by Kat Zhang
She’d figure out something. It will be all right, she told herself as she huddled between the backseats. She raised her arms to shield her head as Ying threw himself at the van again.
It will be all right.
It will be all right.
But what if it wasn’t? What if she never saw Jake and Aunt Lin again? Never went home to her mother again? She pressed even harder against the floor—yelped as something struck the van, harder than any of the previous blows. She was certain this one would shatter the window.
Instead, it was followed by silence.
A moment later, someone—someone who wasn’t Ying, wasn’t anyone Mia recognized—called out, “Hello? Is anyone in there?”
Mia uncurled from her hiding spot. The stranger called out again, asking who was in the van. Shakily, Mia stood and ventured toward the front of the vehicle, where the windows were clear and she could peek outside. A great crack ran down the driver’s side window. A flashlight beam seared through the glass, making Mia shield her eyes.
“You’re safe now,” said the man holding the flashlight. He lowered it a little, so Mia could see past him, where two other men had tackled Ying to the ground—were holding him there while he struggled against them. “You can come out. Unlock the door, child.”
Mia hesitated. She didn’t know these people. She couldn’t trust them—not even if they’d seemingly come to her rescue.
The two men got Ying subdued, and one of them broke away to join the man by Mia’s window. He whispered something to him: “It’s all right. She’ll be here in a minute.”
She? Mia tensed with a shock of new, confused apprehension. Who was She?
And then, surging up out of the dark woods, her hair frazzled, her eyes wide, her mouth open with shock and worry, came Mia’s mother.
26
IT ALL HAPPENED VERY QUICKLY after that. More people arrived—men and women from the nearby village, Mia assumed. Some seemed to be actual policemen. Most were just ordinary people, galvanized into a search party and driven by equal parts concern and curiosity.
Everyone kept talking all at once—to one another, and to Mia, and at Mia: “Who is this man? Were you taken? What’s going on? What’re you doing out here?”
After a few minutes of this, Mia’s mother pulled herself together and did what she did best—she took things in hand. Right now that meant telling everyone to give them room to breathe, then asking Mia, “Where’s your brother? Where’s Jake?”
“With Aunt Lin,” Mia said, and waited only long enough for her mother to say, bewildered, “Aunt Lin?” before telling her mother about the ring of boulders and the secret door.
Everyone galloped off again, Mia at the lead. Two of the policemen stayed with Ying, but no one else wanted to be left behind. They crashed through the woods and down the cliff, flashlights carving bright paths through the underbrush.
Soon they reached the boulders. At Mia’s urging, several people got together to shove the stone door open, revealing the hidden staircase leading below. Aunt Lin and Jake’s voices rang out, echoing through the tunnel: “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?”
Everyone pounded down the stairs, hurried toward their voices—and stopped sharp in their tracks when they came upon the treasure room, their mouths dropping open in surprise. Everyone but Mia and her mother, who continued straight to the rest of their family.
They freed them while everyone else was still preoccupied with Zhu Yunwen’s riches. Aunt Lin pulled Mia tight against her, and Jake embraced them both. They plied her with questions: How had she escaped Ying? Who were all these people?
But Mia had her own question first.
“How did you know?” she asked her mother. The four of them huddled there in the cavern—a spot of quiet relief among the whirl of everyone else’s treasure-blind excitement. “How did you know where we were?”
Her mother bent down and hugged her again. She didn’t seem able to stop hugging her. Right now Mia didn’t mind at all. “We saw the firework, of course. You could see it clear to the village.”
The firework. Mia had meant it as a weapon—she hadn’t considered using it as a flare. Of course, she hadn’t expected for anyone in the area to be looking for her either.
“But how did you know we’d come looking for Zhu Yunwen’s grave?” she said.
“I found this.” Her mother pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from her pocket. On it, scribbled in Mia’s messy handwriting, were the English translations of Zhu Yunwen’s riddles. The one leading to the grave site was at the bottom of the page. “Your uncle told me how you and Jake had been running off to places based on riddles—that you’d been looking for something. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing, Mia?”
She sounded so upset as she asked the last question that Mia didn’t know how to answer.
I didn’t think you’d believe me, she thought. But it didn’t seem like the right thing to say. Not right now.
So she just hugged her mother back as tightly as she could and whispered, “Next time, I will.”
* * *
Back in the village, all any of the residents could talk about was the discovery of Zhu Yunwen’s treasure and the little girl who’d led them to it. Mia’s mother let the police speak to Mia but made everyone else keep their distance. One of the officers, a soft-eyed man with a quick smile, wrote down Mia’s recount of what had happened. She kept fumbling it at first, because she wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know or where to begin.
