This is not my ride!
Faster and faster. I saw glimpses of the outside world though the slits in the drum, like one of those old-fashioned spinning movie drums. A zoetrope, it’s called. Through those slits, I saw the world change. The predawn black sky of the amusement park turned a rich indigo blue.
The ride never felt like it actually slowed, but the world stopped spinning around it. We were no longer pressed against the padded walls of the wheel. In fact, there was no padding behind us at all. We were standing against the stone pillars of a circular temple, and the pictographs that had been decorating the walls had become Egyptian warriors, each with more muscles than those Russian guys that lift eighteen-wheelers on the Extreme Sports Channel. They began to round us up with whips and brute force.
“Don’t let them catch you!” I shouted.
“Well, duh!” said a girl dressed in filthy rags. Actually we were all dressed in filthy rags. Our costumes for the ride.
The other riders raced around the temple in confusion, trying to get away, but the guards must have been through this a thousand times. They caught each rider easily, rounding them all up, shackling them at the ankles, and forcing them to the ground.
I saw an unguarded opening between two pillars. It was my chance to get away, but as I began to run, I saw the clueless kid—the one with the buggy cartoon eyes—with a whip wrapped around his neck, held by a monster of a guard with the neck of a linebacker, who looked mighty fierce, even in a skirt.
The kid’s eyes bulged even more than they had before.
I cursed my stupid conscience, then I raced over to the kid, grabbed the whip, and unwrapped it from his neck. The guard looked at me like I was a quarterback he was about to sack. He was too big to fight, but guys that big can also be clumsy. Still holding the end of his whip, I ran straight toward him, then, at the last second, I slid beneath his legs, coming out the other side. He didn’t let go of the whip, which is what I was counting on. My momentum pulled the whip and his arm between his own legs, leaving him off balance. I rammed into him, toppling him, then I wrapped his own whip around his muscle-bound neck and pulled tight until his eyes were the ones bulging. Touchdown!
And then I heard another kid behind me.
“Kill the creep,” he said.
“Yeah,” said another.
I could have done it. The guard was gasping for breath, and, as strong as he was, he couldn’t pry me loose. But the malice in those kids’ voices got to me. Rather than finishing him off, I let him go.
By now I’d attracted the attention of the other guards, but the rest of the kids were getting some nerve of their own and fought back. Some of them had already been captured, but more managed to get away, running from the hilltop temple in all directions.
I ran until I knew I’d outrun my pursuers. Then I stopped to take in my surroundings. It had to be the most spectacular of Cassandra’s worlds. It was Egypt, but not the real Egypt. It was an exaggerated, absurd vision of everything you might imagine Egypt to have been in its glory but many times larger than life. To the north the Pyramids of Giza towered into the sky. The Great Pyramid’s solid gold tip shone like an illuminatus—you know, that pyramid eye on the back of a dollar bill. It shone against a twilight sky painted in hues of deep indigo blue. The entire sky looked like a bruise across heaven.
In the valley before me, along the bank of the Nile, stood a great city of stone and gold. Hundreds of workers hauled massive stones and obelisks. They were also dressed in tattered rags, but the shirts on their backs were bloodied and torn by the whips of their brutal taskmasters. Cassandra had said that these worlds were built on the souls of those trapped here. Watching this human machine of construction, I believed it.
I hid behind stones and scaffolds, darting in and out of shadows, trying to keep out of the taskmasters’ lines of sight. This was not my ride. There was no place for me here, no secret terror to tackle. All I had to do was pass through the city undetected and find the seventh ride.
At the edge of the city a team of workers pulled on ropes, dragging a statue that lay on its back. It was the statue of a pharaoh, his stone image decorated with diamonds and silver. Even lying on its back, the statue was two stories high, and the workers dragging it couldn’t move it more than a few inches at a time. When the coast was clear, I darted into the gilded city, where more workers labored joylessly, setting tiny jewels into the lines of pictographs. It was a world of opulence, that was clear. But for whose benefit?
“Idols here!” a voice shouted, and I turned to see, of all things, a street vendor. He held a tray before him like a peanut vendor at a baseball game. “Get your idols here! Ra . . . Horus . . . graven image of Tutankhamen, king a’ da Nile—better likeness here than on the Great Sphinx.”
“The face on the Great Sphinx isn’t King Tut’s,” I told him, sounding way too much like a know-it-all.
“It is here,” he said. He glanced at my filthy clothing. “Escaped from the mud pits, huh?” he said. “Good for you. Better change out of those clothes, or you’ll be caught for sure. I wouldn’t want to be in your sandals then.”
“Can you tell me where the next ride is?”
He laughed at me. “I just sell idols, kid.”
“But you didn’t always sell idols. You were once a kid like me, weren’t you? How many years have you been here, playacting for Cassandra?”
He looked at me sternly, like we were on stage and I’d forgotten my part. “Do you want an idol or not?”
“If you help me, I’ll be the first one to make it through,” I told him. “I’m on my sixth ride.”
“Yeah, right, and I’m Cleopatra.” Then he turned and continued on, shouting, “Idols here!”