Read Online The Secret of Ka by Christopher Pike - Free Book Online Page B

Istanbul.
    It was an expensive watch. Waterproof. Shockproof.
    The battery was fresh. It should not have stopped.
    I didn't have time to worry about it. It was no longer dark, although we were light years away from a sunny day. The carpet had transported us to an eerie fog bank, where there were no stars or sky. And it had lowered us to within three feet of the water. Our speed had also decreased; we were creeping along.
    The fog was neither cold nor warm. It did not even feel damp. I might have mistaken it for smoke, but I smelled no odor. I could not tell from which direction the light was coming. There was no wind and yet the fog moved, forming brief-lived spirals that spun up from below. As one swept over me I felt a distinct chill. They looked like ghosts.
    The stars in the center of the carpet had disappeared. In their place was a gray-green circle—the same color as the water.
    I had lost my desire for adventure.
    I wanted to go home.
    Amesh sat with his chin resting on his chest, breathing heavily.
    "Amesh," I said, then louder, "Amesh!"
    He did not wake up. I tried shaking him. He slumped to the side; he almost fell off. Still, he did not regain consciousness. "Amesh!"
    I was terrified. He was breathing; he was alive. Why didn't he wake up? Was there something about this place we were traveling through that was keeping him asleep? Of course I blamed the fog and not the carpet, although the reverse could just as easily have been true. I felt it was a mistake that I had woken up in this place. I wished I hadn't.
    Not long after, I blacked out again.
    ***
    When I awoke next, Amesh was softly calling my name. I sat up with a start. I had passed out sitting in his direction, and as soon as I saw him I gave him a quick hug. "You're all right!" I gushed.
    "Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"
    "Because ... never mind, I was just worried." I realized our surroundings had changed again. The creepy fog had lifted and the sky was back, along with the stars, although a rising sun in the east was chasing them away. Yet in the opposite direction, near the horizon, was a weird red glow. The color seemed angry; a bloody red. It was shrouded in mist and I could not tell if it was caused by a single star or planet. At the same time it was sinking below the horizon.
    I mentioned it to Amesh but he had no idea what it was.
    "I woke up just before you," he said, gesturing in the direction of the sunlight. "I can't believe we slept the whole night."
    "Maybe we didn't." My body was stiff from sitting for so long, and yet I knew I had not been asleep seven hours. But how could one argue with the heavens? It was a brand-new day. And now my watch read 6:30 a.m. I said the time out aloud. Amesh's expression suddenly turned glum.
    "My Papi's going to kill me," he said.
    "I won't tell you I told you so."
    "You just told me."
    "Well, that's beside the point. Where are we?"
    Amesh frowned as he scanned the area. The carpet had climbed once more to ten feet, and it was traveling at about ten miles an hour. The color of the water had returned to normal, but the red glow was not the only thing that troubled me.
    Like I said, my dad had taught me a few things about the stars, but I was not an expert when it came to astronomy. Still, I did not recognize a single constellation. I tried to explain my difficulty to Amesh. He brushed me off.
    "The sun's coming up. There aren't that many stars to go by."
    "There's that weird red glow, too. We can't just ignore it."
    "I'm not ignoring anything; I'm just trying to figure out where we are. If the carpet stayed at this speed for eight hours, we could be two hundred kilometers from shore."
    A kilometer was about two-thirds of a mile, I reminded myself. He was saying we were about 140 miles from Istanbul.
    "You said if we kept going, we'd run into the Aegean Sea. Isn't that full of islands?"
    "Sure. We're bound to run into one. But there's more chance we'll see one in the distance. We should keep the binoculars handy