Seven Wonders 3-Book Collection

  I couldn’t do it any longer. Couldn’t hide.

  As she turned back, I let go of the Loculus. Cass let out a gasp.

  Mom’s eyes immediately looked up and locked on mine. In the flash of a moment I saw grief give way to shock and joy.

  But before I could move, before I could do a thing, her eyes moved and her expression changed abruptly.

  When she looked at me again an instant later, her intent was so strong, so direct, that the strength of her glance nearly knocked me back on my heels.

  Stop now. Don’t do this.

  “Sister Nancy!” Brother Dimitrios’s deep, unmistakable voice boomed from behind us.

  I shoved my hand backward and touched the Loculus. Behind us, the tall monk was stepping awkwardly down the steep incline, eyes on his sandaled feet. In the darkness, his beard seemed to obliterate the bottom of his sallow, bony face. But as he neared the bottom, glancing toward Mom, there was no mistaking the coldness in his eyes.

  “Where did they go?” he demanded. “Where are our assets?”

  “You ask now, Brother Dimitrios,” Mom said, “but when we were fighting the forces of Artemisia, where were you then? Protecting your own assets?”

  He climbed the fence with some difficulty and fell awkwardly to the ground. Brushing himself off, he looked at the shards in Mom’s hand.

  “Oh, by Massarym’s grave . . .” he said, his voice falling to a dismayed hush. Carefully he lifted a piece of the Loculus and turned it in his hand. “He didn’t . . .”

  “Threw it under a train,” Mom said. “The boy did. Jack.”

  “So the prophecy of Brother Charles has been fulfilled,” Brother Dimitrios murmured. “The destroyer . . .”

  “Shall rule . . .” Mom continued.

  Brother Dimitrios gazed slowly back up the hill. “I thought it was the athletic one. Marco the warrior. What an . . . interesting surprise.”

  “He’s a strong young man in his own right,” Mom said.

  Brother Dimitrios shook his head uncertainly. “I suppose there is no arguing what is meant to be.”

  My head was reeling.

  The message in the Charles Newton letter—The destroyer shall rule—wasn’t about Mausolus. It wasn’t about Artemisia.

  It was about Atlantis. About the person destined to rule it.

  In the new world, you can keep calling me Marco. But to everyone else, I’ll be His Highness King Marco the First. That was what Marco had told us in Babylon—Brother Dimitrios’s plan for him. A plan that had been misunderstood.

  Mom was still holding tight to the shards. What did they say? What ruler did they predict? And what was going to happen to Marco now?

  “We must convene immediately,” Mom said. “Go ahead, Brother Dimitrios, tell the others we will have a very long night. I will collect pieces of the Loculus.”

  Mom watched Brother Dimitrios climb back over the fence and begin the trek up the hill. But she did not turn back to the track to pick up any more shards. Instead, she waited a good thirty seconds, motionless.

  Aly gripped me tight. I didn’t dare move.

  Mom began walking, veering toward us. I wanted to reveal myself but her face was still closed up, still a mask of unmistakable no. As she passed, she let something drop from her hand. Without pausing, she continued on.

  I stooped to pick it up.

  When I finally managed to look back, Mom had turned. I realized I had let go of the Loculus and was visible again.

  Mom’s eyes blazed. I gave her a shrug, holding out the shard. “Who?” I mouthed.

  “Acch, these miserable sandals,” came Brother Dimitrios’s voice from the darkness. “Will you help me, Sister Nancy?”

  Mom’s face went taut with panic. I reached back quickly to touch the Loculus of Invisibility, but my eyes never left Mom.

  And as she climbed up toward Dimitrios, I saw her point directly toward me.

  Credits

  Cover illustration © 2014 by Torstein Norstrand

  Cover design by Joe Merkel

  Copyright

  SEVEN WONDERS BOOK 3: THE TOMB OF SHADOWS

  Text by Peter Lerangis, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Torstein Norstrand

  Map art by Mike Reagan, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 2014931071

  ISBN 978-0-06-207046-3 (trade bdg.)

