The Curse of the King

  They were pointing to something between them. I stepped closer until I could see a silvery filament like a taut spiderweb, a line so thin that it was barely a shimmer. It emerged from the jungle behind them and seemed to be connected somewhere near me, like some weird zip line for insects. Squinting against the sunlight that flashed through the trees, I followed the line to its source.

  It ended at the stump.

  From their reactions, I thought the monkeys were going to have a heart attack. At the place where the filament attached to the trunk’s bark was a set of metal electrodes.

  An electric fence. That’s what it had to be. Back when we were first on the island, Aly had discovered a network of these, placed by the KI around the campus.

  How extensive was this fence? How far away were Cass and Aly? I checked my tablet, lining up my location with theirs.

  I was at the bottom right of the X. Aly and Cass were coming closer to the top left. They would be crossing the X soon. But the monkeys were all here, all warning me.

  “Lifeline!” I screamed into the tablet. “What is this—this wire, Dimitrios? Where does it go, and what does it do?”

  Dimitrios’s face did not appear. Instead, I saw footage of Aly and Cass tromping through the woods. This was his answer: a video feed from some hidden security camera in a tree. They were headed for a broken-down cottage in the distance. Around the cottage was a perfectly round wooden fence.

  You will be given sufficient information to figure that out.

  That’s what Dimitrios had promised me. But this information was wack. How was any of this meaningful? Screaming monkeys, electric filaments, hatches that didn’t exist, tree-stump monsters . . .

  The xylokrikos.

  From xylos (“wood”) and krikos (“ring”) . . .

  No. It wasn’t about the stump monster. Not really. It was about its name—wood plus ring. A ring of wood!

  The fence.

  That was what the poem’s code meant.

  “It’s not about a monster, is it, Dimitrios?” I shouted. “The puzzle—xylokrikos was the answer. But it’s about that wooden fence. The wire is attached—and if they cross it they’ll be electrocuted! How do I turn it off? Lifeline! Lifeline! How do I turn it off!”

  A soft chuckle arose from my tablet. “I said one question, and you just asked three. Well, I have a heart and I shall address the last one. The only way to de-electrify that filament is to break the circuit. It is constructed of carbene, an extremely thin, extremely strong material developed by our scientists. So you will not be able to break it with, say, a stick. I suppose the only way to disable it would be contact with a grounded water-containing carbon unit that will conduct the electricity.”

  “Meaning what?” I demanded.

  “A living being, Jack,” Dimitrios replied. “There are candidates in your vicinity, I’d say.”

  The monkeys were backing away, hopping and gesticulating, slapping themselves obliviously. If I could trap one of them . . .

  No. They seemed to sense what I was thinking and were already in retreat. I’d never be able to do it in time.

  But letting Cass or Aly touch that fence was worse.

  Unless I did it first.

  I closed my eyes. This was the right thing to do. I was the Tailor, who figured things out. I was the Destroyer. In this one act, I would be both.

  People say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Not me. All I could see was the photo on my old hand mirror—Dad, Mom, and me as a toddler in the snow, playing Boom to Daddy. The photo I’d been looking at every day of my life since Mom disappeared. It calmed me down. Made me realize I’d once had some happiness in my life.

  I would be dead in a few seconds. But at least I was smiling.

  Stretching out my arms, I dropped the tablet.

  And I dived into the filament, chest first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE SEVENTH CODEX

  MY FIRST TASTE of death was a mouthful of wet leaves.

  I sprang up. My feet were still on the jungle ground. The monkeys were still chattering. My eyes darted toward the tree stump. I saw the black electrodes where the filament had been attached.

  Just the electrodes. Nothing else. The unbreakable carbene filament was . . . broken? “No . . .” I murmured.

  They’d touched it first. They’d gotten to it before I had. I’d been too slow to save my friends’ lives.

  “Aly! Cass!” I screamed.

  The monkeys screeched back at me. But they were hiding now, no longer helping me. Without seeing them, I didn’t know where the filament had been. I had no idea where to go. Everything in the jungle looked the same.

