The Curse of the King

  Brother Dimitrios looked confused. “Yes, we do need you. But I daresay you need us more. And for us to help you—to preserve your lives, my dear—we must follow our orders or we suffer consequences—”

  “What consequences?” Aly demanded. “And who gives them?”

  “So if you’ll pardon my rudeness, here are my terms,” Dimitrios barreled on. “If Jack expects to see you—and his father—again, he will do as I say and come with me. Alone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

  AS WE PASSED the place of eating we used to call the Comestibule, two horrifying things happened:

  One, the sun peeked over the horizon. Which meant we were officially going to begin a full day of misery in Massaville.

  Two, the smell of coffee and fried eggs from inside the building actually made me drool. As in, a string of liquid escaped my mouth and made a straight line down to my shoes. “You are ailing?” Brother Dimitrios said.

  “I am hungry,” I replied, wiping my mouth.

  “The cafeteria is not yet open,” he said, “but I have some pull here. You will need nourishment for what we have planned.”

  “Okay, enough mystery,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

  But Brother Dimitrios was already heading into the building.

  Seeing the interior was a shock. The place looked totally different. The paintings and the huge antler chandelier were gone, and all the wood paneling had been painted white. Brother Mustafa the pilot was swigging down some coffee, but he left the moment we arrived. Dimitrios snapped his fingers and immediately a sleepy-looking goon with a runny nose padded into the room, setting a plate of food in front of me.

  I stared down at a yellow lump oozing about a pound of smelly white cheese.

  “Chef’s specialty, feta omelet,” Brother Dimitrios explained.

  “I think I just lost my appetite,” I said. “Do you have any cereal?”

  Brother Dimitrios leaped up from his seat, running into the kitchen to demand another meal. As I pushed the plate aside, I looked around the room.

  Memories flooded in. I pictured the great banner that had once been strung across this hall: WELCOME TO YOUR KARAI INSTITUTE HOME, JACK. Back then I’d been too scared and creeped out to appreciate the welcome. Or the food.

  Dimitrios reappeared with a bowl of soggy granola and some weird-tasting milk. I bolted them down. I was still chewing as we walked out the back door. We hadn’t gone ten feet before I saw something that made me nearly spit out the remains of my breakfast.

  The KI game building, where we used to have unlimited entertainment possibilities, had been gutted. Now it was being merged with the enormous hangar building next to it—the place where all the KI repairs used to take place. It was where I had nearly been hit on the head by Fritz the mechanic because of my own clumsiness.

  Its roof had been raised even higher. It was a fretwork of curved, thick wooden beams, and I could see that the building’s final shape would be like a gigantic egg. All around the building, massive cranes made of lashed-together tree trunks groaned loudly, hoisting beams on steel winches.

  “Behold the future Tharrodrome,” Brother Dimitrios said. “From the word tharros, which means ‘courage.’ Perhaps you will remember our task chamber in the compound in Egypt, where your remarkable friend Marco performed some extraordinary feats of strength.”

  I did remember the chamber. And I remembered what the Massa had unleashed on Marco. A mutant beast. A warrior swordsman. “Is that what you’re building here? A place where you torture kids and put their lives at risk?”

  “A place where we test our Select and grow them to their full potential,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Which the KI, in their foolishness, never thought to do.”

  “Why did you bring me here alone?” I asked.

  Brother Dimitrios opened a wood-frame, windowless door. “For your test, of course.”

  I stepped inside. The room had a coffee machine, a sink, a door, two office chairs, a wall clock, and a desk. I figured the door led to a toilet. A string of curly fluorescent lights hung from the unfinished ceiling. On the desk was a tablet with a keyboard. A slideshow flashed on the screen—photo after photo of Massa goons tearing down the Karai Institute. “So this is it?” I said. “I have to watch the construction of Six Flags Over Horrorland?”

