The Emperor's Riddle

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The Emperor's Riddle Page 9

by Kat Zhang


  Real history, Aunt Lin always said, was like that. Big and messy and complicated. She’d tap on the covers of Mia’s history books and say, That’s only the simplified version. That’s just touching the surface.

  But Mia’s classes at school had never talked about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so she’d never even ­gotten a simplified, touching-the-surface version of events. Instead, she’d received stories of a life lived.

  “Why did they destroy historic things?” her uncle mused to himself. He hesitated, taking a minute to think. “The Cultural Revolution was supposed to make China more modern—more developed. People believed that sticking to old traditions and old ways of thought were suffocating the country’s progress. A lot of people got swept up in the fervor and did things that don’t seem to make any sense now. Like breaking historic things as a symbolic gesture.”

  “And now we can’t get any of it back.” Frustration made Mia’s words clipped. She needed this clue. She needed to find this treasure. She needed to save Aunt Lin.

  And now it seemed history itself—once a mysterious and beckoning friend—was conspiring against her.

  “You really are just like your aunt,” Mia’s uncle said. He laughed, and that should have rankled Mia’s nerves, but he sounded so fond that she couldn’t quite manage it. “Sometimes bits of history are lost, Mia—whether it’s because people destroyed it, or because it just got old and forgotten and worn away.”

  “Not if we save it.”

  “Can you save everything?” he said. “Oh, here’s the store. We almost missed it.”

  It was an easy place to miss—just a few square yards of scuffed laminate floor and pale, fluorescent lights. The woman behind the checkout counter smiled at Mia’s uncle like they knew each other.

  “Anything you want to pick up while we’re here?” he asked Mia, who shook her head. Mostly, she just wanted to get home, and climb into bed, and curl around her disappointment.

  Her uncle, however, seemed set on taking his time. He wandered through the cramped aisles as if he might find treasure in them. Mia wasn’t even sure what he’d come to get.

  It probably wasn’t the small pile of sparklers and fireworks he stopped in front of, his face splitting into a grin. He beckoned Mia closer. “Do you know what these are?”

  “We have fireworks in America,” she said, only half joking.

  “I used to love these as a kid.” He dug around the pile, and picked out a little one, barely the length of Mia’s hand. It looked like a miniature rocket. “Especially these. They shoot right up into the air. We used to compete to see who could get theirs higher. I’m surprised they’re selling them now—usually it’s more of a New Year’s sort of thing. Maybe it’s a sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  He smiled. “A sign that we should buy it. Do you want one?”

  Mia looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t think I could bring it on the plane.”

  “Then we’ll have to set it off before you go,” he said.

  They brought it to the checkout counter along with some milk and a bag of sunflower seeds. Mia’s uncle had just paid when his cell phone rang.

  “One second, I think this is your brother—” He motioned for Mia to grab the rocket while he took the other bag. “Hello? Yes, I found her. She’s fine.” A pause. “We’re just at the store. We’ll be home soon.”

  “Did he finish his basketball game?” Mia asked once her uncle had hung up. She tried to keep the question casual, like it didn’t matter to her one way or another.

  “Oh, he finished that a while back,” her uncle replied. “He stopped playing once we realized you were missing. I think he was a little worried.”

  “He doesn’t need to worry,” Mia said automatically. “I don’t always have to go places with him.”

  “Maybe that’s what has him worried. You not needing him to take you places anymore.”

  Mia laughed at the idea. “Jake barely wants to hang out with me anymore. I don’t think he’s worried about anything.”

  Her uncle gave her a considering look. “Has Aunt Lin told you stories about us, when we were growing up?”

  “A little,” Mia said. When Aunt Lin had recounted tales of her childhood here in Fuzhou, she’d mostly talked about the adventures she’d gotten up to with her school friends, or with Mia’s mother, once she was old enough to take around the city. She’d mentioned her other two siblings too—Mia’s uncle and second aunt—but less frequently. “She said you guys played with your own friends more than with each other.”

