Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  It was hard to tell. I had a lot of bumps and bruises on my arms and legs, and a cut on my head. I tasted blood in my mouth, but I didn’t think any of the wounds were deep.

  “Where are we, anyway?” I wheezed.

  “A tunnel,” Pan said. “Maybe we were meant to keep sliding.”

  She didn’t sound convinced. Mum had said that everything in this place was designed to kill us. Again I sensed that we were not seeing everything here. Was that slide really all there was to this trap?

  A growl echoed around the chamber.

  “Jane?” Dad asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Mum replied.

  Another growl, deeper.

  “You don’t sound fine,” Pan said.

  “That noise wasn’t me…”

  Dad scrabbled in the rubble until he found his smart-goggles. He ordered them to switch to thermal. He turned, peered deeper into the cave and sat up sharply.

  “Nobody move,” he gasped.

  “What is it?” Pan asked.

  “There’s a jaguar in here with us.”

  Pan’s breaths quickened. “You mean jaguar as in the big cat?”

  “What other type of jaguar could he mean?” Mum hissed.

  “I don’t know … the car.”

  “Why would there be a Jaguar car in here?”

  “I was … I was just hoping.”

  “Just don’t move,” Dad repeated. “It is twenty metres away, watching us. Don’t panic. Jaguars only attack if they are threatened.”

  “Threatened how?” I whispered.

  “If they feel cornered, or their lair is invaded.”

  “You mean exactly the situation we are in now?”

  “I think it’s moving,” Pan breathed.

  “We have to stand up and get back,” Dad said. “We need to show it we are not a threat. Jake, don’t startle it in any way.”

  “Why me? You think I’m going to go and poke its nose?”

  “Just stay quiet…”

  I slid back, helping Pan up from the rubble. Her hand tightened on my wrist as another growl filled the tunnel.

  “This can’t be the trap,” I said.

  “Is a man-eating cat not enough for you?” Pan replied.

  “But the Aztecs can’t have planned this,” I said. “Not five hundred years ago.”

  “Let’s deal with one problem at a time,” Mum said. “It can see us, remember? Just get as far back as possible, so it knows we’re not a threat.”

  Snick-clank!

  Warm air rushed from behind. Instinctively, I pulled Pan and Mum forward as something dropped from the tunnel ceiling and slammed into the ground. Sparks sprayed up at our faces, and in the brief light I glimpsed a grey wall behind me where there had been no wall before. It had fallen from the ceiling, separating us from Dad, and trapping us in with the jaguar.

  “What was that?” Pan cried.

  “Keep your voice down,” Mum warned. “The cat…”

  The snarling grew louder. I don’t know if the creature was getting closer or angrier, or both.

  We backed up against the slab. It was cold and smooth, cut from a glassy stone that didn’t feel the same as the rest of the cave.

  “What is this thing?” Pan demanded.

  Dad spoke to us from the other side of the stone barrier, which can’t have been more than an inch thick.

  “This is cut from obsidian,” he said. “Looks like it fell from a groove in the tunnel roof. The bottom is razor sharp.”

  “Obsidian, John?” Mum insisted.

  “Just don’t panic…”

  “What’s so special about obsidian?” I asked.

  “Just stay by me,” Mum insisted. “I don’t think the jaguar’s coming closer.”

  “But what’s so special about obsidian?”

  “It was a precious stone to the Aztecs,” Pan said. “They used it to make special knives.”

  “What type of knives, Pan?”

  “Knives for human sacrifices.”

  Snick-clank!

  Another stone guillotine fell from the ceiling, this time a few feet in front of us. We pressed back against the first as the new weapon struck the ground, causing more sparks to fly. Beyond it, the jaguar hissed and spat.

  “Ha!” I yelled. “You can’t get us now!”

  Then the obsidian wall rose. So did the one behind it, sliding back into its groove in the cave ceiling. We staggered back into Dad’s arms.

  “Night vision,” Dad barked.

  Whatever he saw in his goggles caused him to grab me and Pan and pull us further back.

