Lost in Babylon

by Peter Lerangis

  CHAPTER THREE

  INCIDENT IN OHIO

  “HEY!” AS CASS turned and jogged up the street toward me, I whipped my two hands behind my back.

  “So, are we there?” I asked nonchalantly.

  Cass looked at me curiously. “What are you doing?”

  “Scratching,” I replied. “A lottery card. Which I found.”

  “And how will you collect if you win?” He burst out laughing. “Come on. The house is just ahead. Number forty-five Walnut Street. The green porch.”

  I’m not sure why I didn’t tell him the truth—that I’d found a piece of burned wood and a gum wrapper on the ground, and now I was using them to write my dad. Maybe because it was a dumber idea than entering a lottery. But I couldn’t help it. All I could think about was Dad. That he was just one state away.

  I shoved the note into my back pocket. We jogged up the road to Torquin and Aly, who were in the entrance to a little cul-de-sac in the middle of Lemuel, Ohio. Torquin had parked our rented Toyota Corolla in a secluded wooded area down the block, to avoid being seen. As I joined Cass and Aly, we stood there, staring at the house like three ice sculptures.

  Torquin waddled ahead, oblivious.

  “I can’t do this . . .” Aly said.

  I nodded. I felt scared, homesick, worried, and nine thousand percent convinced we should have let Bhegad send another team to do this. Anyone but us.

  The house had a small lawn, trimmed with brick. Its porch screen had been ripped in two places and carefully repaired. A little dormer window peeked from the roof, and a worn front stoop held a rusted watering can. It didn’t look like my house, but somehow my heart was beating to the rhythm of homesickness.

  A kid with an overstuffed backpack was shambling toward a house across the street, where his mom was opening a screen door. It brought back memories of my own mom, before she’d gone off on a voyage and never returned. Of my dad, who met me at school for a year after Mom’s death, not wanting to let me out of his sight. Was Dad home now?

  “Come!” Torquin barked over his shoulder. “No time to daydream!”

  He was already lumbering up the walkway, his bare feet thwapping on the gray-green stones. Cass, Aly, and I fell in behind him.

  Before he could ring the bell, I heard the snap of a door latch. The front door opened, revealing the silhouette of a guy with massive shoulders. As he stepped forward I stifled a gasp. His features were dark and piercing, the corners of his mouth turned up—all of it just like Marco. But his face was etched deeply, his hair flecked with gray, and his eyes so sad and hollow I felt like I could see right through them.

  He glanced down at Torquin’s feet and then back up. “Can I help you?”

  “Looking for Marco,” Torquin said.

  “Uh-huh.” The man nodded wearily. “You and everyone else. Thanks for your concern, but sorry.”

  He turned back inside, pulling the door shut, but Torquin stopped it with his forearm.

  “Excuse me?” The man turned slowly, his eyes narrowing.

  I quickly stepped in front of him. “I’m a friend of Marco’s,” I said. “And I was wondering—”

  “Then how come I don’t recognize you?” Mr. Ramsay asked suspiciously.

  “From . . . travel soccer,” I said, reciting the line we had prepared for just this occasion. “Please. I’m just concerned, that’s all. This is my uncle, Thomas. And two other soccer players, Cindy and Dave. We heard a rumor that Marco might be in the area. We wondered if he came home.”

  “The last time we saw him, he was at Lemuel General after collapsing during a basketball game,” Mr. Ramsay said. “Then . . . gone without a trace. Like he ran away from everything. Since then we’ve heard nothing but rumors. If we believed them all, he’s been in New York, Ashtabula, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Manila, and Ponca City. Look!” He grabbed a basket of snapshots off a nearby table and thrust it toward me.

  “I—I don’t understand,” I said, sifting through pixelated, blurry shots of jockish-looking teens who were definitely not Marco. “Why would people lie about seeing him?”

  “People want the reward,” Mr. Ramsay replied wearily. “One hundred thousand bucks for information leading to Marco’s return. It’s supposed to help. Instead, we’re just bombarded by emails, letters, visitors. All junk. So take my advice, kid, don’t trust rumors.”