  I scrambled for the tablet, scooping it off the ground. The screen was cracked, and pressing the power button did absolutely nothing. Tossing it into the jungle, I reared back my head and shouted Brother Dimitrios’s name.

  Among the cacophony of monkeys and birds, I heard a woman’s voice directly behind me. “Remarkable. I would not have predicted it would have been this one.”

  I spun around but all I could see was a suffocating scrim of dense greenery all around. “Who are you?” I shouted. “Where are Aly and Cass?”

  “Remarkable indeed. He is still concerned about them. Bravo.” Dimitrios emerged, with an enormous smile. Next to him was a woman in commando gear. From the weathered wrinkles on her face, I could tell she was much older than Mom. But her carriage was straight and upright like a soldier’s, her eyes sharp and smart. Despite her advanced years she looked as if she could handle herself against anyone.

  “First,” the lady said, “be assured that your friends are safe.”

  “Wh-what?” I stammered. “If they . . . then I should be . . .”

  “The filament held no electrical charge,” Brother Dimitrios said.

  I wasn’t sure I heard that right. “Wait. It was a fake? You made me think I was going to die?”

  “It seems inscrutable, I know,” the woman replied, “but it was necessary.”

  “And who are you?” I demanded.

  Dimitrios stepped forward. “Jack, my boy, I know this is upsetting but manners are always important when among your elders. Before you is—”

  The woman held up her hand to quiet Dimitrios. “You may call me Number One,” she said.

  “Wait . . . Number One?” I said. Okay, maybe it was just the shock of being alive. Or the distant ridiculous jabbering of monkeys. Or the solemn way she called herself a potty name. But I started laughing like a five-year-old. “That’s your name—Number One? I mean, really, Number One?”

  “It’s more of a rank, I suppose,” she said with a bemused smile.

  “I guess it could be worse—you could be called Number Two!” I was howling now. “That would really be rank!”

  “Jack, stop that now!” Dimitrios said. “Apologize!”

  “Sorry . . . sorry,” I replied, taking deep breaths.

  I expected Number One to be as stuffy and upset as Dimitrios. But she was smiling curiously at me. “I had a brother once,” she said. “You remind me of him.”

  “So. Number One,” I said. “Nice to meet you. How come I haven’t ever seen you before?”

  “I haven’t needed to be seen until now.” She nodded toward Dimitrios, then turned back toward the campus. “We have much to talk about. Follow me, please.”

  I stood my ground, looking at the back of her head in disbelief. My giddy mood was curdling fast. Into rage. “Okay. Just a second. You nearly scared me to death. You owe me an explanation. I want to see my friends. I want to talk now.”

  I heard a rustling in the bushes behind me. Brother Yiorgos emerged, blocking my path, along with another goon who wore an eyepatch. Neither was smiling.

  “You know Yiorgos, of course,” Brother Dimitrios said. “And this is Brother Plutarchos—er, Cyclops, for short.”

  “Enough. Your friends are fine. Come. I am not fond of mosquitoes, Jack.” The woman turned to go, calling over her shoul
der, “And you, I suspect, are not fond of being carried.”

  I had a bad case of WWF, Walking While Furious. I could barely see straight. My heart was like a jackhammer.

  I wanted to find Cass and Aly, tell them the story, and begin an assault on the Massa—somehow. But whenever I slowed down, Yiorgos began breathing down my neck. Which, trust me, is enough to keep anyone moving.

  The woman led us through the jungle, into the campus, and up the stairs of the building formerly known as the House of Wenders. I barely recognized the lobby. During the KI days, it had been a soaring, dark-wood-paneled atrium with a towering dinosaur skeleton. Now it was a construction site. The skeleton had been removed, and the grand mahogany balcony was shattered and patched up with crudely cut wooden planks.

  “We sustained quite a bit of damage,” she said.

  “In the attack you caused,” I reminded her.

  She smiled. “Ah well, the old fortress needed some sprucing up anyway.”

