Lost in Babylon
Page 24
Aly walked in behind him. “Flan is like custard. My mom always orders it at restaurants.”
I was still getting dressed and hadn’t yet pulled up my pants. “Will you please?”
“I won’t look,” Aly said, turning away.
I zipped up and belted. From my dresser I grabbed the cell phone, which I had transferred out of my Massa custodial outfit.
Cass was staring at it. “Wait. You still have the phone?”
I nodded. I wondered if it still worked. Pressing the button at the bottom, I saw a warning flash on the screen: LOW BATTERY.
I pressed okay and the giant eye stared up out of the screen. “Who the heck is that?” Aly asked.
“The reason we got out,” I said.
“We had a helper,” Cass added. “A elom. Or, I guess technically, an elom.”
“Wait. There’s a mole inside the Massa?” Aly asked.
My brain was kicking in now. Going back over our capture. The rescue had been thrilling, and I hadn’t wanted to think about the bad stuff. Marco. Daria.
Even thinking about them now gave me a sudden pang in the chest.
But the eye seemed to be staring into me, as if it were alive. As if it knew me. “Yeah,” I said. “A mole.”
“Do you know who she is?” Aly asked.
“No,” I said. “How do you know it’s a she?”
“The lashes,” Aly replied. “They have mascara on them. Looks like there’s some eyeliner underneath, too.”
I thumbed away from it and brought up the contacts app. “There’s a name at the top of this list,” I said. “Probably hers. I mean, they’re her contacts. It’s in code like the rest of the names.”
We stared at the number: 19141325 61361291411.
I grabbed a pencil, then found the sheet where I’d written the number-substitution code.
Then, slowly, I matched the numbers to letters:
“Sister Nancy . . . ” I said. “Nancy Emelink. The person whose voice we heard in that room with all the pillows. The boss of the Massa.”
“That was a woman?” Cass asked.
“And she told you her name?” Aly added.
“She didn’t tell me,” Cass said.
I thought back to that day. To what the woman had said. The words were so strange. “There was another name, though. Morgana . . . Margana? It’s not here in these numbers, but she mentioned it to me.”
“Huh,” Cass said, his head cocked. “Which, by the way, is ‘huh’ backward. But here’s the weird thing. Margana? Did she really say that? Because that’s anagram spelled backward!”
An anagram.
The person—the weird voice—had added the word to the end of her name. Why?
I wrote out the name NANCY EMELINK in big, block letters. Immediately Aly went to work. I could see her writing AMY CLENKINEN, LYNN MCANIKEE, and a bunch of others.
But I could not bring myself to pick up a pencil. The letters seemed to be dancing on the paper, rearranging themselves in my own mind.
I felt a sharp sting of cold at the base of my spine, running up to my neck.
“Stop,” I said.
Aly looked up. “Say what?”
“I said, stop!”
I grabbed the pencil from her. My hand shook as I separated out the letters that I was seeing.
“What?” Aly said. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Cass peered over my shoulder. “There are some letters left,” he said. “N, A, N, E . . . ”
They danced around in my head, too. And as they did, I felt the blood draining from my body to my toes. “Give me the phone,” I said, my voice dry and parched.
“Jack . . . ?” Aly said.
“Just give it to me!” As she handed it to me, I tapped the screen. The big eye was still staring up at me. The iris that got us into the secret room. The reason we were here, safe and sound.
I put my thumb and index finger on the screen and pinched in. A forehead and nose appeared. I pinched again—the eye zoomed downward and became part of an entire person. A woman in a uniform. She was standing in a group, with Brother Dimitrios, Yiorgos, and Stavros.
She was smiling. I knew the smile.
It can’t be.
I pinched outward again, slowly, enlarging the woman until only she filled the screen.
Welcome to have you back.
The head of the Massa had said that. She had used those very words. It hadn’t been easy to understand, and I’d been so angry I hadn’t really listened closely.
It was a phrase I’d heard only one person use.
My fingers slackened. The phone slipped out, falling to the floor. I tried to move my mouth to talk, but I couldn’t. The eye had belonged to the person in the photo. A person who couldn’t have been there. Someone who died many years ago.
“It’s Anne—the letters spell Anne McKinley . . .” I said.
I couldn’t bring myself to continue. But Cass and Aly were staring at me in total bafflement. The words needed to be said aloud. I swallowed hard.
“The head of the Massa,” I said, “is my mom.”
About the Author
PETER LERANGIS is the author of more than one hundred and sixty books, which have sold more than five million copies and been translated into thirty different languages. These include The Colossus Rises, book one in the New York Times bestselling series Seven Wonders, and two books in The 39 Clues series (The Sword Thief and The Viper’s Nest). Peter is a Harvard graduate with a degree in biochemistry and has run a marathon and gone rock climbing during an earthquake—though not on the same day. He lives in New York City, New York, with his wife, musician Tina deVaron, and their two sons, Nick and Joe. In his spare time, he likes to eat chocolate. Lots of it. Seriously, he loves chocolate.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
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Credits
Cover illustration © by Torstein Norstrand
Cover design by Joe Merkel
Copyright
Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon
Copyright © 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress catalog card number: 2013942765
ISBN 978-0-06-207043-2 (trade bdg.)
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EPUB Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062070456
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FIRST EDITION
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