Jia was surprised at how comforted she felt by his presence. She hadn’t felt that kind of comfort since her mother died. She’d always been afraid of her father before. He had always been a stranger to her. But when they had talked the other night in the observatory, the way he had listened to her, asked her questions, she felt a bond form that she knew would not be easily broken, and she began to wonder what her future would be.
Her father brought with him his royal physician, an old man with a bald head and thin mustache who smelled strongly of eucalyptus and ginger. He inspected Matt thoroughly and then declared what Jia already knew. The boy was in a deep sleep. He had suffered a great trauma that his heart and brain could not cope with consciously. So he shut down.
Of course, Jia knew it was the shock of his mother leaving him. That was the last straw. It broke him, and she was starting to fear he would never wake, or if he did he would never truly recover. If Jia ever saw Albert again, she swore she’d strangle him. This was his fault. He’d been scheming with Matt’s mom last night. They’d been planning to steal the compass all along, and it had broken her friend’s heart, the purest, kindest heart she had ever known.
“When he wakes,” her father said, “he will be different.”
“Different how?”
“He will be lost. The Summer Triangle continues to fade. The priests and I have been watching it closely, as well as other movements. I don’t think it is without meaning. Things are changing. They will continue to change and the world will go into deeper chaos, unless the lock is repaired. Your friend here is the only one who can do it. He will need you to help him find his way, do what he needs to do. If he doesn’t, I fear we’ll all be lost.”
“I don’t know how to help him,” Jia said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What are your strengths? What do you do well?”
Jia’s response was immediate. “Fixing things. Machines and structures. I like building and repairing, making things work better.”
This seemed to please her father. “That is a useful skill in all situations, especially when so many things are broken.”
Jia didn’t answer. How could she fix what she could not see, what was not physically in front of her?
“What do you think of Yinreng?” her father asked.
Jia was startled by the questions. She did not know how she should respond. She knew exactly what she thought of Yinreng, but she was not certain if she was walking into a trap or not. It was treasonous to speak of the emperor or his heir with anything less than respect bordering on worship, but Jia had been gone for so long, the rules were not as entrenched in her, and she felt a sense of boldness that she had never felt in all her days in China before. So she told her father the truth.
“I believe Yinreng is unfit to be emperor. One of your servants is more worthy of your throne than he is.”
She held her breath, waiting for her father’s response, his anger or disappointment, at least, but to Jia’s surprise her father laughed. “I suggest you don’t share your feelings with your brother,” he said. It was a warning, she realized. Yinreng had it out for her. She knew just by the way he had looked at her last night at dinner. It seemed her father suspected as well. She thought of her younger self, wandering around the Forbidden City, hiding and spying. Matt was supposed to send her on the Vermillion. She thought that should have happened already, but what if it never happened now? What if too much had changed and so her very life would change? She couldn’t remember, exactly, all that had happened before, but she wasn’t sure if that was because it was so long ago, or if her memories were being erased. What if she started to forget things, forget everything that had happened, forget Matt?
“I believe this belongs to you,” the emperor said. He held something out to her. It was the Qing dynasty amulet. “So you can always return home.”
Jia took the amulet, pressed it to her heart. She knew this was a great sign of trust. And respect. She bowed to her father.
“We cannot fix everything, Quejing,” the emperor said. “We do what we can. We try to do what is right, but not everything will be perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes, and sometimes sacrifices have to be made. We all have to sacrifice for what is right and for those we love.”
Jia felt her heart clench, fearing what those sacrifices might be.
Her father left and she continued her vigil at Matt’s side. She had one of the servants bring her the bag in her room. She changed back into her pants and tool vest. As pretty as the dress was that she’d worn to dinner last night, she felt more herself in her regular clothes. There was another change of clothes in the bag, too, clothes that were not her own. She had a vague memory of borrowing them from someone, Matt’s sister. What was her name again? Riley? Trudy? She shook her head. She should know her name, should remember what she looked like, but it was stuck in some part of her brain that she couldn’t reach.
She found Pike’s book, too, among her things. She knew it was really Matt’s book, but she associated it with Pike so much, it was now more her book than Matt’s. Having nothing else to do, she started reading it from the beginning, reading all about famous scientists and inventors in time. Many she had read or heard about before, such as Galileo, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison. Others were new to her. She’d never heard of Steve Jobs, though of course she had seen all the fancy computers and phones he made in the future. Wiley had stolen one for her once. It didn’t work unless they were far into the future, twenty-first century, and then there were all kinds of things you had to have, like something called a network and a data package. In the end she simply enjoyed taking it apart and trying to understand how it all worked. She still didn’t completely understand. Some people’s brains . . . she would never stop being in awe of what humans could create and invent, and with no one was that truer than Matt. His mind was like a world unto itself.
