The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  I don’t answer.

  “Is she one of them, Josh? From Ek Naab? I bet she is. Is she your betrothed? Have they matched you up like a pair of racehorses?”

  Ollie’s taunts are almost more than I can bear.

  I find my voice. “You can’t make me get the Adaptor out of my pocket. And you can’t touch it yourself, can you? Maybe there isn’t enough to kill you, Ollie, but even a whiff of that gas will make you pretty sick. I know; I’ve seen what it can do.”

  Neither Priya nor Ollie says anything. There’s tension in the air, like a class waiting for the school bell.

  I continue. “If you think I’m getting back into that chimney, you’re out of your mind. You’re not getting the Adaptor back. You’ll have to kill me first.”

  Priya tightens her hold, twisting so hard that a bolt of pure agony zaps through my shoulder. I bite my tongue, trying not to let them see how much it hurts.

  “He’s got a point,” Priya says to Ollie. “What are we going to do? I don’t even think we could climb back up to the chimney. Not without gear – the walls of this chamber are too smooth. Seriously, Ollie, I don’t know how to get out of here – do you?”

  I look at Ollie. “So ‘Ollie Dotrice’ is your real name?”

  She gazes back, impassive. “The ‘Ollie’ part is.”

  “Who are you? All of you, I mean. Are you really the Sect of Huracan?”

  “Well, aren’t you the clever one?”

  “What’s all this about? What’s down there? What were those sarcophagus things?”

  “Oh, please. You surely don’t think I’m going to fill in the gaps for you. . .?”

  I keep going. “What have you got against the people in Ek Naab?”

  This time, Ollie seems irritated enough to answer. “Those people in Ek Naab are not just some charming, Yucatec-speaking Mexicans. They’re not the remains of the Mayan civilization. And they’re not your friends. Stop thinking of them that way. If you had any idea what they’ve done in their history. . . Why do you think there are so few Bakabs in the city?”

  I gape, speechless. How can Ollie know so much about Ek Naab?

  “Do the sums, Josh. Every male born to a Bakab is a Bakab since Ek Naab was founded. They should be ten-a-penny. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Of course you don’t. You haven’t a clue.”

  Everything Ollie is saying confuses me further. I struggle to understand, but the truth is that I can’t even grasp the most basic part of this.

  Why?

  “Why, Ollie? Why are you doing this?”

  “I already told you; don’t you ever listen? It’s a mistake to save the world from the effects of the superwave.”

  “Things like this come along,” Priya says. “And it’s survival of the fittest.”

  “I just don’t understand you. How can you say that?”

  Ollie gives a scornful laugh. “Oh, what do you know? You’ve wasted most of your life being brainwashed by TV and computer games.”

  “What, then?” I yell. “We should just all shut up, wait for 2012 and just stand by while civilization crumbles, while billions of people die?”

  “What’s the alternative? You think we can go on like this indefinitely . . . everyone on the planet living to consume? Using up all the natural resources, poisoning the planet, driving every other species to extinction?”

  I hardly even know what to say to her. “I thought you were the most amazing girl I’d ever met. But you’re not. You’re insane.”

  Priya rewards that remark with a vicious twist of my arm. I can’t help yelling.

  Ollie sighs. “See how confused you are? We love the planet, not just the human part of it.”

  “How did you get so two-faced?”

  “You belong with us, Josh. Not with them.”

  “Are you trying to persuade me?” I ask. “Cos you’re not doing a very good job.”

  “All the Bakabs belong with us. But stop all this stuff about 2012.”

  “We’ll never stop. That’s what Ek Naab is for!”

  Ollie shouts, “And it’s wrong!”

  Our last two statements echo around the cave, jolting my nerves even further.

  Ollie sighs. It sounds as though it comes from the depths of her soul. Her voice softens. “Josh. Please come with us.”

  “Who is that ‘Professor’ woman? She your mother?”

  “What?” Ollie seems puzzled, suddenly thrown. “No . . . she’s. . .”

  I interrupt. “She wants to use me for some kind of medical experiment. That’s the kind of thing you do out of ‘love of the planet’, is it? Using innocent people for lethal experiments?”

  For the first time, I see that Ollie is surprised. Astonished, definitely. Even dismayed.

  “She . . . she must know you’ll probably survive. . .”

  “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t care. Listen. I’m not sure what this ‘Revival Chamber’ is or what it does,” I tell her. I pronounce my words slowly, spelling it out. “But I know you need the Adaptor to activate it. Well, you’re not getting it. Ever.”

  In the distance, there begins a faint sound, from deep within one of the tunnels. We’re silent, tense. Listening.

  Something’s coming towards us – something huge, disturbing all the air around us. Something fast.

