Lost in Babylon

by Peter Lerangis

  “She . . . she touched the Loculus,” I said. “Are you telling me she vanished on contact? All by herself?”

  Daria stared at me, then back at the now-invisible pit. “What is this thing, Jack? I—I can no longer see it.”

  “Try to find it, Daria,” Cass said intensely. “Show us what you mean.”

  Daria reached back toward the area and instantly dissolved to nothingness. “It is here!”

  My mind was racing. “Daria,” I said, “when you told me the story of Kranag’s life, you said he came from a strange land. With some other people. A man with a strange mark. What did that look like? Do you know?”

  “Nitacris spoke of it,” Daria said tentatively, stepping forward and materializing again. “Two lines of gray. Coming to a point at the top. On the back of his head.”

  “Do you have it, Daria?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?” she said.

  “Because we have it,” I replied. “All four of us. We are covering it up with dye.”

  Daria looked at the floor. Slowly she lifted her arm and brought it around to the back of her head.

  Then, for the first time since we’d met her, she removed the head scarf.

  “I don’t believe this . . .” Aly whispered.

  On the back of Daria’s head, amid the shock of red hair, was a white lambda.

  Daria was one of us.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE MARK

  “THAT INSANE LANGUAGE skill,” Marco said. “It makes sense now. Daria’s got G7W.”

  “She’s also got a pedigree,” I said. “Because G7W comes from the royal family of Atlantis. Which means King Uhla’ar and Queen Qalani.”

  Aly nodded. “Who had only two sons . . .”

  “Daria,” I said. “Your parents . . . what do you know about them?”

  “Nothing,” she said quietly. “I was a foundling. For my first years I lived on the streets, until I was taken into slavery. Nabu-na’id and Bel-Sharu-Usur often remind what a great kindness this was.”

  “It’s got to be a lie,” Aly said. “She has to be Massarym’s daughter. It’s the only way she could have the mark.”

  “Or Karai’s daughter,” Cass offered. “Or the daughter of Queen Qalani’s sister. Or King Uhla’ar’s cousin. Or the brother’s fifth cousin twice removed. Royal families can have a lot of people, Aly.”

  Outside the cavernous room, Zinn and the others were shouting. I could see them sinking to their knees, blowpipes to their lips. Someone was coming.

  “Forget the explanation,” Marco said. “Let’s go!”

  I picked up Shelley. “How close do we need to get?”

  But Shelley seemed to be giving me the answer. It began to pulse on its own, lifting upward, out of my palm and into the air. The Song of the Heptakiklos twanged through my body now. Marco, Cass, Aly, and Daria were cringing. They felt it, too.

  I could no longer see the pit’s smoothly curved bottom. It was covered with a gaseous plasma of light, ebbing and swelling like a living cell. Before my eyes the contours of the Loculus began to form into a translucent sphere, a bright storm cloud of visible energy.

  On the shining metallic rim of the pit, a red tile flared like the flash of a camera. Then the next one did, too, and the next and the next, until the light was circling the rim in a spinning pattern that zapped Shelley with electric jolts like lizards’ tongues. Inside, the ball of gas swelled steadily to fill the shape of the Loculus.

  Shelley’s hinged metallic surface was becoming smooth. It changed colors, its dull brown growing silvery, until the two shapes were mirror images. When they were nearly touching, a shadowy bruise grew on the Loculus and another on Shelley—two blue-back shadows facing each other.

  The plasma boiled violently as they came closer. It gathered below the bruise, pushing at it, then finally breaking through. The boom rocked the chamber, knocking us off our feet. The Atlantean energy blasted out of the black circle and into Shelley’s, with a force so strong I thought the contraption would vaporize.

  “It’s working!” Cass said.

  I could no longer see Zinn and the others outside. But I could hear yelling and a clash of metal. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Must be more guards,” Aly said.

  The Loculus was heating up, vibrating like crazy. I heard a bloodcurdling scream outside. A rebel slid across the pathway just outside the door, bloodied and screaming. “How many guards are there?” Cass asked.

  Marco was staring at Shelley. “How long before this thing turns green?” he asked.

