Read Century #4: Dragon of Seas Online
Authors: Pierdomenico Baccalario
Century #4: Dragon of Seas
T
HE
C
ENTURY
Q
UARTET
Ring of Fire
Star of Stone
City of Wind
Dragon of Seas
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 2012 by Leah D. Janeczko
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Jeff Nentrup
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House
Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published as
La prima sorgente
by Edizioni Piemme S.p.A.,
Casale Monferrato, Italy, in 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Edizioni Piemme S.p.A.
All other international rights © Atlantyca S.p.A.,
[email protected]
.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baccalario, Pierdomenico.
[Prima sorgente. English.]
Dragon of seas / by Pierdomenico Baccalario; translated by Leah D. Janeczko.
—1st American ed.
p. cm. — (Century quartet; bk. 4)
Summary: Sheng, Elettra, Harvey, and Mistral meet in Shanghai to find the Pearl of the Sea Dragon and complete the pact before Heremit Devil can stop them.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89229-5
[1. Good and evil—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Shanghai (China)—Fiction. 4. China—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Janeczko,
Leah. II. Title.
PZ7.B131358Dr 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011031018
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
This book is for my grandmother
,
who sees the stars from very close up
.
And a dark sun, in space, will swallow up the sun, the moon, and all the planets that revolve around the sun. Remember that when the end is near, man will journey through the cosmos and from the cosmos will learn of the day of the end
.
—Giordano Bruno,
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
,
De l’infinito universo e mondi, 1584
Thou did as one who walks in the night bearing a lamp, and by doing so benefits not himself but illuminates others, when thou said: “A new age dawns, justice returns, and the primeval time of man
,
and a new progeny descends from heaven.”
—Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy: Purgatory, canto XXII, lines 64–72
I
NSIDE THE ELEVATOR ON THAT AFTERNOON FIVE YEARS AGO
, Z
OE
sees only her reflection. Everything is so confused that she’s not even sure what time it is. The instant she walked into that man’s office on the second-to-top floor of his skyscraper, she lost all track of time. It’s as if the world dissolved and was replaced by a parallel world of shiny, polished surfaces. Of metal and glass.
How long did their meeting last? Minutes? Hours? She doesn’t know. The only clue is the scorching sensation in the back of her throat, a reminder that she spoke for too long. Or that she answered too many burning questions.
The truth is she said too much. And that’s that.
I made a mistake
, she thinks, staring at her reflection in the elevator’s icy surface.
But I had to talk to him. It was like a snake biting its own tail
.
Yes, a snake biting its own tail.
Zoe doesn’t know it yet, but a snake is going to kill her five years from now. It’s going to happen in Paris. Her city.
It’s a coincidence, if anyone still believes there’s any such thing as a coincidence.
The elevator descends, as do Zoe and the silent man beside her. Zoe shudders. It’s like sinking down into ice.
“It’s cold,” she says when she feels her breath condensing.
The silent man raises an eyebrow. His name is Mahler, Jacob Mahler. He’s an accomplished violinist and a ruthless killer. The two things don’t clash as one might expect. “You should be used to it,” he says.
The man is alluding to Zoe’s recent scientific expedition along the Siberian coast. Or to the place they first met: an Icelandic thermal spa surrounded by snow. Whatever the case, Zoe shrugs and wraps her arms around herself like a little girl.
She looks up. The lights on the elevator panel have stopped blinking on and off. For a handful of seconds they stay on, indicating the ground floor, but the elevator continues to descend.
“Where are we going?” Zoe asks, suspicious.
“Below,” Jacob Mahler replies.
Before she can ask anything else, the elevator comes to a halt with a whoosh, its shiny aluminum doors open and Mahler leads her down a narrow corridor. “This way,” he says.
Zoe follows him, still hugging herself.
“Where is he?”
“He’s coming down.”
“Couldn’t he have come down with us?”
“Too dangerous.”
“What do you mean, dangerous?”
Jacob Mahler slows his pace, brushes against her shoulder and stops. “I mean there would’ve been too many chances … of contact.”
Zoe shakes her head. “I see.”
“No, I don’t think you could.”
A shaft of light slices through the darkness of the corridor ahead of them. It widens to reveal a second elevator car, out of which comes a tall, smartly dressed man with glossy, perfectly combed black hair, eyebrows that look like they’re painted on and black Bakelite glasses that frame his ice-cold eyes. He calls himself Heremit Devil. The hermit devil.
“Pardon me for making you wait,” he says.
He gestures at the corridor in front of them. All three of them walk down it. They reach a railing. He switches on the lights and shows her the open space and the ruins they’ve just finished unearthing as they were redoing the foundation of his skyscraper.
Zoe clutches the railing. She grips it tight. It’s cold. Very cold.
Redoing the skyscraper’s foundation, of course
, Zoe thinks.
And he discovered it
. Coincidence. Pure coincidence, if there’s any such thing as a coincidence.
“So now … what … are you going to do?” Zoe asks as her archeologist heart begins to race.
Heremit Devil stares at her, imperturbable. “You tell me.”
T
HE CLOUDS CAST A GRAY VEIL OVER THE SKIES OF
S
HANGHAI, BUT
they’re so fragile it seems the least trace of wind could drive them away at any moment.
Sheng runs at breakneck speed to Renmin Park without looking back. It’s a frantic, frightened race as he leaves behind the large, round Shanghai Art Museum and looks for a place to hide among the age-old trees in the park. He reaches the white trunk of a plane tree and darts behind it, panting. Then he peers out at the other trees, the path lined with benches, the museum, the square where people are practicing tai chi and wushu.
The boy’s gone. Disappeared.
Vanished among the city’s twenty million inhabitants.
Good
, Sheng thinks, trying to calm down.
The boy is haunting him. Sheng’s been seeing him for days now, always just yards away. Inside a shop. Across the street. At the second-story window of a building. He’s a young boy with a pale, sickly complexion and he wears a basketball jersey with the number 89 on it. His black eyes have deep bags under them, and his teeth are spaced far apart.
But today, while Sheng was on the museum steps, thumbing through a comic book, the boy walked up to him. “Sheng, is that you?” he said, his voice so low it was blood-chilling.
