Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “That’s up to your parents, I’m afraid.”

  “They don’t trust us yet, do they? Even after everything we did in Egypt.”

  A few months ago, in Egypt, my sister and I had tracked down a sinister organization we called the People of the Snake, who had kidnapped our parents. They’d tried to force Mum and Dad to locate a lost tomb, but Pan and I found it first. We’d saved our parents and blown up the People of the Snake’s secret base.

  Sami and Kit Thorn had helped us a lot back then. Kit ended up in hospital, and was still there, but he’d let us use his home to train as treasure hunters. We were on the run from the police so we couldn’t go to school, but I was studying way harder than when I was at school. Our parents had taught us about archaeology, ancient civilizations and loads of other stuff. None of it was easy for me – I wasn’t a genius like my sister – but after three months I could just about tell the Olmecs from the Toltecs, or hieroglyphs from hieratic.

  There had been physical training too. Mum and Dad were experts in several martial arts, but they refused to teach those, insisting we’d never need to fight. Instead, Dad made us run laps around the grounds of Kit’s mansion. It was a properly big stately home, and it was autumn in Yorkshire so basically raining all the time. You should have heard Pan moan!

  “Jake does the action stuff!” she always yelled. “I read the books.”

  That was rubbish – Pan was as tough as anyone I knew – but no matter how much Dad tried to encourage her with chants of “You can do it!” she just flicked her fringe down over her eyes and hollered back, “No, I can’t!”, except with more swearing. But, really, I think Pan loved it all as much as I did. We were training to be treasure hunters!

  But Sami was right; I had been getting more and more frustrated. I stared around his workshop, and all the cool gadgets we still hadn’t been able to use. Would we ever?

  Again Sami seemed to be reading my mind. “It will happen, Jake. Besides, you don’t even know what to hunt for.”

  “We do know, though, Sami.”

  We had one clue: a mysterious emerald tablet that Pan and I found in Egypt, one of several hidden in tombs in different countries. Together, the tablets revealed some sort of secret history of the world that the People of the Snake were trying to hide. We’d planned to travel the world hunting for the tablets, protecting the history they were trying to erase. Only, we needed a clue to the next tablet, and so far Mum and Dad hadn’t found anything useful on the one we had. So we were stuck here.

  Eager to take my mind off it, I picked up an object from the workbench – a tiny device, no bigger than a fly, with mini rotors on top.

  “Is this the world’s smallest helicopter?” I asked.

  Sami flicked away the last of the holosphere files, but his eyes were brighter than ever. He loved talking about his work. “That is a nano drone,” he said.

  “A drone?”

  “A very small drone. It can fly through cracks to explore tombs you can’t access.”

  “There ain’t no tomb I can’t access, Sami.”

  He knew I was joking, and grinned. He took the device super-gently, as if it was a delicate living thing, and held it in his palm. “It’s entirely soundless, with a built-in microcamera, echolocation scanner and geothermal sensor. It’s—”

  “It’s off!”

  As Sami was speaking I’d put my smart-goggles back on, and the device had instantly connected. Its tiny rotors spun but made no noise as it rose from Sami’s hand. It really did sound helpful for treasure hunts, but right then I had other plans for it.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “Just tell it where to go.”

  “Turn ninety degrees and fly forward ten metres,” I instructed.

  I saw the drone’s video feed in my goggles as it flew silently from the workshop and into a corridor decorated with antiquities Kit had nicked from tombs: Ming vases on stands, jade dragons, Egyptian shabtis in display cases.

  “Fly forward thirty metres.”

  I guided the drone to an oak door at the end of the corridor. It was open a fraction. Blue and green lights flickered from beyond.

  “Thermal camera,” I said.

  My view changed to a geothermal pattern of the drone’s surroundings – dull grey broken by a bright orange blob: a human heat signature. Someone was in that room.

  Good.

  “Jake?” Sami sounded nervous. “What are you up to?”