  At first it’s just a tremor in the stillness. A second later, I can put a name to the sound. Fluttering. Like hundreds of birds with delicate wings. A dark cloud belches up from inside the tunnel. The cave fills with shadows. Caught in the edges of the torchlight, I see the flicker of hundreds of wings. The air is thick with the creatures, flapping in our faces, against our skin, tangling in our hair.

  Not birds – moths. Huge, each wing the size of my hand. And pink. Like strawberries in cream.

  Priya’s grip loosens the second a moth lands on her mask. She must have a thing about bugs because she shrieks like a smoke alarm, batting the things away with her fists.

  I wriggle free and drop to the ground, crawling on my stomach. Most of the moths flap at least a foot above me. I glance up to see Ollie completely engulfed in the creatures. She’s calmer than Priya; no screaming from Ollie. Her energy goes into getting the moths off her face and hair. The Ziploc bag falls on the floor next to Ollie’s feet. As I reach out to grab it, a huge moth lands on the back of my head. Hook-like insect feet settle into my hair, getting a nice grip.

  It’s kind of gross, but I’m not too freaked out.

  I ignore it and hunt for the opening of Ixchel’s tunnel. There’s just enough torchlight, even if the beam is erratic, darting around from Ollie’s flailing hand.

  Once I’m in the tunnel, I stand up, kicking the last few moths away. My moth-hat is more stubborn – I have to rip it off. I don’t stop to look back. Priya and Ollie sound more vexed by the second. I stumble onward, in the fading light, deeper into the tunnel. In a few more seconds the tunnel turns away from the cave. I have to walk almost totally blind. My left hand fumbles against the wall; my right hand is outstretched. I pause to delve for the Adaptor in my back pocket, and plant it inside Ollie’s plastic bag. The bag seals with a satisfying click. I bury it deep in my jeans pocket and pull my shirt down over it.

  I keep walking, as fast as I can. The sounds of Priya and Ollie battling giant moths fades. In the blackness, I close my eyes. It’s actually less scary than walking along with eyes wide open, filled with nothing.

  I wonder how far Ixchel’s got by now. Will I ever get out of here? People have got lost in cave systems and never been seen again.

  I turn a few more corners, and then stop. About twenty metres ahead, there’s a light, pointing down.

  Ixchel. She beams the light straight at me.

  I yell, “Not like that! It’s in my eyes!”

  Ixchel directs the beam on to the ceiling. I sprint towards her.

  “You waited!”

  She gives a rushed smile. “Of course, dummy. There
’s a fork in the tunnel. Which way?”

  Remembering Blanco Vigores’s words, I tell her, “Left, of course. And you can take off the mask. I’ve wrapped up that Adaptor thing. It’s safe now.”

  Ixchel insists that I show her. Then she removes the mask and puts it into her sisal backpack.

  We jog ahead for what seems like several hundred metres. To save energy, we don’t talk. The tunnel twists and turns so much that it’s easy to lose track, but I have the sensation that we’re going downhill again.

  There’s no sign of anyone in pursuit. We come to another fork, and again we take the left. It’s another fifty metres before the next fork.

  “Left again?” she says, slightly breathless.

  “Why not?”

  Travelling this way, we spend another ten minutes getting nowhere. Or maybe it’s somewhere, but the surroundings don’t change. Our jogging slows to a stroll. Neither of us says a thing. I have the strange sensation that we’re burrowing into the rock, as though it were opening before us, like the Red Sea with Moses.

  Eventually we both stop.

  “This is no good,” she says.

  “It isn’t,” I agree.

  “You want to go back?”

  “Where, to that last turning?”

  “Yes.”

  “And take the other tunnel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a good plan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ll get lost.”

  “We are lost.”

  I shake my head. “No. We don’t know where we are right now, but we do know how to get back. The second we start taking anything but left turns, we’ll be lost.”

  “Why left?”

  I sigh. “Just because.”

  “I think you could be wrong, always with left.”

  “I could be, yeah. But a wrong turn in a labyrinth only leads to a dead end. We haven’t come to one of those yet.”

  “What makes you think we’re in a maze?”

  “I didn’t say we were.”

  Ixchel sounds irritated. “Yes, you did.”

  “I said labyrinth. There’s only one path through a labyrinth. It’s the maze that has more than one way through.”

  “Oh, I get it – you’re showing off. Great timing, by the way.”

  “Hey, I’ve played a lot of computer games. I know how to do labyrinths, OK?”

  Except that this isn’t quite like a game: no secret doors, hidden weapons or monsters. Just tunnel, tunnel and more tunnel.