“Just start at the beginning,” he told her.
So she told him about the morning Aunt Lin went missing. About the letter she’d left that hadn’t rung true. About the trip to Ying’s house—only to discover that Ying was missing too. She hesitated before telling him about the secret map hidden in the painting, worried that he’d laugh—or that her mother, who stood beside her with a comforting hand on Mia’s shoulder, would laugh. But neither did. The officer just nodded and jotted notes as she spoke.
After Mia was finished, the policeman wanted to speak with her mother. Mia stayed for a while, but then she saw, out of the corner of her eye, two other officers pulling a handcuffed Ying toward a police car.
Mia remembered his knife at her throat. His fists pounding at the van window. Those handcuffs seemed flimsy in comparison.
She moved toward him anyway, pushed by something unspoken in her chest. She arrived at the police car just before the police did, Ying between them.
She looked at him, and he looked at her.
“Run along back to your mother,” one of the officers said, not unkindly.
Mia didn’t move. She had something to say—something that raged hot and angry inside her. But as she stood there struggling, it slowly ebbed away again. Turned cold and heavy.
She saw a heaviness, too, in Ying’s eyes. He didn’t look sorry. He didn’t even look regretful. But he didn’t look angry anymore, either—or filled with that wild madness that had made him so terrifying. His desperation was sad now, like a black weight in the core of his body.
Mia found words at the tip of her tongue. They weren’t what she’d originally meant to say, but she spoke them anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your wife.”
Before she could say more, or Ying could respond, Aunt Lin saw them and rushed over to guide Mia away from the police car.
Neither of them looked back.
* * *
There was talk of keeping Mia and her family in the town a little longer. Mostly, Mia thought, because the villagers seemed to like the excitement of having them there. But as the adrenaline of the night ebbed away, Mia wanted nothing more than to be somewhere comforting and familiar again. She could tell the rest of her family felt the same. So as soon as dawn broke over the mountainside, they all squeezed into a police car and headed back to Fuzhou.
Sometime du
ring the trip, Mia dozed off. When she woke again, she was still in the car, Aunt Lin on her left, Jake on her right, her mother in the front seat, and she forgot, for one sleepy moment, where she was or where they were headed. But it didn’t matter.
They were together, and everything was all right.
EPILOGUE
“SHE’S PEEKING,” JAKE SAID. “I can tell you’re peeking, Mia.”
“I’m not,” Mia protested.
She had been, just a little. But now she squeezed her eyes properly shut, her hands stretched out, palms up, like her mother had directed. A moment later, her fingers closed around something velvety and square. A box. It was just the right size to fit in her cupped hands.
“Wait, not yet—” Aunt Lin said.
There was a little creak, and when Mia felt the box again, it had been opened for her.
“Let the girl look,” Mia’s uncle said, laughing.
“Now,” Mia’s mother said.
Mia opened her eyes. On the table, the recently extinguished candles on the cake still wafted smoke. Jake and Aunt Lin watched her, waiting. Her mother smiled at her across the table. A flash went off—her uncle snapping a picture.
“Why’re you looking at us?” Jake said, exasperated. “Look at your present, Mia.”
So Mia did.
In the velvet box lay a tiny, delicate pendant on a golden chain. The pendant was in the shape of two cranes—just like the dancing cranes on the painting that had started it all. They’d decided to leave that painting in China, instead of taking it home with them. It belonged here, along with the priceless historical treasures it had led them to.
“Do you like it?” Aunt Lin said. “We figured you ought to have something you could take back home—a keepsake of your trip.”
“I love it,” Mia said, and everyone smiled, even Jake.
They’d ended up staying here in Fuzhou a few more weeks than expected, while things got sorted out. Once upon a time, Mia would have thought that was the worst thing in the world. It meant she’d barely have any summer vacation left at all once she got back to the United States. It meant she had to celebrate her twelfth birthday here in China instead of with Lizbeth and Thea and their friends from school.
But right now, sitting here in this little apartment, listening to the busy street sounds below, waiting for her mother to cut the birthday cake, it didn’t feel horrible at all.
The phone rang, and her uncle hurried off to answer it, waving at the others to stay where they were.
“So,” her mother said, sliding the first slice of cake onto Mia’s plate. “What’s next for you treasure hunters in the family? Sunken Spanish gold? The lost Fabergé eggs?”