  “It’s coming,” he warned.

  I reached for my belt, feeling for the laser cutter. “I’m going to laser it.”

  “No, Jake!” Mum warned. “You’ll anger it.”

  “It’s already angry, Mum.”

  “Just get behind me.”

  “You get behind me. I’ve got the weapon.”

  “Everyone calm down,” Dad said.

  “Calm down?” Pan spat. “There’s a man-eating cat attacking us from one direction and giant knives in every other place. Please tell me this is one of those funny situations you’ve been in loads of times before and know a way out of?”

  “Not exactly this, no,” Dad muttered.

  Snick-clank!

  Another obsidian blade dropped from the ceiling, blocking the cat off again.

  Snick-clank!

  “Move!” Dad roared.

  He shoved us forward as a blade fell from behind, landing where we’d just been gathered.

  Snick-clank!

  The next blade came down inches in front of us. Now that one shot back up into its ceiling groove, and so did the one behind us.

  “Get back into the tunnel!” Dad called. “If we can find out how we triggered this trap we might be able to stop it.”

  I tried to move back, but another blade landed in the way. The Aztecs hadn’t meant for anyone to leave this chamber. We were sacrifices, to be sliced apart to honour their gods.

  Snick-clank!

  Snick-clank!

  Blades rose and fell like pistons, spraying up sparks. I dived forward to avoid another as the rest of my family moved the other way.

  “Get to the back!” Mum screamed.

  What if there was no way of stopping these things? We’d be trapped. Moving forward seemed even crazier. Above the clatter of the rising and falling blades, I could hear the jaguar going berserk. But it had got into this cave; surely it knew a way out? That was the way we had to go.

  I looked up from the ground, trying to see the grooves from which the blades were sliding. It was too dark, and my eyes were blurred with sweat.

  “Pandora! Jake!”

  Another obsidian blade fell from its groove. I slid back far enough to save my life, but not my shirt. The blade caught my sleeve, pinning me to the ground. I tried to tear it free but the shirt was made of BioSteel. It was like pulling on a chain.

  Snick-clank!

  I slammed my body into the blade in front of me as another crashed down behind. It caught my other sleeve and pinned that one to the ground too, so I was stuck. If there was a blade right above me, I’d be sliced in half.

  I kept screaming until both blades rose back into their places in the ceiling. I’d got lucky – now I had to use that luck. I stayed where I was, trying to think through my fear. There was no groove directly above me, so the distance between the two that tore my sleeves was about a metre.

  “Jake!” Pan screamed.

  “Get up against a blade!” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “Next time one comes down, press up against it,” I called. “When it goes up, take one step forward and stay still. Another will come down in front of you, then do the same thing.”

  “Jake, I—”

  “Just do it!”

  I knew she’d understand, but would she trust me? And where was the jaguar? I tried to listen, but the clashing blades were too loud as they contin
ued to rise and fall along the cave.

  Another blade came down in front of me. I fought the instinct to stagger back and instead rushed forward to stand against the slab. My nose pressed against its cold stone.

  The blade rose and I stepped forward and waited, summoning every scrap of courage to stand still. A few seconds later, another blade slammed down an inch in front of me. I cried out and moved forward a small step. I clenched my fists, urging myself to stay still again. I had to forget about all the other blades, and the jaguar at the end. My whole world was the blade in front of me, the blade behind and the slim gap in the middle.

  The blade lifted. I stepped forward.

  My fear increased with each step. How long could my luck hold? I pinned my arms against my sides to stop them from shaking. Another blade rose. I moved again, stopped again.

  “How many more can there be?” I hollered.

  Another blade crashed down ahead of me, causing sparks to lash up at my face, so I lurched forward in shock. I froze, realizing I’d lost track of how far I’d moved. Was it one metre? Two? How far should I go back?

  I stood for a moment, a dozen obsidian blades clashing and sparking behind me, before I realized that there were none in front of me. I’d reached the end of the trap!

