Isle of the Lost (24 page)

Sand, sand everywhere…and they were falling into it, covered in it.

Evie screamed. Mal started to thrash. Carlos lost hold of his box. Only Jay stood perfectly still.

It wasn’t a dungeon, it was a
cave
.

A cave filled with sand…and, from what Jay could barely make out amid the massive dunes now surrounding him…treasure.

He looked around at the king’s ransom of jewels that glittered in between the dunes. Mound upon mound of gold coins shimmered in the distance, while hills of gold coins stretched as far as the eye could see. There were crowns and coronets, jeweled scepters and goblets, emeralds the size of his fist, diamonds as brilliant as the stars, thousands of gold doubloons and silver coins. There were larger things too: great obelisks, and coffins, lamps and urns, a pharaoh’s head, a winged staff, a chalice, and a sphinx made of gold.

A king’s ransom,
he thought.
That’s what this is.

Evie pushed the sand away and sat up, wearing a new crown on her head, quite by accident. “What is this? Where are we?”

“I can assure you this is not part of my mother’s castle,” said Mal wryly, as she spat out some sand and blew her purple bangs out of her eyes. She stood up, brushing sand off her leather jacket. “More residue from the hole in the dome?” she asked.

Carlos nodded. “It has to be. There’s no other explanation.”

“Wait a minute, where’s the scepter?” she asked Carlos, looking around. She sounded nervous. “It has to be here, right? Has anyone seen it?”

Carlos removed a golden bucket that had fallen on his head and picked up his box from where it was balanced on what looked like an ancient golden sarcophagus. He blew sand from the drive and checked the machine again. “It’s still working, but I don’t know. It’s not beeping anymore. It’s like it lost the signal, or something.”

“Well, find it again!” Mal barked.

“I will, I will.…Give me a second, here. You have no idea what sand can do to a motherboard.…”

Meanwhile, Jay was stuffing every pocket he had with as much of the marvelous loot as he could carry.

This was the answer to his dreams…the stuff he had been longing for…heaven on earth…the Biggest Score of his life, and his father’s!

It was…it was…

It dawned on him that he knew exactly where they were.

“The Cave of Wonders!” he cried.

“Come again?” asked Mal.

“This is the place—where my father found the lamp.”

“I thought Aladdin found the lamp,” said Carlos.

“Yes, but
who
sent him there?” asked Jay with a superior smile. “If it wasn’t for Jafar, Aladdin would have never found it. Hence it was my father’s lamp all along.” He looked annoyed. “But nobody ever mentions that part, do they? And my dad said he thought there might be other things hidden in the mist—he must have suspected this might be here too.”

“Fine. Cave of Wonders. More like Basement of Sand,” said Mal. “More important, how do we get out of here?”

“You don’t,” said a deep voice.

“Excuse me?” said Mal.

“I didn’t say anything,” said Jay, who was now wearing numerous gold chains around his neck and stacking diamond bracelets up his arm.

“Who was that?” asked Evie nervously.

They looked around. Nobody else seemed to be there.

“Fine. It’s nothing. Now, let’s find that door,” said Mal.

“You won’t,” said the booming voice again. “And you will be trapped here forever if you don’t answer me correctly!”

“Great,” Jay groaned.

“Is this another riddle? This whole fortress is, like, booby-trapped or something,” Evie grumbled.

“Multiple defenses—I told you,” Carlos said. “Burglar alarm. Probably for the Dragon’s Eye, don’t you think?”

“Cave? Should I call you Cave?” asked Mal.

“Mouth of Wonders will do,” said the voice.

Evie made a face. “That’s a terrible name.”

Mal nodded. “Okay, Mouth, what’s the question?”

“It is but a simple one.”

“Hit us,” Mal said.

The booming voice chuckled.

Then it asked in somber tones, “What is the golden rule?”

“The golden rule?” Mal asked, scratching her head. She looked at her team. “Is that some kind of jewelry thing? Jay?”

But Jay was too busy grabbing as much gold as he could get and didn’t seem to hear the question.

