“My children, Saknussemm and I anticipated that ssssomeone would do this. People like Niemand always find a way,” Verne said softly. “Luckily, in 1947 we found fissures below this lagoon—long lava tubes that empty straight downward into the depths of the volcano. We have placed explosives—real ones—that will rip it right open. Anything that goes down there will be lost into the molten depths of the Earth forever.”
“You want us to do that?” Alex asked.
“It will destroy the serum,” Verne said. “But listen to me. The water is full of serum molecules now. I am certain your scientists have great capabilities. Take some. Let them study it further. You will have twenty seconds from the time you pull the lever. Unfortunately these fissures also run along a very unsssstable fault line, and you will need to go fast.”
“But—but what about you?” Alex said.
“I have had more than my share of time,” Verne said. “Listen closely. After pulling the lever, you must go immediately. There will be a twenty-sssecond lag before the explosion. Fourteen minutes and twenty-three ssssseconds later, you must be exactly one and a third kilometers to the northwessst. Repeat that to me.”
“Wait . . . what?” Max replied.
“Twenty seconds before explosion. Fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds later, exactly one and a third kilometers to the northwest,” Alex said.
“Brava,” Verne whispered. “Take my love with you, and Godspeed. Pull!”
Brandon was clutching the lever. He looked at Max and Alex, hesitating. “Ready?”
In response, the room’s door flew open and Spencer Niemand stormed in, vial still in hand. Bitsy was close behind him. “Papa?” she said. “We’re not finished.”
“But they will be,” Niemand said. “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”
42
AS Verne stepped forward out of the shadows, the white stripe in Niemand’s hair seemed to grow before Max’s eyes. “What . . . on . . . earth . . . ?”
The mummy-man pulled back his lips, and a tooth fell out. He reached two bony hands toward Niemand’s neck. “Ssssssso good to ssssssee you, Sssssspencer.”
“Papa!” Bitsy shrieked.
“Now, Brandon!” Max shouted.
Brandon yanked the lever down.
Alex was the first out of the room, followed by Kristin and Brandon. As they ran for the hatch, Max snatched the vial from Niemand’s hand. He raced out and quickly slid-walked down to the lagoon and scooped water into the vial. When it was full, he stoppered it and headed back up.
Alex appeared at the top. “Hurry!”
“I got serum!” Max shouted.
“You’ve got eleven seconds!” Alex reached down and yanked him up. He scrambled out of the grotto through the giant manhole cover, where Kristin and Brandon were waiting.
Kristin was looking intently at her GPS device. “Let’s get out of here before . . .”
From behind them, a bone-shuddering GA-BOOOOM echoed against the rock dome. The ground juddered, and Max nearly lost his balance.
A scream welled up from inside the manhole cover. As a plume of smoke rose upward, Max turned away.
He didn’t want to see.
Kristin led them through the woods, expertly leaping over bushes, roots, and scurrying animals. Max struggled to keep pace. He could hear rumblings in the distance. Screeches overhead. The domed sky filled with winged creatures of all sizes, flying every which way. Like panicked animals in advance of some natural disaster.
He had no sense of time. It was easy to lose sight of the others. His shirt was soaked with sweat, which meant they’d been running a long while. “How much time do we have?” he called ahead.
“Four minutes!” Alex yelled back.
Max’s calves ached, and bugs were swarming around his face. As he slapped one, his foot caught in a root, and he went down with a cry.
“Climb on, buddy,” Brandon said, taking Max onto his back while barely breaking stride.
“Are you guys there?” came Kristin’s voice from up ahead of them. “I don’t see you!”
“Here!” Brandon shouted. “Following your voice!”
“Two minutes thirty-three!” Alex was shouting.
With each bounce, Max felt the pain in his calves. And when Brandon stopped short, he thought he’d fall off.
Kristin was standing in a clearing, still staring at the device. “We’re here,” she said.
“Twenty-seven seconds left,” Alex said. “Now what?”
Max rose and fell on the big guy’s breaths for a couple of seconds, before Brandon finally let him down to the ground.
