Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “Mudslide!” Dad bellowed. “Everybody run!”

  Dad grabbed my arm and pulled me with him down the hill. Pan and Mum ran ahead as the slope grew even steeper. The boars charged past us, shrieking. One of them took out my legs, knocking me over onto my back. The next thing I knew I was sliding, but much faster than I’d been able to run. I glanced back and saw that the wave of mud had grown into a wall. It was almost on us.

  “Slide!” I shouted. “Get down and slide!”

  I twisted slightly so that I slid at Pan, and deliberately knocked her over like a skittle. She fell onto me and I clung on as we slid together, face to face. Her eyes were covered in mud, but I could see that her eyes were also wild with terror.

  “Put your breathing tube in!” I screamed.

  She didn’t understand, or didn’t hear above the shrieks of the pigs and the roar of the mudslide. I reached to my utility belt, slid the thin metal tube from its slot and shoved it at Pan’s face. She bit on the mouthpiece. Then I took as deep a breath as I could manage, and the wave hit.

  It swallowed us and carried us down the hill. The force tore Pan from my grip, flipped me over and sent me into a spin. The mudslide spat me to its surface for a gasp of air and a glimpse of a tree that I was heading straight for. I remembered the sonic force field in my belt. Maybe it could have saved me from the impact, but I was too late to use it.

  I hit the tree hard enough to snap my spine, but Pedro’s graphene-plated jungle suit took most of the blow. I was stuck pressed against it as the great mud wave battered me and bent my back. My mouth filled with mud. My nose filled with mud. I was out of breath, drowning in mud.

  Then, finally, it passed. I peeled my eyes open, spitting out mud and sucking in air. I was half-buried, but alive.

  “Jake!”

  I pulled myself from the mud. My side throbbed where it had hit the tree. “Pandora!”

  It was Mum’s voice. Dad was shouting too, screaming our names. I grunted, trying to let them know I was alive. Then I realized: Mum and Dad couldn’t see Pan. She was buried!

  I dragged myself up to scramble over the mud, fighting the pain in my ribs. The slide had carried us to the bottom of a gorge, and the edge of a fast-flowing river. Some of the mud had spilled into the river, while the rest of it had spread out along the bank, raising the ground level. Was Pan buried under it, or had she been taken by the river?

  I was running now, calling to my parents.

  “Jake!” Mum cried. “Thank God!”

  “Where’s Pan?”

  “Spread out!” Dad roared. “Dig!”

  The mud had spread fifty metres in both directions along the river bank. We’d never find her in time.

  “Thermal!” I yelled.

  Mum and Dad heard, and shoved their smart-goggles on. I did the same, ordering them to show me any geothermal heat signatures beneath the mud. I turned, scanning the ground, praying…

  There!

  I rushed to where my goggles showed a bright orange blob under the surface, and dug frantically, calling to my sister. How long had she been buried? Was I already too late?

  “Come on!” I screamed, digging even harder.

  Beneath me, something moved. “Pan! Hold on, I’m here!”

  I reached deeper and grabbed hold of…

  Oh, no. Oh, God…

  One of the wild boars squealed at me as I pulled it by its leg from the mud.

  “Over here!” Dad hollered.

  The boar ran off. Mum and I ran to help Dad, and we lifted my sister out of her mud tomb. She looked shaken but OK, and was still sucking on the breathing tube. She barely had time to take it from her mouth before Mum grabbed her in a suffocating hug.

  “I’m alive!” she gasped.

  Dad burst out laughing with relief.

  “And look where we are,” he said.

  Wiping more mud from my eyes, I gazed along the river to a point where it was joined by a smaller tributary. There, the muddy water churned an even darker brown at the point where a smaller tributary joined it, as if the bigger river was trying to stop the little one from getting in.

  This was the place where two rivers met. This was where we hoped to find the second marker to the tomb.

  So what now?

  18

  The Place of the Jaguar.