Carlos began frantically reciting every mathematical rule he could thing of. “Rules of logarithms? Rule of three? Rules expressed in symbols? Order of operations?”

“Is it maybe something about being nice to each other?” asked Evie tentatively. “Do unto others what you want done unto yourself? Some kind of Auradon greeting-card nonsense?”

In answer, the cave began to fill with sand again. The Mouth of Wonders was not happy, that much was clear. Sand appeared from everywhere, filling the room, filling the spaces between the stacks of gold coins, rising like water filling a sinking ship. They would soon suffocate if they did not give the Mouth the correct answer.

“It’s the Cave of Wonders, not the Fairy Godmother!” shrieked Carlos. “The Cave doesn’t care about being kind! That’s not the golden rule!”

The cave continued to fill with sand.

“Come on—this way!” Mal tried to climb the stacks of gold coins—thinking she could avoid the sand by getting closer to the ceiling—but they collapsed beneath her each time she attempted to scale them, and she only ended up buried in more treasure. She tried again, and this time Evie gave her a push from behind, so that she was able to grab on to the tall statue of a sphinx.

She mounted the creature’s back and reached to pull Evie up beside her, but the sand was still rising, already engulfing her leg, threating to keep her down.

“I can’t make it!” Evie shouted.

“You have to!” Mal yelled back.

But Evie had disappeared under the flood of sand.

Jay couldn’t believe it when he watched her go under. “Evie—”

“Come on—” Carlos said, feeling beneath the sand for her. “She has to be down here. Help me find her.”

“I can’t find her,” Jay shouted.

Evie popped back up, spluttering, spitting coins out of her mouth. Mal and Carlos and Jay looked relieved.

“Here—” Now Mal offered Carlos a hand to pull him up, but the sand was already at his chest. “C’mon,” she cried, “climb the sphinx!”

“I can’t,” he said.

“What?”

“My leg is caught.”

Evie climbed up on the sphinx and tugged at his arm on one side, and Mal from the other, but no matter what they did, Carlos didn’t budge an inch. He was stuck, and the sand was still rising around him. It came from the walls and from the floor, and now Evie noticed that it was coming from the ceiling too.

Mal tugged again at Carlos’s arm, but instead of pulling him from the sand, she pulled him out of Evie’s grasp. Evie tumbled into the ever-growing mounds of sand, crashing against chalices and crowns.

The sand covered her: first up to her knees, then her shoulders…

Carlos reached for her, and they held hands as the sand kept rising.

“At least I have my heels on,” Evie said, trying to sound brave. The sand was up to her neck, and Carlos could barely keep his chin above the surface now.

“JAY! WHERE’S JAY?” yelled Mal, looking around, coughing up sand as she frantically held Carlos by the arm.

“JAY!”

Jay was flailing in the sand; it was in his hair, in his eyes. He was also covered with gold doubloons.
Gold. So much gold
. He’d never seen so much gold in his life. He had all the gold in the world, it felt like.

He would die buried in gold.…

The golden rule…

What is the golden rule?

Why, he knew the answer to that.

He could almost hear his father whispering the answer in his ear.

Meanwhile, Carlos and Evie had disappeared beneath the sand again, and Mal herself was about to go under.

The sand was nearly at the ceiling. Soon there were would be nowhere to escape to—no way to avoid the sand, and no air in the chamber. They were running out of time and out of room.

But Jay knew the answer.

Jay knew he could save them.

“WHOEVER HAS THE MOST GOLD MAKES THE RULES! THAT’S THE GOLDEN RULE!” Jay cried triumphantly, raising a fist in the air.

There was a great booming chuckle, and the sand slowly started to melt into the drains. Soon Jay and Mal and Evie and Carlos were standing right back in the fortress, out of the dungeons altogether.

The Cave of Wonders had disappeared, but then so had all its treasure.

“Fool’s gold,” said Jay sadly, looking at his empty pockets. “All of it.”

E
vie thought her heart would never stop pounding. She could still taste the sand from that cave. So this was what true evil was like—like sand in the mouth and gargoyles on attack. If this was what magic did, she was glad there was a dome.

Also, she had practically lost a heel back in there.

