CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

THE CIRCLE IN THE DARK

ALY’S SCREAM MADE bats skitter out from the crags. She fell over Marco, wrapping her arms around him. “You cannot be alive. I am hugging a not-alive person!”

“Huh?” Marco said.

Cass leaned over Marco, his brow furrowed. “You. Fell. Marco!” he said in a barking voice, as if Marco were still in a coma. “Do you understand me, Marco? You fell! From the top of the volcano! And yet! You survived!”

Marco glanced my way. “Why ith he talking like that? And what’th with thith lithp?”

I opened my mouth to answer but my jaw just flapped open and shut. This couldn’t be happening. But it was. Marco had fallen to his death. His jaw, his teeth—they lay scattered about the center of the volcano.

But he was with us again. Intact.

We were all intact. Guano free. Burn healed.

Returned from death.

“Marco, let me see your mouth,” I finally said.

He obediently lowered his jaw. As I knelt closer, Aly looked, too.

I angled his face so I could catch the light. His front teeth were stubs, just breaking through the gum line. Not smashed, not ragged and pointed, but smooth edged, like Chiclets. The top of Marco’s mouth—the hard palate—was pink and small as if it had been transplanted from a baby.

Aly gasped. “His teeth…”

“His whole jaw,” Cass said softly. “It was shattered in the fall. Destroyed.”

“Marco,” I said, “you may not remember this, but you fell. A huge distance. You should be dead. But you landed by this waterfall, and you’re okay.”

Marco smiled a stubby smile. “I’m immortal?”

“It’s something about the water,” I said. “You’re…regenerating.”

“I whaaaa—?”

He nearly bit off my fingers at the W.

“Your teeth are growing in,” I said. “Your palate—that must have been knocked out of your mouth, too. But it’s coming back. That’s why you’re lisping!”

His face lit up. “Tho it’th not going to latht forever?”

He was sitting up now. His arms were moving. The lacerations on his face were looking less angry. “Marco,” I said, “can you stand?”

Marco shrugged. He swung his legs around so they hung down over the ledge.

“Look at them, Jack!” Aly said with a gasp.

His legs dangled bizarrely, pointing every which way as if he had three knees in each one. He glanced at them curiously, swinging them right to left. “Dang,” he said.

Then he kicked out twice, hard. The legs locked themselves back into a normal angle, and he let out sharp yelp of pain.

Cass groaned. “He has got to stop doing that.”

“Help me up,” Marco said, grimacing. “Gently, doodth.”

Cass and I put our arms around him and lowered him as carefully as we could into the water. He cried out as his feet hit bottom. The backwash from the falls swirled around us, hip deep. “We have to go back under the falls,” I said. “Back into the center of the volcano. That’s where we found you. Can you make it?”

Marco shifted his weight. He rested in the water for a moment, taking deep breaths. Then, unhooking his arms from our shoulders, he firmly pushed us aside.

Grinning at Aly, he said, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.”

Back in the crater, Marco insisted on gathering up all his tooth fragments and lost body parts. Cass and Aly were locked in a worried conversation by an archway at the far end of the caldera, on the opposite side from which we’d come in. There were three tunnel openings there.

But my eyes were fixed on the great shadow to our left. Because of the sun’s angle, a section of the crater floor was totally black. A mist, barely visible, seeped out. I figured it was water evaporating against warm rock.

“I’m pretty sure one of these connects with the path we took,” Cass was saying, “but I can’t remember which.”

“You have to!” Aly said. “What if we walk back into the fire?”

“I’m not a machine, Aly,” Cass replied. “I only got a quick look at that tree trunk. I was nervous. We were in the middle of an escape, remember? Maybe we should do a little reconnaissance—try each of them, weed out any dead ends, see if we can find some markings, leads, whatever. Maybe it’ll bring it all back to me. Marco? Jack?”

“I’ll wait till you figure it out,” Marco called out. “I’m finding cool thtuff. Thcream if you thee a vromathki. But don’t worry. We’re immortal. We have the waterfall—woo-hoo!”

He was over near the waterfall entrance, practically giddy with excitement. He held a fleshy lump to the light, gazed at it in awe, then dumped it into his backpack.

“I want to explore,” I called, gesturing toward the shadow. “Don’t take long.”

As Cass and Aly disappeared into the archway, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bhegad’s classroom lesson—about the heart of Atlantis, the mysterious place Wenders claimed to have seen. Now we had seen it, too. But it sure didn’t match my dream, which had nothing like rock walls or this healing waterfall.

The blackness scared me a little. How could any place be that dark in the middle of the day?

Judging from the curve of the walls, I estimated the depth—the distance to the back wall—couldn’t be more than twenty or thirty yards.

I stuck close to the wall as I walked in. I could see nothing now. I felt my hair lifting upward in lazy swirls.

The back of my head, which had been throbbing ever since I saw the waterfall, now pounded like a drum. I tried to shake it off. The wall was leading me straight back. I wasn’t expecting that. I should have been closing a circle. Calderas were round.

