Seven Wonders (35 page)

To both twin’s utter surprise, when they arrived at the campsite, they discovered that Kyle Grady had exchanged the planned tent for a rented RV—and had turned the entire interior into a makeshift computer lab, complete with sat-link and all the latest gaming systems. He’d given Jeremy a hug, and then he’d handed Jack a flashlight, and the two of them had set off into the woods for the first of many outback excursions.

That day, Jack’s father had shown how much he loved both his sons—those two complementary zygotes. And where Jeremy was a complex child Kyle Grady never truly understood, Jack was cut from a cloth that his father knew as well as his own skin.

Hinh Li was right; Jeremy wasn’t the only reason Jack was in China, risking his life to chase a mystery that seemed to grow deeper with each clue he found. He was in China because like his father he was born to go into the bush.

• • •

The bright orange flames licked at the brick-ceiling work as Jack held the wooden torch in front of him, carefully navigating the last few steps of the corkscrew stairway that led down into the lowest section of the ancient
stone Wall. He guessed they were at least thirty feet out into the bay; he could hear the waves crashing against the outer walls on both sides, and he could feel the pressure building in his ears, the dampness in the air increasing with each descending step.

Sloane followed him in silence, staying close enough to be able to see her footing in the flickering circle of light from his torch. He’d found the torch after they’d gone through the second set of locked doors that led from the touristy part of the tower complex into the older, interior halls that harkened back to this section of the Wall’s Ming-era past. The key ring Hinh Li had provided before they’d disembarked from the helicopter had gotten them to the stairwell, but now they were on their own, working deeper into the base of the drinking dragon’s head.

Jack slowed as he stepped off the last step and into a narrow, cramped passageway. The ceiling was so low he had to hold the torch at chest level, the heat from the flames stinging his cheeks and making his eyes tear. After another five yards straight ahead, the passageway curved to the left—and Jack found himself entering the alcove Hinh Li had described. The passageway widened by a few feet, and the ground shifted from packed mud to paved stones, each slab the size of a man’s head. The walls on either side were lined with antique Ming-era suits of armor hanging from wooden hooks pounded directly into the stone. Shiny bronze breastplates, pewter helmets, and heavy wooden shields, as well as a handful of halberds, axes, and spears.

A few more feet, and Jack saw that the alcove was essentially a dead end; but as he got closer, he realized that the back wall was actually three separate stone panels, each reaching from floor to ceiling. Even from a distance, he could tell that the panels were much older than the rest of the alcove; the stone had a faded, charred appearance, with roughly hewn edges that had obviously not been worked by any modern cutting tool.

As Jack moved closer, he saw that the three panels were covered in Chinese
calligraphic carvings, running down from about eye level to just above his knees. Jack only recognized a few of the characters, but one name stood out.

“It’s the story of Wang Zhaojun,” he said, running his gaze across the calligraphy as Sloane moved next to him. “Dates back to the Han dynasty, which ruled China from around 200 BC to the first few years of the new millennium. As the legend went, Wang Zhaojun was one of the four greatest beauties in all of Chinese history. Originally of low birth, she had been chosen to serve as one of the Han emperor’s numerous concubines. But when the royal portrait artist came to paint her, she refused to bribe him, so he painted her portrait with a huge mole, distorting her ephemeral beauty. Because of this, the emperor never chose her for his bed. When a rival king asked for one of the concubines to solidify a treaty, the emperor offered up Wang Zhaojun. It was only at the rival’s wedding banquet that the emperor finally saw Wang in person and realized the mistake he’d made. But by then it was too late.”

Sloane ran her palm over the carvings, the elegant swishes of ancient black ink sunk into the even older stone.

“A little superficial, for a love story.”

“I’m not sure it’s supposed to be a love story. More of a political tale. The Emperor’s rival is so taken with Wang’s beauty, he pledges to make peace with his former enemy—”

Jack paused, his gaze frozen halfway through the writing on the third stone panel. He took a step closer, lowering the torch, and then Sloane saw it, too. Five lines of calligraphy from the bottom of the stone.

