Free Necropolis by Anthony Horowitz Page A

my place in all this. First of all, I have to survive. But that's not enough. I also have to win.
    At least I'm no longer alone.
    When this all began, I knew that I was one of five children, all the same age as me, and that one day we would meet. I knew this because I had seen them in my dreams.
    Pedro was the first one I came across in real life. He has no last name. He lost it — along with his home, his possessions, and his entire family when the village in Peru where he lived was hit by a flood. He was six years old. After that, he moved to the slums of Lima and managed to scratch out a living there. The first time I saw him, he was begging on the street. We met when I was unconscious and he was trying to rob me. But that was the way he was brought up. For him, there was never any right or wrong — it was just a question of finding the next meal. He couldn't read. He knew nothing about the world outside the crumbling shanty town where he lived. And of course he could hardly speak a word of English.
    I don't think I'd ever met anyone quite so alien to me…and by that I mean he could have come from another planet. For a start (and there's no pleasant way to put this) he stank. He hadn't washed or had a bath in years, and the clothes he wore had been worn by at least ten people before him. Even after everything I'd been through, I was rich compared to him. At least I'd grown up with fresh tap water. I'd never starved.
    Almost from the very start, we became friends. It probably helped that Pedro decided to save my life when the police chief, a man called Rodriguez, was cheerfully beating me up. But it was more than that.
    Think about the odds of our ever finding each other, me living in a provincial town in England and him, a street urchin surviving in a city ten thousand miles away. We were drawn together because that was how it was meant to be. We were two of the Five.
    Pedro is pure Inca: a descendant of the people who first lived in Peru. More than that, he's somehow connected with Manco Capac, one of the sun gods. The Incas showed me a picture of Manco — it was actually on a disc made of solid gold — and the two of them looked exactly the same. I'm not sure I completely understand what's going on here. Is Pedro some sort of ancient god? If so, what does that make me?
    Like me, Pedro has a special power. His is the ability to heal. The only reason I'm able to walk today is because of him. We were both injured in the Nazca Desert. He broke his leg, but I was cut down and left for dead…and I would have died if he hadn't come back and stayed with me for a couple of weeks. It's called radiesthesia, which is probably the longest word I know. I've only managed to spell it right because I've looked it up in the dictionary. It's something to do with the transfer of energy. Basically, it means that I got better thanks to him. And as a result, Pedro is more than a friend. He's almost like a long-lost brother — and if that sounds corny, too bad. That's how I feel.
    And then came Scott and Jamie Tyler.
    They really were brothers…twins, in fact. Formerly the telepathic twins, performing with The Circus of the Mind at the Reno Playhouse in Nevada. While Pedro and I had been fighting (and losing) in the Nazca Desert, they'd been having adventures of their own, chased across America by an organization called the Nightrise Corporation. They'd also managed to get tangled up in the American election and were there when one of the candidates was almost assassinated.
    Scott and Jamie are more or less identical. They're thin to the point of being skinny, and you can tell straight away that they have Native American blood — they were descended from the Washoe tribe.
    They have long, dark hair, dark eyes, and a sort of watchful quality. Physically, I would have said that Jamie was the younger of the two, but when they finally reached us — they traveled through a doorway that took them from Lake Tahoe in Nevada to a temple in