Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon (33 page)

“Marco . . .” Cass pleaded.

Marco stalked into his bedroom. “I'll celebrate my fourteenth birthday without any of you. Because I'll be alive.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I
DIDN'T FALL
asleep until three.

Mainly because I had been arguing with someone who had lost his mind.

King Marco?

He was serious. And he had gone off to a sound sleep. Me, I didn't think I would ever sleep again. But I did, because an alarm woke me up out of a deep dream.

I looked at the clock on the table: 5:13.

Two hours.

I slapped the snooze button, but the alarm kept chiming. I sat up and shook myself awake. The noise was coming from the bed. I could feel the vibrations. I kicked back the sheets. Nothing. I lifted my pillow.

A smart phone glowed bright blue, beeping, with a screen that announced
WAKE UP!
in happy yellow letters.

I swiped at the off button. The place fell quiet, except for the mechanical whir of the lounge refrigerator and the whoosh of the air-conditioning ducts. I held the phone and stared at it. It wasn't the same make as mine. Besides, I didn't have a phone anymore. Hadn't had one since the moment I got to the KI.

The alarm app had vanished. In its place was some kind of map. A tiny blue dot pulsed inside a small yellow box. I pinched to zoom out. The box was part of a larger circle.

Dot, box, circle—the phone, this room, the lounge. Outside the lounge was a network of parallel lines leading in different directions—hallways. At the top of the screen, an arrow pointed diagonally to the right. It was labeled “N” for north.

I pushed open the door of my room, stepped warily into the lounge and the hall. No one was there.

But someone
had
been here. While I was asleep. Someone had put the phone under my pillow, knowing I'd find it and see the map.

Who? And why?

Keeping my eye on the screen, I walked. I moved back from the hallway into the lounge. The place smelled like banana peels and orange rinds, and Marco's uneaten container of Chubby Hubby still stood on the counter.

The blue dot moved into the circle as I walked. I slid my fingers around the screen, examining the maze of pathways. The plan of the Massa hideout revealed itself. The paths ranged much farther afield than I thought. It was huge, dozens of rooms, a crisscrossing maze of corridors. The map was flat, but if I pressed a button labeled “3D,” it tilted to reveal a three-dimensional cross-section of paths on many different levels.

I sneaked into Cass's room and put my hand over his mouth. His eyes popped open in fear, but I quickly put my finger to my lips in a shushing gesture. I flashed the phone's screen to him, and he bolted up out of bed. “Where did you get this?” he whispered.

“Under my pillow,” I said. “And I don't think it was the Tooth Fairy. Somebody here is on our side. Follow me.”

“Wait,” Cass said. “Find out who this is.”

I tried to access mail, photos, browser, settings. All of them were locked. “Just the alarm and map are public,” I said. “No. Wait . . .”

I'd hit the contacts button. It was showing a list. All the names were in number code.

“Got it,” Cass said.

“Got what?” I asked.

“The numbers,” Cass said. “Committed to memory.”

“Doesn't do us much good,” I said. “They look pretty random to me.”

Cass scratched his head. “This is where we need Aly.”

He was right. This was going to be impossible. “We have to channel our own inner Aly,” I said lamely.

“I don't have the brain for this,” Cass said, staring at it intently and shifting from foot to foot, as if that would help. “Memorize, yes. Analyze, not so much.”

“It's an internal code,” I said.

“Duh,” Cass replied. “So?”

“So maybe it's not that hard,” I replied.

“How does that make sense?” Cass asked.

I was thinking about something my dad and I talked about, when I was studying American history in school. “Back in World War II,” I said, “the English stole a code machine from the Germans. If they could figure out how it worked, they could break all the enemy secret codes. They got everything except one part. Every German machine operator had to set each machine by keying in ten letters at the top. If they could figure out those ten letters, they could crack the whole thing.”

“Ten letters, twenty-six letters in the alphabet—that's like guessing the winning lottery numbers,” Cass said.

“Worse,” I said. “That's when someone realized that it was
German soldiers
who had to pick the letters, not cryptologists. They weren't going to pick anything too sophisticated, or they'd forget it. Well, the English realized
Heil Hitler
was ten letters—and it turns out almost all the soldiers had used that!”