  I sensed he was considering snatching my goggles, so I turned away slightly. “Training, Sami. We’re meant to learn how to use this, aren’t we?”

  I guided the soundless machine into the room – and saw my mum. She sat at another holosphere, studying files projected from its table screen. With her hand, she swiped through holograms of ancient texts, pinched one to enlarge it, ran a finger along a line of ancient writing, and then discarded it with a frustrated flick of her hand.

  I guided the drone closer as Mum lifted an object from beside the screen – a relic about the size of a laptop computer but made of shiny green stone.

  “The emerald tablet,” I breathed.

  “What?” Sami asked.

  “Nothing…”

  Just to see the tablet quickened my pulse. This was the closest I’d been to the thing since I’d found it in Egypt. Mum kept it in the study, and had banned me and Pan from going in. I think she feared I might do something crazy, like steal it and put it on eBay to flush out the People of the Snake. It hurt that she didn’t trust me, but I can’t sound too outraged because I actually had considered doing that.

  The video was so sharp that it felt like I was right there in the study, and I spoke in a whisper.

  “Zoom.”

  The drone’s camera showed me a close-up of the tablet, gleaming in the light from Mum’s holosphere. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was, carved on both sides with the same symbol – a snake in a circle, eating its own tail. There was ancient script inside the circle, which my parents hadn’t been able to decipher. They didn’t even know what language it was.

  Mum had stayed up late and woken early, studying the tablet. She’d read dozens of books, examined hundreds of images from archaeology sites, searching for anything to understand the treasure better. So far she’d not learned anything about the location of the next tomb. The bags around her eyes had grown into black bin liners.

  Guilt nagged at the back of my head. I shouldn’t have been spying, but why did Mum have to keep everything so secret?

  “Why can’t she trust us to help?” I muttered.

  “She?” Sami asked. “Jake, are you spying on someone?”

  “I… No. Yes. Kind of.”

  “What? Which?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God. Please tell me it’s not your mother.”

  “OK. It’s not my mother.”

  “But … is it your mother?”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Jake! Get the drone out of there before she sees!”

  I took off the goggles, looked at my friend and cringed.

  Sami sighed. “It’s too late, isn’t it?”

  Right then a shrill scream rang from along the corridor.

  “JAKE!”

  3

  All families fight, right? Before my sister and I learned about our parents’ past, all we did was fight. Then, for a little while, we actually seemed to get on. We’d been so excited about treasure hunting together; thrilled, even. But recently the fighting was back.

  The fights usually followed the same pattern. Pan and I sided with each other, even if we didn’t actually agree on whatever we were fighting about, while Dad tried to keep the peace, and Mum wouldn’t let him. Sami hid in his workshop until the dust settled, but I knew he listened in.

  That evening, after I was caught spying with the drone, the yelling lasted over an hour. You don’t want to hear it all, but this snippet should set the scene. Imagine it to a soundtrack of doors slamming, Mum sighing, and Dad muttering for us all
to calm down after every other sentence.

  “I will not calm down, John! This is serious! Jake, you are grounded.”

  “I’m grounded? That’s crazy, we never leave this stupid house.”

  “I don’t know what’s come over you. You never behaved this badly when you were at school.”

  “That’s not true, Mum.”

  “Stay out of this, Pandora.”

  “But don’t you remember the Ant Farm Incident?”

  “Of course I remember that! But spying on me is even worse.”

  “Worse than tipping red ants over schoolgirls?”

  “Hey, I was helping you out, Pan. Those girls were bullying you.”

  “Still, Jake … those ants were stingers.”

  “How is this helping us right now, Pandora?”

  “Just pointing out that Jake has done way worse things. He blew up a tomb in Ancient Egypt.”

  “I said sorry about that!”

  “Please do not ever mention that again, Pandora!”

  “Listen, everyone just calm down.”

