The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  We’re through the second set of doors minutes later. Still no sign of anyone in the corridors. I peek behind the glass window of the first door we come to. It looks like a lab. We walk straight past. Then we hear voices. Someone’s coming. I grab Tyler and rush towards a big fridge-type door. We’re inside just in time.

  Inside it’s pretty cold but not quite freezing. Metal shelving is covered with boxes of lab supplies, plastic petri dishes filled with cloudy jelly, boxes of test tubes scrawled over with handwritten labels. There is a workbench about two metres wide on which several chunky pieces of lab apparatus sit. Glass plates stand in liquid, with brilliant blue stain across the middle of the plates.

  Tyler kisses his teeth in appreciation. “Hey, man, a walk-in fridge!”

  “It’s a cold room,” I say. “My dad’s department has one too – for storing specimens. This would be a good place to store the Crystal. . .”

  “OK . . . so what are we looking for?”

  My heart sinks at Tyler’s question. Looking around this slightly messy cold room, I doubt that it would be used to store something quite so significant. Surely Lorena would keep something so valuable somewhere special . . . perhaps in its own fridge?

  Then my eye falls on something I recognize. A box of pens – the exact same type of pen that I was given before my mission to find the Ix Codex. An instrument to secretly deliver a dose of a drug. I was supposed to use it to give myself short-term memory loss – in case I was captured by the enemy. But like all the other gadgets they gave me for the mission, I never got to use it.

  I grab a handful of the pens. “These could be useful,” I tell Tyler. “They inject you with an amnesia thing. . .”

  Tyler looks baffled. “Amnesia? What do you want to forget?”

  I glare at him flatly. “They’re not meant for me, bozo.”

  I’m still scanning the room when the door begins to open with a loud, clunking noise as the air seal is broken. Hurriedly I stuff the pens into my back jeans pocket. Tyler and I glance at each other wildly for a second.

  There’s nowhere to hide.

  The door opens.

  Standing in the opening is Lorena – the atanzahab, the chief scientist of Ek Naab. Wearing a stiff white lab coat she looks more imposing than she did the first time I met her, that night I was installed as the Bakab Ix. From behind sternlooking, black-rimmed glasses, she gives me a beady glare.

  “Joshua Garcia . . . what the devil are you doing in here?”

  I lift my hands to where Lorena can see them. “I just wanted to show Tyler a cold room! He’s never seen one – he didn’t even believe me that they existed.”

  Lorena looks doubtfully from me to Tyler, who gives a goofy nod. “He reckons there’s hot rooms too.”

  I give Tyler a sharp glare. Hot room – what’s he on about? But turns out it’s a good guess. . .

  “There are,” she says coldly. “But the ‘hot room’ isn’t actually hot.”

  I step forward, looking straight at Lorena, as though nothing in the room could be of the tiniest interest. Innocently I ask, “Why is it called a ‘hot room’ then?”

  Lorena stands aside to let us out of the room. “Because of the radiation,” she says, now impatient. “Josh, what are you doing here?”

  “Montoyo is organizing a rescue mission to get Ixchel and my mother back from the kidnappers. We thought you might be able to help out with something for weapons, gadgets . . . you know the sort of thing.”

  Lorena’s eyes narrow. “Montoyo sent you? Because I can’t get hold of him – he’s not answering his phone.”

  I’m all wide-eyed innocence. “He’s in meetings now, planning the rescue. He didn’t exactly send me . . . but only because he’s got too much to think about right now.”

  Lorena begins to nod, still a bit suspicious. “There are some things that might be useful, yes. The usual stuff – sedative drugs. . .” Her voice trails off, as though she’s not meant to say more. “We have a nice little dart delivery system now.”

  “Poison darts?” Tyler says. “Why don’t you just use guns?”

  Her attention turns to Tyler. “Guns? When people are killed there has to be an investigation. A secret like Ek Naab doesn’t stay secret very long when it starts murdering people. Look at the Sect of Huracan . . . they’re really sloppy. We’re picking up news stories linked to them every few months now.”

  “It’s true,” I tell Tyler. “My mum showed me one. Simon Madison killed this scientist woman in the Middle East. And he stole the Adaptor from someone in the Middle East, too.”

  “That’s right, from a collector in Beirut,” Lorena confirms.

  “What’s in the Middle East?” I wonder, almost to myself. “Cos Madison keeps cropping up there.”

  Lorena seems surprised. “You don’t know?”

  I give her a blank stare. My comment was just offhand – I hadn’t expected for a second that Lorena would be able to answer my question. “No, I don’t. What’s there?”

  “I’m sorry.” Lorena frowns. “I assumed, with you being the Bakab Ix . . . and the fact that you’re the one who found the Revival Chamber. . .”

  “Huh? What?”

  “There’s a second Revival Chamber in Iraq, Josh. Just like the one that you found under Structure X in Becan.”

  I’m too excited at the news to be angry at yet more evidence of Montoyo’s secrecy. “Another one? Wow! How do you know? What does it do?”

