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In the underworld
FOR DAVE AND ELOISE,
MY FELLOW VOYAGERS INTO WONDERMENT
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Valley of Kings
Chapter 2: Vaporized
Chapter 3: Purys Elpam
Chapter 4: Triangulation
Chapter 5: Counterattack
Chapter 6: Good-bye, Wilbur
Chapter 7: Emergency Protocols
Chapter 8: Location D
Chapter 9: Epic Fail
Chapter 10: The Only Game in Town
Chapter 11: Whac-a-Massa
Chapter 12: Mongolia
Chapter 13: Death Is Cold
Chapter 14: Dad
Chapter 15: Genghis and Radamanthus
Chapter 16: Newton Speaks
Chapter 17: Dad Takes More Weird
Chapter 18: Work to Be Done
Chapter 19: The Tailor Wakes
Chapter 20: Brunhilda
Chapter 21: Gnome? Pixie? Troll?
Chapter 22: Secret in the Stones
Chapter 23: This Is Not Science
Chapter 24: Flying Zombie Skin
Chapter 25: A Game Most Dangerous
Chapter 26: That’s Gnizama
Chapter 27: Cold Feet
Chapter 28: Lost
Chapter 29: The Door
Chapter 30: The Blazing Fields
Chapter 31: Vasilissa
Chapter 32: The Trade
Chapter 33: It Is Good to Be Beautiful
Chapter 34: Shadows on Fire
Chapter 35: Gathering the Clouds
Chapter 36: Nadine
Chapter 37: Because of the Eyes
Chapter 38: We Tried
Chapter 39: The Grand Carbunculus Wizendum
Chapter 40: The Fence
Chapter 41: Code Red
Chapter 42: Hacked?
Chapter 43: Losing It
Chapter 44: The Song of the Heptakiklos
Chapter 45: Shouldn’ts
Chapter 46: Another Exit
Chapter 47: The Prodigal Sunshine
Chapter 48: Mom
Chapter 49: Artemisia Awaits
Chapter 50: A Rush of Air
Chapter 51: One Last Look Back
About the Author
Also by Peter Lerangis
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOR A DEAD person, my mom looked amazing.
She had a few more gray hairs and wrinkles, which happens after six years, I guess. But her eyes and smile were exactly the same. Even in a cell phone image, those are the things you notice first.
“Jack?” said Aly Black, who was sitting next to me in the backseat of a rented car. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. Which, honestly, was the biggest lie of my life. “I mean, for someone who’s just discovered his mother faked her own death six years ago.”
From the other side of the car, Cass Williams slid his Coke-bottle glasses down his nose and gave me a pitying glance. Like the rest of us, he was in disguise. “Maybe she wasn’t faking,” he said. “Maybe she survived. And had amnesia. Till now.”
“Survived a fall into a crevasse in Antarctica?” I said.
I shut the phone. I had been looking at that photo nonstop since we escaped the Massa headquarters near the pyramids in Giza. I showed it to everyone back in the Karai Institute, including Professor Bhegad, but I couldn’t stay there. Not while she was here. Now we were returning to Egypt on a search to find her.
The car zipped down the Cairo–Alexandria highway in total silence. I wanted to be happy that Mom was alive. I wanted not to care that she had actually been off with a cult. But I wasn’t and I did. Life had changed for me at age seven into a Before and After. Before was great. After was Dad on business trips all the time, me at home with one lame babysitter after the other, kids talking behind my back. I can count on one finger the number of times I went to a parent-teacher conference with an actual parent.
So I wasn’t woo-hooing the fact that Mom had been hangin’ in a pyramid all this time with the Kings of Nasty. The people who stole our friend Marco and brainwashed him. The people who destroyed an entire civilization. The Slimeballs Whose Names Should Not Be Mentioned but I’ll Do It Anyway. The Massa.
I turned back to the window, where the hot, gray-tan buildings of Giza raced by.
“Almost there,” Torquin grunted. As he took the exit off the ring road, the right tires lifted off the ground and the left tires screeched. Aly and Cass slid into my side, and I nearly dropped the phone. “Ohhhh …” groaned Cass.
