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We nearly plowed into each other. Torquin passed us, squinting into the smoky air. I followed closer and saw what looked like an enormous spiderweb, strung between trees. “Security fence,” Torquin said. “High voltage.”
“Aly knows how to disable that,” Cass said. “She did it when we tried to escape.”
“From the inside,” Aly reminded him. “Not from here. We’re stuck.”
Torquin crouched silently, grabbed the top of an umbrella-shaped mushroom, and pulled hard. The stalk broke cleanly, revealing a blinking red light, flush with the ground. I heard a soft click. “Voilà,” he said. “Disables. Thirty seconds. For KI people stuck in jungle.”
“You know French?” Cass asked.
“Also croissant,” Torquin replied proudly.
Cass took the lead again. The scent of smoke was growing stronger. We were practically running now. The sweat on my back felt like a lake against the heavy pack. But up ahead, the dense jungle darkness was giving way to the light of a clearing.
A light made brighter by fire.
Cass stopped first. He dropped to his knees, his jaw hanging open.
“This can’t be …” Aly said.
We all sank down beside Cass, at the edge of the jungle now. The Karai Institute spread out before us, but it looked nothing like the stately college campus we’d left. The grassy quadrangle was chewed up by boot prints and speckled with glass from broken windows all around. I could see figures moving through the brick buildings, white-coated KI technicians fleeing into the woods. Flames leaped from Professor Bhegad’s second-floor collection of antiquities.
Fires raged behind the quad buildings, from the direction of the airport, the dorms, the supply sheds, and support buildings. The tendrils of smoke twined skyward, disappearing into an umbrella cloud of blackness.
“Leonard …” Cass rasped.
“Leonard?” Aly said. “All you can think about is what happened to your pet lizard? What about the KI staff?”
An anguished cry from across the quadrangle made us all instinctively duck behind a thicket. I peered through the branches to see a man in a ripped white KI lab coat tumble out the game room entrance. His hair was matted with blood.
As he scrambled to his feet, there was no mistaking Fiddle, our resident mechanical and aeronautical genius.
“We have to help him,” I said, rising, but Aly grabbed me by the collar.
From the building entrance, behind him, stepped a man dressed in black commando gear, goggles, and a helmet emblazoned with a black M.
“Massa …” Aly said, pointing him out to me.
“But how?” Cass asked. “The island is undetectable by human means.”
“Massa not human,” Torquin said.
Now I could see more of them—in the windows of the lab buildings, running across the basketball court. I could see them dragging KI scientists into the dorm, throwing rocks through windows. One of them, racing across the campus, tore down the KI flag, which stood in front of the majestic House of Wenders.
Fiddle staggered closer toward the jungle. He looked desperately around through the broken lenses of his glasses. I wanted to call out to him, but the commando grabbed Fiddle by his lab coat and yanked him down from behind.
“We have to help him,” I said.
“But it’s four against a bazillion,” Cass said.
Torquin crouched. “But this four,” he said, pulling a wooden case from his pack, “is very good.”
(#ulink_7cb9939e-9c3d-5805-84d9-a15cd6189421)
TORQUIN PULLED A long, slender pipe and a handful of darts from his pack. He moved through the jungle, crab-walking silently away from the thicket.
Dropping behind a fallen tree, Torquin put the pipe to his lips, and blew.
Shissshhhh!
Fiddle’s captor crumpled downward instantly, felled by a small, green-feather-tipped tranquilizer dart. “Eye of bull,” Torquin said.
I scrabbled to my feet and raced out of the jungle toward Fiddle.
As Fiddle saw me approach, he turned to run away. “It’s Jack McKinley!” I called out as loudly as I dared.
He stopped and squinted at me. “I must be dreaming.”
I took his arms and pulled him toward the trees. Behind us I could hear doors opening, voices shouting. Torquin’s tranquilizer darts shot out from the jungle with impossible speed, each one followed by a groan.
With the sharp crrrrack of a gunshot, a tree branch exploded just over Torquin’s head. We all dove into a thicket. “Why are we using darts when they’re using bullets?” Fiddle screamed.
“KI not killers,” Torquin replied. He reached out and lifted Fiddle onto his back as if he were a rag doll. “Go! Deeper into jungle. Hide!”
We followed Cass back the way we’d come. Behind us, an explosion rocked the jungle and we were airborne in a storm of dirt and leaves. I thumped to the ground, inches behind Aly and Cass. A tree crashed to the jungle floor exactly where Torquin and Fiddle had been.
“Torquin!” I shouted.
“Safe!” his voice replied from somewhere behind the tree. “Just go!”
Flames leaped up all along the pathway we’d just taken. As we ran blindly into the jungle, I peered over my shoulder to see Torquin and Fiddle following us. Cass was taking the lead, his head constantly turning left and right. Honestly, I don’t know what he was seeing. Every inch of the jungle looked the same to me. But Cass knew. Somehow.
Panting, he stopped in a clearing and looked around. The explosions were like distant thunder now, barely audible above the animal noises and the sound of our own breaths. “Did you know this place was here?” I asked.
“Of course,” Cass nodded. “Didn’t you? We’ve been here before. We’re near the beach where we saw the dead whale. If we have to, we can follow the coast around to the plane.”
“Whoa, dismount!” Fiddle said as Torquin stomped into the area. Sliding off the giant’s back, Fiddle grimaced. He took off his broken glasses and pulled a tiny shard from his cheek. “This really hurts. That means it’s not a dream, right? Which is a bummer.”
“Are you okay?” Aly asked.
