The Empress's Tomb Read online

  KIKI STRIKE

  THE EMPRESS’S TOMB

  Kirsten Miller

  CONTENT

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Also by Kirsten Miller

  Imprint

  For SD, whose secrets are my inspiration

  PREFACE

  The Traitor Empress

  The whispers began the day she arrived on horseback at the gates of the Emperor’s palace. They knew her long journey had begun beyond the great wall being built to the west. A princess of the Xiongnu, the barbarian tribes who waged endless war with China, she had come to marry the Emperor’s son. When they saw her, most members of the court agreed. Peace had been bought at too high a price.

  No one dared question the princess’s beauty, so they sneered at her round cheeks blasted pink by the winds of her native land. They couldn’t deny her nobility, but they scorned a woman who could shoot an arrow farther and straighter than any man. Even the palace servants found something to mock in the fact that her loyal attendant, a lowborn barbarian horsewoman, could always be seen at her side.

  The Emperor’s son thought nothing of the gossip. He adored his wild bride-to-be and lavished her with silk, jade, and gold. She was draped in heavy robes that made it impossible to ride and paraded before the court like an exotic creature from the Emperor’s zoo. Over time, she began to look the part of a Chinese empress. But the women tasked with teaching her the feminine virtues of humility, subservience, and obedience knew that the girl could never be tamed. It would be easier to teach a tiger to tiptoe.

  At night the Princess dreamed only of home—of the deserts, grasslands, and mountains that lay outside the empire she was one day to rule. Finally, in desperation, she traded her robes for the frock of a peasant and fled the palace walls. She and her servant were free for three glorious days before they were captured by soldiers as they crossed the Yellow River.

  The old Emperor was a wise man, and he had long known that the girl could never be Empress. Servants were dispatched to deliver a meal spiced with poison, so her body would remain unmarked and her murder kept secret from his son. But the Princess refused to die. Instead, she drifted into a sleep so deep that her heartbeat was little more than a faint tapping.

  The Emperor’s son was told that the Princess had expired from fever. A royal funeral was planned, even as court gossip branded the girl the Traitor Empress. It was whispered she’d been unmasked as a spy and buried alive as punishment for treachery. The Princess’s faithful servant was powerless to prove the girl’s innocence. All she could do was bribe a guard to smuggle two items into the Princess’s tomb. One was a small statue of herself on horseback, so she could serve her mistress in the after-world. The other was the truth.

  She knew that in time all secrets are discovered.

  CHAPTER ONE

  You’ve Been Warned

  Before we begin, take a quick peek out your window. It makes no difference if you look down on a crowded street in Calcutta or a strip mall in Texarkana. Wherever you might be, all the people you see share one thing in common. They’ve all got a secret they’d like to keep hidden. The dapper gentleman with the briefcase robs parking meters in his spare time. The kid on the bike enjoys eating ants. And the little old lady on the park bench was once known as the Terror of Cleveland. I’m kidding, of course. I don’t know their secrets any more than you do. That’s the point. You never know.

  There are many lessons in life that can be unpleasant to learn. Don’t dry a hamster in the microwave. Flip-flops aren’t appropriate cocktail party attire. And mayonnaise shouldn’t come with a crust. But for a girl detective, there’s one lesson that’s hardest to learn. No matter how hard you try, you can never know everything about the people you care for the most. Even if you’ve shared countless adventures and faced death side by side, there may still be secrets between you.

  When this story began, I had five best friends. I knew all about their unusual hobbies, life-threatening allergies, arrest records, and shampoo preferences. What I didn’t know was that two of my friends still had secrets they were hiding—and that one of those secrets was powerful enough to destroy us all.

  • • •

  It all started at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. I was sitting at my kitchen table, reading a book and enjoying a well-balanced breakfast of butterscotch pudding, when I looked up to find my mother standing in the doorway, clutching a newspaper. I don’t recall feeling particularly guilty that day, but I let loose a shriek at the sight of her. Her short black curls had broken free from their hairpins and surrounded her face like a cloud of toxic smoke. There were bags under her eyes and mismatched sneakers on her feet.

  “What are you reading?” she inquired in an oddly formal voice.

  “Phantoms, Fiends, and Things That Go Bump in the Night,” I informed her. “I found it under the bed in the guest room. What are you doing up?” In my fourteen years, I’d never seen my mother standing upright before noon on a weekend.

  “There was a story on the news last night. I thought you might find it interesting, so I got up early to buy the newspaper.” On her way to the table, she stepped over a pile of books that had spilled across the kitchen floor. A week earlier, what most people assumed was a minor earthquake (I knew better) had toppled the tall towers of books that had lined the walls of our apartment. But the task of putting my parents’ large and bizarre library back in order was too tedious to consider, and most of the books were still lying where they fell. My mother lowered herself into a chair across from me, keeping her eyes trained on my face.

  “What was the story?” I asked, trying to remember if I’d done anything that might have made the papers. On Wednesday I’d helped nab a flasher in Grand Central Station, but that didn’t seem terribly newsworthy. And as far as I knew, the source of that earthquake was never determined. I was trying to keep a low profile.

