Seven Wonders 3-Book Collection

  As he called the genetics team and told them what Aly had said, I sat in a chair. My head throbbed. “Jack?” Aly said. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Guess the crash kinda shook me up.”

  “You kinda might have a concussion,” Cass said.

  “After they’re done working on Professor Bhegad, I’ll mention something to Dr. Bradley,” I said.

  “What? Are you sure?” Dad blurted out, his voice suddenly loud and animated. He hung up the phone and set it down on the table. “The head surgeon just cut into my other call with an update on Bhegad. He pulled through.”

  “Yyyahhhh!” Torquin bellowed, leaping up from his chair.

  I felt a jolt of relief. Cass shot me a smile and said, “Emosewa!”

  As Aly gave me a tight hug, Dad headed for the doorway. “And he wants to see you four. Immediately. Follow me to the recovery room.”

  We raced out of the room, down the hallway, and through a set of doors. Professor Bhegad was lying on a slanted bed, dressed in a white hospital gown that looked like a tent on his skinny frame. His face was papery white, his hands spotted and even more wrinkly than usual. “Hello . . .” he said, his voice hoarse and whispery, barely audible above the beeping and whirring of the machines.

  Aly took his hand. “You look great, Professor!”

  He managed a pained half smile as his head rolled to the side and his eyes fluttered shut. “He’s still fragile,” Dr. Bradley said. “Asleep more than awake. We found a lot of internal trauma. Bleeding. We’ll monitor him and do what we can. But there’s only so much we can do.” She sighed. “He’s an old man.”

  “Not exactly cause for great yoj,” Cass said.

  Dr. Bradley lowered her voice, casting a quick eye toward Dad. “The professor told me he’s concerned you move as swiftly as possible in your quest.”

  That seemed to rouse Bhegad. “Go . . . g . . . go . . .” he said, crooking a gnarled finger to us, gesturing us to come closer. We sank to our knees in order to hear his soft voice. “Neck . . . lock . . .” the professor rasped.

  “Next Loculus?” I said. “Is that what you want, Professor?”

  “Yes . . .” he said, staring at me with an expression of urgency. “H . . . h . . . he . . .”

  “Jack?” Aly said. “He meaning Jack? What about him?”

  “L . . . l . . .” Bhegad swallowed and tried again.

  I leaned closer. “What are you trying to tell us? Go slowly.”

  “Ling,” he finally said.

  “Ling?” Cass said. “Is there someone here named Ling? Dr. Ling?”

  Bhegad’s eyes fluttered and his body gave a sudden jerk. The room resounded with piercing beeps. “What’s happening?” Aly exclaimed.

  “Heart arrhythmia,” Dr. Bradley said. “Get the pads, stat!”

  We backed away fast. Medical workers swarmed into the room. Dr. Bradley lifted a pair of pads like small catcher’s mitts and applied them to the sides of Professor Bhegad’s chest.

  The old man’s body lurched upward like he’d been poked with a dagger.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NEWTON SPEAKS

  ALY 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 ti
tled 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.”

  “Right,” Cass said. “And when you leaned closer he said that name. Ling.”

  “He . . .” I said. “. . . Ling.”

  The answer hit me like a wooden plank. “Oh. Oh, wow . . .”

  Cass and Aly looked at me blankly.

  “He wasn’t giving us a name,” I said. “He was telling us about the next Loculus!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DAD TAKES MORE WEIRD

  HE. LING.

  Healing.

  I hoped I wasn’t wrong.

  “Jack, you can’t just barge in here like that!” Dr. Bradley said. “He just had a highly painful procedure!”

  “Sorry, Dr. Bradley, it’s important.” I darted around her toward Professor Bhegad’s hospital bed. In the time it took to run from the office, my tiny headache had grown. Now it pounded. The old man was flat on his back, his eyes open but glassy and red. Dad, Cass, and Aly were huddled in the doorway, watching. Torquin was sitting in a chair in a corner holding a ukulele.

  I stopped short. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Playing.” Torquin’s eyes were moist. The little instrument looked even smaller in his huge hands. “‘Oh! Susanna.’ Professor’s favorite.”

  I knelt by the professor, leaning close to his ear. “Professor, it’s Jack. How are you?”

  He didn’t turn his eyes. But I sensed he could hear me.

  “Jack, he’s unconscious,” Dr. Bradley said.

  “A little while ago, Professor,” I pressed on, “you looked at me and said something. I didn’t understand you then, but were you telling us to look for a Loculus of Healing?”