  “Well . . . we know from the Ix Codex. There were five Revival Chambers, spread throughout the world. One of them was in the ancient city of Eridu, in modern-day Iraq.”

  “Five chambers! Wow! This is huge!”

  “In answer to your second question – we don’t know what they do. The one here in Becan is empty.”

  “Empty . . . what do you mean?” From what I remember, the Revival Chamber was an octagonal stone room filled with what looked like sarcophagi.

  “Well . . . we activated it,” Lorena continues, still puzzled that I don’t know any of this. “All the receptacles are empty.”

  Now I really do boggle at her. “You activated the Revival Chamber? You got the Adaptor to work in the Container . . . you have the Crystal Key?!”

  They must have followed the instructions in the Ix Codex, succeeded where I’d seen the Professor, Marius and Madison fail. . .

  Lorena shrugs. “We didn’t need the Crystal Key. The Liquid Key works fine so long as it’s used very soon after it is made. The minute we had the amino acid sequence from the Ix Codex, we had it made here in our peptide synthesizer and took it right over to the Revival Chamber.”

  Then I remember that line from the first few pages of the Ix Codex – the Key is unstable – must be used within sixty minutes. . .

  Lorena’s words don’t fully make sense to me . . . amino acid sequence . . . peptide synthesizer . . . but what I do get is this: Lorena doesn’t need the Crystal Key to activate the Adaptor. She can activate it with something that is way, way easier to make.

  So if Lorena doesn’t need the Crystal Key – maybe she’ll let me try it?

  I repeat, “You don’t need the Crystal Key?”

  Lorena frowns. “No, Josh . . . once we cracked the code in the Ix Codex, we realized that the fifteen letters in that sequence represent amino acids. After that it was easy enough.”

  “So you’ve just got the Crystal Key sitting there, then. . .?”

  Doing nothing. . .

  She shakes her head. “We haven’t even made the Crystal Key . . . it’s actually very difficult to make. We’re still some time away from having a big enough crystal. Anyway, there’s no need now. The Liquid Key works in our Revival Chamber. Whoever used to be in there . . . has long gone.”

  “Whoever?”

  “Whoever . . . yes. Josh, you need to speak to Montoyo. I don’t understand why he hasn’t told you these things. Really, it’s your birthright.”

  I feel a wave of such gratitude towards Lorena right then that I regret
making plans to steal the Crystal Key from her.

  There are five Revival Chambers . . . I guess those ancient Erinsi really got around. I shouldn’t have been surprised that one chamber is in Iraq, now I come to think of it. The clues were there all along – the news story about Madison nicking the Adaptor did mention that the object was first found near Eridu in Iraq. Some of the ancient Erinsi stuff is written in Sumerian – the language of ancient Mesopotamia – now mainly in Iraq. Then there’s the phrase itself – Erin si – ancient Mesopotamian words meaning “People of Memory”.

  So where are the other chambers? If Lorena expected people to be inside them, then what exactly are we talking about here?

  Reviving the dead?

  Lorena doesn’t want to say any more. She’s quietly angry with Montoyo, I can tell, and bewildered. But even she has her limits. “Go and talk to Carlos,” Lorena insists.

  I’m angry too, but not surprised. It’s typical of Montoyo to keep stuff like this from me. What’s almost a million times worse than anything Lorena’s telling me is a truth that dawns on me only later.

  There is no Crystal Key in Ek Naab. I can’t fix the Bracelet.

  Ixchel and my mum are going to be slaughtered by those kidnappers. Montoyo will never find them, I know it. He’ll never, ever give up his prize Bakab Ix – me.

  The Sect of Huracan need me to play some part in their top secret, world-changing plan. Well, so does Montoyo.

  The Sect or Montoyo. When it comes down to it, I don’t have much idea what either of them have in store for me.

  Without the Bracelet of Itzamna, there’s nothing I can do about anything. I’m stuck here helpless. Just a kid waiting at home for news from the war.

  Lorena gives me a case of stuff to take for Montoyo – the tranquillizer-dart guns and some darts, and also some tubes of a new “greasy glue” made of carbon nanotubes, which she reckons helps with climbing. I can’t focus on what she tells us about what’s in the case. Tyler at least seems focused on what she’s saying, but I just keep nodding. I just want to get out of there. This is no place for me now.

  Tyler and I walk back. In my daze, I make a wrong turn and we wind up in the marketplace. It’s dense with stalls selling delicious-smelling food. Tyler stops at a juice bar, where a smiling girl in a crisp white apron stands in front of a mountain of fruit. Tyler points to some golden-ripe mangoes and some fleshy guavas. The girl slices up the fruit, throws it into a juicer and pours the pinkish-yellow juice over ice in two glasses.

  We take our drinks and sit at one of the tables at the side of the square. I watch rocks of ice clink against the edge as I nervously push the glass around the table. Try as I might, I can’t help but think back to that night on the beach at Natal. Ixchel with her goblet of frothy juice, me with the purple grape. How much it stabbed at me to see her laughing and dancing with Benicio. What an idiot I was not to give her a proper hug and kiss hello.

