TRAITOR.
Two-faced liar.
Monster.
The words tumbled through my brain each time I looked at the back of Marco’s head. He was in the front seat of the helicopter, sitting between Brother Dimitrios and Stavros, who was the pilot. A sack and a box rested on the ground between Marco’s feet, each containing a Loculus. To my right, in the backseat, were Yiorgos, Cass, and Aly. We were flying at breakneck speed. Stavros was a better pilot than Torquin, but not by much.
I was numb. I fiddled with the bracelet Brother Dimitrios had slapped on my wrist, secured with an electronic key. We all had them, bands that contained iridium alloy. The KI—whoever was left of them—would not be able to track us. I didn’t really care anymore. All I could think about was the look on Daria’s face the last time I saw her. The concern for the sick little boy, Pul. Like nothing else mattered. Like her world was not going to vanish after two thousand seven hundred years.
Marco was talking. Explaining. But his words drifted through the noisy chopper as if they were in some alien language. Now he was looking at us, expecting an answer. “Brother Cass?” he said. “Aly? Jack?”
Cass shook his head. “Didn’t hear it, don’t want to hear it.”
“We trusted you,” Aly added. “We risked our lives with you, and you were working for the enemy.”
Brother Dimitrios turned to us. “I’m afraid we took you from the enemy, children,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Crazy old Radamanthus and his pointy-headed Karai groupies . . . they have infiltrated your mind, haven’t they?”
“Did you tell them about the KI, Marco?” Cass snapped. “Did you give up their secrets? You sold them out, too?”
“We still don’t know their location,” Brother Yiorgos said. “We can block the tracker signals—that’s easy—but decrypting them is beyond our capabilities. Marco couldn’t figure the KI location. But he said you might be able to.”
“He was wrong,” Cass said.
“I knew Bhegad, long ago,” Brother Dimitrios said. “He was my professor at Yale. Not a good teacher, I’m afraid. He disappeared in mid-semester, leaving behind an odd note. He was going away to a secret think tank to determine the fate of the world! Genetic and historic consequences! Most scholars deemed it flat-out loony. It seems that while studying the works of Herman Wenders, Professor Bhegad came across the diary of Wenders’s son, Burt. A deluded boy, feverish and about to die, who believed his father had found a secret island, the remnant of Atlantis. Legend has it that Wenders and his people set up a permanent base there, which only they could locate. It became the home of a secret Karai cult. The Dark Side.” He chuckled. “Until now, I believed it to be a fiction. I thought old Radamanthus was dead.”
“If they’re the Dark Side, what are you?” Aly grumbled.
“Tell me, what did Bhegad say?” Brother Dimitrios went on, ignoring Aly. “That you will die unless the seven Loculi are returned to the Circle of Seven? Hmm?”
He knew about the Heptakiklos, too! “Did Bhegad leave that info in his note at Yale, or did a little bird tell you?” I asked bitterly.
Marco’s face blanched.
“Before you were captured,” Brother Dimitrios said, “back in your hometown, you’d begun experiencing tremors— fainting spells caused by your genetic flaw. Then Bhegad whisked you away to this secret hideout. He keeps you alive, correct? He’s devised some . . . procedure. Something that keeps you healthy temporarily. But alas, the cure comes only after all seven Loculi are returned. Am I right so far?”
His eyes bore into mine. All I could do was nod.
“And he’s told you a story about a fair, golden-haired prince named Karai,” Brother Dimitrios continued. “His mother, Queen Qalani, played god by isolating the sacred energy source into seven parts. This upset the balance, creating havoc in the land. So the good prince Karai sought to destroy the seven Loculi. But his evil brother Massarym—a dark young man, of course, because dark is the color of villains, yes?—stole them away, causing the entire continent to implode. Something like that, was it? And you believed this?”
“Think about it, dudes,” Marco pleaded. “Think about how we felt when Bhegad told this story. Each of us tried to escape—and then we all tried together. But they were on to us. They brought us back and wore us down. So yeah, of course we came around—but not because we trusted him. For survival. Because we really didn’t have a choice.”
Cass and Aly were looking at the floor. None of us had a good response.
“Perhaps Prince Karai wasn’t such a saint after all,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Perhaps he was a foolish young man with a temper. Imagine if the saintly Karai had succeeded. He would have destroyed the Loculi, and the continent would have vaporized in an instant. Massarym took the Loculi away—for their protection.”
“Marco already gave us this line,” Aly said. “There’s one problem with it. Atlantis was destroyed!”
“Destroyed?” Brother Dimitrios snapped. “Really? You saw the Heptakiklos, no? Marco took the waters there. He came back from death. You know very well that a part of Atlantis remains today. It was not vaporized. The Karai Institute colonized it. Our rightful home!”
“Massarym saved Atlantis from totally being eighty-sixed,” Marco said. “Because he took the Loculi away. He hid them away for the future. For a time when people would know how to use them. Like now.”
“Bhegad has lied to you,” Brother Dimitrios said. “To him, people are a means to an end, that’s all. Like this supposed cure? If he were concerned about a cure, he’d set out to make one. Like our scientists did.”
“You have a cure?” I asked skeptically. “You’ve only known us since we kicked your butts in Rhodes!”
“No, we don’t have a cure,” Brother Dimitrios said simply. “I will not lie to you. I will always be direct. But we are working on one, and we’re very hopeful. And we may indeed have just learned about you in Rhodos, but you must remember that the Massa have been around for a long while. Although we had not met any Select personally before you, we have always known about G7W.”
Marco nodded. “These guys are the real deal.”
“I don’t care if they’re Santa Claus and his elves,” Aly snapped. “You broke our trust, Marco.”
“We were family,” Cass said softly. “We were all we had. And now we have nothing.”
He was on the verge of tears. Aly was looking out the window in a cloud of funk.
But I was sifting through Brother Dimitrios’s words in my brain. I had to admit, against all of my emotions, they made some tiny bit of sense.
I sat back in the chair, my head spinning. Was I being brainwashed?
Sleep on it, Jack. A problem that seems unsolvable always looks different in the light of a new day.
Dad’s words. I don’t have a clue how old I was when he said them. But they were stuck in my brain like a sticky note with superglue.
I glanced out the window. We were flying across the Arabian Peninsula, with the sun at our backs. Underneath us, the desert gave way to a great forked waterway. “There’s the Red Sea,” Yiorgos said. “We will stop soon to refuel.”
“It’s the ruins of Petra, to be accurate,” Cass muttered. “Passing due west from Jordan to Israel . . . Yotvata . . . An-Nakhl . . . So I guess you’re putting us on course for Egypt.”
“Very impressive,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Egypt is correct. The Karai are not the only ones with a secret headquarters. Theirs, apparently, is where the search for the Loculus ends. Ours is where it begins.”
“And ours is actually in one of the oldest of the Seven Wonders,” Yiorgos said proudly. “The oldest.”
“The only one that still exists,” Brother Dimitrios added.
Cass, Aly, and I shared a look.
We were heading for Giza, for the site of the Great Pyramid.