The Emperor's Riddle - Softcover

Zhang, Kat

 
9781481478632: The Emperor's Riddle
Softcover
ISBN 10: 148147863X ISBN 13: 9781481478632
Verlag: Aladdin, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

From acclaimed author Kat Zhang comes a “fast-paced mystery adventure” (BCCB) about a girl who embarks on a hunt for a long-lost treasure while on a summer trip to China.

Mia Chen is on what her mother calls a Grand Adventure. She’s not sure what to make of this family trip to China, and didn’t want to leave her friends for the summer, but she’s excited about the prospect of exploring with her Aunt Lin, the only adult who truly understands her.

Then Aunt Lin disappears, right after her old nemesis, a man named Ying, comes to visit. Mia knows that years ago, when Aunt Lin and Ying were sent to the Fuzhou countryside to work as laborers, the two searched for an ancient treasure together—one that still hasn’t been found. She’s suspicious that their shared history might be linked to Aunt Lin’s disappearance.

When Mia discovers an old map filled with riddles in Aunt Lin’s room, she quickly pieces together her mission: find the treasure, find her aunt. Now, Mia, along with her big brother, Jake, must solve the clues to rescue the person she knows best in the world—and maybe unearth a treasure greater than her wildest dreams.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 choice. A writer of books for teens and children, she spends her free time scribbling poetry, taking photographs, and climbing atop things she shouldn’t. You can learn more about her at KatZhang.com. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Emperor's Riddle

1

DEEP IN THE CLOSET OF the master bedroom, buried beneath piles of winter blankets and heavy coats, was an old leather trunk. It might have been bright red once upon a time. But the years had patched it with stains and lighter portions where the leather had worn away.

Mia helped Aunt Lin lug the trunk from the closet, each of them grabbing a dark metal handle. The trunk was heavier than it looked, and Mia was already noodle-­armed from jet lag. She’d arrived in China less than twenty-four hours ago, and most of that time had been spent in transit—taking the train from Shanghai to Fuzhou, and then the taxi here, to this apartment. Her eyes kept slipping shut, trying to remind her that while it was midafternoon in Fuzhou, it was the middle of the night back in America.

Once the trunk was out in the open, Mia saw that it was nearly large enough for her to climb inside. An image came to her—a snapshot of her curled in the trunk like a sleeping fairy, waiting for someone to wake her. Or maybe bound like a prisoner, straining at the rope around her wrists. That was the more exciting story, the kind Mia usually liked. But right now, sleeping for a hundred years sounded like the better option.

“Lost in your head again?” Aunt Lin smiled and brushed a strand of hair from Mia’s face, bringing her back from her imaginings. “Come, let’s see what’s in this thing.”

She rummaged around the nightstand until she produced an ancient-looking key. Mia was surprised her aunt still knew her way around. Aunt Lin and Mia’s mother had grown up in this apartment, but it had been years and years since they’d been here last.

Mia had expected them to feel like she did—a puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

Glum again, she pulled her knees against her chest. This month-long visit to China was supposed to be a Great Opportunity for Mia and her older brother, Jake, to see where their family had come from. The last time they’d visited, Mia had been so little she barely remembered it.

You loved it, Mia’s mother had said. You had so much fun.

But back then, Mia hadn’t met Thea and Lizbeth yet. She hadn’t cared that the trip would rip her from home for a third of summer vacation. The three of them hadn’t spent a summer apart in years. Mia would make it back just in time to celebrate her twelfth birthday, but that wasn’t much consolation.

A month was a long time to be apart from your best friends.

Anything might happen.

Aunt Lin sat and tucked an arm around Mia so they sloped against each other. “Do you want to open it?” she said, holding out the key. She grinned, like they were explorers—or maybe adventurous archaeologists, having just unearthed a treasure. She knew how much Mia enjoyed mysteries.

The lock turned with a satisfying click. Mia opened the lid slowly and peeked inside.

The first thing she saw was a big, square book. It wasn’t until she laid it open in her lap that she realized it wasn’t a book at all, but a photo album. Inside, the photos weren’t slipped into plastic pockets, but pasted onto black paper pages, like a scrapbook.

“Can you recognize your mother and me in any of those?” Aunt Lin said. She was lifting other things out of the trunk—a small frame of embroidered silk, a slender, cloth-wrapped vase. For a minute, Mia was too distracted to look at the album.

But she couldn’t keep her eyes away for long. She squinted at each picture. Some were tiny, barely bigger than a postage stamp. Others were the size of her palm. All were black-and-white, though a couple looked like someone had tried to color them in afterward and hadn’t done a very good job.

“That’s Mom,” Mia said, pointing at a family photo.

Her mother and Aunt Lin bookended a collection of four children, Aunt Lin the eldest, Mia’s mother the baby. In the photograph, all four siblings gathered in a solemn huddle around the seated forms of Mia’s late grandmother and grandfather. Her mother was barely more than a toddler, but she had the same sweet, round face she had now.

“And that’s you, with the braids.” This time, Mia pointed at the eldest child. The girl was maybe fourteen—­around Jake’s age. There was a familiar glint in her dark eyes, as if she were thinking of a joke.

On the next page, Mia found a picture of just the two of them—her mother and Aunt Lin holding hands and laughing at the camera. This time her mom looked to be four or five.

“That was the first day of my senior year of high school,” Aunt Lin said. “One of your grandmother’s friends borrowed a camera from someone.”

She smiled and took the photo album in her careful, life-weathered hands. “Life-weathered” was a term Mia had learned from Aunt Lin, since no one but Aunt Lin used it. Her aunt liked to mash English words together, or substitute one word in a common phrase for another that suited her better. You understand what I mean, she’d say, and Mia always did.

The two of them weren’t like the rest of the people in Mia’s little family. They weren’t like Mia’s mom, who was always punctual, and loved to-do lists, and never let her thoughts wander off when they were supposed to be pinned down. They weren’t like Jake, who did well in school without even trying, who always had people inviting him over to play basketball, or soccer, or tennis.

They weren’t like Mia’s dad, who’d left one day when Mia was little and never came back.

They were only like each other. Cotton-candy-headed, as Mia’s mom sometimes teased; Weird, as Jake always complained. They loved stories and history and make-believe—­and the exciting places where those things blurred into one another.

“Look,” Aunt Lin said. “This is a picture of me during the Chinese New Year. I was nineteen—it was my first time home after being sent down to the countryside.”

Mia studied the picture. It was hard to tell in the black-and-white photo, but her aunt looked heavily tanned. Her hair was still in braids, her smile secret and winking.

When a younger Mia had first heard her aunt’s stories about her years in the countryside, she’d thought they sounded pretty exciting. Mia didn’t have a head for school. She daydreamed through math and English classes alike, distracted by every passing noise in the hallway. Her teachers were always telling her to sit still, to keep her eyes forward.

To think about something that wasn’t fantasy.

She thought she would have preferred tramping around outdoors every day, planting baby rice shoots, or hand-making bricks, or threshing wheat. She’d helped out at Thea’s horse barn before, and that had been fun, the two of them giggling through their tasks and getting straw in their hair.

But she knew Aunt Lin had wanted to go straight to university after high school. She’d dreamed of becoming a history professor—not of being stuck doing farm work in rural China. She’d been there nearly three years before being allowed to come home again. Only then had she applied for university.

“Were you homesick?” Mia said. “When you were down in the...

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Verlag
Aladdin
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
148147863X
ISBN 13 
9781481478632
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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