“IF YOU SAY, ‘It’s alive,’ I will pound you,” Marco said.
His eyes flickered. Professor Bhegad exhaled with relief. Behind him, Fiddle let out a whoop of joy. “You are a strong boy,” Bhegad said. “I wasn’t sure the treatment would take.”
“I didn’t think I needed treatments,” Marco replied. A rueful smile creased his face as he looked up at Aly, Cass, and me. “So much for Marco the Immortal.”
Cass leaned down and gave him a hug. “Brother M, we like you just the way you are.”
“Sounds like a song,” said Nirvana, who was clutching Fiddle’s and Torquin’s arms.
I glanced at Aly and noticed she was tearing up. I sidled close to her. I kind of wanted to put my arm around her, but I wasn’t sure if that would be too weird. She gave me a look, frowned, and angled away. “My eyes . . .” she said. “Must have gotten some sand in them. . . .”
“Aly was telling me about your adventure,” Bhegad said to Marco. “The Loculus seeming to call from the river . . . the weather change . . . the city on the other side. It sounds like one of your dreams.”
“Dreams don’t change the passage of time, Professor Bhegad,” Aly said.
“It was real, dude,” Marco said. “Like some overgrown Disney set. This big old city with dirt roads and no cars and people dressed in togas, and some big old pointy buildings.”
Fiddle nodded. “Hm. Ziggurats . . .”
“Nope,” Marco said. “No smoking.”
“Not cigarettes, ziggurats—tiered structures, places of worship.” Bhegad scratched his head, suddenly deep in thought. “And the rest of you—you all confirm Marco’s observation?”
Nirvana threw up her arms. “When Aly talks about it, you assume it’s a dream. But when Marco says it, you take it seriously. A little gender bias, maybe?”
“My apologies, old habits learned at Yale,” Bhegad said. “I take all of you seriously. Even though you do seem to be talking about a trip into the past—which couldn’t be, pardon the expression, anything more than a fairy tale.”
“So let’s apply some science.” Aly sank to the ground and began making calculations in the sand with her finger. “Okay. Twenty-seven minutes there, about a day and sixteen-and-a-half hours here. That’s this many hours . . .”
“Twenty-seven minutes there equals forty-and-a-half hours here?” I asked.
“How many minutes would that be?” she said. “Sixty minutes in an hour, so multiply by sixty . . .”
Aly’s fingers were flying. “So twenty-seven minutes passed while we were there. But twenty-four-hundred thirty minutes passed here. What’s the ratio?”
“Ninety!” Aly’s eyes were blazing. “It means we went to a place where time travels ninety times slower than it does here.”
Fiddle looked impressed. “You go, girl.”
“Whaaat? That’s impossible!” Cass shook his head in disbelief, then glanced at Professor Bhegad uncertainly. “Isn’t it?”
I desperately tried to remember something weird I once learned. “In science class . . . when I wasn’t sleeping . . . my teacher was talking about this famous theory. She said to imagine you were in a speeding train made of glass, and you threw a ball up three feet and then caught it. To you, the ball’s going up and down three feet. But to someone outside the train, looking through those glass walls . . .”
“The ball moves in the direction of the train, so it travels many more than three feet—not just up and down, but forward,” Professor Bhegad said. “Yes, yes, this is the theory of special relativity . . .”
“She said time could be like that,” I went on. “So, like, if you were in a spaceship, and you went really fast, close to the speed of light, you’d come back and everyone on earth would be a lot older. Because, to them, time is like that ball. It goes faster when it’s just up and down instead of all stretched out.”
“So you’re thinking you guys were like the spaceship?” Nirvana said. “And that place we found—it’s like some parallel world going slower, alongside our world?”
“But if we both exist at the same time, why aren’t we seeing them?” Marco said. “They should be on the other side of the river, only moving really slow a-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-d speeeeeeeeaki-i-i-i-i-ing l-i-i-i-ke thi-i-i-i-s . . .”
“We have five senses and that’s all,” Aly said. “We can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Maybe when you bend time like that, the rules are different. You can’t experience the other world, at least with regular old physical senses.”