The serpentlike dragon, wrapped around a spherical peach, was carved directly between the two characters that symbolized Wang Zhaojun’s name.

Sloane dropped to one knee, inspecting the image.

“Anything in the story about dragons and peach trees? Or is it all just beautiful concubines and sexually frustrated Emperors?”

Jack shook his head, still staring at the panel. There was something about the image that bothered him, but he couldn’t quite place his finger on it.

“Any idea what we’re supposed to do now that we’ve found it?” Sloane asked.

She touched the image with a finger, tracing the coils of the dragon’s serpentine body.

“It’s carved right into the stone, like the other characters—”

“Hold on,” Jack said suddenly. “Do you notice anything wrong about the picture?”

Sloane lifted her finger, looked at it again, then shook her head.

Jack shifted his backpack off of his shoulder and reached into the front pocket, retrieving the shard from the stone urn. He held it next to the image on the wall.

“It’s backward.”

On the wall, the dragon’s equine head was facing to the left—not the right, as it was on the shard from the urn. The creature’s tail curved off in the opposite direction, tilting slightly toward the ground.

“It’s a mirror image,” Jack said. “An enantiomer to the pictogram.”

“A mirror image,” Sloane repeated. Then she looked at Jack. “Which came first?”

“What do you mean?”

“The pictogram, or this carving on the wall? Which is the mirror image?”

Jack wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“We found the pictogram at Petra, which was built at least a few hundred years after this section of the Great Wall.”

“And we were led to Petra by a pictogram we found at the Colosseum, which was built fifty to a hundred years later. We were led to the Colosseum by the image we found at Chichen Itza, built six hundred years after that—”

“And Machu Picchu led us to Chichen Itza. The Taj led us to Machu Picchu. We’ve already established that we’re moving back in time—”

“But don’t you see, Jack—these pictograms, these clues, this road map leading us from Wonder to Wonder: It was all planned out ahead of time. Your brother, Jeremy, the link he found between the Modern Wonders and the Ancient Wonders, his mirror image—that’s the only way it makes sense.”

Sloane stood back from the stone panel, shaking her head.

“These segments that we keep finding, they weren’t just placed in random monuments, which somehow became the Seven Wonders of the World. This was all planned from the beginning.”

Jack realized what she was saying, because it had been in the back of his mind since he’d first seen Jeremy’s program, the glowing double helix that had gotten his brother killed. He nodded.

“An architectural roadmap of human evolution.”

“From the Great Wall to Petra to the Colosseum to Chichen Itza to Machu Picchu,” Sloane said. “And on and on. All doubling as markers built to house, hide, and protect our seven bronze segments.”

“You don’t sound so skeptical anymore.”

“I reserve the right to go right back to being skeptical until we find the last segment and see where it leads us. Because there has to be a pretty incredible reason that the greatest landmarks of human evolution were chosen to lead us here.”

Instead of responding, Jack handed his torch to Sloane, then turned and crossed the alcove to one of the shiny breastplates hanging from the wall. Using both hands, he removed the piece of armor and carried it back to where she was standing.

“In ancient times, mirrors were more than simple objects we used to see how pretty we looked when we woke up in the morning. They were considered gateways to secret worlds, sometimes to the heavens, or the clouds where the gods resided.”

He bent forward and shifted the shiny breastplate so it was directly in front of the image carved into the stone panel. Then he adjusted the angle,
using the light from the torch in Sloane’s hands until the image was reflected across the shiny bronze surface—a perfect mirror image, exactly the same as the original pictogram.

Almost immediately, there was a loud churning sound, like heavy water against a hidden stone wheel. Jack felt a cold, damp breeze against his cheeks, and then the third stone panel tumbled backward—revealing another stone stairway that led directly downward.

