“Beg your pardon?” came Professor Bhegad’s voice from behind us.
Cass immediately clammed up. I was dying to hear about his plan, but not in full earshot of the old professor.
Torquin was leading the group at a breakneck pace, clomping through the bushes like an elephant on steroids. He used his machete, but he didn’t need to. The guy was a human path maker. Especially when he was angry about working on his day off.
Behind him were three of the meanest, biggest guards I’d ever met in the Karai Institute. Guys I recognized from the heliport when I landed after my escape attempt. One was missing teeth, the second was missing a finger, and the third was missing his hair.
Bhegad’s tweed blazer had large circular sweat stains that grew like an incoming tide. “Torquin!” he called ahead, “are you sure this is the path to the Wenders tobacco site?”
Torquin grunted something that could have been either yes or no. None of the other three seemed to have an opinion.
“Tobacco site?” I asked.
“The Onyxians searched fanatically for signs of entry to their maze,” Bhegad replied. “They found a pile of pipe tobacco leaves that matched Wenders’s favorite brand, near a rock wall. Although the wall was solid, they marked the place for future reference. Site One. There were other sites, too—”
“Guys, we need to pick up the pace,” Aly urged. “Torquin and his goons are making tracks.”
The men were way ahead of us, stepping high and fast as if on military training exercises. “Confound it, Torquin, slow down!” Bhegad shouted.
“Go slower is standing still!” Torquin’s voice echoed. “Hurry. Big distance. North side of mountain!”
As we trudged on, the heat seemed to be radiating up from the ground in waves. My clothes were soaked through and my head was throbbing. But we were circling the northern side of the mountain now, and that meant we would soon be in the shadow.
Which dropped the temperature to a breezy ninety-one degrees or so.
I wiped sweat away from my eye as we walked into a clearing. The sun was behind the mountain now, and a scraggly patch of dirt led to a rock wall at its base. Torquin and his men were out of sight, and Professor Bhegad stopped, holding on to a tree. “Please…” he said. “Someone tell those ruffians…to wait…”
“We don’t need to,” Cass said. “They walked past the site. We’re here.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“From one of the maps I saw in the office. I remember a marking—WTS. I’m guessing Wenders Tobacco Site?” Cass pointed to a spot on the rock wall. “It’s right there.”
Cass, Aly, and I ran toward the wall. It was covered with vines. We began ripping down as much as we could. I looked for some sign of an entrance—a suspicious crack, a fingerhold, a carving…
“Stand aside!” Torquin’s voice boomed.
He and his three men were marching back, faces flushed with embarrassment. Using his machete, Torquin began swiping away more vegetation, taking down huge clumps of vines as the others joined in.
“My heroes,” Aly murmured drily.
Torquin turned toward us, his chest heaving. “Is rock. No entrance. Go to Site Two.”
“I’ll be the one who gives marching orders,” Bhegad said. “Let’s rest a moment.”
I was having a feeling again. Something that seemed to be vibrating up from the ground. I stepped back, holding the two parts of the stone in my hands, reading the words. Torquin’s team were muttering to themselves, kicking the wall, yawning.
I looked up the side of the mountain. Maybe thirty feet above us, the rock lost its smoothness, becoming sharply cragged. To the right a cliff jutted outward, a horizontal platform attached to a diagonal outcropping, like a letter Z that had emerged from the rock and lost its bottom part.
“‘If misery be thine,’” I read, “‘enter below, where one, four, two, eight, five, seven becomes nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.’ I don’t get it.”
“Those numbers are familiar,” Aly said. “One, four, two, eight, five, seven. They’re a repeating set. For sevenths.”
“Meaning…?” I asked.
Professor Bhegad nodded. “One-seventh, if you change it to decimal form, is point one, four, two, eight, five, seven. Two-sevenths is expressed with the same digits, only beginning with the two.”
“Look.” Aly pulled a pad and pen from her pocket and quickly wrote out what she meant:
“The same repeating digits in the same order,” she explained, “but starting at a different place.”