  Except…

  In the dark I could just see the jaguar ten metres away, crouched low and curled back against the tunnel wall. Its ears were pinned back and its mouth was open, showing me its dagger teeth, but the cat made no noise. I wish I could tell you I saw respect in its eyes, or something like that. I didn’t. I saw a wild, terrified animal whose home had been invaded. I remembered my utility belt and its force field. Pedro had warned us to use it only in emergencies, and I couldn’t think of a bigger one than this…

  “Nice kitty,” I whispered.

  Very slowly I reached to my belt. My finger hovered over the button beneath the clasp.

  Maybe the jaguar thought I was standing my ground, rather than just being paralyzed with fear, because it turned, scrambled up the tunnel wall and vanished through a crack in the rock.

  Something touched my arm. I whirled around, so startled I almost pressed the force-field button. It was Pan! She’d trusted me and followed my plan.

  “Did we reach the end?” she gasped.

  I grabbed her in reply and hugged her tightly. “We did it!”

  “But where’s the jaguar?”

  My grin grew even wider as I pointed to the crack in the cave wall. “There’s a way out.”

  The rocks around the crack began to tremble. Several fell from the ceiling and thumped to the ground, and a creaking sound echoed around the cave. It sounded like some sort of mechanism was grinding to a stop above the ceiling.

  Then, all at once, the blades retracted back into their grooves. It had felt like we’d walked miles, when in fact the cave was barely thirty metres long.

  Mum called to us from the other end. “We found the trigger. But we can’t keep the blades up for long.”

  “Hurry, then,” Pan replied. “There’s a way through.”

  “No, come this way,” Dad demanded.

  “We need to look for a way out,” Mum added.

  “What?” I said. “No, we have to go on. The tomb is this way.”

  “Forget the tomb!” Mum shouted. “Our mission now is to stay alive. That means going back.”

  “No!” I yelled. “Our mission is to save Sami. We need to go on, this way.”

  “You almost got killed just now,” Dad replied.

  “But we didn’t. We found a way through.”

  “This is not a game, Jake. You got lucky.”

  “It wasn’t luck,” I insisted. “I made a plan and it worked. Sami doesn’t have much time and we’re wasting it now. There’s a way out here.”

  “Jake,” Dad said, “we all want to find the tomb. But sometimes you have to admit defeat. To plan again and rethink.”

  “But not now,” I replied. “Why would we admit defeat when we just won?”

  “Listen to us,” Mum said. “We know what we’re talking about. So far we’ve been lucky.”

  “Stop saying we’ve been lucky!” My voice rang around the cave walls. “It wasn’t luck. If you had trusted us, you would be over here now too.”

  “This is not up for discussion,” Mum said.

  “Not up for discussion? We’re meant to be a team.”

  “Stop saying that! We are not a team. We are your parents.”

  “Mum,” I said. “You have to trust us.”

  “Really, Jake? Should I have trusted you when you got Sami poisoned?”

  “That wasn’t our fault!”

  “No, it was your fault. You walked right into a trap. And you’ll walk into another if you go that way. If we go back, we can find a way out.”

  “We didn’t come here to find a way out. We came to find a tomb.”

  “Not today,” Mum replied. “Come back this instant.”

  “Come forward!”

  “Everyone just calm down,” Dad said. “We can talk about this.”

  “The blades are going to come down again,” Mum warned. “For God’s sake, John, get over there and grab them.”

  “If you try,” I warned, “I swear I’ll use my sonic force field.”

  The cave filled again with the creaking. The walls trembled even harder, and more rocks thumped down around us. The blades were going to come down any moment now. We’d be cut off from Mum and Dad.

  “Jake…” Pan hissed.

  “No, Pan. We don’t need them, anyway.”

  “Jake!” Dad roared.

  He hurled his smart-goggles across the cavern. They landed beside our feet just a second before…

  Snick-clank!

  One of the obsidian blades fell and crashed into the cave floor. I heard Mum yelling at us, but the sounds were drowned by the clash and clang of blades rising and falling again along the tunnel.