She turned the page to Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist who had invented an explosive called dynamite. Jia had heard of it. Brocco had piles of the stuff on the Vermillion, she recalled. He loved to blow stuff up any chance he got. Once, when they were on a mission somewhere in Africa, he’d blown up a section of a mountain that Wiley said was a known diamond mine in the future. They’d cleared out a sizable amount of rough diamond. After, they’d had a wonderful celebration in Nowhere in No Time. Shortly after that, they discovered Pike on board the Vermillion. Pike, Pike . . . why did she leave? Was it just the familiarity of Captain Vincent and the crew? Or was it something else?
Jia turned the page and looked at the pictures of Alfred Nobel, his laboratory. They were all black-and-white photographs, but even so, she thought he looked vaguely familiar to her. She couldn’t think where she had seen him before. It felt recent, but also long ago.
Jia looked up. Matt was awake.
22
Forgetting
Matt was between worlds. No, that wasn’t quite the right way to describe it. That made it sound like he was dying, and he wasn’t dying, he was pretty sure. It was more that he was split in two. He felt part of him was together, solid, lying still in bed, while the rest of him was separated, floating all around like a bunch of dust particles in space, another realm. Definitely not earth. He was in endless space. There was no horizon, no sky, no earth or water. But there was the essence of something more, a kind of presence that he couldn’t see but felt sure was there.
He heard a voice, distant and fading.
Hold on, Matt! Don’t let go!
He wanted to reach out, grab on to whoever was calling out to him, but he had no strength. He wasn’t really here. That other part of him that was still solid and together was pulling him down. These two parts of him struggled against one another. The solid part of him wanted the particles to come back together, and the particles wanted the solid to fly apart. The solid part of him must have won out eventually, because when he woke he was fully together in his bed.
No, not his bed, he didn’t think. He was somewhere else. He�
��d forgotten where. He looked around at the blankets, the tapestries, the furniture. A tapestry of a dragon hung on the wall. On another wall was a series of paintings of Chinese emperors. He was in China, in the Forbidden City. He’d just met the Kangxi emperor yesterday, who just happened to be Jia’s father.
And then he remembered what had happened, what had sent him into a seizure. His mother . . . she had left him.
I’m not your mother.
A sharp pain lashed through his head. He gasped and clutched at his head.
“You’re awake!” Jia jumped up, dropping some book she’d been reading. He hadn’t noticed that she’d been sitting right by his bed. She was back in her regular clothes—pants and a T-shirt with her vest, the many pockets bulging with tools and supplies. Matt decided, even though she had looked beautiful in her dress last night, he liked her better this way. Last night she had been Princess Quejing. This was Jia, his best friend.
Jia rushed to his side. “Does your head hurt?” she said.
“A bit,” he said in a raspy voice. But it was much more than a bit. It felt like someone had dropped a twenty-pound bowling ball on his head. “How long was I out?”
“All night and then some. It’s noon now.”
The events of the previous night came back to him slowly, but remembering them didn’t make him feel any better. It wasn’t just his mother who had left him. Albert had stolen the compass for her, effectively working around her solemn oath to him that she wouldn’t steal it, and they just . . . left. And Gaga and Haha and Uncle Chuck. Vincent had taken them too. How long before he forgot them? There were others that had left him, he thought, but he wasn’t sure who. His memory felt clouded. His head ached. He pressed his fingers to his temples.
“I’ll get you some tea,” Jia said. “You’re probably dehydrated.”
Jia forced about ten cups of ginger tea down him, claiming it could cure any headache, but the pain persisted, as did the fog in his brain. Maybe those particles were still a bit separated, buzzing around inside his skull like a bunch of gnats.
“Matt, I’m so sorry,” Jia said.
“It’s okay,” Matt said, his voice hollow. “It doesn’t matter, really.” And there was part of him that felt that was absolutely true and another part of him telling him that it was a complete lie. It was like there were two beings inside of him, fighting for control.
“Oh, Matt,” Jia said. “Of course it matters! It’s all right to feel sad, you know. And you must know your mother truly loves you. She’s just . . . not herself right now.”
Matt nodded, even though he wasn’t sure what that meant. What did it mean to be yourself or not yourself? Was he himself now? Would he become someone else eventually? Marius Quine . . . and who was he?
Jia picked up the book she’d been reading. It was a book about scientists. It looked vaguely familiar to Matt. He remembered Pike had been reading it somewhere, sometime. But where? Maybe on the Vermillion. The book must be from Wiley’s library.
“Doing some research?”
“A little. I found something I thought you should see.” She opened the book and pointed to a picture. “Doesn’t he look familiar to you?”
Matt squinted at the black-and-white photograph of a man, then looked at the caption. “Alfred Nobel? I’ve certainly heard of him. He invented dynamite, and there are very prestigious prizes named after him.” Ever since he’d learned what they were, Matt had secretly wished to win a Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry or mathematics someday.
“But I think we’ve seen him before,” Jia said. “He was the man on the Vermillion, wasn’t he? The one who was with Vincent when he was chasing us.”
Matt studied the picture again and realized she was right. Nobel was the man he’d seen on the Vermillion, the one holding the case of the strange dynamite.
“I think he’s the reason Pike left us,” Jia said. “I think she knows him somehow.”
