The Treasure Nobody Expected
Chapter 16: The Treasure Nobody Expected
Planet four was the most beautiful place any of them had ever seen.
This was not a useful observation, because beautiful is what you say when the actual description escapes you. Suneo tried to think of something more precise. The grass was knee-high and blue-green, the kind of color that didn't quite belong to either family. The flowers were the size of dinner plates, each one a different pale color, and they grew in clusters around the bases of white trees whose bark peeled in thin curls like old paper. The light was warm and even, with no visible sun — or rather, with a sun so gentle and diffused that it seemed to come from the air itself, not from a point in the sky.
The smell was extraordinary. Not a flower smell — something cleaner than that, more like the air at the top of a mountain, except warm instead of cold.
Nobita sat down in the blue-green grass and said nothing at all.
Shizuka walked slowly, touching the flowers without picking them. Giant stood still and turned his head, slowly, in a full circle, the way he did when he was memorizing something.
Doraemon checked his instruments. "No atmospheric hazards. Mild gravity — about eighty-two percent of Earth standard." He looked up. "This is nice."
"We should keep moving," Suneo said.
"For once you could look at it," Shizuka said.
"I'm looking."
"You're looking for the next clue."
This was true. Suneo was looking for the next clue. He was also, separately, looking at the planet, but he was doing both at once and the looking for clues was more efficient. He scanned the treeline. He scanned the sky. He checked the coordinates on Doraemon's translation.
"Straight ahead," Doraemon said. "Center of the planet."
The path through the flower-planet was not a road. It was more like an intention — the trees and flowers arranged themselves to suggest a direction without enforcing it, wide enough for five people to walk side by side, curving gently. It felt less like a path and more like the planet was showing them the way.
"I don't like this," Suneo said.
"The flowers?" Nobita said.
"The calmness. Everything was trying to stop us before. This isn't. When something stops trying to stop you, it means something else is about to stop you instead."
"Or maybe it means nothing is going to stop us," Giant said.
"That would be unusual," Suneo said.
Giant shrugged. They walked.
The treasure chamber was at the center of the planet, which took forty minutes to reach on foot. They smelled it before they saw it — not the flowers, something different, metallic and complex, like the inside of a very large clock.
Then the trees opened and they saw it.
A temple. Not carved — grown, from something that looked like crystallized silver, the same dark-blue ice material from planet three but warm here, heated by whatever gentle energy the planet ran on. It floated. Not by much — a meter off the ground, casting a shadow shaped like itself, with the space beneath it occupied only by light and the same blue-green grass growing up toward it.
The temple was built almost entirely from mirrors.
Not reflective metal — actual mirrors, framed, fitted into the walls and ceiling and floor at every angle. Hundreds of them. The outside of the temple was a surface that showed you yourself from every direction simultaneously, which was a strange and not entirely comfortable experience.
"That's the treasure chamber," Doraemon said.
"Obviously," Suneo said.
"There's an inscription."
He read it. It was short: Only the honest may enter.
Suneo looked at the inscription. The inscription said nothing further.
Loki arrived.
Not from behind them — from above. He descended from the direction of the warm sky with the casual ease of someone who is accustomed to descending from heights, landing on the grass without a sound. His dark green jacket was immaculate. His expression was the careful, measured expression of someone who has been thinking hard since their copy was walked into the wrong path.
He looked at the temple.
He looked at the inscription.
He walked to the entrance, which was a wide arch of framed mirrors, and stepped forward.
The temple pushed back.
Not violently — it didn't throw him, didn't generate a visible field. He simply could not go in. He walked into the entrance and a resistance met him, gentle and absolute, and he stopped, and no matter how he pushed, he stopped. He stepped back. He walked at it from a different angle. Same result.
He tried to go around. Same result.
He tried to go through a mirror panel directly. Same result.
He stood in front of the entrance for a long moment with his hands at his sides and his expression perfectly composed, in the way that perfectly composed expressions usually mean something more is happening underneath.
"The god of lies," Shizuka said softly, and it wasn't unkind.
Loki turned.
"The god of lies cannot enter a door that requires truth," she said.
Loki looked at her. Then he looked at the group. Then he looked at Suneo.
"Looks like you're the only hope," he said. "How appropriate."
"Shut up," Suneo said.
The group looked at the entrance.
"One at a time?" Giant said.
"I think it's one total," Doraemon said. "The treasure belongs to one person. The map came from one purchase. The first riddle opened for one answer."
"Suneo's answer," Nobita said.
They looked at Suneo.
