The Curse of the King

“SO, DID HE work there before or after you were born?” Cass said as we walked up the street toward school.

“Did who work where?” I asked.

“Your dad, in the circus,” Cass said. “Did you get to see him?”

Trapeze. It took me a moment. “Dad was being sarcastic,” I explained. “He doesn’t like Mr. Reese.”

“Your dad has a weird sense of humor,” Cass said.

“Reese is like the Donald Trump of Belleville,” I said. “Except with normal hair. Dad says he owns half the town, but still Mr. Reese wants to be a media mogul. He’s the head of Reese Industries, the Bathroom Solutions People.”

“Whoa. As in ‘Reese: The Wings Beneath Your Wind’?” Cass asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “Those little plastic toilet thingies that attach the seat to the bowl. Everyone has them. That’s billions in profit. And billions in profit buys local TV stations. Anyway, the most important thing is that Dad’s trying to protect us. To keep our faces out of the news so he can work on saving our lives.”

“Hope springs eternal,” Cass said, kicking a stone up the sidewalk.

I smiled. That was the first positive thing Cass had said all day. “You know, that’s one of my dad’s favorite sayings.”

“That’s a sign!” Cass said with a grin. “I do belong in your family!”

I put my arm around his shoulder, and we walked quietly along a wooded area.

When Cass spoke again, his voice was soft and unsteady. “It’s so hard to stay optimistic. How do you do it?”

“I try to list all the good things,” I said. “Like number one, I have a new brother.”

“Is there a number two?” Cass asked.

“We both feel healthy,” I suggested. “We haven’t needed treatments yet. Your turn.”

“Um …” Cass replied. “Number three, it could be that this whole thing will blow over? I mean, it’s possible the Karai Institute was lying to us—you know, about needing those Sesulucol?”

“Ilucol,” I corrected him.

Cass laughed. “Number four, you are getting really good at Backwardish!”

I veered off the sidewalk onto a dirt path that led into a tangle of trees that sloped downward to a creek. “Come on, this is a tuctrosh … tushcort … shortcut.”

“Wait—what? There’s a stream down there!” Cass protested. As he walked, his foot kicked aside a busted-up baseball glove, festooned with a banana peel. “This is disgusting. Can’t we take Smith Street to Whaley and then the jagged left-right on Roosevelt? Or bypass Roosevelt via the dog run?”

“Even I don’t even know my neighborhood that well!” I said over my shoulder.

“Wait till I learn to ride a bike,” Cass grumbled. “Then we’ll have great options. And I won’t seem like such a doofus.”

“You’re not a doofus,” I said.

“I am the only kid in the country who can’t ride a bike!” Cass replied.

“Yeah, well …” I said. “You had a different kind of childhood.”

“As in none,” Cass said. “You try growing up with criminal parents.”

WHOOOOO … WHOOOO! An eerie call made me stop in my tracks.

“Cool,” Cass said, bumping into me from behind. “An owl?”

Slowly a plaid shirt appeared among the rustling leaves—and then the moonlike, grinning face of Barry Reese. “Whooooo do we have heeeere?”

He jumped in front of us—well, if you consider slowly moving nearly two hundred pounds of well-fed and expensively dressed flesh into a narrow dirt path jumping.

“Not owl,” I said. “Foul. Cass, meet Barry Reese.”

“Son of Donald Trump?” Cass said.

Barry ignored the comment, or maybe he was too busy thinking up his next move. Barry had a hard time doing two things at once. He held up three pudgy fingers to my face, then five, then one. “How many fingers? I heard you had some mental problems, like losing your memory. Just want to test to see if you’re okay, Amnesia Boy.”

There were approximately three hundred middle-school kids in Belleville who would be quaking in their boots at this kind of bullying. But after facing up to killer zombies, sharp-taloned griffins, and acid-spitting vizzeet, I wasn’t bothered by Barry Reese. “Stick two of them into your eyes and I’ll count slowly,” I said.

He shoved both of us backward. His face was covered with a sheen of sweat as he grinned sadistically at Cass. “Look! It’s Cash! The hardened LA stweet tough who still wides a twicycle!”

