mean. Actually, I’m happy Marco is alive. I just was wondering the same thing you were—why Iraq? What’s there?”
Professor Bhegad slowly turned, adjusting the heavy glasses that slid down his sweating nose. “It’s not what is there, but what was there,” he said. “Iraq was the site of Ancient Babylon.”
Cass’s eyes widened. “Duh. The site of one of the Seven Wonders—the Hanging Gardens!”
“He decided to go on a rogue mission to find a Loculus all by himself?” Aly said. “Without my tech skills, or Cass’s human GPS? If I were Marco, I’d want to do this as a foursome! All of our lives are at stake. Going solo makes no sense. Even to an egotist like Marco.”
“Unless,” I said, “he isn’t trying to go solo.”
“What do you mean?” Cass asked.
“I mean, he may not know that his tracker is busted,” I said. “Maybe, when he left Rhodes, he figured we’d pick up the signal and follow him. Maybe he just wanted to force things, to speed the mission up.”
Aly raised an eyebrow. “How do we know he didn’t disable and re-enable it on purpose?”
“You’d have to be a genius to do that!” I said.
“I could do it,” Aly said.
“That’s my point!” I replied.
Aly folded her arms and stared out the window. Cass shrugged.
Now Professor Bhegad was shouting, his face pressed to the window. “The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers! We are approaching the Fertile Crescent!”
I gazed down. I knew that Ancient Babylon was the center of a bigger kingdom called Babylonia. And that was part of a larger area known as Mesopotamia, which was Greek for “between two rivers.” Now we could see them, winding through the desert, lined with thickets and scrubby trees that looked from above like long green mustaches. Everywhere else was dusty, yellow, and dry. The area sure didn’t look fertile to me.
I squinted at the distant ruins. A stone wall snaked around the area. Inside were mounds of rubble and flattened, roped-off areas that must have been archaeological digs. Gazing through a set of binoculars, Bhegad pointed out a small skyline of low buildings near a gate in the wall. Some were flat-roofed and some peaked. “Those are restorations of the ancient city,” he said with a disapproving cluck of the tongue. “Crude, crude workmanship …”
“Where were the Hanging Gardens?” Aly called out.
“No one knows,” Bhegad answered. “Babylon was destroyed by an earthquake in two hundred B.C. or thereabouts. The rivers have changed courses since then. The Gardens may have sunk under the Euphrates or may have been pulverized in the earthquake. Some say it may not have ever existed. But those people are fools.”
“I hope it’s Door Number Two,” Aly said. “Pulverized. Turned to dust. Just like the Colossus was. At least we’ll have a chance for two out of seven Loculi.”
“More than twenty-eight percent,” Cass piped up.
I looked at the tracker panel on the cockpit. Marco’s signal was near the Euphrates River, not quite as far as the ruins. As Fiddle descended, we could see a team of guards outside the archaeological site, looking at us with binoculars.
“Wave! Hi!” Nirvana said. “They’re expecting us. They’re convinced this is a major educational archaeological project.”
“How did you arrange all this?” Cass asked.
“I was a professor of archaeology in another life,” Bhegad replied. “My name still carries some weight. One of my former students helps run the site here. He also happens to be a satellite member of the Karai Institute.”
Fiddle descended slowly and touched down. He cut the engine, threw open the hatch, and let us out.
The sun was brutal, the land parched and flat. The dusty soil itself seemed to be gathering up the heat and radiating it upward through our soles. In the distance to our right, I could see a bus rolling slowly toward the ancient site. Tour groups made their way slowly among the ruins, like ants among pebbles. In between, the sandy soil seemed to give way to an amazingly huge lake.
“Do you see what I see?” Aly said.
Cass nodded. “Egarim,” he said. “Don’t get too excited.”
“Translate, please,” I said.
“Mirage,” Cass replied. “The soil is full of silicate particles. The same stuff glass is made of. When it’s so bright and hot like this, the sunlight reflects off all those particles. At a sideways angle, it looks like a big, shining mass—which resembles water!”
“Thank you, Mr. Einstein,” I said, scanning the horizon. Directly ahead of us, across the yellow-brown desert, was a line of low pine trees that stretched in either direction. The heat-shimmer coming up from the ground made the trees look as if they were rippling in an invisible current. “That’s where Marco’s signal is coming from. The Euphrates.”
Marco was so close!
I checked over my shoulder. Torquin and Nirvana were struggling to lift Professor Bhegad out of the chopper and put him in a wheelchair.
“This is going to take forever,” Aly said. She darted toward Torquin, pulled the tracking-signal detector from his gadget belt, and bolted toward the river. “Come on, let’s start!”
“Hey!” Torquin cried out in surprise.
“Let them go, we have our hands full here!” Nirvana said.
Our footsteps made clouds of yellowish dust as we ran. Closer to the river, the ground was choked with scrubby grass and knots of small bushes. We stopped at the thicket of pine trees that stretched in both directions.
The ground sloped sharply downward. Below us, the Euphrates slashed a thick silver-blue S like a curved mirror through the countryside. To the north it wound around a distant settlement, then headed off toward mountains blurred by fog. To the south it passed by the Babylonian ruins before disappearing into the flatness. I scanned the riverbank, looking for signs of Marco.
“I don’t see him,” Aly said.
I held up the tracker. Our blue dot locator and Marco’s green one had merged. “He’s here somewhere.”
“Yo, Ocram!” Cass shouted. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Rolling her eyes, Aly began walking down the slope toward the river. “He might be hiding. If he’s playing a prank, I will personally dunk him in the water.”
“Unless he throws you in first,” I said.
I glanced quickly back over my shoulder to check on the others. Nirvana was struggling to push Professor Bhegad’s wheelchair across the rocky soil. He bounced a lot, complaining all the way. Torquin had taken off his studded leather belt and was trying to wrap it around Bhegad like a seat belt, causing his own pants to droop slowly downward.
I started
