The Curse of the King

  He looked amazingly powerful, but you would expect that of a Select whose main talent was sports.

  Aly’s jaw was shaking as if the muscles were loose.

  “Mar-co! Mar-co! Mar-co! Mar-co!!” the kids screamed.

  The little girl, with a few quick motions, hog-tied the beast’s feet together. “Ta-da!” she cried out.

  Marco turned. “Good work,” he said. “Okay, time to go home, Porky.”

  Grabbing the rope, he threw the squealing beast back into the pen.

  “I did not just see that,” Cass said.

  Marco bounded toward us, a big smile on his face. “Heyyy, it’s a Select reunion!”

  I had never been so happy to see a traitor I hated so much. But what could I say to him? Good to see you? That wasn’t true. So I settled for “Thanks, Marco.”

  “You know how much I hate vromaskis, Brother Jack.” Marco held his arms wide. I think he expected us to rush toward him, but we didn’t. Not even Aly.

  Standing there a moment, he cast a nervous glance toward Number One. “So, you left your charges alone,” she said.

  “Yo, sorry, Numero Uno,” he said. “I was teaching Gilbert to tie his shoes . . .”

  “Ah, very important task indeed,” Number One said dryly, “but important enough to put the rest of the trainees’ lives at risk?”

  “I lassoed it!” the curly-haired girl cried out. “It was me! Marco came out afterward!”

  A group of boys giggled and began chanting, “Eloise, smelloise, brain is made from Jelloise.”

  “I’ll lasso you, too!” Eloise screamed, stepping toward the boys, who ran off giggling.

  “Yo, little sister, ssshhh, put a lid on it,” Marco said.

  Eloise scowled at Marco. “Put a lid on your ugly face, Dumb Butt.”

  “My butt,” Marco replied, “is actually pretty intelligent.”

  Number One glowered at him. “Then it compares favorably with your brain. Now go untie that beast, and safely. We need it for agility sessions.”

  Marco’s cocky grin vanished. “Yes, ma’am.”

  As he turned and jogged back toward the pen, Eloise stomped away, back toward the big house.

  “Just a moment, young lady,” Number One said, following her.

  Cass watched them go, shaking his head in awe. “She insulted him like that and all Marco could say was ‘Yes, ma’am’?”

  “He respects her,” I said.

  “He’s afraid of her,” Aly said. “Marco Ramsay is actually afraid of something.”

  Now Number One was returning with Eloise, whose arms were folded defiantly at her chest. “Eloise, dear, these are the other three of the Karai Select.”

  “So?” Eloise said.

  “Well, you know how good Marco is at sports—Aly is that good with computers,” Number One replied.

  Eloise put her hands on her hips. “Can you build one using strands of DNA to transmit data?”

  “No one can do that!” Aly said with a laugh.

  “Pffff,” Eloise replied with an unimpressed shrug.

  “And Cass is like a human gyroscope,” Number One said. “Plus he can speak whole sentences backward.”

  “Iksamorv taht dekcor yllatot uoy, yeh!” Cass said.

  Eloise rolled her eyes. “Gnirob yllatot.”

  Cass’s eyes popped wide. “Cool, Esiole! You speak Backwardish?”

  “Who can’t?” Eloise retorted. “I stopped when I was seven. It’s such a loser thing to do.” She spun toward Number One. “Can I go now?”

  With an exasperated sigh, Number One nodded. As Eloise went skipping away, Cass scowled. “Requesting permission to spank that little brat Eloise with a wooden elddap.”

  What was going on here? Who was this girl? Who were all of these freakish children?

  In the vromaski pen, Marco and the other kids were hauling the beast through a gate. Outside the pen, other kids popped triple and quadruple midair spins.

  “These are not normal kids,” I said.

  Number One managed a faint smile. “Unlike the Karai, we selected these children for G7W when they were very, very young. We thought with proper advance training, their bodies would become stronger, resistant to the gene’s deadly effects.”

  I squinted my eyes, trying to make out the white lambda shape on the backs of their heads. “But they’re too young to be Selects. None of them has the mark yet. How can you be sure?”

