I COULDN’T FEEL my feet touch the ground. The noise washed over us, seizing our bodies like a river of sound. Marco was yelling. Pulling me away. His fingers were tight around my forearm as we raced back into the forest, but my eyes saw only inches ahead. A bat dropped lifelessly into my path. A tree groaned and fell to my right. I kept focus on the ground, until the earth cracked directly beneath me.
My ankle caught. I hit the ground, face-first. A root dug into my left cheek. I felt a wrenching pain in my back.
And then everything fell silent. Not a cheep from the birds or a babble from the brook.
“Jack?” came Marco’s voice. “Are you hurt?”
“Only when I breathe,” I said.
Marco emerged from the settling dust to my left. He helped me up, brushing off my tunic. His face was blackened, the hairs at the back of his head singed. “I think maybe if we’d just taken it at a run . . .”
“You are out of your mind,” I said. “But thank you for taking us away. And by the way, you look terrible.”
Marco smiled. “You, too.”
Slowly his eyes rose upward, focusing on something behind me. I sat up and turned.
The curtain of blackness was receding, kicking up dirt and debris. In its wake, where the forest had just been, was a field of ash with smoldering silhouettes of trees, blackened and bent like rubber. Carcasses of animals and birds lay in states of arrested flight, some burned to the bone. Wisps of smoke rose from a culvert, now cracked and empty.
“You seriously thought we could just run through that, Marco!” I said.
He shrugged. “I thought maybe. You know, us being Selects and all. I was delusional.”
The gray field’s border lay maybe thirty yards ahead of us, stark and definite. Our side of the border was dusty but untouched. Water gurgled nearby, and a lone bird let out a confused chitter overhead. “What if that thing comes back for us?”
Marco stood and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s bag this beast, give it to Ol’ Whirly, and find our Loculus. If we keep the black hole to our backs and follow the flow of the water, we’ll be going in the right direction.”
“Promise not to run off,” I said.
“Deal.”
We picked a path through the trees, keeping within earshot of the culvert. The air was clearing now, and one by one the birds started to sing again. After a half hour or so, I expected us to be reaching the edge of the preserve. But nothing seemed familiar. “How big is this place?” Marco said.
I shrugged. The forest was dank and humid. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. “I don’t know.”
As I leaned against a tree, catching my breath, Marco paced. “This is nuts. We’re never going to find this thing. I say we break off and go to the Hanging Gardens ourselves.”
“We’re supposed to cooperate with the Babylonians,” I reminded him. “Professor Bhegad’s orders.”
“To heck with P. Beg,” Marco said. “We listen to him and we’ll be dead by the end of the week. I am so over that guy. That whole lame organization.”
I couldn’t believe the words leaving his mouth. “So we just go rogue whenever we feel like it—like what you did? Be real, Marco. The KI has been at this for years. They know what they’re doing. We can’t play around with our own lives.”
“Brother Jack, no offense, but I’ve had some time to think,” Marco said, his voice weary and exasperated. “Did you ever think this whole thing just . . . smells funny? Try to imagine yourself as him—Bhegad. You’re this old professor who thinks he’s discovered Atlantis. You figure out this stuff about G7W, you set up a secret lab. You put your whole life into it, drop your teaching gig at Harvard—”
“Yale,” I corrected him.
“Whatever,” Marco said. “Now, I’ve got these special kids. I tell them they’re going to be superheroes. But I also know they’re going to die soon. So I figure out a way to keep them alive until they bring the seven Loculi back. I don’t explain how it’s done. It’s just some mystical procedure. This scares them. I’ve got them under my thumb now. I know they’ll do my bidding. Then . . . after those seven babies are returned? Bingo—thanks, guys, sayonara! Next stop, Nobel Prize.”
I nodded. “Exactly. We go home. We’re cured.”
“But what if that part—the cure—is a big lie?” Marco said. “What if there is no cure? What if it’s all a sham? It’s a perfect scheme.”
