He lowered himself to the island, pulled together the cells of his arm, and wrote a message for himself in the sand.
You know how to call the compass, Mateo.
He wondered if he was breaking the rules. Maybe a little, but what was the benefit of being a time traveler if you couldn’t help yourself out a little every now and then? Not too much though. A little was the key. There needed to be a balance. It was all about balance, because somewhere along the line the balance had been disrupted. The pillars of the universe had been broken. He could see it quite clearly now, like he was viewing the whole universe through a giant telescope. He could see how disordered it was, jerked out of alignment.
But he couldn’t fix that now. He still didn’t know how for one, and there was something else he needed to do. Someone besides himself that he needed to help.
Jia.
He pulled himself back into his time tapestry and went back to where he had been in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
“Don’t worry about him,” Yinreng said. “Find Quejing. She’s the real enemy. We cannot let her get away.”
But Matt knew they wouldn’t find her, because she was already gone by this point in time. Jia had told him he’d come and taken her away very shortly after they’d arrived. He hadn’t understood this when she told him, but now he saw it all laid out in his mind’s eye like a choregraphed dance. He saw many things now that he hadn’t before. In this state, he sensed everything in a totally different way. Before he had been a mouse on the ground with no sight or sense of direction. Now he was an eagle in the sky with an aerial view of the world. Past, present, and future were spread out before him, not in a single line, but an intricate web, a sphere. He traveled along the threads to different events and points in time quite easily. His compass had merely been a mechanism to do what his brain could do much faster and easier.
He traveled back in time, to the day he’d first arrived in China. Still in his disassembled state, he followed Jia inside the Hall of Supreme Harmony where with quaking knees she met with her father and Yinreng. He was tempted to take Jia away then, save her here and now from Yinreng’s evil plot. But he knew that was not what was supposed to happen. The Jia he needed to save was hidden behind one of the tapestries. He could just see a small piece of her face poking out. He floated toward her and waited until the hall was cleared. He pulled himself back together. It was easier than he would have thought, like his cells all knew their proper place and order and came together simply by thinking about it. Within a minute he was standing in full physical form before the young Jia. She was so small, no more than six or seven, about Pike’s age, he thought. Her hair was shorter, and her eyes did not hold the brightness that always greeted him. The tunic she wore, though made of fine silk befitting a child of the emperor, was dirty and ragged. She looked thin. He wondered how long she had been hiding from Yinreng in these tunnels. He could well believe she was actually an orphan.
Jia was alarmed by Matt’s presence, at first. She held tight to her little hammer, and for a moment Matt thought she might hit him with it, but her fear seemed to dissipate when he spoke her name, not her given name, but the pet name her mother had called her.
“Nĭ hăo, Jia.”
She lowered her hammer. “Who are you?” she asked.
“A friend.”
It was not hard to convince her to come with him. Jia had told him that she felt she knew Matt from the beginning, that she foremembered him, and that she believed he would take her to her mother. All he had to do was tell her he would take her away from the Forbidden City and she practically jumped in his arms.
He was uncertain how he would travel with her, but he found it was not a problem, that when he disassembled himself he could take her with him, in a similar way that Blossom or the Vermillion could take all passengers wherever and whenever they went. He was the vehicle now. He traveled back a day, as the emperor had said that was when Captain Vincent had come to visit him. He floated around the Forbidden City, invisible, holding on to Jia, until he spotted the Vermillion sitting in the moat surrounding the gates of the city. It, like Blossom, had turned into a junk, but the sail bore the flag with the compass and V at the center.
Matt landed on the deck of the Vermillion. He pulled himself together, and at the same time Jia formed as well. She teetered a little as her feet touched ground. She looked at her hands and wiggled her fingers, then looked around.
“Where are we?” Jia asked.
Matt knelt down next to her. “You will be going on a long journey.”
“With you?”
Matt shook his head. “Not now. I will come later. But I won’t remember you then. And you will have to pretend you don’t know me either. Do you know how to pretend?”
Jia smiled and nodded. “It’s my favorite game.”
“Then this will be the best game of pretend ever. You will be an orphan. You have lived in an
