Matt began to tremble violently. Someone knelt down in front of Matt, but he couldn’t see them clearly. He felt his body convulse, spasming out of control. Spots appeared in the corners of his eyes. He heard a rushing in his ears, like the sound of waves crashing, getting louder and louder, and then he blacked out.
21Asleep
Jia sat by Matt’s bedside, watching his chest move up and down. He had been asleep for an entire day. She had tried everything to rouse him, even slapped and pinched his face to near bruising. The servants had administered tonics and powders, but nothing worked. Every now and then Matt twitched, and Jia thought maybe he was waking, but he was just seizing again. She had witnessed one of Matt’s seizures only once before, and never had she witnessed anyone else seize, but she still thought it was strange. It was almost like he was flickering in and out like a lightbulb.
Jia stayed with Matt every minute. She barely took her eyes off him. She had this increasingly dark feeling that she and Matt wouldn’t be able to stay together for much longer, that he would disappear right before her eyes, or she would. Things were changing. She could feel it, and see it too. While Matt slept, China began to experience time rifts. At first, they were slight. The servants brought in stories of people mysteriously showing up in the midst of the Forbidden City, foreigners who couldn’t speak Chinese and wore very odd clothes. The guards thought they were spies that had infiltrated the city somehow, but then things happened that were less easily explained. Buildings in the Forbidden City started to disappear, and new ones started to take their place. That evening Jia looked out the window and could see the tall spire of a building she knew belonged in Paris. The Eiffel Tower.
Jia wrote a note to her father. He had asked her to keep him informed of any new developments or unusual happenings. Belamie’s abandonment, the disappearance of Gloria, Henry, and Chuck, and Matt falling into a coma were certainly new and unusual developments, not to mention the time rifts that were clearly happening, which surely the emperor knew about. Jia didn’t really expect the emperor to respond. Perhaps he would send one of his advisers. But within the hour of her message being sent, the emperor himself came.
Jia was surprised at how comforted she felt by his presence. She hadn’t felt that kind of comfort since her mother died. She’d always been afraid of her father before. He had always been a stranger to her. But when they had talked the other night in the observatory, the way he had listened to her, asked her questions, she felt a bond form that she knew would not be easily broken, and she began to wonder what her future would be.
Her father brought with him his royal physician, an old man with a bald head and thin mustache who smelled strongly of eucalyptus and ginger. He inspected Matt thoroughly and then declared what Jia already knew. The boy was in a deep sleep. He had suffered a great trauma that his heart and brain could not cope with consciously. So he shut down.
Of course, Jia knew it was the shock of his mother leaving him. That was the last straw. It broke him, and she was starting to fear he would never wake, or if he did he would never truly recover. If Jia ever saw Albert again, she swore she’d strangle him. This was his fault. He’d been scheming with Matt’s mom last night. They’d been planning to steal the compass all along, and it had broken her friend’s heart, the purest, kindest heart she had ever known.
“When he wakes,” her father said, “he will be different.”
“Different how?”
“He will be lost. The Summer Triangle continues to fade. The priests and I have been watching it closely, as well as other movements. I don’t think it is without meaning. Things are changing. They will continue to change and the world will go into deeper chaos, unless the lock is repaired. Your friend here is the only one who can do it. He will need you to help him find his way, do what he needs to do. If he doesn’t, I fear we’ll all be lost.”
“I don’t know how to help him,” Jia said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What are your strengths? What do you do well?”
Jia’s response was immediate. “Fixing things. Machines and structures. I like building and repairing, making things work better.”
This seemed to please her father. “That is a useful skill in all situations, especially when so many things are broken.”
Jia didn’t answer. How could she fix what she could not see, what was not physically in front of her?
“What do you think of Yinreng?” her father asked.
Jia was startled by the questions. She did not know how she should respond. She knew exactly what she thought of Yinreng, but she was not certain if she was walking into a trap or not. It was treasonous to speak of the emperor or his heir with anything less than respect bordering on worship, but Jia had been gone for so long, the rules were not as entrenched in her, and she felt a sense of boldness that she had never felt in all her days in China before. So she told her father the truth.
“I believe Yinreng is unfit to be emperor. One of your servants is more worthy of your throne than he is.”
She held her breath, waiting for her father’s response, his anger or disappointment, at least, but to Jia’s surprise her father laughed. “I suggest you don’t share your feelings with your brother,” he said. It was a warning, she realized. Yinreng had it out for her. She knew just by the way he had