  “That’s true,” her uncle said. “Once we got older, we each had our own gang of friends. But when we were small, I wanted to follow her everywhere. And we got up to some pretty crazy things.”

  “Like what?”

  He grinned. “Come on, let’s head homeward, and I’ll tell you on the way.”

  18

  IT WAS GETTING TO BE full dark as the two of them headed back to the apartment. The basketball court lay empty, the stadium lights extinguished. That same neighbor, somewhere up on the fifth or sixth floor, now blasted pop music from their balcony radio. It was a nice change, Mia figured, from the folk music they usually played at night.

  “In some ways, your Aunt Lin was just like she is now, when she was younger,” Mia’s uncle said. “Especially before your mom and little aunt were born, when it was just the two of us. She was always tearing off on ­adventures—things so crazy and stupid dangerous that none of her friends would go along. Only I would, because I wanted so badly to keep up with her, and I felt very loyal to her. But she never appreciated it!”

  He sounded pretty cheerful about this, all things considered. As if the years made everything funny to look back on. “Once, she wanted to explore this abandoned building. It wasn’t a good idea—the whole thing was falling apart. But your aunt wanted to go, so we went. We split up once we got inside. We were supposed to be looking for something . . . I can’t remember what. Something with historical significance—you know your aunt. Anyway, off she went in one direction and me in the other. I was only, what, six or seven? I stepped someplace I shouldn’t have and my leg went right through the second floor. I was too scared to move—what if I broke the floor even more and fell all the way down?”

  “Did Aunt Lin save you?”

  It was strange to hear about Aunt Lin like this—from someone who’d known her the way Mia knew Jake. Mia’s mom was Aunt Lin’s younger sibling too, but there was such a big age gap between them that Mia often couldn’t relate to the way they’d viewed each other, especially when they’d been younger. Things were different now, of course, but once upon a time, Aunt Lin seemed like she’d been half older sister, half second mother to Mia’s mom.

  “Eventually, she did.” He shook his head. “But it took her half an hour. She’d gotten distracted by something or other and had left the house entirely—went so far she couldn’t hear me calling for her. By the time she realized she should come looking for me, I’d shouted myself hoarse.”

  “And then what?” Mia said.

  “And then she grabbed my arms and yanked me free, and I had to hide the bruises on my legs for weeks.”

  “Were you mad at her?”

  “For a little while. I was too young to hold a grudge very long, though.” He laughed. “These are the things brothers and sisters do to each other, Mia. Don’t you agree?”

  “I guess.”

  They’d nearly climbed to their landing, their footfalls echoing through the stairwell. Everything was lit with a pale, diffuse light.

  Her uncle already had his key in the lock when he said suddenly, “You know, I have pictures of the Black Pagoda, if you’d like to see them. Old ones, from when I was a child.”

  “Sure,” Mia said, still distracted by his story and then by the look on Jake’s face when they entered the apartment—the way he stared a
t her, accusing and angry for a second, then glancing away again, as if he didn’t care at all.

  Whatever distance had grown between them the past year, Jake was still her brother; Mia knew when she’d upset him, however much he tried to hide it. Sometimes, in vindictive moments, that knowing was a vicious victory. Right now it just made Mia’s chest tighten.

  I didn’t do anything to him, she told herself. He’s the one who’s been ignoring me—who abandoned our treasure hunt.

  But the guilt wouldn’t let up. She was almost relieved when he stuck his head into her room later that night and said, his voice low, “You know, Mom would kill me if you got kidnapped in China.”

  “Only in China?” Mia said, a halfhearted joke that made neither of them laugh. She’d been fiddling with the firework her uncle had bought her, but she set it aside on the bedspread. “I was fine. I didn’t get kidnapped. Uncle knew where I was.”

  “He guessed where you might be,” Jake said, angry and showing it. “Mia, you can’t just—”

  Mia didn’t hear the rest of his words, because she’d heard words like them so many times already that her ears closed when she felt them coming. She didn’t need to hear them. She could recite them. She’d been told the same things her whole life—from her mother, from teachers, from everyone.

