Peter Lerangis - The Curse of the King

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 JUSTflew 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!” CASSsaid, 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.

He yanked back the throttle, and the jet began to dive. “Fasten your seat belts, gents. And welcome to LA.”

* * *

It is amazing what $200 will do to a Los Angeles cabdriver.

As we twisted and turned through the city streets, palm trees and white stucco houses zoomed by in a blur. We could see the freeway in the distance, the cars at a total standstill. “Freeway is not free!” the cabdriver said in an accent I couldn’t quite figure out. “Is prison for cars!”

No one laughed. We were too busy keeping our stomachs from jumping through our mouths. Dad was on his cell phone with the hospital the whole way.

According to Dr. Karl, Aly was alive, but it wasn’t looking good.

As the taxi screeched to a stop in the hospital parking lot, we pushed our way out. I hooked my backpack around my shoulders and sprinted after Dad. He flashed his ID left and right, fast-talking his way past guards. In a moment we were on the fifth floor, barging into the intensive care unit. It was a massive room, echoing with beeps and shouts and lined with curtained-off areas.