  As Marco’s dad took the basket back and returned it to the table, two people emerged from inside the house—a trim, red-haired woman and a girl in sweats. The woman’s slate-blue eyes were full of fear. The girl looked angry. They were both focused on Torquin. “I’m . . . Marco’s mother,” the woman said. “And this is his sister. What’s going on? If this is another scam, I’m calling the police.”

  “They’re just kids, Emily,” Marco’s dad said reassuringly. “You guys have to understand what we’re going through. Today it was a repair guy. Flashed some kind of ID card, said he was going to inspect the boiler. Instead he snooped through our house.”

  “Bloggers, crime buffs,” Mrs. Ramsay said. “It’s like a game to them. Who can find the most dirt, post the most photos. They have no idea what it is . . . to lose . . .” Her voice cracked, and both her husband and daughter put arms around her shoulders.

  Torquin’s phone chirped, and he backed away down the stoop. Aly and Cass instinctively followed. Which left me with the three Ramsays, huddled together in the semidarkness of their living room.

  The feeling was too familiar. After my mom died, Dad and I hardly ever left each other’s sides, but each of us was alone, locked in misery. Our faces must have looked a lot like the Ramsays’.

  I was dying to tell them what had really happened to Marco, the whole story of the Karai Institute. Of their son’s incredible heroism saving our lives, of the fact that he could swoosh a shot now from clear across a campus lawn.

  But I also knew what it was like to lose a family member. And if Cass was right, if Marco’s tracker silence meant he was dead, I couldn’t get their hopes up.

  “We . . . we’ll keep looking,” I said lamely.

  As I began backing away, I felt Torquin’s beefy hand on my shoulder, pulling me down the stairs. His face, which wasn’t easy to read, looked concerned. “Thank you!” he shouted. “Have to go!”

  I stumbled after Torquin, Cass, and Aly. Soon we were all running down the street toward our rented car, top speed. I had never seen Torquin move so fast.

  “What’s up?” Cass demanded.

  “Got . . . message,” Torquin said, panting heavily as he pulled open the driver’s side door. “Marco found. Get in. Now.”

  “Wait—they found him?” Aly blurted. “Where?”

  Torquin handed the phone to her. Cass and I came up behind, looking over her shoulder as we walked:

  TRACKER ACTIVE AGAIN. RAMSAY NOT IN OHIO. STRONG SIGNAL FROM LATITUDE 32.5417° N, LONGITUDE 44.4233° E

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “It can’t be . . .” Cass shook his head.

  “Cass, just tell us!” Aly said.

  “Marco,” Cass replied, “is in Iraq.”

  “What?” I cried out.

  But the other three were already at the car, climbing in.

  Quickly, while they weren’t looking, I pulled out my note to Dad. And I tossed it down a storm drain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EGARIM

  THE CHOPPER BLADES were so loud, I thought they’d shake my brains out through my ears. “Are you sure you read the tracker right?” I shouted toward the front seats.

  Professor Bhegad didn’t even turn around. He hadn’t heard a word.

  We’d met him and Fiddle at the airport in Irbīl, Iraq. They’d flown separately from the Karai Institute when Marco’s signal was finally picked up. Now the whole gang—Bhegad, Torquin, Fiddle, Nirvana, Cass, Aly, and I—was crammed into the front seat of a chopper winging over the Syrian Desert. Our shadow crossed a vast expanse of sand, dotted by bushes and fretted by long black pipelines.

&
nbsp; The cabin was stifling hot, and sweat coursed down my face. Cass, Aly, and I huddled together in the backseat. On the long flight from Ohio, we’d had plenty of time to talk. But the whole thing seemed even more confusing than ever. “I still can’t understand why he would come here!” I said. “If I were him, I’d go home. No-brainer. I mean, we all want to see our families again, right?”

  I could practically feel Cass flinch. He had bounced from foster home to foster home; he didn’t have a family to go back to. Unless you counted his parents, who were in prison and hadn’t seen him since he was a baby. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that . . .” I said.

  “It’s okay, Jack ‘Foot-in-Mouth’ McKinley,” Cass replied with a wan smile. “I know what you mean. Actually, I’m happy Marco is alive. I just was wondering the same thing you were—why Iraq? What’s there?”

