“I believe this belongs to you,” the emperor said. He held something out to her. It was the Qing dynasty amulet. “So you can always return home.”
Jia took the amulet, pressed it to her heart. She knew this was a great sign of trust. And respect. She bowed to her father.
“We cannot fix everything, Quejing,” the emperor said. “We do what we can. We try to do what is right, but not everything will be perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes, and sometimes sacrifices have to be made. We all have to sacrifice for what is right and for those we love.”
Jia felt her heart clench, fearing what those sacrifices might be.
Her father left and she continued her vigil at Matt’s side. She had one of the servants bring her the bag in her room. She changed back into her pants and tool vest. As pretty as the dress was that she’d worn to dinner last night, she felt more herself in her regular clothes. There was another change of clothes in the bag, too, clothes that were not her own. She had a vague memory of borrowing them from someone, Matt’s sister. What was her name again? Riley? Trudy? She shook her head. She should know her name, should remember what she looked like, but it was stuck in some part of her brain that she couldn’t reach.
She found Pike’s book, too, among her things. She knew it was really Matt’s book, but she associated it with Pike so much, it was now more her book than Matt’s. Having nothing else to do, she started reading it from the beginning, reading all about famous scientists and inventors in time. Many she had read or heard about before, such as Galileo, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison. Others were new to her. She’d never heard of Steve Jobs, though of course she had seen all the fancy computers and phones he made in the future. Wiley had stolen one for her once. It didn’t work unless they were far into the future, twenty-first century, and then there were all kinds of things you had to have, like something called a network and a data package. In the end she simply enjoyed taking it apart and trying to understand how it all worked. She still didn’t completely understand. Some people’s brains . . . she would never stop being in awe of what humans could create and invent, and with no one was that truer than Matt. His mind was like a world unto itself.
She turned the page to Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist who had invented an explosive called dynamite. Jia had heard of it. Brocco had piles of the stuff on the Vermillion, she recalled. He loved to blow stuff up any chance he got. Once, when they were on a mission somewhere in Africa, he’d blown up a section of a mountain that Wiley said was a known diamond mine in the future. They’d cleared out a sizable amount of rough diamond. After, they’d had a wonderful celebration in Nowhere in No Time. Shortly after that, they discovered Pike on board the Vermillion. Pike, Pike . . . why did she leave? Was it just the familiarity of Captain Vincent and the crew? Or was it something else?
Jia turned the page and looked at the pictures of Alfred Nobel, his laboratory. They were all black-and-white photographs, but even so, she thought he looked vaguely familiar to her. She couldn’t think where she had seen him before. It felt recent, but also long ago.
Jia looked up. Matt was awake.
22Forgetting
Matt was between worlds. No, that wasn’t quite the right way to describe it. That made it sound like he was dying, and he wasn’t dying, he was pretty sure. It was more that he was split in two. He felt part of him was together, solid, lying still in bed, while the rest of him was separated, floating all around like a bunch of dust particles in space, another realm. Definitely not earth. He was in endless space. There was no horizon, no sky, no earth or water. But there was the essence of something more, a kind of presence that he couldn’t see but felt sure was there.
He heard a voice, distant and fading.
Hold on, Matt! Don’t let go!
He wanted to reach out, grab on to whoever was calling out to him, but he had no strength. He wasn’t really here. That other part of him that was still solid and together was pulling him down. These two parts of him struggled against one another. The solid part of him wanted the particles to come back together, and the particles wanted the solid to fly apart. The solid part of him must have won out eventually, because when he woke he was fully together in his bed.
No, not his bed, he didn’t think. He was somewhere else. He’d forgotten where. He looked around at the blankets, the tapestries, the furniture. A tapestry of a dragon hung on the wall. On another wall was a series of paintings of Chinese emperors. He was in China, in the Forbidden City. He’d just met the Kangxi emperor yesterday, who just happened to be Jia’s father.
And then he remembered what had happened, what had sent him into a seizure. His mother . . . she had left him.
I’m not your mother.
A sharp pain lashed through his