“Really?” Cass said. “You think there are Nazis here? I hate Nazis.”

“The point is, everyone in this place has to read internal code.” I said. “The leaders and the goons. So think simple. That's what Aly does. She starts with the obvious, then works from there.”

Cass and I stared at the numbers on the screen. “They look like email addresses,” he said.

“And the last part of each address is the same,” I added.

“After the dot.”

“Either
com, net
, or
org
,” Cass said.

I nodded. “The first number after the dot is a three. The third letter of the alphabet is c. So I'm thinking that's a
com
.”

I grabbed a pencil and paper from a desk drawer and quickly wrote down a key:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

“
Com
is three, fifteen, thirteen!” Cass blurted out.

“Give me a minute . . .” I said, trying to match all the numbers to letters. “Aly could probably do this in her head. I mean, you don't know for sure about these double-digit letters. Like a one next to a seven. That could be the first and seventh letters,
AG
. Or it could mean the seventeenth letter,
P
. Hang on . . .”

“Baaron . . . Baddison . . . Salicia . . . Sanna?” Cass said.

“I'm thinking the B stands for Brother and the S for Sister—like
Brother Aaron
and
Sister Alicia
,” I said. “Monkish names.”

“Sounds like the way Marco normally speaks,” Cass said. “He's made for this place.”

“The person who left this wanted us to see it—but why?” I exited out of the app and kept tapping other ones. Each was password-protected. “Great. Can't open any of these.”

“Any other great insights from World War Two?” Cass asked.

Finally I tapped an app marked RS. It opened to reveal an image that made us both jump back:

“Whoa,” Cass said. “Big Brother is watching.”

“I'm thinking someone was trying to take a picture but pressed the button that turns the camera backward,” I said, flipping back to the maps app. “Let's use this and see where it leads us.”

Cass took the phone, examining the map. “Where do we go if we do escape?”

“We try to find Aly, if she's nearby,” I said. “We hack off the iridium arm bands, and hope that the KI finds us before the Massa.”

Cass's expression darkened. “You mean, if the KI still exist . . .”

“We can't think about what happened at the camp,” I said. “But you heard Brother Dimitrios. He still doesn't know the location of the island. Whatever his people did to the camp, the KI are going to be fired up. And they will be trying to find us.”

“So best-case scenario, we leave this prison and go to a nicer one,” Cass said glumly. “I guess I can live with that.”

I took a deep breath. “It's all we've got. Think about what Dimitrios did, Cass. He knew what would happen when we took the Loculus. He didn't care about all those people. About Daria. She gave her life for us. At least Professor Bhegad tried to do something. Shelley didn't work, but he spent time and money to create that thing. Both organizations have lied to us. But for all its weirdness, only one cares enough not to kill innocent people. And that's the one I plan to stick with.”

Cass's eyes wandered out to the common area. “Okay,” he said softly. “I'll go wake Marco.”

“What?” I grabbed his arm. “No, Cass. Not Marco. He'll rat us out.”

“He won't,” Cass said. “Seriously. He brought us here. He knows we're a family. He wants us to stay together.”

“Cass, I'm sorry, but you are in a fantasy world—” I said.

Cass jerked his arm away. His face was beet red. “Fantasy? Is that what you'd say if I told you, weeks ago, you'd be trying to find the Seven Wonders? Real is real. We break up and we die. Nothing is more important than staying together, Jack—
nothing
!”

From inside Marco's room, I heard a sudden snort. I leaned in to look. He was fast asleep on his back, snoring.

“Cass, listen to me,” I hissed. “when this is over, we will go back to different places. Yeah, maybe when we're old we can move to the same town. But maybe not. Because you make new families when you're old. Real families. This is about survival, Cass. If we tell Marco, we're giving up. Betraying Aly. Deciding to stay here and become the kind of zombie that they're making Marco into. If that's your definition of family, you can have it. But give me a chance to escape on my own.”

Cass's eyes burned into mine. The sides of his mouth curled downward and for a moment I thought he was going to spit, or scream.

Instead, his eyes rose to a small, spherical camera wedge into a corner of the ceiling.

He grabbed the container of Chubby Hubby ice cream that had been sitting out all night. Unscrewing the top, he heaved the container toward the mirror.