Christopher Golden - Uncharted - The Fourth Labyrinth

“Jada, you may not remember Nate-” Sully began.

“I remember him just fine,” Jada said, tucking a magenta lock behind her ear as she regarded Drake coolly. “Though in my memory you’re taller.”

Drake smiled. “Well, to be fair, you were shorter back then.”

“You were cuter, too.”

His smile vanished. “So were you. In a bossy ten-year-old girl kinda way.”

“I was twelve.”

“I know.”

Jada laughed, then immediately sobered, as if she felt guilty for feeling any levity at all in a world where her father had been brutally murdered. She managed a small, melancholy smile, just the slightest acknowledgment that she’d enjoyed the sparring, and then turned back to Sully.

“I kept working while you were out,” she said. “I wanted to have something to show you when you got back.”

Sully followed her over to the sofa and sat on the edge as she started to arrange the papers on the coffee table, then lifted a few of them off the floor. From where he stood, Drake saw that many of the papers were drawings of what looked like mazes, but they were fully rendered illustrations, not a crude puzzle maker’s doodling.

“How much did you tell him?” Jada asked Sully.

“Just about Henriksen, and Luka being afraid. I didn’t get into any of the historical stuff,” Sully replied.

“ ‘He’ is standing right here,” Drake said, then looked from Jada to Sully. “And I thought she didn’t know what this mysterious project was.”

“ ‘She’ knew a little and is trying to figure out the rest,” Jada said, cocking her head and studying him. “What do you know about alchemy?”

Drake shrugged. “What’s to know? Crazy people thought they could turn random other metals into gold. And how cool would that be? Although treasure hunters would be out of work.”

Jada picked up an old book, its dust jacket yellowed and torn at the edges. He could barely make out the title, Science, Magic amp; Society.

“You don’t look like the homework type,” she said. “But if you want to read up, it might not be a bad idea. There were a lot of men through the ages-almost always men-who presented themselves as alchemists and claimed to be able to make gold. They claimed all kinds of other things, too. St. Germain told all of Europe he was immortal. Fulcanelli had a reputation as a sorcerer. Nicholas Flamel supposedly unlocked the secrets of the philosopher’s stone.”

Drake picked up the book and flipped a few pages. “Actually, my favorite was always Ostanes the Persian. You know, the guy who was with Xerxes during the invasion of Greece? Apparently introduced the black arts into the Hellenic world? Quite a rascal, that one.”

Jada gave him an appreciative nod.

“The crack about homework?” she said. “I take it back.”

Drake sat on the sofa, attentive as a schoolboy.

“Don’t be impressed,” Sully sniffed. “You can’t be in the business of acquiring antiquities without knowing the major alchemists.”

“I collect all the trading cards,” Drake put in.

Sully shot him a withering glance. Drake wondered if it was meant to stop him from making jokes or from flirting. Not that he meant anything by the flirting. It was a nervous habit he’d developed when he was around women who intrigued him, and Jada definitely intrigued him. Stunning, smart, and fierce, she still managed to have a sense of mischief that he admired. However, Sully was obviously protective of her, and Drake had no intention of testing that.

“I’ve been taking notes, trying to make sense of the things I remember my father saying in the past few weeks,” Jada explained, gesturing to the papers. “Uncle Vic and I went to the library this morning after he called you, and I tried to find the books I remembered my dad was so fascinated by late in the summer. A couple of them I couldn’t find, but I tried to get things that seemed the most similar.”

“What interests me the most is what I didn’t find,” she went on, turning to Drake. “One of the last things I remember my father saying about all of this was that he’d found some connection between all of what he called ‘the great alchemists’ and King Midas.”

“Not much of a stretch,” Sully said. “Midas was supposed to be able to turn things to gold just by touching them.”

Drake leaned forward, reaching for one of the maze drawings. “Maybe I missed something, but last I checked, Midas was just a myth.”

Jada nodded. “Maybe. But my father always said that every legend has at least a little history at its core.”

“What are all these?” Drake asked, holding up the maze drawing.

She took it from his hand. “My dad had been doing tons of research, but his inquiries were split pretty evenly on two subjects. The first was alchemy. The other one was labyrinths.”

“What’s the connection?” Drake asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Sully said, sifting through the illustrations. “Jada dug up references this morning on some of the more famous labyrinths.”

“Sketching helps me think,” Jada said. “Most of the ancient labyrinths only exist as ruins and foundations, but archaeologists think they’ve got some of them figured out. There are diagrams. I tried drawing them, trying to find design connections, that kind of thing.”

“Any luck?” Drake asked.

Jada’s expression turned contemplative. “A little,” she said, reaching for a larger book from the coffee table. “But the biggest piece of luck was right in front of me from the second we found this book in the library, and it took me until about twenty minutes ago to realize it.”

She tapped the cover, drawing their attention to the author’s name: Maynard P. Cheney.

“You know him?” Sully asked.

“No,” Jada said. “But my father had been talking to the guy constantly in the last few weeks. Cheney is working on a new exhibit for the Museum of Natural History. Want to guess the subject?”

Drake held up the labyrinth illustration in his hand and raised his eyebrows.

“Exactly,” Jada said, nodding.

“The museum’s only a few blocks from here,” Sully said as he stood.

“Let’s go have a talk with Mr. Cheney,” Drake replied, setting the illustration aside.

Jada rose, and they both turned to look at her. She seemed confused for a moment, and then her eyes flashed with anger.

“Oh, hell no,” she said, glancing back and forth between them. “My father is dead, and this guy might help us figure out why. If you want some girl who’s going to lock the door and hide behind the sofa, then you’ve got the wrong damsel in distress.”

Sully looked like he might argue, the thought of Jada in danger making him go pale, but one look from her and he didn’t put up an argument. Drake liked her more and more.

As Jada opened the door and led the way into the hall, he glanced at Sully. “I guess she’s coming along.”

Sully gave a wan smile. “You want to try to stop her?”

Drake followed Jada out the door. “Not in the least.”

As they walked down 81st Street, Drake hung back a ways, keeping an eye on Sully and Jada but also keenly aware of their surroundings. He checked every pedestrian and every vehicle but saw no sign that they were being followed. On the way uptown, he had considered Sully’s paranoia excessive, but now he wasn’t so sure. They had only the edges of the puzzle surrounding Luka’s murder, but if he had made some huge discovery involving alchemy, that likely meant gold. Maybe a lot of gold. And there were a great many people who would do just about anything for such treasure. He scanned the windows and rooftops but realized that it had become his turn to be overly paranoid. Even if Luka’s killers-and logic suggested there was more than one, considering how much effort it required to sneak a steamer trunk with a corpse inside it onto a train platform without anyone noticing-had found out where Jada had been hiding, they could not have predicted which route Drake and Sully and Jada would take when leaving the apartment.