“Thanks,” Max said. “I’m sorry I said all those nasty things about you. You’re not as bad as I thought.”
Brandon smiled. “Arrrgh.”
They were standing at the edge of a big, ugly, white circle in the crust of the Earth. The center of it was filled with some kind of bubbling liquid that looked to Max like milk. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he asked.
Kristin nodded. “The question is, why are we supposed to be here?”
“Fifteen seconds,” Alex said.
Max felt a strong breeze, much colder than any air he’d felt since he’d been down here. He glanced up. Above them was a wide vertical shaft rising through the rock as if it had been dug by machine. And at the top, a blinking black sky winked at them.
“Ten,” Alex said. “Nine . . . eight . . .”
“What the—?” Max said.
“My question exactly,” Kristin said.
“What is happening?” Brandon demanded. “Does anybody know anything?”
“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
The ground jolted beneath them like an underground bomb test. All four fell to the ground. “Curl yourself into a ball, now!” Kristin said. “We’re on top of a—”
Max didn’t hear the last word, but he didn’t need to. He brought his knees to his chin as the bubbling circle exploded.
He lurched upward so violently he thought he’d lost a leg. Like a giant monstrous fist had broken through the Earth beneath him. In that instant, he thought about black holes, about how they could suck in a star so fast that it would become negative matter. In a black hole you couldn’t even think of screaming. Or seeing. Or hearing.
But he wasn’t in a black hole because he was hearing a roar. A whooshing noise. The sound of breaking waves from a hundred stormy seas.
He flew upward above the crust of the Earth on a column of water, high and fast, zooming into a cold black skyscape of stars.
43
“A freak of nature . . .”
“How did they get down there . . . ?”
“Not one broken bone . . .”
“The temperature . . .”
Max registered the voices before his eyes opened.
When they finally did, he was staring into the sagging face of Dr. Gunther Zax-Ericksson, framed by a clear night sky. “Haw!” Zax-Ericksson called out from a cushy, padded wheelchair. “The youngest one is awake!”
Max blinked and looked around. He was in the middle of a flat plain, slick with water. Cool water. Water that felt so refreshing that he leaned down and licked it from a rock.
A small group of uniformed people surrounded him. Behind them was a ring of vehicles with blinking lights. Emergency medical staff. “Alex?” he called out. “Where is my cousin?”
About fifteen feet away, a mass of unruly black hair rose from within another cluster of people. Alex burst through them and ran to Max, nearly tackling him to the ground. “You’re alive you’re alive you’re aliiiive!” she screamed.
“Are you trying to kill me?” he asked.
As the medics swooped in to check Max’s vital signs, Alex turned to Dr. Zax-Ericksson. “And . . . Kristin—?” she said.
“Already in the ambulance,” the old man said. “Ten fingers, ten toes, ten thousand instructions to the medical staff. She is just fine, thank goodness. The big fellow is in
there too. Brendan?”
“Brandon,” Alex said.
“Of course you know his name,” said Zax-Ericksson with a wide grin. “I saw you kiss the lucky fellow.”
“Ewww, there goes my frisky mood,” Max said.
“And how are you feeling, dear?” Zax-Ericksson asked.
“A little waterlogged, but perfect,” Alex said.
From behind her, a medic said, “We need you in the ambulance too, for follow-up.”
“Let the girl talk to her cousin for five minutes,” Dr. Zax-Ericksson said. “They just survived a historic event. I’m a doctor. They’ll be under my guidance.”
As the medics scooted away, Zax-Ericksson leaned forward. “I didn’t tell them I was a doctor of philosophy. Haaa! Ah well, the medical staff are saying that no human being has ever ridden up from the depths of a volcano on a geyser. You could have easily died. It is frankly a miracle you all survived.”
“And Niemand and Bitsy?” Max asked, turning to Dr. Zax-Ericksson. “Has anyone found signs of other people?”
