocean. He landed so hard on the water it felt like solid rock. Despite the airtight compartments, seawater came seeping up to our ankles.

  Swimming to a muddy shore and then scaling a steep wall of slime was pleasant in comparison.

  At the top of the hill was a long, flat, treeless field of mud. The Karai rebels and the Massa had slapped together a small compound of tents and makeshift buildings of driftwood and tarps. Although the sun had just set and a steady rain fell, I still could see the outline of Mount Onyx looming in the distance. Being in the center of the island, it hadn’t submerged. But its familiar cone now canted to the south.

  “Thank you for getting everyone back safely, Torquin,” was Aliyah’s greeting. “That was a monumental feat.”

  “Would do it again any time,” he said.

  “Not with us,” Cass murmured.

  Eloise leaned over to me. “Did she just say Torquin had monumental feet?”

  As we gathered inside the largest of the tents, a team of rebels served us hard crackers along with lukewarm tea. “We managed to salvage some provisions, electronic materials—and, naturally, all of Wenders’s records,” Aliyah said. “The rebels have been an enormous help, having survived in the wilderness for so long. There were no casualties, I am happy to report.”

  My eyes kept darting out the flap, hoping to see signs of Mom. “So . . . people like, um, Dr. Bones . . . Sister Nancy . . . ?” I asked, trying not to be too obvious.

  “All fine,” Aliyah said. “Scattered about on various recovery projects. But as you can see, we are running out of time. There is no telling what this island will do next. It is as if it has a life of its own. Now . . . please, tell us some good news.” She looked greedily at my shoulder bag from Alexandria.

  I felt my shoulders shaking. I was cold, and I took a sip of tea. Eloise started telling our story, with the rest of us chipping in until we covered everything. Torquin was quiet—even for him. The whole time he stared at Mount Onyx as if he were afraid it would fly away.

  As I finished, with the account of how the new Loculus saved our lives, Aliyah’s eyes drew together with confusion. “You mean the power of the Loculus is not time travel?” she asked. “How could you have gotten that wrong?”

  “Did you bring back wrong Loculus?” Manolo grunted.

  We’d hardly been back on the island a half hour, and already they were yelling at us.

  “Uh, yeah, I’m really glad we’re alive, too!” Cass said.

  Aliyah’s voice softened. “I’m sorry. Of course I’m glad you’re all safe. This information throws me, though. If we are to manage the Loculi, we must not make mistakes.”

  I shook my head. “Something about the description. I must have read it wrong.”

  Aliyah snapped her fingers. In a moment, one of her goons had laid out the boxes with Wenders’s notes, and next to them the Loculus of Language. I had marked the part where Wenders described the powers of the Loculi, so it didn’t take long to find it. Cass, Marco, Eloise, and I leaned over it, touching the Loculus of Language. We stared at it intently, the silence broken only by the tapping of rain on the tent canvas.

  The words appeared to me in Latin first. Then they began to change before my eyes. Most of them transformed instantly into their English meaning, bold and clear. Others were slower, their print soft and murky. I waited until I had something definite, and then read slowly: “‘Forward is the thrust of growth/That makes us human, gives us breath/To travel back can now be done/Where death is life and life is death.’”

  Manolo scratched his head. “Sounds like the time travel to me!”

  “How do you do that so fast, Brother Jack?” Marco said. “The words are still forming for me. Some are supereasy. Like, the. But the rest . . .”

  “Me, too,” Cass said.

  “Which ones are you stuck on?” I asked.

  “Well,” Cass replied, staring hard, “most of them are there by now, but the place where you see ‘growth’—I’ve got nothing definite yet.”

  Marco was frowning. “Weird. Something is forming for me, but it doesn’t begin with g. I’ve got an e . . . v . . . o . . . t . . . ? What the heck?”

  I blinked at the text. Marco’s suggestion was making stuff happen on the page for me, too. My brain was scrambling the letters again. “Could that t be an l?” I asked.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Marco said.

  The word was transforming before my eyes. “Evol . . . ution . . .” I said. “Whoa, okay, that makes sense. My first reading was growth. That’s one of the possible definitions. But what Wenders meant was evolution. Maybe that changes the meaning?”

  Aliyah’s eyes lit up. “Wenders lived in a world that was being rocked by the publications of Charles Darwin. Everyone was talking about evolution. About how humans began as so-called lower life forms—single-celled organisms to amoebas to fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals—”

  “‘Forward is the thrust of evolution’?” Eloise said. “That’s what he meant?”

  Cass nodded. “He’s saying it makes us human and gives us breath. And evolution can only go forward, not back.”

  “And now, with this Loculus, we can ‘travel back’—not through time but down the evolutionary cycle!” I said. “To some kind of amphibious state. Which made us able to breathe.”

  “So while using the Loculus in water we can breathe, but if we keep holding it out of the water we can’t—just like fish,” Eloise said excitedly. “And that’s what he meant by ‘where death is life and life is death!”

  “Bingo, Sister Eloise!” Marco said, slapping her a high five.

  I heard the crackling sound of a rock slide in the distance. Torquin stood up abruptly and peered out the tent flap, his eyes trained on the weirdly tilted silhouette of Mount
Onyx.

  I felt my body moving from side to side, as if some ghost had decided to wiggle me with invisible hands. Through the open flap I could see the tide at the bottom of the cliff sweep out with a swift sucking sound and then crash to the shore, throwing Slippy into the mud like a toy.

  Aliyah held tight to my arm until the motion stopped. After a moment of eerie silence, monkeys began screeching bloody murder from the jungle.

  I left the tent and looked down over the cliff. The shore had shifted about the length of a football field.

  No one had to say a word. But our eyes were all speaking volumes.

  We had to act.

  Now.

  Before we were underwater permanently.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  WWDD

  “NO,” ALIYAH SAID. “And that is final. You will not be taking the Loculi from this island.”

  “Technically, they’ll still be on the island,” Marco said. “Just, like, thousands of years in the past.”

  Aliyah shook her head. “You didn’t take them on your last journeys, and you were quite successful—”

  “If we’d had the Loculus of Strength, we would have defeated the Zons so much easier,” Cass said.

  “If we’d had the Loculus of Teleportation, we could have gotten out of the Mu’ankh’s belly in a much less disgusting way,” Marco said.

  “If we’d had the Loculus of Healing,” I added, “Brother Dimitrios might still be alive.”

  Aliyah turned away. Her face darkened.

  The tent flap opened, and three Karai rebels stepped in. One of them bowed to Aliyah and reported, “We’ve rerouted the fresh water lines, but Nirvana is still having trouble getting the electronics to work again.”

  The rain had stopped, the full moon was peeking through, and people were busy reorganizing the camp, repairing damage from the latest quake. The noise and the level of activity were distracting. I needed Aliyah’s full attention to convince her that going into the rift without the Loculi would be crazy. I needed to talk to her alone.

  I stepped toward her and put a hand on her arm. “Let’s go outside and, um, take a walk,” I said.