TESS
The major symptoms of shock: weak pulse, clammy skin, shallow breathing, dizziness, light-headedness, confusion. To this list, Tess added numb lips, itchy toes, gnashing teeth, and a deep desire to toss the nearest real estate developer into the Hudson. Maybe all the real estate developers. And their creepy minions. Where does a person find minions anyway? Was there a job board online somewhere? How would an advertisement for minions read? Have you ever been told your smile makes people uncomfortable? Does your voice sound like a dentist's drill? Does your gaze cause others to break out in hives? Have you misplaced your moral compass?
"Tess, are you okay?" Jaime asked.
Right. She wasn't alone in the elevator. Sometimes she forgot she wasn't alone, like when she walked down the street and realized she'd been mumbling to herself for blocks.
"Tess?" Jaime said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
"Yeah?" said Tess.
"You were mumbling to yourself," Theo said. "I don't mumble," Tess said.
"I wasn't talking about the mumbling, I was talking about your eye," said Jaime.
"My eye?"
"It's sort of . . . twitching." "My eye is really, really angry." "Makes sense," said Jaime.
But the twitching was contagious, Tess noticed. As they rode to the penthouse, Jaime's fingers typed out manic messages against the leg of his jeans. Theo's foot tapped as if he was reliving the way he'd destroyed the Tower of London. Nine paced the length of her leash, pausing only to sniff at their sneakers. Even the elevator was twitchy; it lurched forward, stopped, jerked back, retraced its path, then lurched and jerked again.
Finally, they reached the seventh floor and the elevator released them into the corridor, which smelled of oatmeal, musty newspaper, and just the tiniest bit of lavender. Tess dug around in her messenger bag, pulled out the keys to her grandfather's apartment, and unlocked the door.
Grandpa's apartment had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and dining room, even a library. He'd offered to switch apartments with the Biedermanns once, but Mom said there was no way that Grandpa would be able to fit his stuff anywhere else.
"I've never been up to the penthouse," said Jaime. Theo grunted. "My mom says a more accurate name would be 'the fire hazard on the top floor.'"
Which was true. The apartment was packed with books and maps and parchments, strange gadgets designed by the Morningstarrs and others, piles of newspaper that formed little chimneys all over the place. How would they sort it all? And where would they move it?
Tess let go of Nine's leash and the cat pranced between the chimneys. Huge windows lined one wall, motes of dust dancing in the bright sunshine. Nine leaped up to catch them like a bear snapping at spawning salmon.
"Wow," said Jaime. "This is..."
"A mess?" said Theo. "Amazing," said Jaime.
Clanking sounds erupted from the kitchen, followed by some high-pitched squealing that pasted Nine's ears to the top of her head.
"I thought your grandpa wasn't here," said Jaime. "He's not," Theo said.
"Then who—"
A man dressed entirely in silver armor complete with helmet clomped into the living room. He held a tray with a plate of cookies and three overfull glasses of water that sloshed all over his chain-mail gloves.
Jaime's mouth dropped open. "Is that what I think it is?"
"It is," said Theo. "A Lancelot. Servant model. Built by the Morningstarrs, based on designs by Leonardo da Vinci. Something they did when they were young, but the machines caught on."
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.
"Not everyone wants poor people fed and educated," said Jaime.
"Or living in decent housing," said Tess. Again her stomach accordioned in, accordioned out. She imagined the people of the Five Points who had just arrived in America, whole families crammed into a single hot and dirty room, the stink of Collect Pond, fouled with factory runoff and waste, seeping in through the racked walls. She hoped that Idahovians were against fouling ponds with factory runoff. She hoped they supported decent housing.
Jaime moved from the drawing of the Tombs to a framed newspaper clipping hanging lopsided. "'New York Sun, 1855,'" he read. "'Morningstarrs leave first clue in city-wide treasure hunt.'"
Theo recited, "42, 1, 2; 42, 20, 7; 42, 1, 10; 42, 2, 17; 42, 2—"
"Stop showing off, Theo." Tess waved her hand. To Jaime, she said, "He remembers every number he hears and likes to remind everyone."