I shook my head. “But Wenders isn’t writing here about decimals. It’s whole numbers—what do you call them, integers. How does one number become the other? And how does this get us inside?”
Cass walked closer to the wall. “Maybe he left another message somewhere…”
I looked up at the ledge again. At the shape of the outcropping. The incomplete letter Z.
And it hit me. The formation was the shape of a perfect seven!
Where 142857 becomes 999999…
Quickly I took Aly’s pen:
“Where the first number becomes the second number,” I said, “is here. At a seven! We just have to find the entrance.”
Torquin stomped over to me and took the sheet of paper. He and his men stared at it.
“The slanted part of the seven points downward,” I said. “Could it function like an arrow?”
I followed the diagonal downward, but the wall didn’t show any obvious clue. Just rock. It was lined, like sedimentary rock formed in layers. I figured that when the volcano formed, those layers were pushed up out of the ground to form this wall. I went closer, running my hand along the rock. It was covered with spindly little roots where the vines had attached, all of which fell right off.
And then a chunk of rock peeled away, too.
Professor Bhegad came closer. “That brittle rock appears to be shale,” he said. “There is no shale on this island, though.”
I dug my hand in and scooped out some more. The rock crumbled easily, raining outward.
Torquin stooped down, lifted a handful of the powdery stuff, and tasted it. “Not rock,” he said. “Plaster.”
I cleared away as much as I could. Aly and Cass dug their hands in to help. When we were done, a sharp-edged carving stared back at us.
My hands shook slightly as I joined the two halves of the rock with Wenders’s weird rhymes on them.
Then I inserted them into the carving.
CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX
THE MAZE
I WAITED.
My fingers tingled. After holding the rocks in place for a long moment, I had to let go. The two halves of Wenders’s “key” did not fall out, though. They stayed snug in their place.
Torquin turned away with a dissatisfied grunt. “Now, Site Two.”
“Just a minute!” Bhegad barked.
I was feeling something. I could tell from Bhegad’s face that he was, too.
It began as a movement underneath us, like the passing of a subway train or a slight earthquake. Cass gasped. He and Aly looked down instinctively. But I had my eye on the wall. On a seam in the rock. Slowly it darkened into a crack and began to move with an awful scraping noise, like a boulder being pulled across a parking lot. Pulverized rock billowed out in dense clouds.
I covered my ears. We ran to a safer spot, behind bushes and away from the spewing grit, until the noise stopped. As the dust settled, we saw a slim, arched opening, barely tall enough for a human to enter standing up.
“That’s it?” Cass said. “We did it?”
Professor Bhegad nodded, speechless.
We all walked cautiously closer. A horrible stench rushed out, putrid and wet, like sulfur.
“Smells like something big and disgusting died in here,” Aly whispered.
“Extraordinary,” Bhegad said, wiping his dirt-encrusted glasses on his tie. “The Onyxians were right about Wenders…”
“We lead. Kids follow,” Torquin int
errupted. “Mark walls. Return.”
“Torquin, don’t lose them,” Bhegad said.
“Pah,” Torquin replied with a contemptuous glare.
Bhegad turned to us with a wan, forced smile. “I’ll be waiting here. And please, my young friends, stay safe.”
I nodded at the old man. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back.
The four goons went first into the darkness, shining their flashlights all around. The opening was barely wide enough for Torquin.
Placing my hand over my nose, I stepped in next. Cass and Aly followed close behind.
“Narrow,” Torquin grumbled, his shoulders scraping the sides.
“Diet didn’t work, eh, Torq?” one of his goons remarked with a laugh.
I heard a thump and the laughing stopped.
After plodding for about ten minutes, Cass called out, “Turn right at the fork!”
“How do you know there’s a fork?” I asked.
“I was trying to tell you earlier,” Cass said. “That tree stump we saw in the jungle—remember the one with the carved lines? It looked suspicious to me. Like someone had carved it. Which meant there was a reason for carving it. So I memorized it.”