  What did that even mean? My parents were experts in ancient cultures and treasure hunting, but even they had no idea. We’d hoped it might make more sense once we found the junction of the two rivers, where the Aztecs said the marker would be. But now we were here, soaked to the skin and caked in mud, and we still didn’t have a clue. I’d secretly hoped to find a temple with a stone jaguar’s head on it and Aztec writing saying “marker in here”. But things were never that easy, were they?

  We sat on the bank, letting warm rain wash the mud from our hair and faces. From here we could see along the chocolate-coloured river, towards the Storm Peaks. Lightning flashed around their summits, and a waterfall plunged down the sheer side of the higher of the two mountains.

  “The Place of the Jaguar,” Pan mumbled.

  “Place of the Jaguar,” I muttered.

  “Just repeating that isn’t going to help,” Mum said.

  We’d trekked for eight hours to get here, been soaked by rain, sucked on by leeches, trampled by boars and had almost drowned in a mudslide. We desperately needed rest, but there was no time. Sami needed us to keep going.

  We had to find that marker.

  I breathed in deeply and closed my eyes, letting my mind settle.

  “We’ll split up,” I said. “Let’s each take a twentymetre stretch of the bank either side of the river junction. Set your goggles to ultrasonic view, to search for openings underground. Dad, we need ideas for how to cross the water in case we don’t find anything on this side. Mum, we need to know how deep the river is and if there’s any risk of attack by crocodiles or piranhas, or whatever, in case we need to go for a swim.”

  Mum stared at me, startled by the commands. I could tell that she was thinking through everything I’d said, looking for holes in the plan. In the end there was only one thing she chose to question.

  “Swim?” she asked.

  “The Aztecs said we’d find the Place of the Jaguar at the spot where the two rivers met,” I said. “And Dad said that they were always very literal in what they wrote. What if they meant literally at that spot?”

  “You mean in the river?” Pan said. “Underwater?”

  I shrugged. It was just a thought.

  Dad looked at Mum, and I thought I saw him smile. Mum just nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “That’s our plan for now. We communicate through our goggles. But no one moves out of sight.”

  “Remember,” Dad added, “the Aztecs left the three markers to guide their own people to the tomb of Quetzalcoatl. They wanted the markers to be found. So they would have put them in places that were permanent.”

  “So, made of stone?” Pan said.

  “Perhaps,” Dad agreed.

  We split up, each taking a different strip of the riverbank to search. I still had no idea what to search for, so I just used my goggles’ echolocation soundscape to scan for cavities under the bedrock. The mud was thick from the landslide, so at times I got down and dug randomly, hoping to find something under there. Mostly I saw ants.

  “Anyone see anything?” Dad called.

  “Mud,” Pan replied. “Lots of mud.”

  I stared up at the Storm Peaks, strobe-lit by the storms above them, and wondered if anyone had ever climbed that high. From where I stood, the two mountains seemed to overlap slightly. Their edges made patterns, like shapes in the clouds. I stepped to one side and saw a face in the rocks that looked a bit like Mum being angry. I moved further along the riverbank and the face brightened into a smile, which didn’t look like Mum at all.

  A jolt went through me as if one of the lightning strikes had zapped my chest.

  “The Place of the Jaguar…” I
muttered.

  Was it possible?

  My heart picked up speed as I trudged along the riverbank through the mud. My eyes stayed locked on the Storm Peaks.

  “Jake?” Mum said. “Don’t go too far.”

  I heard but didn’t listen. I kept moving, stopping every few paces to consider the shapes made by the overlapping cliffs. I wiped the lenses of my goggles and looked again.

  “Guys?” I yelled.

  I saw another face, but this time it was not that of a person.

  It was a cat’s face.

  A jaguar’s face.

  It wasn’t just my imagination. Caves formed almond eyes; cracks and ledges came together to create the shape of a wide nose and curved mouth.

  “Guys?” I said again.

  The face wasn’t perfect. The ears weren’t quite right. I got down lower – first to my hands and knees, and then lying flat on the mud – and gazed up at the Storm Peaks.

  “Bingo!” I cried.