"I remember studying the first clue in grammar school," said Jaime. "It's a book cipher using an Edgar Allan Poe story."
"'The Purloined Letter.' From a magazine called The Gift. My grandpa has a couple of copies of that magazine, too," Tess said, pointing. "Right on that shelf."
Jaime wandered over to a nearby bookcase, scanned it, and pulled out the magazine, the pages of which were laminated.
"The first number is the page number, the second number is the line number on that page, and the third number is the word in that line," Theo said.
"'It begins, as everything does, with a lady. Her book holds your keys,'" said Tess. "We know. Everybody knows."
Theo said, "But did you know the word begins doesn't actually appear in the story, only the word begin?"
"What does it matter?" said Tess.
"Details always matter," Theo said. "Like the fact that the Morningstarrs used that story in the first place. They could have used the Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The Bible. Something by Dickens or Melville or even a recipe for a cake. They could have used anything. But they used a detective story about something hidden in plain sight, which pretty much describes all the clues they left."
"They used a detective story because they had a sense of humor," Tess said.
"I wouldn't go that far," said Theo.
"I thought they were real sticks in the mud," Jaime said. "Never laughed. Never smiled." All three of them looked again at the portrait of the Morningstarrs, who seemed to be glowering at them the way eagles eyed their prey.
Tess crossed her arms. "It's just a theory my grandpa was working on. He said that anyone who designed machines the way they did had to have a sense of humor." "They designed the machines the way they did because they thought people would accept them if they looked more like natural creatures," said Theo.
Tess waved him off. "You sound like a history book." "Thank you," said Theo.
Jaime leafed through the magazine, counted down the lines on the pages. Then he said, "That's your grandpa's thing, right? Studying the Morningstarrs? Trying to solve the Cipher?"
"It was his thing," said Tess. "What happened?" said Jaime. "He just gave up, that's all."
Remarkably, Theo still had the energy to roll his eyes. "It's not like he could help it."
"Yeah, well," Tess said, knowing she was being unfair, even awful, but still wanting to argue. Her mind raced with what-if questions, each worse than the last.
"Stop catastrophizing," Theo said.
Jaime looked from Theo to Tess. "Is that a real word?" "I am not catastrophizing," snapped Tess, annoyed that Theo could read her so easily.
A loud crash echoed from the kitchen. Theo said, "You're not the only one who's mad, you know."
"I know," she said. But sometimes it felt like it. The therapist her parents brought her to see liked Tess to do a lot of drawings. The therapist was a nice man with a bushy mustache; he looked like a portrait from another century. He said, "It's interesting that you drew yourself with this little golden crown on your head. What does the crown mean to you?"
"That's not a crown," she'd told him. "That's a nimbus of outrage."
Lance clomped back into the living room with the tray of stale cookies. Jaime gave him the empty glass, took two more cookies. Theo stuck a hand in his thick hair and held it there, his thinking pose. The cat stopped leaping and sat in front of the window, staring out at the middle distance. Tess let out a sigh, and with the sigh her outrage leaked away, leaving her with a hollow in her gut the size of a city. She slumped in the nearest chair, pulled the strap of her bag over her head, and set the bag on the floor. A stack of Grandpa's unfinished crossword puzzles sat by the chair, as if Grandpa had been paging through the endless clues. "Almond capital of the world." "Bug bite." "Wrong."
"Look at this place," she said. "Where's Grandpa Ben going to put it all when the building is gone? Where are any of us going to go? There has to be a way to stop this."
"We could stage a protest," Jaime said. "Go on a hunger strike."
"My mom would never let me go on a hunger strike," said Theo.
Jaime sighed. "Now that you mention it, neither would my grandmother." He glumly ate another cookie.
"If we can't keep Slant from knocking down a build-ing he owns," Tess said, "I wish we could find a way to buy it back."
"Okay," said Theo, "but where are any of us going to get that kind of money?"