“Sadly, no, I didn’t realize there were more people in there. I must emphasize there was major seismic action this evening. Scientists report evidence of several collapses inside the volcano. Not to mention a shift of the tectonic plate that registered 6.1 on the Richter scale.” Zax-Ericksson shook his head with a hearty chuckle. “And here you all are, popping up like trapeze artists with barely a bruise. Inconceivable!”
Alex shook her head in disbelief. “I’m thinking the same thing. Did that really just happen?”
The events of the last day rushed into Max’s brain. So many of them made no logical sense, and he knew it would take a long time to put the pieces together. “He knew . . . Verne. He’d been hearing those geysers go off every day for almost two centuries. He knew their schedule and their location. He was a fact nerd.”
“And he sacrificed himself to keep the world from being consumed by a genetic nightmare,” Alex said.
Max reached into his pocket, hoping not to feel the shards of a broken vial. But there it was. Completely stoppered and intact.
Nightmare.
He thought of his mom’s face, her cheeks so red and healthy after she’d been sick. He pictured Evelyn, who may even be walking on her own now.
In his mind, they were transforming into mummy-people. Like Verne and Saknussemm. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
“What Verne told us,” Alex said. “We find the best scientists in the world. We let them analyze this. We hope they find a way to solve the side effects.”
Max nodded. “Hope. Yeah.”
“Did you say . . . Verne told you?” Dr. Zax-Ericksson said. “As in . . . Jules?”
Alex shot Max a look. He shrugged. “We have to tell someone if we want to get this into the right hands,” he said, turning to Zax-Ericksson. “Alex will explain, sir. I want to talk to my mom and dad.”
Max called out to the EMTs: “May I borrow someone’s phone? If you incur roaming charges, I will reimburse you.”
A baffled-looking medic handed Max a phone, and Max handed the vial to a baffled-looking Zax-Ericksson. “This is a serum,” she said. “In order to get it, we met a few mutant creatures, collapsed a tunnel, and negotiated with Jules Verne and Arne Saknussemm. . . .”
Zax-Ericksson’s response was more a series of amazed clucks than real words.
As Alex continued, Max smiled. He tapped out his country code and phone number. After it rang four times, his dad picked up. “Yeah?”
Max knew that tone. Dad had seen this random cell number and hadn’t recognized it. He was assuming it was some kind of phone scam. And Dad was an expert at stringing along scammers, just for fun. By the end he would be pretending to throw up, or inviting the scammer over for a dinner of roast salamander stew, or talking in a completely incomprehensible accent. He would do this kind of stunt whenever Max was in the room, and by the end Max would be rolling on the floor laughing.
Max missed that so much. He ached with how much he missed it.
At the moment, with a million things racing through his brain, tripping over themselves to be first through his mouth, Max instead said, “This is the Visa account services calling to inform you of an opportunity to lower your interest rates on credit cards.”
It was what they all said. Max waited for a Dad response. But instead he heard a moment of silence and then, “Max?”
Max was disappointed. But not really.
Actually, not at all.
“Hi, Dad,” he said. “I want to come home now. I think Alex does too.”
He could tell his dad was crying. He was calling Mom to the phone too. “Max, we were so worried about you!” she said.
She was crying too.
“It’s kind of a long story,” Max said. “And we kind of got what we were looking for. I think you’re going to be OK, Mom. Evelyn too. At least for now. And maybe forever.” He looked up into the faces of the EMTs. Dr. Zax-Ericksson was wiping something from his eye. Snaefellsjökull loomed to his left, looking exactly as it had when they first visited. It was as if nothing at all had happened and no one had been trapped inside. As if an entire ecosystem that seemed to be from another planet simply didn’t exist. As if the bodies of Arne Saknussemm and Jules Verne were actually in their graves the way everyone assumed they were.
In the clear, crisp night it was easy to imagine that Mom had never gotten sick and Alex had never come to his house, that Max and Alex had never been kidnapped, never found a treasure in Greenland, never traveled around the world to collect the ingredients of an ancient concoction only to have it stolen from under their noses and found again.
“I—I feel wonderful right now, Max,” his mom said. “And I’ll feel even better when you’re home.”
