Lost in Babylon

Right. And the world would start revolving the other direction.

Marco was stubborn. He was also totally convinced he was (a) always right and (b) immortal. Plus, if he was home, telling the story of our abduction, there would be paparazzi and TV news reporters waiting at the airport. Milk cartons with our images in every supermarket. WANTED posters hanging in post offices.

How could we possibly rescue him? Torquin was supposed to protect us in case of an emergency, but that didn’t give me confidence.

The events of the last few days raced in my head: Marco falling into the volcano in a battle with an ancient beast. Our search that found him miraculously alive in the spray of a healing waterfall. The ancient pit with seven empty hemispheres glowing in the dark—the Heptakiklos.

If only I’d ignored it. If only I hadn’t pulled the broken shard from the center. Then the griffin wouldn’t have escaped, we wouldn’t have had to race off to find it without adequate training, and Marco wouldn’t have had the chance to escape—

“You’re doing it again,” Aly said.

I snapped back to attention. “Doing what?”

“Blaming yourself for the griffin,” Aly replied. “I can tell.”

“It crushed Professor Bhegad,” I said. “It took Cass over an ocean and nearly killed him—”

“Griffins were bred to protect the Loculi,” Aly reminded me. “This one led us to the Colossus of Rhodes. You caused that to happen, Jack! We’ll get the Loculus back. Marco will listen to us.” She shrugged. “Then maybe you can let six more griffins through. They’ll lead us to the other Loculi. To protect us, I can help the KI develop … I don’t know, a repellant.”

“A griffin repellant?” Cass said.

Aly shrugged. “There are bug repellants, shark repellants, so why not? I’ll learn about them and tinker with the formula.”

Tinker. That was what Bhegad called Aly. We each had a nickname—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Aly was the Tinker who could fix anything, Marco the Soldier because of his strength and bravery, Cass the Sailor for his awesome navigational ability. Me? You’re the Tailor because you put it all together, Bhegad had said. But I wasn’t putting anything together now, except pessimism.

“DIIIIIIIIE!”

Nirvana’s sudden shriek made us all spin around. Torquin bounced upward and banged his head on the ceiling. “What happened?” I asked.

“The end of the song,” Nirvana said. “I love that part.”

“Anything good?” Torquin said, scrolling through the tunes. “Any Disney?”

Cass was staring out the window, down toward a fretwork of roads and open land. “We’re almost there. This is Youngstown, Ohio … I think.”

“You think?” Aly said. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I—I don’t recognize the street pattern …” Cass said, shaking his head. “I should know this. I’m drawing a blank. I think something’s wrong with my … whatever.”

“Your ability to memorize every street in every place in the world?” Aly put her arm around him. “You’re nervous about Marco, that’s all.”

“Right … right …” Cass drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You sometimes make mistakes, right, Ally?”

Aly nodded. “Rarely, but yes. I’m human. We all are.”

“The weird thing is,” Cass said, “there’s only one part of Marco that isn’t human—the tracker. And those things don’t just fail—unless something really unusual happens to the carrier.”

“Like …?” I said tentatively.

Cass’s eyes started to moisten. “Like the thing none of us is talking about. Like if the tracker was destroyed.”

“It’s inside his body,” Aly said. “He can’t destroy it.”

“Right. Unless …” Cass said.

We all fell silent. The plane began to descend. No one finished the sentence, but we all knew the words.

Unless Marco was dead.

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turned and jogged up the street toward me, I whipped my two hands behind my back.

“So, are we there?” I asked nonchalantly.

Cass looked at me curiously. “What are you doing?”

“Scratching,” I replied. “A lottery card. Which I found.”

“And how will you collect if you win?” He burst out laughing. “Come on. The house is just ahead. Number forty-five Walnut Street. The green porch.”

I’m not sure why I didn’t tell him the truth—that I’d found a piece of burned wood and a gum wrapper on the ground, and now I was using them to write my dad. Maybe because it was a dumber idea than entering a lottery. But I couldn’t help it. All I could think about was Dad. That he was just one state away.

I shoved the note into my back pocket. We jogged up the road to Torquin and Aly, who were in the entrance to a little cul-de-sac in the middle of Lemuel, Ohio. Torquin had parked our rented Toyota Corolla in a secluded wooded area down the block, to avoid being seen. As I joined Cass and Aly, we stood there, staring at the house like three ice sculptures.

Torquin waddled ahead, oblivious.

“I can’t do this …” Aly said.

I nodded. I felt scared, homesick, worried, and nine thousand percent convinced we should have let Bhegad send another team to do this. Anyone but us.

The house had a small lawn, trimmed with brick. Its porch screen had been ripped in two places and carefully repaired. A little dormer window peeked from the roof, and a worn front stoop held a rusted watering can. It didn’t look like my house, but somehow my heart was beating to the rhythm of homesickness.

A kid with an overstuffed backpack was shambling toward a house across the street, where his mom was opening a screen door. It brought back memories of my own mom, before she’d gone off on a voyage and never returned. Of my dad, who met me at school for a year after Mom’s death, not wanting to let me out of his sight. Was Dad home now?

“Come!” Torquin barked over his shoulder. “No time to daydream!”

He was already lumbering up the walkway, his bare feet thwapping on the gray-green stones. Cass, Aly, and I fell in behind him.

Before he could ring the bell, I heard the snap of a door latch. The front door opened, revealing the silhouette of a guy with massive shoulders. As he stepped forward I stifled a gasp. His features were dark and piercing, the corners of his mouth turned up—all of it just like Marco. But his face was etched deeply, his hair flecked with gray, and his eyes so sad and hollow I felt like I could see right through them.

He glanced down at Torquin’s feet and then back up. “Can I help you?”

“Looking for Marco,” Torquin said.

“Uh-huh.” The man nodded wearily. “You and everyone else. Thanks for your concern, but sorry.”

He turned back inside, pulling the door shut, but Torquin stopped it with his forearm.