Ever since the last time Peter, Wendy, and John had gone into the labyrinth, the changes to Marlowe had become impossible to ignore. Strangely enough, the students and faculty managed to do just that. Sure, there were cleanup crews dispatched, air purifiers installed, plumbing inspected, pest control called, and hallways fumigated. But in the end, no one acknowledged that this was all one thing — a single thread of changes that were very much related to one another. No one thought that the sadness they felt when they entered the grounds — now just a little grayer, drearier — had anything to do with the school itself.
This morning, Wendy had walked in on four faculty members marveling at a classroom that was filled — filled — with moths and flies. They were everywhere, inhabiting every nook, covering every surface, leaving no air for breathing and no ground for walking. No teacher could explain it. They all just stood back and watched. The assistant principal shook her head and said, “It’s an old, historic school. There are quirks with ancient buildings like this. Comes with the territory.” And weirder still, the new school nurse stepped right into the middle of it, as if she didn’t mind, and let the moths cover her for a second before stepping back and agreeing with the assistant principal. And so they had left it, the entire buzzing, fluttering mess. Wendy stayed a bit longer to watch, because this was not the kind of insect swarm you see every day. Peter had said that the moths were spies. . . . The darkness from below was watching them.
Peter and Wendy walked through the halls, trying to figure out what to do about Simon, while John followed behind with one of the LBs, a geeky-looking one that was probably the Marlowe-branch webmaster, trying to convince the guy to add him to the text-message group list, and occasionally chiming in on Peter and Wendy’s conversation.
“We’re so close,” said Peter. “If we just figure out the last two, then who cares about getting in trouble or losing my job?”
“Uh,” said John, “you might not care, but we still have a couple of more years here.”
“Simon won’t tell,” said Wendy. “He’ll work his butt off to get the other bonedust first, but he won’t tell. If Dad finds out about any of this, Simon’ll lose all leverage.”
Peter was lost in thought. He didn’t seem to be listening, which made Wendy mad and anxious. She wasn’t used to these erratic feelings. She was usually very levelheaded. She wished things with Peter could be clearer and that she wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth between elation and rage.
“Enough of this crap,” Peter finally said. “Time to go after the Nubian.”
John perked up. “What Nubian?” he asked excitedly.
“The fourth legend,” said Peter.
“I say it’s a desert,” said the LB, never taking his eyes off his phone.
John’s eyes were shining, and his mind was already working full time. “Nubian, huh?” he said, though neither he nor Wendy knew the fourth legend. “Then I bet it’s someplace with horses. Nubians were known for horse skills. . . .”
“Nah,” the LB said. “What about a battlefield? They were warriors.”
John jumped in, clearly feeling competitive with this fellow nerd who had the privilege of being an LB, while he was still a nobody. “An army barracks!” John countered.
“I’ve tried all those,” said Peter. “Hey, you,” he said to the LB, not bothering even with a nickname. “Get me a smoothie.”
The boy rushed off to the dining hall. “How did he get to be an LB?” John asked.
“He’s on my hall,” said Peter with a laugh. “Plus, he can hack into anything. I don’t know how I ever lived without one of him . . . oh, and he does whatever I say.” Peter handed John a five and said, “Forgot to ask for a bag of chips.”
Wendy could see John seething and considering at the same time. Poor kid. He really wanted to be an LB, but he obviously hated doing anything for Peter. He finally settled on taking the money and showing his contempt by huffing and stomping after the webmaster to the dining hall.
When Peter reached for Wendy’s hand, she felt her stomach tighten. She knew Peter was a good person, but sometimes his selfishness made her worry. She remembered when they were outside the school before Simon’s lecture on Harere, when Peter had almost admitted to letting someone die. She shook the thought from her head. For the first time ever, walking through her own school frightened her. Every two minutes, she felt chills, as if someone was running cold fingers up and down her back. More than anything, she sensed a lingering evil here.
“Don’t be scared,” Peter said when Wendy shuddered.
“I’m not,” said Wendy a little too quickly.
A tiny smile curled Peter’s lips, and he interlaced his fingers with hers. Out of nowhere he said, “Wendy, what if there were enough for two?”
“Huh?” she said, and then wished she had said something more graceful.
He leaned close to her and whispered, as if he thought someone else were listening, “If there were enough for two, I’d share it with you. I’d let you have half the bonedust, and then neither one of us would ever grow old.”
Wendy’s heart started to beat faster. What he was inviting her to do was huge. It wasn’t just a gift, a little present you give to any random girl. He was offering her an eternity. He might go away, run to the far reaches of the world, meet a hundred different girls, live a dozen different lives, but in seventy or eighty years, she’d be his oldest friend. She stopped walking. Despite the thumping of her heart, she wasn’t sure what she would do if given this chance. Living forever wasn’t necessarily a blessing to Wendy. She looked forward to growing up, even to growing old.
Suddenly Connor appeared at the other end of the corridor. Wendy was so taken off guard that she didn’t realize she was still holding Peter’s hand. But Peter didn’t let go.