Max grinned. “I’m smelling mint, Mom. I haven’t smelled mint since I left home.”
“Well, that’s good,” his mom said. “That means you’re happy.”
He nodded. And then he laughed because nodding to someone on the phone was ridiculous, but sometimes you just forgot. And doing dumb things when you’re in a good mood makes you laugh, instead of getting angry at yourself.
Max liked the feeling. He wanted to hold onto that feeling for a long time. He took a deep breath and heard Alex trying to explain the detonator mechanism to Dr. Zax-Ericksson.
“Mom, I want to be a kid again, is that OK?” Max said. “Just stay home and make robots and talk to Evelyn and explore with Smriti and perfect my cupcake recipe and not fly on a jet for a while or deal with detonator mechanisms. Because I’m already thirteen, and there’s not much time.”
“I think we can do that, Max,” his mom said.
“But first, tell me about those new interest rates!” Dad said. “I’m sure you hear this a lot, but I just dumped my old interest rates in the toilet by mistake.”
“Use a plunger,” Max said.
It was fun to hear Mom and Dad laugh. He couldn’t wait to see them again. He felt he could feel their smiles through the phone.
It was funny how you could do that.
EPILOGUE
ALEX was the worst driver Max knew. She drove too fast and was too distracted, and she talked too much. But on a cold afternoon in March, a couple of months after they’d returned home from Iceland, her new car screeched to a stop in front of Max’s school so suddenly that her tires left thick black tracks.
She had never done that.
“Awwwwwesome!” yelled Dugan Dempsey. He was one of the Fearsome Foursome, so called because they used to make fun of Max before Max became rich and famous.
Max could hear music blasting from inside her car. Some loud rock anthem he didn’t know. The whole vehicle was bouncing up and down in rhythm because Alex was inside, screaming the song and dancing on her butt.
That made Max laugh. He was glad to laugh, because Evelyn had not been in robotics that day and that had put him in a bad mood.
“You’re happy,” Max said, sliding into the passenger s
eat.
“Eeeeeee!” Alex squealed, holding out her phone screen to him. “They said yes! The Morgan Group. One of the best literary agents in New York!”
“Wait,” Max said, squinting at an email message. “You wrote a book? Called The Lost Treasures?”
“A proposal,” Alex said. “And four chapters. I based it on our adventures. With names changed. They want me to write more. They think they can sell it. They’ll help me. Can you believe this, Max? This has been my dream! Woooooo-HOOOO!”
“That’s awesome,” Max said.
Alex snuck a kiss onto his cheek so fast, he didn’t have time to lurch away. “I thought this year would be lost, Max. I thought taking care of you would be a sacrifice. A way to make some money. To prepare for my real life. But what we’ve done, Max—oh my goodness, I have material for years. And I have you. Who would have thought I could meet a cousin I never knew I could love so much? It’s you and me, buddy—family forever!”
She stuck out a fist, and Max bumped it. “Can we go now?”
Alex’s face fell. “Was it something I said?”
“No, I’m happy you’re happy,” Max replied. “But I’m not happy that Evelyn wasn’t in class, that’s all. Whenever she misses, she’s supposed to tell me. We promised we’d tell each other. But she didn’t.”
“Maybe she just forgot,” Alex said, putting the car in Drive. “She’s busy.”
“She always lets me know,” Max said. “It’s something we worked out. And can you turn the music down?”
Alex drove through the streets of Savile, humming to the softened tunes on her radio. As they pulled up to the Tilts’ house, Max’s mom and dad were both waiting at the foot of the walkway. Smriti was with them.
“Evelyn wasn’t in robotics,” Max said as he stepped out of the door. “And why are you all smiling?”
Smiles were fine, but Max was not used to three of them for no reason at all. He wasn’t used to being greeted on the sidewalk of his house either. This was starting to seem odd to him.
“They’ve sequenced it,” Mom said, the words nearly getting stuck in her throat with excitement. “They’ve sequenced the serum. At that lab at MIT. They’ve never seen anything like it, they said. They joked about winning a Nobel.”
Enter the Core Page 20