“Um, Torquin?” Aly called out. “That left pedal? It’s a brake.”
Torquin was nodding his head, pleased with the maneuver. “Very smooth suspension. Very expensive car.”
“Very nauseated passenger,” Cass mumbled.
Torquin was the only person who could make a Lincoln Town Car feel like a ride with the Flintstones. He is also the only person I know who is over seven feet tall and who never wears shoes.
“Are you okay, Cass?” Aly asked. “Are you going to barf?”
“Don’t say that,” Cass said. “Just hearing the word barf makes me want to barf.”
“But you just said barf,” Aly pointed out.
“Gluurb,” went Cass.
I rolled down a window.
“I’m fine,” Cass said, taking deep, gulping breaths. “Just … f-f-fine.”
Torquin slowed way down. I felt Aly’s hand touching mine. “You’re nervous. Don’t be. I’m glad we’re doing this. You were right to convince Professor Bhegad to let us, Jack.”
Her voice was soft and gentle. She wore a gauzy, orangey dress with a head covering, and contact lenses that turned her blue eyes brown. I hated these disguises, especially mine, which included a dumb baseball cap that had a ponytail sewn into the back. But after escaping the Massa a couple of days earlier and creating a big scene in town, we couldn’t risk being recognized. “I’m not Jack McKinley,” I said. “I’m Faisal.”
Aly smiled. “We’ll get through this, Faisal. We’ve been through worse.”
Worse? Maybe she meant being whisked away from our homes to an island in the middle of nowhere. Or learning we’d inherited a gene that would give us superpowers but kill us by age fourteen. Or being told that the only way to save our lives would be to find seven magic Atlantean orbs hidden in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—six of which don’t exist anymore. Or battling an ancient griffin, or being betrayed by our friend Marco, or watching a parallel world be destroyed.
I don’t know if any of them qualified as worse than what we were about to do.
Cass was taking rhythmic deep breaths. His floppy white hat was smashed over his ears, and his glasses were distorting his eyes. In the lenses, I saw a mirror image of my own disguise, the hat and ponytail, my left cheek decorated with a fake birthmark like a small cockroach. Torquin had been forced to dye his hair black. His ponytail was so thick it looked like a possum attached to his neck. He still wouldn’t wear shoes, so Professor Bhegad had had someone paint fake sandals on his feet. You’d be amazed how real that looked.
“You think your mom might have some motion sickness meds?” Cass asked.
“Let’s make sure she’s real first,” I said. “Then we’ll take care of the other stuff.”
“She’s real,” Aly said. “Five Karai graphics experts, four coders, and me—all of us examined that photo. No feathered edges, no lighting discrepancies or pixel-depth variations. No Photoshopping.”
I shook my head in total bafflement. “So she slips us a cell phone that leads us to the two stolen Loculi. She leaves us a code that reveals her identity, and she helps us escape. Why?”
“Maybe she’s a spy?” Cass asked.
Aly sighed, shaking her head. “If she were a spy for the KI, they would know. But they don’t. Right, Torquin?”
As Torquin shook his head, his ponytail-possum did a little dance. The car was veering left and right. Someone behind us honked.
Aly peered over the big guy’s shoulder. “Torquin, are you texting while driving?”
“Jack mother not spy,” he replied, putting down his phone.
“You could kill us!” Aly said.
“Wait,” I said. “Your thumb is the size of a loaf of bread. How can you hit the letters?”
“Make mistakes,” Torquin grunted. “But this is emergency. You will thank me.”
He yanked the steering wheel to the right, to get into the exit lane.
“No,” Cass said, “I won’t.”
* * *
The afternoon sun was setting on the Valley of Kings, about a quarter mile ahead. Even at this distance we could see tourists flocking to buses. The pyramids cast long shadows toward the Sphinx, who sat there, staring back. She looked pretty bored about the whole thing.
I wished I had her calmness.
