Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon (28 page)

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. It had to be a lookalike. A coincidence. His being here was a physical impossibility.

“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.”

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 intelligence. 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.”

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“M
ARCO
. . . ?” C
ASS 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 lunge at Brother Dimitrios and punch him in the face for his brazen insult. But he said nothing. No denial at all. Which meant he had betrayed us. The idea clanged around inside my head, as if someone had just revealed that the sky was made of jelly.

I would have believed that more than this.

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 asked.

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 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.

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
.

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 through 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.

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W
E 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. And I realized how little she knew.

Not about the Loculus's connection to Sippar. Not about the fact that the whole civilization she called home was about to be sucked into a collapsing time-space rift. Not about the lambda, or the power of being a Select. Not about the centuries-old battle between the followers of Karai and the followers of Massarym.

The Ishtar Gate was looming closer. One of the moat walls had cracked, and a crocodile was climbing out onto the rubble. It eyed Cass and Aly as they took a wide berth around it. The turrets of the gate were empty. One of them had partially collapsed. As we sprinted through the gate's long passageway, we had to shield our heads from falling pieces of brick. We burst out the other side into utter chaos. The stately paths of Ká-Dingir-rá were now choked with fallen trees. Boars, fowl, and cattle ran wild, followed by guards with bows and arrows. I saw mothers scooping up children and running into houses with broken doors, teams of
wardum
carrying the injured away from harm.