The Curse of the King (18 page)

“Meaning what?” I demanded.

“A living being, Jack,” Dimitrios replied. “There are candidates in your vicinity, I'd say.”

The monkeys were backing away, hopping and gesticulating, slapping themselves obliviously. If I could trap one of them . . .

No.
They seemed to sense what I was thinking and were
already in retreat. I'd never be able to do it in time.

But letting Cass or Aly touch that fence was worse.

Unless I did it first.

I closed my eyes. This was the right thing to do. I was the Tailor, who figured things out. I was the Destroyer. In this one act, I would be both.

People say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Not me. All I could see was the photo on my old hand mirror—Dad, Mom, and me as a toddler in the snow, playing Boom to Daddy. The photo I'd been looking at every day of my life since Mom disappeared. It calmed me down. Made me realize I'd once had some happiness in my life.

I would be dead in a few seconds. But at least I was smiling.

Stretching out my arms, I dropped the tablet.

And I dived into the filament, chest first.

M
Y FIRST TASTE
of death was a mouthful of wet leaves.

I sprang up. My feet were still on the jungle ground. The monkeys were still chattering. My eyes darted toward the tree stump. I saw the black electrodes where the filament had been attached.

Just the electrodes. Nothing else. The unbreakable carbene filament was . . .
broken
? “No . . .” I murmured.

They'd touched it first. They'd gotten to it before I had. I'd been too slow to save my friends' lives.

“Aly! Cass!”
I screamed.

The monkeys screeched back at me. But they were hiding now, no longer helping me. Without seeing them, I didn't know where the filament had been. I had no idea
where to go. Everything in the jungle looked the same.

I scrambled for the tablet, scooping it off the ground. The screen was cracked, and pressing the power button did absolutely nothing. Tossing it into the jungle, I reared back my head and shouted Brother Dimitrios's name.

Among the cacophony of monkeys and birds, I heard a woman's voice directly behind me. “Remarkable. I would not have predicted it would have been this one.”

I spun around but all I could see was a suffocating scrim of dense greenery all around.
“Who are you?”
I shouted.
“Where are Aly and Cass?”

“Remarkable indeed. He is still concerned about them. Bravo.” Dimitrios emerged, with an enormous smile. Next to him was a woman in commando gear. From the weathered wrinkles on her face, I could tell she was much older than Mom. But her carriage was straight and upright like a soldier's, her eyes sharp and smart. Despite her advanced years she looked as if she could handle herself against anyone.

“First,” the lady said, “be assured that your friends are safe.”

“Wh-what?” I stammered. “If they . . . then I should be . . .”

“The filament held no electrical charge,” Brother Dimitrios said.

I wasn't sure I heard that right. “Wait. It was a fake?
You
made me think I was going to die?
”

“It seems inscrutable, I know,” the woman replied, “but it was necessary.”

“And who are
you
?” I demanded.

Dimitrios stepped forward. “Jack, my boy, I know this is upsetting but manners are always important when among your elders. Before you is—”

The woman held up her hand to quiet Dimitrios. “You may call me Number One,” she said.

“Wait . . . Number One?” I said. Okay, maybe it was just the shock of being alive. Or the distant ridiculous jabbering of monkeys. Or the solemn way she called herself a potty name. But I started laughing like a five-year-old. “That's your name—Number One? I mean, really,
Number One
?”

“It's more of a rank, I suppose,” she said with a bemused smile.

“I guess it could be worse—
you could be called Number Two
!” I was howling now. “That would really be rank!”

“Jack, stop that now!” Dimitrios said. “Apologize!”

“Sorry . . . sorry,” I replied, taking deep breaths.

I expected Number One to be as stuffy and upset as Dimitrios. But she was smiling curiously at me. “I had a brother once,” she said. “You remind me of him.”

“So. Number One,” I said. “Nice to meet you. How come I haven't ever seen you before?”

“I haven't needed to be seen until now.” She nodded
toward Dimitrios, then turned back toward the campus. “We have much to talk about. Follow me, please.”

I stood my ground, looking at the back of her head in disbelief. My giddy mood was curdling fast. Into rage. “Okay. Just a second. You nearly scared me to death. You owe me an explanation. I want to see my friends. I want to talk now.”

I heard a rustling in the bushes behind me. Brother Yiorgos emerged, blocking my path, along with another goon who wore an eyepatch. Neither was smiling.

“You know Yiorgos, of course,” Brother Dimitrios said. “And this is Brother Plutarchos—er, Cyclops, for short.”

“Enough. Your friends are fine. Come. I am not fond of mosquitoes, Jack.” The woman turned to go, calling over her shoulder, “And you, I suspect, are not fond of being carried.”

I had a bad case of WWF, Walking While Furious. I could barely see straight. My heart was like a jackhammer.

I wanted to find Cass and Aly, tell them the story, and begin an assault on the Massa—
somehow
. But whenever I slowed down, Yiorgos began breathing down my neck. Which, trust me, is enough to keep anyone moving.