  “An hour,” I replied.

  Aly looked nervously at the door. “We won’t have that long!”

  “No,” Marco said. “It’s not supposed to happen this way. The timing is all wrong.”

  “What’s not supposed to happen?” I asked. “Timing of what?”

  “Come on, Shelley babe, turn green,” Marco said, shaking it roughly. “Turn green!”

  “Leave it alone, Marco!” Cass shouted.

  I grabbed Marco’s arm. I was afraid he’d break the mechanical Loculus. “What has gotten into you? Let it do its work!”

  Dropping his hands, Marco stepped back. He glanced over his shoulder toward the commotion outside. Behind him, Shelley was starting to make noises. To vibrate jerkily.

  “Okay, guys,” he said, “you know who brought this Loculus here, right? I mean, the legend is pretty clear. . . .”

  “Duh, Massarym, the evil brother of Karai,” Aly said. “This is no time for a history lesson, Marco—”

  “And what did he do?” Marco demanded.

  “Stole the Loculi and hid them in the Seven Wonders!” I shouted.

  “He did it because Karai wanted to destroy them!” Marco said. “Karai was mad at his mom, Qalani, for doing what she did. And he had a point. Isolating the Atlantean energy into seven parts was bad. It upset the energy balance. But Karai was too dumb to realize that destroying the Loculi would nuke Atlantis.”

  “Marco, Atlantis was nuked anyway!” I said.

  “Why are we talking about this now?” Aly demanded.

  “Don’t you see?” Marco said. “Karai was wrong. If he’d just left the Loculi alone, he and Massarym could have done something. Repaired them. Adjusted the energy. Whatever. The smartest minds in the history of the world lived in Atlantis. But Massarym couldn’t convince his bro, so he had to take the Loculi—”

  A shadow moved into the light. At the doorway, across the width of the cavern, stood a tall man in a simple brown robe, his face shrouded by a hood, his feet in simple leather sandals.

  I had seen a similar outfit before—many of them—on a hillside full of monks on the island of Rhodes in Greece. Monks who were protectors of the relics of the Colossus of Rhodes. Who called themselves Massarene, after the Atlantean prince they worshipped. Who, under the leadership of a guy named Dimitrios, had tried to kill us.

  Cass and Aly backed away slowly as the man put his hand on either side of his hood and pulled it down. In the darkness, his salt-and-pepper hair looked mostly black.

  It can’t be. I stared at him, blinking.

  “Brother Dimitrios?” Aly said.

  “Well, well,” the man replied in a heavily accented voice, “what a pleasure to be sharing such a rousing adventure with old friends.”

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “How can you possibly be here?”

  As two other hooded figures moved into the torchlight, Brother Dimitrios said, “I would be rude if I did not introduce my colleagues, Brothers Stavros and Yiorgos. We are here to collect something we have sought for a long time.”

  Were they Select? Impossible! They were way too old.

  He doesn’t see the traps—the projectiles, the gas . . .

  “Come and get us,” I said with a smile.

  Brother Dimitrios threw back his head and laughed. “Nice try, my boy. We know what’s in here. You see, we have been briefed by one of the best. An expert at both access and intelli
gence. A young man with his heart and mind finally in the right place.”

  “You found another Select?” Cass asked.

  “I didn’t need to.” Brother Dimitrios looked into the chamber and smiled. “Good work, Marco.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  THE BETRAYAL

  “MARCO . . . ?” CASS SAID, his face bone-white.

  Marco looked away.

  I tried not to see that. I tried to tell myself that he was looking at the Loculus. That he would run safely through the booby-trapped room, lunge at Brother Dimitrios, and punch him in the face for his brazen lie. But he said nothing. No denial at all. Which meant he had betrayed us. The idea clanged around inside my head. It was impossible.

  Daria looked utterly baffled. “Marco, who is this man? Is this your father?”

  “No, it’s a thief, playing a mind game!” Aly said. “Don’t listen to him. He thinks we’re dumb, gullible kids.”

  “Am I playing games, Brother Marco?” Dimitrios called from the door.

