The Empress's Tomb (23 page)

It was two weeks into my sentence, on a cold, wet Sunday at the beginning of November, when I heard a strange sound issue from one of my desk drawers. Inside, I found an old GPS device vibrating like a Mexican jumping bean. A motion sensor had been tripped in the Shadow City. Several seconds later, a text message arrived on my phone.
“Iris's house. ASAP.
” It was from Kiki Strike.

My heart was racing, but I managed to appear calm as I bargained with my mother for an early release. For
weeks, I'd impersonated the perfect child. I had put my parents' library back in order without being asked, and I'd cleaned the oven—twice. When the boredom got bad enough, I'd even finished my homework and turned in the essay that Principal Wickham had assigned. I hoped to have earned enough goodwill to be allowed an un-chaperoned stroll, but at first my request was denied. It took a humiliating amount of groveling before I was finally granted a couple of hours outdoors.

•     •     •

“Hi, Ananka!” Iris ushered me into her house. She was wearing a tiny white lab coat with her initials embroidered on one of the pockets.

“You're looking very professional today, Iris. What's the occasion?”

“A package just came in the mail. It had three of these coats and a chemistry set in it. I think I have a secret admirer.”

I started to crack a joke, but held my tongue when I remembered the scolding I'd gotten from Betty. “I hope he's handsome.”

“Me, too,” Iris said dreamily. “How much do you think delivery boys make?”

“I have no clue. Why do you want to know?”

Iris blushed. “Never mind. You better get down to the basement. I told the nanny I've got diarrhea, and she ran out to get some medicine. She could be back any second.”

I scrambled down the stairs and found the Irregulars waiting impatiently.

“What took you so long?” asked DeeDee.

“I had to make a deal with my warden. Where's Oona?” The other girls traded glances.

“How should
I
know?” DeeDee said. “She won't return my calls.”

“She's been busy. Spending Daddy's money is hard work.” Luz sounded bitter, and even Betty didn't rush to Oona's defense.

“I guess she's not coming,” said Kiki, handing me a bottle of Iris's rat-repelling perfume. “Go ahead and freshen up. We'll just have to go without her.”

“Should
you
be here?” I asked. Kiki had lost weight since I'd seen her. Her black pants looked three sizes too big, and they remained above her hips only with the help of a tightly cinched belt. “Shouldn't you be at home with Verushka?”

“The doctor says she's in stable condition. Sitting around the house isn't going to make her any better,” said Kiki. “At least here I might do
somebody
some good.”

“In that case, we should get started,” said DeeDee. “Unless we want Iris's nanny tagging along.”

“Do we know where we're going?” I asked.

“Underneath Chinatown,” Luz answered.

•     •     •

Inside the Shadow City, Luz led the way through the dark tunnels toward the location of the tripped alarm. As soon as we were under Chinatown, we began to hear shrieks, screams, and what sounded like cursing in an unfamiliar language. I felt a warm body brush past my ankles as a rat scampered past me to join the mob of ravenous beasts that had assembled outside a thieves' den.
We waded through the rodents and found a girl standing on top of a rickety table, gripping a candle that was little more than a stub of wax. The rats were taking turns clambering up the table's legs. As each one made it over the side, the girl punted it across the room. A ball of greasy fur flew past my head as we entered the chamber, hit the wall, and then quickly lined up for another chance at a meal. One of the Irregulars screamed. My eyes followed the finger that Luz was pointing. The girl looked as though she were rotting. The skin of her arms and legs was covered with oozing green blotches and speckled with what looked to be blood.

As the scent of our perfume filled their nostrils, the rats parted, leaping out of our path and snarling at us from the sidelines. The girl on the table froze when she saw Kiki. Judging by her starstruck expression, she would have been less surprised to see Jackie Chan coming to her rescue. As DeeDee sprayed her down with ratrepellent, the girl coughed and lashed out, nearly knocking the bottle from DeeDee's hands. But when the rats retreated, she began to understand. She let Kiki take one of her arms and examine it under the flashlight.

“Don't touch her!” shouted Luz. “She could be contagious!”

