CHAPTER 70

Our great escape turned out to be not so great.

When whatever the dart drug was wore off (around five a.m.), we all woke up to discover that we’d been chained together, with our hands cuffed behind us, at the base of an ancient Incan idol—a weird smiling guy with a slit for a mouth.

“Was this thing here last night?” I asked through a yawn.

“Chya,” said Tommy. “Collier wanted to chain me to it but the dude with the feathers said he couldn’t. Said it was a sacred sculpture.”

“Who’s it supposed to be?” asked Beck, our family artiste.

“Feather Head called him Inkarri,” said Tommy.

“Inkarri,” said Dad pensively. That meant he was thinking about stuff. Dad does that a lot. “The statue’s presence is further proof that the Lost City of Paititi is close at hand.”

I squirmed around a little and noticed something kind of odd.

The old guy, the mighty Willaq Umu or whatever, the wannabe-high-priest dude, was sitting on the ground, chained to the post where Tommy had been chained. His buddy Supay was chained right beside him. The high priest wasn’t wearing his robes or his feathered hat. Just antique underpants.

“What’s going on?” I muttered.

“Good question,” said Dad. “I suspect Collier no longer thinks he needs those two gentlemen to help him raise Paititi from its hiding place. His ego is such that he thinks he can do it all by himself. And here is something else for us to ponder: Those dart guns that did us in last night weren’t installed by Nathan Collier or his crew. Remember, they only just discovered this site last night. There was no time for them to engineer a defensive contraption as complex as the trip-wire dart-gun artillery installation we encountered.”

“So who put the dart-launcher things in all the rocks?” asked Tommy. “There were like a bajillion of them, all firing at once.”

“My guess?” said Dad, looking up at the smiling idol behind us. “Inkarri’s followers. Five hundred years ago.”

“They installed the same kind of defenses here that Beck and I discovered in that cave back at the necropolis!” I said.

Dad nodded. “Such is my supposition.”

“So those darts were dipped in, like, a five-hundred-year-old sleeping potion?” asked Tommy.

“Powerful stuff,” said Storm. “But I suspect its potency has diminished over the centuries. If we had come by, oh, two hundred years ago, we’d probably all be dead right now.”

“Great,” I said. “Another lucky break.”

“Now if only we could stop the sun from rising,” said Beck, nodding her head toward the eastern sky, which was starting to glow golden.

Dawn was about to break.

So were our rib cages.