Akiko in the Castle of Alia Rellapor by Mark Crilley Page B

reached inside Gax and produced a tool about the size of an eggbeater. At one end of the tool was
    a small rotary blade. Clicking a button on one side, Spuckler made the blade spin at an incredible speed.
    “Cover your eyes, now,” Spuckler said to Mr. Beeba and me. “This thing tends to send out a lotta sparks.”
    I turned my face away and covered my eyes with my hands.
    ZZZZYYYYAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!!
    There was a terrible grinding sound. I wanted to see what Spuckler was doing, but I didn’t dare look. There were two loud clanking noises, like the sound of a barbell being dropped on a metal floor. Ten or twenty seconds later the noise stopped and Spuckler invited us to see what he had done.
    Two bars of the cage had been cut away, creating a window about three feet tall and two feet wide.
    “C’mon, everybody!” Spuckler shouted. “Up on top of the cage! Fast as ya can!”
    By then the pools of lava on the floor had reached the bottom of the cage and begun to seep between the bars. I stuck my foot into Spuckler’s folded hands and stepped up through the opening he had made.
    When I got to the top of the cage, I saw that the chain was gone, just as Spuckler had said. Peering up into the darkness, I could see a tiny circle of light in the distance. It looked as if we were at least half a mile away from the top of the pit.
    “Akiko! Do give me a hand here, won’t you?”
    It was Mr. Beeba. His head was poking out from under the roof of the cage, a look of real terror gripping his face. I reached down with both hands and helped him up. Spuckler lifted Gax by his round robot body and carefully handed him to us before swiftly scrambling up himself. By then the floor of the cage was completely covered with white-hot lava, which created an intense dry heat beneath us. It was like being trapped inside a parked car with all the windows up on a blistering August day. We quickly peeled off our thick winter coats and allowed them to fall into the glowing fire beneath us.
    “We’re doomed!
Doomed!
” Mr. Beeba wailed.
    For once his fears seemed to be completely justified. The fiery rivers continued pouring down the walls, raising the level of the lava to ever greater heights. Within minutes the cage was more than half buried. Stranded on the top, there was nothing we could do but huddle closer and closer together.
    “I just want you all to know,” Mr. Beeba said tearfully, “that I can think of no people I’d rather die with than you. . . .”
    “For cryin’ out loud, Beebs, we ain’t gonna die!” Spuckler said between clenched teeth. But even
he
seemed to have run out of ideas. We all stared longingly at the tiny circle of light hundreds of feet above, hoping that by some miracle the lava flow would stop.
    It didn’t.
    Soon only about a foot and a half of the cage remained above the scalding-hot lava, and another inch vanished with each passing second. Wondering if this really
was
the end, I looked at Spuckler, Mr. Beeba, Gax, and . . . 
    I suddenly realized that Poog was nowhere to be seen.
    Just then the cage began to tremble under us. At first I thought it was just being lifted by the sheer volume of the fiery material surrounding it. But no! It was actually
rising into the air,
floating up out of the lava as if by magic. Spuckler lay down and stuck his head out over the edge of the cage.
    “It’s Poog!” he shouted. “He’s underneath this here cage!”
    He swung his head around and gave us a big toothy grin just as the cage broke free of the lava for good.
    “He’s liftin’ us outta here!”
Spuckler hollered, cackling with delight.

    Mr. Beeba and I held on for dear life as Poog carried the cage—and all of us on top of it—from the very bottom of the pit to the very top. The bricks on the wall raced by as we kept going up, up, up. I sucked in the clean, cool air with hungry gulps as the cage rose over the lip of the hole and settled gently on one side of the room.
    Throck was gone. So