  ISBN 978-0-06-232546-4 (int’l ed.)

  EPub Edition © March 2014 ISBN 9780062070487

  * * *

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  FIRST EDITION

  CONTENTS

  Note to Reader

  The Journal of Burton Friedrich Wenders

  Copyright

  NOTE TO READER

  The Seven Wonders series is a tale of adventure, sacrifice, and friendship. Of awesome mysteries locked away for centuries. Of prehistoric beasts and burping barefoot giants. Of an ordinary thirteen-year-old kid named Jack McKinley, captured and taken to a hidden place dedicated to the study of … him. You see, Jack is one of only four people who possess unearthly powers—powers that will kill them. To stay alive, these four friends must embark on a dangerous quest for the secrets of a lost civilization. The secrets they find may save them, but at a cost—the destruction of the world.

  So what are these journals?

  Well, first of all, the Seven Wonders series takes place now, with kids who might be your best friends. But recently, while working on the series, I came across a trove of documents that made my blood race. What do they have to do with this epic? An insane amount. After a high-level meeting in midtown Manhattan, and at some risk of personal danger, I have arranged for them to finally be released as soon as each is translated and ready. The events in these journals occur centuries before the first book in the series, The Colossus Rises. The tales themselves are amazing. But more importantly, those who read them will have the inside track on everyone else. You’ll learn some deep secrets—secrets some people might not want you to know.

  A discovery like this is too big to hold back.

  The fate of the world is in the balance.

  —PL

  THE JOURNAL OF

  BURTON FRIEDRICH

  WENDERS

  13 YRS OLD

  SEPTEMBER 24, 1894

  I DO NOT hear them, but I know they are near.

  The creatures. The men. They hunt me through the rocks and jungle trees.

  I must move, but I cannot. I fear my ankle is broken. If I stay, they will flush me out of this hiding place. When they are through with Father, they will come for me.

  I pray they spare him. It is I whom they seek.

  Yesterday I was the proud son of a renowned archaeologist, a man of science. We were explorers in a strange land. We would make incredible discoveries.

  Today I know the truth.

  Father brought me here to find a cure for my sickness. To heal my weakened body. To fix what science cannot understand.

  But today I learned that my blood has sealed my fate.

  If the prophecy is true, I will die before reaching my fourteenth birthday.

  If the prophecy is true, I will cause the destruction of the world.

  The island drew us here. It will draw others. Like Father. People who seek the truth. It must not end like this. So I leave this a
ccount for those who follow. And I pray, more than anything, that I have time to finish.

  Our ship was called Enigma. She sailed ten days ago, September 14, into a red, swollen sun setting over Cardiff. But I lay in a cabin belowdecks, racked with head pain.

  “Are you all right?” Father asked, peeking over for the dozenth time.

  For the dozenth time I lied. “Yes.”

  “Then come abovedecks. The air will be good for you.”

  I followed him out of the cabin and up the ladder. Above and around us, the crew set the rigging, hauled in supplies, checked lists. English, French, Greek—their shouts kept my mind off the pain. Silently, I translated. What I didn’t know, I learned from context. I had never heard the Malay tongue, but the words floated through the air in rapid cadences. They were spoken by a powerful but diminutive deckhand named Musa.

  My love of languages is not why Father hired these motley men. It was the only group he could get together in such a short time.

  He knew the clock was ticking on my life.

  Five weeks earlier I had collapsed during a cricket match. I thought I had been hit accidentally by a batsman. But when I awoke in a hospital, Father looked as if he had aged twenty years. He was talking to the doctor about a “mark.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. But from that day, Father seemed transformed. The next two weeks he seemed like a madman—assembling a crew, scaring up funding for a sturdy ship. Impossible at such short notice! He was forced to interview vagabonds from shadows, to beg money from crooked lenders.

  We sailed with a ragtag crew of paupers, criminals, and drunks. It was the best he could do.