“Wait, how did you know that?” Cass said.

“Um, maybe because you just announced it to the world?” Barry replied. “Can I have your autograph? It’s okay if you want to use cwayons.”

I lunged forward and gave Barry a shove. “It’s Cass. And he only gives autographs to people who know how to read.”

Unfortunately pushing a guy of Barry’s bulk was like trying to move a boulder. He bumped me hard with his belly and grabbed my backpack straps. “That was disrespectful, McKinley. The Barry sent you to the hospital once and he can do it again. Now give me your phone.”

“My phone?” I said. “Doesn’t the Barry have a phone?”

His beefy fingers were already in my jeans pocket. As I wriggled to get away, the pocket popped inside out along with Barry’s hand. All my stuff spilled out onto the ground, including the Loculus shard.

Cass and I scrambled to grab it, but Barry was shockingly fast when he was excited. “What’s this?” he asked, scrunching up his face at the shard.

“Nothing!” I blurted.

“Then why did you both grab for it first?” As he lifted it upward, the shard glinted in the sunlight. “What’s that weird star shape on it? A symbol from a secret nerd society?”

“Mathletes!” Cass said. “It’s … a club. Of math people. We talk about … pi. And stuff like that.”

“I like pies, too … but I don’t like lies!” Barry snickered at his own idiotic joke. “Especially lies about anti-American world-domination cults that kidnap kids for weeks at a time!”

Cass was shaking now. “Jack, is he going loony tunes on us? Should we be calling nine-one-one?”

Barry stepped closer, his beady eyes shifting from me to Cass. “You’re not a street tough, Casper, are you? And, Jack, you didn’t lose your memory and travel across the country. Your little story? It’s full of holes. My dad thinks your dad has connections with terrorists. Where does he fly all the time? What’s with all the long trips to Magnolia?”

“Mongolia,” Cass corrected him.

“Wait—terrorists?” I said. “There are no terrorists in Mongolia!”

“Ha—so you were there!” Barry said.

“My dad runs a genetics lab there,” I replied. Barry’s face went blank, so I added, “That’s the study of genes, and not the kind you wear.”

Barry grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He cradled the back of my head in his right hand. “Where’s the white hair, Jack?”

“What?” I squeaked.

He let go of my head and spun me back around. “That day you fell into the street—I saw this, like, upside-down V shape on the back of your head. Now it’s gone. It means something, doesn’t it? A secret symbol from some hidden organization?”

Cass’s eyes were huge. Leave it to Barry, the dumbest person I knew, to come the closest to the truth.

“Uh …” Cass said.

“I’m right, huh?” Barry barked. “Go ahead, tell the Barry he’s right!”

Let your enemy give you the lead.

Dad had recited that one to me at least a thousand times. And now, in this moment, I finally understood it.

I stepped right up to Barry and refused to blink. Then I took a deep breath and spoke fast. “You want the truth? Okay. My hair and Cass’s? Yup, it did go white in the back, in the shape of a Greek lambda, which is their letter L. Now our hair is dyed. The lambda means we inherited a gene from a prince who escaped the sinking of Atlantis. See, the gene unlocks part of our DNA that turns our best ability into a superpower. But it also overwhelms the body, and no one who’s ever had it has lived past the age of fourteen. In the last year of life, the body begins to break down. You get sick every few weeks. You can stay alive for a while if you get certain treatments, but eventually you die. We learned this from a group called the Karai Institute on this island that can’t be detected. They told us we can be cured if we find seven magical Loculi that contain the power of Atlantis, which were hidden centuries ago in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. As you know—well, maybe you don’t—six of the Wonders don’t exist anymore. The thing in your hand is a piece of a destroyed Loculus.”

“Jack?” Cass mouthed, as if I’d just lost my mind.

Barry’s mouth was sagging. His eyes narrowed, as if he were still stuck on the second sentence. Which he probably was.

Would he try to repeat his own mangled version of what I’d just said to his dad? I hoped so, because any sane human being would send him straight to a psychologist. And he knew it.

