“And then some.”
Now that’s she’s interested, I have to deliver the not-so-good news. “The only downside is that they’re on a different schedule than we’re used to—they do four quarters, with much longer breaks in between.”
“Meaning we start really soon or a long time from now?”
“Um, soon. Like mid-July.”
“Caity, we just got out! June hasn’t even ended and we have to go back to school in a few weeks?”
“Yeah, but it’s not like we’ll be sitting at desks or anything. Plus, we have to go to the Dunhuang Caves in China like, stat, anyway.”
“So Uncle Li is our first stop?”
“Yep.”
“It’s still hard to believe—”
“I know,” I say, interrupting her. I really, really don’t want to talk about Uncle Li right now. It’s still like squeezing a lemon with a cut on your finger.
“Is it weird that we’re casually talking about going to school in Argentina?” she asks.
“After having the weirdest few weeks of my life, this seems totally normal.”
“Roger that, my friend.”
“So will it be hard to leave David von Kellerman?” I ask.
“Over it,” she replies flatly.
“Why? What did he do?”
“I found him in the equipment locker in the gym with Amanda Moore. It makes me throw up a little to think about it.”
“Not Demanda More! She’s so high maintenance!”
“No joke,” she says. “Get this: Curran Williams told me she’s been to her house and Demanda has a tanning bed in the workout room.”
“No! That’s so last millennium.”
“Whatevs. They deserve each other.”
“Well, you’ll always have Peru … ” I say, unable to stifle a laugh.
“Oh my God!” Justine yells.
“What? What happened?”
“I just pulled up the La Escuela Bohemia website—it’s like the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!”
“Isn’t it amazing?” I squeal, relieved that she’s interested.
“Done,” she says. “We’re so going.”
THREE
I spend the next day getting what I can of my application for La Escuela Bohemia in order and waiting to hear from Alex. By the afternoon I realize that if he doesn’t arrive on the 4:00 ferry, it will be another day. I decide to see if Mrs. Findlay knows anything and before I even reach the first floor, I get a good indication that someone will be here for dinner: the smell of roasted lamb and fresh bread.
What I’m not prepared for is Alex. He’s already in the kitchen, leaning against the tiled wall eating a carrot.
I know I should play it down, but because I’m so happy to see that he’s alive and well, I give him a full-body-press hug, despite the fact that I did not put defrizzer on my hair this morning. Mrs. Findlay looks startled at our reaction to each other, so I pull back, give him a brotherly punch on the shoulder and say, “Hey, good to see you.”
“You too,” he says, sparring back with a soft punch on my shoulder. “Did you have a nice trip to see your friend in San Francisco?”
“Oh, yeah, great trip.” I answer, fully aware that Mrs. Findlay is still watching us closely.
Motioning to the door with his head, he asks, “Want to go have a chat?”
“First floor only, son,” Mrs. Findlay says sternly.
I turn bright red—does she really think I’d take him up to my room to make out?
Okay, I see her point.
“Go on into the library; I’ll bring your dinner in there,” Mrs. Findlay adds. Her strategy is clear: keep us in the room nearest the kitchen so she can check on us by constantly bringing in food and drinks.
We close the glass doors and settle into chairs by the fireplace. I draw in the utterly unique smell of Breidablik’s library, which will stay with me forever. The scent of old books bound in leather and rugs from faraway lands mingles with the static, electric smell of technology coming off Dad’s wall of computers and servers. It’s the smell of old and new, of ideas captured on the written page and flying through the Internet.
Mr. Papers hops onto the ottoman between us, sits with his tail curled around himself, and begins peeling a banana. Cuteness overload.
“So, you’re alive,” I say, looking at Alex. “That’s a very good thing.”
“I’d have to agree,” he says, leaning over in the chair to scratch Mr. Papers’ neck.
“Seriously, though, I have to thank you. There’s no way I could have done it without you.”
“It was … an experience,” he says, looking at me through hair that has fallen forward.
“So sorry to leave you with Donald.”
Alex shakes his head. “How could we have known that Thomas had a twin that was a bad seed?”
“An evil twin—it’s so cliché! So what happened to Donald after I left?” I ask. “Did he ever come to and freak out on you?”
“Nae. The doc from the hotel knocked on our door really early in the morn’ while Donald was still groggy from the pills. He checked his eyes and his pulse, cleaned up his hand and put a new dressing on it, and then gave him a shot of antibiotics with a painkiller.”
“Nice. So that kept him groggy.”
“Meanwhile I found your note—I was so worried about you, mate.”
“Well, I felt terrible having to leave you there.”
“I didn’t stay for long—after giving Donald the shot, the doc told me to get my things and then he took me to the airport. I got on the morning plane out and made my way back, sure that I’d see you on one of the flights...”
“I’m sorry; I had no choice. Did you hear the helicopters and dogs late that night?”
Alex’s sky-blue eyes widen. “Those weren’t—”
“They were,” I say, sliding up the sleeves of my shirt to show him the cuts and bruises still on my hands and wrists. “They chased me through the lava tube caves that run under the island.”
“Bloody hell, Caity! How did you get out? How did you get home?”
