As I swam toward them, I realized I was gaining speed. An undertow.
I tried to pull back but I couldn’t. The glow was intensifying, looming closer. It was a circle of bright tiles with a center of solid black. In front of me, Marco seemed to be changing shape—blowing out to an amorphous humanoid blob, then shrinking to clam-size.
What’s going on?
My head snapped back, and suddenly I was surging into the black hole as if sprung by a giant rubber band.
As I passed through the hole, it let out a deep, threatening buzz. A halo of green-white light shot sparks from its circumference into my body. My mouth opened into an involuntary scream. I collided with Marco and Cass, but they felt porous, as if our molecules were joining, passing through one another. My left leg smacked against something hard, and I bounced away.
I was spinning with impossible speed, as if my head were in ten places at once. And then I felt myself catapulted forward, and I thought my limbs would separate into different directions.
But they didn’t. I flattened out, decelerating. The water’s temperature abruptly dropped, and so did its texture. All at once it had become clear and cool—and I was whole again. Solid. But the change had unsettled every biological function inside me. My brain registered relief, but my lungs were in chaos. As if someone had reached inside and squeezed them with a steel fist.
Aly … Marco … Cass. I spotted them all in my peripheral vision, rising. But Cass’s legs hung like tentacles, undulating with each of Marco’s powerful thrusts. Those two would reach the surface first. I pushed with all remaining strength, fighting to stay conscious. Aiming toward a dull, flat-gray surface glow above us.
My arms slowed … then stopped.
I felt myself traveling to a dream world of bright sun and cool breezes. I was floating over a field of waving grass, where a white-robed shape stood from a circle embedded in the ground.
As she turned, I could see the seven Loculi, glowing, revolving. They seemed to blend together, so their shapes merged into a kind of circular cloud.
The Dream.
No. I don’t want it now. Because I’m not asleep. Because if I have the Dream now, it might be because I’m dead.
“I knew you would come.”
The voice was unfamiliar, yet I felt it was a part of me. I knew instantly who the figure was. She turned slowly. Her eyes were the color of a clear tropical ocean, her face gentle and kind, ringed with a floating mane of glorious red hair.
Her name was Qalani.
Whenever I’d seen her, it had been in a ring of explosions, some kind of strange flashback to the destruction of Atlantis. In the Dream, I came close to death but always woke up.
Here, she had come to meet me. As always, her face looked familiar. She resembled my mom, Anne McKinley—and now, deep under the Euphrates, it was more than a resemblance. It was a beckoning, a welcoming.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“I’ve been waiting,” she said with a knowing smile. “Welcome to have you back.”
I couldn’t help grinning. Our old family saying! I’d blurted it out to Dad once, when he returned from a business trip to Manila. From then on, we always used it as our own private joke.
I felt strangely peaceful as she reached toward me. I would be fine. I would finally be meeting her, in a better place.
Her hand gripped my shoulder, and darkness quickly closed in.
She was gone.
“Mo-o-om!” I shouted.
“No! Marco!” a voice shouted back.
I blinked water from my eyes. I could see Marco rising and falling on a wild current. He let go of me, swimming toward Aly, pushing her toward the bank. I could see her struggling to stand, grabbing onto Cass’s arm.
I was too far into the middle, the deeper water. I struggled to push myself high enough above the surface for a proper breath. As I went under again, I fought to stay conscious.
“Hang on, brother!” Marco shouted.
His fingers locked around my arm. He was swimming beside me, pulling us both toward the bank. His arms dug hard into the frothing current. Aly and Cass were struggling onto the shore, staring over their shoulders at me in horror.
Marco and I bounced downstream in a helpless zigzag. We careened around a jutting rock that rose up between us, forcing Marco to let go of me. Directly in our path was a downed tree. I kicked hard and up, opened my arms, and let it hit me full force in the chest. My legs swept under the wood as I held tight.
“Marco!” I yelled.
“Here!” Marco clung to the tree about three feet to my left, closer to the riverbank. We both hung there, catching our breaths. “How’s your grip, Brother Jack? Steady?”
I nodded. “I think … I can make my way to the shore!”
“Good—see you there!” Marco swung up onto the wood, stood carefully, and scampered toward the shore like an Olympic gymnast. Jumping onto the bank, he began calling for Aly and Cass.
I yanked myself onto the fallen tree. Lying there, I felt my chest beating against the slippery wood. I didn’t dare try to stand. Slowly I reached out toward the shore, gripping farther along the branch. In this way I managed to shimmy along at a snail’s pace until I finally reached the bank and flopped onto the mud.
Farther upstream, Aly had made it to solid ground. Marco was back in the river, helping Cass out of the water. I struggled to my feet. My legs ached and rain pelted my face, but I hobbled toward them as fast as I could in the soggy soil.
A total freak rainstorm. One moment, hot and dry air. The next, this. Was this normal in the desert?
What was going on here?
“Jack!” Aly threw her arms around me as I arrived. Her face was warm against my neck. I think she was crying.
“Behave, you two,” Marco said.
I pulled away, feeling the blood rush to my face. “What just happened?” I said.
Cass was staring across the river, looked dazed. “Okay, we jumped into the river. We hit a rough patch. We came out the other end. So … we should be staring across the river, at the place we left from, right?”
“Left,” Marco said. “Right.”
“So where is everything?” he asked. “Where are Torquin, Bhegad, Nirvana? They should have made it down here by now.”
Aly and I followed Cass’s glance. “Looks like we were carried pretty far downstream,” I said.
“Yeah, like a zillion miles away,” I said.
“That,” Cass said, “would be geographically elbissopmi.”
“How do you do that?” Aly said.
A dense cloud cover made it hard to see north and south, but I could see no sign of human life—no settlements, no Babylonian ruins, no KI people. Just swollen river in either direction.
“We can’t waste time—come