“Relax,” Kiki told her. “She's covered in paint.”

“Yes. Paint,” the girl agreed, bobbing her head up and down. Her black bangs had grown over her eyes, and she held them back with one hand so she could get a good look at Kiki.

“You speak English?” Luz asked.

“No,” replied the girl, then sensing our disappointment, “Little.”

“How did you get here?” Kiki asked. The girl shook her head in confusion. Kiki asked again in Cantonese and Mandarin, but the girl shook her head each time. “Looks like she speaks only Hakka.” Kiki noted. She tried again. “Ladder?”

“Yes. Ladder.” The girl pointed to a ladder in one corner of the room that led to an exit from the Shadow City.

“Come on, Ananka,” said Kiki. “Let's see what's up there.”

“Why me?” For some reason, I always got stuck with the dangerous jobs.

“It's for your own good. You've been cooped up too long. If you don't get a jolt of adrenaline soon, you're bound to go soft.”

Seventy feet above the thieves' den in the Shadow City, we pushed open a trapdoor and pulled ourselves into a dungeonlike space. A splinter from the ragged floorboards slipped beneath the skin of my palm, and I stumbled into a wall of jagged rocks. After two weeks of house arrest, I was already out of practice. Kiki put her ear to the room's only door.

“Hear anything?” I whispered.

“It's quiet. I think we're alone.”

Beyond the dungeon lay a maze of hastily constructed cubicles. We crept through the corridors, peeking into cramped pens that had recently housed human beings. Each was empty but for a single mattress, and the concrete floor was splattered with paint. Multicolored
footprints led in circles, and we found a small, bright red palm print on one of the plywood walls.

“Looks like we're too late,” said Kiki. “The kids have been moved.”

“What do you think they were doing here?”

“Given the evidence, I'd say they were painting.”

“Your powers of deduction astound me,” I teased. “Any idea
what
they were painting?”

“Well, the splatter seems to be concentrated in a corner of each cubicle. They were probably working at easels.” Kiki dropped to one knee to study a single smear of blue paint on the floor. “Ultramarine. It's a pigment made from crushed lapis lazuli, and it isn't cheap. The kids weren't just painting to pass the time. We should check upstairs and see where we are.”

A flight of rickety stairs led to the ground floor. When we reached the landing, we saw the sun pouring through massive holes in the roof. Aboveground, the building was nothing more than a hollow shell. The floors and windows had been ripped out, and only four crumbling brick walls kept the structure standing. Pigeons cooed from a hundred nooks and crannies. Their feathers and droppings had transformed the ground into modern art. Kiki tried the front door of the structure, ramming her shoulder against the wood when it refused to open. A man passing by was startled by the ensuing bang, and the bucket he'd been carrying slipped from his fingertips. Foul, gray sea cucumbers flopped out on the sidewalk. I stared past the construction zone tape at the scene in front of me. We were just down the street from Oona's house.

“Coincidence?” I asked Kiki, knowing what her answer would be.

“There's no such thing. Let's go get the girl. Since we're already here, we might as well ask Oona to translate.”

•     •     •

Oona's brightly dressed bodyguard stormed down the stoop without giving a second look to a miniature thug spray painting his tag on the side of the building. She was lugging a bulky suitcase, and she wasn't smiling.

“Is Oona home?” Kiki repeated the question in Mandarin when the woman ignored her.

“No,” the woman replied rudely in English. “She's having lunch with her father.”

“She's at
lunch?”
DeeDee's blood boiled.

“Do you mind if we wait upstairs for her?” I asked.

“Do what you want. I don't work here anymore.” The woman shoved past us and disappeared down the street.

“Why would Oona get rid of her bodyguard?” Betty wondered.

“Why do you
think?”
Luz huffed.

Looking up at the second floor, I saw Mrs. Fei watching from a window. I gave her a wave, and she came down to greet us. We hadn't made it past the foyer before Mrs. Fei grabbed the girl we'd found in the tunnels and scratched at the paint on her arms. Then she took her patient by the chin and studied her tongue and eyeballs. Once she was satisfied, Mrs. Fei led us upstairs and dragged the girl to the bathroom, where we heard water running in the tub. When she returned, Mrs. Fei spoke with Kiki in Mandarin.

