Uncle Li gently puts Mr. Papers back on my shoulder. “You remember how to get back to the hotel?”
I nod. If I say anything I’m afraid my voice will crack and I’ll lose it.
Uncle Li turns and walks through hole, disappearing into the darkness. Justine and I replace the back wall and the shelves before unbolting the door and sneaking out.
We walk in silence under a blanket of early morning stars. With no city light and no clouds to obscure the sky, it looks like a star traffic jam. The air is dry and crisp and the only sound we hear is the electric buzzing of insects we cannot see.
When we make out the hotel glowing in the distance, Justine says, “Caity, I don’t know if I can do this. After what we heard tonight, I’m just—”
“I know,” I say, putting my arm around her shoulder as we walk. “Honest, I know exactly what you’re thinking and I feel the same way. But can we talk about it after we sleep? I can barely even focus my eyes.”
She nods. I feel guilty about being unable to respond to Justine or even comfort her, but I’m just far too freaked out myself right now to offer any comfort.
Once back safely in our rooms, I take a piece of hotel stationary and write a note for Clath:
Dear Professor Clath,
Justine and I are both terribly sick from last night’s room service. Can we wait until the afternoon to meet for lessons? We are trying to sleep after a fitful night.
Your devoted students,
Caity and Justine
I slip the paper under Clath’s hotel room door, flashing back to the last time I did this on Easter Island. After slipping that note to Alex, I had one of the worst nights of my life.
When I get back to the room, Justine is already asleep. Mr. Papers has fallen asleep in my open bag, curled up on a sweatshirt.
Collapsing on the bed, I’m more than happy to escape to a world of dreams. Though I try not to, I cannot help but wonder if that was the last time I would ever see Uncle Li.
TWENTY
A beam of light wakes me from a deep, dreamless sleep. Looking for the source of the light, I see Mr. Papers lifting a corner of the curtain to look out the window. I roll over to peek at the clock; it’s one in the afternoon. As I get up to go to the bathroom, I notice an envelope has been slid under our door. The word “Coursework” is written on it in Clath’s hand. Ugh. She’s not letting anything get by.
Justine is sitting up in bed when I come out of the bathroom, her hair a messy beehive as if she’d been grinding the pillow all night long.
“Just tell me it was a dream,” she croaks.
I hand her a bottle of water and say, “It was a dream.”
She drinks the whole bottle in a few gigantic swigs and then falls back to her pillow.
“Homework,” I say, flashing the envelope. “Let’s see what the Pedagogue wants us to learn.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if you opened it and it said, ‘Write a five hundred word essay on how the Shadow Government and the Church have controlled the masses by weaving myths with religion.’”
“Almost as funny as if it said, ‘Describe how you would change the very nature of humanity by wiping out all third-world debt.’”
We both start laughing hysterically because it’s not at all funny and actually too scary to face.
“We’re so screwed,” Justine says.
“Yup,” I agree.
We both stare at the ceiling.
“But it would be pretty cool to be modern-day Robin Hoods,” I say.
“Seriously,” she replies.
“Right?”
“Right.”
“But how?”
“Exactly.”
“Are we really talking about this?” I say.
“I don’t know, are we?”
“I think we are.”
“Crap.”
“Exactly,” I reply.
I open the envelope to see what kind of evil coursework Clath has slid under our door. Inside are ten photographs of various pieces of art featuring the Three Hares symbol.
On the last one is a sticky note saying, “Now that you’ve seen it in its original context, please try your hand at decoding.”
“I can’t believe I forgot to ask Uncle Li about this symbol before we left!” I say, mad at myself for overlooking the main reason we were supposed to be studying at Dunhuang in the first place.
Laying out all the photographs on the floor between us, Justine and I each lie face-down on our beds so we can both look down on them. Mr. Papers comes over from the windowsill and walks up my back to see what’s going on.
“What do you think, Mr. P.?” I ask.
He hops off, grabs a pen from the nightstand, picks up one photo, and spears the center of it with the pen tip.
“Hey!” I yell, reaching to grab the photo back. He jumps up to Justine’s bed and starts to spin the photo on the end of the pen.
“Does this guy ever stop?” Justine asks.
He looks at us as he spins the photo as if to say, “Seriously? You guys don’t get it?”
I try to take in what’s happening and then something clicks. “Is it about the spinning?” I ask.
“Is he saying this symbol is about motion?” Justine asks.
“Right! The rabbits represent motion—ever changing, ever reproducing … ”
“But what does that mean though?” she asks. “Spinning what? Spinning the center section of the Flower of Life where the ears connect?”
“Oooh, maybe you’re onto something. Does something happen when you spin the Flower of Life symbol?” I ask, reaching for my laptop. I open a browser and search “spinning + flower of life.”
“Dude, you will not believe this!” I say, motioning for Justine to come see. “Look what happens when you spin the Flower of Life—you get this thing called a ‘tube torus’!”
“Wait, what? How does it go from the Flower of Life to that donut-like thing?” Justine asks.