  The jaguar’s face glared at me from the mountains. I could see it perfectly from this spot and only this spot. This was the place where the Aztecs had wanted me to stand. Was this spot the Place of the Jaguar?

  Pan, Mum and Dad raced closer, baffled and breathless.

  “Are you ill?” Mum asked.

  “Jake,” Dad said. “Answer me honestly. Have you licked any frogs?”

  I stared at the cat’s face in the mountains, my cheek pressed against the warm, wet mud. “I see the jaguar,” I said. “It’s there, in the—”

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because right then something bit my face and my world exploded in bright-coloured pain.

  19

  I woke lying on canvas and staring up at the sky. One side of my jaw felt numb and swollen, as if I’d just had dental surgery. The other ached like the dentist had drilled there too, but without anaesthetic. A thick line of drool slid from my lips and down my chin. I tried to speak, but the words came out as a groan.

  My family was close by, frantically digging mud from the spot where I’d previously been.

  “What happened?”

  That’s what I tried to say, anyway, but my jaw was so swollen it came out as “Wrrrrr hagggnnnnnnn?”

  Somehow Pan understood. “You’ve skived off all the work, that’s what’s happened.”

  “You were bitten by a bullet ant,” Mum explained. “You’re lucky you passed out. Their sting is not pleasant.”

  Not pleasant was an understatement. It had felt as if someone had hammered a tent peg into my jaw.

  “What are you doing?” I mumbled.

  “Digging!” Pan said. “The jaguar face, remember?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to stop my head from spinning. The jaguar face… Yes, I’d found the Place of the Jaguar, the second marker to the tomb of Quetzalcoatl! Not that anyone seemed to remember; they were all just annoyed that I wasn’t helping.

  I tried to sit up but my vision swirled and my arms crumpled, and I sank back to the canvas. My body wouldn’t do what my brain wanted. I felt like I’d been drained of half my blood.

  “We’ve hit the rock bed,” Mum announced.

  “Keep digging,” Dad said. “Clear everything away.”

  “There’s something here,” Pan replied. “A groove in the rock. It’s not natural – too straight.”

  “There’s another here,” Mum gasped. “They’re edges of something.”

  “Spread out,” Dad ordered. “Find where they meet.”

  All I could do was watch as they scrabbled excitedly in the mud, exploring the grooves in the rock bed. From what I could see, the edges marked a rectangle about the size of our kitchen table.

  “Looks like a doorway,” Pan said.

  “It is a doorway,” Dad replied.

  “Mmmm rgggh brrrrr,” I added.

  “Look,” Mum breathed. “There’s a carving.”

  She poured water from her canteen across the rock and wiped away more mud to study it. Her eyes were full of wonder.

  “John!” she cried. “It’s the symbol of the jaguar.”

  Dad got in closer to see, and they grinned and hugged. It was weird to see them looking so happy. Pan glanced at me and I wondered if she was thinking the same thing; right then Mum and Dad were their old selves from before we were born, when they were treasure hunters without the worry of protecting children.

  “We need to get this open,” Dad said. “Look for thin rocks – anything we can use to lever it up.”

  Argh! I wanted to help!

  I gritted my teeth and rose higher on my elbows. Some of my strength had returned, but not enough to help lift that door. I could only watch as my sister rushed around the riverbank gathering rocks, and Mum used her laser cutter to slice them into thinner slabs. Dad hacked branches from a tree and lashed the rock slabs to the ends to make shovels.

  By then I could move my legs enough to crawl closer. The swelling in my jaw had eased and I called to them to wait for me, but they didn’t listen as they forced their shovel tips into the door frame.

  “Good,” Dad said. “Now heave!”

  “Heave!” I repeated, trying to be involved.

  They were heaving – even Pan, who is not a born “heaver”. Her arms trembled, but excitement seemed to give her the strength to force the shovel deeper into the groove.

  “It’s rising!” Mum grunted.

  “Hold your breath,” Dad ordered.

