The Curse of the King (16 page)

“A place where we test our Select and grow them to their
full potential,” Brother Dimitrios said. “Which the KI, in their foolishness, never thought to do.”

“Why did you bring me here alone?” I asked.

Brother Dimitrios opened a wood-frame, windowless door. “For your test, of course.”

I stepped inside. The room had a coffee machine, a sink, a door, two office chairs, a wall clock, and a desk. I figured the door led to a toilet. A string of curly fluorescent lights hung from the unfinished ceiling. On the desk was a tablet with a keyboard. A slideshow flashed on the screen—photo after photo of Massa goons tearing down the Karai Institute. “So this is it?” I said. “I have to watch the construction of Six Flags Over Horrorland?”

“Sit, please.” Brother Dimitrios rolled back the office chair. As I sat, he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a set of earplugs connected to a small tablet. “During your task, you will wear these, with the tablet hooked onto your belt. This way you can communicate with me if you need to.”

“Wait. Where will you be?” I asked.

“This does not matter,” Dimitrios said. “Let us begin.”

He touched the screen. The slideshow disappeared to reveal a screen full of strange-looking apps with Greek labels. “Do I get a lifeline?” I asked. “If it involves any tech, I'll need Aly.”

“You, Jack, will be
their
lifeline.” Dimitrios leaned over and tapped an app that resembled a camera. Instantly the
screen showed Aly and Cass in a dorm room, much nicer than the one we'd just been inside. Cass was holding a phone and Aly was touching her fingers to the wall.

“Aly appears to be placing a wad of chewing gum over a spy lens,” Brother Dimitrios said. “We placed three of those lenses in the room—small, dark globes about a quarter inch in diameter. Just large enough for a bright young person to spot. You see, she believes she is blocking us from seeing into the room.”

“Because the lenses are fake,” I said.

“Very good, Jack,” Dimitrios said. “This is our way of giving her the illusion of control.”

“If the lenses don't work, how come we see Cass and Aly?” I asked.

“We are actually watching through another lens, the size of a pinhead,” Dimitrios replied. “It blends in with the grains of cement on the ceiling. I would like you to keep an eye on your friends. If they try anything funny, they will ruin your test. And there will be consequences. Oh, yes, just in case . . .”

He tapped another app and a kidney-shaped map appeared on the screen. In the northern section, two dots glowed. “This, of course, is the island, and the dots are Cass and Aly. Should they move outside the cabin, you will be able to track their movements.”

“That's my trial—to spy on my own friends?” I asked.

Brother Dimitrios shook his head. “Your trial is to decode this.”

Another app, this one revealing an image of an old document.

“What the heck does that mean?” I asked.

“You tell me,” Brother Dimitrios said.

“Wait,” I said. “I have to do
your
work? You guys couldn't figure this out?”

“Who says we haven't?” Brother Dimitrios shot back.

“Any hints?” I said.

“The answer to this is the name of a great danger that exists on this island.” Dimitrios held a remote to the wall clock. It instantly became a timer, which read 20:00:00.

“You have twenty minutes,” he said. “If you fail, one of your friends dies.”

“Wait, you're joking, right?” I said. “You wouldn't do that. You said you needed us!”

“Unfortunately, Jack, I am not the one who sets the rules,” Dimitrios said.

“Then who is it?”
I demanded.
“Let me talk to him now!”

Dimitrios backed out of the room shaking his head. “I am sorry, dear boy. But twenty-three seconds have gone by.”

The door clicked shut as he disappeared.

17:58:13.

This was insane.

Impossible.

I couldn't concentrate. My eyebrows were raining sweat. Nearly two whole minutes had gone by and I hadn't done a thing except stare at the dumb poem. I couldn't make any sense of it.

Curses? Deep within orbits?

Youth became old?

The words swirled in my head until they had no meaning at all. Like I was looking at a foreign language.

Do something. Print it out. Take notes. First things that come to mind.

That was what my creative writing teacher, Mr. Linker, always told us.
Sometimes it looks different when it's on paper.
So I went to work.

I felt like an utter idiot.

This was a waste of time.

15:56:48.

“Code . . . it's a code, it must be a code . . .” Now I was talking to myself.

I thought about the codes we'd seen.

The rock at the top of Mount Onyx
.

No. Not like this at all.

The door to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
.

Nope.

The letter from Charles Newton we'd found at the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
.

Uh-uh.

Wait.

I stared at the heading, which was in bigger type than the rest of it.
In hexad de heptimus veritas.

The Charles Newton letter had a heading, too. It was the key to understanding the rest of the letter. Where the date was supposed to be, there was a message:
The 7th, to the end
. That meant we had to count every seventh letter.

My eyes fixed on the word
Heptimus
. It was like Heptakiklos.

Hepta
was seven;
kiklos
was circle.

I wiped the sweat from my brow.
Duh.
So much of this quest was about the number seven. Everything always came back to sevens.

Carefully I wrote down every seventh letter of the poem.

Looked like a word scramble. Great. Cass was good at those. Probably Aly, too. For all I knew, Marco ate them for lunch. Me? It's about the same level as my gift for ballet dancing. Zero out of ten in the Jack McKinley Scale of Loserdom.

But Brother Dimitrios's words clattered around in my brain:
If you fail, one of your friends dies.

The threat of murder has a way of bringing out the best in a person.

Okay, the
Q
had to go with a
U
. In the letters I saw a
query . . .
also a
require . . .
and an
I am
. . . I began scribbling as fast as I could:

“Arrrghhh!” I cried out.

Useless. I slammed down my pen.

7:58:34.

Eight whole minutes, down the toilet!

Okay. Calm down.

I needed to go further. Figure out the other parts of that heading.
In hexad de heptimus veritas
. My fingers shook as I opened the tablet's browser. I typed “in hexad de heptimus veritas” into a search engine page but got nothing. So I entered the words one by one.

Definition: hexad.
A group of six.

Definition: heptimus.
Sevenths.

Definition: veritas
. Truth.

This was weird. The first two words were from the Greek, the last was from Latin. It was a mishmash. This wasn't Atlantean. Or even ancient. Brother Dimitrios and his pals must have made it up.

“Just go with it, Jack,” I muttered to myself. “Okay . . . in a group of six of sevenths truth . . .”

7:14:32 . . .

I glanced away from the clock and then back again.

7:14:29 . . .

7:14:28 . . .

Seven-one-four-two-eight.

For that one second, the clock showed a number that meant something to me—the magic sequence of sevenths, 714285!

I hated fraction conversions. But I knew this one cold.

Divide seven into any single digit. You get the same
digits in the same sequence. Well, they may start in a different place, but it's all the same.

Like .142857. Which is one seventh.

Or .285714, two sevenths.

Or .428571, three sevenths.

Or .714285—five sevenths, same as on the clock.

The same six digits over and over again, starting in different places.

That would be a group of six.

A hexad!

We were getting somewhere. Maybe.

In hexad de heptimus veritas.

Okay.

That would mean . . .
Truth in the hexad of the sevenths
.

But which hexad?

I figured, start with one seventh: .142857. Maybe if I pulled out the right letters, it would spell something. So the first letter, the fourth, the second, the eighth, and so on from each line. . . .

Impossible. One of the lines only had three letters.

Wait. Wait.

There was another possibility.

Down the side of the printout, I wrote out the magic sequence, one digit for each line of text. Then I circled the corresponding letter—for number 1, the first letter, for number 4, the fourth . . .