Jaime finished the cookie, found an antique monocle sitting on a shelf. He took off his glasses, blew the dust off the monocle, and held it up to one eye, making that eye look twice as large as the other, deep brown with a ring of gold around the edge of the iris. "Wouldn't it be great if we could find a treasure? We could buy back the building."
"Well, if we could solve the Cipher, we'd—" Tess began, and then stopped. If they could solve the Cipher, then maybe they'd find treasure. More than treasure. The secret of the Morningstarrs. The reason for all these buildings, all these things they made. That had to be worth something.
It had to be worth everything.
"People have been trying to solve the Old York Cipher for one hundred sixty years," Theo said. "I'm not sure there is a solution."
Of course there was a solution. There had to be a solution.
"There's a solution," said Tess. "How do you know?" Theo said. "I just do."
"I don't," said Theo. "The Morningstarrs valued process over product. Or maybe the process is the product. The puzzle is its own reward. That's what Grandpa Ben said, anyway."
"Yeah, well, Grandpa Ben's not here," said Tess. Theo extricated his hand from his unruly hair.
"What's your point?"
"What if we did solve the Old York Cipher?" "Tess . . . ," Theo began.
"I'm serious!" Tess said. "If we solved it, we'd get the treasure and we'd also prove it wasn't a hoax. It would be news all over the world. The city couldn't sell this building or any of the other Morningstarr buildings, either. The buildings would be too important to sell."
Jaime stared at her with his giant eye. "I'm not so sure about that," he said. "A lot of things are for sale that shouldn't be for sale." He put the monocle back on the shelf and used the bottom edge of his T-shirt to polish his glasses. "What if your brother's right and the Morningstarrs just wanted a whole lot of people running around trying to figure out clues? What if your grandpa was right and this is one big joke?"
"This is no joke," said Tess. The top of her head was twitchy, itchy, as if her nimbus of outrage were getting too tight for just one person. "This is our home."
Jaime slipped the glasses back on, blinked. Theo shifted in his seat. Nine padded over to Tess, laid her chin upon Tess's knee. Even Lance went quiet. Tess knew what they were thinking. How could a bunch of seventh graders solve a mystery that people had been trying to solve for more than a century? People including her own grandfather? Grandpa Ben had tried; he had tried his entire adult life. Up till now, it hadn't mattered that Grandpa hadn't found an answer. The important things couldn't be rushed. You had to dream your way to them, like a luftmensch, like the Morningstarrs themselves. She touched a page of Grandpa's unfinished crossword puzzle. Tempus fugit. What if you had no time left to dream?
"It's not just about us, guys," Tess said. "A lot of people live in this building. People who don't have the money to just pick up and move because some megalomaniac says we have to. We can't sit around waiting for Slant to send his wrecking balls." This wasn't catastrophizing anymore. This was telling the truth. A lump hard as a pebble tumbled in her throat, and she couldn't seem to swallow it back no matter how many times she tried. "We can't just sit here, Theo. We can't. We can't."
"Okay, okay," Theo said, one palm up like a traffic cop. He gave her that look that said he just might go along, not because he thought it was a good idea, but because Tess needed him to, because he was her brother, because he was not a robot. At least not today.
Tess turned to Jaime. They'd gone to elementary school with him, they'd seen him around the building for years, but they didn't know him, not really. He had his own friends and always seemed way too cool to hang out with them—the nerd twins, those fuzzy-haired weirdos. And yet Jaime was here, and he was listening, not pointing, not laughing. Tess cocked her head, a question.
"It's my home, too," Jaime said quietly. Through the dancing dust motes, something passed between them. A decision. An agreement.
Theo's hand dropped to his lap. He frowned, his shaggy brows meeting in the middle just the way they had when he was smashing the Tower of London to bits.
"Let's say for a second that we are going to try to solve the Cipher," he said. "We have to do it right."
Jaime nodded. "We should start at the beginning." They were humoring her or maybe they were humoring themselves, but Tess didn't care. She smiled. "'It begins, as everything does, with a lady.'"
"Right," said Jaime. "So let's go see her."