“It was just some random thing in the middle of the jungle!” Aly said. “And you only looked at it for a moment.”
Cass shrugged. “I can’t help it. I memorize everything. It’s like you with tech stuff. And movies. Oh, by the way, look out.”
I turned and walked smack into the beefy back of one of Torquin’s men. They were all standing still at a fork in the path. “Left,” Torquin said.
“Right,” Cass corrected.
“Right,” Torquin agreed. “Left.”
As the men walked off to the left, Cass’s shoulders slumped. “They’re just going to run into two more branches that are dead ends, and another that winds all the way around the mountain.”
I called out to Torquin, “We are going to the right!”
The men stopped. I could see Torquin trying to elbow his way through them.
“Guys?” Aly called out. Just inside the right-hand turn, she had found a small rectangular panel in the rock wall. It held two buttons, one above the other in a row. “What’s this doing in an ancient tunnel?”
Cass leaned closer. “Has to be from Wenders’s time. But what’s it for?”
Aly thought for a moment. “It looks like an early design for an on-off light switch. You see them in old movies sometimes. It’s possible the correct path is rigged with lights.”
“I don’t see any bulbs or electrical wires,” Cass pointed out.
“I said possible,” Aly reminded him. “Of course, it could be some spectacular Indiana Jones–style effect, and we’ll all be running from some boulder rolling down a chute. Ha-ha-ha.”
Her laugh echoed unanswered.
Torquin had managed to emerge from the crowded knot of goon muscle. He stood at the opening to his tunnel, glaring at me. “Lost you before. Glued to my side now.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Aly pressing the top button. It was rusted and old, but it finally went in with a crisp snap.
I was hoping for something spectacular to happen—holiday lights, music, whatever—but there was nothing. Torquin stepped closer. The goons were grumbling.
“Let’s just go with them,” Cass said. “We need them. They’re nasty enough to scare away vromaskis.”
Click.
I stopped short. The sound had come from above. From within the rock ceiling. “What was that?”
“What?” Cass said. “I didn’t hear—”
A deep rumble interrupted him. There was no mistaking that. Torquin looked up, grunting under his breath.
With a sudden explosion, rocks showered from above. I shoved Cass and Aly away from the noise. As we fell to the ground, arms over our heads, a clang echoed against the walls.
I peered out to see a rusted iron gate slamming down from the ceiling. It completely sealed off Torquin and his men at the opening to the left-hand tunnel.
“How?” Torquin shouted.
We stared, bug-eyed. “I don’t know!” I replied.
“Sorry…” Aly squeaked.
The men raced to the gate and tried to lift it. Torquin wedged a machete under it as a lever. Cass, Aly, and I joined from the other side. But the thing held fast. It must have weighed a ton. “You did on purpose!” Torquin shouted.
“Like we want to go into this maze alone?” I shot back.
I felt helpless. Cass was right—we needed these guys. Badly. They were our first line of defense.
“We have to get some help,” Cass suggested.
I was about to agree—until I considered what would happen. Bhegad would radio KI for backup. We’d have to wait. He would suspect that we’d done this on purpose and not let us go back. Our mission would be over.
“That pattern from the tree trunk—you memorized it completely?” I asked Cass.
“As well as I know my name,” Cass said.
“Can Torquin and the guards meet up with us if they keep going?” I asked.
Cass thought a moment and then nodded. “But it would be a very long and twisty path.”
I turned back and walked to the gate. Holding myself as tall as I could, I said, “Give me the machete, Torquin.”
Torquin’s eyes seemed to want to bust out of his head. “Orders, me. Following, you.”
“We warned you guys—and you got trapped,” I said, stepping closer. “I can go back and report that to Bhegad. He won’t take it kindly. Or we can go on ahead without a weapon and be eaten by wild beasts, which Bhegad won’t like either. Or you can give me the machete. We’ll go ahead while you try to lift this thing—or take the path you wanted to take and meet up with us later on. Follow my instructions, and we won’t say a word to your boss.”
