The Curse of the King (4 page)

“Jack?” Cass mouthed, as if I'd just lost my mind.

Barry's mouth was sagging. His eyes narrowed, as if he were still stuck on the second sentence. Which he probably was.

Would he try to repeat his own mangled version of what I'd just said to his dad? I hoped so, because any sane human being would send him straight to a psychologist. And he knew it.

“Well, that's everything,” I said, reaching to grab the Loculus from Barry's hand.

He pulled it back.

“Okay, so if you're supposed to get sick every few weeks . . .” he said quietly, “how come you're not sick?”

“The fresh, rejuvenating Belleville air?” Cass said.

Barry's face curled. “You guys are playing me. That was the obvious-est lie! I'm going to get to the bottom of this. You watch, I'll find out the truth.”

“Great,” I said. “Meanwhile, will you give me that back?”

“Why should I give you a piece of a destroyed Oculus?” Barry asked. “It might be worth something.”

“Loculus,” Cass said. “With an
L
.”

“Trust me,” I said, “it's worth absolutely nothing to you.”

“Awwww, really?” Barry said. “Nothing?”

With an exasperated sigh, Barry held out the shard to Cass. Both of us reached for it at the same time.

Before our fingers could touch it, Barry spun away. With a grunt, he tossed it far into the scrubby, trash-strewn woods.

“Fetch,” he said. “With an
F
.”

“W
HAT HAPPENED TO
your face?” Dad stared at me oddly, standing in the front door.

I peeked past him to the sofa, where a strange man dressed in black was rising to his feet. “Thorns,” I said, touching my cheek, where the edges of thin gash peeked out from behind a Band-Aid. “We lost something in the woods.”

I didn't want to mention the shard in front of a stranger. It had taken us about a half hour on our hands and knees in the woods to find it. Which made us very late for school. The cool thing was, no one seemed to care. Cass and I were like returning war heroes. Everyone was nice to us. The nurse cleaned us up and gave me a whole box of Band-Aids.
The principal herself, Mrs. Sauer (pronounced
Sour
), brought a Welcome Back cake into homeroom. Barry ate most of it, but it was still nice. I even had a session with the school psychologist, who said she was screening me for PTSD. At first I thought that was some kind of a sandwich, like pastrami, turkey, salami, and dark bread, but it means post–traumatic stress disorder. The only stress I felt was from thinking about the great sandwich I wasn't going to eat.

“Jack . . . Cass,” Dad said, “this is Mr. Anthony from Lock-Tite Security. After that strange little visit from the TV station this morning, I figure we'd better make ourselves safe from intrusions, wiretaps, recording devices. Somebody in this town—who shall remain nameless—thinks he's going to win an Emmy Award for investigative journalism.”

Cass nodded. “I understand, Mr. McKinley. I met his son. I don't blame you.”

“We'll go upstairs,” I said.

We raced each other through the living room and up the back stairs. Cass reached the second-floor landing first. He quickly tossed off his shoes and socks before walking on the Oriental rug that lined the long hallway. “I love the way this feels. This house is so cool.”

“You could have a whole room of your own, you know,” I said. “We have a lot of them. There's more on third floor, too.”

“We already decided we were going to share,” Cass said. “Are you changing your mind?”

“No!” I said. “I just thought . . . if you ever felt like you needed space. It's a big house and all.”

Cass shook his head, his face darkening. “Besides we have to be prepared. We can't be separated if it happens . . .”

“It?”
I said.

“You know . . .
it
,” Cass repeated. “Dying.”

I leaned over, softly banging my head on the wood railing that looked out onto the first floor vestibule. “I thought we talked about this. We're going to stay positive, remember? We're feeling good so far, Dad is on the case—”

“Right,” Cass said. “But doesn't that first part seem scary to you? About us feeling good?”

“
Dying
is scary, Cass!” I said. “Feeling good is not scary!”

“But we shouldn't be feeling good!” Cass replied. “By now, both of us—or at least you—should have had an episode. Which would mean we'd need a treatment. No one knows how to give us one!”

“Dad is working on it,” I said.

“He has no contact with anyone in the KI, so how can he figure it out?” Cass said. “I've been thinking all day about what Barry Reese said. Why are we still healthy, Jack? We shouldn't be!”

“Uh, guys?” Dad's face appeared directly below me. He was scowling. “Can you please take it inside?”

Cass and I ran into our room and shut the door tight. I emptied my pockets onto the desk, yanked off my ripped pants, and quickly pulled on a pair of sweats I'd left on the floor. That was another agreement Cass and I had made. I could keep my side of the room as messy as I wanted.

Feeling more comfortable, I began pacing. “Okay, let's think about this. The intervals are irregular. Always have been. We know that.”

“Yeah, but the older we get, the
closer
they should be,” Cass said.

I couldn't argue that. Professor Bhegad had warned us exactly that would happen as we neared the Day of Doom.

Closer. Not farther away.

“I think it's the shards,” Cass said. “Remember, it was the Loculus of
Healing
. It was supposed to restore life to the dead.”

