The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  All of them had been in this apartment. The walls had heard their wishes. The floors had felt their footsteps. How could he leave this place when so many of the people he loved had left the last of themselves here?

  It was the same for the twins. But maybe they wouldn’t have to leave. If they just could figure out which map the Guildman had been talking about, and which lights.

  “Is this all you’ve done? Two rooms? Are you moving in slow motion?” Mima said, hands on hips.

  “I keep looking at the pictures,” Jaime said.

  “You haven’t seen them before? They’ve only been hanging in this apartment your whole life.”

  “I know. I just . . .” He shrugged.

  “Okay,” said Mima, taking from him an old photo of her as a child with her favorite cat, Beets. “Shoo.”

  “What?”

  “Go take a walk around the block. Get some fresh air.” She held out some money. “And pick up a pizza for dinner on your way back.”

  Jaime took the folded bills. He hadn’t told her what had happened on the train, hadn’t told her that if he and Tess and Theo hadn’t been able to save one another, he’d be just another picture on the wall.

  “What?” said Mima. “Why do you have that strange look on your face?”

  “Just hungry.”

  She waved her hand. “What else is new? Get two pizzas.”

  Outside, the sun was just setting, which meant it was late, after eight o’clock in the evening. The sky was so wild with purples and pinks and oranges that even New Yorkers couldn’t help but stop and look up. High above, the white belly of a solarship floated past. He wondered what the people on the ship saw when they looked down, all the people skittering around the streets like tiny little Rollers. After walking awhile, Jaime sat on a bench in Riverside Park. He pulled his sketchbook from a pocket and sketched—not the river in front of him or the dazzling sky and the solarship above, but Tess on top of a train, head thrown back, roaring like a liger. Tess didn’t have any superpowers—she was as skinny as a chicken wing—but Mima always said that you could never tell how strong a person was just by looking at them, especially girls skinny as chicken wings. Mima said that when she was just a teenager, skinny as a chicken wing, she’d knocked out the front teeth of a boy who’d tried to kiss her after she told him no.

  He was just wondering if he should give Tess a pair of wings when the lamps in the park went on. Or one lamp went on. The rest stayed dark. Which was weird. Weirder when he saw the buildings across the water and saw only a smattering of lights over there, too.

  But the city had had brownouts before, especially in summer. Anyway, it was too dark to keep sketching. He tucked the book in his pocket and made his way over to Mima’s favorite pizza joint, Dangerous Pie, and ordered two pizzas with everything. He sat down to wait. While he was playing Angry Bots on his phone, a large man charged into the pizza shop and ordered a pie with a quarter cheese and tomato sauce, a quarter no cheese or tomato sauce, and half pineapple and peppers. He paid, turned around.

  “Jaime!”

  “Hey, Mr. Moran. How are you?”

  “I’ve been apartment hunting all day. How do I look?”

  He looked like a ham with under-eye bags. “Fine?” said Jaime.

  “I look terrible. We all look terrible.”

  The pizza man said, “Maybe some of the lights will go out uptown, then. We won’t be able to see you all looking so terrible.”

  “That’s not funny. Why would I want a brownout? Out-of-control machines aren’t a joke.”

  “What do you mean, out-of-control machines?” said Jaime.

  “A Morningstarr Machine was caught on video in a bunch of different power stations messing with the circuits,” Mr. Moran said. “It was all over FaceSpace. They haven’t caught it yet.”

  The pizza man was shaking his head. “I saw that video. It looked fake. And that ain’t no Morningstarr Machine.”

  “Of course it was!” said Mr. Moran, growing even pinker.

  “Morningstarr Machines don’t break. And anyway, they didn’t make a machine that looked like that.”

  “That looked like what?” said Jaime.

  “Butterfly,” said the pizza man. “My kid has the complete Lego collection of Morningstarr Machines. You got your Rollers, you got your SqueeGees, you got your anteaters, your caterpillars and dragonflies. Oh, and Lancelots, too, but those don’t really count. Anyway, they didn’t make a butterfly.”

  “I don’t care what kind of toys your kid has!” Mr. Moran shouted. “That butterfly is a Morningstarr Machine. It has to be.”

  “I’m just saying, I know those machines, and that screwy machine ain’t one of them.”

  “What else would it be, then, huh? Huh, tell me that!” said Mr. Moran.

  The pizza man scratched his big belly. “Okay, okay. Maybe you want to sit down.”

  “Why should I sit down?!”

  “Because you look like your head’s going to pop like a balloon.”

  “MY HEAD IS FINE! WHY IS EVERYONE ALWAYS BURSTING INTO HYSTERICS?”

  The pizza man plopped two boxes on the counter. “Pies are ready, kid. Get out while you can.”

  “WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?”

  “Thanks,” Jaime said. He grabbed the pies. They smelled delicious, but his mind wasn’t on his stomach. His mind was on the “butterfly” that was flying around turning off the lights.

  But turning off the lights for what?

  Turning off the lights for who?

  When Jaime got home, he and Mima did something they never did: ate dinner in front of the TV. They watched the amateur videos of a fluttery silver object so blurry you could barely identify it, and listened to witnesses and reporters:

  “Look, I’m telling you, that thing attached itself to one of those there circuit breakers and zapped it. Lights haven’t been right since.”

  “It was only a matter of time for those machines to go kablooey. Darnell Slant knows. Out with the old, in with the new, am I right?”