“Well, that’s everything,” I said, reaching to grab the Loculus from Barry’s hand.

He pulled it back.

“Okay, so if you’re supposed to get sick every few weeks …” he said quietly, “how come you’re not sick?”

“The fresh, rejuvenating Belleville air?” Cass said.

Barry’s face curled. “You guys are playing me. That was the obvious-est lie! I’m going to get to the bottom of this. You watch, I’ll find out the truth.”

“Great,” I said. “Meanwhile, will you give me that back?”

“Why should I give you a piece of a destroyed Oculus?” Barry asked. “It might be worth something.”

“Loculus,” Cass said. “With an L.”

“Trust me,” I said, “it’s worth absolutely nothing to you.”

“Awwww, really?” Barry said. “Nothing?”

With an exasperated sigh, Barry held out the shard to Cass. Both of us reached for it at the same time.

Before our fingers could touch it, Barry spun away. With a grunt, he tossed it far into the scrubby, trash-strewn woods.

“Fetch,” he said. “With an F.”

“WHAT HAPPENED TO your face?” Dad stared at me oddly, standing in the front door.

I peeked past him to the sofa, where a strange man dressed in black was rising to his feet. “Thorns,” I said, touching my cheek, where the edges of thin gash peeked out from behind a Band-Aid. “We lost something in the woods.”

I didn’t want to mention the shard in front of a stranger. It had taken us about a half hour on our hands and knees in the woods to find it. Which made us very late for school. The cool thing was, no one seemed to care. Cass and I were like returning war heroes. Everyone was nice to us. The nurse cleaned us up and gave me a whole box of Band-Aids. The principal herself, Mrs. Sauer (pronounced Sour), brought a Welcome Back cake into homeroom. Barry ate most of it, but it was still nice. I even had a session with the school psychologist, who said she was screening me for PTSD. At first I thought that was some kind of a sandwich, like pastrami, turkey, salami, and dark bread, but it means post–traumatic stress disorder. The only stress I felt was from thinking about the great sandwich I wasn’t going to eat.

“Jack … Cass,” Dad said, “this is Mr. Anthony from Lock-Tite Security. After that strange little visit from the TV station this morning, I figure we’d better make ourselves safe from intrusions, wiretaps, recording devices. Somebody in this town—who shall remain nameless—thinks he’s going to win an Emmy Award for investigative journalism.”

Cass nodded. “I understand, Mr. McKinley. I met his son. I don’t blame you.”

“We’ll go upstairs,” I said.

We raced each other through the living room and up the back stairs. Cass reached the second-floor landing first. He quickly tossed off his shoes and socks before walking on the Oriental rug that lined the long hallway. “I love the way this feels. This house is so cool.”

“You could have a whole room of your own, you know,” I said. “We have a lot of them. There’s more on third floor, too.”

“We already decided we were going to share,” Cass said. “Are you changing your mind?”

“No!” I said. “I just thought … if you ever felt like you needed space. It’s a big house and all.”

Cass shook his head, his face darkening. “Besides we have to be prepared. We can’t be separated if it happens …”

“It?” I said.

“You know … it,” Cass repeated. “Dying.”

I leaned over, softly banging my head on the wood railing that looked out onto the first floor vestibule. “I thought we talked about this. We’re going to stay positive, remember? We’re feeling good so far, Dad is on the case—”

“Right,” Cass said. “But doesn’t that first part seem scary to you? About us feeling good?”

“Dying is scary, Cass!” I said. “Feeling good is not scary!”

“But we shouldn’t be feeling good!” Cass replied. “By now, both of us—or at least you—should have had an episode. Which would mean we’d need a treatment. No one knows how to give us one!”

“Dad is working on it,” I said.

“He has no contact with anyone in the KI, so how can he figure it out?” Cass said. “I’ve been thinking all day about what Barry Reese said. Why are we still healthy, Jack? We shouldn’t be!”

“Uh, guys?” Dad’s face appeared directly below me. He was scowling. “Can you please take it inside?”

Cass and I ran into our room and shut the door tight. I emptied my pockets onto the desk, yanked off my ripped pants, and quickly pulled on a pair of sweats I’d left on the floor. That was another agreement Cass and I had made. I could keep my side of the room as messy as I wanted.

