Kneeling at the edge, Qalani lowered the rope into the pool. When she felt the tug at the other end, she pulled up Eloise as if she were a rag doll.
She stood up and rubbed the water from her eyes and then hauled off and slapped Torquin’s beefy face as hard as she could. “Why’d you dump me down a well? That really hurt.”
Before Qalani could react, Cass threw his arms around his sister and lifted her in the air. Standing behind them, Aliyah let out a gasp.
As Eloise and Cass spun around, I saw why. On the back of Eloise’s head, as clear as can be, were two bright white streaks of hair in the shape of a lambda.
Qalani was still rubbing Torquin’s jaw as we walked back through the tunnel. “You pack quite a punch,” she said to Eloise.
“Sorry about that,” Eloise said. But her face was alive with excitement, and she could not keep her hands from the back of her head. For about the tenth time, she asked, “So, I’m a Select? Really? I can go into the rift?”
“Yes, dear,” Qalani said with a smile. “We need you. I have been admiring your progress for a long time . . . in my various forms. You’re ready.”
Marco, who was in the lead, turned and began walking backward. “So, if we’re friends now, can I have KissKiss back?”
Qalani had to think a moment, then smiled. “Ah, you mean Ischis, the sword. I suppose so.”
She handed the sword to Marco and he tucked it into his belt. As he kept walking backward, it clattered awkwardly against his leg. “So, Torquin—er, Clownie—”
“Qalani,” the queen said patiently.
“So all that time I was working with those brats at the Massa training center?” Marco went on. “You were there . . . hanging around as, like, a bee or mouse or cockroach?”
“I hope I didn’t step on you,” Eloise said.
“Qalani,” Cass said, “Why Eloise? Why did you do that to her in the cenote?”
“I have long been filled with impatience over the length of time necessary for G7W to express itself—and naturally for its, er, limitations,” Qalani said. “I thought about these things as the time approached to go back to Atlantis. This must be done right, with maximal strength and effectiveness. The rift can only be transited by Atlanteans—and naturally, Selects. As Queen, I will be able to do this in Torquin’s body, which will be a great boon, as we can certainly use his strength. As for Eloise—R’amphos is a wise and innovative scientist, and he can do remarkable things with a few spells and some holy waters. So in short, yes, Eloise has been accelerated to a Select. And we shall be that much stronger for her presence.”
Eloise squealed happily and threw her arms around Qalani, then Cass and me. I smiled back at her. I didn’t want to mention the fact that if we failed, her time clock ran out at age fourteen, too.
This was not the time to be a downer.
The rebels and Massa guards bustled around us as we strode past the waterfall and entered the caldera. Manolo gestured toward the Heptakiklos. Which, at the moment, was basically a Sphinx’s butt embedded in a green blob.
“I think,” Manolo said, “the two beasts are dead.”
“A fortuitous circumstance indeed,” said Qalani.
Manolo shrieked. “Torquin?”
“I know,” I said. “Shocker, huh? But it’s not him. It’s a queen that took over his body.”
Manolo shrieked again.
“Is it really dead?” Aliyah asked, walking toward the motionless Sphinx.
“Not chitchatting about the weather,” Manolo replied.
“How do we proceed now?” Aliyah asked.
“Carefully,” Nirvana said.
Qalani put her hand on the beast’s furry, motionless flank. “Poor, dear creature. The Sphinx was the most cultivated of animals. What did Massarym do to this one?”
Marco crept forward, pulling the sword from his belt. “Turned it into one great big pain in the . . .”
He tapped the flat side of Ischis’s blade on the Sphinx’s hip.
With a muffled howl, the beast began kicking violently. A cloud of soil, dust, and rocks rose from the rift. A small crack began to grow and spread on either side.
Shards of bright white light shot upward like knives. The ground began rumbling beneath us. I fell, but Marco remained upright. He was staring directly at me. “Soldier yields to Tailor,” he said.
“What?” I didn’t know what to do. If the Sphinx shook loose, we were back to Beasts Unlimited. Only this time, maybe we wouldn’t survive. “I hate that nickname, Marco.”
