Phoebe leaned closer, while blindly tapping the keyboard. She flipped between the image recorded by the first ping and the latest one. She switched back and forth, like an optometrist testing one’s vision.

  “What are you seeing?” Adam asked, clearly failing the eye exam like Monk.

  “Hang on. Let me adjust the opacity.”

  Phoebe tapped a few more times, and the two images now overlapped each other, translucent enough to see both. The trench walls aligned perfectly on both images, as did most of the seabed—but not at its center. The current image showed the coral canopy and the submarine it cradled had dropped tens of meters lower.

  “What’s happening?” Adam asked.

  “It’s all sinking.” Phoebe frowned. “Maybe the radiation weakened the coral forest under it, enough to make it crumble beneath the sub’s weight.”

  “Is that possible?” Monk asked. “The sub’s been leaking radiation for more than two weeks. Why would the coral be breaking down now?”

  “Could it be secondary to the quake?” Adam asked.

  “Maybe.”

  Another of the DriX pinged its sonar scanner. Phoebe quickly placed the new image on top of the other two.

  “It’s still subsiding,” she reported. “Another eight meters.”

  As they watched the images over the next half hour, the sinking appeared to be accelerating, which made no sense.

  Phoebe frowned at the oddity. “If the sub was merely settling atop a crumbling expanse of forest, its descent should be slowing as the debris piled beneath it, braking its fall. But that’s not happening. I think I know what’s—”

  They all gasped with the next sonar firing.

  Phoebe leaned closer, studying the seabed.

  The wreck of the submarine was gone.

  6:30 A.M.

  Phoebe ignored the chatter from the two men. They had kept secrets long enough, so she felt little need to answer their press of questions.

  Instead, she brought up the sub-bottom profiler on one of the DriX units and ran a real-time scan of the black hole in the coral. She studied the cross-sectional image as it cut down into the darkness, searching for its bottom.

  She didn’t find it.

  With a growl of frustration, she sat back.

  Adam touched her shoulder very gently, as if fearful of her reaction. “What happened down there?

  “It’s as I feared.”

  “What?”

  “A fissure must have opened under it. Swallowing the sub and a big section of the coral forest with it.” She glanced over at Monk and Adam. “I don’t know if the quake broke it open, or if it was always there. Maybe the radiation weakened a bridge of coral that had spanned the crack. Until it finally shattered, dumping everything below.”

  Adam stared at the screen. “But what could be down there?”

  Phoebe sighed her frustration. “It’s too deep to discern anything.”

  “Could whatever we’re seeking—the cause of all this tectonic instability—be hidden in there?” Monk asked. “It’s right at the heart of the strange swarming of quakes.”

  Phoebe stared over at the two men. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Adam closed his eyes, knowing what she meant. “Radiation or not, we have to go down there again.”

  She slowly nodded.

  One of the DriX units blasted its sonar again. She leaned forward as its scan appeared, hoping it might offer some further answers to what lay below.

  Instead, a shape blocked the right edge of the image. It was the tip of a tapered object that sprouted a set of fins at its end. It hung at a depth of two hundred meters.

  Phoebe knew what she was seeing. “You were both right.”

  They waited out the next pass of the second DriX as it circled to the same position and pinged its sonar. The image on the screen was clear again. The tail of the submarine was gone.

  “Does it know we found it?” she asked.

  Monk shook his head. “No way of telling. The sub surely heard the ping, but hopefully those aboard just assumed that it was another of the units’ automated blasts. For us to have caught a glimpse of its tail, the sub’s captain must have let his guard down, overly confident that the Titan X—an unarmed research vessel—posed no threat to it.”

  “So what do we do?” Phoebe asked. “Do we dare dive in the Cormorant with that shark patrolling these waters?”

  Monk rubbed his chin. “Something feels off.”

  Adam stepped closer. “What do you mean?”

  “Why’s the sub just waiting out there? Circling the Titan X.”

