“Rick says you’ve been helping the enemy search for Raphael Kain,” D’von had said coldly. “That’s treason, man.”
“If I help find Raphael, maybe the Flatliners won’t be our enemies anymore, D’von,” Zhai had patiently replied. “Did you and Rick think of that?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone line.
“Look, I gotta go. Rick told me not to talk to you,” D’von had said and ended the call.
Dax and Michael had acted a little weird, too. Standing on his front porch, Dax had glanced around furtively before turning his shard over to Zhai, as if he expected Rick to be hiding in the bushes watching them. Once he’d handed it over he quickly said goodbye and slipped back inside. Michael wouldn’t even see Zhai; he simply left the shard in an envelope and put the envelope in his mailbox for Zhai to pick up.
Zhai worried about the fact that his control on the Toppers had slipped. For years now, he’d been the voice of reason and the advocate of calm and peace within the group. Without him, there was no way of telling what the Toppers would become. But as dangerous as it was to cede his position as leader of the gang, finding Raphael was more important, and he wasn’t going to let anyone’s opinion stand in his way.
So, Zhai had three shards of the magical crystal ring in his pocket, Maggie Anderson had one, and Master Chin had one—that made five. It only accounted for about a third of the ring, but they would have to hope it was enough.
“We’re getting close,” Chin said, and Zhai immediately abandoned his extraneous thoughts and focused on the task at hand. The tunnels were dangerous—it was important that he remained mindful and present.
“I’ve never been in here before. Are we going to the X?” Maggie asked quietly. “It’s kind of creepy.” But she seemed more fascinated than scared.
Zhai knew what she was talking about. There had always been legends circulating in the school about a spot deep inside the tunnels where the railroad tracks crossed. According to the stories, no one saw the X and lived to tell about it—because the Middleburg monster would eat them alive. Zhai, however, had seen the X and survived. He also knew that the stories were true, and he hoped that when the ring shattered, the giant shadow monsters that guarded it had also disappeared.
“Yes—the X is just up ahead,” Chin whispered, and as he did they passed from the stone tunnel into an open space so massive and vacuous that their flashlight beams were unable to penetrate the blackness surrounding them. The Wheel was housed in a vast stone dome, Zhai knew—a space so huge that it had to take up half of the mountain.
“Be on your guard, my friends,” Chin whispered. “We are not alone.”
Moments later, the companions reached the fabled X where the tracks crossed. Zhai and Maggie each handed their ring shards to Chin, who held the five pieces in his hands and closed his eyes in reverent meditation. For an instant, Zhai thought he saw a glimmer of light through Chin’s fingers. Maggie gasped, too, but in the next second, the spark faded, and the shards were dead again, like ordinary pieces of broken glass.
Chin opened his eyes and shook his head. “There is still some power in them,” he said, “but not enough.”
It was at that moment that Zhai saw a movement just out of range of his flashlight beam. The figure materialized so suddenly that Zhai’s breath caught in his throat. When the man stepped into the light and Zhai recognized his face, his unease only grew.
He was Asian, with long dark hair, a thin beard, and penetrating, dark brown eyes. He was tall and imposing, with limbs that seemed to Zhai as long and strong as the branches of an ancient oak. But perhaps it was his garb that made Zhai think of a tree. Instead of the robes he’d worn before—the one of bloody, autumn red or the austere, icy bluish-white garment—this time, the Magician’s habit was the tender green color of the first newly born buds of spring.
“Greetings, Man of Four, our Dark Teacher,” Chin said and bowed.
Silently, the Magician returned the bow.
“You know the one whom we seek,” Chin said. “Will you help us find him?”
The Magician stared at Chin without moving, without breathing, as still as a corpse. In their previous encounters, Zhai had found the Magician’s maniacal laughter and endless questions disturbing and frightening—but neither was half as terrible as his current stillness.