  “See for yourself.” My mother slapped the newspaper down in front of me. The front page of the New York Post featured a picture of a young orangutan wearing a pair of purple boxer shorts and brandishing a set of salad tongs. I started to laugh until I read the headline: Is This the Work of Kiki Strike? the paper asked. The smile slid off my face as I glanced up at my mother.

  “Go ahead. Read it,” she insisted. “The story’s on page three.”

  As my mother watched, I skimmed the article. Apparently, at eight o’clock the previous evening, a woman by the name of Marilyn Finchbeck had woken to find a three-foot iguana crawling into bed beside her. Her next-door neighbor, hearing Marilyn’s terrified screams, was dialing 911 when he stepped into the nursery to discover his one-year-old son playing peek-a-boo with a family of hairy-eared lemurs. Not long after, a man on the third floor of the same building leaped from his bedroom window when confronted by the orangutan pictured on the newspaper’s cover. At the time, none of the residents of 983 Broadway had noticed that the animals that had invaded their apartments were all wearing handwritten notes tied around their necks.

  When police had responded to calls from Marilyn Finchbeck’s building, they quickly discovered the source of the mayhem. Someone had picked the locks to a pet sto
re on the ground floor and liberated the animals inside. Rotweiller puppies were found gorging themselves on bags of premium dog food. Half a dozen cockatoos and one foul-mouthed parrot screeched from the rafters. But rather than search for the animals’ mysterious benefactor, the police instead arrested the pet store’s owner. In the back of his shop, behind a hidden door, they had found a series of secret cages. Most were empty. Only two drugged koalas remained inside, both too woozy to join the party. The zookeepers who were called in to capture the lemurs and orangutan (along with a young snow leopard that had chased a deliveryman for thirteen blocks) knew a crime when they saw one. The animals that had been locked away in the secret cages were all members of endangered species. They had no business being in New York. Around each of their necks was a note that read I want to go home.

  The New York Post believed Kiki Strike was responsible. A man in the neighborhood was reported to have witnessed a pasty-looking elf in dark clothing casing the pet store the week before. (Not the most flattering description of Kiki, but not entirely inaccurate, either.)

  ” So. Where were you last night, Ananka?” my mother asked.

  “Here,” I insisted, relieved to be able to tell her the truth. “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “You know Kiki Strike. She was here on Thursday watching kung fu movies in our living room.”

  “Yeah, but the girl I know is fourteen years old and couldn’t care less about the animal kingdom. The Post is just trying to sell papers, Mom. Everybody wants to believe there’s a teenage vigilante running amok in New York.”

  My mother snorted like an angry bull preparing to charge. “Let me get this straight. You still expect me to believe that your friend had nothing to do with foiling that kidnapping plot a couple of months ago?”

  “Do we have to go over this again? You saw the news,” I told her, sidestepping the truth. “The Kiki Strike story in June was a hoax. That girl who claimed Kiki rescued her from kidnappers was lying. She made up the story because she wanted to be on TV. Who knows where she got Kiki’s name? She could have picked it out of the phone book.”

  My mother leaned back in her chair and glared at me through narrowed eyes. She had something else on her mind, and I knew it couldn’t be good. I saw a mouse take a cautious step out of the cabinet under the kitchen sink. He took one look at my mother and scurried back to safety.

  “Principal Wickham called yesterday afternoon,” my mother finally announced. “Your history teacher says you haven’t been paying attention in class. He claims you slept through a lecture on the founding of New York. Apparently you didn’t even bother to clean up your drool when you left.” At last I had identified the species of bee in her bonnet. My extracurricular activities weren’t the issue. I could dress up like Wonder Woman and fight the forces of evil as long as I got good grades.

  “I don’t drool. Mr. Dedly doesn’t like me because I know more about New York history than he does.” It may sound conceited, but I wasn’t exaggerating. I’d spent two years picking through my parents’ massive library and gobbling up every book I could find on the subject. I knew how many unfortunate workmen were entombed in the Brooklyn Bridge, which burial grounds had once supplied the city’s medical students with fresh corpses to dissect, and the location of the secret underground railroad built for the Vanderbilt family’s personal use. I could have taught the class myself—and with much more flair than Mr. Dedly, I might add.

  “That may be true, Ananka. But Mr. Dedly isn’t the only teacher who’s caught you taking cat naps.”

  “Who else complained?” I snapped, not entirely surprised to find that the snooty Atalanta School for Girls was filled with spies and traitors.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “What matters is that classes started three weeks ago and you’re already in trouble. I don’t want more report cards like last year’s. Any more C’s or D’s and I’ll send you to boarding school. I’m not joking, Ananka. I’ll find one so far away from civilization that you’ll have nothing to do but your homework.”

  “You’re bluffing.” I laughed nervously. My mother had never threatened me before, and I wasn’t sure if I should take her seriously. But I couldn’t imagine a fate more horrible than being banished from Manhattan.

  “I don’t think you want to find out what I’m capable of. I suggest you start spending more time studying and less time hanging around with your friends. Some of those girls don’t seem to care about school, and a couple of them are downright shifty. Oona Wong never even knocks when she comes to visit. She just picks the lock on the front door and lets herself in.”

