by Anne Ursu
“Fine,” the Oracle said, sounding extremely annoyed. She shifted on the rock. “What’s your name?”
“Charlotte Mielswetzski.”
The Oracle nearly slipped off the rock. “Really!” she exclaimed.
“Um…yes.”
“You want a prophecy?” she said, leaning in, her eyes narrowing. “I’ll give you a prophecy. Get out of here.”
“What?”
“Get out. Now. Go back to your parents and your mortal life and forget everything.”
Charlotte’s stomach turned. “What happens if we don’t?” she said quietly.
The Oracle leveled her eyes at Charlotte. “We start all over again.”
She watched the Oracle for moment, waiting for her to explain. But the Oracle closed her mouth and would say nothing else.
Well, whatever she meant, it didn’t matter. They were not going to turn back. They had their quest. Charlotte set her jaw.
“We know the Flame is here,” Charlotte said. “Do you know where it is?”
“If you haven’t been chosen to find the Flame, you won’t find it,” muttered the Oracle, looking back at her nails. “If you have, you don’t need any help from me.”
“And you don’t know whether or not we’ve been chosen?”
“Don’t you?” said the Oracle, leveling her gaze at Charlotte.
“Is that all? You have nothing else to say to me?”
She raised her hands. “Don’t look at me. I’m not part of this.”
“Charlotte!” The voice seemed to emerge from the very rocks, and Charlotte nearly jumped off her perch.
But it was just Zee, standing by the wall below, eyes ablaze. “Come on,” he called in a whisper.
“Oh, boy,” she heard the Oracle say. “Here we go.” Charlotte turned to look at her, but she had disappeared.
Charlotte looked around. The school group was heading out now, and Mr. West was surveying the temple, looking for stragglers. She ducked behind one of the segments of wall, only to see the Oracle crouching down next to her. The Oracle blushed when she saw Charlotte and cleared her throat. “You can see me, can’t you,” she said. Charlotte nodded, and the Oracle mustered her dignity and walked off.
Rolling her eyes, Charlotte stayed in her crouch and waited until she couldn’t hear the students’ voices anymore. She peeked up over the rock and then, seeing the group disappearing up the hill, slipped out of the temple and went to join her cousin.
He was standing by the polygonal wall, brandishing the map, which he thrust at Charlotte when she appeared next to him. “Look,” he breathed.
The map had changed. Next to the illustration of the Temple of Apollo was a mark that had not been there before. A big letter E. Charlotte looked at Zee and remembered what he had mumbled in his sleep on the Prometheans’ jet.
“E marks the spot,” she said.
“What do you think?” Zee said.
There was only one place in the temple they hadn’t been. Charlotte pointed to the small opening in the temple’s foundation, and Zee nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said.
CHAPTER 22
Seek the Belly Button
WHILE GROUPS OF TOURISTS MOVED AROUND THEM, Charlotte and Zee hovered by the polygonal wall, waiting for their chance. A tour guide eyed them suspiciously, as if he knew full well what they were up to, and together the cousins moved to the wall and began studying it as if there were something exceptionally fascinating about it. They were so convincing that a French couple appeared next to them to see what they were looking at.
And then finally they saw their chance. There was a break in the stream, and the cousins moved as one to the wall. Charlotte pulled herself up and climbed in, followed closely by Zee.
It was dark. It was wet. It was stinky. As Charlotte jumped down from the perch onto the slimy floor, she felt herself being pulled back by the daylight behind her. It didn’t seem possible that such a place could exist in a world of so much sun.
Zee landed behind her with a thud. The cousins stood, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness. Not that there was much to see. They were in an underground chamber that seemed to be about half the length of the temple. The floor was littered with pieces of large stone brick. And that was all—there was no passageway, no cave, no Flame.
“It’s got to be in here somewhere,” Charlotte said. Her voice boomed through the chamber, and from the temple above they could hear someone yelp.
Oops.