  “Sit, please.” Brother Dimitrios rolled back the office chair. As I sat, he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a set of earplugs connected to a small tablet. “During your task, you will wear these, with the tablet hooked onto your belt. This way you can communicate with me if you need to.”

  “Wait. Where will you be?” I asked.

  “This does not matter,” Dimitrios said. “Let us begin.”

  He touched the screen. The slideshow disappeared to reveal a screen full of strange-looking apps with Greek labels. “Do I get a lifeline?” I asked. “If it involves any tech, I’ll need Aly.”

  “You, Jack, will be their lifeline.” Dimitrios leaned over and tapped an app that resembled a camera. Instantly the screen showed Aly and Cass in a dorm room, much nicer than the one we’d just been inside. Cass was holding a phone and Aly was touching her fingers to the wall.

  “Aly appears to be placing a wad of chewing gum over a spy lens,” Brother Dimitrios said. “We placed three of those lenses in the room—small, dark globes about a quarter inch in diameter. Just large enough for a bright young person to spot. You see, she believes she is blocking us from seeing into the room.”

  “Because the lenses are fake,” I said.

  “Very good, Jack,” Dimitrios said. “This is our way of giving her the illusion of control.”

  “If the lenses don’t work, how come we see Cass and Aly?” I asked.

  “We are actually watching through another lens, the size of a pinhead,” Dimitrios replied. “It blends in with the grains of cement on the ceiling. I would like you to keep an eye on your friends. If they try anything funny, they will ruin your test. And there will be consequences. Oh, yes, just in case . . .”

  He tapped another app and a kidney-shaped map appeared on the screen. In the northern section, two dots glowed. “This, of course, is the island, and the dots are Cass and Aly. Should they move outside the cabin, you will be able to track their movements.”

  “That’s my trial—to spy on my own friends?” I asked.

  Brother Dimitrios shook his head. “Your trial is to decode this.”

  Another app, this one revealing an image of an old document.

  “What the heck does that mean?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” Brother Dimitrios said.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have to do your work? You guys couldn’t figure this out?”

  “Who says we haven’t?” Brother Dimitrios shot back.

  “Any hints?” I said.

  “The answer to this is the name of a great danger that exists on this island.” Dimitrios held a remote to the wall clock. It instantly became a timer, which read 20:00:00.

  “You have twenty minutes,” he said. “If you fail, one of your friends dies.”

  “Wait, you’re joking, right?” I said. “You wouldn’t do that. You said you needed us!”

  “Unfortunately, Jack, I am not the one who sets the rules,” Dimitrios said.

  “Then who is it?” I demanded. “Let me talk to him now!”

  Dimitrios backed out of the room shaking his head. “I am sorry, dear boy. But twenty-three seconds have gone by.”

  The door clicked shut as he disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IN HEXAD DE HEPTIMUS VERITAS

  17:58:13.

  This was insane.

  Impossible.

  I couldn’t concentrate. My eyebrows were raining sweat. Nearly two whole minutes had gone by and I hadn’t done a thing except stare at the dumb poem. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  Curses? Deep within orbits?

  Youth became old?

  The
words swirled in my head until they had no meaning at all. Like I was looking at a foreign language.

  Do something. Print it out. Take notes. First things that come to mind.

  That was what my creative writing teacher, Mr. Linker, always told us. Sometimes it looks different when it’s on paper. So I went to work.

  I felt like an utter idiot.

  This was a waste of time.

  15:56:48.

  “Code . . . it’s a code, it must be a code . . .” Now I was talking to myself.

  I thought about the codes we’d seen.

  The rock at the top of Mount Onyx.

  No. Not like this at all.

  The door to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  Nope.

  The letter from Charles Newton we’d found at the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

  Uh-uh.

  Wait.

  I stared at the heading, which was in bigger type than the rest of it. In hexad de heptimus veritas.

  The Charles Newton letter had a heading, too. It was the key to understanding the rest of the letter. Where the date was supposed to be, there was a message: The 7th, to the end. That meant we had to count every seventh letter.