  “I can’t see them,” Pan yelled. “Jake, I can’t see them!”

  Her voice was filled with panic. I think she’d only just realized that we’d separated ourselves from our parents.

  She stared at me. Her arms were shaking and even in the gloom of the cave I could see that her face was almost white. “Jake, what did we do?”

  I stared at the obsidian blades, and hoped our parents were able to find another way out. The truth was, I was as scared as my sister about continuing without them. I’d insisted that they trust us, but my confidence came from knowing they were there, ready to correct our mistakes. Now we really were on our own. But what choice did we have? We couldn’t go back. So I tried to sound as if that was fine by me.

  “We did what we had to,” I said. “For Sami.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  I picked up Dad’s goggles and used their torch to study the crack in the rock. I prayed the jaguar was gone, but feared that the creature might be the least of our problems once we climbed through that gap. The Aztecs wanted our blood. They weren’t done with us yet.

  31

  “It’s a dead end, Jake.”

  I swore, kicked the cave wall, and swore louder. We’d squeezed through the crack in the wall, convinced that we were getting even closer to finding the tomb of Quetzalcoatl. But the path seemed to lead nowhere – another narrow cavern, another rock wall.

  “We could go back,” Pan said.

  “No,” I insisted. “There’s no way back.”

  We could still hear the obsidian blades clashing against rock in the chamber behind. Even if there was a way to get through them, I wasn’t going back. That meant giving in, and giving up on Sami. It also meant admitting to Mum and Dad that they were right, that I was just a hothead whose plans they couldn’t trust.

  My blood was boiling from the argument. After everything we’d been through, how could our parents still not trust us? We were meant to be a team, but they just wanted to tell us what to do. If we did find the tomb, well, that would really show them.

  �
�It feels strange without them,” Pan muttered.

  “Feels better,” I replied.

  That wasn’t true – I was just raging. It did feel strange, and scary. The last time Pan and I were in a tomb we’d been searching for Mum and Dad. This time we were running away from them, and maybe into danger. But we were ready for danger; that was the point of our training. Mum was so determined to keep us safe that she refused to take any risks. She’d said that this wasn’t a training simulation, but that was my point too – this was real, and if we failed, Sami was dead. We had to go on, despite the risks.

  I turned, guiding the shaky torch beam around the cavern. “The jaguar isn’t here,” I said, “so there must be a way through.”

  We searched the walls, climbing up and pulling back rocks, using night vision, then thermal vision, and ultrasonic.

  “There’s a crack in the cave ceiling here,” I said, directing the light up into the tight space. “Looks like it runs higher into the mountain.”

  The opening, which was less than a metre wide, was curved and sharp, like a rock-monster’s grin. It looked like a natural crack rather than anything the Aztecs had carved. The torchlight startled several long bugs, like giant millipedes only with sharp pincer fangs.

  “Scolopendra,” Pan said.

  “Are they deadly?”

  “They kill bats.”

  “Good job we’re not bats, then.”

  “What? We can’t go up there, Jake. It’s too dangerous.”

  “It’s meant to be dangerous. We’re in a lost tomb. But I think that’s where we’re meant to go.”

  My sister saw what I saw, but at the same time something totally different. “Jake, it’s just a crack in the rock. We could get stuck, or slip and fall.”

  “Pan, the tomb is close. It has to be.”

  “We’re just in a cave system, Jake. The only thing we’ll find up there is the jaguar. We should go back.”

  “We’re not going back.”

  “We have to. Come on.”

  She gripped my wrist and tried to pull me back the way we’d come. Instinctively, I lashed out and shoved her. She tripped; stumbled back and bashed her head against the cave wall.

  The push was harder than I had intended, but she looked at me as if I’d plunged a knife into her chest. We used to fight all the time: punches, shoves, hair-pulling. A few months ago she’d have responded with a kick, or picked up a rock and launched it at me. But since we’d started training as treasure hunters, Pan and I had become friends.