  “Stop saying that, John! How can Jake expect us to trust him if—”

  “Trust me? You hide the emerald tablet from us. You won’t even let us look at it. We found it. Pan, I don’t remember Mum and Dad being in that tomb, do you?”

  “Nope. It was just before we saved their lives. In fact, the tablet is technically ours.”

  “Yes! Finders keepers! The first rule of treasure hunting.”

  “That is most certainly not the first rule of treasure hunting. Honestly, it’s as if we have taught you nothing, Jake.”

  “OK, this is interesting. Jake, Pandora? What would you say are the main rules of treasure hunting?”

  “John, this is not a lesson! Jake was spying on me!”

  “Because you don’t trust us!”

  “Because you don’t think. Spying on me with a drone? It wasn’t even a sensible plan. I can think of at least half a dozen better ways to have invaded my privacy. Can you?”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t a lesson.”

  “You didn’t think, Jake. It was just a silly drone.”

  “Actually, it was a carbon-filament nanodrone with a built-in high-definition—”

  “Stop listening in, Sami. This is a family dispute!”

  “Sami is family, Mum. You go ahead and listen, Sami!”

  “I’m staying out of this!”

  “Everyone just calm down. I’ll make some dinner, and we can all just get along like normal.”

  I don’t know what world Dad lived in where “getting along” for us was normal. The only time we ever had was when we were treasure hunting in Egypt. Then, the Atlas family had worked. That’s what we needed to be doing.

  None of us spoke for a while after that. Dad cooked something with chickpeas that I knew none of us would eat, either – even Pan, who is a vegetarian. It was another part of our training: to introduce us to foods from around the world so we didn’t moan when we went on adventures. Only, Dad was such a bad cook. He burned every single chickpea, so my meal looked like a pile of rabbit poo.

  Mum didn’t even look at the food. She just sat staring out a window and stroking the Egyptian amulet she wore around her neck – a symbol of the mother goddess Isis that she’d swiped from one of the first tombs she and Dad discovered, way before Pan and I were born. I wondered if she was thinking how much easier life had been back then…

  Some of the things she’d said seriously worried me. More and more, Mum had been mentioning school, as if this was all just a holiday. In training, she’d taught us to always have a back-up plan, to know two exits for every entrance. I suspected she and Dad had a way out of this too, a plan to clear our names so we could go back to our old lives. That scared me far more than anything.

  Before this our lives were rubbish. Mum and Dad were pretending to be happy as boring college professors. I was always getting into trouble, kicked out of schools for stealing and fighting. Pan had been miserable too. Bullied for being so clever, she’d turned into a Goth, dying her hair black and wearing dark clothes. We were constantly at each other’s throats. But our adventure in Egypt changed everything. Pan became proud of her big brain, and I’d stopped feeling bad about myself, too. I wasn’t a troublemaker anymore. I was a treasure hunter.

  Only, was it ever going to really happen?

  We had to make this work.

  Dad tapped his fork against the side of the table. I could tell he was trying to think of something to say to break the silence. He looked at me and Pan through the thick lenses of his glasses, which made his eyes seem freakily big.

  “So what went wrong in the simulator today?” he asked.

  “We were attacked by a giant scorpion,” Pan replied, rifling through chickpeas with her fork for any that might be edible. “That’s a bit dumb, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “Well, your mother and I were once attacked by a monitor lizard in Malaysia.”

  I pushed my plate away, always keen to hear more about their adventures. “How did you get away?”

  “I jumped on its back. Except dozens of baby lizards ran out from behind a rock.”

  Pan edged closer too. “What then?”

  “One of them bit my hand. That’s why I can’t use this little finger, see?”

  “You told us you broke that in a rugby match.”

  “Well, that’s sort of true.”

  “It’s not true at all, is it, Dad?”

  “No, not at all.”

  I grinned, adding it to the list of stories they’d told us to cover for their treasure-hunting past. I loved picturing them travelling the world and getting into danger, but the stories stung, too. I was desperate to have tales of my own.

  “Do you want to hear something really strange?” Dad said.