  I felt myself wince. I’d asked Oona to stop picking the locks, but it was a habit she was finding hard to break.

  “My friends are geniuses” was my pathetic response.

  “I don’t doubt it for a moment. They may even help you win a scholarship to the community college of your choice.” My mother rose from the table. “You and Kiki Strike are up to something,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but if it keeps affecting your schoolwork, I’ll make it my business to find out.”

  As she shuffled out of the room, I glanced down at the open paper in front of me. If Kiki was responsible, she should have been more discreet.

  • • •

  Of course my mother was right. My friends and I were up to something. But even if the possibilities had been presented in the form of a multiple-choice question (Ananka and her shifty friends have been …A: spending time with radical animal-rights groups; B: sniffing Sharpies and neglecting their homework; C: falling under the influence of a tiny Svengali who will ensure they end up working at Better Burger; D: saving the city of New York), my mother could never have guessed the truth. Like many people her age, she suffered from a bizarre form of amnesia that prevented her from remembering what it was like to be young. Despite her suspicions, she couldn’t bring herself to believe that a group of fourteen-year-old girls were capable of anything more than petty mischief.

  Since I’m in the mood for sharing, I’ll let you in on the truth. At the age of twelve, I had joined the Irregulars, a band of disgraced Girl Scouts led by the infamous Kiki Strike. Together, the six of us shared a remarkable secret. We had discovered a vast maze of forgotten passages beneath downtown New York that had been constructed by the city’s criminal community more than two hundred years earlier. Hidden entrances to the Shadow City could be found in the basements of banks, boutiques, and fancy homes throughout Manhattan, and anyone with access to the rat-infested tunnels could enter and rob the buildings at will. Of course the Irregulars weren’t interested in lining our pockets with ill-gotten goods. We just wanted to keep the tunnels to ourselves. But we knew our underground playground came with a price. Instead of letting the authorities ruin our fun, we took responsibility for keeping a new generation of criminals out of the Shadow City.

  I’d like to say we succeeded. But like the bloated bodies of giant squid that wash ashore on the coast of New Zealand, even the best-hidden secrets surface sooner or later. Six months earlier, an incomplete map of the Shadow City had fallen into the very worst hands, and Kiki Strike’s murderous relatives—the evil Queen of Pokrovia and her morally challenged daughter—had used it to plot her destruction. After the Irregulars foiled their attempt on Kiki’s life, Livia and Sidonia Galatzina fled to Russia. But it was only a matter of time before they returned—and as far as we knew, they still had a copy of our map.

  While we waited for the Galatzinas to make their next move, the Irregulars stayed busy. Over the summer, we explored new tunnels and expanded our map of the Shadow City, collecting the treasures (gold coins, silver watches, surprisingly valuable antique bedpans) we found along the way. Whenever we came across an entrance in danger of discovery, we either blocked it or set booby traps. It was exhausting work, and much of it was done at night while most girls our age were snuggled up in their beds. We had hoped to complete our map before school started in September. But by the time Principal Wick
ham decided to rat me out, there was still one tunnel left to explore. Nothing my mother might have threatened could have kept me from finishing the job.

  It’s not that I didn’t take her warning to heart. As my friend Verushka would say, when a quiet dog begins to bark, it’s best to pay attention. I even tried tackling the geometry homework I’d long been neglecting. But math has always made my mind wander, and it didn’t help that every room in our apartment was littered with books on more interesting topics. (Lost South American civilizations, forensic analysis of prehistoric dung, and the MI5 plot against Princess Diana, to name just a few.) While brewing a pot of strong coffee, I spotted a book titled Female Poisoners of the Seventeenth Century leaning against a box of Sweet’N Low. Unable to resist, I convinced myself I needed a short break from numbers and let my eyes sink into the story of the greedy Marquise de Brinvilliers, who poisoned half her family before being burned at the stake. When I looked up again it was almost nine o’clock in the evening. As I threw on a pair of black pants and a black T-shirt, I cursed my lack of discipline. Books have always been my weakness.

  I locked the door to my bedroom and scrambled down the fire escape outside my window. I’ll admit that there wasn’t much call for Cat Woman—style stealth. My mother and father weren’t even home. I had put on such a convincing show of studying all day that they had decided to toast their success at a nearby restaurant. A simple Studying: Do Not Disturb sign would keep them out of my room when they returned. But since I was meeting Kiki Strike for an evening of adventure (perhaps my last for a while), going out the front door just didn’t seem fitting.

  • • •

  The weather had been unseasonably hot for weeks, and the air was thick with the rancid smell of a million garbage cans. Lightning crackled in the clouds above, warning of a storm that was slinking toward the city. As I headed for the Marble Cemetery, a hidden graveyard with an entrance to the Shadow City, I counted the rats that ducked into the sewers at the sound of my footsteps. I’d made it past forty when I turned into a short unlit thoroughfare named Jersey Street. The hair on the back of my neck began to levitate, and my fingers gripped the small can of pepper spray I had hidden in my pocket. I tried to prepare myself for an encounter with a gang of quick-fisted hooligans or one of Manhattan’s fabled muggers. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with an enormous rodent.