Evie shook her head. This was the second time the Forbidden Fortress had almost gotten the better of them. Did Maleficent know she was sending her own daughter into a trap? And if so, did she care? Probably not: this was the feared and loathed Mistress of Darkness, after all. Evil Queen was a fool to think she could compete with someone like that, and Evie almost felt like a fool for trying to compete with the Mistress of Darkness’s daughter.

Now that she thought about it, Evie almost felt sorry for Mal.

Almost.

Carlos’s machine was beeping again.

The four crept through the ruined castle. Bats screamed and fluttered over their heads, and the crumbling marble floor beneath them seemed to shift and slide in order to bear their weight.

Evie stumbled. “What
is
it with this place? Is there a fault line that runs under this island?”

“Well,” Carlos began.

“Joke. That was a joke.” Evie sighed.

There was nothing too funny about their current situation, however. It was a miracle that the surrounding ocean hadn’t completely swallowed the castle and the entire mountain by now. Evie could hear the scampering of rats inside the walls, and chills ran up her spine.

Even the rats were looking for safer ground, she thought.

“This way,” Carlos said, motioning to a narrow passage in front of him.

They followed, trailing behind Carlos, the machine beeping, the sound growing louder. “Now this way,” he said, rounding one turn, then another. Evie was right behind him as they followed, the passage growing narrower. “And now—”

“What’s going on?” asked Evie, cutting him off. “Because I know my sizing, and I didn’t just double in diameter in the last two and a half minutes.”

Indeed, the passage had narrowed to nearly her shoulders’ width. If it got any narrower, she would have to turn sideways. A lump formed in her throat, and her stomach began to roil—she felt as if this were no longer a corridor. It was crack, a fissure, and it felt like it might close on them at any moment.

Mal raised her voice. “Is it just my imagination, or are we wedged inside a mountain like—”

“A piece of string dangling down a pipe? Toothpaste squeezed inside a straw? A hangnail in this cuticle right here?” Jay said, holding out his hand. “Dang, this one really hurts.”

“Are you describing the things you’ve stolen today? Because those are all terrible analogies,” Evie said, looking at Jay. “And I’m saying that as someone who was castle-schooled by a woman who thinks the three R’s are Rouging, Reddening, and Reapplying.”

“Maybe we should go back,” Carlos said, giving voice to Evie’s fear. “Except—I think I might be stuck.” Just then, the walls shook, the castle rattled, and a chip of stone fell to the floor. The shard was big enough to do damage, and it narrowly missed Evie’s perfect nose.

She cried out. She wanted to retreat, but she couldn’t, the corridor was too narrow. “Maybe it’s some kind of trap! Let’s go—it doesn’t look safe!”

“No,” Carlos said. “Look! There’s another passage,” he added, wedging himself forward until he could pry first one hip and then the other out from the narrow corridor to a just-wider one.

As she and Jay and Mal followed him, Evie was so relieved that she didn’t even remember to complain about her nose.

This new passage turned right, then left. The walls were farther apart here, but they were oddly sloped, some tilting inward, others outward. The effect was dizzying, as even the ceiling was sloped in spots, and the corridors kept branching, splitting into two or sometimes three directions.

And always, the rumbling continued beneath them.

“Something doesn’t like us,” Jay said.

“We’re not supposed to be in this place,” echoed Evie.

“We need to hurry,” Carlos said, trying to sound calm, though he had to be as scared as any of them.

Another stone broke free of the wall, shattering as it hit the floor, nearly crushing Evie’s head. She jumped back this time, shuddering. “What
is
this place?”

“We’re in some kind of maze,” Mal said, thinking aloud. “That’s why the corridors keep turning, why passages keep splitting off and narrowing. It’s some kind of twisted maze, and we’re lost in it.”

“No, we’re not. We’ve still got the box,” Carlos replied. “It’s the only thing that
is
keeping us from getting lost in here.” The machine was still beeping, so they just kept following him. Evie only hoped he was right and that he knew where he was going. He must have, though, because the winding corridors soon gave way to more open spaces, and all of them breathed a sigh of relief.