Read The Other Tree for Free Online Page B

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