Arkie Sparkle Treasure Hunter: Code Crimson Read online

  She was going to die here. Never seeing her mum and dad again. Never being able to tell them what had happened. Would they die too, with all hope of seeing her again – of being rescued – disappearing each day?

  Then Arkie felt herself being pulled apart as TimeSlip locked onto her and reconstructed her nearly 200 years later.

  She collapsed on the sand. She was still in the desert but it was a desert without wind, and the sky was calm and cloudless.

  Arkie coughed the sand from her lungs and took a deep, sand-free breath.

  ‘TJ,’ she said. ‘I’m back, I think.’ She checked the date on her THinc ring. ‘YES,’ she cried.

  ‘Arkie,’ said TJ. ‘Phew. That was way too close. Are you okay?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Arkie. ‘But what about Abu Simbel? And where are you?’

  ‘CamOp 18,’ said TJ. ‘BLUR is disguised as a sand dune.’

  Arkie looked around her.

  There were hundreds of sand dunes in every direction she looked.

  Debrief

  ‘I’m never going to the beach again,’ said Arkie.

  She was standing on her head in BLUR – trying to dislodge every grain of sand that was in her hair, her ears, her nose, her teeth.

  ‘And you’ve ruined your pyramid pants,’ said TJ, inspecting the holes in them.

  ‘Well, they weren’t that great in the middle of a raging sandstorm,’ said Arkie. ‘It was like wearing a parachute. They just wanted to float in the wind.’

  ‘Well I didn’t know there was going to be a sandstorm when I designed them,’ said TJ.

  ‘It’s the desert,’ sighed Arkie. ‘There are always sandstorms.’

  Every time she spoke sand crunched through her teeth. ‘And I can’t believe you disguised BLUR as a sand dune? I could have been searching for days, months, lifetimes. It was just as well you sent Cleo out to find me.’

  Cleo barked.

  ‘Yes, you’re an excellent treasure hunter’s helper’s super-snooper dog,’ said Arkie, tickling her tummy and giving her a beef jerky treat.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said TJ in a quiet voice. ‘Even geniuses can make mistakes. And I’m still getting the hang of this treasure-hunting business.’

  Arkie smiled at her. ‘Yeah, me too,’ she said. ‘And the main thing is that we found the statue and I got the photo. But what about Abu Simbel? We were together in the sandstorm and then he just disappeared.’

  ‘I didn’t have time to explain,’ said TJ, ‘but, apparently, when two people timeslip it operates on a last-in, first-out basis so I had to timeslip Abu Simbel before you. And because he was never really there in 1817 – it was more just an impression of him – I was able to Rewind him back to 1813 to just before he met you.’

  ‘So he’s okay,’ said Arkie, smiling. ‘That’s good.’ Then she thought about TJ’s words. ‘Before he met me? So that means he won’t remember me at all?’

  ‘No,’ said TJ. ‘He won’t remember a thing about Arkie Sparkle from the world beyond.’

  ‘Nobody would believe him anyway,’ said Arkie. But now I know you really did exist, she thought.

  ‘Setting flight coordinates for home,’ said TJ. ‘According to TIC, we’ll be back just in time for dinner. I’m still starving.’

  ‘We’ve just got one more thing to do,’ said Arkie. She keyed her password into BLUR’s computer and emailed the photo of herself and Queen Nefertari to: [email protected]

  She received a reply immediately:

  Treasure No. 1 verified and credit registered in treasure bank.

  Await instructions.

  The kidnapper was online now. She emailed back as quickly as she could:

  Are Mum and Dad okay?

  Please let me speak to them.

  I just need to know they’re all right.

  She stared at the screen, anxious, hopeful. The email back was prompt, and cold.

  No further communication allowed.

  This will not be repeated again: await instructions!

  Arkie slumped back in her seat. Maybe next time, she thought. Maybe they’ll let me speak to Mum and Dad then. If I just keep doing everything they tell me, it will all be okay.

  ‘While you were surviving sandstorms and finding Queen Nefertari,’ said TJ, interrupting her thoughts, ‘I fixed the molecular reconstruction sequence on TimeSlip so that we can both timeslip next time. And I’ve made a special map so that we can track our travels across the world.’

  Arkie looked at the map and the small dot marking Egypt.

  One tiny dot.

  One big world.

  What Next?

  Arkie and TJ were eating pasta in the kitchen when Cleo started barking.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  Arkie and TJ jumped off their stools and scrambled under the kitchen bench as fast as they could.

  Someone was outside.

  Someone was coming closer and closer to the window, trying to peer through the kitchen blinds.

  ‘How did they get past the front gate?’ whispered TJ as they huddled under the bench.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Arkie. ‘I’m sure I alarmed HAL when I got home. But maybe I didn’t?’

  They could hear the person still moving around outside. Then the sound of a car door closing. Then silence.

  ‘Do you think they’ve gone?’ said TJ, after a couple of minutes.

  ‘I think so,’ said Arkie. ‘It’s quiet, and Cleo’s stopped barking.’ She crawled out from under the kitchen bench and over to the window.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she said, lifting the blinds. ‘I’m going to check the front door.’

  She unlocked the door and opened it slowly. The driveway was empty and the front gate was closed.

  Arkie looked down at her feet.

  There was a small box on the doorstep.

  And a note.

  In Real Life

  Abu Simbel

  Tour guides in Egypt today tell of a boy who found the temple of Ramses II nearly buried in the sand and showed John Burckhardt who then told Giovanni Belzoni. The site of the temple was named after this boy. Nothing else is known about him.

  John Burckhardt

  John Burckhardt died in Cairo in 1817, only a few months after the temple of Ramses II had been cleared from the sand.

  Giovanni Belzoni

  Belzoni was 1.8 metres tall and once worked as a strongman in a circus. Later, he excavated tombs and temples in Egypt. He was the first European to enter the temple of Ramses at Abu Simbel. He also discovered the entrance to the Great Pyramid at Giza and found five tombs in the Valley of the Kings, including that of the famous pharaoh Seti I.

  The treasures of Ramses II

  Belzoni shipped all the antiquities he found in the temple back to the British Museum in London.

  The temples at Abu Simbel

  When the two temples at Abu Simbel were in danger of being flooded by waters from Lake Nasser, a worldwide rescue plan, involving more than 100 countries, began. The temples were carefully cut into blocks by thousands of workers, numbered, and then reassembled on higher ground, like an enormous jigsaw puzzle. An artificial mountain was then built around them and that’s what you will see if you visit Egypt today.

  First published 2012 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © Petra James 2012

  Illustrations copyright © Roy Chen 2012

  Copyright TJ’s Style File © Maddy Gerrard 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrat
ions and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  James, Petra.

  Code crimson / Petra James.

  9781742611105 (pbk.)

  Arkie Sparkle. Treasure hunter ; 1.

  For children.

  A823.4

  Adobe eReader format: 9781743348246

  EPUB format: 9781743348253

  Online format: 9781743348239

  Typeset by XOU Creative

  Cover design by Mel Feddersen

  Macmillan Digital Australia: www.macmillandigital.com.au

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