Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1) (18 page)

Zak tossed another emerald. I didn’t bother catching it. Instead, I was silent like I was in some kind of yogi trance. I quivered my lips and moaned a little. Zak didn’t respond at first, so I played it up with another moan, then another, just to make sure he was watching.

“Yogi girl?” Zak finally said. “Are you all right?”

I managed to make my whole body shake.

“Zoe?”

 
Zak felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. My eyes were still closed. I could tell he was getting worried about me.

“Yogi girl?”

I felt him lifting up my wrist. I think he was checking for a pulse.
 

“I’ve got to call 911. I need a phone. Something…” Zak said.

I heard him shuffling around. I felt myself starting to laugh but I held it. Then I felt him stick his thumb on my eyelid like he was trying to lift it. I started to feel bad. I was pretty sure he thought I was in a trance. Or worse, dead. Zak began to lose it.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no. I know I have to be more responsible. My dad told me I have to be more responsible. It’s my fault we’re here. What am I going to do? Focus, Zak.”
 

I had no idea Zak could be so concerned about anyone, let alone me. I could tell that he was losing it.

“It has to be the water. Please let her be OK. Please. Please,” Zak said.

My game had gone on long enough. I knew I had to stop what I was doing. But instead, I tried foaming at the mouth. I don’t know why I did it, I just couldn’t resist. The foam came out like spit.

“Ah!” Zak screamed.

I couldn’t keep it up any longer. It just wasn’t right.

“Sucker,” I said, opening both eyes.

Zak's pale-as-a-ghost face flooded with relief. Then he looked like he wanted to kill me. I’m talking, really kill me.
 

“One must respect the Yogi Way,” I said.

Zak tossed his handful of emeralds at me. One of the bigger ones hit me on the cheek. It kind of stung.
 

“You totally suck,” Zak said.
 

I’m not sure, but I think I saw him chuckle to himself as he walked away.

The clouds had cleared overnight, the morning sun revealing a beautiful mountain day. I felt rested despite the fact that I had had some strange dreams, but more than that, I felt inspired by the breathtaking landscape. The Himalayas — home of the gods. I knew we weren’t very high in the mountains yet. We were still in the foothills, but this was my kind of hiking. It was like a giant nature park and I shot as many pictures as I could. A farmer passed us with a giant water buffalo and I took a picture. Zak posed under a waterfall and I took a picture. Zak bucked heads with a billy goat and I took two pictures of that. It was a fun day with little in the way of weird surprises and though I did feel an aching that told me that we should start making our way back to the hotel soon, I was also beginning to feel comfortable in the mountains. All the picture taking and walking and nothing weird happening made me feel half normal. It was nice to not be worried for a change. Hiking was totally fun. You could talk as you walked so it never got boring. If we’d had something to eat other than just soggy cookies, it would have been totally perfect.

“I love it up here,” I said.

“Really? You’re not worried about school, or your mom, or whether or not you remembered to make your bed?”

“I’m not like that,” I said.

“Are too.”

“I am not. I’m just considerate.”

“You weren’t too considerate when you pretended you were dead.”

“No. Then, I was being funny.”

“OK,” Zak said. “I just think you need to relax more.”

“Well, it’s hard when my mom is always running off to this place or that. We never get time to just hang out. Sometimes I don’t even know if we’re going to be moving or not.”

“Tell me about it,” Zak said. “Same with my dad. With his job sometimes I get the feeling we’ll be moving too.”

“That would suck.”

“No kidding. I don’t want to go to a new school, make new friends. I like the friends I have just fine.”

“Me too, I don’t want to make new friends.” I thought about it. “I mean you and I are starting to be friends, and that’s cool, but it would be scary to have to go to a whole new school. You should talk to your dad about this stuff.”

“Me? You should talk to your mom.”

“About what?”

“The whole adoption thing.”

“I told you, I’m going to.”

“What did you find out about it anyway?” Zak asked.

“My adoption? Not much. I tried an internet search, but I really didn’t come up with anything. Mostly what I found were these old photos that I think the police took. They showed a burning building, a car accident. What I know for sure is that around when my mom adopted me there was a huge fire. A lot of people died.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

“What can I tell you? I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s why you have those spots on your hand. Maybe they’re a scar.”