  Marco looked away. “You’re early,” he mumbled.

  “Beg pardon?” Dimitrios asked.

  Sweat was pouring down Marco’s face. “Remember what we said, dude? By the river? After I brought you here? My peeps were going to put Shelley in place and take the Loculus. I was supposed to have time to talk to them. About . . . the truth and all. Then I would signal you.”

  “Ah, my apologies,” Brother Dimitrios said. “But circumstances have changed. The Babylonian guards are—were—more forceful than we’d anticipated. So if you don’t mind, the Loculus, please.”

  My brain wasn’t accepting Marco’s words. He couldn’t be saying them. It sounded like a cruel joke. Like some evil ventriloquist was using him to pull a prank on us.

  “I don’t believe this . . .” Aly murmured, her eyes hollow. “Marco, you brought them here. You’ve gone over to the Dark Side.”

  “You can’t have the Loculus,” I said. “Absolutely not. We need to wait for Shelley to work. If you remove the Loculus too early, all bets are off for Babylon. This place will be sucked up into oblivion. Wiped off the face of the earth. Tell him, Marco!”

  Daria stared at her. “Oblivion? What does it mean?”

  “It is the place where Babylon is headed, unfortunately,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Where it should have gone, centuries ago, in the proper passage of time. This city exists outside of nature. You’ve had several free millennia, happy and content, while millions of deaths have occurred in the rest of the world.” He looked at each of us, one by one. “And as for Shelley, based on the writings of an nineteenth-century crackpot? I hate to disappoint you, but it is a comic-book contraption, nothing more. It cannot possibly work.”

  Marco was looking guilty and confused, his eyes darting toward the back of the chamber. We all stood speechless, our brains racing to provide some sort of meaning to all of this. “You brainwashed him,” Cass said.

  “It wasn’t brainwashing, Brother Cass,” Marco said. “I mean, think about it from his point of view. We total his monastery. We destroy the thing the monks had been guarding for years, right? Then we fly away, in full sight. So he tracks us to the hotel. And when I leave with the Loculus, he’s there. On the beach.”

  “So what you told us was a lie!” Cass said.

  “I left some things out, that’s all,” Marco said, “because you guys weren’t ready to hear it. Look, at least Brother D didn’t kidnap me, dude. Bhegad did that. Brother D didn’t take me from my home and stick me on a deserted island. The Karai Institute did that. Dimitrios? He just talked to me. About Massarym. About the snow job Bhegad has given us. About what the KI is really up to. He said, hey, go home if you want. He wasn’t going to force me to do anything—even after all the bad things we did to the monastery. But hearing the truth really knocked me out. I knew I couldn’t go home. Not yet. Because now we have a new job to do.”

  “But . . . the tracker . . .” Aly said.

  “We have ways of controlling those signals,” Brother Dimitrios said. “They are blocked by trace amounts of iridium. A patch, placed anywhere on the body, will do the trick.”

  “Yes . . . iridium . . .” Aly’s face was wan. “So you listened to him, Marco, there in Rhodes. You came to Iraq and went looking for the Loculus. You figured out that only Select could pass through the portal. But then, after our discovery, with Leonard, you saw your opportunity to bring these guys through.”

  “The morning after your treatment,” I cut in, “you went for a jog. The KI couldn’t find you.”

  Marco nodded. “I used that iridium patch. Brother Dimitrios was camped about five kilometers north of the KI camp.”

  “So while Cass, Aly, and I were recovering from our treatments, you had a secret meeting with these guys and told them we’d found the Loculus,” I barreled on. “And the extra good news that you could transport them to Ancient Babylon.”

  Aly’s eyes were burning. “You used us, Marco. You lied. When you told us to go on ahead, because you had to relieve yourself—”

  “You were bringing these guys over!” Cass blurted out.

  Brother Dimitrios chuckled. “This is the excuse you gave them?”

  “Okay, it was lame,” Marco said. “Hey, it was hard work, guys. I had to move fast. Don’t look at me like I’m a serial killer, okay? I can explain everything—”

  “And we will, on the way,” Brother Dimitrios interrupted.

