Читать книгу Lost in Babylon - Peter Lerangis - Страница 13

weed-choked muck.

No wonder Marco couldn’t find the second Loculus. You couldn’t see three feet in front of your nose.

As I swam, trying to keep up with him, noodle-like shapes slimed my face. Marco was holding tight to Cass. The fluorescent strip on Cass’s backpack flashed occasionally in the dim ribbons of light that somehow broke through the water. I was getting colder by the second. With my clothes and shoes, I felt heavy like a whale.

Down … down … how far was this thing? It was practically black now. The light was way too far over our heads.

As far down as you go, you will need an equal amount of air to swim back up. It’s what I learned in summer camp. I learned to sense when I was half spent. And I was way past that. Already my head felt light and my heart seemed about to explode.

Marco wasn’t slowing a bit. Aly banged me on the shoulder. She was gesturing, urging me to go back up with her. I knew she was right. Marco was going to kill us. How far were we supposed to go? What exactly were we going to see—and where?

Ahead of me, Marco had stopped swimming. He still held tight to Cass, who was now hanging limply in the water. The two of them were silhouetted by a weird, dull yellow glow below them.

As I swam toward them, I realized I was gaining speed. An undertow.

I tried to pull back but I couldn’t. The glow was intensifying, looming closer. It was a circle of bright tiles with a center of solid black. In front of me, Marco seemed to be changing shape—blowing out to an amorphous humanoid blob, then shrinking to clam-size.

What’s going on?

My head snapped back, and suddenly I was surging into the black hole as if sprung by a giant rubber band.

As I passed through the hole, it let out a deep, threatening buzz. A halo of green-white light shot sparks from its circumference into my body. My mouth opened into an involuntary scream. I collided with Marco and Cass, but they felt porous, as if our molecules were joining, passing through one another. My left leg smacked against something hard, and I bounced away.

I was spinning with impossible speed, as if my head were in ten places at once. And then I felt myself catapulted forward, and I thought my limbs would separate into different directions.

But they didn’t. I flattened out, decelerating. The water’s temperature abruptly dropped, and so did its texture. All at once it had become clear and cool—and I was whole again. Solid. But the change had unsettled every biological function inside me. My brain registered relief, but my lungs were in chaos. As if someone had reached inside and squeezed them with a steel fist.

Aly … Marco … Cass. I spotted them all in my peripheral vision, rising. But Cass’s legs hung like tentacles, undulating with each of Marco’s powerful thrusts. Those two would reach the surface first. I pushed with all remaining strength, fighting to stay conscious. Aiming toward a dull, flat-gray surface glow above us.

My arms slowed … then stopped.

I felt myself traveling to a dream world of bright sun and cool breezes. I was floating over a field of waving grass, where a white-robed shape stood from a circle embedded in the ground.

As she turned, I could see the seven Loculi, glowing, revolving. They seemed to blend together, so their shapes merged into a kind of circular cloud.

The Dream.

No. I don’t want it now. Because I’m not asleep. Because if I have the Dream now, it might be because I’m dead.

“I knew you would come.”

The voice was unfamiliar, yet I felt it was a part of me. I knew instantly who the figure was. She turned slowly. Her eyes were the color of a clear tropical ocean, her face gentle and kind, ringed with a floating mane of glorious red hair.

Her name was Qalani.

Whenever I’d seen her, it had been in a ring of explosions, some kind of strange flashback to the destruction of Atlantis. In the Dream, I came close to death but always woke up.

Here, she had come to meet me. As always, her face looked familiar. She resembled my mom, Anne McKinley—and now, deep under the Euphrates, it was more than a resemblance. It was a beckoning, a welcoming.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“I’ve been waiting,” she said with a knowing smile. “Welcome to have you back.”

I couldn’t help grinning. Our old family saying! I’d blurted it out to Dad once, when he returned from a business trip to Manila. From then on, we always used it as our own private joke.

I felt strangely peaceful as she reached toward me. I would be fine. I would finally be meeting her, in a better place.

Her hand gripped my shoulder, and darkness quickly closed in.