“How?”

“Like maybe the fire burned you there?”

“They’re not a scar. They’re a birthmark.” I showed Zak that the brown spots were in the shape of perfectly elongated ovals. “Does that look like a scar to you?”

“No,” Zak said. “But it doesn’t look like a birthmark either.”

“Why not?”

“Because birthmarks don’t glow.”

I stopped in the middle of the path. “What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, you saw it too. You had to. Your hand last night in the temple. The spots glowed.”

“I think it was just the candlelight.”

“They. Glowed.”

I hiked silently. I had seen my birthmark glow too, but I didn’t really want to talk about it. It was just too weird. And if there was one thing I wasn’t in the mood for now, it was weird. With all the talking statues and flying carpets, just too much strange stuff had happened since we left the hotel. Now we were finally having a nice day and I wanted to keep it that way. What I didn’t want was weird. I continued to march forward, staring down at my running shoes, solidly ahead of Zak. Then I lurched back. The path had fallen off to nothing. It had just dead ended on a cliffside. A steel-gray river ran through the gorge far below. Looking up, I saw that a pulley and cable system had been rigged across the gorge like a long zip-line. The pulley had a wooden handle on either side of it. The cable was anchored in the pine trees on either side of the gorge.
 

Just off the trail, to the right of the knotty pine on our side of the gorge, sat what looked like a throne attached to long poles. I was pretty sure that it was called a sedan chair. A long time ago, chairs like that were used to carry rich people so they didn’t have to walk. I suppose the rich people didn’t think that they needed to exercise back then. Like they could have their servants do it for them or something. The sedan chair was red with gold embossing with a canopy overhead.
 

“Cool,” Zak said.

 
Zak sat inside the sedan chair to check it out. I wasn’t so sure that was the smartest thing to do.

“This is the way to travel,” Zak said. He put his feet up, fanning himself with a folded paper fan that sat on the chair. “Air conditioning. Embroidered seats. This thing is sick.”

“Do you think that maybe you should get out?” I said.

“It’s just sitting here.”

“Exactly the reason you should get out. We don’t know who it belongs to.”

“Maybe it doesn’t belong to anybody.”

I pulled out the map. I’d been carrying it since we started hiking and I wanted to check if there was another way across the gorge. But before I could unfold the map, I felt something. The earth began to move. Gently at first, but it was definitely moving. I had never been in an earthquake before, but I was pretty sure this was what one would feel like. The ground vibrated below me. I looked at Zak. I wasn’t imagining the vibration because I could see that he felt it too. He was actually shaking inside the sedan chair. Strange, but not super weird. But then a whistle sounded. It was muffled like it was underwater or rock or something, but it was very loud. I looked up at the rock face on the slope above us. The entire granite cliff began to shake violently, rocks falling down from above.

Then the impossible happened. Amala was right about me having to reexamine my definition of the word. The impossible had started happening so often, I was getting tired of calling it that. Anyhow, I wasn’t sure if I could believe my eyes, but a tunnel-shaped hole split open the rock wall with a loud crack. In the blink of an eye, train tracks appeared out of nowhere, running along the slope above us. I felt myself wondering why there would be train tracks there all of a sudden? It made no sense until I heard the piercing whistle, louder this time, and a polished red steam train came racing out of the newly formed tunnel.

I remembered the fancy steam train. It was the same cherry-red train with the gold bands on its wheels that we had seen at the station two days before. As the steam subsided, the earth stopped shaking and the door to one of the ornate carriages opened, two men unfolding a set of stairs. A man in a golden cloak descended the stairs. He looked right through me with his deep-set, piercing eyes. I recognized him right away. He was the same ageless man with the tight, waxy skin that I had seen drinking from the goblet back at the station. I remembered the silver goblet, because he was drinking from it again. He lowered the cup from his mouth, his lips stained blood red.
 

“I am the Bhagwan Attish,” he said. “Namaste, Zoe Guire.”