Suneo was looking at the mirrors. From where he stood, he could see himself in six or seven of them simultaneously, each reflection at a different angle, each one showing the white Space Suit, the silver stripes, the expression that he wore by default in situations he wasn't sure about. Which was an expression that looked confident. It was not confidence. It was the face he put on when he needed to seem larger than he was.
He was aware, in this moment, that the temple was probably going to let him pass. The first riddle had opened for him because he had answered honestly. The temple required honesty. He had more honest moments than people gave him credit for.
He was also aware that being aware of this was exactly the kind of thought a person has before they do something they're nervous about.
"I'm a liar," he said. "Why would this open for me?"
"You're our liar," Giant said.
Nobita nodded seriously. "You know you're lying. That's different from thinking you're telling the truth."
Suneo looked at Nobita. "That's surprisingly philosophical."
"I have my moments."
Suneo looked at Shizuka. She said nothing. She just looked back at him with the expression that meant she already knew how this was going to go and was waiting for him to get there.
He stepped toward the entrance.
The mirrors reflected him: six Suneos approaching six archways, each one smaller and more anxious-looking than he intended.
He stepped through.
The resistance wasn't there. The temple let him pass.
Inside, the mirrors covered everything.
The floor, the ceiling, the four walls — all mirrors, fitted edge to edge, some large and old-looking with tarnished frames, some small and modern, some the size of a playing card. They reflected each other endlessly, so the inside of the temple looked like it went on forever in every direction. You could not tell where the actual walls were.
At the center of the room, floating at eye height, was a single mirror.
It was oval, about the size of a serving tray, with a plain silver frame. No carving on the frame, no inscription. Just a mirror. It was not doing anything special. It was not glowing or rotating or emitting sounds. It looked like something you'd find at the back of a second-hand shop in Nerima Ward for about eight hundred yen.
Suneo walked to it.
He looked in.
He had expected gold. His reflection showing him surrounded by gold, or successful, or famous, or tall — at least a little taller.
What he saw was a boy.
Shorter than all of his friends. This was simply true. He was the shortest of the group and he had spent years not talking about it directly, because talking about it directly would require acknowledging that he noticed, and acknowledging that he noticed would require acknowledging that it bothered him.
The boy in the mirror was wearing an expensive Space Suit. The rest of him was less expensive. Small hands. A face that worked very hard to look certain when it wasn't. The chin was up, the shoulders were back, and the overall effect of all this effort was visible in the mirror in a way it wasn't visible in other mirrors, because other mirrors just showed you the outside. This one showed you the outside and also the effort behind the outside.
The boy in the mirror was desperate.
Not for gold. Not for rare jewels or alien artifacts. For something more ordinary. To be looked at the way his friends were looked at, by other friends, for what they actually were — the way Nobita's friends sat with him while he cried over bad test scores, the way Giant's friends stayed when he shouted and still called him Giant instead of something mean, the way Shizuka was surrounded by people who liked her without her having to prove anything.
Suneo had things. He had the nicest house and the most trips abroad and the first game of anything new and the rarest items at school. But having things and having the look on people's faces that meant they were glad you were there — those were different categories.
He had confused them for a long time.
The mirror was clear about this.
He stood there. One minute. Two. He wasn't sure.
Something happened behind his eyes that he was not prepared to describe to anyone present, and the mirror showed him that too, quietly.
He was crying.
Not loudly. His face didn't do anything dramatic. His eyes filled and it spilled over, and he stood in front of the mirror in an empty room and let it happen because there was nobody watching and it was over before it had fully begun and then he stood there for a moment longer.
Loki's voice came through the temple walls, which were mirrors, which apparently conducted sound.
"You're still in there." Not a question. "You've found it."
Suneo wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
"Bring it out," Loki said. "We can negotiate. I'll be reasonable. I have very good reasons for wanting it — strategic uses, intelligence gathering, it would change everything I'm able to do."
He heard his friends outside too. Not pressuring him — just present. Nobita asking Doraemon something in a low voice. Giant being quiet, which was the loudest form of Giant's attention. Shizuka saying nothing.
"You broke everything up for a mirror," Loki said. His voice was closer now, near the arch. "Not even a spectacular mirror. I've seen better in palaces. The power in that object would reshape entire systems of—"
"I know," Suneo said.
"Then bring it out. Keep half. Keep all of it, even — we'll find a different arrangement. You'd be the most powerful—"
"I know what it does," Suneo said. "I just looked in it."
A pause.
"Then you understand why I want it."
"Yes," Suneo said.
He picked up the mirror. It was not heavy. It was warm, the same temperature as the air inside the temple, which was the same temperature as a comfortable room.
He held it in front of him and looked at it one more time.
The small boy looked back. Still there. Still himself.
He put the mirror down on the ground.
He raised the Air Cannon.