“It fits, Brother Jack,” Marco insisted. “Hurry.”
“It was just Bhegad trying to make me feel better, trying to turn me into someone I’m not!” I shot back. “I can’t hurry!”
My brain was a mess, thinking and overthinking. In my mind I remembered the day Professor Bhegad died. How he’d clung to my ankle as I flew through the underworld on the back of a griffin. How I watched him fall to his death. How I then lost a piece of my heart and soul when he disappeared forever from my life. And now a slideshow of other people flashed through my brain—Dad and Mom and the Ramsay family I’d met in Ohio and Mrs. Black in Los Angeles and Brother Dimitrios and my bike and the pathway through the woods to school. Everything a fragment of me. And all of it exploding into chaos.
You put things together, Bhegad said.
If things weren’t together, they fell apart. Lives vanished. Worlds ended.
I leaped to my feet. My mind was jammed with thoughts. I had no plan. I wasn’t ready to do anything. But plans, I knew, were overrated. We might not succeed. We might not make it back. But sometimes you just had to act even when you didn’t know how. And that made you ready.
What I did know was this: possible success trumped certain death. My instincts were shouting at me loud and clear.
Sometimes, instinct was everything.
I grabbed Qalani’s hand and pulled her toward Marco. “Remember, you’re Torquin!” I said. “So act like him for a minute and do as I say.” I turned, shouting over my shoulder, “Manolo, take the sword. Eventually you will have to jam it back into the rift, when it is finally clear. You’ll know exactly when—and if you don’t, ask Aliyah!”
Manolo stood rigid, his lips curled in disgust. “What does he think he’s doing?”
“I’m not sure,” Aliyah said, “but just do it!”
Marco handed the sword to Manolo. Grumbling, he took it. I took Marco’s hand and Qalani’s, held tight, and positioned us all close to the Sphinx but out of its kicking range.
I told myself I was crazy.
And then I shut myself up.
“Okay, on three!” I shouted. “Eloise, Cass, you come with us!”
“Come with you where?” Cass shouted.
“One . . .” I bent my knees. Qalani did the same, and then Marco. “Two . . .”
At the count of three, Marco, Cass, Eloise, the body of Torquin, and I leaped high. Our ten feet thudded hard on the Sphinx’s flank.
Our weight caused the crack to widen again. The animal sank inside in a reverse shower of light.
We fell back onto the ground. Thunder cracked overhead and the ground jolted. From the rift came the howling screech of a griffin that flew straight upward—into the path of a falling boulder.
“Watch out!” Marco cried out, pushing me out of the way.
I felt myself rumbling side to side. Then upward. “What’s going on?” Eloise screamed.
Behind us, Aliyah was holding the phone to her ears. “We’re getting reports of an approaching tsunami!” she shouted. “East Coast!”
“Go!” Mom screamed.
“But what about you?” I screamed back. “What will happen to—?”
With a deafening boom, the walls of the caldera began to crack down the middle.
“Just go!” Mom ran toward me and squeezed my hand tightly.
“I love you,” I said.
She nodded and then pushed me toward the rift. I took Eloise’s hand. She took Cass’s, and he took
Marco’s. Marco grabbed on to Qalani.
I did not look back.
On the count of three, we all plunged into the rift.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
THE END OF THE WORLD
UNTIL I GOT to the island, my most painful experiences were at the hands of Barry Reese, the Blowhard of Belleville.
Those were nothing compared to being squeezed by a Colossus. Or spat at by a vizzeet. Or attacked by a zombie army. Or swallowed by a Mu’ankh. Or having every atom of my body teleported.
But compared to the rift, the worst of these were 3 on a scale of 10.
I felt that the skin had been flayed from my body and then sliced thin and flayed again. I felt as if a thin electric prod had been inserted into the spaces between every molecule in my body.
My first thought was that I wanted to die. My second thought was that I should have died a nanosecond ago. After that my brain stopped thinking, and my senses shut down, one by one.
Sight.
Smell.
Sound.
Touch.
Nothing.
The Dream.
A ring of fire, screaming animals, the end of the world.