Aunt Lin grinned and slipped an arm around Mia’s shoulders. The two exchanged a look.
“Oh, we don’t know just yet,” Aunt Lin said. “There’s a lot out there. We’ll have to see what tickles our fancy.”
“And has the best story,” Mia said.
“Very true.”
“And we’ll be busy for a while, anyway,” Mia added.
They were still getting calls all the time asking for interviews or photo ops with regards to Zhu Yunwen’s treasure. The plans for all those priceless items were still up in the air—there was talk of adding them as an exhibit at one of the major national museums, or maybe even building a new expo to put them on display near the location where they’d been hidden for more than five centuries.
Her mom laughed. Jake rolled his eyes.
Mia sat back in her chair and smiled. It would be nice to take a break for a while. But when the next adventure came, she’d be ready for it.
In the meantime, she had quite a story to tell Thea and Lizbeth once she got back home.
“Speaking of busy,” her uncle said, bringing the telephone into the living room, “the call’s for you and Aunt Lin. That journalist you met last week? She wants to fact-check something.”
“Again?” Jake said. “How many times can she ask the same questions?”
Mia’s uncle grinned and traded Mia her slice of cake for the phone. “I guess she wants to be sure about things. It’s a very important story, after all.”
* * *
Aunt Lin closed her bedroom door quietly and motioned for Mia to put the journalist on speakerphone. The woman’s cheery voice filled the room, gliding through pleasantries before getting to the root of the call. By then the two of them were both seated on the bed, their slippers kicked off on the floor, their knees knocking into one another.
“I know it’s hard to be exact about the history concerning Zhu Yunwen,” the journalist said, “what happened after his supposed assassination, I mean. But I wanted to make sure I got your version of the story right. Could you just walk me through it again?”
“Sure,” Mia said, smiling at Aunt Lin. “But we have more than one version. It might take a while.”
The woman laughed. “I have all the time in the world.”
Mia settled more comfortably on the bed and leaned her head against Aunt Lin’s shoulder—felt Aunt Lin lean against her, too.
“You tell it,” her aunt whispered.
“Well, all right,” Mia said, and began.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BOOKS ONLY COME TO FRUITION through the hard work of a great number of people, and The Emperor’s Riddle is no exception. I have so much thanks to give to so many people—even more than can be named here:
As always, to my agent, Emmanuelle Morgen, who has been making my dreams come true since I was nineteen. And to Whitney Lee, my foreign agent, who works so hard to see my stories overseas.
To my editor, Jennifer Ung (and the rest of the amazing team at Aladdin!), who worked so tirelessly to make this book the very best it could be. Your enthusiasm was the greatest encouragement a writer could have.
To my mother and father, for taking me to and from China so many times as a child, and for all the stories they’ve told me about their experiences growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
To Savannah Foley and Julie Eshbaugh, critique partners extraordinaire. And to the other lovely members of Pub(lishing) Crawl, whose support is paramount.
To Jenny Tobat and Renee Wu, for all the in-jokes and can’t-even-breathe-laughter and General Ridiculousness that has kept me sane these past two years. It’s been unforgettable.
(Moo).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photo by Alice Hong
KAT ZHANG LOVES TRAVELING TO places both real and fictional—the former have better souvenirs, but the latter allow for dragons, so it’s a tough pick. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, she now spends her free time scribbling poetry, taking photographs, and climbing atop things she shouldn’t. You can learn about her travels, literary and otherwise, at katzhangwriter.com.
ALADDIN
SimonandSchuster.com/kids
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Kat-Zhang
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALADDIN
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First Aladdin hardcover edition May 2017
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Text copyright © 2017 by Cathy Zhang
Interior maps illustrated by Robyn Ng copyright © 2017 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Jacket illustration copyright © 2017 by Jim Tierney
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The text of this book was set in Weiss Std.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zhang, Kat, 1991-
Title: The emperor’s riddle / by Kat Zhang.
Description: First Aladdin hardcover edition. | New York : Aladdin, 2017. |
Summary: During a family trip to China, eleven-year-old Mia Chen and her
older brother, Jake, follow clues and solve riddles in hopes of finding
their missing Aunt Lin and, perhaps, a legendary treasure.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027523 | ISBN 9781481478625 (hc) | ISBN 9781481478649 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Buried treasure—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Family life—China—Fiction. | China—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Multigenerational. |
JUVENILE FICTION / People & Places / Asia.
Classification: LCC PZ7.Z454 Emp 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027523
