CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

DON’T LOOK UP

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” CASS’S SCREAM caromed off the stone wall.

We fell over each other trying to run away. I hit my head against a low ceiling. Aly dropped the flashlight.

“Is it behind us?” Cass said.

“It’s dead, Cass!” Aly replied. “It’s a skeleton!”

“So why are we running?” Cass demanded.

I took a deep breath. I stepped back and picked up the flashlight. I shone it back behind us into the empty passageway. “Okay,” I said. “There’s an explanation.”

“S-sure. The explanation is that that used to be a live person,” Cass said. “Someone who found this maze. Like us. The wall trapped him. He started knocking. And he’s b-been there ever s-s-since—”

“Stop!” Aly said. “I think Wenders set this up. He found a skeleton, maybe from an ancient sacrifice. He set it up. To scare people away from getting into the tunnel.”

I nodded. “Nothing to get freaked about. No big deal.”

“No big deal?” Cass said. “What if there are ghosts in here, or zombies?”

“Those are mythical, Cass,” Aly said.

“So are vromaskis, and superpowers, and shared dreams,” Cass retorted.

Aly leaned forward, putting her hand on Cass’s shoulder. “Hey. I know how you feel. We’re all scared. But we have a mission. Remember?”

Cass nodded. “Marco.”

“Marco,” she said.

“There will be an opening off the right wall,” Cass said softly. “Take it.”

I trained the flashlight ahead. Cass was clinging to Aly. The opening was exactly where he said, and I scratched a mark on the corner with a piece of flint. Then we all edged past the skeleton.

This tunnel was wider. Someone had painted strange-looking animals, now faded and almost transparent. A red bird with the body of a lion. A hook-nosed beast with sharp teeth. “The vromaski and the griffin,” I said.

“I need to see this,” Aly said, taking out her own flashlight.

“Are you nuts?” Cass snatched the flashlight from her. “We can’t sightsee! Let’s get through this place. About fifty feet ahead, we turn left.”

“That is rude, Cass.” Aly lunged toward him and grabbed back the light.

“Guys!” I shouted. “Stop this!”

As Cass lurched away, Aly lost her balance, hurtling to the ground. She cried out, her foot wedged in a hole.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She grimaced, looking straight downward. “I think so. Lost my flashlight, though. Thank you, Cass.”

Cass and I knelt beside her. I shone my light down into the hole. It was bottomless. “Next time you guys want to fight over something,” I said, “make sure it’s not anything our lives depend on.”

“Sorry,” Cass murmured.

I helped Aly up. “We only have one working flashlight. Let’s hope it lasts. How’s your foot?”

She leaned on my shoulder, testing her ankle. “It’s only a flesh wound,” she said through gritted teeth.

Aly held on to the back of my shirt and hobbled forward. After a few steps she was limping along on her own. Our next left was a vast chamber. It vaulted upward into a dome, so high that the flashlight beam barely kissed the top. In the center of the room was a raised stone platform shaped like a keyhole, round and flat with a short walkway leading to a table on the left. The platform was surrounded by five steps. Directly across the chamber was an exit portal, an archway leading deeper into the maze.

We stepped slowly onto the floor of polished stone slabs.

“Looks like an altar,” Aly said.

“Probably where the Atlanteans made the s-s-sacrifices,” Cass added, setting his pack on the floor.

He took the flashlight from my hand and skimmed the beam over the wall behind the altar. It looked like an enormous grayish-green canvas.

I stepped closer to it. “Focus the light on here a minute.”

Cass and Aly were examining the table, but Cass shone the light for me, and I flicked the bottom left of the canvas with a finger. Dust poofed outward. Under the coating was an image of a man wearing a toga. I shook it and saw an entire scene, some kind of ancient festival. This wasn’t a canvas. It was a gigantic tapestry.

The image looked just like Professor Bhegad’s scene from the classroom—the king, queen, Karai, and Massarym. But then the light beam moved, and I turned to see that Cass and Aly were examining something carved into the table.

“Guys, can I have the light back?” I asked. “This is important.”

“There’s some writing here,” Cass said. “I want to copy it down.”

I couldn’t wait. I needed something brighter than a dying flashlight. Something that would show me the whole scene at once. Like a fire.

I grabbed Cass’s pack and angled it so whatever light was in the room would illuminate its contents. I pulled out the kerosene can and found some stray wood. At the bottom of the pack was an old, yellowed newspaper. He hadn’t included it in his inventory of the packs. But it would be useful. Quickly I set the newspaper down, piled the branches on top, and lit it with one of Cass’s matches.

Flames shot upward, first consuming an advertisement for Bob’s Plumbing Supplies and traveling upward to a screaming banner headline: MATTIPACK CRIME-SPREE COUPLE CAUGHT!

As the wood ignited, my mouth fell open. The tapestry came to brilliant life in the amber glow. It showed all the images from Bhegad’s tutorial—the peaceful kingdom, the sparring brothers, the destruction of Atlantis. But I noticed something strange. In the highest right corner of the weaving, there was a man hanging by his arms from what looked like a small beach ball. It looked completely out of place in this scenario. “Cass, Aly—take a look at—”

“What did you just do?”

Cass’s scream shocked me.

I spun around.

“You—you burned my Chronicle!” Cass lunged at me with his fists.

As we struggled, Aly tried to grab Cass from behind. The three of us stumbled back, bouncing off the altar and onto the round platform. Aly caught her heel on a slightly raised lip where two stones met. We all fell onto a disk of polished marble, directly in the center of the platform.

And after a hesitant rumble, it began to sink.

A roar echoed through the chamber, stone scraping on stone.

Cass’s eyes were huge. “What’s happening?”

I leaped back up to the lip of the platform. “This room is bad enough,” I said, reaching down for the others. “I don’t want to see the basement.”

The entire chamber began to vibrate. Dust clouds shot outward from the tapestry. The stone legs of the altar table groaned against the floor as they slid.

As Cass and Aly scrambled upward, a square section of the ceiling moved. I squinted upward to see a stone door on thick metal hinges, opening to release something thick and black.

The mass spilled out, morphing and growing, changing shapes like a living thing.

“Let’s go!” I screamed. I grabbed on to Aly. She locked her fingers around Cass.

Before we could clear the platform, the blob hit us.