“Yeah, I think.” Fiddle nodded. “Although I should have bought safety lenses.”
“What happened here?” I demanded, catching my breath.
Fiddle’s eyes seemed drained of life. His face was taut, his voice distant, as if he were recounting a horrible nightmare. “I’m … sitting in the airport minding my own business—and these turkeys fly in. No one expected it. We were caught totally unaware. Someone must have given us away …”
“Marco,” Torquin said.
“Marco doesn’t know the way here,” Aly protested. “None of us do. It’s got to be someone else.”
“It is.” Cass eyed me warily. “It’s … Jack.”
I looked at him, speechless.
“Not you, personally,” Cass said. “Your phone. The one your mom gave you, in the Massa HQ. You turned it on while we were here.”
“Wait,” Aly said. “And you left it on?”
“Okay, maybe—but so what?” I said. “No signal can get through to the island. It’s totally off the grid. Any grid!”
Aly groaned, slumping against a tree. “It’s not about location, it’s about vector, Jack—meaning direction. When we got in the plane, the signal traveled with us. Once we left the protected area around the island, the Massa could pick up the signal.”
I imagined a map, with an arching, beeping signal, traveling slowly from the middle of the ocean toward Egypt. Like a big old arrow pointing where to go. “So they just followed the path backward and kept going … until they discovered the island …”
“Bingo,” Cass said.
I felt dizzy. This whole thing was my fault. If it weren’t for my boneheaded move, we wouldn’t be in this danger. How could I have been so ignorant? “I—I’m so sorry. I should have known.”
Cass was pacing back and forth. “Forget that now, Brother Jack. Really. It’s okay. Actually, it’s not.”
“Need to counterattack,” Torquin added, looking back in the direction of the compound.
“You and what army?” Fiddle asked. “You got zombies hidden away? Because the Massa are all over the explosives supply now. I say we run. However you got here, let’s get out the same way.”
When Torquin turned, his face was lined and his eyes moist, as if he’d aged a few years. “Never leave Professor Bhegad behind.”
“Or the Loculi,” I said. “Where are they?”
Torquin and Fiddle both looked at each other and shrugged.
“We gave them to Bhegad,” Aly said. “He didn’t tell you where he put them?”
Cass sagged. “There goes that plan.”
“Okay … okay …” I said, rubbing my forehead as I tried to think this through. “Bhegad probably kept the location of the Loculi to himself—one person only, to avoid a security leak. So we find him first, and he’ll lead us to them.”
“Unless the Massa get to him before us,” Cass said.
“Bhegad tough,” Torquin said. “Won’t crack under pressure.”
“We need to find his EP assignment,” Fiddle said. “Emergency protocol. We all get one. It’s where we have to go in case of an attack.”
“These EP assignments,” Aly said. “Are they stored somewhere?”
Fiddle shrugged. “Must be. The assignments are changed randomly from time to time. We’re notified electronically.”
“I’ll need to get to the systems control building.” Aly looked up. “The sun is setting. We have maybe an hour before it gets too dark to see outside. That’ll help us.”
“But the control building will be full of Massa,” Cass said.
“We clear it,” Torquin declared.
Fiddle looked at him in bafflement. “How? With darts? You guys are out of your minds. We need an army, not a sneak attack with a half-blind geek, a caveman, and three kids barely out of diapers.” He looked toward the water.
Aly’s jaw hung open. “Did you say … diapers?”
“Caveman?” Torquin added.
Fiddle backed away slowly. “Oh, I forgot—feelings. Guess you guys want sensitivity. Fine, it’s your funeral.”
He turned, lurching into the jungle.
“Hey!” Torquin cried.
As he lumbered after Fiddle, I followed. Aly called me back but I kept going. “Torquin, let him go!” I cried out.
After a few turns, deeper into the dense-packed trees, I felt my foot jam under a root. I tripped and landed a few feet from Torquin’s pack. I guessed he must have dropped it to lighten his load. But I couldn’t leave it there. Not with those tranquilizer darts inside. We could use those.
Wincing, I sat up. I could hear movement—footsteps? I wasn’t even sure from which direction the sound was coming. The sky was darkening. I looked over my shoulder, but the jungle was without paths, and even my own footsteps were lost in the dense greenery. “Aly?” I called out. “Cass?”
I waited. High overhead a monkey screamed. It dropped from a branch and landed on its feet, jumping wildly up and down. Eeee! Eeee!
“Go away!” I said. “I don’t have any food.”
It was slapping its own head now, gesturing wildly back into the woods.
“Do I know you?” I said, narrowing my eyes at the creature. During my first escape attempt from the island, I’d been lured to Torquin’s helicopter by an extremely smart chimp. Who looked very much like this one. “Are you showing me which way to go?”
Oooh, it grunted, darting straight for the backpack.
So that was its game—distracting me so it could steal the pack! “Hey, give me that!” I shouted.
A loud crack resounded, followed by a familiar scream.
Aly’s voice!
Ignoring the branches and vines that slashed across my face, I ran back toward the noise. In moments I saw the dull glow of the clearing.
Silently I dropped into the brush. I had a sight line. Cass and Aly were where I’d left them. Aly’s arm was bleeding. Cass was holding a branch high like a spear. Around them were four helmeted Massa, armed with rifles. They grinned, jeering, taunting my friends in some language I didn’t know.
My muscles tightened, ready to spring.
No. No way you can jump in there alone.
Where was Torquin?
I felt something jam into my back and nearly screamed aloud.
Whipping around, I came face-to-face with the monkey. It was holding out Torquin’s backpack to me.
