York: The Shadow Cipher

CHAPTER FOUR

Tess said, "In the early eighteen hundreds, everybody had a Lance—well, all the rich people had a Lance—but they went out of style more than a hundred years ago."

"Maybe if you got him a different outfit," said Jaime. "Lances can get destructive when left alone too long," Theo said. "My grandpa's always finding the toilet paper

pulled off the rolls and dragged around the house." Jaime nodded. "So they're like big metal kittens?" Lance held out the tray to Jaime, metal arms squeaking.

"He makes the cookies himself," said Tess. "Oatmeal.

They're pretty good, usually. He must have made these before my grandpa . . . well, before he left. They might be a little stale."

"Stale cookies are still cookies." Jaime took a couple of cookies and a glass of water. "Thanks, uh, man."

Tess wasn't hungry, but she took a cookie, and Theo did, too. Lance clomped back into the kitchen, where he started banging around pots and pans. If he had the ingredients, Lance could make cookies, beef stew, vegetable soup, or pancakes; you never knew which. Normally, just the thought of an empty suit of armor whipping up a batch of pancakes would make Tess laugh, but now . . .

She put the water and cookie on top of a stack of papers, her stomach clenching and unclenching in its own interpretative dance of catastrophe. When she went back downstairs, her parents would tell her to stop worrying so much, that worrying didn't solve anything. But worrying was supposed to keep bad things from happening—that was the entire point of worrying. You said to yourself, I hope I don't die in a bizarre accident with a revolving door, and you didn't, see? Because you worried about it.

She felt as if she had been smacked in the face with a revolving door. A stale cookie wasn't going to fix that.

But what would? What could?

Tess said, "Well, I can't say I didn't expect this." "That your Lance would need some oil?" Jaime said. "That Slant would eventually get our building," Tess

said. "That he'd want to destroy it."

"I didn't expect it," said Theo. "Not in our lifetime. It's . . . it's . . ."

"An affront to decency?" Tess said. "An affront to humanity? An affront to every living creature in the known and unknown universes?"

"It's pretty bad," Jaime said. He took a bite of a cookie, raised his brows, and popped the rest of the cookie into his mouth. "I wish we could do something."

"Like what?" said Theo.

The cat banked off the window, flipped in the air. Jaime wandered around the apartment, sipping his water, picking up framed photographs and putting them down again, pressing middle C on the baby grand piano that Grandpa used to play before he got sick. Tess almost explained about Grandpa, about where he'd gone, but Jaime was examining a Duke map of New Amsterdam, 1664. Next to that was another map that showed New York City under British occupation from 1776 to 1783. And then a drawing of the Tombs, a fortress prison on Centre Street built around 1830 in the style of ancient Egyptian architecture, right next to the Five Points neighborhood.

Jaime leaned in to look more closely. "What is this place?"

"That's the Tombs courthouse and prison," Tess said. "The building's still there. It's where my mom works. But the neighborhood around it was torn down a long time ago. It was mostly immigrants living in cruddy buildings that were sort of sinking into the ground. Lots of crime and stuff. The Morningstarrs were immigrants, too, and when they first came, that's where they lived. Later, they fought to get the place cleaned up, the people fed, schools built, things like that." She nodded at a portrait of the Morningstarrs on the opposite wall. In it, the twins looked like two cotton swabs—long faced with wispy tufts of white hair.