  My eyes fixed on the word Heptimus. It was like Heptakiklos.

  Hepta was seven; kiklos was circle.

  I wiped the sweat from my brow. Duh. So much of this quest was about the number seven. Everything always came back to sevens.

  Carefully I wrote down every seventh letter of the poem.

  Looked like a word scramble. Great. Cass was good at those. Probably Aly, too. For all I knew, Marco ate them for lunch. Me? It’s about the same level as my gift for ballet dancing. Zero out of ten in the Jack McKinley Scale of Loserdom.

  But Brother Dimitrios’s words clattered around in my brain: If you fail, one of your friends dies.

  The threat of murder has a way of bringing out the best in a person.

  Okay, the Q had to go with a U. In the letters I saw a query . . . also a require . . . and an I am . . . I began scribbling as fast as I could:

  “Arrrghhh!” I cried out.

  Useless. I slammed down my pen.

  7:58:34.

  Eight whole minutes, down the toilet!

  Okay. Calm down.

  I needed to go further. Figure out the other parts of that heading. In hexad de heptimus veritas. My fingers shook as I opened the tablet’s browser. I typed “in hexad de heptimus veritas” into a search engine page but got nothing. So I entered the words one by one.

  Definition: hexad. A group of six.

  Definition: heptimus. Sevenths.

  Definition: veritas. Truth.

  This was weird. The first two words were from the Greek, the last was from Latin. It was a mishmash. This wasn’t Atlantean. Or even ancient. Brother Dimitrios and his pals must have made it up.

  “Just go with it, Jack,” I muttered to myself. “Okay . . . in a group of six of sevenths truth . . .”

  7:14:32 . . .

  I glanced away from the clock and then back again.

  7:14:29 . . .

  7:14:28 . . .

  Seven-one-four-two-eight.

  For that one second, the clock showed a number that meant something to me—the magic sequence of sevenths, 714285!

  I hated fraction conversions. But I knew this one cold.

  Divide seven into any single digit. You get the same digits in the same sequence. Well, they may start in a different place, but it’s all the same.

  Like .142857. Which is one seventh.

  Or .285714, two sevenths.

  Or .428571, three sevenths.

  Or .714285—five sevenths, same as on the clock.

  The same six digits over and over again, starting in different places.

  That would be a group of six.

  A hexad!

  We were getting somewhere. Maybe.

  In hexad de heptimus veritas.

  Okay.

  That would mean . . . Truth in the hexad of the sevenths.

  But which hexad?

  I figured, start with one seventh: .142857. Maybe if I pulled out the right letters, it would spell something. So the first letter, the fourth, the second, the eighth, and so on from each line. . . .

  Impossible. One of the lines only had three letters.

  Wait. Wait.

  There was another possibility.

  Down the side of the printout, I wrote out the magic sequence, one digit for each line of text. Then I circled the corresponding letter—for number 1, the first letter, for number 4, the fourth . . .

  Underneath I wrote out the letters:

  “What the heck?” I quickly typed the word into the search engine. The first hit made me gasp:

  I clicked on it and looked at the page:

  Finally I clicked on the translation button and read what it meant:

  I leaped up from my seat, pumping my fist in the air. “Woo-hoo! I got it! Brother Dimitrios, I know you must be watching this! The answer is Xylokrikos!”

  Dimitrios’s face appeared on the tablet screen. I jumped. I didn’t realize he was controlling the screen like that. “Ah, bravo, Jack,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said quickly. “So you’ll let them alone, right? Cass and Aly—they’re going to be okay?”

  “For now,” Dimitrios said. “Your friends will indeed be pleased that you passed part one. Let’s tell them.”

  The image dissolved. Now I was looking into Cass and Aly’s room.

  It was empty.

  “Well, will you look at that . . . tsk-tsk-tsk,” came Dimitrios’s voice.

