City in the Clouds Read Online Free

pants, which were beginning to slip down on him. “Gotta give them biscuits or they get mad.”
    Sparr squinted. “Biscuits?”
    “Um, right!” Keeah blurted out, her voice not so deep anymore. “Then we’ll go find those pesky kids. And that princess. You know, the junior wizard. She’s powerful, but we can take her.”
    Eric’s eyes gaped. He nudged Neal. Neal’s foot was turning back into a bug foot.
    “If you find the children, throw them off the side!” Sparr boomed. “Go! We leave Ro soon!”
    Neal grabbed Eric, Julie, and Keeah. They clomped out the door and ran until they were out of breath.
    “Bodo and Vasa could have told us we were on a timer!” Eric exclaimed when they were far away from the Guardians’ room.
    Julie bit her lip. “We need to split up. You guys head to the Tower and find Neal’s cure. I’ll see if I can help Bodo and Vasa. We’ll meet at the front steps in an hour.”
    “Half an hour,” Keeah said. “Ro will disappear very soon. Look.”
    They all looked out a window in the hall. Outside the palace, the sky was turning a deep blue. The moon shone through puffy white clouds.
    “It’s nearly midnight,” Keeah said. “We haven’t much time.”
    “I’ll go with Julie,” Neal said. “My bug sense may help us stay away from Ninns. Real Ninns.”
    “Neal, you’ll be normal again soon,” Eric said, patting his friend on the back. Then he stopped. Neal’s back was as hard as a shell.
    Eric swallowed hard.
    Neal was getting worse. Much worse.
    “Come on, Keeah,” Eric said. “To the Tower!”
    The gang split up. With Ninn footsteps echoing all around them, Eric and Keeah threaded their way toward the center of the palace.
    To the giant Tower of Memory.
     

Seven

Written in Stone
     
    The Tower of Memory was a huge spiral of stones coiling up from the ground.
    Eric and Keeah entered a vast inner courtyard, looked up, and saw it.
    “It’s huge,” Eric whispered.
    Row upon row of rough gray blocks circled higher and higher into the starlit sky.
    “Do you have the papers with our name symbols?” Keeah said, spotting a narrow opening in the tower.
    “Yes.”‘ Eric clutched Neal’s square of paper, along with his own and Julie’s. “Let’s do it.”
    They slipped through the opening.
    The inside of the tower was empty and very quiet. The only noise was a faint scratching sound from above.
    Eric squinted up. There, on the very top row of stones, barely visible in the mist and moonlight, was the magic feather. Quill. It scratched word after word into the stones, writing quickly, then stopping, then writing faster than ever.
    Whenever it filled one stone with the strange words and symbols, another stone mysteriously appeared next to it. Quill filled that one and went on to another. And another.
    “This is so weird,” Eric said softly. “The Tower is building itself. It keeps getting taller.”
    “Quill writes what happens to everyone,” Keeah said. “Everything that has ever
    happened in Droon is right here.”
    “And some things that haven’t happened yet.”
    Eric turned a complete circle as he followed the rows of silvery gray stones, looking for the strange symbols the Guardians had given them.
    Keeah breathed out suddenly.
    “What?-” Eric said, turning to her.
    “My mother’s symbol!” she said, running to the wall nearest her. “And Sparr’s! I see them. That must be it! What happened to her at Plud!”
    She began scratching down the strange words with the pencil Bodo had given her.
    Then Eric saw his own name among the carvings. “Oh, wow!”
    Next to it were Julie’s and Neal’s names. He scanned the lower row’s to see if the names appeared before then. No, they didn’t. But their names were written many times after that. He looked up as far as he could. Their names were still there, curving into the upper rows.
    All the way into the future?
    Would he and his friends do many things in Droon? Eric wished he could read the top row, to find