“GAAAH!” MY FACE broke through the water’s surface. Air rushed into my mouth like a solid projectile. I sucked in huge gulps.
She was gone.
“Mo-o-om!” I shouted.
“No! Marco!” a voice shouted back.
I blinked water from my eyes. I could see Marco rising and falling on a wild current. He let go of me, swimming toward Aly, pushing her toward the bank. I could see her struggling to stand, grabbing onto Cass’s arm.
I was too far into the middle, the deeper water. I struggled to push myself high enough above the surface for a proper breath. As I went under again, I fought to stay conscious.
“Hang on, brother!” Marco shouted.
His fingers locked around my arm. He was swimming beside me, pulling us both toward the bank. His arms dug hard into the frothing current. Aly and Cass were struggling onto the shore, staring over their shoulders at me in horror.
Marco and I bounced downstream in a helpless zigzag. We careened around a jutting rock that rose up between us, forcing Marco to let go of me. Directly in our path was a downed tree. I kicked hard and up, opened my arms, and let it hit me full force in the chest. My legs swept under the wood as I held tight.
“Marco!” I yelled.
“Here!” Marco clung to the tree about three feet to my left, closer to the riverbank. We both hung there, catching our breaths. “How’s your grip, Brother Jack? Steady?”
I nodded. “I think . . . I can make my way to the shore!”
“Good—see you there!” Marco swung up onto the wood, stood carefully, and scampered toward the shore like an Olympic gymnast. Jumping onto the bank, he began calling for Aly and Cass.
I yanked myself onto the fallen tree. Lying there, I felt my chest beating against the slippery wood. I didn’t dare try to stand. Slowly I reached out toward the shore, gripping farther along the branch. In this way I managed to shimmy along at a snail’s pace until I finally reached the bank and flopped onto the mud.
Farther upstream, Aly had made it to solid ground. Marco was back in the river, helping Cass out of the water. I struggled to my feet. My legs ached and rain pelted my face, but I hobbled toward them as fast as I could in the soggy soil.
A total freak rainstorm. One moment, hot and dry air. The next, this. Was this normal in the desert?
What was going on here?
“Jack!” Aly threw her arms around me as I arrived. Her face was warm against my neck. I think she was crying.
“Behave, you two,” Marco said.
I pulled away, feeling the blood rush to my face. “What just happened?” I said.
Cass was staring across the river, looked dazed. “Okay, we jumped into the river. We hit a rough patch. We came out the other end. So . . . we should be staring across the river, at the place we left from, right?”
“Left,” Marco said. “Right.”
“So where is everything?” he asked. “Where are Torquin, Bhegad, Nirvana? They should have made it down here by now.”
Aly and I followed Cass’s glance. “Looks like we were carried pretty far downstream,” I said.
“Yeah, like a zillion miles away,” I said.
“That,” Cass said, “would be geographically elbissopmi.”
“How do you do that?” Aly said.
A dense cloud cover made it hard to see north and south, but I could see no sign of human life—no settlements, no Babylonian ruins, no KI people. Just swollen river in either direction.
“We can’t waste time—come on!” Marco was already heading up the slope into a thick pine grove.
Cass, Aly, and I shared a wary glance. “Marco, you’re not telling us something,” I said. “What just happened?”
Marco scampered through the trees without an answer, as if our near drowning, our battering against the rocks, had never happened. Cass looked at him in disbelief. “He can’t be serious.”
“Chill is not in that boy’s vocabulary,” Aly said.
We followed behind as fast as we could. My legs were bruised and my head bloody. My arms felt as if I’d been bench-pressing a rhinoceros. The slope wasn’t too steep, really, but in our condition it felt like Mount Everest. We caught up with Marco at the edge of the pine trees. Here, everything seemed a little more familiar. Just beyond the grove I could see a vast plain of dirt to the horizon. The clouds were lifting, the water-soaked ground quickly drying. Scrubby bushes dotted the landscape, which was crisscrossed by a network of wide paths cut through the plain.
“Check it out,” Marco said, gesturing to the left.
A giant rainbow arched through the sky, sloping downward into a city of low, square, yellow-brown buildings—thousands of them, most with crown-like sandcastle roofs. The city rose on a gentle hill, and if I wasn’t mistaken, I thought I could see another wall deeper inside the city. The outer wall contained a mammoth arched gate of cobalt-blue tiles. In the center of the city was a towering building shaped like a layer cake. Its sides were ornately carved, its windows spiraling up to a tapered peak. The city’s outer wall was surrounded by a moat, which seemed to draw water from the Euphrates. Closer to us, outside the city limits, were farms where oxen trudged slowly, plowing the fields.
“Either I’m dreaming,” Aly said, “or no one ever told us there was a phenomenally accurate ancient Babylonian theme park on the other side of the river.”
“I don’t remember seeing this from the air,” I said, turning to Cass. “How about you, Mr. GPS—any ideas?”
Cass shook his head, baffled. “Sorry. Clueless.”
“It’s not a theme park,” Marco said, ducking back into the trees. “And it’s not the other side of the river. Follow me, and keep yourselves hidden by the trees as long as possible.”
“Marco,” Aly said, “what do you know that you’re not telling us?”
“Trust me,” Marco said. “To quote Alfred Einstein: ‘a follower tells, but a leader shows.’”