  The stone slab rose an inch. There was a loud hiss – as if they’d opened the seal on a snake pit – and a cloud of brown air rushed up from around the frame. Pan spluttered and staggered back, but Mum and Dad held on to their shovels, lifting the slab higher. Dad’s face turned red and his glasses fell off. Veins bulged in Mum’s neck. The slab rose another few inches, and I glimpsed darkness beneath it. But the shovels weren’t strong enough to lift it any higher. Their wooden handles bent back, about to snap.

  “It’s going to fall,” Mum groaned.

  It was open! Just half a metre, but enough for someone to get inside…

  This was the sort of thing Mum kept warning me about: acting on impulse without thinking about the consequences. If the marker was down there, we had to get it now. I could do it, I was certain.

  I reached a shaky hand to my utility belt and pulled the clasp that unravelled the bungee cord wound around the inside.

  “Jake?” Mum said. “What are you doing? Jake?”

  By the time she saw me I was just a few feet from the entrance.

  “Jake!” Dad barked. “Get back. The slab is going to fall!”

  I moved faster over the mud, wriggling like a worm. My mind had been blunted by the ant sting, but suddenly it was pin-sharp, totally focused on what I knew I had to do. My eyes raked the ground, searching for a place to fix the bungee clasp, but all I saw was mud.

  “Jake! I’ll take it!”

  Pan rushed closer, knowing what I was about to do. I thought she might try to stop me, but instead she grabbed the end of the bungee cord from my hand to help.

  “Go!” she screamed.

  The bungee unwound further from my belt as I slid face forward through the gap and into the darkness below.

  20

  “Torch.”

  I hung on the bungee line, slowly revolving so the light from my smart-goggles swept in circles around rock walls. I was dangling in a pit about the size of a well shaft, carved five hundred years ago by Aztecs fleeing Spanish invaders. Above, the stone slab had sealed the entrance, trapping the top of my bungee cord so I didn’t fall.

  I looked down, shining the light deeper underground. The Aztecs hadn’t needed to tunnel too far into the bedrock, which opened into a natural cave about ten feet below my legs. Below that it looked like a long drop into darkness. Was the marker down there? Was anything else down there? At least my vertigo didn’t seem to be a problem. It’s hard to be scared of the height when all you can see below you is darkness.

  “Jake? Can you hear me?”

  Dad�
�s voice came through my goggles.

  “I’m OK,” I grunted.

  “You’re grounded!” Mum snapped.

  “What? What for?”

  “Going through a secret door without permission.”

  I laughed, but the idea of being grounded at home was suddenly quite appealing.

  “What do you see?” Pan asked.

  “A cave,” I replied.

  “We’re working on getting this door open again,” Mum said. She sounded breathless, like she was running. I guessed she was scouring the riverbank for stronger stones to lever open the slab.

  “You wait right there,” she insisted.

  “I’m going down.”

  “Did you not hear what I said?”

  “I can’t hear you. It’s all crackly.”

  I was lying, but there wasn’t time to hang around. I pressed a button on my utility belt, and the bungee began to unreel, lowering me deeper into the darkness. Torchlight corkscrewed down the pit walls.

  “Go slow, Jake,” Dad said. “Remember, the Aztecs didn’t want the Spanish to find the marker. There could be traps.”

  “Like killer spikes,” Pan added. “With poison.”

  “We’ve got your back, son,” Dad said.

  No, they didn’t. They were on the other side of a massive stone slab. But it was reassuring to hear their voices as I descended beyond the pit and into the cave.

  “Night vision.”

  My lenses showed the underground world – a domed cavity beneath the jungle. Stalagmites snarled up around the cave floor. Nothing looked man-made – no carvings or shrines in the walls.

  I touched down in the centre of the cave, slid the flare gun from my utility belt and fired it at the ground. The firework flare fizzled on the rock bed, casting a blood-red glow around the cave walls. That was my landing site. If my family managed to get the slab open again, they’d lower some sort of line to lift me back up. I hoped…

  I unclipped the belt and left it hanging on the line, then shook my head to clear the last of the fog from the ant sting. I needed to focus to stand any chance of finding the marker. Only, where should I look?