The Emperor's Riddle

by Kat Zhang

  A woman strolled ahead of them with a waddling corgi puppy. A businessman hurried past, running for the nearby bus stop. Jake pulled Mia out of the way as an old man rode by on a bicycle, pulling a rickety cart piled high with leafy vegetables. The wheels splashed dirty water from the gutters. Everyone seemed lost in their very separate lives, no one paying the least attention to Mia and Jake.

  That, too, was different. Back home, people nodded and smiled at each other on the streets. But Mia supposed that was easier to do when their town was so little, they barely had streetlights.

  The sidewalks got even busier as they rounded the corner. Here, venders lined the sides of the roads, peddling everything from stacks of steamed buns to basins of gasping fish. Some had tiny storefronts. Others only had carts. Boiling oil gurgled away in enormous pots or sizzled in pans as cooks fried up ever-growing piles of scallion pancakes.

  Choosing breakfast here was certainly more exciting than it was at home, where Mia climbed onto the ­counters to reach for cold cereal.

  Still, Mia felt Aunt Lin’s absence like an icy ghost at her side. If her aunt had been here, she would have taken Mia to all the venders, suggested things for her to try, and told her stories about cooking for her siblings when she was younger. She would have laughed and chatted with the cooks, sweeping Mia up in the cheer of her personality.

  “What do you want to eat?” Jake said.

  Mia shrugged and fiddled with the strap of her messenger bag.

  To her surprise, Jake didn’t get annoyed with her nonanswer, the way he usually did nowadays. Instead, he pulled her to one of the venders selling you tiao.

  Mia had eaten you tiao before in America, but they’d come frozen from the Chinese market. These were hot out of the wok. She watched as the street vender plopped strips of dough into the bubbling oil, where they turned golden as they puffed up. A quick flip over, and they were done. Jake bought them one each.

  Mia knew she ought to wait for them to cool down a little, but she managed to be patient only a few seconds. The you tiao was perfect: crispy on the outside, fluffy within.

  They picked up milk next, which didn’t come in ­bottles or cartons here, but in little plastic bags. Mia ripped a hole in the corner to drink. It tasted different, too, though she couldn’t put her finger on how.

  The food bolstered her spirits. The early morning hustle and bustle seemed more friendly and less intimi­dating. It gave her a clearer view on Aunt Lin’s disappearance, too.

  There was simply no way her aunt had abandoned her like this.

  She thought back to the last time she’d seen her aunt, right before she’d fallen asleep. No, that wasn’t right. She’d seen her after that. She’d woken up in the middle of the night and seen . . .

  What had she seen?

  Aunt Lin had been sitting cross-legged on the bed. She’d been studying something. The drawing of Zhu Yunwen’s well.

  Maybe her disappearance had something to do with the emperor’s lost treasure.

  “What is it, Mia?” Jake said.

  Mia blinked. She hadn’t realized she’d frozen right in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Jake frowned at her. It still disoriented Mia sometimes, how tall he was now. It was like gremlins had crept in one night and stolen her brother away—her old brother, who didn’t mind cartoons and liked chopstick sword fights—replacing him with a gangly-armed skyscraper who slathered gel in his hair. Who spent half his days looking at Mia like he couldn’t believe they were related.

  “Look,” Jake said, “you can’t get too upset about Aunt Lin leaving, okay? It’s like Mom said. She’ll be back soon, and in the meantime, you can do stuff without her. You don’t have to be attached at the hip all the time.”

  “We’re not,” Mia said.

  I just have a feeling that something is wrong, she wanted to say but didn’t know if she should. If Jake would just roll his eyes and say she was blowing things out of proportion or letting her imagination run away with her.

  Before she could make up her mind, Jake had already turned away again, heading farther down the street.

  Mia ran to keep up.