  “A while back a brilliant geneticist joined our team,” Number One said, “defecting from the Karai, by the way. Her technique revolutionized the diagnosis of G7W. With her genetic mapping analysis, we are now able to recognize the gene at birth. We no longer need to see the lambda.”

  I felt Aly’s and Cass’s eyes on me. We all knew a former Karai geneticist. I had spent my first seven years with her. “A while?” I said, trying to sound all la-di-da. “What’s her name?”

  “I believe you’ve met her,” Number One said. “Sister Nancy.”

  I swallowed hard. How was this possible? My own mom, grooming Massa recruits? How could she do this?

  Don’t. Let. It. Show.

  “Um, yeah, right, we did meet her, I think,” I said. “But if she’s from the Karai, how are you so sure you can trust her?”

  “She came to us in a state of panic,” Number One replied. “The Karai had placed a kill order on her. Because of a disagreement with your beloved Professor Bhegad.”

  “P. Beg?” Cass said. “He was disagreeable, but he wasn’t a killer.”

  “Ah, but Professor Bhegad did not call the shots,” Number One replied. “He followed whatever the Omphalos decreed. And when anyone crosses the Omphalos, they . . . disappear and never resurface. I would keep this in mind if you still harbor any crazy notions.”

  My head was about to explode. Seven lost years of my life finally made some horrible sense. Mom had disappeared because she had been afraid. Because her life had been on the line. “And . . . these kids,” I said. “What will happen to them, now that we’re here?”

  “I suppose they will be our B team,” Number One replied. “We don’t have years to train them anymore. Your actions at the Heptakiklos changed everything, Jack. Our seismologists tell me the rip in the caldera of Mount Onyx is growing. If it bursts before the Loculi are returned, Atlantis will be lost forever.”

  “And if we return them,” Aly said, “we raise an entire continent and destroy the world as we know it?”

  “Evacuating coastal cities is difficult but possible,” Number One said. “Losing Atlantis is a crime against humanity. But of course you wouldn’t be here to see it, because if you don’t return the Loculi, your time will have run out. Not to be cruel, but you’ll be dead. So, children, it seems you have no choice but to join us. Can I count on you?”

  Aly and Cass were staring at me. As if I were the only one who could sort this out. I averted my eyes, looking out across the vast field. Marco was nowhere to be seen.

  Jack, you are the one who puts it all together. Professor Bhegad’s words echoed loud in my brain.

  We were losing sight of the plan. The plan was everything.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re with you.”

  “Jack!” Aly cried out.

  “Under one condition,” I added. “If you return the two Loculi to us, we will agree to reconstruct the third one.”

  Number One smiled patiently. “No conditions. We will construct it ourselves.”

  “You’re not Select,” I replied. “You can’t.”

  “Let me ask you something, then, Jack,” said Number One, stepping closer to me. “Haven’t I been straightforward and honest with you?”

  “I—I think so,” I said.

  “And you understand your own destiny on this island, don’t you, Jack?” she asked.

  Cass and Aly looked at me curiously. “Um, yeah . . .” I said.

  “Then why on earth would you lie to my face right now?” she said.

  My legs locked. Lie? Did she know about the plan? Or
about Mom’s identity?

  “Wh-what do you mean?” I said.

  “Earlier this morning, our Loculus shards went missing from their hiding place,” Number One replied.

  “Missing?” Cass squealed. “Who—?”

  “Perhaps you can tell me,” Number One said.

  “Wait,” Aly said. “You think we did that?”

  “My dear, there are no other people on this island with any motivation.” Number One held up her hand as if to stop us from protesting. “You’re children. You do foolish things. I understand that. I will go away and let you return them, no questions asked. You have until nightfall.”

  “Or else what?” Cass said.

  Number One turned to go. “There will be no ‘or else.’”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE KING OF TOAST

  “YOUR OWN DESTINY on this island?” Aly was doing a great imitation of Number One’s strange, faint accent. As she paced my dorm room, she ripped apart long strands of beef jerky, shoving the pieces into her mouth. “Don’t tell me they’re feeding you the same line they fed Marco.”

