Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake

by Rob Lloyd Jones

“She’s lying.”

  Pan had told the police that Mum and Dad were responsible for everything. I understood why. They had wanted to protect us. If they took the blame, Pan and I would walk free. I don’t know where we’d walk to – a foster home, maybe – but we’d be free.

  Pan was trying to honour them, to make their deaths count, but I couldn’t. It made me feel sick to think of the snake lady getting away with what she did. Of Mum and Dad being remembered as criminals, destroyers rather than protectors of history.

  “Do you have any proof?” the captain asked. “Of this mysterious group, this tablet, or the crystal coffin with the … wait, what was it?”

  He checked his notes again. “Yes, the snake symbol.”

  From somewhere inside I managed a sad smile. Despite everything we’d been through, I didn’t have one shred of evidence that any of it had happened. The snake lady had made sure of that.

  “Your story does not even make sense,” Captain Abbas added. “Why would this group wish to destroy tombs and coffins? Such things would be worth millions.”

  Again, I didn’t have an answer. I could have told him what Kit said, that the snake lady and her people were hiding some sort of secret history of the world. But without any proof it would just make me sound even crazier.

  “Can I see my sister?” I asked.

  The captain rose. Bones clicked in his knees. “Perhaps, if you tell me the truth, you might see her.”

  “I have told you the truth.”

  “You are accused of terrorism. You will be handed over to the military. I would not tell them your strange story. It will not serve you well.”

  “When will they come?”

  “Tomorrow, the day after. We are busy with the flood. No one died, praise Allah, but thousands need shelter. You will be kept here for now. I cannot even offer you a blanket.”

  He hesitated in the doorway and looked back. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  I stayed in the cell for hours. Mainly I stared out the window as day became dusk and the first stars were reflected in the flood waters between the buildings. My cell was one of several in a row. I guess Pan must have been in another one and I called her name, but no one replied.

  The rest of the cells were being used as shelters for flooded-out families. Mums and dads shared concrete beds with their children, playing backgammon and singing. They’d lost their homes, maybe everything, but they were happy to have one another. They reminded me of the families at the City of the Dead.

  I kept thinking I was hungry, but it wasn’t that. I was empty. I’d been trying to stay strong, but the hole inside me was growing, a black hole sucking in all other emotions and leaving just sadness and grief.

  Each time I heard a door open I jumped up, hoping against hope that I would see Mum or Dad, or Sami; or even Kit. Each time the door shut, I cried again.

  I cried a lot, but at the same time these past few days had been the best of my life. At least I’d got to know my mother. I’d always loved my parents in the vague way that any son did, though maybe vaguer, considering how hard they’d made it to love them. I wished they’d never been like that, but now I understood why and I respected them for it.

  I lay back on the concrete bed, desperately needing a rest. Everything ached. There were bruises up my side, cuts across my back and chest, and several parts of me were swollen. I felt like I’d been used as target practice. A police doctor had stitched my forehead, but blood still oozed from beneath the bandage and trickled down my ear.

  I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I saw the smile on the snake lady’s lips. She’d killed my parents and I had no idea why. Those maps in the tomb, of places where Ancient Egyptians had never travelled, and the crystal coffin with its carved, coiled snake … all of it had been deliberately destroyed by her and her thug mercenaries.

  It made no sense.

  Bolting up, I kicked the wall in rage. If I changed my story to the police, I’d be free. I could go after the snake lady. I’d dedicate my life to the quest, I’d… I’d…

  I slumped back to the bed.

  No, I couldn’t change my story. I wouldn’t.

  Somehow I fell asleep, and I was woken by the sound of the cell door rattling open. Captain Abbas waddled in, a bowl in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. He looked about a decade older than when I’d seen him the previous evening. He’d had a long night. He placed the bowl of some sort of stew on the floor and managed a tired smile. He was all right, this guy.

  “Half the night,” he said, “I have been dealing with floods. The other half, with you.”

  “Did Pan change her story?” I asked.

  “No. Do you wish to change yours?”

  I groaned and rolled over. “You don’t believe me, so why bother asking.”