“But you—you all managed to traverse the two worlds,” Bhegad said, “by means of some—”
“Portal,” Fiddle piped up.
“It looked like a tire,” Marco said. “Only nicer. With cool caps.”
Bhegad let out a shriek. “Oh! This is extraordinary. Revolutionary. I must think about this. I’ve been postulating the existence of wormholes all my life.”
Torquin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Pustulate not necessary. See wormholes every day!”
“A wormhole in time,” Bhegad said. “It’s where time and space fold in on themselves. So the normal rules don’t apply. The question is, what rules do apply? These children may very well have traveled cross-dimensionally. They saw a world that occupies this space, this same part of the earth where we now stand. How does one do this? The only way is by traveling through some dimensional flux point. In other words, one needs to find a disruption in the forces of gravity, magnetism, light, atomic attraction.”
“Like the portal in Mount Onyx,” I said, “where the griffin came through.”
“Exactly,” Professor Bhegad said. “Do you realize what you were playing with? What dangers you risked? According to the laws of physics, your bodies could have been turned inside out . . . vaporized!”
I shrugged. “Well, I’m feeling pretty good.”
“You told me you could feel the Loculus, Jack,” Bhegad said. “The way you felt the Heptakiklos in the volcano.”
“I felt it, too,” Marco said. “We’re Select, yo. We get all wiggy when we’re near this stuff. It’s a G7W thing.”
“Which means, unfortunately, you will have to return . . .” Bhegad stated, his voice drifting off as he sank into thought.
“Yeah, and this time without the twenty-first-century clothes, which make us stick out,” Marco said. “I say we hit the nearest costume shop, buy some stylish togas, and go back for the prize.”
“Not togas,” Aly said. “Tunics.”
Professor Bhegad shook his head. “Absolutely not. This is not to be rushed into. We must return to our original plan, to finish your training. Recent events—the vromaski, the griffin—they forced our hand. Made us rush. They thrust you into an adventure for which you were not adequately prepared . . .”
“Old school . . . old school . . .” Marco chanted.
“Call it what you wish, but I call it prudent,” Professor Bhegad shot back. “Everything you’ve done—Loculus flying, wormhole traveling—is unprecedented in human history. We need to study the flight Loculus. Consult our top scientists about further wormhole visits. Assess risk. If and when you go back through the portal, we must have a plan—safety protocols, contingencies, strategies, precise timing to your treatment schedule. Now, turn me around so we can get started.”
Fiddle threw us a shrug and then began turning the old man back toward the tents.
“Yo, P. Beg—wait!” Marco said.
Professor Bhegad stopped and looked over his shoulder. “And that’s another thing, my boy—it’s Professor Bhegad. Sorry, but you will not be calling the shots anymore. From here on, you are on a tight leash.”
“Um, about that flight Loculus?” Marco said. “Sorry, but you can’t study it.”
Professor Bhegad narrowed his eyes. “You said you hid it, right?”
“Uh, yeah, but—” Marco began.
“Then retrieve it!” Bhegad snapped.
Marco rubbed the back of his neck, looking out toward the water. “The thing is—I hid it . . . there.”
“In the water?” Nirvana asked.
“No,” Marco replied. “Over in the other place.”
Bhegad slumped. “Well, this makes the job a bit more complicated, doesn’t it? I suppose you do have to go sooner rather than later. Prepared or not. Perhaps I will have to send the able-bodied Fiddle along to help you.”
“Or Torquin,” Torquin grunted indignantly, “who is able-bodied . . . er.”
Fiddle groaned. “This is not in my job description. Or Tork’s. We were told one Loculus in each of the Seven Wonders. Not in some fantasy time warp—in the real world.”
“The second Loculus, dear Fiddle,” Bhegad said, “is indeed in one of the Wonders.”
“Right—so we should be digging, not spinning sci-fi stories,” Fiddle said. “You see those ruins down the river—that’s where the Hanging Gardens were!”
“But our Select have gone to where the Hanging Gardens are.” Bhegad gestured toward the water, his eyes shining. “I believe they have found the ancient city of Babylon.”