  My eyes strafed the room. Aly had disabled the spy cam, but I didn’t trust the Massa. They might have had another one embedded in a cobweb or a speck of cockroach poop. I tried to catch her eye, to get her to be quiet, but Aly was on a roll.

  “You’re not answering me,” she barged on. “Did they tell you you’d be king? Because you are King of Toast, Jack, unless you have some brilliant idea. Marco’s turned into a camp counselor, your mom is a Massa recruiter, we’re supposed to create global catastrophe—and just to make things more interesting, we were just accused of stealing the only things that can save our lives.”

  “Who could have stolen the shards?” Cass asked. “No one has any motivation!”

  I eyed the iPod in a dock on my shelf. It was grubby and well used, probably stolen from a Karai worker, I figured. Quickly I flipped through the songs, mostly old pop tunes I would never listen to. Cranking it up, I hit shuffle and let her rip.

  As the room echoed with sound, Aly covered her ears. “Justin Bieber?”

  I walked right up next to her ear. “This place may be bugged,” I said.

  “But I—” she protested.

  “They’re smarter than you think,” I said. “If we speak softer than the music, they won’t hear us.”

  They both sidled closer.

  “I think it’s Fiddle,” I whispered. “By taking the shards, the rebels may be sending us a signal. They know we’re here and they want us to find them.”

  “Then why didn’t they come for us directly?” Cass asked.

  “We have been under constant surveillance,” I said. “Finding the shards would be easier than reaching us.”

  “How do you figure that?” Aly asked.

  “The rebels know this island,” I said. “There must be at least one Karai security expert among them who can help them get past the Massa defenses and figure out where the likely hiding places are. So it’s up to us to find the rebels.”

  “The last time we were here, when Fiddle liberated those Karai prisoners, he mentioned where he’d be taking them,” Cass said. “He gave the location a name . . .”

  “‘MO twenty-one—near Mount Onyx.’ That’s what he said,” Aly piped up.

  A giant green bird flew past our window, disappearing into a tree bordering the jungle. Despite the brilliant tropical sunshine, the area beneath the tree canopies looked almost pitch-black. “We need to be careful, though. There are cameras in the jungle,” I continued. “I don’t know how many. We’ll have to disable them.”

  “I can cross the signals,” Aly said. “So one camera’s feed will actually be another’s. That way we’ll pass by unnoticed.”

  “What if they track us?” Cass asked.

  “I disabled our KI trackers,” Aly reminded him.

  “But they had some kind of tracking mechanism on us when I had to find you in the woods,” I said.

  Aly turned her shirt sleeve inside out and gave it a sharp tug. It ripped open, revealing a tiny, super-thin, wafer-like plastic chip. “That’s why they made us wear these shirts,” she said.

  Cass and I quickly ripped out our chips and threw them on the floor. I ran to the window and flung it open. It was a short drop to the ground and maybe a ten-yard run into the jungle. “Number One told us we had until darkness, ‘no questions asked.’ My feeling is they’ll leave us alone. They’ll see we ripped out the trackers but they’ll think we’re trying to cover up our hiding place. And they won’t care where we hid the shards, so long as we bring them all back.”

  “What if we can’t find the rebels by darkness?” Cass asked.

  “The Massa need us,” Aly said. “What could they possibly do?”

  “They have a whole other team of Selects now,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t count on kindness anymore.”

  I jumped out the window first. Together we raced into the jungle, leaving Justin Bieber far behind.

  Within minutes, my shirt was sweat drenched.

  We ran until we had to catch our breaths. I looked at my watch, and then upward into the deep green sameness. I could see the distant black peak of Mount Onyx above the tree line. “It’s two thirty-seven,” I said. “The sun sets around seven thirty.”

  “Hold it,” Aly said. She pointed upward into the canopy of a tree. There, a small camera sat on a branch.

  She quickly climbed to the branch, then pulled a nail file and a paper clip from her pocket. Prying open the back of the device, she tinkered with it and climbed down. “We’re safe.”