The cousins moved slowly around the room, examining the walls, stepping in puddles, over rocks, and on squishy things Charlotte chose not to examine too carefully. At the far side was a large structure that proved to be the remnants of a staircase that led up to the temple. Muffled voices and footsteps emanated from the temple above, and narrow beams of light shone through the cracks in the walls. The stone walls were covered in two millennia worth of graffiti, from etchings to markers to spray paint. Charlotte frowned at some of the more recent additions—you’re under the Temple of Apollo and all you can think to write is D.B. + L.W. in a heart?
“Maybe there’s an E somewhere,” Charlotte whispered. Zee nodded in agreement, and they scanned the walls up and down. It took forever. People wrote all kinds of things in secret places, swear words and confessions and love notes and dirty poems, but no one, in the long history of the place, seemed to have scrawled the letter E.
“I’ll try the other side,” said Charlotte. She hurried across the room so quickly that she did not notice the three-foot-wide stone brick in front of her until she was tripping over it. Time slowed just enough for her to reflect that she did not want to fall on this particular ground…and then she landed in a pile of goop.
She growled, and her face scrunched up as the decay of the ages assaulted her nose. Her hand flew over to the offending stone for leverage, and that is how she saw it. As she pulled herself up, her eyes traveled over the side of the brick, where one very large capital E was etched quite clearly.
“Zee,” Charlotte whispered urgently. “Over here.” As her cousin made his way over, she began to scan the large stone mass, looking for whatever mechanism would open the trap door or whatever it was that would lead them to the Flame.
“You try,” she said, when Zee arrived. He crouched down and ran his hands over the brick, but found nothing. Charlotte couldn’t believe it—they were so close now. What were they missing? She let out a grunt and gave the stone a soft, chiding kick.
And it moved.
The cousins looked from the brick to each other. Zee leaned down to push it, and it slid so easily he lost his balance. “That was lighter than it had any right to be,” he muttered.
Charlotte thought of what the Oracle had said: If you were chosen to find it, you won’t need any help from me.
The brick had been covering a hole in the ground about the size of a large pothole. Crouching down, Charlotte peered into it and saw only blackness—no light, no flickering, nothing. She put her hand inside it and moved it around, looking for a ladder or stairs or something. But there was nothing. She remembered her dream.
“Zee,” she whispered. “I think we’re supposed to jump for it.”
“Can you tell how far down it is?”
“I think it’s far,” she admitted.
Zee nodded resolutely. “I’ll go first. If it’s all right, I’ll call for you. If not, well…”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Charlotte said. “I’ll go.” Her cousin’s gallantry always annoyed her enough to distract her from however terrifying the situation was.
But before she could react, Zee had jumped.
Charlotte froze. The world stopped. She was alone, entirely, perpetually. There was nothing at all, nothing but the dark hole and the silence Zee had left behind. It was as if the air he had displaced while jumping had solidified as a monument to Zee’s rash act, and it and Charlotte would remain there for the rest of time.
Shouldn’t she be hearing something? Should the whole universe h
ave gone quiet like this? Shouldn’t she be able to move? Shouldn’t she be hearing Zee calling up to her, telling her he’d landed safely, that it was okay to jump, that there was a large, soft mat down below and a whole herd of kittens waiting to greet them?
And then everything started again. The footsteps, the voices, the air—but still no Zee. Heart racing, Charlotte did the only thing she could think of doing: She jumped.
It was just like her dream, except without the comfort of knowing that you’d wake up in the morning. She plunged into absolute darkness and kept falling. The air was thin and cold and oddly empty, as if the entire world had vanished and all there was was this endless space. Down, down she fell, into silence, into cold, into deep, unending, unyielding blackness, her only companion the sensation of falling. She must be falling to the center of the Earth, beyond—
And then it was over. Like that. Charlotte never felt herself land, did not feel anything—at one moment she was falling and the next she was standing upright and still.
