Free The Magnificent 12 by Michael Grant Page A

you, like, a fantastic poem.”
    â€œThen get to it, silly,” Risky said.
    Gil exited the temple with the intention of writing a poem, all right, but not a love poem. And also he would be writing it a long, long way from Babylon.
    He raced to the holding pen full of sacrificial animals and yelled, “Are there any horses here?”
    One of the humans reclassified as sacrificial “goats” said, “If it means getting out of here, I can pretend to be a horse!”
    Which was how Gil Gamesh ended up riding for his life from Babylon on the back of a cheesemaker’s curd-skimmer slave named Enkidu.
    They rested for a moment atop a nearby hill and looked back just in time to see a massive pillar of oily smoke rising from the desert on the other side of the city. Inside that greasy black smoke was a fell beast of incredible size—the world’s sole surviving apatosaurus. It walked with a slow, shambling gait. Atop that apatosaurus on a slightly unsteady canopied saddle rode the Pale Queen. An army of monsters walked before her and behind her.
    â€œOkay,” Enkidu said brightly after seeing what was coming. “I’ve rested plenty!”
    â€œLet’s get out of here,” Gil agreed.

Nine
    V alin’s plan was obvious: he clearly wanted Mack to find some way to rewrite history. He would hold Stefan’s and Xiao’s lives hostage to ensure that Mack did not flee.
    Mack definitely would have fled if given half a chance. For one thing, the Cossacks struck him as a bunch of guys who would just as soon cut your head off as say hello. In fact they were so heavily armed all the time that if you happened to just accidentally bump into one, you were in danger of losing a hand.
    The other reason Mack wanted out was that he didn’t think it was a good idea to mess with time travel. Who knew what damage he might do? What if he did manage to convince Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy to continue seeing Boguslawa? What if they got married? What if they had kids? What if those kids became evil and altered the course of history? Or for that matter, what if they were great and amazing geniuses who invented cars way too early?
    On the other hand, obviously whatever he did couldn’t change the future too much, could it? After all, if he changed the future so much that he himself was not born, then he wouldn’t have existed to come back in time and cause himself not to be born. Would he?
    These kinds of thoughts brought on headaches, and when he explained them to his friends, they were no help.
    Xiao, who was constantly guarded by two Cossack warriors, simply said, “These things are unknowable. You must do what you feel in your heart is right.”
    And Stefan, who was guarded by nine Cossack warriors, said, “Huh,” which in this case meant, “I don’t like paradoxes.” And he would threaten to punch Mack if Mack insisted on trying to talk metaphysics. 32
    Mack missed Sylvie. She totally would have talked about paradoxes with him.
    Mack decided to focus on simply getting himself and his friends out of trouble. The easy way seemed to be to convince Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy to remain true to Boguslawa.
    All he had to do was change the future in such a way that Valin did not become the descendant of someone named Izmir the Clown.
    So . . . change the future, but without changing the future.
    Headache pills were still hundreds of years away from being invented, so Mack shrugged it off, said, “Whatever,” and at the first opportunity introduced himself to Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy.
    â€œHey, my name’s Mack.”
    It was a couple of days after Mack had been rudely shanghaied to the seventeenth century, and they were watching a game of polo. Polo is a game where men on horses hit a ball using long-handled hammers. In Cossack polo the ball was a head. Yes, they were a pretty tough bunch of guys, the