I stopped when I heard faint, muffled music. It was an unearthly tangle of sounds, not like any instrument I knew but not singing either. It throbbed in rhythm with my head’s pounding.

It was irresistible. Pulling me. Scaring me.

I turned, intending to call to my friends. But the voice that emerged from my throat was compressed and garbled. Not even a word, more like the fluting of a bird.

It made me giggle in spite of myself. I kept moving inward, helpless to resist, ignoring the pain in my head.

This sound was now commandeering all my senses, exhilarating and horrifying me at the same time. It was the smell of Christmas Eve and Barry Reese’s breath, the sight of Mom’s smile and Marco’s shattered teeth, the feel of beach sand and burning bat guano. I could no sooner escape it than turn the waterfall back up to its source. And I didn’t want to.

You’re not in danger. Marco is a shout away.

In the shadow’s center was a bluish-white glow. A circle. It seemed to come from deep below the earth, shining through translucent rock. Pulsing with the music’s rhythm. The mist hissed up through pencil-thin cracks, obscuring what was inside the shape.

I moved closer. Carved into the circle’s center was a deep, wide hemisphere. Around the perimeter were seven shallower ones. Each was marked with a symbol. I leaned in, trying to make sense of them.

It looked like some weird game. The carvings looked like landmarks from some ancient country.

No. Not landmarks.

I knew what these represented.

Of sisters, gables, virtues, sins,/Of gambling men with lucky wins/Of continents and stormy seas…

Seven. All of Wenders’s clues—even the opening to the outside—involved the number seven. And I began thinking about school, about something I’d been obsessed with in sixth grade. “The Pyramids of Egypt…Hanging Gardens of Babylon…Pharos Lighthouse…” I muttered.

These were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But what the heck did they have to do with the Karai Institute, and this volcano—and Atlantis?

“Yo, Jack…where’d you go…?”

Cass’s voice was disembodied, as if from a TV in the next room. I knew I should call out, but the circle was beckoning, silencing me. The mist—I could see now—it was coming from a crack in the center. Maybe that was making the sound, like breath blowing through a clarinet reed.

I edged closer. The mist caressed my face softly. It lifted my spirits. Was this the volcano’s real healing source—the thing that transformed the water, gave energy to the falls?

In the eddy’s midst I spotted a jagged thing, rising from the center of the circle. It was dirty and forlorn, like a spoon broken off in a bowl of petrified soup. Or the withered, split trunk of an ancient dead sapling. It seemed out of place within such an awesome force.

My head throbbed now. I felt as if someone had placed three fingers on the three points of the lambda at the back of my skull. But I was too curious to turn back. As I wrapped my hand around the little tree, a layer of dirt and rust fell off. It had more heft than I expected. It was flatter, too. Definitely not a tree. Not wood at all. Metal, probably.

I pulled and it came out easily, with a clean-sounding shhhick. I held it over the glow. Either the light had intensified or my eyes were getting used to it. I could see the thing pretty clearly. It was the pointy half of a rusted sword blade, marked with a finely etched design that was hard to discern. Someone had obviously gone all King Arthur on the sword and tried to pull it out of the stone, instead breaking it off midway. I looked around for the other piece but there was no sign of it.

From the center of the circle, where I’d pulled the broken weapon, came kind of a deep-earth belch. The music, so loud a moment ago, was fading.

“Jack?” Cass’s voice echoed from far behind me. “’Sup? You fall into a hole or something?”

He couldn’t see me in the dark. Was too scared to venture closer. I tried to answer but couldn’t.

“We need your help, Jack,” Cass continued, his voice growing more nervous. “We investigated three paths. Two of them are dead ends, and the other goes on forever and kind of smells of the outdoors. Marco’s with us now. But the flashlight’s dead. Jack…? Jack?”

I heard Cass’s footsteps retreating at a run. As my eyes fell on the circle again, I saw that the place where the sword blade had been was now glowing a garish blue-white. Something seemed to be pressing up from underneath. Trying to break out.

The ground began to shake. I could hear an avalanche of rocks all around. Through the small rip in the earth came an explosion—not of rock and soil but blinding white light. A savage wind whipped upward, lifting me off my feet, bringing me down hard.

What had I done? I needed to put the sword shard back. It had blown out of my hand and was lying on the ground. I lunged toward it. My hand closed around it just as a blast of wind spun me around.

The light was blinding me. Where was the circle?

I skidded against the wall, hitting my head. For a moment all went black. Then I heard a piercing screech and saw a wash of bright red. I felt the flapping of wings like a sudden gale wind.

My eyes were fluttering, my brain dancing in and out of consciousness.

Stay awake!

I forced myself to lean into the wind. The circle was now an angry bright white. I couldn’t look into it for more than a fraction of a second. I would have to be accurate.

With a grunt, I shoved the shard back down. Hard.

It entered the rock cleanly and held.

The wind echoed up toward the sun and dispersed. The light was back underground. The circle had a swollen, angry brightness, but the sense of imminent disaster was over.

As I backed away, the mist began to rise again. My legs shook uncontrollably as I edged out of the darkness.

And I ran.