The Other Tree (5 page)

“Are you okay?” asked Luke.

Chris forced herself to swallow, taking a slow breath. Since when had her mother been into secret-agent stuff? She had been a doctor, one of the best in the area, and well on her way to becoming Director of Trauma Services at the district hospital. Everyone thought she had been crazy to leave everything behind and go off on a wild expedition to who knew where, looking for who knew what. But then again, she’d changed. She hadn’t been the same after—

“My sister,” said Chris. “Liada was my little sister. She died of leukaemia when she was seven.”

Two years later, her mother had joined the SinaCorp mission.

“I’m sorry,” said Luke.

The journal hadn’t been made to be written in—it had been a memorial.

“I think I know what the key unlocks,” said Chris.

* * *

There had been a time when the next birthday had been taken for granted. When Chris had assumed she would buy next season’s clothes, would plan next New Year’s Eve, would watch next year’s movies.

All that had ended with Liada’s diagnosis.

There would be no next birthday for Liada. No next New Year’s Eve. No next anything. Just now.

All talk about the future just…stopped. Every topic seemed fraught with heartbreak—Liada’s ambition to become a microbiologist, her desire to get a pet lizard next year, her fantasy of living in the Galapagos Islands one day. Instead, Chris would sit on Liada’s bed and read stories to her, always the ones with happy endings—the ones where nobody died. Liada would sit surrounded by her plush toy microbes, her hand sometimes straying to the microscope on her bedside table, as though finding some comfort in the cool, metal curves. They had originally promised to buy her one when she got older, and Liada must have known what it meant when her parents had brought one home a week after her diagnosis.

It had been agony, watching Liada’s childish comprehension of mortality grow more lucid every day. Her parents’ grief was a constant tide, growing stronger as Liada’s painful deterioration became living decay. After two eye operations, one hip surgery, and three relapses, Chris couldn’t help wondering if Liada had finally just…let go.

Her mother had been catatonic for days after the funeral, barely moving, barely breathing. She had lain like a human shell, frighteningly like the unresponsive husk of a creature long gone. And then, it had just stopped, as abruptly as if she had flicked a switch. She’d thrown herself back into work, bright and cheerful, working deep through the night in her study, to the endless sound of shuffling papers.

And then her voice had barely faded from the room before she was gone, too.

Chris stood at the gates to the cemetery, the crooked ironwork rusted open. Nearby, a dilapidated booth housed a man who had been there so long they had probably erected the stand around him. Weeping angels mourned dramatically over long-untended graves, while solemnly dressed children chased wild rabbits through the tall grass. A slim young woman in black stood by a fresh grave, sobbing rather unconvincingly, her face covered by a dark veil.

It had been years since Chris had come here. She hadn’t found it comforting or restful, and she didn’t feel connected to the ones she had lost. She just felt horribly alone.

“I like the resuscitation kits they have stationed around,” said Luke. “Prevention is better than business. Very moral.”

Chris and Luke strolled across the manicured lawns, towards a pale granite structure that resembled a petrified telephone box. The walls were a light rose, flecked with grey, and the door was unvarnished silver birch.

Chris disappeared grimly inside, and Luke wondered if the structure was bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside. He peered into the granite box and saw a set of steep limestone stairs descending into the darkness.

Luke caught up to Chris about twenty feet down, at the edge of an enormous underground room that stretched into impenetrable shadows. The walls were bare concrete, and the occasional light bulb was caged against the ceiling. Endless rows of marble crematory lockers filled the space, stacked seven high, and faded memorial photos stared down like a silent crowd. A ledge ran beneath each row, balancing the occasional sprig of flowers or plate of buns, and beside every carved name was a tiny keyhole.

Wanderer’s Peace had been an unremarkable cemetery, catering to those who weren’t wealthy enough for Havingwood’s Keep, or poor enough for Council Disposal. But as land availability grew scarcer, the new management at Wanderer’s Peace was struck with inspiration.

High-density urban planning had led to a boom in the construction of massive, multi-level, underground car parks, which frequently resembled a hopeless netherworld. In the minds of the cemetery managers, if you could go six feet down, then surely you could go down twenty, or fifty, or a hundred. So, Wanderer’s Peace commissioned a subterranean, high-density parking lot for the economically deceased. Mausoleums on levels one through five, coffin drawers on levels six through ten, and crematory lockers on eleven to fourteen.

