Seven Wonders 3-Book Collection

Grinning at Aly, he said, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.”
Back in the crater, Marco insisted on gathering up all his tooth fragments and lost body parts

He was sitting up now. His arms were moving. The lacerations on his face were looking less angry. “Marco,” I said, “can you stand?”
Marco shrugged. He swung his legs around so they hung down over the ledge.
“Look at them, Jack!” Aly said with a gasp.
His legs dangled bizarrely, pointing every which way as if he had three knees in each one. He glanced at them curiously, swinging them right to left. “Dang,” he said.
Then he kicked out twice, hard. The legs locked themselves back into a normal angle, and he let out sharp yelp of pain.
Cass groaned. “He has got to stop doing that

Returned from death.
“Marco, let me see your mouth,” I finally said.
He obediently lowered his jaw. As I knelt closer, Aly looked, too.
I angled his face so I could catch the light. His front teeth were stubs, just breaking through the gum line. Not smashed, not ragged and pointed, but smooth edged, like Chiclets. The top of Marco’s mouth—the hard palate—was pink and small as if it had been transplanted from a baby.
Aly gasped. “His teeth…”
“His whole jaw,” Cass said softly. “It was shattered in the fall. Destroyed.”
“Marco,” I said, “you may not remember this, but you fell. A huge distance. You should be dead. But you landed by this waterfall, and you’re okay.”
Marco smiled a stubby smile. “I’m immortal?”
“It’s something about the water,” I said. “You’re…regenerating.”
“I whaaaa—?”
He nearly bit off my fingers at the W.
“Your teeth are growing in,” I said

I opened my mouth to answer but my jaw just flapped open and shut. This couldn’t be happening. But it was. Marco had fallen to his death. His jaw, his teeth—they lay scattered about the center of the volcano.
But he was with us again. Intact

No. Not a branch. A foot.
I jumped aside and looked down.
There was no mistaking the ragged, water-soaked figure against the wall.
“Marco?” I said

As Cass and Aly scrambled upward, a square section of the ceiling moved. I squinted upward to see a stone door on thick metal hinges, opening to release something thick and black.
The mass spilled out, morphing and growing, changing shapes like a living thing

As the wood ignited, my mouth fell open. The tapestry came to brilliant life in the amber glow. It showed all the images from Bhegad’s tutorial—the peaceful kingdom, the sparring brothers, the destruction of Atlantis. But I noticed something strange. In the highest right corner of the weaving, there was a man hanging by his arms from what looked like a small beach ball. It looked completely out of place in this scenario. “Cass, Aly—take a look at

Cass choked. Marco looked stunned.
“If I’m not mistaken, Jack, you’ve been having these visions for as long as you can remember,” Bhegad continued. “Do they sound familiar, Marco?”
Marco swallowed nervously. “He’s lying to you, Jack. Those are my dreams. You are messing with our heads, Professor.”
“No, he’s right, I did dream them,” I said. “I dream them a lot.”
“I do, too,” Cass piped up.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “How can three people have the exact same dreams?”
“Four,” Bhegad said. “Aly has them, too. Same event. Same location. It is a place all four of you know well.”

Professor Bhegad’s eyes grew sad and distant, his face red from the humidity in the submarine. He paused, wiping his fogged glasses, then put them on and looked at me. “Jack, when you came out of the operating room, you were in a coma for two days. We monitored you, round the clock. You talked quite a bit in your sleep. Something about an explosion and an earthquake. A red flying beast. A hoglike thing resembling a cheetah. You called it a vromaski, I believe.”