  “Actually… Perhaps your story is not from a movie after all.”

  I rolled back. “Eh?”

  “It is curious,” the captain added. “Another man is saying similar strange things.”

  “Man?” I sat up. “What man?”

  “He was found on the west bank, washed up like a rat. He is in hospital. When he woke he told a tale about treasure hunters, and you and your sister. It is … similar to the story you tell. The doctors believe him to be delirious.”

  It must have been Kit. That he’d survived was something, at least, but not loads. A plaster over a bullet wound.

  Captain Abbas brought an item from his bag and laid it on the cell floor. “Do you recognize this?” he asked.

  It was Kit’s utility belt. The wave had stripped it of most of its gadgets, other than his smart-goggles, which were smashed, and another device that looked like a smartphone, only slimmer.

  “That man said you had to see this,” the captain added. “I would not usually grant requests to arrested criminals, but…”

  Why did Kit want me to see his utility belt? So we knew he was still alive, or for another reason?

  I reached for the smart-goggles, but the captain raised a palm. His other hand went to the gun on his belt.

  “Is it a weapon?” he said.

  “It’s a pair of glasses,” I replied. “They’re mine. I have bad eyesight.”

  “You have not been squinting.”

  “There’s nothing to see, I’m in a cell. Can I put them on?”

  The captain eyed me suspiciously, but he was too tired to worry about a boy trying on a pair of glasses. He sighed and lowered his hand.

  I pulled the goggles from their slot in the belt. As I slid them over my eyes, digital information crackled in my vision. They were trying to work, but the information was fractured. It was like looking in a shattered mirror.

  Then I saw something.

  And in that moment everything changed. I sat up higher in the bed, excitement tingling my back.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” I said, tossing him the goggles. “If you show those glasses to my sister. That’s my deal.”

  I’ve never seen a person look more confused than Captain Abbas right then. But he didn’t seem to have the energy to argue, or even question why I’d want Pan to see the goggles. He just sighed and left.

  “Fine,” he said, locking the door behind him.

  The moment he was gone, I grabbed the bowl and wolfed down the stew, filling myself up. I felt like a car with a new engine. I twisted my neck, getting rid of a couple of cricks, and did a few stretches to warm up, but I didn’t need to. I’d never felt so psyched.

  I slid two other items from Kit’s belt – the device that looked like a smartphone and another gadget, something Captain Abbas had missed: Kit’s skeleton key.

  38

  About ten seconds after Pan put on Kit’s smart-goggles, she collapsed to the floor and began to convulse.

  Captain Abbas screamed for a doctor. People came running. Someone found a stretcher. Several locals that had been using the cells as shelters got involved too. Some helped to carry Pan on the stretcher, while others followed along the corridor
and up some stairs, shouting things that no one listened to.

  By the time the crowd reached the police station roof, I was deep among it, my face hidden by a shawl I’d swiped from a cell. I joined in the shouting, keeping everyone excited. I was pumped, ready for action.

  On the stretcher, Pan continued to fake the seizure. She even managed to bring up a bit of froth at her mouth. It was such a good act that I worried it might be real, until she caught my look and her eyes narrowed slightly. Then she began shaking harder and screaming even louder.

  I hung back, afraid I might be recognized as the captain and a few guys lowered the stretcher onto a rowing boat. I’m not exactly proud of what I did next, but it had to be done. Pushing through the crowd, I pretended to lose my balance and barged Captain Abbas off the roof and into the water.

  Before he’d even surfaced, I was on the boat and sitting beside Pan. Some of the locals yelled at me, but I yelled back louder.

  “I’m a doctor! I’m a doctor, for God’s sake!”

  I shoved the boat away from the police station and ordered the guy rowing it to head for the hospital, pointing in any old direction. Behind, some of the crowd hauled Captain Abbas up onto the roof again. He looked back and I think he saw me, but he just stood there.

  I waited until we were out of sight. “OK, we’re clear.”

  Pan sat up and wiped spit from her mouth. She opened her hand, revealing Kit’s shattered smart-goggles. She grinned, grabbed me in a tight hug, then pushed me away.