I shrugged. “So what else do we do? If we’re going to die either way, there’s no difference. At some point you have to trust somebody. The KI is our only possible hope. Otherwise there’s nothing.”
“But I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Marco said with a deep sigh. “You know as well as I do that the KI isn’t the only game in town.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Right, Marco. Of course! I forgot. The Massa. Those crazy monks who tried to kill us. Let’s fly on over there and join up.”
Marco fell silent. In a fraction of a second, I could feel a change in the air pressure, like a fist squeezing the last bit of patience from me. “Wait. You’re not serious, right?” I snapped. “Because if you are, that is an idea so colossally ridiculous that it redefines ridiculousness.”
“Whoa, don’t assume, dude,” Marco said. “My mom always said, when you assume you make an ass of u and me—”
“Not funny,” I said. “Not remotely funny. Either you’re taking duh pills or that dust storm has affected what little was left of your brain.”
Marco’s brown eyes softened in a way I’d never seen before. “Brother Jack, I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that to me. I’m trying to have a conversation, that’s all. You’re not even asking questions—like What do you mean by that, Marco? The way you would do to someone you respected. I’m not a goofball twenty-four-seven, dude. I wouldn’t treat you like that.”
I stopped short and took three deep breaths. I could feel Marco’s confusion and desperation. He was bigger and stronger than any of us. He could climb rocks and battle beasts, and he’d literally given his life to save us. Marco had more bravery in his fingernail than the rest of us had combined. I never thought a kid like me could bully a Marco Ramsay. I was wrong.
“Sorry,” I said, “you didn’t deserve that.”
“Sssh.”
Marco was standing stock-still. Quietly he reached around for his quiver. I saw a figure moving in the woods. A mass of brown-gray fur, a glint of tooth. A grunt echoed from behind the tree. “Don’t move, Jack.”
I nodded. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. My knees were locked.
Marco stepped away, closer to the beast. “Peekaboo, mushushu, I see you . . .”
A bloodshot eye, about knee-high, peered from behind the tree.
“Careful!” I whispered.
“Careful is my middle name,” Marco said.
Without a sound, an impossibly long body leaped toward Marco. Its eyes glinted with a hundred dark segments, and its tongue lashed like a whip. With a high-pitched screech, it lowered its two short, powerful horns. Marco jumped, spinning in the air and bringing the bow down like a club.
He connected with the side of the beast’s head. The mushushu roared in pain, sliding into a thorny bush and uprooting it from the soil. Struggling to his feet, the beast turned toward Marco. His back was covered in matted, dirt-choked fur, his belly in scales smeared with slime. Blood dripped from his horns from what must have been an earlier kill. His back leg was tensed, its talons dug into the dry soil. He fixed Marco with red eyes, his thin red tongue whipping in and out of his mouth.
Marco lifted an arrow to eye level. The bow creaked as he pulled back . . . back . . .
With a flick of his finger, Marco released the arrow. It shot through the air with a barely audible whoosh and caught the beast directly in the shoulder. He flung his head back in agony, stumbled to the earth. “Dang, I meant to get his heart,” Marco said with disappointment, reaching back for another arrow. “These arrows must be bent. Hang on, Brother Jack. I’m trying again.”
The beast’s movements were quick and slippery. With a bloodthirsty scream, he leaped again. Marco jumped back, but the mushushu’s razor-sharp horn sliced through the side of his leg.
“Marco!” I shouted.
I raced toward him, but he staggered away on all fours, scrambling behind a tree. “Stay away, Jack!” he called out. “I’m . . . okay. Run for help!”
His leg was gashed deep, spouting blood. The smell of it seemed to excite the mushushu, and he pawed the ground hungrily.
With one hand, Marco clamped down above the wound. He was trying to stanch the bleeding, but it wasn’t working. Not by a long shot. I could actually see his face growing paler as the blood gushed out.
With a snarl, the beast lowered its horns and charged Marco head-on.