  As Father and I came abovedecks, I fought back nausea. The Enigma was a refitted whaling ship that stank of rancid blubber. Its planks creaked nastily on the water. Back at the port, Welsh dockmen mocked us in song: “Hail, Enigma, pump away! Drooping out of Cardiff Bay! Hear her as she cracks and groans! Next stop, mates, is Davy Jones!”

  Our captain, a grizzled giant named Kurtz, hurled a lump of coal across the bay at them, nearly hitting one of the men. “Let me at them leek-lovin’ cowards,” he grumbled.

  “Pay them no heed,” Father said.

  “Not that they’re wrong, mind ye,” Kurtz said, his eyes flashing with anger. “Us heading for the middle of the ocean to find nothing.”

  As he lumbered away, I looked at Father. My head pain was beginning to ease. “Why does he say this?” I asked.

  Father took my arm and brought me to the wheelhouse. He took out an ancient map, marked with scribblings. In its center was a large X. Directly under that was an inscription in faded red letters, but as Father skillfully folded the map, the words were tucked away. “Kurtz sees no land under this mark, that’s why,” Father said. “But I know there is. The most important archaeological discovery I will ever make.”

  “Could not we have waited and gathered a better group of men?” I asked as I glanced toward the foremast, where two Portuguese sailors were brawling with Musa. As the Malay drew a dagger to protect himself, Father ran toward them.

  He did not know that I had seen the inscription he’d folded away. It was in German: Hier herrscht eine unvorstellbare Hölle.

  “Here lies a most unimaginable hell.”

  We reached our own Hölle early.

  We were in open ocean. The sky was bright, the sails full, and the Strait of Gibraltar had long faded from sight. Eight days into the voyage, I was making progress in understanding Malay. Not to mention many of the saltier words and phrases used by these men in many other languages. I tried to help as often as I could, but the men treated me as if I were a small child. I must have seemed like one to them. My headaches were becoming more frequent, so I often went belowdecks to rest. Father would often join me for a card game or conversation.

  It was during one of the games that we heard a scream above.

  We raced upward. What we saw knocked us back on our heels.

  The freshening sky had given way to an explosion of black clouds. They billowed toward us as if heaven itself had suddenly ruptured. Captain Kurtz was shoving sailors toward the mainsail sheets, shouting commands. First Mate Grendel, so quiet I’d thought he had no voice, was shrieking from the fo’c’sle, rousing the sailors.

  The Enigma lurched upward. As it smacked back to the water, men fell to the deck. The wind sheared across the ship and the mainsail ripped down the center with a loud snap. In the thunder’s boom, I stood, paralyzed, not knowing how to help. Rain pelted me from all directions. I saw a flash of lightning, followed by an unearthly crack. The mizzenmast split in two, falling toward me like a redwood. A hand gripped my forearm and I flew through the rain, tumbling to the deck with Father. As we rolled to safety, I saw the crumpled body of a sailor pinned to the deck by a jagged splinter of the mast.

  I tried to help, but my feet slipped on the planks. The ship tilted to starboard as if launched by a catapult. I was airborne, flailing. All I saw beneath me was the sea, black and bubbling. Three sailors, screaming, disappeared into the water. I thought I would be propelled after them, but my shoulder caught the top of the gunwale railing. I cried out in pain, bouncing back hard to the deck.

  “Sea monster!” a voice called out. “Sea monster!” It was the sailor named Llewellyn, dangling over the hull.

  I held tight to the railing. Beneath me was a horrifying groan. I took it to be the strain on the keel’s wood planking. I looked downward and saw the churn of a vast whirlpool.

  In its center was a man’s arm, quickly vanishing.

  Where was Father? I looked around, suddenly terrified by the thought that the arm might have been his. But with relief I saw him coming toward me, clutching the railing. “Come!” he cried out.

  He grabbed my forearm. The ship was rocking. I heard a deathly cry. Llewellyn’s grip had loosened and he was dropping into the sea. I pulled away to try to grab him. “It’s too late!” Father insisted, forcing me toward the battened-down hatch.