Our turnoff—the dirt road to Massa headquarters—was in sight about a hundred yards away. Torquin turned sharply onto a rubbly path. The car jounced at every pothole, and I had to put my arms over my head to cushion the blows against the roof. He slammed on the brakes, and we stopped in a cloud of desert dust.
As we stepped out, three Jeeps appeared on the horizon, speeding toward our location. Torquin’s cell phone began beeping.
“Wait—is this the reason we’re going to thank you?” Aly asked. “You called for backup?”
“I thought we were going to surprise the Massa,” Cass said.
“Dimitrios smart and strong,” Torquin said, popping open the trunk. “Must be smarter and stronger.”
Aly reached in to hand us each a small backpack with supplies—flashlights, flares, and some stun darts. I slipped mine on quickly.
Before us was a small metal shack with a badly dented side. The entrance to the Massa headquarters looked like a supply shed, but it led downward into a buried pyramid untouched by archaeologists. Deep under the parched ground was a vast network of modern training rooms, laboratories, living areas, offices, and a vast control center, all interconnected. Some of the tunnels and rooms had been built during ancient times to honor the ka, the spirit of the dead pharaoh. To make that spirit feel coddled and comfy when he visited the world of the living.
The only spirit down there now was pure Massa evil.
“Moving now,” Aly said. She darted ahead of us and reached for the door handle.
With a swift yank, she pulled it open.
“What the—?” Cass said.
“No lock?” I said, staring into the blackness beyond the door. “Weird.”
Aly and I peered through the doorway and down concrete steps. It seemed overheated. I remembered this place being cold. At the bottom, a single lightbulb hung from a wire.
“It’s so quiet,” Cass said.
“What now?” Aly asked.
A soft, plaintive screech wafted upward. A pair of eyes moved erratically toward us out of the blackness.
“Duck!” I said.
We fell to the dirt as a bat flew over our heads, chittering. Torquin thrust his arm upward, snatching the furry creature in midair. It struggled and squeaked, trapped in his giant man-paw. “Not duck,” he said. “But very nice breaded and fried, with mango salsa.”
Aly’s face was white with horror. “That is so unbelievably disgusting.”
Torquin scowled, reluctantly releasing the critter. “Actually, is pretty … gusting.”
The Jeeps had stopped now. Men and women in everyday clothes were filing out, spreading around, surrounding the area. They carried briefcases, heavy packs, long cases. They nodded imperceptibly toward us, their eyes on Torquin for instruction.
“These are all KI?” Aly said.
“New team,” Torquin said. “Brought over after you escaped.”
“They’re armed!” Cass said. “Isn’t this overkill?”
Torquin nodded, his brows knit tightly. “Not for Massa.”
He had a point. Keeping low, I walked to the entrance and dropped to my stomach. Slowly I thrust my head out over the stairway. A sickly-sweet smell wafted up from below: mildew and rotted wood … and something else.
Something like burning plastic.
I pulled the flashlight from my pack and shone it downward. The stairs were littered with broken glass, wires, empty cans, and torn scraps of paper. “Something happened here,” I said.
“Need backup?” Torquin lifted his fingers to his lips in preparation for a whistle signal.
“No,” I said. “The Massa have surveillance. They’ve got to be seeing the Jeeps right now. If we go in together, with all the KI personnel, they’re likely to react with force. That could end badly.”
“So … you want just us to go down there?” Cass said.
“I’ll do it alone if I have to,” I said. “I need to see if my mom is really alive. If she’s down there, she won’t let anything bad happen.”
Cass thought for a moment, then nodded. “Dootsrednu,” he said softly. “I’m with you, Faisal.”
“Me, too,” Aly said.
“Mm,” Torquin agreed.
“Not you, Torquin.” I said. No way could we risk scaring the Massa with him. “No offense. We need you out here. To … be commander of the KI team.”
I began descending the stairs, swinging the flashlight around, trying to remember the layout. I could hear Aly’s footsteps behind me. Cass’s, too. “Commander?” Aly whispered.
“Had to make him feel important,” I said.
“Ah … choo!” Cass sneezed.