“It says here that a tube torus is the spinning, 3D version of the Flower of Life.”
“That’s totally got to be what the Three Hares symbol is about! Three is a key to the number of dimensions and the running in a circle is a key to the spinning!”
Mr. Papers nods and puts his hands in the air like what took you so long?
Since I don’t have a printer, I grab my sketchbook and draw what the torus looks like:
Watching me draw, Justine says, “Okay, so now we get that the Flower of Life makes a tube torus, but one question remains: What’s a tube torus got to do with anything?”
I shrug and keep drawing, but Mr. Papers springs into action. I have to put my pencil down to watch because I rarely get to see him do origami this fast—usually his creations are so complex that it takes a while. After just seconds he produces a pink heart, which he gives to Justine, and after a few more seconds he produces a pale yellow star, which he gives to me.
We thank him and he takes a deep bow, as if all has just been answered.
From the corner of her mouth, Justine whispers, “I don’t want to offend him, but what do hearts and stars have to do with a spinning Flower of Life or the Fraternitas or any of this?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper back. Once again to the browser. We both watch for what pops up when I search various ways on torus + heart + space + stars. I click on one of the top results.
“No way. Papers is a genius! Listen to this: ‘The pumping heart creates a spinning field of electromagnetic energy in the shape of a torus’!”
Reading over my shoulder, Justine says, “Freaky—it says this magnetic field of the heart is even stronger than the magnetic field of the brain.”
“Isn’t it weird to think that we create magnetic fields?” I ask.
“Wait! Look at the result below the one you’re reading—the astronomy website talks about the entire universe being a torus shape!”
“Hearts and stars,” I say, looking at Mr. Papers. He smiles so big we get to see every little tooth in hi
s mouth.
“Click on the heart thing! I want to see more about that,” Justine says. It’s a medical abstract on a U.S. government website about how the heart produces torsion and an electromagnetic field that extends beyond the body.
“Weird,” we both say after we read it. Going back to the search results, Justine points to another odd article.
“Click that one,” she says. “Something about DNA creating this torsion field, too.”
We click through to the site and she reads, “We are all surrounded by a magnetic field that can now be seen and photographed by several medical devices. The torus generated by your DNA and your heart is the same shape as the magnetic torus around the Earth and the sun. From the molecular to the massive, the torus generates a vortex of energy that bends back along itself and re-enters itself.”
Then I see something amazing at the bottom of the page.
“That’s it!” I say, jumping off the bed and pacing. “That’s what Bolon was talking about!”
“What?” Justine asks. “What do you mean?”
Finally, something big is coming together for me.
TWENTY-ONE
Look at the bottom,” I tell Justine. “It says the spinning torus creates gravity!”
“It creates gravity?” Justine asks, looking at the page. “You mean even at the tiny DNA and heart level?”
“Yes! Do you remember the poem I showed you, the one that came out of the decoded spirals? One of the lines is, ‘Like gravity, love is a force of great might’!”
I grab the computer and pull up the document with the whole poem in it.
“Read that!” I say, pointing to the stanza I’m talking about.
This birth may come like a storm or a dove
The outcome lies in how much we can love
Like gravity, love is a force of great might
True power comes when we connect and unite
“Do you see how this is important to our whole mission?” I ask.
“Not totally,” Justine shrugs. “Sorry … ”
“Remember after the first gathering, when I was on Easter Island, you were in Peru, and Chatrea and Amisi were in Angkor Wat and the pyramids? By getting together, being ‘on the same channel’ so to speak, the energy from our combined hearts or DNA or whatever actually affected physics—that’s how we managed to get a reading on the PEAR research equipment!”
“And that’s how we got all the animals that are sensitive to waves to be in phase!” she adds.
“So, the sentence ‘Like gravity, love is a force of great might’ is totally literal.”
“Isn’t that weird? That love can be measured?”
“But only if we’re all working together instead of against one another,” I say.
“And that’s where the constant fear tactics come in,” she says. “That’s where the Fraternitas works its magic. Keeping people in a state of either fear or poverty. Or both.”
“Exactly. Plus, if everything from DNA to the heart to the magnetic field around the Earth, sun, and galaxy all move as toruses—”
“Probably tori, not toruses,” Justine interjects. “Like cactus and cacti?”
“Okay, tori—then getting our human waves to match the powerful waves coming in from the Galactic Center could be key to making this evolutionary leap.”
“Makes total sense,” Justine says.
“In the weirdest possible way that something can make sense … ”
“So the big questions are, what is the next step, and what do we tell Clath?”
I put my face in my hands and we both think for a moment. “I’m guessing she’d be pretty interested in what we found,” I say.
“Well, yeah,” Justine answers, “but how much can we divulge?”
“Just enough,” I answer, opening up a Word document. “Just enough for her to help lead us to answers.”
In about an hour, Justine and I are able to put together a short paper answering Clath’s question: Now that you’ve seen it in its original context, please try your hand at decoding.