Feeling more comfortable, I began pacing. “Okay, let’s think about this. The intervals are irregular. Always have been. We know that.”

“Yeah, but the older we get, the closer they should be,” Cass said.

I couldn’t argue that. Professor Bhegad had warned us exactly that would happen as we neared the Day of Doom.

Closer. Not farther away.

“I think it’s the shards,” Cass said. “Remember, it was the Loculus of Healing. It was supposed to restore life to the dead.”

“You mean shard,” I said.

“Shards.” Cass shrugged. “I took one, too.”

I looked at him. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was important,” Cass replied. “I just took it as a souvenir. It’s not as nice as yours. No designs or anything. I thought it was just a busted, useless piece of junk. But now …”

He went to his desk and pulled open a drawer. From the bottom he took out a hunk of material maybe three inches long, wrapped in tissue. “It’s kind of ugly.”

I heard a rustling noise from my pile of junk on my desk and jumped away.

Cass dropped the shard. “Whoa. Did you bring in a mouse?”

The rustling stopped. I darted my hand out and pushed aside some candy wrappers. No critters there.

Just my shard.

“Pick it up, Cass,” I said softly. “Your shard.”

Cass swallowed. He lifted the little disklike thing from the floor. On the desk, my shard began to twitch like a jumping bean. “Whoa …” Cass said.

I leaned over, peering closely at my shard, then Cass’s. “They’re not two random pieces,” I said. “It looks like they may have broken apart from each other.”

“It feels warm,” Cass said.

“Hold the long side toward me,” I said.

As Cass angled his arm, I reached out to my shard and turned it so its longest side faced Cass’s.

“Ow—it’s like a hundred degrees!” Cass said.

“Hold tight!” I said.

I felt a jolt like an electric current. As I pulled my fingers away from the shard, it shot across the room toward Cass.

With a scream, he dropped his relic and jumped away.

Bluish-white light flashed across our room. As Cass fell back on the lower bed with a shriek, the two shards collided in midair with a loud DZZZZZT and a blast that smelled like rotten eggs.

Flames shot up from the carpet as the pieces landed. I raced to the bathroom for a glass of water and doused the small fire quickly. I could hear Dad yelling at us from downstairs.

But neither Cass nor I answered him. We were too busy staring at what remained in the singed, smoking patch of carpet.

Not two shards, but one.

They had joined together, without a seam.

“WAIT, THEY JUST flew together and joined in midair,” Aly said, “like snowflakes?”

Her hair was purple now, her face pale on my laptop screen. Belleville, Indiana, may have been overcast, but the Los Angeles sunshine was pouring through Aly’s bedroom window.

“It was more like massive colliding spacecraft,” Cass said. “Only … tiny. And not in outer space.”

I held up the joined sections. Together they formed one larger shard. “You can’t even tell where they were separated.”

“That’s awesome,” Aly replied, as her face loomed closer to the screen. “Absomazingly ree-donculous. It means that—” Aly turned away from the screen and let out a loud sneeze. And then another.

Cass’s eyes widened. “Are you okay?”

“A cold,” Aly said.

“Because Jack and I were wondering, you know, about the treatments,” Cass went on. “It’s been a while since your last episode …”

“It’s a cold, that’s all,” Aly said, clacking away at her laptop. “Let’s get down to business. I’ve been doing research. Tons. About the Seven Wonders. About Atlantis.”

“Why?” Cass asked.

“Because what else am I going to do?” Aly said. “I know you’re feeling bad, Cass. But I refuse to give up. We start by trying to get back in touch with the KI. They’re lying low, but I’m betting they’ll want to be in contact with us. Which means we need to protect our alibi. So I pretended to be, like, an evil spy searching for clues to break our story. All kinds of things didn’t add up. That doctor friend of your dad’s? His employee records showed he was in Mexico the day he supposedly treated Cass. And the convenience store where Marco was last seen? Its video feed showed a seven-foot-tall, red-bearded barefoot guy who bought three peanut butter sandwiches and a dozen doughnuts. The owner was suspicious, so he sent the feed to the local cops, who ran a primitive facial ID scan. They came up with three hundred and seven possible suspects. Including one Victor Rafael Quiñones.”

