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phones. “What do you want?”
    Toria looked out the window at the menu. “Double cheese-burger, fries, chocolate malt.”
    He turned a doubtful eye on her. “You’re nine , Toria. Where are you going to put all that?”
    She smiled. “I’ll eat it all, I promise.” David and Xander were going to be so mad when they found out what she had for lunch. There was nothing in Pinedale like the In-N-Out. Just the dumpy diner.
    Dad placed their order, then she said, “Xander and David are going to freak out. We know where Phemus came from: Atlantis!” She turned to her teddy bear, strapped in beside her on the backseat. “Good job, Wuzzy,” she told it.
    They had just left the UCLA office of Dad’s friend Mike Peterson. The ancient languages expert had listened to the words Phemus had said the night he kidnapped Mom, words that had been captured on Wuzzy’s voice recorder. Using a computer program, Mike told them where Phemus had come from and what he’d said: Have you come to play ?
    But then Mr. Peterson had added: “Considering the violent ‘games’ the Atlantians engaged in to prepare its young people for war, Atlantis is the last place you want to go to ‘play.’ ”
    Toria didn’t want to think about what that meant.
    Dad pulled up to the window and paid.
    Toria stared out at the bustling streets, more people on the sidewalks than you’d see driving all the way through Pinedale, and everything almost glowing in sunshine that seemed brighter, more golden than it was six hundred miles north. All of it brought back memories of their life here, and that got her thinking of Mom. She felt sadness coming on: a tightening in her stomach, an ache in her heart, pressure behind her eyes, like the tears were always there, waiting to come out. She didn’t want that, to feel sad thinking about Mom. She’d believed Dad and Xander and David when they said they would get her back. They were really trying, too. She thought about Mom coming home, her smile, how she’d sweep Toria up in her arms and hug her like she was never going to let go.
    Dad pulled a bag into the car, and the air filled with the smell of burgers and fries.
    “Oh,” Toria said, patting her stomach, “I think I gained five pounds just from the smell!” It was something Mom always said.
    Dad smiled back at her.
    “I’m glad we came here, Daddy. To see Mr. Peterson, I mean.”
    “I think it was a good trip,” he said. He took their drinks from the girl at the window and handed one to Toria.
    “It makes me feel like I’m helping,” she said. “You know, to find Mom. The boys are always going over to those other worlds and everything. I don’t get to do anything.”
    Dad reached back and grabbed her knee. “You found Nana,” he said.
    “I think she found us.” She and David were just trying to find a way out of the Civil War world when Nana, dressed in the bloody smock of a nurse, ran up to them. She would never forget Dad’s face when he saw his mother for the first time in thirty years.
    He said, “But she couldn’t have found you if you weren’t there, right?”
    Toria smiled.
    Dad pulled out of the drive, his hand digging in the bag on the passenger seat. “Well, I hope the boys are enjoying school.”
    “You’re kidding!”
    He shrugged. “It’s the only chance they get to rest these days.”
    She laughed. “Wait’ll they hear what we found out! They’re not going to believe it. Atlantis!”

CHAPTER

seven

    The Atlantian soldier marched David across the square. People pointed and laughed. Playing to the crowd, the soldier jerked him one way, then the other, making him wobble and shake like a puppet.
    David closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain in his arm, shoulder, and neck. His back hurt where one of the boys had kicked him, but it was nothing next to the pulses of agony in his raised, broken arm and the intense ache under the fingers squeezing his neck. The soldier waggled him back and forth again. If the guy was