The Emperor's Riddle Read online

  Important people—people with the power to shift and mold history—would have gathered beneath its roof to sip tea and make plans. Mia felt their ghosts pressing around her.

  Or maybe it wasn’t ghosts at all. She whirled around again, the back of her neck prickling, her ears straining. She swore she’d heard something. And this time, she thought she’d seen something too—a flash of movement at the corner of her vision.

  “Someone’s watching us,” she whispered.

  “Hmm?” Jake squatted beside a bit of crumbled wall, picking at the fallen bricks. “What do you think the riddle means by ‘the southern heart’? Should we head inside?”

  One of the doors was cracked open—not exactly inviting, but suggesting that visitors were allowed to enter.

  Mia hesitated, checking over her shoulder. By the time she turned back again, Jake was halfway through the door. She hurried to keep up.

  To her surprise, the door didn’t lead to a room, but straight into a courtyard. A clothesline was strung across one edge of it. It was currently bare of actual clothing—someone must have taken them down in anticipation of the rain—but the hangers were still there. Proof that someone actually lived here.

  More proof lay around the courtyard in the form of little plastic chairs and other knickknacks. A birdcage hung beneath one of the eaves. A bicycle leaned against the wall, a plastic bag tied around the seat to keep it dry.

  Mia relaxed a little. She’d probably just heard the footsteps of a resident—someone trying to get out of the rain. It was coming down harder now. She and Jake ducked beneath an overhang.

  “Maybe the courtyard is supposed to be the heart?” Mia said, looking around. It did seem to be in the middle of everything. She sighed. “I didn’t bring the map.”

  Without the aid of the map’s guiding lines, it would be a whole lot harder to make sure they’d found the right missing piece.

  Jake looked vaguely embarrassed as he reached into his pocket. “I did.”

  “You did?”

  “It turned out to be the right decision, didn’t it?” he said defensively. He unfolded the sheet of paper and pressed it flat against one of the wooden walls. Together, they studied the blank space they were supposed to be filling in from the “southern heart” of Zhang Jing’s home.

  Mia turned to face the threshold they’d just crossed. If the courtyard was the heart of the compound, then this made sense as the southern side of the heart. She studied the plain, ancient walls, searching for something like the pattern she’d found at the base of the Pottery Pagoda. There was nothing to be seen.

  Maybe she’d gotten the cardinal directions mixed up. The sky was too overcast to look to the sun for clues—and besides, it was too near noon for that. She chewed at her bottom lip and stepped deeper into the courtyard, ready to investigate every inch of it for Zhu Yunwen’s clue.

  She didn’t get far before something arrested her attention. But it wasn’t a pattern or a clue. It was a face peering at her from one of the compound’s latticed windows.

  It belonged to a girl a little younger than herself, her dark eyes curious. Mia stared back, just as intrigued.

  The other girl opened her mouth, as if to speak. Then her gaze flickered up and past Mia’s head. Her eyes widened.

  This time Mia whirled around so quickly she almost lost her balance. She was just fast enough to catch what the girl had seen—

  A bear of a man with a head of hair like black thunder­clouds.

  Ying.

  It was Ying.

  Her heart pounded.

  He stood in the doorway of the southern wall, something pale blue in his hands. He looked raggedy, like he hadn’t slept since she’d last seen him. His eyes met hers, just for a second. They were dark, and still, and filled with the same muddy mix of melancholy and irritation Mia had shied away from when he’d come to tea.

  Then her gaze shifted back to his hands, and she realized what he was holding.

  That blue was the blue of Aunt Lin’s notebook. The robin’s egg of its inside pages.

  Was this the missing page?

  The one Aunt Lin had used to copy the map?

  Where is she? Mia tried to shout. Where’s Aunt Lin?

  But her lungs wouldn’t expand, and her lips wouldn’t move, and finally, all she could manage was to turn to Jake—Jake, who was crouched by the corner where the southern wall met the west, his back to her—and cry his name.

  “Look!” she said, when his head came up.

  “Just a second,” he said. “I’ve found something—”

  “Jake—it’s Ying!”

  He stood and looked. But it was too late. The man had gone, leaving the doorway empty but for the drizzle and the dampening grass. Mia’s legs unfroze. She tore out of the compound, searching for a flash of Ying’s dark hair. For a glimpse of that blue notebook paper.

  The path outside lay just as abandoned.

  Where had he gone?

  Was Aunt Lin nearby too? Was she desperately trying to get Mia’s attention right this moment?

  She startled as someone’s hand closed around her shoulder. It was only Jake, his eyes bright with excitement. “I think I found it,” he said. “The clue.”

  Mia resisted as he tried to pull her back into the courtyard. “I saw Ying—I swear I did.”

  “Well, he’s not here.” Jake barely sounded like he was listening to her. He’d learned, at least, to not say things like, You thought you saw him, Mia, which was what he used to say. It had driven Mia absolutely crazy.

  But she could tell that was what he was thinking.

  “Come here,” he said, and sighed when she ripped out of his grasp, darting forward a few more steps.

  “Aunt Lin!” she shouted into the rain. “Aunt Lin!”