Except they ran out of money at level one. So, crematory lockers it was.

Treading lightly through the eerie lot, Chris’s fingers gripped the small steel key, her gaze running across the engraved names.

“How far does this go?” asked Luke.

He turned to see Chris standing very still, her eyes cast down to one of the lockers. Chris touched the faded photo of a smiling girl with dark hair.

Liada Arlin
.

“Not far enough,” said Chris, slotting the key into the memorial door.

The door tugged open stiffly to reveal a narrow stone compartment. A plain brass urn stood in the hollow, and beside it lay a package wrapped in plastic. It reminded Chris faintly of when she’d cleaned out her locker after high school graduation and discovered a sandwich from the seventh grade. It looked like it had learned more than she had.

Chris picked up the plastic bag and stared at it for a moment. Wordlessly, she snapped the locker shut and headed towards the exit.

This was all wrong.

Her mother had been a sensible, spirited, optimistic woman. She had always reminded Chris of the charming heroines from certain 1940s films—the kind of woman who compensated for not having small pores by being able to perform a triple bypass with a set of car keys.

But the package Chris gripped in her hands was a sign of something different. There was something decidedly unhealthy about hiding things beside the ashes of your dead daughter—

Luke’s arm flew up in front of Chris, and she jerked to a sudden halt. In the immediate silence, she heard two faint steps on the other side of the lockers. They stopped abruptly, and there was no further noise.

Chris suddenly sprinted towards the exit, leaving a startled Luke to scramble after her. Nearing the entrance, she swung tightly around the end of the row, staring breathlessly down the next passage.

Luke caught up to her, and they stared down the empty, silent row, fading into the distance.

“Who did you expect to see?” asked Luke.

Chris said nothing for a moment, staring into the gloom. She finally turned away, marching towards the stairs.

“Let’s just get out of here,” she said.

* * *

Chris and Luke sat on the floor of the apartment, the late afternoon sun casting wedges of orange light across the floorboards.

Peeling away the plastic wrap and prising apart the tightly furled roll had revealed maps, arcane sketches, scribbled notes, diagrams copied from unidentified books, and addresses jotted on scraps of napkins. There were pages and pages of excited scrawl, conscientiously annotated, referencing things Chris had never heard of.

“I can’t read any of this,” said Luke. “It’s like trying to make out a prescription.”

“There’s nothing here about finding Eden,” said Chris, her eyes darting over another page.

Her mother hadn’t needed to write in code—her writing was so illegible it would have required nothing less than family to decipher it.

“It’s all about how to get in,” murmured Chris.

“Get in?” said Luke warily. “Is this the part involving riddles and traps?”

“She keeps referring to three ‘gates,’ or obstacles.” Chris’s gaze moved back and forth between her mother’s notes and scattered reference documents. “The first gate is the Cherubim, guarding the approach. The second gate is the flaming sword, to ward off intruders.”

“I assume you’ll have a plan before we get there. I’m not good with running away from large rolling boulders in confined spaces.”

Chris squinted at the second last line on the scribbled page. It read simply:

Last gate…?

Followed by a large white space, with the single line:

NEED THE KEY
.

“This is the only thing I can find about the location,” said Luke.

He passed Chris a sheet of paper, photocopied from a text called
Before the Sumerians—Paradigms for Inconsistent Archaeological Evidence
.

“She’s marked a section about a Sumerian clay tablet, apparently dated about 3000BC, which supposedly identifies the location of the four rivers,” continued Luke.

Chris’s gaze travelled down the page, to a handwritten note at the base:

St Basilissa, Naples
.

“I guess that’s where we start,” said Chris.

4

Chris had never liked flying.

She liked
being there
, having her feet firmly on the ground, hiking through the jungle, or up the slope of a volcanic island. She loved picking slowly through the grasses, collecting plants that were the botanical equivalent of albino ligers and amiable giant rats.

She didn’t like the part where you were stuck in a pressurised tube, being ignored by the cabin crew.

“Hello! Hey!” called Chris as the air steward wheeled past with a silver trolley.

