Century #4: Dragon of Seas (2 page)

All it took was one look at him and Sheng was gripped by uncontrollable fear, the mind-numbing kind.

Whoever it was, he’s gone now
, Sheng tells himself, a little reassured. His eyes are burning, so he covers them with his hand.

Who is he?
he wonders again.
And how does he know me?

Maybe he’s a classmate. Someone Sheng has completely forgotten about. One of those students whose names you can’t remember. Or who change schools after a few months.

Could be.

It’s just that the boy couldn’t be one of his classmates. He’s at least five or six years younger than Sheng.

A cousin? The son of one of his parents’ friends?

Could be
, he thinks again, leaning back against the plane tree. Maybe it’s someone who stopped by his dad’s agency to sign up for a study abroad program.

That’s normal enough. Sheng must have forgotten about him, that’s all. But then why did he feel the sudden fear? Even more importantly, why does he still feel it? He cradles his head in his hands. It’s throbbing. He hasn’t been getting much sleep lately. Because of the dreams. Bad dreams, recurring dreams that leave him exhausted in the morning, as if he never even went to bed.

“My eyes ache,” he moans aloud.

“You can see me, can’t you?” someone nearby whispers.

Sheng springs to his feet.

The boy in the number 89 jersey followed him. He’s right there, ten paces away, staring at him.

I’m dreaming
, Sheng thinks.
I’m dreaming
.

But he isn’t. This really is Renmin Park. It’s mid-September. In a few days he’ll be meeting up with the others. And over the last two months no one’s been following him.

“What do you want?” he asks the boy, his back pressed up against the tree trunk. “My name’s not Sheng!”

The boy stares at him with his long, dark eyes. “You aren’t Sheng?”

“No,” he snaps. “Besides, I gotta go.”

Without giving the boy a chance to add anything else, Sheng runs off, heading out of the park. His backpack thumps against his shoulder blades.

Trees, benches, people practicing martial arts. Cement buildings. Airplanes disappearing into the clouds. Multitudes of TV antennas. Neon signs. Cars and loud city noises. The sirens from the barges sailing up the Huangpu River.

Without looking back, Sheng keeps running until he reaches the Renmin Square metro stop.

He takes the steps two at a time, slides his magnetic pass through the steel turnstile and pushes on the metal bar before the green arrow even appears. Only then does he turn around, afraid he’ll see the boy behind him. But he’s not there. He’s gone.

He reaches the platform and waits, in a daze. He feels like a fish in a sea of people and finds the loud chatter in the station unbearable. He waits with his eyes closed until he hears the train emerging from the tunnel. At the sound of the doors, he opens his eyes, steps on board and looks for a secluded place to sit, even though he’s only a few stops away from home.

“I’m losing my mind …,” he murmurs, worried.

His eyes have turned completely yellow.

Mistral shuts the door behind her, takes a few steps down the hall of the Paris conservatory of music and dance and leans against the wall, sighing. Her legs are wobbly and her head is heavy. A thousand thoughts are buzzing around in her mind like crazed bees. She adjusts the boiled wool flower on her dress and tries to think straight.

On the door she just came out of is a brass nameplate:
PROFESSOR FRANÇOIS GANGLOF
. One of the conservatory’s most renowned and most feared faculty members.

In front of her, the sound of a newspaper being lowered. Heels clicking across the floor in small steps. And finally, Madame Cocot, her music tutor, appears.

“Well? How did it go?” Madame Cocot’s eyes are bright. She was the one who convinced Mistral to have the audition at the conservatory. That was before Mistral, Elettra, Sheng and Harvey hid out at Madame Cocot’s music school to escape Cybel’s men. When Sheng fell from the top-floor terrace. And Mistral saved him by summoning the bees to break his fall. Memories so close they seem unreal, almost as if her Parisian summer was just a bad dream.

“It went well,” she says, smiling.

