Seven Wonders Book 1: The Colossus Rises by Peter Lerangis Page A

consequences you may have faced? By depriving Aly of the treatment, you nearly killed her.”
    “Sorry, it was really stupid,” said Cass feebly.
    Bhegad whirled on him. “ Stupid is a small word. What you did was unforgivably reckless. Imagine if you’d succeeded. What happened to Aly would happen to you all. The operation unlocked your G7W gate, which saved your life. But the gate is unstable and can fail. The metabolic pathways are too weak. It’s like a dam—open it slowly and it will irrigate a landscape; break it and it causes a flood. Your powers will overwhelm your system and kill you. We have developed the treatments to adjust the energy flow. To preserve your lives. And you decide to take a toy boat into notoriously unnavigable waters during a storm? By the Great Qalani, this is not stupid , it’s insane. Suicidal.”
    I knew I should have felt moved by Bhegad’s words. He had saved us. But his tone was angry and scolding, as if we’d just spilled coffee on his favorite scientific experiment.
    “We’re grateful, Professor,” I said, “but you’re part of the reason this happened. What do you expect? Whether you lock people up in an underground bunker or in a tropical village, you’re still locking them up. Saving people’s lives is a great thing, so why do it in secret? Maybe there are hundreds more G7W carriers you could help—”
    “There’s a good reason for the secrecy,” Professor Bhegad said.
    “Atlantis!” I blurted out, staring at him levelly. “You’re turning us into super-charged slaves who will find Atlantis for you.”
    My words hung uncomfortably in the room’s dankness.
    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.”
    Cass choked. Marco looked stunned.
    “If I’m not mistaken, Jack, you’ve been having thesevisions 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.”
    “I thought you were a scientist, P. Beg,” Marco said with a baffled laugh. “I don’t need a PhD to know that’s impossible.”
    “Do you know the term déjà vu?” Bhegad asked. “When you have this odd feeling I’ve been here before , even though you know you haven’t? That feeling is considered to be a fantasy, too. But our research shows that déjà vu is a connection to something real—some past event that left an unanswered question. Any of you could feel it, say, in a small coffeehouse while visiting Paris. Chances would be that your great-great-great-great grandfather fell in love there and never saw the woman again, or was attacked by a stranger who was never found.”
    “So déjà vus are like memories from people who are dead?” Cass asked. “Ghosts of memories?”
    “They are visions of real things,” Bhegad said. “We don’t pretend to understand them fully. But these visions exist—stored in that vault of mysteries, the ceresacrum! You are being called to see the destruction of Atlantis. It is a vision of what happened when its source of power was stolen, upsetting the balance that had existed for ages. We believe the power was divided into containers and hidden.”
    “And where are we