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Other volcanos were surely erupting across Indonesia, but the thick smoke had reduced the world to those four peaks and this beleaguered city at the edge of the Java Sea.
The volcanos continued to boom, at times loud enough to shatter windows. The ground shook in a continual tremor. The tops of the peaks cast out dark plumes lit by showers of fire below and chains of lightning above. The air burned with sulfur. Flames lit large swaths of the city.
Closer by, shouts and screams echoed in a continual chorus of misery. Wagons and laden cars crept through the pall. Faces were masked against the powder and foul air. But where could anyone go? The falling ash had grounded all aircraft. The coastline remained treacherous, continually swamped by tides and surges.
One thing remained clear.
We’re all trapped here.
Seichan hoped that included one other. She pictured Valya’s smirking confidence when they had all met at the bridge. Though Seichan was happy to have her mother safely recovered, she wondered if such a reprieve would prove costlier in the end.
As if sensing her misgiving, Guan-yin touched Seichan’s clenched fist. Her mother stood beside her in the balcony doorway. Despite the blistering heat and burn in the air, she smoked a cigarette.
“There will be another chance,” Guan-yin assured her with a long exhale of smoke, clearly knowing what frustrated Seichan. “Remember, my daughter,wonsungido namueseo tteoleojinda.”
Seichan lifted a brow, recognizing the Korean adage. “‘Even monkeys fall from trees.’”
Guan-yin nodded. “The Russian woman believes herself to be as skilled as a monkey in a tree, but even she will make a mistake. You must be patient enough to take advantage of it.”
“Or I can hunt her down and kill her before she gets a chance.” Seichan challenged her mother with another proverb, this one from their native Vietnam. “Vi?c hôm nay ch? d? ngày mai.”
It was a sentiment Seichan preferred when it came to dealing with Valya.
Don’t leave today’s work for tomorrow.
Guan-yin shrugged. “For now, let’s hope there is a tomorrow.”
Seichan glanced back into the room where Gray sat and pored over a spread of papers, the copies he had made of the museum pages. Zhuang stood on the other side, leaning on his fists atop the table.
Seichan crossed back inside. “Let’s see if the others have made any headway.”
2:49A.M.
Gray rested his forehead in his palm, his elbow on the table. The room was hot, the air stifling. A low fan stirred a slight breeze.
The colonial-era building was in the Old Town quarter of Jakarta. Outwardly, the structure appeared dilapidated, with a crumbling façade and taped windows. The courtyard was overgrown and weedy. But the place had a modern generator chugging down there, where a triad member fought to keep the falling ash from clogging it. The rest of the city lay dark, lit by occasional flames and loomed over by the fiery flanks of the volcanos.
The nearest—Mount Salak—rose only twenty miles away. It boomed with regular detonations, flaring the skies brighter, as if scolding him for not solving this riddle.
Gray shifted the papers on the table. He had read through them four times, searching for answers in the faded lines of neat script. The account came from Sir Stamford Raffles. It told the tale of his discovery of a pair of petrified bodies. The two corpses had been recovered from a ship sent out to sea following the eruption of Mount Tambora. An autopsy had been performed by a local physician—Dr. John Crawfurd—the same man whom Stamford would eventually assign to govern Singapore after driving off his nemesis, William Farquhar.
Seichan joined him, accompanied by her mother. “Have you learned anything?”
Gray sighed and straightened. “Nothing that makes sense.”
“Tell me what you know.” She placed a palm on his shoulder. “Talk it out.”
He had already told her some of the account, so he skipped ahead. “The recovered bodies belonged to Johannes Stoepker—a member of the Batavian Society—and an Aboriginal cabin boy named Matthew. Dr. Crawfurd seemed certain that Stoepker’s corpse—which was only partially consumed by the petrification process—might offer a clue to a cure.”
“Did he find one?”
“Not directly. After studying Stoepker’s body, Crawfurd became convincedsomethinghad stopped the petrifying process. Unfortunately, not in time to save the man’s life. Still, Stoepker had survived long enough to leave behind a record. His story described toxic seas and a danger lurking in the water following the eruption of Mount Tambora. Whatever that hazard was, it had set fire to his ship and a pirate vessel.”
“What was it?”
Gray sat back and shook his head. “Stoepker believed it was a strange coral. I suspect a piece of it might have been in that box that the Chinese obtained from Valya. Something hard had been rattling inside there.”
“Why do you think it was a piece of coral?”