As Zhai’s desperation rose, he could no longer contain it or remain silent. He moved closer to Chin and spoke to the Man of Four: “Please, how can we get Raphael back?” he asked. “Tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”
Slowly, the Magician’s gaze shifted to Zhai.
“Have you the treasure?” the Magician asked.
Zhai had expected to feel relieved when the Magician finally broke the horrible silence, but his voice was terrifying, too. It was somehow deep enough that Zhai could feel its rumble but also shrill enough that he wanted to cover his ears.
“Yes,” Zhai answered quickly, and Chin held out the five ring shards.
The magician’s terrible, dark eyes scanned Master Chin’s outstretched hands.
“A broken wheel cannot turn,” he said, and Zhai felt his hope crumbling to despair. Then, he had a realization.
“Wait—so you mean if we get all the shards and put them back together, then the Wheel will turn, and we can get Raphael back?”
It would be hard to get the shards back from all the Toppers and the Flatliners—but if there was a possibility it would work, they had to try. Zhai wouldn’t rest until they’d exhausted every effort to get Raph back.
A slow smile curled across the Magician’s face.
“That’s it!” Zhai said triumphantly. “We have to reunite all the shards!”
He looked to the Magician for further confirmation, but the man’s smile had disappeared. He sniffed the air, frowning.
“What is it?” Chin asked, his brow furrowed with concern.
The Magician looked at him, a hint of his smile returning. “I smell snake,” he said, and he receded quickly into the darkness, disappearing even as he went.
At the same instant, Zhai heard the sound of a footstep on the railroad ties behind them and whipped around, his flashlight slashing through the darkness. The man who stepped out of the shadows was handsome and muscular, with a thin moustache and pale-gray eyes. He wore a black silk shirt, and he was Chinese.
“Greetings, Chin,” he said. But his inflection was harsh and the words seemed more like a command than a greeting. Zhai’s mind spun as he tried to figure out who this stranger might be, and he widened his stance, preparing for a potential attack. A moment later, his worries were confirmed: five men wearing derby hats stepped out of the darkness and took their positions behind the stranger.
Master Chin, as usual, remained perfectly calm. “Hello, Feng Xu,” he said.
Zhai noticed a stirring in the shadows behind their adversaries, and for just an instant he was able to see the outline of the God of the Black Snakes—a massive, half-invisible cobra, rising behind them.
A pang of crippling fear hit Zhai in the gut. So it would be just him, Chin, and Maggie fighting against Feng Xu, five Obies, and an ancient Snake God? It didn’t look good. What they desperately needed was backup.
Please, All! Please, Shen! Zhai entreated silently, fighting back the desperation that was trying to surface. Where is Raphael?
Chapter 6
Raphael Kain awoke from a long and dreamless sleep.
Before he even opened his eyes, he was aware of a sound, a single deep, sonorous note that seemed to him like the mingled howl of a mighty wind and the low hum of a huge, powerful motor, combined into the single, soul-thrumming chord of a Gregorian chant.
Oooooooooooooooooo . . .
He sat up and looked around. He was on the floor of a small room, perhaps 10-feet-by-10-feet wide. Windows ran
along three sides, but they were too high up for Raphael to see what was outside them. In the front of the room, strangely enough, was the control panel from the Wheel of Illusion—or a panel that was almost identical to it, with the same polished-wood body and old-fashioned gauges. There was a single high leather seat in front of the control panel, as if one were meant to sit there to operate it. Slowly, Raphael rose to his feet.
Standing, the sound he heard rushing and moaning all around him seemed to condense into a vibration that ran from the soles of his feet up through his shinbones and all the way into his chest and his head, where he felt as if it was jiggling his heart and his brain at once. It was a weird feeling, but not entirely unpleasant. Now that he was upright, he was able to look out the windows. Outside, a thick gray fog was racing past. It seemed to be blowing toward him from the direction that the chair and the control panel faced, and Raphael suddenly understood. It wasn’t the fog outside that was moving—it was him. And he had to be moving at an incredible speed.