  “Maybe it’s come to guard the wreckage below,” Adam suggested. “Making sure no one else dives down there.”

  Monk shook his head. “No, it’s waiting for something else.”

  “What?” Phoebe asked.

  Monk stared them down, certainty firming his voice. “Reinforcements.”

  22

  January 24, 2:45 A.M. WIB

  Jakarta, Island of Java, Indonesia

  From the courtyard balcony of the safe house, Seichan stared out at the shrouded hellscape. Ash rained in a hot powder across the city. Low clouds hugged the island. Four fiery-sloped mountains glowed brightly beyond the city. The peaks were close enough that rivers of lava could be seen flowing down their sides.

  She had learned the mountains’ names.

  Salak, Gede, Cereme, Papandayan.

  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. “Việc hôm nay chớ để 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.”

  2:49 A.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 convinced something had 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?”

  Gray shifted through the pile of papers. “Besides studying the bodies, Crawfurd had employed a biologist to help him investigate a stick of coral. Look at this.”

  Gray slipped out a page. It showed a naturalist’s sketch of a branch of coral and a microscopic study of its hard skeleton.

  Seichan grimaced. “That coral almost looks like a finger.”

  Gray conceded the point. “You could be right. From the pathology findings, Crawfurd believed the bodies were mineralized in the same manner as the coral.” He pulled out a sheet and read from it: “The bones of the deceased appear to have been dissolved away and reformed into a new crystalline pattern throughout the surrounding tissues. Thus casting the flesh into an unnaturally brittle texture.”

  Zhuang frowned with distaste. “Is that possible?”

  Gray shrugged. “I can’t discount it. Considering what the researchers at the Titan Project discovered in the Tonga Trench—a huge coral forest—it could be significant.”

  “What else did Stoepker or Crawfurd write about all of this?” Seichan asked.

  “That’s just it. The story ends there. To me, it feels as if it had been purposefully edited. Stoepker’s account seems incomplete. And Crawfurd draws no further conclusions.”

  Zhuang waved to the pages. “What about all those drawings?”

  “I don’t know. It’s as if they were left as clues to the rest of the tale. If Stamford had been worried that someone like Farquhar might expose his secret, he might have taken some of the pages and hidden them elsewhere.”

  “Didn’t want to keep all his eggs in one basket,” Seichan said.

  “Maybe. But if so, I keep going around in circles.”

  Guan-yin joined in. “What do the drawings show?”

  Gray shifted a page into view. “This one just shows a detailed sketch of some island and some indigenous people living there.”

  Seichan frowned at the drawing. “Maybe it was added by mistake. Someone’s travelogue that got mixed in over the centuries.”

  “I might have thought that, too, except for one detail.”

  Gray slid out the other sketch, which showed a thatched hut, probably on the same island.

  “Why do you think it’s significant?” Guan-yin asked.

  Gray tapped the bottom left edge of the sketch. A figure in colonial clothes sat there, smoking a pipe, and appeared to be consulting with the natives.

  “I think this could be Crawfurd,” Gray said. “I can’t be certain, but to me, it looks like someone from this story went to that island to talk to an indigenous tribe living out there. And these drawings are a record of that encounter.”

  “But what does it mean?” Zhuang asked. “Why would the doctor go out there?”

  “Maybe in search of that cure,” Gray said. “The account does hint at some discovery of an elixir.”

  Seichan scowled. “That island . . . it could be anywhere.”

  “True. But the last drawing in the portfolio makes even less sense.”

  He pulled out another sketch. This one was far cruder, nearly childish in nature. It depicted a fire-breathing snake and what appeared to be a rainbow.

  “According to the account, this was discovered among Stoepker’s handwritten papers in the steel box found with his body,” Gray said. “It comes with no provenance or explanation. Or least not in the pages secured in Singapore. Maybe there’s more of an account in the part of the story that remains missing.”

  “Why did Stoepker include it?” Zhuang asked. “There must be a reason.”