I am back to where it started, motionless, senseless, without thought. It begins again and I must endure all of it. I must fall to my death and wake up to the Ugliosaurus and wish that my dad were not in Singapore and bike to school and leap away from Barry into the street and be kidnapped to the island, where I will meet the nervous kid and the genius girl with the dyed-pink hair and the jock who can sink fifty-yard jump shots and the tweed-jacketed professor. It is the cycle of life and death stood on its head, past and present colliding, death and death everlasting, amen.
And this repeat cycle, more than the senselessness, more than the pain of all I have endured, more than death itself, is the one thing I cannot stand. The worst I can imagine.
“No-o-o-o!”
I shout at the top of my lungs, drawing my hands across the scene in front of me as if I can rip it apart and cause everything to vanish.
But it’s . . .
“TOO LATE!”
I would say Eloise’s scream woke me up. But that would imply that I’d been sleeping. I’m not sure I was. I’m not sure what state my body was in—dream or seeing, past or present.
Splayed out before us was a lake of green goo with three eyes and a Sphinx jutting from its mouth—both motionless. But gone were the walls of the caldera. We were in the center of what looked like a bowl, a vast circular field that rose all around to a steep, curved ridge. A waterfall cascaded from part of the ridge, and thick woods surrounded us on all sides. Below us the soil was parched, and I could smell the fires that smoked upward from the woods. I could also hear the distant scream of a creature that I recognized as a hose-beaked vromaski.
“Are we . . . in Atlantis?” Eloise said.
As Qalani struggled to her feet, she glanced at the countryside. I had never seen Torquin’s features show so much emotion. They stretched and strained into an expression of both sadness and joy. “By Uhla’ar’s staff, I never thought I would see this again . . .”
“I guess that’s a yes,” I said to Eloise.
“Because I—I just dreamed this, Jack,” Eloise said. “And then I woke up, and there it was . . .”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re having the Dream, too, huh? Welcome to the world of the Select.”
“Where’s Cass?” Eloise said.
I looked around but saw no sign of him. He had to be here. We’d made it, so he must have, too.
Didn’t he?
“Cass?” Eloise called out, heading for a thicket at the edge of the forest.
My eyes darted left and right, hoping to spot Cass. Rain was beginning to fall, and the drops felt prickly and sharp on my skin. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was wide awake, because I hurt from head to toe.
Marco was hunched over the Heptakiklos. The seven bowls were empty, but the carvings inside were sharp and new. Both his hands clutched the hilt of Ischis, which was stuck directly into the rift. I stood and walked toward him, adjusting my Loculus vest. “I thought you left the sword with Manolo,” I said.
“I did,” Marco replied. “This one was lying on the ground here when we came through. I think it must have been stuck in the rift, but we knocked it out. So I replaced it. Meaning the rift here, back in Atlantis. As opposed to the rift back in Team Karassarym Land. Because, let me see if I have this right . . . they are the same place, only we just went through Bhegad’s mole hole in time, right?”
“Worm hole,” I said. “Yeah.”
“So why does the Heptakiklos look the same, but everything all around it is different?” Marco asked.
Qalani turned to face us, and I saw tears streaming down the face of Torquin. “Because Mount Onyx has not formed yet,” she said. “The land has not buckled and sunk. It will before long. You see, you in the twenty-first century assume that the land changes slowly, over millennia. But in Atlantis, mountains rose and fell, shorelines changed swiftly—all for the benefit and protection of the people. This was the extraordinary work of the Telion, the unseen energy that nourished our land.”
“Whoa,” Marco said, “so if your people were like, dang, this place needs a good surfing spot, then the energy whips up a beach the next day?”
“Not quite as fast, or as frivolous—but that is the general idea.” Qalani looked around. “Right now, we have arrived at a glorious time in my kingdom’s history. You are seeing Atlantis is as it was and always should have been, vast and verdant and peaceful. I spent years constructing the Loculi. But it was only toward the end that Mount Onyx arose. I thought the Telion was causing this glorious mountain to form in order to protect the Heptakiklos. I should have known it was a volcano, not a mountain . . . a sign of the end . . .”