  He yanked it open, shoving me toward the ladder. Overhead I thought I heard the flapping of wings. A frightening high-pitched chitter. “What is that?” I called out.

  “Must be the angels, lost in the wind! Looking out for us!” Father shouted, trying desperately to be cheerful. “Now go!”

  My fingers, wet and slippery, untwined from Father’s. I fell from the ladder. Before my voice could form a cry, my head hit the deck below.

  I awoke squinting.

  To heat. To blaring light through the cabin porthole.

  The sun!

  Immediately my heart jumped with relief. The storm, the whirlpool, the devilish noises—had it all been a dream?

  I called for Father, but he was by my side. I felt his hand holding mine.

  “How’s the boy?” came First Mate Grendel’s voice.

  I willed my eyes fully open. Father’s hair was a rat’s nest, his face bruised, his spectacles gone. His shirt had torn and now hung in strips off his shoulders. I knew in that instant that the storm had been no dream.

  Father chuckled and turned to Grendel, replying, “He’s awake.”

  “Aye, good,” Grendel said. “There’ll be four of us, then.”

  I gripped Father’s hand. The words chilled me. “Only four of us remain?” I asked.

  “I thank God,” Father said softly, “that I am holding the most important of them.”

  “We’re not likely to last much longer if we can’t rig the ship to sail again,” Grendel said grimly. “And with the masts all snapped off, I don’t—”

  I heard a sudden shout from above. Musa. The fourth survivor.

  “Can’t understand the blasted fellow,” Grendel said. “Too much trouble for him to learn English, I suppose—”

  “‘Land,’” I said.

  Grendel stared at me. “Say what?”

  “Musa,” I explained. “He said, ‘land.’”

  Grendel raced away from us, up the ladder. Father followed, then I, on shaky legs.

  Abovedecks,
I nearly reeled backward from the intense daylight. Where roiling fists of blackness had smothered us, now the sun blazed in a dome of cotton-flecked blue. Musa’s face was streaked with tears, his gap-toothed smile resembling the keys of a small piano. Dancing wildly, he gestured over the port bow.

  On the watery horizon was a distant frosting of yellow green.

  Schwenk. Coopersmith. Martins. Vizeu. Pappalas. Roark. Llewellyn. Finney. Gennaro. Caswell …

  Grendel recited the sailors’ names, placing for each a perfect seashell on a mound of sand. Reciting a prayer, he touched the white scrimshaw that hung around his neck on a leather strip: a crucifix carved into the cross section of a whale’s tooth.

  The battered Enigma lay anchored out to sea, tilted to starboard. It rocked on gentle swells, its timbers groaning in ghastly rhythm to Grendel’s prayers. I felt the heat of the pink-yellow sand through the soles of my shoes. Behind us, a thick scrim of jungle greenery stretched in both directions. Animals cawed and screeched, unseen. A great mountain loomed in the distance, black and ominous, as if the storm itself had gathered to the spot and magically solidified.

  Earlier we had managed to reach the shore via rowboat. All morning and into the afternoon we had traveled to and from our wounded ship, salvaging kerosene, sailcloth, wood, a small amount of salt beef and hardtack, a leather pack, a sopping wet blanket, and Father’s revolver—the only firearm that had not been submerged in seawater and damaged. Miraculously I also found this journal, relatively dry and not yet used, which I put directly into my pocket—and a pencil. Everything else had either washed away or been ruined.

  I had helped Musa and Grendel build four small tent huts, then briefly explored the jungle, finding a flat stone into which I scratched my name. Father had just unloaded and cleaned the gun, and he gave me a lesson in its use. He’d been unable to find extra ammunition, so we had only five bullets for hunting and protection. Accuracy would be essential. I was skittish about shooting, but Father scoffed. “Your aim was excellent when you were spitting wadded-up papers at your schoolmates!” he reminded me.