  “You saw?” I asked. “In the goggles?”

  I wanted to see again, to know it was real. I took the goggles and slid them over my eyes. They flickered to life and a video appeared on the lenses, fractured, but clear enough to see and hear. It showed Kit, filming himself from a hospital bed. He looked pretty banged up: one arm in plaster, an oxygen mask pulled down from his mouth and stitches on one cheek that were almost symmetrical to the scar on the other. He looked so different from the man who had spoken to me on a tablet in Heathrow Airport. His voice wasn’t just weak from pain, it was softer, sadder.

  “Jake, Pandora,” Kit said. “Listen to me. Your desert suits are rigged with tracking devices. That’s how we found you on the Nile and knew you were at the dam. The receiver is on my utility belt. Turn it on and you will see it tracks both of your positions. Except, they are not together. A signal shows one of you at Aswan police station, where I believe you are both being held. But the other signal is moving, heading into the Western Desert. I cannot say why, only that perhaps you will find answers if you follow its trail, and a chance to avenge your parents’ deaths.”

  He coughed, and gritted his teeth in pain.

  “I survived,” he continued, “but I am not mobile. Sam will intercept the tracker signals and come to your assistance however he can. But you cannot waste time. Do not think for one moment that you cannot do this. You are not twelve. You are twelve and a half. And you are treasure hunters. Good luck.”

  The video ended and I pulled off the goggles.

  “You know what it means?” Pan asked, still grinning.

  I didn’t need to be as clever as her to work it out. There was something Kit hadn’t realized, something he couldn’t have known. He’d said there were tracking devices on our desert suits…

  I took out the smartphone-like device from my pocket, the tracking receiver. A grid map appeared on its screen, with two flashing red dots. It was just as Kit had said: one dot was moving across Aswan, away from the police station. That was the tracker in my suit. The other, Pan’s signal, was west of Aswan, in the desert beyond the Nile Valley.

  Except, of course, Pan was with me. Pan was here, but her tracker wasn’t. Her tracker was on her desert suit coat. The coat that Mum took when she left us on the dam.

  Pan’s grin spread wider, a beam of sunshine across her pale face. “She’s alive,” she said. “Jake, Mum’s alive. So maybe Dad is too.”

  I was grinning now, too, although the device didn’t tell us that much. Perhaps the signal was simply Mum’s body being moved, or someone had stolen her coat. Or maybe the snake lady knew we’d survived the tsunami and was luring us into a trap.

  But there was a chance. There was hope.

  We had to follow that signal to find out for sure. But not in this slow rowing boat. Pan stood up and smiled at the owner of the boat, who looked astonished at her sudden recovery.

  She pointed at me. “He’s a really good doctor.”

  She jumped into the flood waters. I followed, and we swam and waded until we reached higher ground near the Aswan bridge. The river had risen to within a metre of the bridge and was lapping against its base. Ambulances, fire engines and police vans used sirens to clear a path through hundreds of refugees fleeing to higher, drier ground beyond the Nile’s west bank.

  Rescue workers were rushing about, shouting orders and carrying bundles. No one cared about two pale, sodden kids moving among them, their faces hidden by scarves. No one noticed us looking for the right type of vehicle to steal.

  “Over there, Pan. Look.”

  She followed my gaze to a pair of quad bikes, their fat wheels muddy from the flooded riverbanks. The bikes were covered in stickers for desert tour companies, but were being used to bring supplies to people in the flood. Their drivers had rushed to hand over bundles of blankets to one of the boats.

  “Jake,” Pan said. She grabbed my arm to stop me.

  “We have to, Pan,” I said.

  She didn’t look convinced, but nodded. “Are they easy to ride, at least?”

  I took Kit’s tracker from my pocket, watching Mum’s location flashing on the map. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  39

  Quad bikes, it turned out, are not at all easy to ride.

  But right then, with the hope burning inside us that our parents were still alive, not at all easy seemed no problem at all. Even impossible wouldn’t have stopped us.