  Professor Bhegad slowly turned, adjusting the heavy glasses that slid down his sweating nose. “It’s not what is there, but what was there,” he said. “Iraq was the site of Ancient Babylon.”

  Cass’s eyes widened. “Duh. The site of one of the Seven Wonders—the Hanging Gardens!”

  “He decided to go on a rogue mission to find a Loculus all by himself?” Aly said. “Without my tech skills, or Cass’s human GPS? If I were Marco, I’d want to do this as a foursome! All of our lives are at stake. Going solo makes no sense. Even to an egotist like Marco.”

  “Unless,” I said, “he isn’t trying to go solo.”

  “What do you mean?” Cass asked.

  “I mean, he may not know that his tracker is busted,” I said. “Maybe, when he left Rhodes, he figured we’d pick up the signal and follow him. Maybe he just wanted to force things, to speed the mission up.”

  Aly raised an eyebrow. “How do we know he didn’t disable and re-enable it on purpose?”

  “You’d have to be a genius to do that!” I said.

  “I could do it,” Aly said.

  “That’s my point!” I replied.

  Aly folded her arms and stared out the window. Cass shrugged.

  Now Professor Bhegad was shouting, his face pressed to the window. “The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers! We are approaching the Fertile Crescent!”

  I gazed down. I knew that Ancient Babylon was the center of a bigger kingdom called Babylonia. And that was part of a larger area known as Mesopotamia, which was Greek for “between two rivers.” Now we could see them, winding through the desert, lined with thickets and scrubby trees that looked from above like long green mustaches. Everywhere else was dusty, yellow, and dry. The area sure didn’t look fertile to me.

  I squinted at the distant ruins. A stone wall snaked around the area. Inside were mounds of rubble and flattened, roped-off areas that must have been archaeological digs. Gazing through a set of binoculars, Bhegad pointed out a small skyline of low buildings near a gate in the wall. Some were flat-roofed and some peaked. “Those are restorations of the ancient city,” he said with a disapproving cluck of the tongue. “Crude, crude workmanship . . .”

  “Where were the Hanging Gardens?” Aly called out.

  “No one knows,” Bhegad answered. “Babylon was destroyed by an earthquake in two hundred B.C. or thereabouts. The rivers have changed courses since then. The Gardens may have sunk under the Euphrates or may have been pulverized in the earthquake. Some say it may not have ever existed. But those people are fools.”

  “I hope it’s Door Number Two,” Aly said. “Pulverized. Turned to dust. Just like the Colossus was. At least we’ll have a chance for two out of seven Loculi.”

  “More than twenty-eight percent,” Cass piped up.

  I looked at the tracker panel on the cockpit. Marco’s signal was near the Euphrates River, not quite as far as the ruins. As Fiddle descended, we could see a team of guards outside the archaeological site, looking at us with binoculars.

  “Wave! Hi!” Nirvana said. “They’re expecting us. They’re convinced this is a major educational archaeological project.”

  “How did you arrange all this?” Cass asked.

  “I was a professor of archaeology in another life,” Bhegad replied. “My name still carries some weight. One of my former students helps run the site here. He also happens to be a satellite member of the Karai Institute.”

  Fiddle descended slowly and touched down. He cut the engine, threw open the hatch, and let us out.

  The sun was brutal, the land parched and flat. The dusty soil itself seemed to be gathering up the heat and radiating it upward through our soles. In the distance to our right, I could see a bus rolling slowly toward the ancient site. Tour groups made their way slowly among the ruins, like ants among pebbles. In between, the sandy soil seemed to give way to an amazingly huge lake.

  “Do you see what I see?” Aly said.

  Cass nodded. “Egarim,” he said. “Don’t get too excited.”

  “Translate, please,” I said.

  “Mirage,” Cass replied. “The soil is full of silicate particles. The same stuff glass is made of. When it’s so bright and hot like this, the sunlight reflects off all those particles. At a sideways angle, it looks like a big, shining mass—which resembles water!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Einstein,” I said, scanning the horizon. Directly ahead of us, across the yellow-brown desert, was a line of low pine trees that stretched in either direction. The heat-shimmer coming up from the ground made the trees look as if they were rippling in an invisible current. “That’s where Marco’s signal is coming from. The Euphrates.”