  As I followed her to the second floor, I felt a tug in my chest. She’d taken over Professor Bhegad’s office, complete with his rickety old leather chair and wooden desk. His mess was gone—no more piles of papers and bursting file cabinets. No more creaky, dust-encrusted metal fan and grimy windows. But the old Oriental rug remained, and I could see a straight path worn by Bhegad’s footsteps, leading from desk to door.

  Somehow the sight of that path brought him back in my mind. I could see his heavy footfalls and stooped gait, the way he pushed his glasses up his bulbous nose, his stiff and formal language. Here in this office, on the day Marco had fallen into the volcano to save our lives, the professor had actually cried. For us.

  For the first time, I realized how much I missed the old guy.

  “Sit,” the woman said, gesturing toward an empty chair.

  Looking straight at this gray-eyed Massa leader, I wondered if she could cry. I wondered if she had emotions about anything.

  Just over her shoulder were two framed black-and-white photos. One, of a dark-eyed boy, looked like a faded school picture. The other was a dark-curly-haired man with watery eyes and a huge, ridiculous-looking smile.

  “Family resemblance, no?” the woman said. “Both my father and my brother are long gone.”

  “Did you play chicken with their lives, too?” I muttered.

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  I didn’t care if she was an adult, or if that ridiculous name “Number One” meant she was the head of the Massa or Queen of the Universe. For all I knew, those family photos were just more lies. “I thought I was going to die!” I rose to my feet and gripped the edge of her desk. “The poem was a lie. The code was a lie. The xylokrikos meant nothing, and you made up that stuff about the unbreakable wire. Was that your idea of a joke?”

  Brother Yiorgos grabbed me and held my arms behind my back. The lady known as Number One stood up sharply. “Release him. He’s more angry than dangerous.”

  With a grunt, the monk pushed me down into a chair. Number One came around her desk, sat on the edge, and leaned toward me. When she spoke, her voice was soft and sad. “Until you have experienced the death of your own blood before your eyes, you will not appreciate what it means to love and lose someone.”

  “What makes you think I don’t know that?” I snapped.

  I looked away so I wouldn’t be tempted to blurt out any truths about my mother.

  “If you do know, then we may begin to understand each other.” The woman stood, looking at the two pictures on the wall. “My brother’s name was Osman. He and you were very much alike. He was a Select, you know. There is not a day that I don’t think of him.”

  “Your brother was a Select?” I said. “So you knew about all of this back then?”

  “I did,” Number One said. “In fact, I lost both Osman and Father to Artemisia, just as you lost Radamanthus Bhegad.”

  I thought of Bhegad’s soul being ripped from his body. I thought of the last time I’d seen him, hanging from my ankle as I flew on a griffin. I began to shake. In my mind’s eye he was falling to the earth below, falling fast, without a scream . . .

  “We have the resources to prevent further deaths, Jack,” the woman said, her voice softening. “To restore the world to its glorious destiny that ended at the fall of Atlantis—reason and equality, health and progress, cooperation. Since the fall, the world has become a battleground among barbarians, all of them blind to the coming destruction. You are our hope, Jack. Show him, Dimitrios.”

  Brother Dimitrios spun a tablet toward me.

  “Does this look familiar?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “There were a bunch of these paintings at Brother Dimitrios’s monastery in Rhodes—all about the life of Massarym.”

  “Now look at this,” Number One added, swiping the screen with a bony finger and revealing another image:

  “The two images are the same painting,” Dimitrios explained. “In this image, I used infrared imaging to reveal the pentimento.”

  “Penti-who?” I said.

  “When words are written onto a canvas, and then artists paint over these words to hide them,” Brother Dimitrios said. “That is pentimento. The history of Atlantis was written in six books, or codices. Massarym, fearing these books would be destroyed, wrote his own history. We call it the Seventh Codex. And it is hidden in these paintings.”