  5

  BACK AT THE APARTMENT, MIA made a beeline for the bedroom she shared with Aunt Lin. She hadn’t thought to check Aunt Lin’s bed closely this morning—she’d seen that her aunt wasn’t in it, and that had been enough. Now, she flipped through the rumpled blanket until her fingers closed around Aunt Lin’s discarded notebook.

  They brushed against something else, too. Frowning, Mia pulled a picture frame from beneath the spiral-bound notebook. It was the painting of the two cranes. The one Mia’s grandmother had loved and hidden away during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  They’d put it back in the trunk before Ying arrived. Had Aunt Lin retrieved it last night?

  Mia shifted the painting into her lap—and startled as the painting slid from the frame. Someone—Aunt Lin?—had popped the two apart. Gingerly, she slipped the painting the rest of the way free. Traditional Chinese brush paintings were done on rice paper, as thin and fragile as butterfly wings. This one had been mounted onto a sheet of heavier board, but it still felt tenuous in Mia’s hands, as if one careless motion might tear it down the middle.

  The dancing cranes shimmered in the morning light. Mia tilted them this way and that, her eyes roaming across the rolling landscape behind them. She’d ­forgotten to ask Aunt Lin how old this painting was—or how it had come into their family.

  Despite all of Aunt Lin’s stories, there were so many things Mia didn’t know about her relatives here in China. She could recite more about a six-hundred-year-old emperor than she could about her own grandparents.

  Was that why Aunt Lin had gotten the painting out of storage again? Had she wanted to remember Mia’s grandmother, or tell Mia something?

  It was impossible to say.

  Mia sighed and flipped the painting over, preparing to pop it back into the frame. She was so focused on being careful, on making sure nothing got crinkled or bent, that it took her several seconds to realize what she was seeing.

  There was something sketched on the back.

  It was hand-drawn, spindly black lines stretching across the stiff paper in geometric patterns. It looked like a more chaotic version of a window lattice, or an imprint of a fancy balustrade design, the marks looping into half-moons or zigzagging in neat corners. At five different places, they disappeared entirely, leaving big blank spaces in the—

  In the what? What was this?

  Mia’s heart thumped against her ribs.

  She didn’t dare move—barely dared to blink, as if that might make the mysterious lines disappear.

  Everything was faded with age, but Mia made out columns of neat calligraphy beside each blank spot. Most of the characters were unfamiliar. They looked like traditional, complex Chinese, which Mia had never learned. Almost everyone in China learned the simplified versions of characters nowadays.

  If Aunt Lin were here, Mia could seek her help. But she wasn’t. Did her disappearance have something to do with this strange drawing? She must have found it last night. Maybe that was why she’d looked so excited.

  Then what? What had happened afterward?

  Mia flipped through Aunt Lin’s notebook, hoping for answers. On the last page was the sketch of Zhu Yunwen’s well. Her aunt had made a small addition to the drawing—she’d circled part of the well’s repeating geometric pattern. Beside it, in her hurried handwriting, she’d scribbled: Clue #5.

  “Clue five,” Mia muttered, turning back to the drawing. She studied each of the blank portions, trying to work her way through the characters written beside each one. None of them were numbered, so Aunt Lin must have come up with her own system.

  It was no good. She couldn’t read enough of the characters to make sense of anything.

  “What’re you doing?”
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  Mia nearly fell off the bed in surprise. Jake stood in the doorway, one hand propped against the doorjamb. Before she could cobble together an answer, he crossed to the bed and tugged the painting out of her hands, ignoring her protest.

  “What’s this?” He raised his eyebrow at her. “Where did you find this?”

  “It was Grandma’s favorite painting,” Mia said. She felt a little defensive, though she wasn’t sure why. “Aunt Lin showed it to me yesterday. It was on her bed.”

  Jake frowned at the black lines, then flipped the canvas over and looked at the cranes on the other side—before turning back to the patterns again. “This must be ancient. What does the writing say?”

  It usually made Mia feel rather proud—and maybe just a little superior—when Jake asked her to translate some Chinese. But right now, she had to admit that she couldn’t read enough to know.

