left side, were two canvas bags, full and round and exactly the right size. They were cinched at the top with a rope. One was an olive color, the other brown. Both of them were ragged and full of holes. I guessed Bhegad had hidden these in a hurry.
Quickly I opened the olive sack and saw the glowing, whitish shape of the Loculus of Flight. With a smile, I cinched the bag closed and opened the other. Although I could feel the Loculus of Invisibility, I couldn’t see it.
“Yes! Got ’em.” Making sure both bags were tightly closed, I pulled them out. I braced myself to run and turned toward Aly. I came face-to-face with a superbright flashlight beam. “Aly, will you please lower that thing?”
A deep, guttural voice answered. “As you wish.”
I jumped back as the beam dropped downward, revealing a hooded man, his face concealed by a cowl. In the dim streetlamp light, I saw Aly a few feet beyond him. Torquin was with her now, too. Their faces were ashen, their hands in the air. Behind them stood three Massa.
“What a stroke of luck to find you here,” said Brother Dimitrios, pulling back his cowl. “We missed you in Egypt. But how considerate of you to return and find these for us.”
BROTHER DIMITRIOS HELD out his hand, palm up. Behind him stood his two favorite henchmen. Brother Yiorgos was dark and balding, with a round face and a constant creepy smile. Stavros had a mass of curly hair, a thick unibrow, and a scowl, his chin blackened by beard stubble.
Both of them held guns pointed toward Aly and Torquin.
“I do not like to use such brutish tactics,” Brother Dimitrios said, “but I believe we are having some temporary trust issues. You left us rather abruptly in Giza.”
“You kidnapped us!” I said.
Brother Dimitrios chuckled. “We freed you from the people who had taken you from your homes. That is the opposite of kidnapping, yes? More like rescuing, I’d say.” He was moving closer now, hand still outstretched. “We extended an offer to you. A lifeline. An opportunity to prevent your own deaths. And instead you fled to your abductors. Tell me, how’s that working for you now?”
I took a step backward. “You destroyed Babylon. You brainwashed Marco. You’re turning him into some kind of monster. And you promised him he’d be a king! How were we supposed to trust you?”
“Because we are the ones who tell the truth, Jack,” Brother Dimitrios said. “We are the good guys.”
“You destroyed the Karai Institute!” I said.
“They would have destroyed us if they’d gotten the chance,” Brother Dimitrios said. “It has always been part of their plan. But none of that matters now. The KI no longer exists. We are the only game in town. Which is as it should be. I trust we will eventually earn your loyalty, Jack. But for now, you need only give us the Loculi. It is the smartest thing you can do. For yourselves and the world.”
As he reached for both sacks, Aly gasped aloud. “Don’t!”
I held tight and backed away. Brother Dimitrios chuckled again. “So shy now. And yet you were the one who generously showed us the way to the island, which we’d been seeking for decades.”
Once we left the protected area around the island, the Massa could pick up the signal, Aly had said.
“You planted that phone!” Aly accused him.
Brother Dimitrios raised an eyebrow. “You mean, the phone you stole?”
I couldn’t read his expression. Was he mocking us? Was it possible Mom had played us?
I thought about what she had done—left us a high-res close-up of her own eye, which we’d used for the retinal scan. That was how we’d gotten access to the Loculi. That was how we were able to escape. She had risked her status to help me. To help us.
At least I’d thought so.
Dimitrios barked a dry laugh. “You know, the timing couldn’t have been better. You see, we were looking for a new headquarters anyway, since you betrayed the location of our old one to your Karai Institute friends. So this gave us the opportunity to eliminate the competition, so to speak.” He looked around with a satisfied smile. “Not to mention upgrading our location at the same time.”
A distant explosion made me flinch. The KI was being destroyed. This reality was squeezing me like a fist. The Scholars of Karai had built the island on centuries of research, on land that no one could ever find. Now all of it—the labs, the healing waterfall, the Heptakiklos, the space-time rift—was under new ownership. Because the Massa had found the one person dumb enough to leave a trail. Me.
“As you can hear, we are already in the process of a … gut renovation,” Brother Dimitrios said. “We will rebuild here, more gloriously than you can imagine. If you keep the Loculi, you will die, Jack. Or you can choose to give them to us. And we will save your lives.”
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to shape some kind of plan, something that made sense. I concentrated on the McKinley family motto, which had always gotten me through tough times: a problem is an answer waiting to be opened.
All my life I’d thought that mottoes were dumb. Just words.
Opening my eyes, I stared at the two canvas bags.
There was only one possible answer.
“All right,” I said, slipping my hands under the sacks. “You win. Take them.”
“JACK, NO!” ALY cried.
Torquin let out a roar. He turned and lifted Brother Yiorgos off the ground like a toy soldier, but the sound of a gunshot made him freeze.
Brother Stavros stood with one arm raised high, a revolver in his fist. Smoke wisped upward from the barrel, from where he’d shot in the air. His other arm was locked around Aly’s neck. “Don’t make this hard for us,” he growled.
Torquin let Yiorgos fall to the ground.
“Vre, Stavros, this is not a movie,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Let go of the girl.”
Aly pushed herself away from Stavros’s grip. Yiorgos rose, grimacing. They all stood, bodies angled toward me. In the dim light I couldn’t see anyone’s face clearly, but I gave a sharp warning glance to Aly and Torquin. I did not want them to get hurt.
Lifting the sacks, I curled my hands underneath. The material was worn and ripped, and my fingers felt for the holes.
There.
Quickly