Outside, everyone heard the sound.
It was not loud, which was surprising. It was more like a chord — like every piece of glass in a very large building all finding its resonant frequency at once, all agreeing, and then all releasing at the same moment.
Then it was quiet.
Then Suneo walked out of the temple.
He was carrying the Air Cannon. Behind him, through the arch, the floating temple was full of light — a billion fragments of mirror, each one catching the warm planet-light and spinning it in every direction, the most perfectly distributed light source in the galaxy, which had been one mirror one minute ago.
Loki was staring at him.
"You broke it," Loki said.
"Yes."
"The most powerful artifact in the galaxy. The Treasure of Mirrors. The thing that grants its finder their deepest wish."
"It showed me the truth," Suneo said. "That was the wish. I just didn't know it yet."
Loki stared.
Suneo put the Air Cannon away.
"I don't need a mirror for that anymore," he said.
The fragments continued to spin inside the temple, catching light, scattering it in patterns across the blue-green grass. They would probably keep doing this for a long time. It would be very beautiful. It was also, now, not useful to anyone, which made it purely beautiful, which was perhaps an improvement.
Loki stood in front of the temple entrance for a long moment.
He was the god of mischief. He had lived for centuries. He had fought gods and giants and armies and had been, at various points in his life, a horse, a salmon, and an old woman carrying an apple. He was not easily surprised.
He was quiet.
"You are a very strange child," he said finally.
"Eleven," Suneo said.
"A very strange eleven-year-old." Loki looked at the spinning fragments through the arch. Something passed across his face — not quite amusement, not quite sadness, something more complicated that had elements of both and was not named in the Asgardian language. "I would have used it badly," he said. "I should tell you that."
"I know."
"You knew and you still didn't bring it out to bargain."
"Yes."
Loki looked at him a moment longer. Then he turned. He looked at the warm sky with its gentle even light. He looked at the flowers, which were still growing in their pale clusters, entirely unaffected by any of this.
He was gone when Suneo turned back.
Not dramatically. Not with a shimmer of green light. He had simply taken his presence elsewhere, the way a thought leaves your mind — you realize you're not having it, and it's already gone.
They walked back through the flower-planet in the warm golden afternoon.
Nobita wanted to take a flower but decided against it. Giant picked up a smooth blue stone from the path and kept it without explaining why. Shizuka walked beside Doraemon, and they talked about something Suneo wasn't close enough to hear.
Suneo walked at the back.
He was thinking about the mirror. About what it had shown him. About the boy in it.
He had known about the boy for a long time, in the way you can know things without letting yourself look at them directly. Having the mirror hold it in front of him, making him see it clearly and honestly, without the usual softening he applied to his own image — that was different from knowing.
He thought he would probably go back to bragging about this adventure when they got home. That seemed inevitable. He would stand in the school yard and tell people about planet three and the Copy Robot gambit and tricking a god, and his voice would have that particular angle it took when he wanted to be impressive, and some of it would be true and some would be polished to a higher shine than the original had warranted.
Old habits.
But when he passed a window on the way home, through a gap in the afternoon light, he caught his own reflection.
He stopped. For just a moment.
The boy in the glass looked back at him. Smaller than he wanted to be. The face that worked hard. The chin that went up automatically.
He knew it, now, without flinching. He nodded at it once, the way you nod at someone you know but haven't seen in a while.
The Anywhere Door was already open on the other side of the flower-path, set to the street outside Nobita's house. Through it he could see the ordinary evening light of Tokyo and hear the sound of the neighbor's television from two houses over and smell, faintly, the takoyaki stand that operated on the corner on weekday evenings.
"I outwitted a god, you know," Suneo said, catching up to the group.
"We know," Giant said. "We were there."
"I just want to make sure everyone is clear on that point."
"We are clear," Shizuka said.
"Because it was impressive."
"Yes," Nobita said. "It was."
He wasn't saying it to make Suneo feel better. He said it the way he said things that were simply true, in the flat honest voice that Nobita sometimes had, the one that came out before he thought to put anything on top of it.
Suneo walked through the Anywhere Door.
The evening air of Nerima Ward settled around him — warm, slightly humid, the specific warmth of a Tokyo summer evening that has been warm all day and has nowhere to go. The takoyaki smell was stronger on this side. Somewhere a train was running.
He had not found the treasure he expected.
He had found something that couldn't be bought at any auction in Geneva or anywhere else, something that didn't look like treasure when you were looking at it, something small and familiar and entirely his.
It was just the truth about himself.
It wasn't much.
It was enough.
He added, as the door closed behind him: "But the adventure was incredibly impressive. You're all welcome."
The door closed.
The evening continued in its ordinary way.