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Your brain is a labyrinth, Dr. Trevers had once said. The most challenging puzzle you will ever confront is yourself.

Brink took the final sip of his coffee and was folding the newspaper under his arm when he noticed a woman watching from the edge of the park. There were dozens of people at the dog run—it was a popular time at the park, seven-thirty on a Thursday morning. But for some reason this woman stood out. When he met her eye, she didn't blink but watched him, her gaze tracking him. Something about the equanimity of her expression, the way she seemed to recognize him but made no sign of approach, made him feel uncomfortable.

As did her attire. It was frigid, the wind sharpened to a point, and yet she wore nothing more than a black blazer over a hot-pink T-shirt. Her hair was windswept, with a thick strand dyed bright blue. She was Asian, young, and wore no hat, no gloves, not even a scarf. It was as though she didn't feel the subzero wind at all.

Brink pulled a rubber ball from his jacket pocket and threw it to Connie. His fingers stung with cold. He rubbed them together and glanced back at the woman. The wind didn't even faze her. What did she want? Why was she looking at him like that?

It was possible that she'd recognized him. It didn't happen often—people knew Mike Brink's puzzles, not his face. Still, occasionally someone would approach him, one of his puzzles in hand, and ask for an autograph or a selfie. But this woman wasn't holding one of his puzzle books, and she didn't seem like the type of person to pose for pictures. Deciding to ignore her, he threw the ball to Connie a few more times, then clipped the leash onto her collar and headed home.

He'd completely forgotten about the woman from the park until he walked up the five flights of stairs to his loft and found her waiting at his front door. Her skin was raw from the cold, her cheeks bright pink, her black leather Doc Martens covered in salt and snow from the sidewalks. Clearly, she'd run from the park. That explained how she beat him to his apartment. It didn't explain how she knew where he lived.

"Hey there," she said, looking him over. "Didn't mean to startle you." She offered her hand. "I'm Sakura. Sakura Nakamoto. Can you talk a minute?"

Her name was Japanese, but she spoke to him in colloquial, unaccented English. He shook her hand. "Mike Brink."

"I know who you are."

Before he could respond, she reached into the pocket of her blazer and, like a magician conjuring a dove from a hat, removed a small wooden box and placed it in the palm of his hand. She stepped away carefully, as if the box were dangerous, a delicate thing wired with explosives. Brink stared at it, amazed. There, light as a pack of cards in his palm, was a Japanese puzzle box.

Turning the box over, he examined it from all sides. It was simple, elegant, the wood surface glossy and smooth. He glanced back at Sakura. Why in the world had she followed him from the park to give him a puzzle box?

She bowed, a formal gesture that seemed out of place in the dingy vestibule outside his loft. "In the name of the emperor of Japan, please accept this challenge."

Brink caught his breath as her meaning became clear. The woman was not an intrepid fan. She hadn't followed him home looking for an autograph. She'd brought an invitation to solve the most challenging and mysterious puzzle in the world: the Dragon Puzzle Box.

CHAPTER THREE

Mike Brink punched in his door code—his birth date and Social Security number added together, divided in half, and rearranged in a series of ascending numbers. He hadn't memorized the numbers but saw them as a scale of color at the edge of his vision, a byproduct of his synesthesia. Brink didn't know how it worked, only that the colors guided him to solutions, and they were always right.

He led Sakura into an apartment crammed full of his puzzle collection. Stacks of spiral-bound books of crosswords, sudoku, number puzzles, and mazes; a collection of rare books about puzzles; a glass case filled with Rubik's Cubes, nearly five hundred of them, solved and gleaming like cut gems. His cryptic jigsaws hung on the walls, each intricate square puzzle glued and framed like abstract art. And at the far side of the loft, displayed on custom-built shelves, were his Japanese puzzle boxes.

Japanese puzzle boxes were intricate devices filled with secret compartments, trick openings, false walls, and other diversionary tactics meant to confuse and frustrate a solver. In reality, they weren't one box but many—a box within a box within a box. To solve one, you had to arrange its pieces, step by step, in a way that changed the entire structure of the object. One wrong move and the thing closed like a fist. Rubik's Cubes, tangrams, burr puzzles, mazes, entanglement puzzles—all were examples of mechanical puzzles. They were his favorite kind of puzzle, but they could be maniacally difficult.