  Mia, you can’t just get caught up in your own imagination.

  Mia, you can’t just make things up and say them like they’re the truth.

  Mia, you can’t just ignore the real world.

  Mia, come back down to earth.

  “Mia—” Jake said, and however sheepish Mia had felt before, it wasn’t as furious as she felt now.

  “I wouldn’t have gone by myself,” she snapped, “if you hadn’t abandoned everything.”

  If you’d just believed me about seeing Ying. If you didn’t care more about playing basketball with those boys you don’t even know—won’t ever see again after we go home.

  Jake rolled his eyes. “You’re always so dramatic.”

  “Aunt Lin’s been taken, Jake. And every day we don’t solve this is another day that man’s got her—I don’t know—tied up somewhere.”

  He didn’t look at her, but at the door, when he spoke. “Maybe he doesn’t have her, Mia. Maybe she’s just off visiting friends, like her letter says.”

  Mia stared at him, numb, until he finally met her eyes again.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine. Then just leave me alone.”

  He didn’t. He opened his mouth to speak, and she jumped off the bed to drive him back out into the hallway. To shut the door in his face.

  “That’s really mature, Mia,” Jake shouted at her through the door. He said it in English, so their uncle couldn’t understand—but there was no way anyone could miss the fact that they were fighting.

  Mia reached into her bag, where she’d stored Aunt Lin’s severed bracelet. She clutched it in her fist and curled up on the bed, shutting her eyes as tightly as she could.

  Come back, she thought.

  Come back.

  Come back.

  * * *

  Somehow, without meaning to, she fell asleep. Her murky dreams were full of twisted, half-familiar faces, along with bits and pieces of Zhu Yunwen’s map. Mia dreamed ­herself back to the Pottery Pagodas of Yongquan Temple, staring at the tiny, hand-crafted buddhas. They whispered something to her, something she couldn’t hear.

  When she stepped forward, trying to get closer, she somehow tripped and ended up in Sanfang Qixiang, ankle-deep in the scraggly grass outside the ruins of Zhang Jing’s house. Ying is here, her dream-self thought. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, but no matter how fast she ran, he was always just ahead of her, always a flutter of black clothing turning the corner or dashing down an alleyway, and Mia kept putting on more and more speed until finally, with a flying tackle, she caught him—

  Only it wasn’t him. It was Aunt Lin. And they weren’t in Sanfang Qixiang anymore, but standing in the giant shadow of the Black Pagoda.

  Aunt Lin looked as she always looked, except a little fuzzier around the edges, as dream people do. She wore blue jeans and a slightly too-big blouse, little stud earrings glinting in her ears.

  “I can’t find you,” Mia said. Instead of coming out sad or pleading, the words came out angry and frustrated.

  The dream–Aunt Lin didn’t reply. She just turned from Mia to the pagoda. Her lips started to move, but before the sounds could reach Mia’s ears, she woke to a knock on her door and her uncle calling her to dinner.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until later that night, after a tense meal during which both Mia and Jake studiously deflected their uncle’s attempts at conversation, that Mia remembered what her uncle had said about his old photographs of the Black Pagoda. Even then, she only remembered because he’d left the photo album on her desk, spread to the right page.

  She quickly found the pictures her uncle had wanted her to see. Like he’d said, he’d only been a little boy in them, chubby-cheeked and squinting into a winter sun. He was so bundled up that he was practically as wide as he was tall.

  There were only two snapshots. One of them was wide-angled, with Mia’s uncle taking up a tiny portion of the frame. Even so, she could tell he was staring at the camera with a goofy expression, like he was laughing at the photographer. The other one was a close-up, his face looming large next to one of the stone figures at the base of the pagoda.

  Mia couldn’t help laughing. It looked like he was trying to copy the stone figure’s serene expression but couldn’t quite hide his grin.