“I can’t believe you,” Connor said, his voice more high-pitched than usual, his eyes darting. “What’s this?”
Wendy was dumbstruck. She couldn’t tell if Connor’s anger was genuine or caused by the school. He stared at Peter, his eyes angry and sad. “Aren’t you the RA?”
“No, Connor . . .” Wendy began.
“No, what?” he said. “No, you’re not one half of a statutory?”
Wendy wasn’t sure who moved first, but in the next second, three things happened almost at once: Peter dropped Wendy’s hand. Connor lunged toward Peter and shoved him against a locker. John reappeared with the webmaster and, seeing Peter in the middle of a beat-down, made his own contribution by drinking Peter’s smoothie.
Wendy tried to pull Connor off, but she just got shoved out of the way. Peter didn’t need help anyway. He kneed Connor in the stomach, then pulled back and punched him in the jaw, just as Professor Darling and two other teachers came running down the hall in time to witness the massive violation of the resident adviser code.
Peter was fired on the spot.
Wendy was dumped faster than she could say “Nothing happened.” Connor just said, “We’re through,” and walked away.
Professor Darling glared at his children, shooting them looks that said Did I not tell you he was trouble?
John just stood there, sipping a smoothie, watching Connor walk off as if nothing had happened, probably wondering if he was still invited to lift weights tomorrow after school.
Simon sat at his desk and, for the hundredth time since losing the Garosh bone, thought about how he could get the book away from the Darling kids without giving away what he knew. He could not let that kook Darling get credit for such a discovery (which Simon had known all along to be real). “I am going to win the freakin’ Nobel Prize. Forget it, they’re going to rename it and give Mr. Nobel the Grin Prize.”
Once he had discovered that the legends were real, Simon had gone on a research rampage. He had perused all of Darling’s published works and even thumbed through several of Darling’s source materials — works that until now Simon had dismissed as garbage. He had camped out at the Egyptology Library with a sleeping bag and a
thermos of coffee, bribing the guard not to kick him out at closing time. He read and reread all the seminal works on the Book of Gates, and even some of the obsolete ones, until finally he had found something. It was no more than a footnote in a dusty old volume from a hundred years ago. A book that had been tucked away in the last row of the back shelf, unread for decades. The footnote alluded to an old story about a portal and referred the reader to yet another volume, which Simon had to crawl through the cobwebbed stacks to find. But finally, he had it. He translated it and committed it to memory. The words were vague, but enough.
The next day, he was back at the library, rereading all the obscure books he could find. He now understood the connection between the guardians and the five mummies of Elan’s cursed line. He quickly linked the earthworm to Nailah, never admitting to himself that he had been wrong when he scribbled insults all over Professor Darling’s notes. For days, Simon researched. He read about Garosh and the Bedouins, Elan and his quest, and all the details surrounding their lineage. He tracked the generations using obscure genealogical records, filling in the holes from Elan to Garosh to Harere and beyond. He even made rough blueprints of the school, attempting to tie every little nook to its twisted underworld twin. Soon, he thought, he would figure out how to cross the barrier between the overworld and the underworld. And then those stupid kids could do nothing to stop the up-and-coming scholar from getting his due.
“After leading his basketball team to a state championship, setting national records at three different golf courses, and anchoring the 4 × 200 m butterfly relay earlier today, Connor Wirth has got to be the favorite for this race, even considering the other two excellent swimmers on his team. Connor scoops some of the water over his arms to warm up his muscles, gets a pat on the back from his teammate, and climbs onto his starting block. The gun sounds and they’re off. Teammate Christian Faust gets a HUGE dive off the block. Wirth seems to stumble. His kick seems off, a cramp maybe? I think . . . I think Wirth is suffering some kind of injury. His rhythm is completely off. He seems to be flailing. Faust is on pace to shatter the school record, held by none other than the struggling Wirth. Something must be wrong. Wirth has put up his arm for assistance. He can’t even tread water. He’s sinking. I’ve never seen anything like it. The best swimmer in the state is drowning.”
In the innermost depths of her chamber, the Dark Lady fumed. Her home had been breached, and now the boy had three of the five immortal bones. It would no longer be so easy to kill him. Now he had the power to heal, the power to fortify his mortal body. He must be captured. He must be stopped. He is nearly there. . . .
She stood in the lowest part of the underworld, the very tip of the pyramid, the deepest part of the abyss. She was covered by a cloud of her companions, her minions, her eyes. They whizzed around her as in a mist, making her seem like a giantess made of black billowing specks. And this is what she was. This was her natural state. She was their mistress. Lord of all flies, mother of all the creeping, buzzing things of the world. She lifted her shoulders, and the insects gave her strength. When she bent her weary body to cough, they propped her up and soothed her throat.