“Bolon came to get me,” I say, stopping myself before I added anything about the Vimāna; I wasn’t quite ready to explain that. “Anyway, at least we’re both safely back.”
I like being able to say the word safe. For the first time in my life that word really means something, and I’m unsure of how long this feeling of safety will last.
Thinking the same thing, Alex asks, “But for how long?”
“Thomas is on high-security alert. He’s keeping the gates locked and the alarms on, so as long as we’re in here, we’re good.”
I see Mrs. Findlay outside the doors with a tray in her hands, so I run over to open them for her. She seems happy to see us talking in the library like eighty-year-olds. Scooting Mr. P. off the ottoman with her foot, she sets the tray down and asks if we need anything else. We thank her and say we’re fine, but she says she’ll be back in a jiff to bring some water. Clearly she thinks she has to babysit us.
Once she’s gone I say, “There’s one thing I haven’t told you … and it really complicates everything.”
“What?” he asks, brows furrowed as he hands me a plate. “Something wrong?”
I hate saying this out loud. I look down and whisper, “Uncle Li is with the Fraternitas.”
“What? You’re joking!”
“I wish,” I say. “I’m dead serious. If it wasn’t Donald who tipped them off that I was on Easter Island, then it was Uncle Li.”
“But I thought you’d known him since you were just a wee girl?” Alex digs into his plate of lamb and potatoes, but I seem to have lost my appetite.
“I have. I don’t know if he’s always been with the Fraternitas or if this was a recent thing. I don’t know much other than that he took the two Sanskrit books that are super important. They’re the books Donald came back for. Uncle Li left a note, saying he had to ‘follow his path,’ whatever that means.”
Alex l
eans back, plate balanced on his lap. “Oh, Caity, I’m sorry. That is such a betrayal. Do you think he went back to the States?”
“I don’t think so. When Mr. P. saw me freak out about the note, he immediately made an origami cave and put the rabbit ears key inside it.”
“Which means?”
“This rabbit ears symbol traces back to the Dunhuang Caves in China, where the prophecy started.”
“And that’s where you think he went?”
“Yep. And it’s where I’ve got to go next.”
“You’re a mad rocket! Easter Island is one thing, but some cave in China? How are you going to pull that off?” he asks with a laugh before popping a small roasted potato in his mouth.
“Well, now that our house in San Francisco has burned down, my parents have no choice but to stay here for a couple of years and they’re encouraging me to find a good boarding school.”
I look at Alex’s face and see what I had hoped for: a hint of sadness.
“Honestly, I would much rather stay here and hang out with you and be with my parents,” I say, “but there are bigger things at stake.”
He just nods.
“Before all … this, I was totally opposed to going away to school. But now, with what I have to do, I don’t really have a choice. And I found a school that will allow me to travel.”
“In Scotland?” he asks. I love that I hear a trace of hopefulness in his voice.
“No, actually, it’s in … uh … Buenos Aires.”
“As in Argentina? Is that the farthest point on Earth from the Isle of Huracan?”
“I know, I know. It’s a million miles away in a country I know nothing about.”
“Well, it’s the Paris of South America,” Alex says.
“They totally said that on the school’s website! How did you know that?”
“Mum’s travel magazines,” he says. “So why this school in Buenos Aires?”
“It’s called La Escuela Bohemia, and the whole curriculum is based on travel that is designed by the students.”
“Sounds pricey,” he says.
“It is. But my parents said I could choose any school. The thing is, this all hinges on one person: Justine. I need her to enroll with me because there’s no way I could make some random girl go to places like the Dunhuang Caves and other far corners of the world that I may need to travel to.”
“Will she go?”
“I don’t know. She seems up for it but it’s really up to her parents.”
We sit quietly for a moment, Alex eating his lamb, me pushing the same little potato around the edge of my plate.
When he’s done he sets his plate on the ottoman. “So is there anything I can help with before you go?”
“There’s so much to do I don’t even know where to start! We need to get that phone widget into use, set up a network connecting kids, translate the Mayan dates into the daily Mosquito Tone so that adults can’t hear it—”
Alex laughs and puts up his hands to stop me.
“I know. I’m freaked out.” I take a deep breath through my nose to try to calm myself down. I look at him and say, “I don’t know how I’ll do it all.”
“You don’t have to—I’ll help,” he says, slipping his hand over mine. Just as we lock eyes, Mrs. Findlay knocks on the door with a tray of water. I pull my hand away and put it on my lap as she walks in.
“Time to leave, son. Your mother has just called for you.”
Way to ruin the moment, Mrs. Findlay.
FOUR
We have exactly two days before Alex has to start demolition on the butcher shop, so we have to get a lot done in a short amount of time. We decide to set up shop in the library because Mrs. Findlay would probably freak out if we were in my room all day, and she doesn’t know enough about computers to even question what we’re doing.