The teacher rubs her hands together, making her rings sparkle. “Meaning what, Mademoiselle Blanchard? Would you care to be more specific? Did they accept you?”

“Well …” Mistral searches the pockets of her gray dress. “I guess they did.”

She hands Madame Cocot a sheet of the conservatory’s letterhead,
on which Professor François Ganglof has written in elegant handwriting:

“Level two?” Madame Cocot gasps. “Meaning you’ll skip the first year of courses? Why, that’s wonderful! Come here and tell me everything. What did he have you do?”

Mistral lets the woman usher her into a small waiting room and sits down on a modern, quite uncomfortable chair. “He just asked me what I wanted to sing,” she says. “He was sitting at the piano. And I told him I wanted to sing … Barbra Streisand.”

“Oh, no! I don’t believe it!” Madame Cocot laughs. “You had Ganglof play a Barbra Streisand piece?”

“ ‘
Woman in Love
,’ of course. He played it and … and I sang. That’s it.”

The music teacher scrunches the sheet of letterhead in her hand. “You mean he didn’t ask you any questions, like how long you’ve been singing, who—who brought you here or—or what you’d like to do?”

Mistral shakes her head. “No. It seemed like … I don’t know … like he already knew.”

“And he didn’t make one of his snide remarks, about your dress or your hair, for example, or about your specifically requesting that he give you the audition?”

“No. He made me sing and then he wrote his evaluation. Then he told me to show up for lessons next Monday.”

Madame Cocot sinks back into the uncomfortable chair, satisfied, as if it was a cushy mattress. “Incredible. Truly incredible.”

“Is something the matter, Madame Cocot? Aren’t you pleased?”

Her teacher looks her up and down. “What on earth do you mean? I’m
very
pleased. I’ve always told you you’re my best pupil. But you must understand: Ganglof is a legend in our field. I mean, he—he’s never accepted one of my girls just like that before. That’s why I was always under the impression he had something against me. But maybe I was wrong.”

Suddenly, Madame Cocot claps her hands. “You need to tell your mother! She’ll be thrilled.”

Mistral isn’t so sure of that: she doesn’t want such a big change herself, and she doesn’t think her mother wants it, either. Not now, at least.

“What is it, Mademoiselle Blanchard? Go on, call her!”

There’s a trace of uneasiness in Madame Cocot. A lavish display of happiness that seems to be hiding something else. The glimmer of a teardrop?

“I’m sorry, though,” Mistral says, getting up to leave.

“Sorry? But why?”

Passing by Ganglof’s door, they hear piano notes and a female voice trying to follow them.

They reach the stairs.

“I’ll still come visit you. After all, it’s thanks to you that the conservatory accepted me.”

“Nonsense, Mademoiselle Blanchard. Don’t say such a thing. You’re talented, simply too talented to spend any more of your Thursdays—”

“Wednesdays.”

“Your Wednesdays, right, with an old piano teacher like me, a teacher who never managed to get into the Conservatoire de Paris.” With this, she cocks her head and casts Mistral an amused glance. “In any case, the world is full of pupils who surpass their teachers, don’t you think? And now … go prepare yourself. Lessons at the conservatory are far more difficult than mine. I wish you the best of luck, Mademoiselle Blanchard!”

Squeezing Mistral’s hands, the teacher gives her a little pouch. “I hope you like it. It isn’t new, naturally, but …”

Inside the pouch is a small silver MP3 player.

“They told me it can hold all the songs you like. The last owner’s music must still be on it, but I couldn’t find a way to delete it.”

“But … why? You shouldn’t have!”

“At least now it has an owner who’ll know how to use it,” Madame Cocot insists.

Without waiting for a reply or a goodbye, the music teacher whirls around and walks off between the boxwoods.

Mistral is dazed, to say the least. She switches on her cell phone, but before she can even dial a number, it starts ringing. It’s her mother.

“Mistral, there you are, at last! Come home right away, please.”