  “Mia,” Jake snapped. “There’s no one there.”

  Mia sucked in a long breath and quieted. He was right. There was no one there—not anymore. But there had been. The shock of it reverberated in her.

  Jake took hold of her shoulder again, and this time she didn’t resist, grudgingly following him back into the courtyard. As it turned out, he hadn’t been looking at the wall, but at a pile of loose bricks that had fallen off it. Someone had collected them into a stack.

  Jake grabbed one and held it up for Mia to examine. “See it?”

  The brick must have cracked in half when it fell, leaving one end rough with protruding stones. No, they weren’t stone—they were tiny seashells. Mia remembered what her mother had said about the houses here being built from sand.

  But none of that felt relevant right now. Not with Ying’s shadow hanging over her.

  “Yeah, shells,” she said. “So what?”

  Jake gave her an exasperated look, dropped the brick, and picked up another one. This one was less damaged. He tilted it toward the weak sunlight, so that the shells glittered. “You don’t see it? There’s a pattern there!”

  Mia squinted. Once she managed to pull her thoughts from Ying and actually focus on the brick, she did see what Jake was talking about. The shells embedded in the brick weren’t randomly scattered, as she’d thought. They’d been placed to form a pattern. It looked a bit like a cross, only with an additional line at the end of it.

  “Are they all like this?” Mia tilted her head back to look at the rest of the wall.

  “I think most of them are.” Jake grinned at her, his annoyance momentarily forgotten. “Can you imagine the work it must have taken, making every single brick like this?”

  Mia shrugged. She couldn’t help checking over her shoulder again, just to make sure Ying wasn’t lurking. She almost wished he were—then at least Jake might see him.

  She stayed quiet as Jake copied the new clue onto their map. He folded it back up afterward and stuck it in his pocket with a smile. “Two clues in two days. Not bad.”r />
  Mia didn’t smile back. “I saw him, Jake,” she said quietly. “I saw Ying. He was right there.”

  “You sure you’re not just saying that because you’re upset I found the clue and you didn’t?” Jake said, laughing.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Mia growled. “I saw him—”

  “Okay, okay.” Jake’s grin faded. “Don’t freak out.”

  I’m not freaking out, she thought. But saying it would only make things worse. So Mia just bit her tongue, silent, and looked away. Her chest tightened.

  Jake motioned for her to lead the way out of the compound. “I’m just saying, it would be a pretty big coincidence, you know? Him being here exactly the same moment we’re here. Even if you’re right about him having the map and the clues. Even if you’re right about him trying to find the treasure—the chances of him showing up here . . .”

  Mia walked faster, trying to leave her brother and his doubts behind.

  At the end of the day, when push came to shove, Jake would never take her seriously.

  14

  THEY DIDN’T STAY MUCH LONGER at Sanfang Qixiang after that. Between the rain and the new, crackly, thunderclap tension between Mia and Jake, there wasn’t much fun left in it. Their mom wasn’t in the best of moods either. She’d been left alone at the table for twenty minutes with plates of rapidly cooling dumplings.

  “I don’t know what got into you two.” She sighed as they waited for the bus to take them home.

  Neither Mia nor Jake replied.

  The rain got harder as the afternoon wore on, crashing onto the city in waves of water. Mia holed up in Aunt Lin’s room, trying to read one of the books she’d brought, and wishing that the rain would stop so she could go outside. That Jake would come and apologize for being an idiot and not believing her.

  That her aunt had never disappeared.

  Just before sunset, one of three of her wishes came true: The rain slowed to a sprinkle, then dwindled away entirely. Mia looked up hopefully when Jake knocked at her door, but he didn’t look her in the eye, and only said, “Come on, Mom wants us to pick up some stuff for dinner before it gets dark.”

  The two of them were quiet as they headed down the stairs. Outside, the sunlight had turned golden, the air cooled by the afternoon showers. Mia was lost in her thoughts, sidestepping puddles, and didn’t notice Jake wandering away from her until he was on the other side of the parking lot.

  He edged up to the fence surrounding the basketball court. On the other side, a group of boys—high school age, maybe a little older than him—ran a big, spongy roller across the court, trying to soak up the rainwater.

  Mia came up behind him, was about to tell him they needed to go, when one of the other boys caught sight of them.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do you play?”

  Jake gave him an easy grin. The one that made him everyone’s friend in two seconds flat. “Sure,” he said. “Are you looking for someone to join you guys?”

  The older boy called back to his friends, and before Mia knew it, Jake had jogged onto the damp court—was laughing and chatting with the other boys. She herself might as well have been a ghost on the other side of the fence. Or perhaps just part of the scenery.

  When Jake finally remembered that she existed, he only said, “Can you go on without me? You know where the store is, right?”

  Mia nodded. She tried to say something—what, she wasn’t sure. Something. But it didn’t matter what it was, because Jake never gave her the chance. He turned back to the other boys, and they closed themselves off to her, lit by the tall lights of the basketball court.

  She waited a few seconds longer, as if Jake might change his mind. Then she slunk off alone down the street.