As for the meddlesome children above, the darkness would draw them in. She had been a nanny, after all, before she was ever a nurse. She would distract them with their own petty problems — infatuation and obsession and the longing for validation. She loved these weaknesses most of all, and she would use them to turn the children’s focus from the quest. If that failed, she would fool them with tricks of the eye. Then, if they persisted, she would guide them through the murky depths, to the place where she lived alone — all the way to the heart of the underworld maze. It would not be enough to kill them then. If they persisted in disturbing her slumber, she would bring them deep into the underworld and take back the bones that had been lost. And so the dark nurse schemed. . . .
Wendy stood breathless in front of the boys’ dorm building. Am I hallucinating? She had come to visit Peter as he packed his dorm room to leave Marlowe for good. After the incident with Connor, Wendy had spent hours obsessing about their relationship. Now that she was officially single, she analyzed everything Peter had said. She thought about Tina, who had known Peter for so much longer. She just had to know where things stood with Peter.
But now, as she stood in front of the boys’ dorm, she was sure the paranoia was getting to her, because there wasn’t just one but two black Eyes of Ra singed into the door frames leading into Peter’s hallway. “Is there an open gate here?” she muttered aloud. Should she avoid going in? But she wanted to see Peter. And besides, why would there be an open portal here, in Peter’s (soon to be ex-) hall?
“What gate?” said someone from behind her.
Wendy jumped a foot and screamed at the unexpected voice over her shoulder.
“Sorry.” Wendy turned and saw that she had startled the school nurse, whose hand was hovering just over her chest. “I’m jumpy today.”
The nurse was wearing an eye patch. “Are you OK?” Wendy asked.
“Yes.” The nurse smiled and touched the patch. “Just an infection. Were you talking to yourself, dear?”
Wendy laughed nervously. The way the nurse said dear was nice, like a mother or a confidante. “No . . . I mean, yes . . . I’m here to see my boyfriend.”
“You mean Connor?”
Wendy was surprised that the nurse knew about her love life. She scrunched her brow, and the nurse smiled and said, “You hear things around here.” Then she looked away and took out her handkerchief and wiped her forehead. She coughed once while averting her eye and then looked at Wendy again, waiting.
“Right,” said Wendy. “I’m here to see Peter.”
“Peter?” The nurse raised an eyebrow. “Ooooh . . . I heard about what happened, dear.” Then she leaned in like a practiced gossip and said, “I suppose he won’t be moving far.”
“What do you mean?” Wendy asked.
The nurse shrugged. “He can just bunk with his Spanish friend, like he always does.”
Professor Darling kept pushing his glasses farther and farther up the bridge of his nose. Wendy knew the students were waiting anxiously, hoping that he wouldn’t call them out on the fact that none of them had gone to see the Egyptian exhibit. She was livid and full of unanswered questions. What did the nurse mean when she said Peter could bunk with Tina? Peter was supposed to be hers . . . or so she thought. She could barely focus her attention on the class or on her father or on the worrisome fact that Simon had been eerily quiet about the Garosh bone incident, which meant that he was up to something.
Wendy was desperate to talk to Peter alone, but Peter, now fired, was reduced to lurking in the background and getting his information through Tina and the Lost Boys. Wendy’s eyes darted from where Peter was hiding, on the other side of a windowsill, to the classroom door. Every passing custodian made her jump at the thought that a faculty member could storm in any minute now, followed by police looking for Peter (and Wendy, too, since she had helped him sneak back onto campus). Wendy glanced at her brother. John had been awfully quiet since the breakup with Connor. He was obviously taking it hard — not that he ever thought Connor was his best friend or anything. But even the occasional charity invitation was better than total friendlessness. Wendy pressed her fingers to her temple. She didn’t think she could handle all this at once.
Simon sat nervously in the corner, but he was always nervous, along with nosy, narcissistic, and nettlesome. Since losing his precious artifact, he had been humiliated and had promised himself that he would unlock the labyrinth no matter what. He had drawn up a plan. In fact, he had drawn out maps and charts and all kinds of schematics during his off-hours. On the margins of his plan, there were doodles of a stick figure version of himself dancing on a pile of money. And in a few other doodles, his head was poking out of a poorly drawn biplane as he shot down the Red Baron with photon torpedoes. The plan itself was nothing more than a diary of how he had John wrapped around his litt
le finger, and that he could use this “mole” to extract further information about the book. What more did he need? The schematics were mostly of the huge house/arcade he was going to build after he became the richest Egyptologist ever.
When the bell rang and it was time to start class, Professor Darling walked to his podium. He was still staring off into a distance as he flipped to the right page in his workbook. Wendy knew that whatever was occupying his mind, it wasn’t as simple as the success of the exhibit. To the outside world, the exhibit was going great. The governor’s office had even asked the professor to attend a gala, where they would present him with some kind of award. Whatever was bothering her dad, thought Wendy, it had to be big. Not many things could turn the jolly professor to such brooding behavior.
“Hey, Professor,” said Marla from the back of the class. The professor was flipping the pages while staring out the window with a far-gone look on his face. “What’s the story?”
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