The woman led us through the jungle, into the campus, and up the stairs of the building formerly known as the House of Wenders. I barely recognized the lobby. During
the KI days, it had been a soaring, dark-wood-paneled atrium with a towering dinosaur skeleton. Now it was a construction site. The skeleton had been removed, and the grand mahogany balcony was shattered and patched up with crudely cut wooden planks.

“We sustained quite a bit of damage,” she said.

“In the attack
you
caused,” I reminded her.

She smiled. “Ah well, the old fortress needed some sprucing up anyway.”

As I followed her to the second floor, I felt a tug in my chest. She'd taken over Professor Bhegad's office, complete with his rickety old leather chair and wooden desk. His mess was gone—no more piles of papers and bursting file cabinets. No more creaky, dust-encrusted metal fan and grimy windows. But the old Oriental rug remained, and I could see a straight path worn by Bhegad's footsteps, leading from desk to door.

Somehow the sight of that path brought him back in my mind. I could see his heavy footfalls and stooped gait, the way he pushed his glasses up his bulbous nose, his stiff and formal language. Here in this office, on the day Marco had fallen into the volcano to save our lives, the professor had actually cried. For us.

For the first time, I realized how much I missed the old guy.

“Sit,” the woman said, gesturing toward an empty chair.

Looking straight at this gray-eyed Massa leader, I wondered if she could cry. I wondered if she had emotions about anything.

Just over her shoulder were two framed black-and-white photos. One, of a dark-eyed boy, looked like a faded school picture. The other was a dark-curly-haired man with watery eyes and a huge, ridiculous-looking smile.

“Family resemblance, no?” the woman said. “Both my father and my brother are long gone.”

“Did you play chicken with their lives, too?” I muttered.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

I didn't care if she was an adult, or if that ridiculous name “Number One” meant she was the head of the Massa or Queen of the Universe. For all I knew, those family photos were just more lies.
“I thought I was going to die!”
I rose to my feet and gripped the edge of her desk. “The poem was a lie. The code was a lie. The xylokrikos meant nothing, and you made up that stuff about the unbreakable wire. Was that your idea of a joke?”

Brother Yiorgos grabbed me and held my arms behind my back. The lady known as Number One stood up sharply. “Release him. He's more angry than dangerous.”

With a grunt, the monk pushed me down into a chair. Number One came around her desk, sat on the edge, and leaned toward me. When she spoke, her voice was soft and sad. “Until you have experienced the death of your
own blood before your eyes, you will not appreciate what it means to love and lose someone.”

“What makes you think I don't know that?” I snapped.

I looked away so I wouldn't be tempted to blurt out any truths about my mother.

“If you do know, then we may begin to understand each other.” The woman stood, looking at the two pictures on the wall. “My brother's name was Osman. He and you were very much alike. He was a Select, you know. There is not a day that I don't think of him.”

“Your brother was a Select?” I said. “So you knew about all of this back then?”

“I did,” Number One said. “In fact, I lost both Osman and Father to Artemisia, just as you lost Radamanthus Bhegad.”

I thought of Bhegad's soul being ripped from his body. I thought of the last time I'd seen him, hanging from my ankle as I flew on a griffin. I began to shake. In my mind's eye he was falling to the earth below, falling fast, without a scream . . .

“We have the resources to prevent further deaths, Jack,” the woman said, her voice softening. “To restore the world to its glorious destiny that ended at the fall of Atlantis—reason and equality, health and progress, cooperation. Since the fall, the world has become a battleground among barbarians, all of them blind to the coming destruction. You
are our hope, Jack. Show him, Dimitrios.”

Brother Dimitrios spun a tablet toward me.

“Does this look familiar?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said. “There were a bunch of these paintings at Brother Dimitrios's monastery in Rhodes—all about the life of Massarym.”

“Now look at this,” Number One added, swiping the screen with a bony finger and revealing another image:

“The two images are the same painting,” Dimitrios explained. “In this image, I used infrared imaging to reveal the pentimento.”

“Penti-
who
?” I said.

“When words are written onto a canvas, and then artists paint over these words to hide them,” Brother Dimitrios said. “That is
pentimento
. The history of Atlantis was written in six books, or codices. Massarym, fearing these books would be destroyed, wrote his own history. We call it the Seventh Codex. And it is hidden in these paintings.”

“The Seventh Codex,” Number One went on, “told of two curses. When Massarym stole and hid the Loculi for their safekeeping, Uhla'ar blamed his son for the kingdom's destruction. He suspected Massarym wanted to rebuild a new Atlantis with himself as king. Massarym tried to explain the truth: that the queen's tampering had upset the balance of Atlantean power—that he, Massarym, merely wanted to preserve the Loculi. But Uhla'ar would not hear of it. He placed a curse on his own son, that Massarym would never live to see the Loculi retrieved.”