She stood there, sucking in the air, wondering how she had survived, wondering if she had survived. She could see nothing except a very dim, flickering light source off in the distance. Around her was a whooshing, pulsing sound, and she thought it was the Earth’s heartbeat. And there was something else, something very familiar, something very close, the sound of rapid breathing next to her—
Zee?
She looked wildly around and saw in the darkness the very still form of her cousin. He was not alone. In front of him was a tall, broad mass, and there was something long and thin and pointed that bridged the gap between it and Zee. Charlotte squinted at the form, trying to make it out, but there was no need, for just then there was a clanking and a creaking and a six-foot-tall bronze figure with a bucket-like head and a barrel body appeared in front of her. Slowly, smoothly, it lifted up a long bronze spear and held it against her neck.
The point pressed against her throat gently, but with a promise of menace, and Charlotte froze. She tried to glance at her cousin, but could not move enough to see him.
“We’re supposed to be here,” she squeaked. “We’ve been chosen. The girl sent us, the girl in the white dress….”
The bronze figures did not move. They were defenders, not attackers, and it seemed that as long as Charlotte and Zee didn’t try to go forward, they would not kill them. But the cousins could not exactly go back the way they had come.
“We’re supposed to be here,” she repeated, panicking. “Zee and I—”
The pressure on her neck lessened slightly.
“What? Zee and I? I’m Charlotte and this is Zee. Zachary. We’ve been sent—”
In perfect, eerie unison, the automatons lowered their spears and took three clunky steps backward. The creatures backed right into a shadowy wall and, as one, lifted their spears upward to form an arch, framing a passageway Charlotte just now could see in the flickering light.
Rubbing her throat, Charlotte looked at her cousin.
“Friendly,” Zee said in a tight voice.
“Come on,” Charlotte murmured. “Let’s go.”
Their way was clear. The fire beckoned them through the long passageway, just like in their dreams. They arrived in a cave chamber, in the center of which flickered a fire—small, but dazzlingly bright. Shadows danced against the wall amid drawings that seemed to move in the firelight. Barely able to breathe, Charlotte let her eyes pass over the walls until she saw the tall form of Prometheus.
There was nothing to say. They had arrived. They had done it. Together, Charlotte and Zee stepped toward the fire, the silence of the ages embracing them. And then, suddenly, Charlotte turned to her cousin. “Um, how do we take a fire, anyway?”
Zee frowned at her. “Um, I guess a log or something? We could make a torch. Or—” Something seemed to strike him. “Or,” he said, reaching into his bag, “I wonder…”
Zee produced the small silver lighter that had come in the package with the map. Charlotte stared at it with wide eyes.
“How…?”
Zee went over to the Flame, wielding the lighter. He flipped the switch and the top half of it opened, revealing a small wick.
“Won’t it go out when you close it?” Charlotte whispered. Fires need oxygen—she had paid some attention in science. One day.
“I don’t know,” said Zee, bending down and holding the open lighter out to the Flame. “But we’ll just take a bit, and if it doesn’t work—oh!” A little bit of fire had danced onto the wick and Zee closed the top of the lighter. Just as he did, the entire room went dark.
Silence. Charlotte stared at the spot where the ancient Flame of Prometheus used to be. A low groan came from Zee, and he muttered, “Oh, brilliant, we killed it.”
“Open it,” Charlotte urged, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. She didn’t particularly want to be responsible for destroying the last hope of humankind.
But then a flicker of light appeared on Zee’s face, and relief washed over Charlotte. He closed the lighter again, then flicked the switch, and the Promethean Flame sparked up, just like any ordinary lighter. In the dim light Charlotte could see Zee shaking his head.
“What?” she asked. “You didn’t kill it!”
“It’s too easy, isn’t it?” he said.
“What was easy? We fell about six thousand miles and were attacked by Bozo and Buckethead!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think this will work? We put this in the hearth, knowledge of the gods spreads among humanity, and they all magically rise up? Won’t there be chaos?”