“Shhhh!” Aly and I said at the same time.
At the bottom was a hallway that sloped downward, feeding into rooms with different functions. As we tiptoed, I flashed the light left and right. The floors were littered with debris. The overhead lights were out. So were the security lights.
I peeked through the first door, a storage area. Metal file cabinets had been pulled open. Some of the drawers were strewn on the floor. A round, old-timey wall clock lay broken among them, fixed at 3:11. Wrappers, newspapers, and assorted garbage had been hastily dropped in piles.
“What the—?” Aly said.
Cass stepped into the room across the hall. He stooped down and picked up a string of beads, which he flipped so that the beads slid up and down. “I think these are called worry beads,” he said before slipping them into his pocket.
I shone my light into the room. Tables lined all four walls, with another long table stretching across the middle of the room. Cables lay strewn about like dead eels, chairs were upended, and trash littered the floor. No computers, no files, nothing.
“Looks like there was more hurrying than worrying,” I said.
“It’s impossible,” Aly said, shaking her head numbly. “There were hundreds of people here. It was like a city.”
Her voice echoed dully in the silent hallway. The Massa were totally gone.
A TRICK.
It had to be.
No one cleared out of a space this large in such a short time, for no apparent reason. They were up to something, I knew it. “Be careful, guys,” I said, ducking back into the hallway.
“Should we contact Torquin?” Aly asked.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
If the Massa were luring us in, Mom knew about it. And Mom would make it all work out. Despite everything, I had to believe that.
As we tiptoed deeper in, the burning stench became stronger, more acrid, until we emerged into a familiar-looking corridor. This one was wider and brighter than the entrance hallway. Like much of the HQ, it had been built in modern times, for a modern organization.
“We took this route when we escaped,” Cass said, peering around. “Remember? We went toward an exit to the right. That was where we found the Loculi. To the left was the huge control room …”
His voice trailed off as he looked left. The hallway was lit by a dull yellow-orange glow. We stuck close to the wall. I checked my watch—seven minutes since we’d left Torquin. He would be coming after us soon.
We rounded a bend and stopped short. The main control room’s thick metal door was hanging open. Days ago, the place had been a hive of activity, Massa workers at desktop consoles and laptops, in consultations, shouting to one another across a vast circular space. An enormous digital message board hung from the domed ceiling, dominating the area.
Now the board was in pieces on the floor, engulfed in flames. Shattered glass lay everywhere, and tables had been reduced to splinters.
“It’s like they … vaporized,” Cass said.
Aly ran to a keyboard of a computer console near the wall. She upended a fallen chair and sat at the desk. “This one’s working!” she exclaimed, her fingers dancing on the keys. “Oh, great. It’s being wiped clean right now. Military-grade overwrite, every byte replaced with zeroes. They must have started this a few hours ago. I may be able to recover some data. I need a flash drive!”
Cass began rummaging in his backpack. I looked around for surveillance cameras. “Mom!” I cried out, my voice echoing in the cavernous dome. As Cass pulled a flash drive from his pack and gave it to Aly, I ran to the other side of the room, looking for clues. I peered through the doorway at the opposite end, which led to yet another empty corridor.
Numbly, I stepped in. A dim blue light pierced the hallway’s blackness. It was shining from a room to my right. I walked closer, focusing my flashlight on the open door.
Its panel said SECURITY. I could hear a soft but insistent beep inside.
Slowly I walked in.
“Faisal?” came Cass’s voice from behind me.
I jumped. “We don’t need the disguises,” I said. “She’s not here.”
“Who’s not?” Cass asked.
“Mom. None of them. They’re not anywhere near.”
My eyes focused on a flickering light shining from the wall to my left—a rectangular pane of glass with bright blue letters, flashing to the rhythm of the beep.
Beep.
FAILSAFE MODE: 00:00:17 …
Beep.
FAILSAFE MODE: 00:00:16 …
I snapped to and grabbed Cass’s arm. “Out—now! The whole place is going to blow!”
