Lost in Babylon. Peter Lerangis

       were so loud, I thought they’d shake my brains out through my ears. “Are you sure you read the tracker right?” I shouted toward the front seats.

      Professor Bhegad didn’t even turn around. He hadn’t heard a word.

      We’d met him and Fiddle at the airport in Irbl, Iraq. They’d flown separately from the Karai Institute when Marco’s signal was finally picked up. Now the whole gang—Bhegad, Torquin, Fiddle, Nirvana, Cass, Aly, and I—was crammed into the front seat of a chopper winging over the Syrian Desert. Our shadow crossed a vast expanse of sand, dotted by bushes and fretted by long black pipelines.

      The cabin was stifling hot, and sweat coursed down my face. Cass, Aly, and I huddled together in the backseat. On the long flight from Ohio, we’d had plenty of time to talk. But the whole thing seemed even more confusing than ever. “I still can’t understand why he would come here!” I said. “If I were him, I’d go home. No-brainer. I mean, we all want to see our families again, right?”

      I could practically feel Cass flinch. He had bounced from foster home to foster home; he didn’t have a family to go back to. Unless you counted his parents, who were in prison and hadn’t seen him since he was a baby. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that …” I said.

      “It’s okay, Jack ‘Foot-in-Mouth’ McKinley,” Cass replied with a wan smile. “I know what you 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