“Cass!” Eloise’s shocked scream, from the direction of the forest, sent us running.
Cass lay motionless behind a bush, his head twisted to one side against the trunk of a tree. “He’s breathing,” Eloise said. “But look at his head! I—I’m afraid.”
“Cass has the Loculus of Healing,” Marco said, reaching for the straps of Cass’s backpack.
As Marco began yanking on the zipper, Cass let out a shuddering moan, his face twisting into a grimace. “Let me do it,” I said.
Gently I eased the zipper down and reached in. Cass also had the Loculus of Invisibility, but I could see this one, so it had to be Healing. As I slipped it out from under him, Eloise, Marco, and Qalani held his body still.
The rain was falling harder now, and I had to wipe it out of my eyes. I touched the Loculus to Cass’s forehead, and he flinched. His head began to move, forcing itself away from the twisted position it was in, slowly straightening. Qalani pulled him away from the tree gently, gradually, to give his head more room to move. His eyelids began to flutter. “Hey, Brother Cass,” Marco said. “Welcome to a rainy afternoon in Paradise.”
“M-m-m-m” Cass said, his eyes wide and kind of wild looking.
“Marco,” Marco said. “Or maybe you’re reaching for the word magnificent? Or, my hero?”
“Massarym!” Cass shouted, pointing his finger.
We all spun around. Riding on a giant black horse across the field was a tall, thin figure wearing a hood against the rain. His eyes were hawklike, and the outline of a mustache and beard poked out from his smooth face. He looked younger than the guy in my Dream, maybe in his midteens. Behind him rode two burly men with tight-fitting hoods and belted swords.
I realized they would be asking questions and I would need to understand them. My hands reached instinctively toward my backpack pouch for the Loculus of Language, but I realized it was inside the dead green monster. Which still lay about thirty yards away, choked on a Sphinx.
Massarym shouted something to us in Atlantean.
“That didn’t sound friendly,” Marco said.
“He said, ‘That was a fine use of the royal Loculi . . . for th
e benefit of petty foreign thieves’ . . .” Qalani said, her voice distant and dreamlike. She was walking toward her son, holding out her hands. “My boy. My young, handsome son . . .”
Seeing the lumbering form of Torquin, Massarym’s horse shied away, rearing back on its hind legs. The prince shouted to her angrily in Atlantean.
“Do you not recognize your mother, Massarym?” Qalani said.
“No, he doesn’t!” Cass called out. “And by the way, you’re speaking English! Which is a good thing, because you are a big, ugly, bearded guy and if you keep saying you’re his mother, he may kill you!”
From behind Massarym came the clopping of another set of hooves. A powerful horse emerged from the woods, with bejeweled reins and a saddle studded with gold. It took me a moment to recognize the rider, a broad-shouldered man in a woven tunic and brocaded felt hat, staring at us with cruel steady eyes.
“Heyy, ’sup, King Uhla’ar!” Marco said. “Remember us?”
Qalani stared at her husband but said nothing. From behind the king trotted another horse, tethered to Uhla’ar’s with a long rope. On it was a thin person with arms tied, a prisoner wearing a loose-fitting sack with a hood.
A clap of thunder resounded, and a bolt of lightning hit a tree not far behind them, cracking off a branch that fell in a loud thump. Massarym’s horse shied again, and the prince beat its side with a whip. Rain began falling in sheets, as if bowl the size of the entire sky had just overturned.
But my eyes did not move from the small, serious face that peered out at me from inside the prisoner’s hood. A face that broke into a slightly freckled smile, turned up more on the left than on the right.
“Jack?” said Aly Black. “What took you so long?”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
BACK TO BLACK
NOTHING CAME OUT of my mouth. Not “Aly!” or “I can’t believe we did it!” or “I am about to cry,” because my tongue had dried up and my feet were taking me at about a million miles an hour to Aly’s side.
I could feel my own smile cracking my cheeks. For the first time in my life, I was moving faster than Marco. Behind me, he and Cass were whooping at the top of their lungs.
The Legend of the Rift Page 23