Torquin’s eyes narrowed. Then, crouching slightly, he slid the machete under the bars.
“Thanks, Torquin,” Aly said. “We owe you.”
“Will pay,” Torquin replied.
I took the weapon, tucked it into my belt, and turned. “Let’s roll.”
As Cass, Aly, and I headed down the right-hand corridor, I could hear one of the goons wish us good luck. It was followed by the sound of a dull blow and an agonized cry.
Torquin was not happy.
I scraped the machete along the wall, making a white line. “A marker, in case we get lost,” I said. “Cass, any sense of how long this maze is?”
“If we make no mistakes, if there are no traps, no doubling back, and then we actually find…find Marco’s…” Cass’s voice dropped and his pace slowed.
This was going to be tough on us all.
“I’m concerned about flashlight battery life,” I said. “Let’s use one at a time. Cass, yours first.”
As he flicked on his light, I put mine away in my pack. Although he was behind me, Cass kept the light trained on the path ahead. After a few minutes we started descending sharply. We slowed. The rock surface beneath me was slick with water. Probably from some mountain stream. To keep my balance, I stuck to the right side, walking sideways, holding the wall with my free hand. I felt an opening behind me, big enough for us to fit. I just needed to shine the flashlight into it, make sure nothing nasty was waiting for us.
“Cass, can I borrow your—” I didn’t have a chance to finish the question. The floor gave way beneath me. The machete’s point jammed against the stone as I fell, ejecting the weapon out of my belt. I slid downward, quickly gaining speed on the wet surface. My fingers grasped for a hold but only reached smooth stone. “Help!”
Cass and Aly screamed my name, but their voices were fading fast. I shielded my face with my arms as my body tumbled, out of control, down a long chute. I braced myself for impact.
But the chute ended into nothingness. I was somersaulting in midair, down to utter blackness.
CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN
RECALCULATING
I FELL ON cold, pricking knives.
I tried to gasp, but the air had been displaced by…
Water.
The stabbing sensation slammed up through my body—the shock of cold. Colder than anything I’d ever felt. By the time my feet hit bottom I could barely feel them. I pushed as hard as I could, rising, my lungs tight as fists.
As I broke the surface, stunned and numb, I heard clattering noises. It took a second to realize they were footsteps.
“Jack! Over here!” Aly was calling.
The call seemed to come from everywhere. But I saw only blackness. “Where are you?”
“Here!” Cass said from my right. “There are stairs on the right. You didn’t have to slide!”
“Th-th-thanks,” I said through chattering teeth.
A flash of a light blinded me, and I felt something snakelike drop onto my shoulder. I recoiled with a yell.
“It’s a rope, Jack!” Cass shouted. “Grab it!”
I managed to close my fingers around it. Cass dragged me through the water, and then two pairs of hands lifted me over the surface of a sharp rock ledge.
I flopped against a slimy wall, grateful to be out of there but shivering uncontrollably. Aly and Cass had both taken thin blankets from their packs and wrapped them around me. “Easy,” Cass said. “Just sit tight.”
My teeth kept chattering. My entire body shook. I’d bruised my ankle against the bottom of the underground pool. I’d lost the machete.
“Well,” I said, my voice raspy and raw, “at least we’re off to a good start.”
I’m not exactly sure how Cass found all the wood. But it was really dry. He returned with pile after pile, proudly dropping it all on the chamber floor. “Very strange. A karst topography in a jungle environment.”
“No backward words, please, Cass,” Aly asked.
“Karst is a real word that means an area of limestone, sink holes, underground pools, cenotes,” Cass said. “This must have been some kind of sacred location. There are piles of beads, stacks of wood all around. Maybe this was one of those ancient places where they sacrificed maidens to the gods.”
“Why was it always maidens?” Aly said with disgust.
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