“What’s going on?”

“We might have discovered something.” Cecile Blanchard ends the conversation without asking her daughter a single question.

As Mistral imagined, the audition at the conservatory is the last thing on her mind, too.

“T
HE ANCIENT MAP OF THE
C
HALDEANS DOESN
’
T WORK ANYMORE.
”

This is all Elettra manages to think as she sits on the floor between the two bunk beds in her room. The bathroom light is on and the door ajar. Through the window comes the constant hum of traffic on the boulevard along the Tiber River: horns, scooters.

Elettra sighs.

She grabs the heart top for the umpteenth time, rests it on the center of the map of Italy and tries to concentrate. She knows the tops never answer specific questions: they indicate places and provide clues. But she also knows she has no choice.

“Where is my aunt?” she asks under her breath.

She flicks the top between her fingers and casts it. It starts to spin, its pointy tip following the grooves in the wooden map of the Chaldeans. It whirls silently from one city to the next, from one village to the next, to give its answer. Its revelation.

Where is Linda Melodia, who’s been missing since the beginning of summer?

Still resting on the bedroom table are copies of the flyer Elettra
posted in half the city. Her aunt’s photo, their home number and the words:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

Many people claim they have. There have been lots of phone calls. And just as many prank calls. The woman’s sister, Irene, seems calm, but only one thing is certain: Aunt Linda disappeared without leaving a trace. And given her particular inclination for cleanliness, it’s absolutely impossible to find her. Above all, to find out why she left without saying a word or giving an explanation.

“You know she’s always been impulsive,” Aunt Irene said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “She wanted some time alone.”

In Elettra’s room, the heart top spins, slows down and finally stops. On the city of Verona, in the Veneto region. The umpteenth different answer …

Elettra stands up, furious.

Once again, an answer that doesn’t make sense. But why? She’s getting to the point of thinking that the oracle doesn’t work anymore, that its fall onto the sidewalk of Avenue de l’Opéra, which split one corner of the map, irreparably damaged it.

Elettra’s tension has risen day by day as the date they plan to meet up in Shanghai draws closer. She’s been wearing the same sweatpants and baggy old T-shirts for days now, and she hasn’t combed her hair for a week, focusing on the sole objective of hearing news about Aunt Linda before leaving for China.

She holds the top up to the light and peers at it: the faint engraving of the heart that looks like it’s pierced by a thorn has led her and her friends to believe it represents life. A life that goes on despite the pain.

“Maybe I just can’t use it alone,” Elettra murmurs.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

The big mirror in the bathroom reflects the image of a girl who’s changed. Her black hair has grown since the drastic haircut she gave herself in Paris, but it’s still short and accentuates her long neck. Her eyes, which are usually intense, have dark shadows.

Elettra rests her palm against the mirror and savors its cold, reflective surface. When she pulls her hand away, her fingerprints remain on the glass. The secret labyrinth that each of us carries with us.

“What should I do?” the girl wonders with a shiver. “And who am I?”

When she closes her eyes, the only answer she can come up with is a whirl of images: the mixed-up New Year’s reservations, the snowstorm, the blackout, their run down Ponte Quattro Capi, Professor Van Der Berger, the briefcase, the map of the Chaldeans, the first four tops.…

Elettra is one of the four kids born on February twenty-ninth.

“Why?” she wonders again, well aware that she has no answer.

Angry, she leaves the bathroom and then the bedroom. She walks down the hallway to the dining room, climbs the stairs, passes by her aunt Irene’s bedroom door and those of the guest rooms and reaches her aunt Linda’s room on the top floor.

She doesn’t turn on the light. By now she knows the room by heart. She and her father have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb, drawer by drawer, dress by dress, without finding any clue, any lead, any explanation for Aunt Linda’s leaving.

Missing are eight blouses, four heavy sweaters, five pairs of woolen slacks, a few pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes and a week’s change of underclothes.