We meet Thomas outside to strategize, and he commits to keeping Mrs. Findlay occupied as much as he can. We already have the website up, we’ve started the viral use of the Tzolk’in numbers and day signs through an email with links to the site, and now we have to get down to translating the Tzolk’in calendar into Mosquito Tone sound waves that only kids can hear. Thomas says he’s been in contact with Tenzo, who is still using the lab to check global patters of unification or coherence based on things that are happening. We seem to be on track, so we go inside to make all this happen.
We sit side-by-side in the library, each at our own computer. I can’t seem to get started; I pretend to read my screen but instead I watch Alex’s hands fly over the keys. I look at his profile out of the corner of my eye until I get a headache and have to scrunch my eyes together to make them work again. When he makes sudden moves, I secretly breathe deeper to catch his scent—that pine smell that wafts from his pores as if amber tree sap runs through his veins.
I want to say, Do you remember that we kissed? What was that? Is whatever it was gone now? I think that maybe because it happened so far away, in such bizarre circumstances, it sits out there like a dream so real you have trouble figuring out if it happened or not.
I’m not sure how long I’m lost in Alexness before I’m pulled back to reality by his sudden outburst.
“Done!” he says. “I just wrote a little piece of code that takes each day, translates it from the Mayan calendar number to a hertz tone, and then translates that into a super-high frequency Mosquito Tone so no one over twentyish can hear it.”
“Amazing,” I say, trying not to gush. I think I may be the only girl in the world to swoon over talk of algorithms and hertz tones. “Did you bundle it with a picture of the Daylord and number for each day?”
“Of course, take a look.” He clicks on the day, and four dots—the Mayan symbol for four—and the Daylord symbol of Lamat pop up, along with a super-high-frequency tone.
“Nice! Now it’s a multimedia experience! No coincidence that today is Four Lamat, huh?” I say. “Lamat is opposition, risk, and daring mixed with Four, which is challenge and change. Perfect for creating a subversive app.”
“After reading about how the Russians are making changes to DNA with sound, I really think there might be something to this.”
“Speaking of sound, do you think the website should be sound-driven?” I wonder out loud.
“What do you mean?”
“Like when you get to the home page, maybe we should record the instructions in Mosquito Tone to keep it all subversive.”
“Aye!” Alex says, slapping me heartily on the back. “You can have the home page show a 404 Error but then have a Mosquito Tone message play that’s saying the address of the hidden site.”
“It’s perfect.”
So we work together on each of our freaky little projects. But it seems like I’m the only one stealing glances from the corner of my eye.
I’m astounded when I look at the number of people who have given addresses for email alerts. “We made it over the one million mark,” I tell Alex. “Adults have absolutely no clue about the power we hold.”
“My guess is they will soon … ” Alex replies.
“Yes!” I reply, holding a fist in the air. “I shall unleash the power of the Tzolk’in upon the world!”
“I shan’t miss that, mate!”
“Wow, I’ve never actually heard someone use the word ‘shan’t’ in real life,” I say.
Alex does not look amused. “Okay, then I’ll um, like, try to talk, like, a lot more like you, then. Like, seriously,” he says in a perfect imitation of my tone.
It’s a weird moment. I try to laugh but it feels awkward. Like we’ve just insulted each other for no good reason.
Thankfully, Mr. Papers hops up onto the long wooden table that Alex and I are working on. He has a sheet of blue paper and a pair of small scissors, like the kind you use for sewing.
“What’s up, friend?” I say as he starts to fold and cut and fold and cut the paper.
“Can you tell what he’s making?” Alex asks.
“Not a clue. I di
dn’t even know he could use scissors.”
“S’pose that’s where the opposable thumb comes in handy.”
Mr. Papers puts down the scissors and turns his back to us. We can hear him unfold and refold the paper but we can’t see what he’s doing.
Finally he turns around and holds in his hand a perfectly made blue paper harp.
“A harp?” Alex says.
Papers pretends to pull a string of the harp and then mimes an expanding wave.
“Oh!” I say, getting the pun. “He means HAARP!”
Papers puts a finger to his nose, sets the harp down on the table, and then crushes the tiny paper instrument.
“What am I missing?” Alex asks. “I said harp then you said harp and then he destroyed it!”
“Open a browser and do an image search on the letters H-A-A-R-P,” I tell him as I lean over to look at his screen.
The first image that pops up looks like something out of a sci-fi film—acres and acres of land in the middle of Alaska. Forests have been cleared and in the place of trees lies a massive tangle of antennas and wires.
“What the bloody hell is that?” Alex asks.
“This was one of the things those guys from the Fraternitas were talking about, and it showed up in that binder Justine and I stole from Tremblay! There’s this antenna farm in Alaska where they send out frequency waves into the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere.”
“Why?” he asks.
“They say it’s about defense, like for blocking weapon pulses or something, but what if it’s really about blocking this incoming energy from the galaxy?”
“Keeping us sealed off as another form of control?”
“Exactly!”
“So they’re jamming the frequencies that would otherwise cause this leap in evolution.”
Papers nods and taps Alex on the nose.
“The question is, can what we’re doing with the Tzolk’in tones rebalance that?” I ask, and Mr. Papers comes over and taps me on the nose. Then he goes back to the crushed harp and ferociously wads it up.
The Serpent's Coil Page 2