“You mean
shard
,” I said.

“Shards.” Cass shrugged. “I took one, too.”

I looked at him. “You did? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't think it was important,” Cass replied. “I just took it as a souvenir. It's not as nice as yours. No designs or anything. I thought it was just a busted, useless piece of junk. But now . . .”

He went to his desk and pulled open a drawer. From the bottom he took out a hunk of material maybe three inches long, wrapped in tissue. “It's kind of ugly.”

I heard a rustling noise from my pile of junk on my desk and jumped away.

Cass dropped the shard. “Whoa. Did you bring in a
mouse
?”

The rustling stopped. I darted my hand out and pushed aside some candy wrappers. No critters there.

Just my shard.

“Pick it up, Cass,” I said softly. “Your shard.”

Cass swallowed. He lifted the little disklike thing from the floor. On the desk, my shard began to twitch like a jumping bean. “Whoa . . .” Cass said.

I leaned over, peering closely at my shard, then Cass's. “They're not two random pieces,” I said. “It looks like they may have broken apart from each other.”

“It feels warm,” Cass said.

“Hold the long side toward me,” I said.

As Cass angled his arm, I reached out to my shard and turned it so its longest side faced Cass's.

“Ow—it's like a hundred degrees!” Cass said.

“Hold tight!” I said.

I felt a jolt like an electric current. As I pulled my fingers away from the shard, it shot across the room toward Cass.

With a scream, he dropped his relic and jumped away.

Bluish-white light flashed across our room. As Cass fell back on the lower bed with a shriek, the two shards collided
in midair with a loud
DZZZZZT
and a blast that smelled like rotten eggs.

Flames shot up from the carpet as the pieces landed. I raced to the bathroom for a glass of water and doused the small fire quickly. I could hear Dad yelling at us from downstairs.

But neither Cass nor I answered him. We were too busy staring at what remained in the singed, smoking patch of carpet.

Not two shards, but one.

They had joined together, without a seam.

“W
AIT, THEY JUST
flew together and joined in midair,” Aly said, “like snowflakes?”

Her hair was purple now, her face pale on my laptop screen. Belleville, Indiana, may have been overcast, but the Los Angeles sunshine was pouring through Aly's bedroom window.

“It was more like massive colliding spacecraft,” Cass said. “Only . . . tiny. And not in outer space.”

I held up the joined sections. Together they formed one larger shard. “You can't even tell where they were separated.”

“That's awesome,” Aly replied, as her face loomed closer to the screen. “Absomazingly ree-donculous. It means that—” Aly turned away from the screen and let out a loud sneeze.
And then another.

Cass's eyes widened. “Are you okay?”

“A cold,” Aly said.

“Because Jack and I were wondering, you know, about the treatments,” Cass went on. “It's been a while since your last episode . . .”

“It's
a cold
, that's all,” Aly said, clacking away at her laptop. “Let's get down to business. I've been doing research. Tons. About the Seven Wonders. About Atlantis.”

“Why?” Cass asked.

“Because what else am I going to do?” Aly said. “I know you're feeling bad, Cass. But I refuse to give up. We start by trying to get back in touch with the KI. They're lying low, but I'm betting they'll want to be in contact with us. Which means we need to protect our alibi. So I pretended to be, like, an evil spy searching for clues to break our story. All kinds of things didn't add up. That doctor friend of your dad's? His employee records showed he was in Mexico the day he supposedly treated Cass. And the convenience store where Marco was last seen? Its video feed showed a seven-foot-tall, red-bearded barefoot guy who bought three peanut butter sandwiches and a dozen doughnuts. The owner was suspicious, so he sent the feed to the local cops, who ran a primitive facial ID scan. They came up with three hundred and seven possible suspects. Including one Victor Rafael Quiñones.”

“Who's that?” Cass asked.

“
Tor
from Victor,
quin
from Quiñones,” Aly said. “I'm figuring Torquin is a nickname.”

“Wait. His name is
Victor
?” Cass said.

“So of course I deleted the footage of Torquin from the FTP servers,” Aly said. “Even the backups. And I altered the doctor's hospital records, too. I even hacked into his Facebook account and deleted the pictures of Mexico. I am covering our tracks so the alibi is clean. But the point is, I can't do everything. Things can go wrong. What if there are off-line copies of the originals?
Arrrrrghh!
” Aly shook her fists in frustration. “Okay. Okay, Black, stay calm and hack. I will try to locate Torquin or anyone who seems connected to the KI.”

“Is that possible?” Cass asked.

Aly shrugged. “Anything's—” She broke off in a fit of coughing, swinging away from the screen. All we saw now was her bookcase.

“Aly?” Cass said.

Something thumped. I heard a choking noise. A pounding on the floor.
“Mo-o-om!”
came Aly's voice.

A blur passed across the screen—a woman with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She passed from top to bottom, falling to her knees and out of the screen. “Aly?
Aly, wake up!
”

I was on my feet now.
“ALY!”

The image on the screen juddered. And then all went black.