Jack tossed the armor to the floor. Then Sloane held the torch forward, trying to see past the first few steps.

“I kind of wish the stairs led up instead of down. What did she say, a phoenix in the branches?”

Jack took the torch from her and started down the steps.

“And a dragon down below.”

• • •

“Look out, the last step is a doozy.”

Jack held out his hand, stopping Sloane on the stairwell. He lowered the torch, letting the flames play across the surface of the murky water that stretched out across the long, rectangular basement, lapping at the walls and disappearing into the shadowy corners. The room was part cave, part chamber; in some places, the walls were made of the same stone panels they had just come through, in others, it was just mud and rock, chunks jutting out like knuckles over the fetid, liquid floor. The ceiling was too far above to see clearly, but Jack’s attention had already shifted across the long room to a raised stone platform up against the far wall. In the center of the platform stood some sort of altar, about waist-high, in front of what appeared to be a sculpted diorama. Even from a distance, Jack could tell that the craftwork didn’t appear to be from the Han era, or even Chinese. If anything, it looked
Greek—but Jack had a feeling it wasn’t the ancient Greeks who had led him to this place.

Jack turned back to the water below his feet, then shifted his gaze to the nearest wall, searching for the sturdiest looking outcropping of rock. He moved his free hand into his jacket, reaching for his grapple.

“We should be able to make our way along the far wall, for at least the first ten yards. Then we’ll cross back to the other side—”

Before he could finish his sentence, Sloane strolled past him and stepped boot first into the fetid water. There was a splash, and then she was standing in front of him, the water reaching to just above her upper thigh.

“Really, Jack, enough with the theatrics. It’s not that goddamn deep.”

Jack’s eyes widened.

“How did you know?”

She pointed to the surface of the water, a few feet to her right. Jack saw a clump of thin, green strands, each about the width of a strand of hair, floating on the top of the murk.

“Filamentous algae. It only grows in shallow water. Are you coming?”

Jack placed his grapple back in his jacket and stepped off the last step. The water felt cold through the material of his jeans, but his boots easily found the floor—slick and flat, more packed mud than stone. He moved next to Sloane, and together they started forward across the rectangular room.

Each step took effort, and twice Jack almost lost his footing, but Sloane caught him both times, gripping his jacket tight enough to send jabs of pain into the flesh wound on his shoulder. When he grimaced, she apologized, but he waved her off with the torch; the pain was keeping him alert, reminding him that one wrong step, one inch to the left when he should be going right, and there was a good chance the blood was going to flow. Though they were solving riddles, this wasn’t a game; they were in a chamber over twenty-two hundred years old beneath the last and oldest of the
Seven Wonders of the Modern World, searching for the final piece to a mystery that had already gotten his brother killed. A mystery millennia in the making—

“There it is. The last segment.”

Sloane’s voice was a whisper, nearly lost in the lapping of the murky water against the walls. Jack followed her gaze to the raised stone platform, now only a few feet in front of them. There on the waist-high stone altar sat the final bronze segment, the snake’s tail curved and shiny in the torchlight.

“No parchment,” Sloane said. “No protective vessel. It’s just sitting there.”

But Jack’s gaze had already moved from the segment to the diorama behind it, which he suddenly realized wasn’t made of stone like the walls and the rest of the section of Wall above them. The diorama was glistening white, with smooth lines and curved edges.

“Ivory,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

It was the same image from the mural he had seen over and over again—beginning in the pit beneath the Temple of Artemis, again on the stone tablet he’d found in the crate beneath Christ the Redeemer, and again in Sloane’s photos from the hypogeum of the Colosseum. Except instead of paint against stone, this time the mural was carved in pure ivory, from the dense spectacle of the ancient garden to the group of armed women carrying the tablet of the segmented snake. And in this version of the mural, there was one marked difference. The women weren’t simply leaving the garden. They were heading toward something. Something huge, intricately carved—and instantly recognizable.