Century #4: Dragon of Seas Read Free

split one corner of the map, irreparably damaged it.
    Elettra’s tension has risen day by day as the date they plan to meet up in Shanghai draws closer. She’s been wearing the same sweatpants and baggy old T-shirts for days now, and she hasn’t combed her hair for a week, focusing on the sole objective of hearing news about Aunt Linda before leaving for China.
    She holds the top up to the light and peers at it: the faint engraving of the heart that looks like it’s pierced by a thorn has led her and her friends to believe it represents life. A life that goes on despite the pain.
    “Maybe I just can’t use it alone,” Elettra murmurs.
    Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
    The big mirror in the bathroom reflects the image of a girl who’s changed. Her black hair has grown since the drastic haircut she gave herself in Paris, but it’s still short and accentuates her long neck. Her eyes, which are usually intense, have dark shadows.
    Elettra rests her palm against the mirror and savors its cold, reflective surface. When she pulls her hand away, her fingerprints remain on the glass. The secret labyrinth that each of us carries with us.
    “What should I do?” the girl wonders with a shiver. “And who am I?”
    When she closes her eyes, the only answer she can come up with is a whirl of images: the mixed-up New Year’s reservations, the snowstorm, the blackout, their run down Ponte Quattro Capi, Professor Van Der Berger, the briefcase, the map of the Chaldeans, the first four tops.…
    Elettra is one of the four kids born on February twenty-ninth.
    “Why?” she wonders again, well aware that she has no answer.
    Angry, she leaves the bathroom and then the bedroom. She walks down the hallway to the dining room, climbs the stairs, passes by her aunt Irene’s bedroom door and those of the guest rooms and reaches her aunt Linda’s room on the top floor.
    She doesn’t turn on the light. By now she knows the room by heart. She and her father have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb, drawer by drawer, dress by dress, without finding any clue, any lead, any explanation for Aunt Linda’s leaving.
    Missing are eight blouses, four heavy sweaters, five pairs of woolen slacks, a few pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes and a week’s change of underclothes.
    Elettra stares at the bed, the wardrobe, the mirrored dressing table, the Venetian glass collection on the shelf. This is the hundredth time she’s been up here.
    And it’s the hundredth time she thinks something doesn’t add up. Something she’s not being told. Something she needs to find out.
    She quietly steps over to the window, from which she can see the Santa Cecilia bell tower and the four statues that peer down into the inside courtyard of the Domus Quintilia Hotel. They’re black shadows in the night. Stone guardians, silent and still, which the first rains of September have begun to cover with damp streaks.
    Four statues
, she thinks. Then she shakes her head.
    She realizes she’s obsessed with that number.
    September
, she thinks again.
    In a few days she has to leave for Shanghai. And she’s going, no matter what. Aunt Linda or no Aunt Linda. Because she’s convinced everything is going to end in that city.
    “Did you let them know at the gym?” Mrs. Miller asks her son, walking out the front door with him. “It seems silly to pay if you aren’t going.”
    “I won’t be gone for a whole month. I’ll be back soon, don’t worry,” Harvey replies. He kisses her on the forehead and walks toward the taxi.
    His mother smiles. “I could call them for you.”
    “If you feel like it. The number’s up in my room, on the bed. Ask for Olympia.”
    Harvey opens the taxi door and tosses his backpack onto the backseat. “I’m off. The plane won’t wait.”
    “Tell your father I said hello.”
    “You bet. Oh … darn it.” Harvey hesitates, looking up at the roof of their house.
    “What’s wrong?”
    The boy motions to the taxi driver to wait a moment and goes