  The rescue team had left one of the bikes running, and Kit’s skeleton key got the other one going quickly enough. The roaring engines attracted attention, and a few people charged towards us, yelling, but by then we’d sussed out that the hand grips got the bikes moving, and were away.

  Driving the things was easy. Steering was the hard bit. The bikes were made for riding over tricky terrain, but not this tricky. The bridge was awash with mud and water, flipping fish and silt from the river. The quads skidded and mud flicked at our faces, making it hard to see. My bike spun a full circle and Pan bashed hers into a rail.

  We drove for a few miles through water that came to the top of the tyres, until we passed through the floods and were riding over sand. There were no roads or paths, no villages or camps or pylons. Nothing but flat, empty desert. The ground was dry and cracked. Brittle bushes crunched like cornflakes under our wheels. Ahead, rust-coloured mountains appeared through shimmering heat.

  Twisting my bike’s hand grip, I sped to catch up with Pan. She’d used a bungee cord from her bike’s luggage rack to lash Kit’s receiver to the handlebars. The flashing light suggested Mum’s tracker had stopped somewhere in the desert, towards the red mountains.

  “At this speed we’ll get there in three hours!” Pan said, yelling over the roar of the engine.

  Sand replaced rock, and the landscape began to ripple. Dunes grew from humps of sand to huge waves that we needed to rev our engines to climb.

  “They call this part of the desert the Great Sand Sea,” Pan said. “Thirty thousand square miles of nothing.”

  Not nothing, I hoped. Mum – and maybe Dad – were out here somewhere. With each rev of the bike’s engine, I felt it more strongly in my heart. If we saved them, surely Mum couldn’t claim we weren’t up to the job of being treasure hunters.

  The deeper we rode into the desert, the stranger the place became. Rock formations jutted from the sand. They were twisted, wind-blown shapes, sandstone figures dancing in the desert. The wind through the sculptures made eerie crooning sounds.

&nb
sp; One large rock was the shape of a monster with a humped back and oversized head, and looked a lot like the Great Sphinx. We stopped for a moment in its shade while Pan checked the tracker. It was a relief to escape the sun, but we couldn’t wait there long.

  “I think the signal’s coming from those mountains,” she decided.

  With their sheer walls and jagged ridges, the mountains looked like battlements. They were all different reds, and separated by wide gorges. They were at least an hour’s ride away, and in our rush to escape Aswan we’d forgotten to grab any water. My lips were cracked and my mouth was so dry, it felt like I’d been chewing sand. At times I steered away from the red mountains, chasing splotches of cloud shadow for shade. I fantasized about being hit by a wave, but remembered that that wasn’t much fun either.

  The wind grew stronger and hotter as we rode west. Like a hairdryer in my face, it shrivelled my eyeballs and dried my throat. At this rate we’d turn up to save Mum, but barely be alive ourselves.

  At least we had the bikes.

  And then the bikes ran out of petrol.

  Mine went first, grunting to a stop halfway up a dune. We left it there and rode together on Pan’s until that one conked out too.

  Pan kicked the bike several times, as if that might get it moving. “How are we going to find Mum and Dad now, Jake? You’re the one with the plans.”

  “Camels,” I replied.

  “There aren’t random camels in the desert.”

  “No, look. Camels.”

  A line of them moved though the shimmer of a heat haze, rode by men in flowing jellabiyas and turbans.

  “Those are Bedouin,” Pan said. “Nomadic tribes that live in the desert.”

  “I know what Bedouin are,” I muttered.

  I didn’t, actually, and I had no idea what nomadic meant either.

  The Bedouin weren’t that chatty, but they were friendly. They had a good laugh as we mimed riding quad bikes, attempting to explain what two sunburned kids were doing in the middle of a desert. They were headed towards the red mountains, too, and they gave us a lift.

  I have no idea how people have ridden camels for so long and been so happy about it. Pan and I squashed together on a saddle on the top of a hump, gripping on tightly as we bobbed along with the rhythmic plod. The camels were grumpy beasts, spitting and making whining noises like Chewbacca.