  Jake took out his phone. In a moment, he’d pulled up a Chinese dictionary application. He handed it to Mia, a glint of something like cautious excitement in his eyes.

  It took them a while to translate even one collection of characters. But by the time they were halfway through, Mia could guess what it was—a description of a place.

  A clue.

  She read her rough translation aloud when they were done:

  At the foot of the mountains

  Sweet water flows, singing

  Not only in the rivers

  But pulled from the earth.

  Seek me at the edge of the ring.

  “A well,” Mia said. “That’s what it’s talking about—a well.”

  She looked at Jake, and Jake looked at her.

  They spoke together: “Zhu Yunwen’s well—”

  Mia rushed to look at Aunt Lin’s drawing again, and at the pattern she’d circled. What had she meant?

  Then it clicked. She grabbed the pencil and copied the pattern from the well onto the blank portion of the lines—the one beside what Aunt Lin must have designated Clue #5. It fit perfectly, matching up with the design already present.

  Then she sat back and looked up at Jake, wide-eyed.

  Treasure map, cried Mia’s thoughts. What else could it be?

  A lot of things, whispered the more practical part of her. The part that spoke in her mother’s calm voice and rolled its eyes just like Jake.

  But Jake wasn’t rolling his eyes right now. He looked just as stunned as she felt.

  If Mia’s intuition was right, this wasn’t just any map.

  It wasn’t even just any treasure map.

  It was Zhu Yunwen’s treasure map, and if they managed to solve every clue—fill in every blank space—they could have a map leading right to his long-lost hoard.

  6

  MIA’S MIND REELED.

  Hadn’t Aunt Lin always said that their ancestors had known Zhu Yunwen? Been his friends and secret supporters? If the emperor had left a map, it made sense that it might end up in Mia’s family, passed down generation after generation until everyone forgot the heirloom’s ­significance.

  Had Aunt Lin realized all this last night? She must have been as excited as Mia felt now—like she was tilting on the edge of something wonderful, and vast, and thrilling.

  Then she’d gotten a call from a friend in the morning and left?

  No. That story made even less sense now.

  Mia’s brow scrunched up in thought. Why would Aunt Lin leave the house? Why hadn’t she immediately woken Mia to share the good news?

  She flipped through the rest of Aunt Lin’s notebook. It wasn’t big—Mia had bought it for her aunt during the last school book fair, and she’d chosen it more for the unique, pale blue pages than for actual utility. Inside, there wasn’t much of interest—a packing list for their trip, a jotted flight itinerary, a few telephone numbers Aunt Lin had wanted in hand while they were overseas. And one page, ripped out. Mia ran her fingers over the ragged blue edge left behind.

  Then she squinted at the blank page beneath it. She tilted the notebook up, toward the window, and stared at the divots that had been carved into the page—a ghostly impression of the missing page that had lain on top of it. Aunt Lin always pressed too hard when she wrote.

  But this wasn’t writing. These lines were remnants of a drawing.

  A copy of the map.

  Mia tilted the notebook a little more, and a slip of paper fell out, stark white against the dark red blanket.

  An address was scribbled on it.

  Ying’s address.

  There was only one person Aunt Lin might have wanted to tell before Mia. The person who’d started this search with her so many years ago.

  Mia hesitated. Jake had seemed excited about the treasure map, but that was different—that was something tangible he could hold in his hands. This suspicion niggling at the back of Mia’s mind was something else entirely. Something he might laugh at.

  “If Aunt Lin figured all this out last night,” Mia said carefully, “she might have wanted to share it with Ying. Since they worked on the treasure hunt together before.”

  She waited, breath held, for Jake’s reply.

  He gave her a long look. “You don’t think Aunt Lin just went to visit a friend.”

  Mia shook her head.