  I take a sip, try to swallow, almost choke.

  I think about the time Ixchel fell asleep against my chest in the bus to Tlacotalpan last December. Long moments of actually holding her. In my memory, I can still feel her breath ruffling the hairs on my arms. Just before she woke up properly, she squeezed me. I hadn’t dared to move.

  Why didn’t I think about this at the time? It’s like some horrible time-delay bomb. As if every detail was logged that day by a secretive part of my mind. It’s being slowly released into my system, like poison, to torture me.

  Every time I touched her, or looked into her eyes, or even more heart-stopping – every time she touched me. It’s all flooding back. Now that I can’t see, hear or touch her. Now that she might be about to die.

  When I remember that as well as Ixchel there’s my mother, my stomach lurches.

  I wonder then – is this what Montoyo is going through? Is he thinking about my mum the way I’m thinking about Ixchel? I actually feel sorry for him for a minute. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

  I was so horrible to Mum, to Ixchel, that day on the sand dunes. What if that’s their last memory of me?

  Tyler says very quietly, “What’s wrong?”

  I lift my eyes to meet his and actually can’t speak.

  “Ixchel,” he pronounces, watching for my response. I nod miserably, feeling my eyes fill with tears. Tyler looks at me for a few seconds and then he nods too. “Figures.”

  Not for the first time, I ask him, “What am I going to do?”

  Tyler doesn’t have an answer to that one. But I can feel the answer forming inside me. It’s not as easy as I thought to be a coward, interested only in self-preservation. It takes more nerve than I’ve got to hold out.

  All this and it’s only been a few hours. How will I get through the rest of my life, knowing that I let one of them die instead of me?

  We finish our juice and wind our way back to the apartment where Montoyo’s thrown my stuff. I can’t think of it as “my place” yet. But being the one who leads Tyler around Ek Naab – even if I do make a couple of wrong turns on the way – makes me feel strangely at home.

  No one tries to talk to us. Sometimes when people don’t think I’m looking I notice them staring at us – especially me. It makes me wonder what sort of information is out there about me. What have they heard?

  Back at the apartment I open my suitcase and take out the two books by John Lloyd Stephens that Montoyo gave me. Tyler has been asking me about how I solved the code with the chemical formula of the Crystal Key. I show him how the cipher works, and talk him through the solution.

  “So that’s it, then, is it? Them fifteen letters?”

  “Lorena said ‘amino acids’. That’s some kind of chemical, isn’t it? We did it in biology. I guess each letter means a different amino acid.”

  “But why? Why is Arcadio putting that in this book?”

  I shrug. Right now I’m off the whole idea. If Lorena – with all her labs – can’t make the Crystal Key, what hope do I have? “I dunno, Tyler. I don’t even know who Arcadio is.”

  But Tyler won’t let it go. “He’s written this same thing in all those other books? That’s what Montoyo said, yeah?”

  I nod. Tyler looks down, touches the final page of the book where Arcadio’s scrawled the quotation.

  “And he’s got a quote, yeah, from this Calvino bloke, from 1979?”

  “‘I would like to swim against the stream of time. . .’ That one, yes.”

  “But what this says, yeah, is that he wants to go back in time and change something, something that went wrong. But new things keep happening in his life . . . and things change. And he can’t work out which is the moment he needs to go back to . . . the zero moment . . . the point in time where . . .”

  “. . . where his fate changes,” I finish. “Yeah . . . that’s what he’s saying.”

  It’s not the first time those words set off a tingle inside me. Interesting that Tyler should notice something, too.

  “So he’s talking about time travel, innit? This Arcadio – he’s another time traveller!”

  I nod. “It looks that way.”

  “You think he’s actually . . . Itzamna?”

  “Great minds think alike, mate,” I tell him with a slight grin. “That’s my theory, anyway. Arcadio disappears, we know that much.”

  “Disappears?”

  “Uh huh. Susannah St John met Arcadio when she and him were both young. They had a ‘thing’. Then one day, he never came back.”

  “What would happen, Josh, if that Bracelet thing broke? If the crystal got bust. You’d get stranded in time, yeah?”

  I feel a crackle of excitement. “Unless. . .”

  Tyler looks as excited as me. “Unless you could make a new Crystal Key. And to do that. . .”

  “You’d have to keep the formula handy.”

  Tyler looks doubtful. “But writing it in a book. . .? You could lose a book.”

  “Yeah, it would make more sense to, like, tattoo it on your body. Like in that film about the gu
y who keeps losing his memory, Memento.”

  Then Tyler says something truly brilliant. “Maybe Arcadio never saw that film? Or had other reasons why he couldn’t write everything on his own body. So he wrote it in these books. Maybe other places too. All in code. . .”

  “Someone must have been after Arcadio,” I say suddenly. I can understand how that might feel – pursued through time and space by the Sect of Huracan. You’d need every trick in the game to stay ahead.

  “But then he disappears,” Tyler says, closing the book. “Arcadio takes off one day and . . . that’s it.”