“The girl is healthy,” Kiki translated. “Just dirty. Mrs. Fei wants to know if we'd like some tea while we wait for Oona.”

Oona barged through the door. “The wait is over.” She was wearing a short sable jacket over a gray pencil skirt. Her long black hair was twisted into a chignon and pinned with a diamond-encrusted comb. At the base of her neck, the skin was red and covered in tiny bumps. “Long time no see. I didn't know you guys wanted me in your little club anymore.”

“What's wrong with you?” Luz demanded. “The alarms in the Shadow City went off two hours ago. You should have been with us.”

“They did?” Oona looked genuinely surprised. “What happened? Why didn't somebody call me?”

“We
did
call you,” DeeDee told her. “You didn't bother to pick up.”

Oona was in no mood to be taken to task. “What is this, some sort of intervention? I was having lunch, and it was loud in the restaurant. I must not have heard the phone ring.”

“Or maybe you just didn't want to interrupt your afternoon with Daddy,” I said. “You two sure are spending a lot of time together, aren't you?”

Oona reached under her jacket and scratched furiously at her neck. “Like I have a choice? While you guys have been running around looking for squirrel boy, I've had to do my own detective work.”

“Detective work?” Luz scoffed.

“I've never seen a detective wear sable,” Betty muttered softly. It was a powerful blow, and Oona looked stunned.

“Well, I guess you've all made it clear how you feel,” she said.

“What are we supposed to think?” DeeDee stated matter-of-factly. “You won't answer our calls, and you spend all of your time shopping and going to lunch with a man who might want to kill us. You even fired your bodyguard. What's up with that, by the way? Don't need the protection anymore?”

“For your information, I gave her the boot 'cause she has sticky fingers. I found one of my best rings stuffed under her mattress. Kiki, how much more of this crap do I have to take?”

Kiki was quiet for a moment.

“You're in over your head, Oona,” she said at last. “Whatever you're trying to do, you
have
to let us help. Something big is going down. Think about it. Your father shows up after all this time; then Kaspar disappears and Sergei Molotov is spotted in town. I know it all looks random right now—but there could be a connection.

“And that's not all. We just found a Taiwanese girl in the Shadow City. She led us to the basement where she and the other kids had been locked up. Guess where it was?”

“Where?”

“In the abandoned building down the street from your house.”

“Really?” Somehow, Oona didn't sound shocked. She seemed
happy.

“And you say you didn't see
anything?”
DeeDee couldn't hide her skepticism.

“I saw construction workers going in and out all the time.”

“Did you notice anything strange
today?”
asked Kiki.

I could see a memory flicker through Oona's mind. “They woke me up this morning. They were hauling a bunch of crates out of the building. It couldn't have been past eight o'clock.”

“That must have been when they moved the kids to another location,” I said.

“What did the girl say?” asked Oona. “Did she know who kidnapped her?”

“She doesn't speak much English,” said Kiki. “That's why we're here. We need you to translate.”

Oona scowled. “Of course. I should have known that's why you came.”

We suddenly heard two cries of joy in the hallway and found Yu and the Taiwanese girl locked in an embrace.

“Looks like they're happy to see each other,” Luz observed.

“Friends usually are,” Oona snipped. She listened to their conversation for a moment. “Her name is Siu Fah. She and Yu were schoolmates.”

The girl saw us watching and pointed at Kiki. Yu gave Kiki a once-over and both of them giggled.

“What did they just say?” I asked.

“They were talking about how much Kiki resembles the star of a famous kung fu movie called
Cute Little Demon Girl.”
Oona couldn't help but grin.

“Tell them it's just a coincidence,” Kiki said. “Then ask Siu Fah how she escaped.”

Oona questioned the girl. “She says her captors told her that Yu had died, but she never believed them. She knew he'd found a way out, so she snuck into the room
where he'd been kept. She searched whenever she could, but it took her more than a week to find the trapdoor.”