  “Well, if she and Ying are really out there chasing down clues,” he said, cracking a smile, “I guess that’s not terrible. Aunt Lin could be famous by the end of this trip.”

  Mia couldn’t think about Ying without thinking about the unsmiling way he’d looked at her all afternoon. The way his eyebrows had knit after Aunt Lin revealed that she’d told Mia all about Zhu Yunwen’s treasure.

  Maybe Aunt Lin was right, and Ying was just dour because he was worried about his wife. Maybe he was a nice person, despite how he’d seemed.

  But either way, he might know where Aunt Lin had gone.

  “I have to know for sure where she is,” Mia said. “I have—I have to go talk to him, Jake.”

  Jake tapped his finger against the side of the picture frame. He looked from the translated clue to the blank portions of the map, then back again.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s finish translating these ­riddles. Then we’ll visit Ying.”

  * * *

  Mia’s mother and stranger-uncle were just finishing up breakfast, the former scrolling through e-mails on her laptop while the latter read the morning paper. Both were still in their pajamas.

  Jake and Mia shot each other a look before stepping into the dining area. There was always a game plan to asking their mother for something. By this point, they knew all of the moves instinctually, but it was good to touch base beforehand, even if only through a glance.

  Jake went first, pulling up a chair and saying, “Mia and I were thinking about going to see Ying today. You know, because his wife is sick. We could bring him something.”

  Their mom gave him a surprised smile. “That’s sweet of you. But shouldn’t you wait until Aunt Lin gets back? Then you could go with her. She knows Ying best, after all.”

  That was Mia’s cue to wander closer to the table. “We don’t know when Aunt Lin’s getting back.” It wasn’t hard to make sure she looked upset.

  “Mia—” their mom said. It sounded like the placating start of a sentence that would end with no, and Jake quickly interrupted: “I wanted to go check out that big supermarket Uncle was talking about. We could pick up something there.”

  Their stranger-uncle had spent the whole conversation peering at them over the top of his paper. Now he grinned. It was weird to see a man lounging around the breakfast table beside Mia’s mother—even if it was her own brother. Usually, only Mia, Jake, and Aunt Lin were privy to her early morning rumpled hair and unlined eyes.

  But here she sat next to Mia’s uncle, as casual as if she did it every day.

  “I have plans to
meet up with some old classmates for lunch,” she said. “If you two can wait until afterward, I’ll go with you—”

  “I think we can get around by ourselves, Mom.” Jake looped his arm around Mia’s shoulder. “Mia can read the street signs, right?”

  Mia nodded vigorously. “Right.”

  She felt their mother wavering. Back home, she let Mia and Jake run free around town. Between her own long hours at work and Aunt Lin’s sometimes unpredictable shifts at a local shop, there wasn’t always someone home to keep tabs on them anyway. But home was home.

  There was a whole other country outside these apartment doors, and Mia figured her mother might need an extra push toward yes.

  Please, she begged her with her eyes. Aloud, she just said, “What else are we supposed to do while you’re out for lunch? We’ll just be stuck here.”

  Ten minutes later, they were yanking on their shoes and scrambling out the door. Mia barely heard their mother as she called out after them: “Be careful! Come straight back afterward! And make sure you stick together!”

  * * *

  It was even hotter now, the city furnacelike in the summer heat. Some of the young women on the streets carried parasols to shade their faces, but Mia and Jake made do without, squinting at the road signs as they hurried past.

  Ying’s apartment wasn’t far at all. They made a quick stop at the supermarket to pick up a fancy-looking tin of cookies, then hurried across a small bridge, headed for the address Ying had left behind. Mia was so focused on finding their way that when they came upon the high-rise, she felt slightly disoriented.

  She fell behind, letting Jake take the lead. Part of her demanded more time to prepare. Though to prepare for what, she wasn’t sure.

  They caught an elderly lady on her way inside the building. She smiled and held the door open for them. All three of them squeezed into the tiny elevator, Mia clutching the tin of cookies to her chest.