  Marco was so close!

  I checked over my shoulder. Torquin and Nirvana were struggling to lift Professor Bhegad out of the chopper and put him in a wheelchair.

  “This is going to take forever,” Aly said. She darted toward Torquin, pulled the tracking-signal detector from his gadget belt, and bolted toward the river. “Come on, let’s start!”

  “Hey!” Torquin cried out in surprise.

  “Let them go, we have our hands full here!” Nirvana said.

  Our footsteps made clouds of yellowish dust as we ran. Closer to the river, the ground was choked with scrubby grass and knots of small bushes. We stopped at the thicket of pine trees that stretched in both directions.

  The ground sloped sharply downward. Below us, the Euphrates slashed a thick silver-blue S like a curved mirror through the countryside. To the north it wound around a distant settlement, then headed off toward mountains blurred by fog. To the south it passed by the Babylonian ruins before disappearing into the flatness. I scanned the riverbank, looking for signs of Marco.

  “I don’t see him,” Aly said.

  I held up the tracker. Our blue dot locator and Marco’s green one had merged. “He’s here somewhere.”

  “Yo, Ocram!” Cass shouted. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Rolling her eyes, Aly began walking down the slope toward the river. “He might be hiding. If he’s playing a prank, I will personally dunk him in the water.”

  “Unless he throws you in first,” I said.

  I glanced quickly back over my shoulder to check on the others. Nirvana was struggling to push Professor Bhegad’s wheelchair across the rocky soil. He bounced a lot, complaining all the way. Torquin had taken off his studded leather belt and was trying to wrap it around Bhegad like a seat belt, causing his own pants to droop slowly downward.

  I started through the brush. It was dense and maybe three to five feet high, making it hard to see. As we moved forward, we kept calling Marco’s name.

  We stopped at the edge of a rocky ridge. None of us had seen this from the distance. It plunged straight downward, maybe twenty feet, to the river below. “Oh, great,” Aly said.

  I looked north and south. In both directions, the ridge angled downward until it eventually met the riverbed. “We’ll be okay if we go sideways,” I said.

  I went to the edge and looked over. I eyed the tangle of trees, roots, and bushes along the steep drop. Since Marco had taught us to rock climb, steep embankments didn’t
scare me as much as they used to. This looked way easier than climbing Mount Onyx.

  “Maybe there’s a shortcut,” I said. Quickly I stepped over the edge, digging my toes into a sturdy root. I turned so my chest would be facing the cliff. Holding on to a branch, I descended another step.

  “Whoa, Jack, don’t,” Cass said.

  I laughed. “This is ea—”

  My foot slipped. My chin hit the dirt. I slid downward, grasping frantically. My fingers closed around branches and vines. I pulled out about a dozen, and a dozen more slipped through my hand. I felt my foot hit a root and I caromed outward, landing at the bottom, hard on my back.

  Aly’s face was going in and out of focus. I could have sworn she was trying to hold back a smile. “Are you hurt?”

  “Just resting,” I lied.

  “I think I’ll look for a path,” Cass called down.

  I closed my eyes and lay still, my breath buzzsawing in my chest. I heard a dull moan, and I figured it must have been my own voice.

  But when I heard it again, my eyes blinked open.

  I sat up. Aly and Cass were just below the crest of the ridge, trying to make their way down. They were both shouting. But my eyes were focused on a thick, brownish-green bush, maybe ten yards away.

  A pair of shoes jutted from underneath.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TOGETHER, WE FELL INTO DARKNESS

  NEW BALANCE BASKETBALL shoes. Size gazillion wide. With feet in them.

  I ran to them, grabbed the ankles, and pulled. The legs slid out—Ohio State Buckeye sweatpants—and then a ripped-up KI polo shirt.

  From above, Fiddle shouted at me to give him CPR. How did you do CPR? I wished I’d taken a course. All I could think about were scenes in TV shows—one person blowing air into another’s lungs.

  As I lowered my mouth carefully, his eyes flickered open from a deep sleep. “Jack? Hey, bro. I didn’t know you cared.”

  I sprang back. “What the—how—you were—we thought—” I stammered.