  Wait.

  Mia lifted the album off the desk. The photograph, like all the others on the page, was black-and-white, but it was clear enough to see something etched at the bottom of the buddha’s cheek.

  She scrambled up from the chair and made a beeline for her uncle. He was out on the balcony, watering his plants, and to his credit, he didn’t ask her any delaying questions when she spat out an excited, garbled request for a magnifying glass.

  Magnified, the buddha’s face looked a little distorted, and a lot grainy, but the scratchy marks to the side of his chin were definitely more than just slips of a stone­mason’s chisel or faults in the photograph.

  They were a pattern.

  It was a good thing she’d done this twice already, because as Mia pulled out her map and copied the lines down, she was so shaky she could barely get the pattern right.

  Magnifying glass still grasped in her fist, she ran back out onto the balcony and—and almost threw her arms around her uncle to hug him. A bit of her happy delirium cleared at the last minute. She stuttered to a stop, shy and awkward again.

  In the end, she just gave him the magnifying glass back and grinned—a big, show-every-tooth sort of grin that only got wider as he grinned confusedly back.

  19

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE CLUE left. One more space on the map left blank. It occurred to Mia, as she brushed her teeth the next morning, that even a complete map wasn’t much good if she didn’t know where to start. She’d spent half the night staring at the patterns she’d already copied onto the page, trying to decipher their meaning.

  It looked like abstract art. Something interesting to hang on the wall, maybe, but nothing that represented any place Mia knew of. Would the final piece make everything click together? Or would she just be left with another mystery?

  But that was something she could worry about later. For now there was still one more riddle to solve.

  I lie cloistered in a shadowy mountain glen

  Edged by sea, enclosed by sturdy walls of stone

  But protection of my eternal sleep

  Lies with the twin dragons stretched out below

  Approach me at my final rest

  And look for me at the head.

  She pondered it all through breakfast.
And then all through a long, fancy lunch with yet another group of her mom’s old friends, who alternately cooed over Mia and ignored her while she and Jake sat politely and bored stiff in their chairs, eyes wandering from the red-and-gold embroidered tablecloth to the glass lazy Susan laden with food, to the crisp white napkins and shimmery chandelier.

  Usually, they could have at least thrown each other secret, exasperated looks when the adults weren’t paying attention. But they weren’t talking, so they just stewed in their separate boredoms until lunch ended.

  Things weren’t any better back at the apartment. Even with a fan blowing right at her, Mia felt so riotously hot she thought she might explode. She paced the apartment, muttering the riddle to herself under her breath, until her mom asked her to please be a little quieter, Mia, so I can take a nap.

  “Where are you going?” her uncle asked when he saw her pulling on her shoes.

  “Nowhere,” Mia huffed. “Downstairs. Out.”

  It wasn’t any cooler outdoors, but a bit of the jittery energy beneath Mia’s skin calmed as she threw herself onto the apartment building’s front steps. She tilted her face toward the afternoon sun, her eyes closing—then popping back open as something, someone, cast a shadow over her.

  It was one of the boys Jake played basketball with. He was dressed for a game, wearing a sleeveless shirt and clunky, purple tennis shoes. He smiled. “Hey, you’re Jake’s little sister, right? Is he coming down?”

  “I don’t know.” The answer came out pricklier than Mia had intended. How did Jake always find a cheerful word for strangers? “He didn’t tell me,” she amended, trying to make her voice sound the way Jake’s did—casual, friendly. “Do you have a game today?”

  “Just a practice,” he said. “We’re playing another team tomorrow, though.” Maybe Mia’s attempts were working, because instead of walking away, he added, “Jake said you guys were working on a project together. Researching an old emperor—Zhu Yunwen?”

  “Something like that,” Mia said, startled. She hadn’t imagined Jake would tell his new friends anything about their treasure hunt. She wasn’t sure if she was pleased that he’d acknowledged it, or betrayed that he’d talked about their secret.

 

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