Only then did he remember what had happened on the train tracks back in Middleburg.
In his mind, he retraced the events for himself, trying to make sense of it all. There had been a battle raging between the Flatliners and the Toppers, then between the Obies and Orias. Raphael remembered saving Aimee from the giant cobra, then Maggie saving him from the slithering, raging beast. Then, he had picked up the treasure that everyone—the Order of the Black Snake, Orias, the Flatliners, and the Toppers—had been searching for. The glowing crystal ring. He had grabbed it, and when he looked up, he had seen the train coming—a massive, ancient-looking steam-powered locomotive thundering toward him. But instead of being scared, he had felt mysteriously grateful. And he’d stood his ground without moving, without flinching, without fear, until the engine hit him.
The next thing he remembered was waking up in this room—and of course it was not a room. It was the cab of the train that had struck him. Somehow, he was inside it now. He stepped up to the front of the car, placed one steadying hand on the back of the big leather engineer’s chair and gazed out the windshield, hoping to get some idea of where he was.
The fog he was passing through was the densest Raphael had ever seen. He stared into it for perhaps ten minutes as it flowed past, but it was as thick and heavy as cotton candy, and it obscured every feature of the land that might lay behind it; he couldn’t catch a glimpse of a single tree, or a house—nothing. Raphael had never been on an airplane, but he imagined this must be what it would look like to be jetting through a massive cloudbank.
For a moment, it occurred to him that he might be dead. Maybe this was what people saw when they passed away, he reasoned. The famous tunnel leading to the white light. But when he went to the side window and looked down, he found that he was not racing through the heavens. There was land below him, featureless brown earth that shot by so fast it was a total blur. He stared down at it for a moment, then looked out the front window again, trying to estimate how fast he might be going. But, he decided, it was impossible. Without any landmarks to watch, there was no way to judge. All he knew was that he was moving fast.
“Very fast,” he said aloud. “But where am I going?”
Of course, there was no one to answer him. He was alone in the cab of the train, and judging from the terrain around him, he might be alone in some strange world or dimension that he’d somehow been blasted into when the train hit him.
He left the window, went back to the control panel, and looked down at it. There were six gauges, each one with a dial and a red needle. But the markings on the gauges were not numbers or letters—to Raphael, they looked like the nonsense squiggles a child would make up before they learned how to write for real.
“Oh, great,” he said to himself, “we’re going squiggly-mark, lopsided-circle, leaning-triangle miles per hour.”
A brass lever extended from the side of the panel, similar to the slot machine–type lever that operated the Wheel of Illusion. Raphael considered pulling on it to see what would happen, then thought better of it. For all he knew it would make the train blast off into space. No, he decided, the train had started moving by itself. It would stop by itself. But he was worried. Where would he be when it stopped? Where was it taking him?
If the Wheel that was meant to turn the trains in different directions could take its operator to different times, what could the trains themselves do? Wherever he was going, was it a round-trip or a one-way ticket? How long had he been gone? He had this weird feeling that he’d been sleeping for a week. What was happening back in Middleburg? Was his mom worried about him? How would she survive if he never came back? She could barely take care of herself, much less a new baby. And what about Aimee? He had to get back to Aimee and find a way to get her away from Orias.
He reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone, but when he looked down at the screen, he wasn’t surprised to find that it was dead. He held down the power button and waited for the screen to light up. Nothing.
When he put the phone back into his pocket, he felt something else there and took it out. There, in the palm of his hand, was a jagged shard of crystal about three inches long. It was flat and rounded. It took him a long moment before he realized what it was: a piece of the crystal ring, the treasure he and his friends had searched so hard for. It must’ve broken when the train hit him. The light that had once shone through it had disappeared now, and it looked dead in his hands, like nothing but a piece of broken glass.
Just as this thought crossed his mind, however, a blink of greenish white light winked through the shard, as if reassuring him: oh, no, my friend. I am alive.