“It would serve them right,” Charlotte said, determination swelling inside her. “They hid themselves from humans because we were too much of a bother. They’re supposed to be our gods. They have the ability to help people, and instead they just sit around on fancy yachts and watch surfers getting eaten by sharks. They deserve this. Anyway, knowledge is power, right? Mr. Metos told us the truth, and look at us! We’re marching up Mount Olympus to our certain deaths!”
A grim laugh emanated from Zee.
As Charlotte spoke the words, their import washed over her. She could not put off worrying about it anymore. They had the Flame; it illuminated the path before them, up to Olympus, up to the hearth. Except for one problem.
“Zee, how are we supposed to get there? Do we just find Mount Olympus and start climbing? Do we stop at Socrates’ Suicidal Mission Mountain Supply and suit up?”
The people who lived next door to the Mielswetzskis were always going off camping and mountain climbing and the like, and their garage was filled with all sorts of strange-looking equipment. It seemed to her an insane way to pass the time. If mountains wanted to be climbed, they wouldn’t be so high up.
Zee looked around uncomfortably. “I think I know how. I mean…I don’t know how. But I have an idea. It was something in the dream. Did the girl ever say anything to you about, well, a belly button?” He grimaced as he said the words.
“A…what?”
“I don’t know if it was just something she said once. I was in the room—this room—and then she said, ‘Seek the belly button.’”
Charlotte remembered Zee talking to himself on the plane; she should have known then that he had completely lost his mind. “So, in other words, I stare at my belly button and then Mount Olympus pops out? Don’t you think I would have noticed by now?”
Zee did not answer, and with a heavy sigh, Charlotte sat down on the hard ground. Another strange clue, another mystery, another struggle. It was the metaphor made perfectly true—they had another mountain to climb. Except they had to find the mountain first.
So—find the mountain they would. Charlotte pulled out her guidebook and searched the index. Surely someone had identified where Mount Olympus was supposed to be. They would go back to Sir Laurence’s driver and drive around, climbing every single mountain in Greece if they had to. Though she would really prefer not to.
“Well,” she said to Zee, “there is a Mount Oly
mpus. It’s in northern Greece. And from Delphi, that’s—” She flipped back to the Delphi pages and then inhaled sharply. She looked up at her cousin. “Zee,” she whispered. “I found the belly button.”
There was the matter of extricating themselves from the bowels of the Earth. Whoever had constructed the chamber was not, apparently, so big on exit strategies. Charlotte and Zee walked around the dark chamber, looking for a magic ancient Greek elevator, with no luck. Then, rather nervous to be encountering the robot twins again, they headed back the way they had come, Zee holding up the lighter to guide their way.
But when they reached the antechamber, they saw no sign of their bronze friends. What they did see, in the wall directly opposite the passageway from which they had emerged, was an industrial-looking steel door. So, with a nod to each other, the cousins went through.
They found themselves standing on the clearing of the mountain just below the Sanctuary of Apollo. They were in front of a small nondescript storage shack with a heavy steel door and a sign in Greek that Charlotte was pretty sure read NO ADMITTANCE.
“We couldn’t have gone in that way?” she grumbled.
They turned away from the Sanctuary and followed a path that curved around the mountain and led to their destination: the Museum of Delphi.
They found themselves in front of a modern-looking building made of white stone bricks. In front of the museum was a large, paved clearing filled with tourists. Zee nudged Charlotte and pointed up ahead where Mr. West, Rosina, and the school group were moving into the museum. The group had suffered from some serious attrition since they’d left them at the Temple of Apollo, and it seemed there were probably more students on the bus than off at this point.
“Maybe you should put that away,” Charlotte whispered.
Zee looked at his hands. He was still holding the lighter clenched in his fist. But before he could, a young man sidled up to them and nodded toward Zee’s hand. “Hey, man,” he asked in a thick, undefinable accent, “can I have a light?”
A panicked look crossed Zee’s face, and Charlotte opened her mouth to explain that the lighter did not work, when Zee said, “Uh…I don’t speak English!”