“Who’s that?” Cass asked.

“Tor from Victor, quin from Quiñones,” Aly said. “I’m figuring Torquin is a nickname.”

“Wait. His name is Victor?” Cass said.

“So of course I deleted the footage of Torquin from the FTP servers,” Aly said. “Even the backups. And I altered the doctor’s hospital records, too. I even hacked into his Facebook account and deleted the pictures of Mexico. I am covering our tracks so the alibi is clean. But the point is, I can’t do everything. Things can go wrong. What if there are off-line copies of the originals? Arrrrrghh!” Aly shook her fists in frustration. “Okay. Okay, Black, stay calm and hack. I will try to locate Torquin or anyone who seems connected to the KI.”

“Is that possible?” Cass asked.

Aly shrugged. “Anything’s—” She broke off in a fit of coughing, swinging away from the screen. All we saw now was her bookcase.

“Aly?” Cass said.

Something thumped. I heard a choking noise. A pounding on the floor. “Mo-o-om!” came Aly’s voice.

A blur passed across the screen—a woman with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She passed from top to bottom, falling to her knees and out of the screen. “Aly? Aly, wake up!”

I was on my feet now. “ALY!”

The image on the screen juddered. And then all went black.

“GALLUP, MCKINLEY!” CASS said, staring out the window of the jet.

“I’m not piloting this plane, Captain Nied is,” Dad replied. “And he’s going as fast as he can.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Cass gestured to the distant ground below, which was clearly visible even in the dimming sunlight. “That little town near the river? It’s called Gallup, New Mexico. Right near the Arizona border. It also happens to be in McKinley County. So it’s Gallup, McKinley.”

I took a deep breath. I could barely focus on what Cass what saying. Except for the “Gallup” part. Because my heart was galloping.

“I think it’s named for US president William McKinley,” Cass said. “He was shot. But he didn’t die right away. He died because no one got to him in time.”

“That’s cheerful,” Captain Nied said.

“Cass,” Dad said softly, “we’re doing the best we can. We’ll get to Aly. She’s with the best doctors in Southern California. Dr. Karl has promised me she’ll see to her personally.”

Dr. Karl was another college friend of Dad’s. She was the head of emergency medicine at St. Dunstan Hospital, where Aly had been taken. I was becoming convinced Dad knew at least half the doctors in the United States. In my left hand I clutched my phone. Before leaving, I’d sent Aly three unanswered texts. There was no cell reception up here, but that didn’t stop me from looking at the screen for about the thousandth time.

In my right hand I turned the shard around and around as if it were a magic charm. As if I could somehow massage it to full size. “I wish we were taking her a whole Loculus of Healing.”

“That wouldn’t cure her,” Cass said. “Or us. It takes seven of these things to do that.”

“Yeah, but it would buy some time,” I said.

“You and I are feeling fine without a Loculus of Healing,” Cass remarked with a deep sigh. “Why us and not her? Why does she get the bad luck?”

I stopped turning the shard. My hands felt warm. My first thought was body heat.

My second thought was, Are you crazy?

Spoons and forks didn’t heat up in your hands when you fiddled with them. Neither did joysticks, worry beads, action figures, whatever.

I handed it to Cass. “Notice anything?”

“Whoa,” Cass said. “Do you have a fever or something?”

“It’s warm, right?” I said. “Like, unnaturally warm?”

Cass turned it around curiously. “It looks smaller to me.”

“Cass, what if that heat isn’t just heat?” I said. “What if it means something—like, it’s active in some way?”

“Like, alive?” Cass said.

“No!” I said. “It’s the shell of a Loculus that’s existed for thousands of years, right? What if it absorbed some of that healing power? Maybe that’s what’s keeping you and me from having episodes.”

Cass’s eyes were as wide as baseballs. Dad was staring at the shard, too, from the copilot’s seat. Together we looked at Captain Nied.