He slipped back into the trees, heading in the direction of the city. Aly, Cass, and I fell in behind him. “It’s Albert Einstein,” Aly corrected him. “And I don’t believe he ever said that.”
“Maybe it was George Washington,” Marco said.
We trudged through the brush. The river roared to our right. Roared? Okay, it was swollen by the rain—but how long could it have rained, five minutes?
The tree cover seemed a lot denser than I’d remembered seeing it from the other side. It partially obscured our view of the city, save for a few glimpses of distant yellowish walls.
As the rain clouds burned away, the temperature climbed. We may have walked for ten minutes or an hour, but it felt like ten days. My body still felt creaky from our little swim adventure. All I wanted to do was lie down. I could tell Cass and Aly were hurting, too. Only Marco still seemed fresh and dewy. “How far are we going?” I called ahead.
“Ask George Washington,” Aly mumbled.
Marco took a sharp turn and stopped short at the edge of the trees. He peered around a trunk, signaling us to come close. With a flourish, he gestured to his left. “Abracadabra, dudes.”
I looked toward the city and felt my jaw drop. The tree cover completely ended here. Up close, I could see that the city spilled directly to the banks of the Euphrates.
Marco was climbing a pine tree and urged us to do the same. The branches hadn’t been trimmed, so it was easy to get maybe fifteen feet or so above the ground.
From this vantage point we could see over the outer wall and into the city. It was no theme park. Way too vast for that. It wasn’t a city, either. Not like the ones I knew—no power wires, no cell towers, no cars. The roads leading into the city were hard-packed dirt. On one of them trudged a group of bearded men in white robes and sandals, leading swaybacked mules laden with canvas bags. They were heading toward a bridge that led over the moat and into the city gate. From the lookout towers, guards watched them approach. I craned my neck to see what the place was like inside, but the walls were too high.
“These people are about as low-tech as it gets,” Cass said. “Like, from another century.”
I felt a chill in spite of the hot sun. “From another millennium,” I added.
“M-M-Marco . . . ?” Aly said. “You have some ’splainin’ to do.”
Marco shook his head in wonder. “Okay. I’m as baffled as you are. Lost in the Land of the Big Duh. No idea where we are or how we got here. I wanted to show you, partly because I couldn’t believe it was real. But you see it, right? I’m not crazy, am I? Because I was having my doubts.”
A rhythmic whacking noise nearly made me slip off my branch. We all scrambled down the trees. A little kid’s voice was coming nearer, singing in some strange language. Instinctively we drew closer together.
Strolling up the path toward us was a dark-haired boy of about six, wearing a plain brown toga and holding a gnarled stick. As he sang, he whacked a hollow, dead tree in rhythm, his eyes wandering idly.
He stopped cold when he saw us.
“Keep singing, little dude,” Marco said. “I like that. Kind of a reggae thing.”
The boy glanced from our faces to our clothes. He dropped his stick and darted back toward the main road. We must have seemed pretty strange to him, because he began shouting anxiously in a language none of us knew.
At the road, a caravan of camels turned lazily toward him. A man with graying hair was at the head of the caravan, leaning on a stick and talking to a city guard dressed in leather armor, who had strolled out to meet him. Both of them turned toward us.
The guard had a thick black beard and shoulders the size of a bull. Narrowing his eyes, he began walking our way, a spear balanced in his hand. He shouted to us with odd, guttural words.
“What’s he saying?” Aly asked.
“‘Does this toga make me look fat?’ How should I know?” Cass said.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Fido,” Marco said. “I say we book it.”
He pushed us toward the river. We began running into the woods, down the slope, tripping over bushes and roots. I felt like I was re-banging every bruise I had. Marco was the first to reach the river banks. Cass was close behind, looking fearfully over his shoulder.
“He’ll give up,” Marco whispered. “He has no reason to be mad at us, just probably thinks we’re dressed weird. We hide for a few minutes and wait for Spartacus and Camel Guy to go away. Then when things are quieter, we go find the Hanging Gardens.”
“Um, by the way, it’s Toto,” Aly whispered.
“What?” Marco snapped.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Aly said. “Not Fido. It’s a line from The Wizard of Oz.”
As we crouched behind some bushes, Marco’s eyes grew wide. I looked in the direction of his glance. Over the tops of the trees, a solid black band shimmered across the sky. It wasn’t a cloud cover exactly, but more like a distant gigantic cape.
“And, um . . . that thing?” Marco said. “That’s maybe the wizard’s curtain?”
I stood and ran to higher ground, to a place where I could see the city. I spotted the guard again and ducked behind a tree. But he wasn’t concerned about us anymore. The guard, the camel driver, the boy, and a couple of other men were hurriedly herding the camels toward the bridge.
“I don’t like this,” Cass said as he caught up to where I was standing. “Let’s get out of here before a tornado strikes. We need to get Professor Bhegad. He’ll know what to do.”
“No way, bro,” Marco protested. “It’s just weather. We need to move forward. And I have about a million things I have to tell you.”
In the distance an animal roared. Birds flew frantically overhead, and a series of crazy, high-pitched screeches pierced the air. This place was giving me the creeps. “Tell us on the other side,” I said, heading back down.
Aly, Cass, and I bolted for the river. It was three against one.
“Wusses. All of you,” Marco said. And with a disgusted sigh, he followed us back in to the river.