  * * *

  By the time she returned from the store, swinging a bag of groceries, the basketball game was underway. She snuck looks at the court as she passed, and couldn’t help noting that Jake was just as good, if not better, than most of the other players. She disappeared into the apartment building just as he made a basket. The boys’ cheers swelled the twilight darkness.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” their mom said, when Mia handed her the groceries and told her Jake was still outside. “He’s always quick to make friends, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Mia said. “I guess.”

  She stayed a little longer in the kitchen, helping her mom wash vegetables and peel sweet potatoes. But then her uncle came in to lend a hand, and the space wasn’t large enough for three people, even if the third was as small as Mia. She retreated back to Aunt Lin’s room, and her book, and the two wishes she’d wished that hadn’t come true.

  * * *

  The weekend arrived. A few weeks ago, when Mia had been at home and school had been in session, this would have been cause for celebration. Now it was just cause for boredom.

  Jake seemed to have forgotten all about Mia, and the treasure hunt, and everything they’d been working for. When he wasn’t in the middle of an actual game, he was playing one-on-one keep-away or throwing hoops by himself. He came home sweaty and exhausted, barely pausing to wolf down food before showering and collapsing onto the sofa. At dinner, he and their uncle—who’d apparently loved to play basketball, too, when he was younger—went on about basketball in a language Mia only half understood.

  The whole situation wouldn’t have been so awful if she were doing better with the last two riddles. But each was as indecipherable as the other, and there were only so many times Mia could reread them before she just wanted to bang her head against the wall.

  Sunday morning, her mom declared that she and Mia were going clothing shopping. She seemed to expect Mia to be more excited about that than Mia really was. For her sake, Mia tried to pretend.

  They caught a bus downtown and trudged through one bright, shiny shopping mall after another. The malls here were much bigger than any in Mia’s little hometown, but otherwise they were pretty similar. The famili­arity was more tiresome than it was comforting.

  Usually, Aunt Lin took Mia shopping if she needed clothing. Or, more recently, Mia would go with Thea and Lizbeth. Coming to this mall with her mom was a bit strange.

  She let her mother hustle her from store to store. She slipped into dresses, then out again—pulled on shirts and jackets and then shimmied them off again. Every time her mom said, “Do you like it?” she just shrugged, and her mom would sigh.

  “Okay, Mia,” she said after an hour or two had passed. They stood by the escalators in a department store, and Mia stared at the people getting on and off, knowing what question was coming next. “What’s wrong?”

  My job is to put out fires, her mom had said once, when Mia asked her what she did at work. Mia was accustomed to her taking work calls on weekends or running into the office after dinner because some business catastrophe or another had thrown everyone into a panic.

  Most times, Mia enjoyed knowing that people needed her mom—that they looked to her to solve their problems. Other times, she wished her mom were as good at understanding Mia’s catastrophes as she was those of her company.

  “Mia?”

  “Nothing,” Mia said.

  “Doesn’t seem like nothing,” her mom said, and Mia didn’t really have a response to that, so she just looked back at her and shrugged. When her mom spoke again, her voice was softer. A little thin. “Is this about Aunt Lin being gone?”

  It was, but not in the way she thought. Not in any way Mia could tell her.

  Her mother smiled, and for once it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even nice. It fluttered around her mouth like something wounded. “It doesn’t have to be that terrible. I thought it might give us some time to spend together—just us. Mia, I know we don’t always get a lot of time with each other when we’re at home. I’m sorry about that.”

  It felt wrong to hear her mother apologize. It felt even more wrong to see her upset and
trying to hide it and failing.

  It’s okay, Mia tried to say, but couldn’t, so she just stared at the ground instead.

  “Mia, you know Aunt Lin isn’t—she isn’t always reliable.” Her mouth tightened, like she regretted saying that, but it didn’t stop the sudden anger in Mia’s stomach.

  “She is,” she bit out. “She—”

  She cut herself off. There were a lot of ways she could finish that sentence. A lot of hurtful things she could say—that roiled around in her head, burning like steam. But she saw the way her mom’s face had gone quiet and still, and she swallowed everything back.

  They stood in silence for a little while.

  “Do you want to go home?” Mia’s mom said finally.

  Mia knew her mom meant the apartment and not home home. But when she nodded, she knew in her heart that she meant the latter.

  15

  BACK AT THE APARTMENT, MIA’S Mom silently disappeared into her room with her laptop. Her brow was furrowed. Whether it was because of their fight at the department store, or because of the work call she’d received just as they came through the door, Mia wasn’t sure. It was eight a.m. on a Sunday back home, and her mom was technically on vacation, so something big must have happened.

  As “fire putter-outer,” Mia’s mom was never really off from work. Not completely. Getting this month away wasn’t easy for her, Aunt Lin had told Mia, gently chiding, when she’d heard her complaining about how long they’d be in China. It was really important to her to have this time with you and Jake.

  Mia had forgotten that conversation until now, and she didn’t like the way it made her stomach twist. She looked toward her mother’s closed door. It was too late to do anything now. She could already hear her mom speaking to someone in English on the telephone.

  “Didn’t find anything you liked?”

  Mia hadn’t even noticed her uncle hanging out on the sofa, his ever-present newspaper half blocking his face. He lowered it as she turned to face him.