  “If I had to guess, it was not drawn by Stoepker, but by his passenger aboard the tender.”

  “The Aboriginal kid,” Seichan said.

  Gray sighed. “Matthew, the cabin boy of the doomed Tenebrae. He and Stoepker were found roughly sixteen days after their ship departed Jakarta. I wager the course of the illness took a long time to incapacitate them. During that time, Stoepker wrote his account. Maybe Matthew did the same, drawing the snake and rainbow before he died.”

  “That poor boy,” Guan-yin said. “But why would he draw such a strange picture?”

  “It had to be significant for Stoepker to seal it up in his box,” Gray said. “Unless he just wanted to preserve the boy’s artistry—in which case, it’s meaningless. But I don’t think so.”

  Seichan frowned. “Why?”

  “From their account, Crawfurd and Raffles did not strike me as sentimental. They’re coldly scientific, which is fitting for members of the Batavian Society. If Stoepker had merely kept it as a memorial to the boy, the others would not have saved it.”

  “Then what does it mean?” Guan-yin asked.

  “I can only guess.”

  Seichan narrowed her eyes. “Guess or hunch?”

  “A bit of both, I suppose. While en route to Jakarta, I only had a short time with the papers, but even then, I had suspected that the drawing was done by Matthew.” He tapped the detailed sketches of a meeting at an island. “Maybe the indigenous people shown here are Aboriginal, too.”

  Zhuang picked up the page and squinted at the figures.

  Gray tried to explain his reasoning. “Before landing here, I did an internet search for snake and rainbow and Aboriginal people. It was a long shot, but something intriguing did pop up.”

  Zhuang lowered the drawing. “What?”

  Gray reached to an e-tablet where he had stored his research. “According to Aboriginal mythology, one story persists across the hundreds of communities of the Australian First Nations. It’s the myth of the Rainbow Serpent. A snake god that went by many names. Yurlunggur, Tulloun, Kanmare, Goorialla, and others. Yet, its story remains remarkably consistent. In fact, the myth is considered to be one of the oldest continuing religious beliefs in the world.”

  “What’s the story behind this snake god?” Seichan asked.

  Gray stared down at the sketch. “According to Australia’s First Nations peoples, the Rainbow Serpent is said to be the creator of humankind. It’s a great snake that lives in the water. And while it’s considered to be a creator of humanity, it’s also said to be a destroyer. It travels the watery pathways beneath the world, popping up here or there and exacting punishment or offering protection.”

  Zhuang shifted the sketch closer. “Could the boy have drawn the snake as a means to seek his god’s help?”

  “I don’t know. But if this page was some form of an Aboriginal prayer, why did Crawfurd and Raffles—both Christians—preserve it with their records?” Gray stared around the group. “It must be significant.”

  Seichan crossed her arms, still unconvinced.

  Gray pulled free the last page of the handwritten account and read from it. “Here is what Sir Stamford Raffles writes at the end. ‘Alas, we have learned how very little we know of our world. And now we must protect a secret that could lead to its ruination if abused by the wrong hand. Perhaps it would be better if we carried it to our grave, but we know it must not be lost. For it equally holds the promise of salvation. A method to appease the gods of the underworld if they should ever grow angry again, which they surely will.’”

  A thunderous boom outside ended his words, as if the gods were punctuating this centuries-old testament. Past the windows, flames fountained high over the crown of Mount Salak.

  “The gods are certainly furious now,” Seichan mumbled.

  “Then we must find a way to appease them,” Gray said.

  “How?” Zhuang asked.

  “By seeking out the rest of Stamford and Crawfurd’s account.”

  “Where do we even begin to look?” Guan-yin asked.

  Gray stood up and stared beyond the balcony to the raging skies. “By breaking into another museum.”

  He reached to his e-tablet and scrolled past the many legends of the Rainbow Serpent—a god of creation and destruction. He brought up an advertisement for a current exhibit: MARITIME TRAILS: PEOPLE, PLACES, AND OBJECTS.