Matt nodded. “Pike could definitely be Swedish.”
“Anyway, I think he has something to do with what’s been happening, your family disappearing, the forbidden lock breaking. I think if we could visit him, he might be able to help.”
“Or not,” Matt said. “Clearly he was helping Captain Vincent.”
“We don’t know what he was doing,” Jia said. “Or why.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? We can’t visit him. Nobel’s not alive yet, and I don’t have the compass anymore.” Matt felt at his chest where the compass should have been. It didn’t just feel like something was missing from the outside, but from the inside too.
“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Jia said.
Tong interrupted them with a tray of food. Matt was doubly grateful, both because he really did not want to discuss losing the compass and because he was starving. Plus, he desperately needed to pee. Triply grateful.
Matt got out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom. His legs felt like they would crumple beneath him, like dry pillars of sand. But he managed to hold himself together. After he was finished in the bathroom, he glanced out the window and did a double take.
“Is that the Eiffel Tower?” he said.
“Yes,” Jia said. “It showed up while you were asleep, among other things. China is experiencing time rifts. The emperor says it will only get worse.”
Matt frowned at the tall metal spire reaching above all the buildings of the Forbidden City. This was not a good sign.
“Listen, Matt,” Jia said. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe you don’t need the compass to time-travel.”
“What do you mean? Of course I do. No one can travel without the compass.”
“Marius Quine can,” Jia said.
Matt frowned. That was true. Marius Quine could apparently travel without the compass. He could make himself disappear and reappear wherever and whenever he wanted. Matt remembered the time he’d accidentally traveled to him in the future. Quine said he would teach him how to do it at some point, but it wasn’t until this moment that Matt realized what he might have meant is that he would teach himself.
“You’re right,” Matt said, “Marius Quine can disappear and reappear, but it’s not helpful to me at the moment, because I’m still Mateo. I don’t know how to do it. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“I think you do.”
Matt scoffed. “You think you know what I know better than I do?”
“I know you are constantly underestimating yourself. Just think about it, Matt. You built a time-traveling compass in your grandmother’s basement at the age of twelve. Don’t tell me you can’t do incredible, even impossible things, because we already have proof that you can.”
“Okay, fine,” Matt said. “Yes, I built the compass, and yes, it was incredible, but I had something to go off of. I’d already seen it. I knew it could work, so it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Jia threw up her hands. “So is this! You’ve already seen yourself disappear and reappear, so you know you can do it!”
“But I was much older when I saw myself do it. Maybe it takes years and years to learn. Maybe I won’t be able to do it until I’m, like, fifty.”
“I think you could do it right now if you wanted,” Jia said. “In fact, I think you’ve already done it before, and you didn’t even know it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your seizures. You once told me that doctors never could find any reason for them, right?”
Memories suddenly flooded Matt’s mind—the antiseptic smell of hospitals, the prick of needles, drawing blood, brain scans, endless waits, and nurses giving him stickers. In his memory he was all alone, but that couldn’t be right. Someone had to have taken him to the hospital—his mother or father—but he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t even sure he had a mother or father. “Yeah, so?”
“So, maybe they couldn’t find anything wrong with you because there’s nothing actually wrong with you,” Jia said. “Maybe your seizures aren’t reall
y seizures, but something else entirely.”
“I’m not following.”
“You haven’t seen yourself having a seizure, but I’ve seen it. Twice. I’m telling you, you don’t just shake and twitch. You flicker in and out like a shorted lightbulb. It’s like your body is trying to do something it knows it can do, but your brain doesn’t yet, at least not on a conscious level, so it fights it. Remember when you blacked out when we were in Nowhere in No Time, and when you came back you were convinced you had traveled, but none of us had seen you travel? What if you did travel, but it happened so quickly we just couldn’t see it for what it was. You were just . . . flickering.”
Matt considered this. He had never understood how he had traveled in that moment when he’d gone to see Quine in the future. At the time he thought maybe Quine was the one who had manipulated it all, but Jia’s hypothesis was pretty interesting. He felt she was probably on to something here. He did feel like he was having some kind of out-of-body experience when he had his seizures. The problem was, he hadn’t done any of it on purpose. It had just happened. He had no control over when his seizures happened or how long they lasted. He explained all this to Jia.
“Have you noticed any pattern to your seizures?” Jia asked. “Like when they come on?”
“They usually occur during moments of high stress or excitement,” he said. “Like when I get an adrenaline rush.” It was one reason why his mom had been a bit of a helicopter parent toward him in particular, always making sure he was calm and safe. He was more likely to have a seizure and black out if he was anxious or scared.
“Maybe your seizures are some kind of fight-or-flight response,” Jia said, “but much stronger, so your body loses control? But what if you could learn to control it?”
“It’s an idea,” Matt said. “But how are we supposed to test it—put me under a lot of stress or something?”
Jia looked like she was thinking just that. He could almost hear her brain coming up with all the ways she could torture him and make him have a seizure.
The Forbidden Lock Page 23