  I stared into his face for what felt like an hour, looking for the tiniest flicker of recognition. All I could see was a white ring in the pupils of his eyes, reflecting the fluorescent lights above. Cold and unmoving. With a deep sigh, I stood up to leave.

  The white ring moved.

  “Jack . . . ?” Aly whispered.

  Bhegad’s eyes were turning toward me. His mouth shuddered slightly but no sound came out. I leaned again, so that my ear was close to him. I felt a soft breath of air. A vowel followed by a kind of hiss. “Is that a yes, Professor?”

  Professor Bhegad’s face moved up and down in the weakest nod I have ever seen.

  “We found a coded letter from Charles Newton,” I said. “The guy who discovered the remains of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The code said something about the lame walking and the sick rising. Is that the place we need to go? Is that where we’ll find the Loculus of Healing?”

  “Newton . . .” Bhegad said. “. . . Massa . . .”

  “Charles Newton was with the Massa?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  But Bhegad’s energy was spent. His lids slowly closed, his breaths deepening into a snore.

  As Dr. Bradley stepped in, I backed away toward the door. If I had two spitballs, I could have launched them into Aly’s and Cass’s mouths, which were hanging open. “You were right about the Loculus . . .” Aly murmured.

  “Which means we might be able to save him,” Cass said.

  “Dad,” I blurted out, “we have an emergency. A big one. That aircraft on the runway with an MGL logo—can we use it? Can you get a pilot to take us to Turkey?”

  “What?” Dad looked flabbergasted. “Would you mind telling me what the heck is going on?”

  This was not going to be easy.

  “Follow me.” I barged past Dad, Cass, and Aly, jogging back to the office. Now my whole body felt weird, like I’d caught a cold. When we were all in the office, I shut the door behind us and gestured toward the black padded desk chair. “Sit, Dad, and listen. Promise you’ll hear us out until the end. This is going to sound weird.”

  “I don’t know if I can take more weird,” Dad said.

  “Inside that pack,” I said, pointing to Torquin’s bulky backpack against the wall, “are two Loculi. Spheres. Orbs. One of them can make you fly, the other can make you invisible. They were made by Queen Qalani, wife of King Uhla’ar, mother of Prince Karai and Prince Massarym.”

  Dad’s tense expression softened. “Karai . . . Massarym . . . of Atlantis. I know those names. Your mother was fascinated by the legend.”

  “It’s not a legend, Dad,” I said. “It’s real. Atlantis was this unbelievably peaceful place, amazingly advanced. All due to this magical energy from a breach in the ground. Qalani was a scientist. She wanted to analyze the energy, thinking she could transport it if she needed to. So she managed to isolate it into seven components, which she put into the Loculi. They had to remain in a place called the Heptakiklos, passing their energy in a kind of circuit, so it would all be in balance. But Massarym liked to sneak
off with the Loculi and play with them. When the continent was hit by earthquakes, wars, and disease, Karai thought his mom was to blame for disturbing the sacred energy source. So he figured destroying the Loculi would end the problem. Massarym freaked, and secretly hid them away where Karai would never find them. One went into the Great Pyramid. He commissioned six other structures, like storage lockers, but, well, magical and powerful. They became known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”

  “The continent sank,” Aly went on. “Totaled. But centuries later the explorer Herman Wenders discovered the remains, a small volcanic island. His son, Burt, was a Select like Jack and Cass and me. Wenders and his crew stayed there and founded the Scholars of Karai. They couldn’t save Burt, but now there’s an awesome high-tech laboratory where they’ve been working on many of the secrets of Atlantis—including finding a treatment for people like us. The problem is, the breach is widening, weakening. It could blast open a rift in time and destroy the world. Already some Atlantean beasts have slipped through.”

  “So we need to return the Loculi and close the breach,” Cass said. “But here’s the bonus—if the Loculi are put back into the Heptakiklos, and their energy is in balance, moob! We’re cured. We have long, happy lives as superbeings and awesome people.”

  Our words hung in the air. Dad looked at each of us for what felt like a long time. “And you believe all this?”

  “We’ve seen the evidence,” I said. “Cass has talon marks from the griffin. We made the Colossus of Rhodes rise from rocks. We traveled to Ancient Babylon in a parallel world progressing at one ninetieth the speed of our own.”

  Cass had pulled open his shirt to show the griffin scars, but Dad was shaking his head. Both of his heads, actually—my eyes were starting to see double. I shook it off, but my head felt weird.

  “Where are these things—the griffin, the Colossus, the ancient civilization?” he asked. “If all this happened, why wasn’t it in the news?”

  “All destroyed,” I explained.