Chapter Fifty-Three: The Exit at the End of the Hall
Chapter Fifty-Four: Deafening Silence
Chapter Fifty-Five: Push Harder
Chapter Fifty-Six: Mustaches Everywhere
Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Chilling
And now I was speeding through the jungle in a Jeep next to a three-hundred-pound giant who took great joy in driving into potholes.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Torquin!” I shouted as my head hit the ceiling.
“Eyes in face, not on road,” replied Torquin.
In the backseat, Aly Black and Cass Williams cried out in pain. But we all knew we had to hang on. Time was short.
We had to find Marco.
Oh, about that time bomb. It’s not an actual physical explosive. I have this gene that basically cuts off a person’s life at age fourteen. It’s called G7W and all of us have it—not only me but Marco Ramsay, Aly, and Cass. Fortunately there’s a cure. Unfortunately it has seven ingredients that are almost impossible to find. And Marco had flown off with the first one.
Which was why we were stuck in that sweaty Jeep on a crazy rescue mission.
“This ride is bad enough. Don’t pick the skin off your face, Jack!” said Aly from the backseat. “It’s disgusting!” She pushed aside a lock of pink hair from her forehead. I don’t know where she gets hair dye on this crazy island, but one of these days I’ll ask her. Cass sat next to her, his eyes closed and his head resting against the seat back. His hair is normally curly and brown, but today it looked like squid-ink spaghetti, all blackened and stringy.
Cass had had a much worse time with the griffin than any of us.
I stared at the shred of skin between my fingers. I hadn’t even known I was picking it. “Sorry.”
“Frame it,” Torquin said distractedly.
His eyes were trained on a dashboard GPS device that showed a map of the Atlantic Ocean. Across the top were the words RAMSAY TRACKER. Under it, no signal at all. Zip. We each had a tracker surgically implanted inside us, but Marco’s was broken.
“Wait. Frame a piece of sunburned skin?” asked Aly.
“Collect. Make collage.” If I didn’t know Torquin, I would think he had misunderstood Aly’s question. I mean, the four of us kids are misfits, but Torquin is in a class by himself. He’s about seven and a half feet tall in bare feet. And he is always in bare feet. (Honestly, no shoe could possibly contain those two whoppers.) What he lacks in conversation skills he makes up for in weirdness. “I give you some of mine. Remind me.”
Aly’s face grew practically ash white. “Remind me not to remind you.”
“I wish I only had a sunburn,” Cass moaned.
“You don’t have to come with us this time, you know,” Aly said.
Cass frowned without opening his eyes. “I’m a little tired, but I had my treatment and it worked. We have to find Marco. We’re a family.”
Aly and I exchanged a glance. Cass had been flown across an ocean by a griffin, who then prepped him for lunch. Plus he was recovering from a so-called treatment, and that wasn’t easy.
We’d all had treatments. We needed them to survive. They held off our symptoms temporarily so we can go on this crazy quest to find a permanent cure. In fact, the Karai Institute’s first job is to help us cope with the effects of the G7W.
Not to brag or anything, but having G7W means you’re descended from the royal family of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis. Which is probably the coolest thing about incredibly ordinary, shockingly talent-free me, aka Jack McKinley. On the positive side, G7W takes the things you’re already good at—like sports for Marco, computer geekiness for Aly, and photographic memory for Cass—and turns those qualities into superpowers.
On the negative side, the cure involves finding the stolen Loculi of Atlantis, which were hidden centuries ago in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
And if that wasn’t hard enough: six of those Wonders don’t exist anymore.
A Loculus, by the way, is a fancy Atlantean word for “orb with cool magic power.” And we did find one. The story involves a hole in time and space (which I made by accident), a griffin (disgusting half eagle, half lion that came through the hole), a trip to Rhodes (where said griffin tried to lunch on Cass), some crazy monks (Greek), and the Colossus of Rhodes (which came to life and tried to kill us). There’s more to it, but all you need to know is that I was the one who let the griffin through, so the whole thing was basically my fault.
“Hey …” Aly said, looking at me through squinty eyes.
I turned away. “Hey what?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Jack,” she said. “And stop it. You are not responsible for what happened to Cass.”
Honestly, I think that girl reads minds as a hobby.
“Torquin responsible!” Torquin bellowed. He pounded the steering wheel, which made the whole vehicle jump into the air like a rusty, oil-leaking wallaby. “Got arrested. Left you alone. Could not help Cass. Could not stop Marco from flying away with Loculus. Arrrrgh!”
Cass moaned again. “Oh, my neelps.”
“Um, Torquin?” Aly said. “Easy on the steering wheel, okay?”
“What is neelps?” Torquin asked.
“Spleen,” I explained. “You have to spell it backward.”
Luckily the Jeep reached the end of the winding jungle path and burst onto the tarmac of a small landing field. We were finally at our destination. Before us, gleaming on the pavement, was a sleek, retrofitted military stealth jet.
Torquin braked the Jeep to a squealing stop, doing a perfect one-eighty. Two people were inspecting the plane. One of them was a pony-tailed guy with half-glasses. The other was a girl with tats and black lip gloss, who looked a little like my last au pair, Vanessa, only deader. I vaguely remembered meeting both of these people in our cafeteria, the Comestibule.
“Elddif,” Cass said groggily. “Anavrin …”
The girl looked alarmed. “He’s lost the ability to speak English?”
“No,