  Pan and I leaned even closer. We definitely wanted to hear. Dad had a look that I’d only seen since we’d come back from Egypt – his eyes wider than ever, and twinkling like he’d just heard the best bit of gossip. He and Mum had hidden their past for years. Now, at last, he could talk about the good old days, and he loved it.

  “This one time in China,” he began, “we saw a rabid panda bear bite another treasure hunter right on his—”

  “John?”

  Mum tucked her amulet back under her shirt. She sighed, stretching her back where it ached from leaning over the holosphere screen.

  “I think they’ve heard enough,” she said.

  She looked at her plate of food as if she’d only just noticed it was there. “What is this, anyway?”

  “Gheimeh,” Dad replied. “It’s Persian. We ate it in Iran when we were hunting for the temple of—”

  “I remember,” Mum interrupted. “But it wasn’t black, was it?”

  She flicked one of the burned chickpeas off the plate, a perfect shot that hit Dad on the chest. Dad humphed and flicked it back. I noticed Pan smile at the exchange, even though she looked away to hide it.

  The atmosphere seemed to be perking up, so I decided to ask what had been on my mind since I spied on Mum in her study.

  “Did you discover anything today?” I asked. “On the emerald tablet?”

  Mum sighed again, so heavily this time that the chickpeas rustled on her plate. “No, Jake,” she said.

  “Where do you think the tablets will lead? If you had to guess.”

  “Never guess,” Dad replied. “That’s the first rule of treasure hunting.”

  “Yesterday you said the first rule was ‘never go into the study without my permission’,” Pan said.

  “But if you had to guess,” I asked. “About the tablets?”

  Dad nudged his glasses up his nose. “Remind me what she said.”

  She. He meant the woman who had tried to kill us in Egypt. She was one of the People of the Snake, maybe their leader, although we weren’t sure. She wore their symbol on a brooch, so we’d called her the Snake Lady. We’d discovered her real name was Marjorie, but that just sounded silly. />
  “The Snake Lady said there were several emerald tablets around the world,” I replied, thinking back to our encounter in her headquarters in the Egyptian desert.

  “They’re all in lost tombs,” Pan added. “The people buried with them were from a civilization that was older even than Ancient Egypt, but was somehow wiped out. The People of the Snake are trying to find the tablets and destroy the tombs, to hide a secret about who those people were and what happened to them.”

  “And how much of that do you believe?” Mum asked.

  “Pretty much all of it,” I replied.

  “Just like that? Because someone told you?”

  “We have the emerald tablet,” Pan said. “That’s evidence.”

  “That’s evidence of something,” Dad agreed. “But we don’t know what.”

  “Whatever it is, the Snake Lady is trying to hide it. We have to stop her, right?”

  Mum looked at Dad, but neither of them answered. Mum smiled painfully, as if the effort had used up her last scrap of energy.

  “I’ll cook us something else,” she said. “It’s been a while since we had spaghetti. How about that?”

  I glanced at Pan and noticed her watching Mum with the same concern. Pan loves spaghetti. So do I. But right then we wanted burned chickpeas.

  Mum collected our plates and scraped the leftovers into the waste disposal unit. Blades whirred, grinding up the chickpeas. She stared down into the sink, watching the food vanish in a mush, and then she said something else. It was hard to be certain with all the noise from the blades, but I was pretty sure I heard her right.

  “Perhaps it’s time we let this go.”

  4

  That night I lay awake watching raindrops race each other down the windowpane. I kept imagining one of them was the Snake Lady going after an emerald tablet and the other was my family trying to get there first. The Snake Lady won every time.

  Mum’s words rang around my head.

  Perhaps it’s time we let this go.

  I’d dreaded this moment for months, but expected it too. Our parents were chickening out. The longer they studied the emerald tablet, the crazier they thought this whole thing was. At times Mum seemed to trust Pan, but she’d never been convinced that I was up to the job of being a treasure hunter.