  “The Seventh Codex,” Number One went on, “told of two curses. When Massarym stole and hid the Loculi for their safekeeping, Uhla’ar blamed his son for the kingdom’s destruction. He suspected Massarym wanted to rebuild a new Atlantis with himself as king. Massarym tried to explain the truth: that the queen’s tampering had upset the balance of Atlantean power—that he, Massarym, merely wanted to preserve the Loculi. But Uhla’ar would not hear of it. He placed a curse on his own son, that Massarym would never live to see the Loculi retrieved.”

  “Well, that sure happened,” I said.

  “Ah, but Massarym, in turn, placed a curse on his father,” Number One said. “Uhla’ar would not die, but would be condemned to remain on earth, neither dead nor alive.”

  “He turned Uhla’ar into a ghost?” I asked.

  Brother Dimitrios chanted as if reciting by memory. “‘The Curse of Uhla’ar shall not be lifted until the seven Loculi are placed within the Heptakiklos by the actions of the Rightful Ruler. Only then shall the Curse be lifted and the continent raised once again.’”

  “Wait—raised?” I said. “Like, this whole island? Right here?”

  Number One was beaming. “Kind of quickens the heart, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay . . . okay . . .” I said, trying to make sense of what she’d just said. “Uhla’ar chased Massarym—right, I know that because I have these weird dreams about the past. But about the Loculi. I thought we just had to bring them back and put them in the Heptakiklos. Bam, done and done. No one told us about any Rightful Ruler.”

  “Dimitrios, continue,” Number One commanded.

  “‘By two indicators shall the Ruler’s identity be revealed,’” Brother Dimitrios recited. “‘The first shall be an act of Locular destruction. The second, an act of self-sacrifice.’”

  I flopped back into my chair. “Oh, great—he’s the only one who can activate the Loculi. But he has to destroy one, and then kill himself. Sure. I think I know where you’re going with this.”

  “It is a paradox,” Brother Dimitrios said.

  “Massarym was all about mysteries,” Number One said. “One must read the prophecy carefully, in the original language. Destruction sounds so final in English. But broken things can be fixed, no? And what if the act of self-sacrifice is just that—an act? An attempt.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to piece this craziness together. “So you saw me throw the Loculus under the train. Boom, Locular destruction. And just now, you faked me out to see if I would attempt to sacrifice myself.”

  They both nodded.

  “Didn’t you
try this with Marco already?” I snapped. “Back in Babylon, he told us he was going to be king. Is this your trick—you tell him, then me, then Cass, then Aly . . . ?”

  Brother Dimitrios sighed. “You will forgive us for being impulsive about Marco. We had heard how jumped into a volcano for his friends. In our judgment, he had fulfilled the second part of the prophecy—”

  “He didn’t jump,” I said. “He was fighting a vromaski, and they both fell off the edge.”

  “So we learned,” Brother Dimitrios said. “But alas, only later on. So when in Ancient Babylon, he destroyed a Loculus, well, that was the first part of the prophecy! But there, too, we were wrong. He merely destroyed the replacement, your so-called Shelley.”

  “He never destroyed a Loculus,” Number One said. “You did, Jack.”

  I thought about what happened when I was standing by the tracks in New York City, invisible—when Mom was looking straight at me, somehow knowing I was there.

  The first to leave the scene had been Dimitrios, muttering something under his breath. We all heard what he’d said—Cass, Aly, and me. Mom had waited till he was gone—and then she’d pointed at me.

  I recited those words under my breath. “The Destroyer . . .” I said, repeating Brother Dimitrios’s words, “shall rule.”

  “You have fulfilled both requirements, Jack the Destroyer,” the woman said. “Marco has indeed an extraordinary destiny based on his gifts, and Aly and Cass on theirs. But yours is the most important gift of all.”

  Brother Dimitrios’s eyes were intense. “We must keep this a secret until the training is complete.”

  “And then the real work can begin”—Number One’s mouth curved upward into a smile that was half ironic, half admiring—“my liege.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  HIS JACKNESS

  THERE’S A FINE line between destiny and doofusness, and I was walking it.

  All the way back to the dorm, I felt like two people. One of them was trembling with excitement and the other was cackling out loud.

  My liege.

  Was that supposed to be a joke? Was she flattering me? What did her little smile mean?