  As if in response, an explosion of animal shrieks echoed back at us.

  Cass jumped. “Who invited them?”

  “They sound scared,” I said. “Which means maybe we should be, too.”

  A sudden roar erupted from our right. The animal shrieks became panicked squeals. I could hear a thrashing of leaves not far away.

  “Follow me!” Cass shouted. He raced away to the left. I grabbed Aly’s arm and pulled her after him. There were no paths here, not even enough room for Aly and me to walk abreast. It took only a moment to lose Cass in tree cover. “Cass, where are you?” Aly cried out.

  “Thirteen degrees southwest!” Cass yelled back.

  “In human terms, please!” she shouted.

  “Just follow my voice!”

  I tried to keep up. My sandals caught on vines and roots. I whacked my head against a low-hanging branch. Visibility was about three feet, tops.

  I lost sight of Cass first, and then Aly. “Guys?” I called out. “Guys, don’t get too far ahead of me!”

  No answer. The trees were so thick even sound didn’t travel far.

  By now I could smell the faint saltiness of sea air. That meant we weren’t too far from the beach. As I hauled myself around a fallen tree, I stopped to take a breath. A monkey swung overhead, and I felt a tiny nut bop the top of my head. “Thanks a lot,” I grumbled.

  Eeeee! cried the monkey. It was standing upright on a branch, gesturing deeper into the woods. Eeee! Eeee!

  It looked a lot like Wilbur the extremely smart chimp, Torquin’s friend, who had given his life for us. These island monkeys were not normal. This one seemed to be warning me.

  “What?” I strained to see into the jungle but nothing seemed unusual.

  Eeee!

  “Thanks, that makes it clearer,” I said.

  There.

  A flash of black.

  I squinted. Something moved in the distance, from one tree to the next. As I instinctively jumped back, the monkey pounded its own chest as if to say See? What did I tell you? Then it swung away and out of sight.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  More than anything I wanted to hear Fiddle’s voice or Nirvana’s. But I got no response. I waited a few minutes, then picked up a rock and threw it in that direction.

  With a hollow thump, it bounced off a tree and fell to the ground.

  I looked back toward the directi
on Cass and Aly had disappeared. They would be noticing my absence now. But if they tried to find me in these woods, they might get lost. Even with Cass’s help.

  “FI-I-I-DL-L-LE!” I shouted. Then, “CA-A-A-ASSS! A-A-A-L-Y!”

  My voice echoed briefly into the canopies then faded quickly, answered only by a few curious bird calls. I began thrashing my way after Cass’s path.

  At least I hoped it was Cass’s path.

  The ocean smell came and went. I was sniffing up the sweat that poured down my face in torrents. Neither Cass nor Aly had left footprints in the thick piles of decaying leaves. My ankles were crosshatched with tiny lashes and swollen with bug bites. The trees seemed to be growing closer, threatening to strangle me. I knew it was the dead of afternoon, but the skies seemed to be darkening.

  I heard a rustling sound and paused. The sea?

  No. It was behind me. In the trees.

  At the sharp, pistol-like snap of a branch, I spun around. The shape was closer, ducking behind a tree. I saw a flash of a black boot and knew it was human.

  Not a rebel, I figured. They knew who I was, and they would come out of hiding to meet me. Then who? A Massa spy? “Hello? Hey, I see you. We were told we had until darkness!”

  No response.

  I turned and ran away as fast as I could. In about twenty yards I came to a dense copse off to the left and dived into the brush. My breaths came in loud, ragged gasps, but I tried to control the noise.

  I heard footsteps. The figure was coming closer now. I could wait till he passed. Or jump him.

  The steps crashed through the underbrush and then abruptly stopped. I held my breath. A mosquito buzz-bombed my ear and I swatted it.

  Carefully I pushed aside the branches of the bush and peered into the pathway, where I’d last heard the steps.

  It was empty.

  I felt a hand grab my arm, and another jam against my mouth. A scream caught in my throat as I turned, staring into the fabric of a black hooded mask.