He didn’t even slow down.

“That’s the third time he’s gone past with the snack trolley and deliberately ignored me,” grumbled Chris.

“How sure are you about this?” asked Luke, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Because I only have a week of holiday leave, and then they’re going to give my office to the psychic counsellor.”

“You mean psych counsellor.”

“No,” said Luke firmly. “The university’s been hiring all kinds of crackpots.”

Silence.

“I didn’t mean you,” said Luke. He leaned over. “Maybe you’re not doing the wave right.”

Luke pointed to a pretty young Asian woman wearing oversized sunglasses several aisles away.

“Thank you,” said the Asian woman, raising her hand in a neat salute towards the man with the trolley.

The air steward rushed to her side, lavishing her with cream biscuits. Chris’s scowl deepened.

“So how sure are you about this?” continued Luke.

“There’s a St Basilissa’s Museum in Naples, and they confirmed that they have a Sumerian clay tablet.”

“Is it
the
Sumerian tablet?”

“Sorry, but my Italian’s kind of limited,” said Chris defensively.

She decided now was not a good time to share the fact that her Italian was actually limited to “Baci” and the names of other chocolates.

“I told the head of Religious Guidance I was on a research sabbatical,” said Luke.

“Would you rather be back at uni?” asked Chris, thinking back to the grey plasterboard walls of his office.

Luke turned to face the lightening window, settling his head against the travel pillow.

“Wake me when we get there,” said Luke.

* * *

Hoyle tapped quickly across the sliding layers of text on his electronic pad, then raised his eyes to address Marrick.

“Genie Four have hit a dead end, sir,” said Hoyle. “The promising retail premises they visited yesterday appear to have…moved elsewhere.”

“Any commercial lease documentation to track?” asked Marrick.

“The whole
building
is gone, sir.”

“Keep me informed,” said Marrick. “That will be all.”

* * *

St Basilissa’s Museum had aspired to be a classic Renaissance edifice, with towering Corinthian columns, flushed with gradients of brilliant apricot at the base, fading to pearlescent white near the domed roof. Tall, open archways connected each room to the next, beneath panelled ceilings patterned with mouldings of leaves and florets.

They seemed slightly incongruous with the newly installed skylights and the laser alarms surrounding various displays, which Chris suspected were less for breach detection than for sizzling holes in intruders.

Chris and Luke wandered across the glossy marble floors of the museum, through rooms of medieval texts, illuminated scrolls, signets etched in jade, intricately carved ivory urns, and Grecian statues striking heroic poses. Further in, the artefacts became less finely crafted—roughly hewn animals carved from volcanic tuff, stylised clay figurines with ancient fingerprints still visible, wobbly pictograms pressed into baked mud.

As they circled back into the reception hall, Luke’s expression painted a hole where an ancient Sumerian map should be. Chris walked over to a distracted museum guide, who was eyeing a group of American tourists with one hand on her Taser.

“Buon giorno,” ventured Chris. “Per favore…antico pastiglia?”

“There’s a pharmacy across the road, two blocks south,” said the museum guide, twitchily watching as the tourists attempted to put a baseball jacket on a dour-looking statue of Anubis.

“Actually, we’re looking for the Sumerian tablet of the Persian Gulf,” said Chris.

“We don’t display it,” said the guide.

“Excuse me?” said Luke.

“It’s kept in the vaults,” said the guide. “Sorry, I have to—hey!”

The guide scrambled towards the tourists, who scattered, leaving Anubis wearing a beer-dispensing cap.

Luke swivelled slowly to Chris, possibly stonier than Anubis.

Chris suddenly gasped and dragged Luke behind a display case of antique shivs. She crouched beside him, her gaze fixed on a group of people entering the foyer.

“You realise this display case is made of glass,” said Luke.

“Shhh!” hissed Chris.

The trolley man, the man from SinaCorp, the man who had made her an offer she’d quite easily refused, had sauntered into the polished foyer of St Basilissa’s Museum. Docker—according to the business card he’d left behind—was a Project Manager in the Expeditions Department. Chris suspected he wasn’t the kind of Project Manager who organised team lunches or office birthday cakes, and his idea of an exit interview probably involved a private plane and an open hatch.