Even though I hadn’t actually met this bhagwan guy before, I thought I recognized the word bhagwan. It meant lord or master or something, which was definitely what this guy in his golden silk pants and frilly tailored shirt was going for. Anyhow, it didn’t really matter what his name was, what mattered was that he knew mine. Not a good thing. Generally you didn’t want creepy, frilly strangers knowing your name. Or blasting holes through rocks at you on magical trains.
   

“Namaste,” I said, placing my palms together and bowing slightly.

“I like your ride, Mr. Bhagwan Attish,” Zak said.

“Thank you. I like it too. I see my sedan chair has arrived. I trust you’ve found it comfortable?”

“Perfect,” Zak said, running his fingers along the polished wood.

The bhagwan glanced at the map I held loosely in my left hand.

“Were you intending to cross?” the bhagwan asked.

“Ah, yeah,” I said. I couldn’t help but sense that everything had begun to feel very wrong.
 

“Before you do, may I take a look?” The bhagwan pointed a long, cracked fingernail at the map. “I haven't seen that particular parchment for a very long time.”

I backed up a step. I now held the map behind my back, but I knew it wasn’t much of a hiding place. “Seen what?” I said.

“Your map.”

My eyes darted around. Zak was still in the chair. I noticed movement behind the bhagwan as more men got out of the train. Rhino Butt got out and so did his two goons and a reddish-brown monkey. OK. This was it: the moment. If we wanted to give back the map and get Rhino Butt and his buddy the bhagwan off of our case, now was the time to do it. A little-here-you-go-sorry-for-the-inconvenience speech probably would have gone a long way. Except the thing was, I don’t why, but I suddenly felt like it would be a very bad idea to give up the map. I met Zak’s look and I was pretty sure he agreed with me. We both stared up at the zip-line strung across the gorge. The zip-line was the other way out of the situation.

“I think you may have been right,” Zak said quietly to me.

“About what?” I said.

“About it not being a good idea to sit in other people’s chairs.”

Zak got out of the sedan chair and took hold of the handle of the pulley attached to the zip-line. I glanced down at the river before glancing back at the bhagwan and the rest of them. It was no contest. I couldn’t exactly say why, but there was no way I was giving them the map. I took another step backward and grabbed the opposite pulley-handle with my left hand.

“You may want to reconsider that,” the bhagwan said.

“No, I don’t think so,’’ Zak replied. “Did you want to reconsider, Zoe?”

“Nah. No, I think I’m good.”

Zak and I were on the same page on this one. I’d never been zip-lining before, but it had to be better than a sit-down with the bhagwan. I stuffed the map into my back pocket and we each grabbed onto our side of the pulley with both hands and pushed off together, lifting our feet. In another moment, we were zipping across the chasm, the river churning far below. I did my best not to look down. I still hadn’t recovered from yesterday’s bus trip.

“You see who that bhagwan guy’s with?” Zak said.

“Rhino Butt,” I said.

I listened as the pulley whirred on the cable. But the sound began to change. We had begun to slow down and we weren’t even halfway across the gorge yet. It didn’t make any sense because the zip-line was running downhill. We should have been speeding up, not slowing down. We weren’t though. Soon enough, Zak and I were barely moving. The pulley creaked in the wind as we hung high above the river below, swinging from side to side.

“This isn’t good,” Zak said.

“Nope.”

 
I felt the tired muscles in my arms burn as I looked back across the gorge, careful not to look down at the river below. The bhagwan stared us down, Rhino Butt and the others at his side. I wished I had never met any of them. I could feel in my bones that we were in trouble. The pulley creaked even more loudly above us. We had reached a full stop, midway across the gorge, the water rushing nosily below. I risked a glance down and had no doubt that it was too far to fall. Even after a quick peek, I felt the blackness closing in around the edges of my vision. I fought it off, staring back up at the pulley. There were huge rocks down there. I had to master my fear of heights. We had to hold on. But then something really weird began to happen. Even though the cable sloped down to the far side of the gorge, the pulley began to roll slowly back up the cable toward the bhagwan's side. It was like a car rolling up hill. It shouldn’t have been happening.