But whether it was alive or not, Raphael doubted it would do any good. He stuck it back in his pocket.
Questions swarmed through his mind, thick and fast, but he realized quickly that none of them had answers. Whatever was happening in Middleburg, he couldn’t do anything about it. As for where he was going, the track had already been laid. He had no choice but to follow it.
With a sigh of surrender, Raphael settled into the surprisingly comfortable, old-fashioned leather armchair and gazed out the windshield. Soon, his thoughts were as featureless and serene as the fog that roiled past.
* * *
“There is no need for anyone to get hurt, Chin. All I require are the pieces of the ring.”
Feng Xu’s words gave Zhai a moment of hope. If the Obies were after the shards, then maybe there really was some Shen magic left in them, and maybe they could use them to get Raphael back—but they’d have to get out of here alive first.
Master Chin’s eyes traced the forms of Feng Xu, the five Obies, and the indistinct, looming shape of the Black Snake God, and Zhai knew from his years of training that his sifu’s brain was racing like a Pentagon computer, calculating whether or not this was a battle they could win—and if so, how.
After a moment, Chin replied, “Certainly. I will be glad to give them to you, sihing. I’ll give them to you freely. All you have to do is beat me in a fair fight.”
Feng Xu barked out a laugh, but his narrow eyes remained mirthless. “And to think your father called me the tricky one. Of course you would prefer a duel. You know that in an all-out battle, your dear student Zhai and his pretty little friend would perish along with you—and I would take the shards anyway.”
Chin nodded, never taking his eyes from Feng Xu’s. “You could try to take the shards,” he agreed. “And you might succeed. Certainly, you are a man who values winning his objective at any cost. But think of your pride. We both know you will never find another opponent so worthy of your consideration. If you don’t fight me now, you will spend every day for the rest of your life wondering who would have won—me or you.”
Chin handed the shards to Zhai and took a small step forward. When he did, there was a collective metallic click as all the Obies whipped out their weapons—twelve-inch-long s
witchblade daggers. But Feng Xu stayed them with a gesture.
Chin placed the fist of one hand against the palm of the other in front of his heart and bowed to Feng Xu. The Black Snake master hesitated only for a moment before he stepped forward.
“Very well, then. To the death,” he said, and returned the bow.
As one, the Obies put away their knives and settled into a semi-circle to watch the duel unfold. The massive, half-visible cobra that loomed behind them seemed to fade out of existence as the two masters each assumed their fight-ready positions. As they did, Zhai noticed something strange about Feng Xu. He had long nails on the middle two fingers of each hand, like two deadly steel fangs.
It was all happening so fast, Zhai could barely process it. As he looked upon Chin’s opponent, he felt a rising panic. Feng Xu looked bigger and stronger than master Chin, and although Zhai had great faith in his master’s tremendous martial arts ability, Zhai knew firsthand how incredibly potent the snakes’ Venom of the Fang martial arts style could be. Neither he nor Raphael had been able to win against it, and Feng Xu was the grand master of the style.
What if Chin loses? Zhai wondered, suddenly alarmed. What if he dies?
Maggie Anderson nudged him with her elbow. “What’s happening?” she asked. “Should we do something?” He had almost forgotten she was there.
“No,” he said quickly, even though he wished with all his heart that there was something he could do. “For a student to interfere with his master’s duel would be a major violation of the Wu-de,” he told her. “That’s the code he taught us—Raphael and me.”
“So we’re just supposed to stand back and hope for the best?” she demanded.
“We have no choice,” he said.
Chin and Xu were circling around the center of the crossed railroad tracks. Feng Xu’s arms undulated hypnotically in front of him, and his feet barely seemed to move as he circled, as if he were slithering rather than stepping. Chin, on the other hand, looked just as he did in his kwoon during Zhai’s weekly lessons. He seemed as relaxed as ever, but there was a look of sublime focus on his face that was as intense as it was placid.
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