  My bruises begin to throb. I lean against the wall for a second, wincing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just got beaten up by that woman, in case you missed that.”

  “You didn’t get totally beaten. You were doing OK there. For a minute or so.”

  I try to ease out the ache. “Yeah, right.”

  “Are you OK?”

  I stand up slowly, flex muscles in my back and neck. “I will be. Let’s keep going.”

  Ixchel is quiet for a several minutes. Then she pipes up. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. . . Back in Veracruz, you said that the Ix Codex is written in English. You pretended you were joking, but . . . I don’t think you really were.”

  I’m silent for a while. “Guess you’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve worked out that you know a lot, lot more than you’re letting on. I bet you even know what that room is for, the one with the sarcophagi. It’s the Revival Chamber, isn’t it – the Professor mentioned it . . . and you said something about it to that Ollie girl.”

  Truthfully, I say, “I don’t know what the Revival Chamber does.”

  Because having a theory isn’t the same as knowing the answer. . .

  “But, Josh, how do you even know about it?”

  I breathe a heavy sigh. “If I told you. . .”

  “What? Don’t you trust me?”

  I stop, and so does she. For a second, we look straight into each other’s eyes.

  “I do trust you,” I admit. “But there are things I’m not allowed to talk about.”

  “Like the codex?”

  “That’s one of them.”

  Ixchel rolls her eyes. “I think you like being all mysterious.”

  “I don’t.”

  She picks up her pace. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna tell me.”

  We walk in silence for another ten minutes, then another ten, and another, and another. We come to an opening. As we step through, Ixchel’s torch picks out the most incredible sight.

  For as far as we can see in the low cave, rock drips from the ceiling, frozen in time, hundreds upon hundreds of delicate stalactites, some no thicker than a pencil, coiled like corkscrews, twisted and torn, some vertical, beaded, glistening in the light beam, pearl-white, like coral. It’s like a fairy kingdom: an upside-down, fantasy vision of a miniature New York.

  “What the heck is this. . .?”

  Ixchel touches what looks like a giant hydra with her finger. “Amazing . . . helictites. I’ve read about them. I didn’t know there were any so near to Ek Naab.”

  “You still think we’re near Ek Naab?”

  She turns to me. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “What?”

  “We’re in the Depths. Under Ek Naab.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Ixchel nods. “Those giant moths, they came flying right past me. Just like bats out of hell. Did you see their colour? Pink!”

  “So. . .?”

  “The stories about the Depths always mention pools of pink water. It has some kind of red algae.”

  “You think the moths drink that water?”

  Ixchel shrugs. “What else? That stuff must turn their wings pink. Like with flamingos.”

  I stare at the ceiling of the cave. It’s astonishing. As well as helictites, there are also stalagmites, rising from the ground like miniature Leaning Towers of Pisa. There’s something almost organic about their texture. They glisten with moisture, like the rippling muscles of a bodybuilder.

  They take some navigating; we make slow progress through the cave. There’s only one way out. A dark hole gapes ahead of us. Amongst the stalagmites and helictites, the torch doesn’t reveal much of what’s ahead. We don’t see the blockage in the tunnel until I almost trip over it. I glance down just as my foot thuds against it.

  A body. A human skeleton – wrapped in the ragged remnants of clothes.

  Instinctively, we both leap backwards. I don’t know what’s stronger, the shock or the revulsion.

  The instant I recover, I’m fascinated. It’s the first real skeleton I’ve seen. The tattered clothes look like a shirt tied loosely at the waist, and trousers.

  They look horribly familiar.

  Ixchel crouches down, touches the hem of the shirt. She lifts it, examines the torso.

  “This person was from Ek Naab. Look at the fabric – linen. We still use this weave, too.”

  I look closely at Ixchel’s face. She’s thoughtful, not disgusted. “There’s no sign of injury,” she says. “This person might have died of hunger, for all we know.”

  I ask, “Has anyone gone missing recently?”

  Ixchel doesn’t reply. She steps over the body and looks at it from the other side.

  “You still want to keep going left?” Ixchel says.

  “You want to go back?”

  “I think maybe we should.”

  I pause. Ixchel actually sounds nervous. I say, “If we go back, they might be there.”

  Ixchel nods. “Yeah. But if we go deeper, who knows what we’ll find?”

  “Maybe we’ll find the other way into Ek Naab. We know there is one.”

  “You’re so sure?” Ixchel says.

  I point to the skeleton. “How else do you explain him?”

  “Chances are we’ll never find it.”

  “No, we should keep going,” I insist. “Until we come to a dead end; then we go back. That’s the rule of the labyrinth.”
r />   Ixchel sighs. “All right.”

  “We have to have a system.”

  “OK.”