  “On the way where?” Aly demanded.

  Marco opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Brother Dimitrios was glaring at him. Brother Yiorgos handed him a sturdy metal box. He flipped open the lid. It was empty inside, and just big enough to hold a Loculus. “Bring it to me. It’s time.”

  Marco turned, lunging toward the invisible orb.

  I don’t remember if I cried out. Or what exactly I did. I only remember a few things about the next few moments. Shock. The weight of Marco’s invisible body against mine as he rushed to the door with the Loculus.

  He knocked me off my feet. I hit the ground next to Shelley, which had not turned green. Nowhere near.

  “Watch it!” Aly screamed, as a shower of bronze knives dropped from the ceiling. I rolled away as they clattered to the ground.

  Marco had managed to run straight through, his reflexes quicker than gravity.

  “Follow me!” Cass said.

  “Wait,” I said, looking down at the wheezing bronze sphere known as Shelley. It looked pathetic to me now. A comic-book contraption.

  Maybe not. Picking it up, I dropped it into the pit. As it clanked sadly to the bottom I turned to go. “Okay, Cass, get us out before the place blows.”

  He led us back out through the booby-trapped room. We were all so numb with shock we barely paid attention to where we put our feet. It was a wonder we didn’t get nailed by a new trap. Or maybe by now we’d sprung them all.

  A moment later we were outside. We stared into the faces of several more Masserene monks, at least a half-dozen of them. But Marco and Brothers Dimitrios, Stavros, and Yiorgos were nowhere to be seen. “Where did they go?” I demanded.

  The ground shook. An Archimedes screw toppled to the ground in a shower of dust and water. Vizzeet were scattering to the winds, leaving behind the rags and bones that were once Kranag. Black clouds roiled angrily in the sky, lit by flashes of greenish lightning.

  The monks stood stock-still. From all sides, the rebels were advancing. Most of them held blowpipes to their lips. Zinn was screaming at Daria, and Daria shouted back to them.

  “What are they saying?” I asked.

  “They think these men are your people,” Daria said. “I explained they are the enemy. Oh, yes—one other thing.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “I told them to fire away.” Daria pulled me forward with all her strength. I held tight, racing through the garden grounds. Behind us, I could hear the groans of Massarene monks as they fell to the ground. Lightning flared, and a massive ripple ran throu
gh the ground, as if a giant beast had passed just underneath our feet.

  We scaled the inner wall, dropping to the other side. As we landed, I heard the crack of gunfire.

  “No!” Aly cried out. “We have to go back! They’re killing the rebels!”

  But the wall itself was crumbling now. We had to run away to avoid being crushed.

  I looked back through the opening and saw the Hanging Gardens of Babylon collapse into a cloud of black dust.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  YOU HAVE TO LEAVE

  WE RAN ACROSS the furrows of grain. A farmer screamed as a team of oxen dropped into the earth, out of sight. We fell to the ground, barely missing the crack that grew across the soil like a grotesque opening zipper.

  “Stop here!” Marco’s voice cried out.

  He materialized at the edge of the farm, not twenty yards in front of us. “Go through the city and directly to the river!” he shouted. “I’ll take the old guys and come back for you!”

  He grabbed a satchel from Brother Stavros’s shoulder and pulled out a glowing Loculus. A visible one. The one we’d taken from Rhodes. Marco must have dug it up when he was bringing the Massa in.

  When he was betraying us.

  He knelt again and vanished. I saw the satchel bulge and realized he was storing the invisibility Loculus. As he materialized once more, the three Massarene gathered around him and put their hands on the flight Loculus. Together they rose high above the farmland. The men let out frightened shouts, scissoring their legs like little kids. In another circumstance, it might have looked funny. But not now. Not when we’d been betrayed by one of our own.

  Not when we were destroying an entire civilization.

  “He . . . he is truly a magician . . .” Daria said, looking up at Marco in awe. “Will he be safe?”

  “Don’t worry about him!” I said. “Let’s go!”

  Daria and I ran together across the field, with Cass and Aly close behind us. Daria looked bewildered but determined. How little she knew.