Seven Wonders Book 3 (8 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
EWTON
S
PEAKS

A
LY TURNED AWAY.
“I can't watch this.”

The surgical team was closing around Professor Bhegad, along with Dad and Torquin. With each electrical jolt, I could hear a deep, unearthly-sounding cry. My head, which was already hurting, began to throb.

I felt Aly's head settling into my chest, her arms wrapping around my waist.
Hug her back
, a voice screamed inside my head. But that was ridiculous. We had to move. The doctors needed room. So I backed away with Aly hugging me, and me not hugging back, which was awkward beyond belief. I tried to wrap my arms around her but they collided in midair trying to find a place to settle, until my back plowed into the side of an open door.

“Are you two all right?” Cass said. “Or is this Zombie Dance Night at the hospital?”

Aly and I let go of each other. I could feel my face burning. We stepped into the hallway, leaving Torquin, Dr. Bradley, and Dad inside with the medical team.

Cass began pacing up and down. He had the worry beads now and was flicking beads down the necklace-like cord. “He can't die.”

Click . . . click . . .

I glanced back into the room. “We have to contact this Mr. Ling,” I said.

“Maybe it's not a Mr.,” Aly said. “It could be a Ms. Or a first name.”

“Or linguini?” Cass shrugged. “Maybe he was hungry.”

Click . . .

“Is there a ‘Ling' in any of the names of the Seven Wonders we haven't been to?” Aly said.

“The Great Pyramid of Giza . . .” I said. “Lighthouse at Pharos . . . Mausoleum at Halicarnassus . . . Temple of Artemis at Ephesus . . . Statue of Zeus at Olympia.”

“All Ling-less,” Cass said.

Click . . . click . . .

“Will you please stop that?” Aly cried out.

“They're worry beads!” Cass protested. “I'm worried.”

Click . . . click . . . click . . .

“Give me that!” Aly grabbed for the string, but Cass yanked it back. With a soft snap, the clasp pulled open. The beads smacked downward against the lower part of the clasp. Cass held up the other half.

Jutting out of it was the end of a flash drive.

Aly's face brightened. “Cass, you are my hero.”

“I am?” Cass said.

“Let's see what's on this thing.” Aly took the beads and ran them down the hall to the room where Dad had shown her the genome. Its image still glowed on the screen.

Aly inserted the USB into the port at the side of the monitor. The screen went black, then showed a login screen. “Okay, let's hack this thing. Accessing a password generator from my VPN . . .”

The screen was going crazy with scrolling numbers and letters, error messages flashing at blinding speeds.

“Is this going to take a long time?” Cass asked.

The craziness on the screen abruptly stopped, revealing a folder. “Got it. Eight seconds. Owner of this drive is . . . him.”

She showed us the screen.

“Yiopyos?” Cass said.

I thought back to Rhodes. The Greeks called it Rhodos, and you saw it written everywhere as
POΔOΣ
.

“I think that
p
is actually an
r
sound in Greek,” I said. “This says Yiorgos Skouras.”

Cass made a face. “Yiorgos knows how to use a flash drive?”

“He's like the nasty cousin of André the Giant,” Aly said.

“Who?” Cass asked.

“You know . . . ‘Anybody want a peanut?' From
The Princess Bride
?” Aly said. “Don't you two know anything about American cinema?”

“If I watched as many old movies as you, I'd be fat and bald and using dial-up,” Cass said.

Aly ignored him, scrolling through a folder of documents. “Seven folders,” she said. “All the labels are in Greek but I'm guessing each folder is dedicated to one of the Seven Wonders. Let's start with this one . . . it looks like it says pyramid.”

She clicked on a folder marked
ΠYPAMIΣ
. As she clicked through a trove of documents—architectural reports, images, Wikipedia entries, Cass exhaled. “This isn't helping. It's just research. Bhegad will be dead in the ground by the time we read all this!”

Dead in the ground.

I caught a blast of decay, a memory of the awful smell in my dream. “Let's think positively, okay?”

“Okay, I'm collecting everything that's in English,” Aly said. “The rest we can show Torquin later. He knows Greek.”

I watched documents fly by, and some images. One of them was a stately building overlooking a cliff. “What's that?” I asked.

“The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,” Aly said.

I leaned closer. Something about it seemed familiar. “Creepy looking,” I said.

“Should be. Dead people are buried there. Some ruler named Mausolus. And his wife, Artemisia.” Aly clicked on the folder titled
MAYΣΩΛEION
.

Like the Pyramid folder, it contained tons of files. She opened all of them at once. We looked at a cascade of Greek words, every document complete gibberish.

Except for one.

“Whoa, go back,” I said. “I think I saw something in English.”

Aly toggled through the documents, pausing at one and then printing it out.

“Who's Charles Newton?” Aly asked.

“Turkey is pretty famous for figs,” Cass said. “Maybe he named a cookie after himself.”

She clacked away on the keys again, running a search on
CHARLES NEWTON.
First hit was a Wikipedia entry. Cass and I leaned over to read it. “Here we go,” Aly said. “Newton is the guy who discovered the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Well, the remains of it.”

My heart started to race. “Okay, I'm looking for the word
ling
. It would be great to find a connection . . .”

“Well, not here, anyway,” Aly said. “Badly written letter. What person would write ‘all hopes I had of ever my seeing'? Wouldn't you say ‘my ever seeing'?”

“Maybe English wasn't his first language,” Cass suggested.

“With a name like Charles Newton?” Aly said.

“He could have changed it,” Cass said, “from Charles Ling.”

I stared at the words “The 7th, to the end.”

“Do you see what I see?” I said.

Aly nodded. “Sevenths. The Atlanteans loved that ratio of sevenths. We used it on the island and in Babylon.”

One-seventh: 0.142857.

Two-sevenths: 0.285714

Three-sevenths: 0.428571.

The same digits, in the same order, only starting in different places. They were part of the codes we'd used in the Mount Onyx labyrinth and in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Cass took a sheet of paper and a pen from the desk and began writing. “So let's take the first, fourth, second, eighth, fifth, and seventh letter of the message . . .”

“Helpful,” Aly drawled.

“Maybe it's an anagram?” Cass said.

Aly scratched her head. “FWONTY? As in, ‘Don't go in the backy, go in the fwonty?'”

I took a deep breath. “There's another name there—Harold Beamish. Anything on him?”

Aly did a quick search. “Nothing.”

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my temples, which were starting to ache. “Okay. Maybe we're overthinking this.”

“Maybe it's not one-seventh,” Cass said.

“What if we just take every seventh letter of the message?” I suggested.

I took Cass's pen and carefully circled the letters of the message:

I wrote out the letters one by one:

“‘Where the lame walk, the sick rise, the dead live forever,'” Cass read.

“It makes no sense,” I said. “A mausoleum is where you bury the dead.”

I leaned back in the chair, my thoughts in total chaos. “Did Professor Bhegad say anything else?”

“He called you over to his bed,” Cass said. Flipping into a croaky Professor Bhegad imitation, he said, “Jaaack!”

I shook my head. “No. He didn't say ‘Jack.' He said ‘He.' Bhegad looked at me and said ‘He.' That's why we thought this Ling character must be a guy.”