Aly was already in the hallway. I pushed her back the way we’d come. Together we sprinted up the hallway toward the exit. At the base of the stairs we ran into Torquin, which was like running into a small building. “Turn around and go!” I shouted. “Now!”
Torquin’s face went taut. He scampered up the steps and out the door with the speed of someone one-third his weight.
I felt the floor shake. I smelled sulfur.
The boom shook the walls, its blast hitting me square in the back.
“PKKAAAACCCH!” I COUGHED and spat as my eyes teared up from the dust.
I was outside, on the ground. Alive. My back rested against Torquin’s rented car, which meant I was about thirty feet from the Massa entrance.
I opened my mouth to call out, but instead I sucked in another lungful of sandy dirt. Spitting, I struggled to my feet. Everything hurt. My pants had been torn at the ankle. “Cass!” I finally called out. “Aly!”
“Torquin,” a familiar voice rumbled behind me. “Forgot Torquin.”
The big guy’s silhouette came out of the cloud, coated brown gray from head to toe, as if he’d been created from the dirt itself. With his right hand, he dragged Cass by the scruff of his neck. Cass’s face was blackened, his limbs slack. His floppy hat and glasses were gone.
“What happened?” I slumped toward them as fast as my scraped-up legs could take me.
In a moment, Aly was beside me, holding a grimy pair of glasses. “I found these. Is he …?”
“Chest moving,” Torquin said, setting him on the ground. “Need to find help.”
Aly and I dropped to our knees beside Cass. “Please, please, please, be okay …” I whispered, slapping his face gently. “Hey, Cass, come on. Don’t forget to be emosewa.”
“This can’t be happening …” Aly said, yanking a canteen from her pack and spilling some water on Cass’s face.
No reaction.
A team of KI soldiers surrounded us now. “We’ve got EMTs coming,” one of the KI men called out.
Aly pried Cass’s mouth open and dumped water in. “Come on, Cass,” she said. “Cass, you can do this!”
Cass’s body jerked upward, clipping Aly on the jaw. “Do what?”
“That!” Aly cried out in surprise, falling backward.
Cass turned away, retching a glob of wet sand. “Ewww, that needed a little purys elpam.”
Holding her jaw with one hand, Aly managed a huge smile. “I will buy you a gallon of it when this is all over.”
As two KI operatives approached with a stretcher, Cass’s eyes were trained on the Massa headquarters. The entrance shack was a pile of twisted metal.
Another muffled explosion shook the earth. The structure groaned loudly, tilted, and vanished into a widening black hole.
Cass sprang to his feet. We ran for our cars, leaving the stretcher empty on the ground.
* * *
“Corrupt … gibberish … broken …” Aly muttered. She was in the copilot seat of Slippy, the KI retrofitted stealth jet, her fingers flying across the keyboard of the tablet that was built into the arm of her seat. Torquin was our pilot, and for once he wasn’t making the plane do barrel rolls. He just focused on flying us back to the KI while Aly tried to get some usable information off Cass’s flash drive.
My eyes were fixed on the sea below. The water was silvery and bright on a cloudless day. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe a big ship with a Massa flag blowing in the wind. I was kind of rattled, obsessed with only two thoughts:
We’d gone to find Mom.
We’d walked into a trap.
No warning about the evacuation. No hint about the time bomb. What if I hadn’t noticed the readout? What if we hadn’t gotten that far into the headquarters? What if we’d been a few seconds late? Did Mom know we would be going back?
How could she have let that happen?
Aly massaged her forehead, sitting back from the tablet. “If only we’d gotten there a few minutes earlier. Those jerks managed to overwrite just about everything. Maybe I can take apart the remaining data packets, but I’ll need better equipment.”
“You can do it,” I murmured. “You’re Aly.”
Aly sighed, turning away from the tablet. “How’s Cass?”
I turned toward the back of the compartment. Cass was lying against the bulkhead just behind my seat, on a narrow platform covered with layers of foam and blankets. He’d been asleep most of the way. Now he was blinking his eyes and grimacing. “What’s that smell?”