The Three Hares:
The Code of the Torus in an Ancient Symbol
By Caity Luxton and Justine Devereux
The Three Hares symbol has been found all over the world, but has never been decoded. The earliest painting of it is from a Buddhist cave in Mogao near Dunhuang, China (600 AD). It was then carried across to Europe on the Silk Road, where it really caught on in England. There it can be found carved in churches all over.
To decode the Three Hares symbol, we started by looking at the one link between the three rabbits: their ears. If you just trace their ears, what you get is a piece of the Flower of Life. The Flower of Life symbol is also found all over the world, in even more places than the hares. It is supposed to be the basis of all things because within these thirteen overlapping circles you can make the five building blocks of organic life: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron (aka the Platonic Solids).
So we looked at the center of the Three Hares symbol and thought about what the hares around the Flower of Life represent: a) SPIN, b) the number THREE, and c) some kind of ILLUSION because though there are three hares, there are only two sets of ears.
Then we looked at what would happen if you applied these three things to the Flower of Life, and that is where we had our Eureka moment! If you SPIN the Flower of Life, you get this interesting vortex shape, and if you make that shape THREE dimensional you get what is called a torus! This shift from the one-dimensional drawing to the three-dimensional torus is the ILLUSION part.
In Math they call the torus the perfect shape and it is now accepted as the model that can be used to describe objects in space.
But this torus, which looks like a simple and delicious cake donut, is not just found in space. It turns out that the muscles of the heart are in the perfect shape to create a torus of energy as it pumps our blood! And on an even smaller level, our DNA forms tori, too. The shape of the Earth’s magnetic field: torus. The shape of the sun’s magnetic field: torus. Everywhere you look, energy is forming in torus shapes.
But the most amazing part of it all is that the torus energy actually creates gravity!
Our theory is that the ancient Chinese, with their well-known thinking on things like acupuncture and feng shui, created the Three Hares symbol to encode this information about how the universe works, from our tiniest building blocks to the largest things in space.
(It only took Western Science ten centuries to create instruments that have the ability to measure the energy from these torus shapes. Way to go, West!)
We both proof the paper and then attach it to an email to Clath, feeling pretty smug.
TWENTY-TWO
Want to go down to the restaurant?” I ask, as I close my laptop.
“Definitely. I’m starving,” Justine answers. “Plus we’ve got to get out of this bleak room,” she says, motioning to the cinderblock walls painted the color of dust.
I open the door and motion for Papers to come along, but he just shakes his head and curls up next to my pillow. All the fun with his old friends last night has worn him out.
The restaurant in the lobby of the hotel is about as bare and simple as our room, and it smells like the funky back rooms I remember at some of Uncle Li’s friends’ places in Chinatown—of roots and spices and other unknown things. But the hot tea, brought by a tiny Chinese man who smiles big enough to reveal a full set of top teeth yet not one bottom tooth, tastes great.
The menu is interesting. Under the Chinese names of food someone has made hilarious attempts at English translations: Bean Juice Steams the Spare Rib, Grill Cowboy Leg, Big Bowl Flower Immerses Pork Kidney, and my personal favorite, White Tree Fungus Braise Pig Heart.
“Just rice, please,” Justine says when the tiny man comes back for our order.
“Two, please,” I add.
He gives us a look of concern so I tap my stomach in the universal “tender tummy” pantomime. He fills up ou
r tea cups, flashes a gummy smile, then takes off for the kitchen.
Justine dumps three packets of sugar into her tea and says, “If you had told me a year ago we’d be sitting in a strange little Chinese hotel recovering from a night in a secret city in Mongolia, I’d have called for the friendly straightjacket patrol to come get you.”
Shaking my head, I pour myself a third cup of tea. “The weirdest part is that there was no build-up to this. Like nothing in my life led me to believe that I would be put in a position like this, you know?”
“Well, you did have that early ninja training,” Justine says.
“I’d hardly call long afternoons in the back of herb shops ‘ninja training’.”
“Still, you’ve had this ‘protector’ your whole life. And your parents are not really standard model.”
“True.”
“I mean, I can’t do any of the stuff you can do on the computer,” she says. “You got all that from your parents.”
“I’d trade it for your looks,” I say, only half joking.
“And that briefcase thing back in San Francisco, that was pure Fiona.”
“Huh. I wonder if that’s how Mom does it? When we met with members of The Council, didn’t Apari say that all that information is registered—we just have to pick up on it? Maybe Mom’s ability to ‘touch sound’ to open safes is really just her tapping into this field of information.”
“Whatever it is, it’s genetic. So maybe there were signs, clues, what have you.”
I shrug. “I guess no sign or clue can prepare you for something as far out of the realm of possibility as what we’re in now.”
The waiter comes in with a big tray. We each get a heaping bowl of rice, and then he sets another two covered bowls on the table. Pointing to the bowls, he says, “Good for stomach” before bowing and backing away.
I lift the lid on my mystery bowl, then gently set it back down.
“And every time we think it could not get weirder, it does,” I whisper.
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