01_-_The_Alchemyst

In fact, he’d been lying to Josh from the very beginning. He hadn’t even
been Nick Fleming. And somewhere at the back of Josh’s mind, an ugly
question was beginning to form. Keeping his voice low and his eyes on the
road ahead, he asked, “Did you know all this would happen?”
Flamel sat back into the deep leather seat and turned to look at Josh.
The Alchemyst was partially in shadow and he clutched the seat belt across
his chest with both hands. “What would happen?” he asked carefully.
“You know, I’m not a kid,” Josh said, his voice rising, “so don’t talk to
me like one.” In the rear seat, Sophie muttered a little in her sleep, and he
forced himself to lower his voice. “Did your precious Book predict all this?”
He caught a glimpse of Scatty moving in the backseat and realized she had
eased forward to hear the Alchemyst’s answer.
Flamel took a long time before replying. Finally, he said. “There are
some things you must know first about the Book of Abraham the Mage.” He
saw Josh open his mouth and he pressed on quickly. “Let me finish. I always
knew the Codex was old,” he began, “though I never knew just how old.
Yesterday Hekate said she was there when Abraham created it…and that
would have been at least ten thousand years ago. The world was a very
different place then. The commonly held view is that mankind appeared in
the middle of the Stone Age. But the truth is very, very different. The Elder
Race ruled the earth. We have scraps of the truth in our mythology and
legends. If you believe the stories,” he continued, “they possessed the power
of flight, they had vessels that could cross the oceans, they could control the
weather and had even perfected what we would call cloning. In other words,
they had access to a science that was so advanced, we would call it magic.”
Josh started to shake his head. This was too much to take in.
“And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human
race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for
example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their
pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more
computing power than was used to send the first rockets into space. We have
electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure
diseases that only fifty years ago were fatal. And the rate of change is