  “Where did they go?” I demanded. “If you hurt them . . .”

  “They are fine. I am a man of my word,” Dimitrios said. “Ten minutes ago they received a handwritten message from a fellow named Fiddle.”

  I froze up but said nothing.

  “It seems this musically named fellow directed them toward somewhere on the island,” Dimitrios continued.

  The screen’s image dissolved to reveal a patch of jungle. “You have hidden cameras?”

  “All throughout the island, of course,” Dimitrios said.

  In the midst of the patch was a dull glow. As the camera zoomed in, the glow became a hatch, half-hidden by vines. On it was a carved L.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Dimitrios said. “If they reach this hatch, there is a . . . surprise waiting for them.”

  “What kind of surprise?” I demanded.

  “You will be given sufficient information to figure that out.”

  “Just tell me if they’re in danger!” I said.

  “I would recommend that you make haste, Jack,” Dimitrios replied.

  The image vanished. In place of Brother Dimitrios’s face was a map of the island, marked like a radar screen. I could see two blue dots moving from one of the compound buildings into the jungle, toward a big X.

  Farther south in the compound was a third blue dot. As I walked the tablet to the door, the dot jiggled slightly.

  It was me.

  “You will be allowed one lifeline,” Brother Dimitrios’s voice said. “And that will be me. You may ask one question after you begin.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I shouted into the tablet. “And that doesn’t count as my lifeline question!”

  Dimitrios’s answer was one word:

  “Hurry.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  LIFELINE

  “UCCCHH.” I STOOPED down and plucked the tablet out of the jungle grass.

  I was running too fast, being too hasty. The jungle humidity drenched me. My hands were slippery. I needed the tablet to check my bearings, my blue dots, but I kept dropping it.

  Where were they?

  There.

  Their two dots were looping around from the north. They’d had a big head start, and they were way closer to the hatch than I was. My dot was at the extreme western part of the screen. I’d never catch up to them. I’d have to go straight to the hatch.

&nb
sp; Clutching tight to the tablet, I ran. I lifted my feet as high as they could go. Overhead, birds and monkeys screeched as if they were watching a soccer match. As I got closer I shouted, “Aly! Cass!”

  My answer was a chorus of hoots, caws, and shrieks. My friends were never going to hear me.

  My blue dot moved toward the goal faster than Aly’s and Cass’s did from the north. When I was on top of the big X, I stopped.

  I looked around for a hatch, but all I saw was the same old jungle mess. I leaned over, clearing away brush with my arms. A snake hissed, slithering away. A huge lizard eyed me from beneath a nearby bush.

  “Where is it?” I cried out in frustration.

  EEEEEE! came the shriek of a monkey. Torquin had understood those cries. He’d made friends with some of these creatures. What were they telling me?

  My eyes were watery and stinging. I didn’t know if it was sweat or tears. I caught sight of the corner of a high tree stump and leaned on it, rubbing away the moisture with my free hand.

  EEEE-EEE-EEEEEE!

  EEEEEEE!

  I had to jump back. Monkeys were dropping out of the trees like parachute jumpers. They landed just beyond the stump in two lines.

  I narrowed my eyes. “What do you guys want?”

  EEEE-EEE-EEEEEE! One of the chimps pointed to the stump, slapping his head.

  “It’s a stump! What’s wrong with . . . ?” The research. I realized Brother Dimitrios had given me a big fat clue. “Okay . . . the xylokrikos . . . is that what you’re warning me about? This thing is really a monster?”

  I stared at the remnant of the old tree. Was this where Brother Dimitrios was leading us all—some kind of portal, where the monster would morph out of the wood to attack us?

  I backed away. But then, out of nowhere, a rock went flying past my ear. The monkeys were trying to get my attention. They were divided down the middle into two groups, each screaming and gesturing toward the other.

  “What?” I said. “Come on. This is a magical island. Be magical. Talk to me!”