  “The machine seems have rewired the system somehow, because some lights work, some don’t.”

  “It’s a conundrum for city workers and for authorities, too, who are trying to figure out who or what is behind this sabotage, if it is sabotage. But officials say they expect to have full power restored by tomorrow morning.”

  Mima put a slice of half-eaten pizza back on her plate. “This is a strange story. A strange story for a stranger city.”

  Maybe not so strange, Jaime thought. What if the moth wasn’t sabotaging the lights? What if it was trying to send a message with the lights? But what kind of message? Morse code? No, then the lights would have to blink on and off. Maybe not a message. Maybe a picture or a pattern.

  A pattern like . . . a map?

  But then how would they see the whole of the map? From his vantage point, Jaime could only see a few lights here and there in the buildings closest to him. They’d have to plot the map light by light on a computer or on paper, and there were hundreds of lights. That would take forever. They could climb the tallest building in New York City, but even that might not be high enough to see the whole of the city, might not show them all the lights at once.

  Then he remembered the white belly of the solarship he’d seen earlier, floating gently across the clouds, and he knew what they’d have to do.

  “Fly,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” said Mima. “If I was going to make a machine to mess with this city, I would not make a butterfly. I would make a wasp.” She nodded to herself. “Yes. Something that stings.”

  Later that night, while Mima was washing the dishes, Jaime whispered into his phone: “You guys know anyone with a solarship?”

  There was a long silence on the other end, and then Theo said: “I think we might.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tess

  “Uncle Edgar!” said Tess loudly. “What are you doing here? Look, Dad, it’s Uncle Edgar!”

 
; “Yes,” said Tess’s dad. “I heard that. And so did the entire building. Hello, Edgar. Great to see you again.”

  Edgar stepped inside the apartment, took in the boxes and the bags and the general chaos, Nine guarding her pile of socks like a dragon over an egg. “I know it’s last-minute, but I thought I’d take the kids off your hands for a couple of hours.”

  “Now?” said Tess’s dad, looking at his watch. “But it’s so late.”

  “For you and me, maybe. But not for these two.” He patted Theo’s poufy hair. “There’s a showing of The Glorious Vision of the Morningstarrs at the planetarium. I figured we could catch it if we hurry.”

  Tess’s dad tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Well, they have been packing and moving all day.”

  “And yesterday! And the day before that!” said Tess.

  “I don’t see why not. They deserve to have a little fun.”

  They told the same story to Jaime’s grandmother, who told them they’d probably have more fun going to see Wonder Woman: Revolution, but to each his own. Uncle Edgar packed them in a cab and told the driver to take them to the Croton Fountain. In the front seat, Uncle Edgar kept up a steady stream of chatter with the driver about politics and about the best baseball player on the New York City Starrs and whether or not the team would make it to the series, while Tess’s leg vibrated with nerves until Theo clamped his hand down on her knee.

  The driver dropped them off at the fountain, where a group of teenagers crowded around listening to a kid in braids and jeans rapping: “I grew up a warrior in the Seminole Nation, resisting the brutality of colonization. . . .” Otherwise, it was quiet, and the society’s building was dark, as were most of the buildings on the street. Edgar led Tess, Theo, and Jaime through the oak-paneled lobby and the steel door beyond, down the filigree staircase, and into the belly of the archives. Auguste Dupin, sleeping in his cage with his head under his wing, didn’t even look up.

  As soon as they reached the ground floor, Uncle Edgar pulled out his phone, typed in a code. Two enormous bookcases opened up to reveal a cavernous room.

  In the center of the room was a yellow inflatable ship with solar panels on top and a gondola underneath for the pilot and passengers.

  “Kind of looks like a pat of butter you’d get at a fancy restaurant,” Jaime said.

  “It’s small but powerful. And it’s safer than riding in a car,” said Edgar. “Wouldn’t be a great idea to tell your mom, though.”

  “Or my grandmother,” said Jaime.

  “Or anyone else,” said Tess. “Since when can you fly?”

  “A number of members got our pilot’s licenses when the society purchased the ship. We keep it inflated and ready to go at all times. But we’re not going to have much air time before air traffic control notices us. So, we’re going to have to get up in the air, see what we need to see, and then get back inside as quickly as possible. Someone could get a picture or a video, but I can always explain that away later. We society members are considered quite eccentric, so if I told them that I wanted to fly to the moon on my pat of butter, I’m not sure they’d be surprised.”

  They got inside the gondola and strapped in. Uncle Edgar told them that though it was an antique, it ran as well as a new ship, but didn’t feel much different from strapping into the car of a Coney Island roller coaster.

  Uncle Edgar pushed a bunch of buttons and controls. The ceiling above the ship split, then yawned wide. But instead of the herky-jerky motion of a roller coaster, the airship rose gently as a balloon. Once they were hovering over the courtyard, Edgar pushed another button, and the doors below them closed tight again, so tight that you’d never have known they were there in the first place.

  The airship lifted straight up. The ground below got smaller and smaller, the society building turning into a miniature of itself, a model among a line of models, rows and rows of models, like the worlds Theo built with his blocks. The air flowing through the open gondola windows was crisp and cool, and the sky revealed more shades of blue—midnight and cornflower and periwinkle—all streaked with traces of silvery cloud.

  Jaime said, “I want to draw this, but I don’t have the right colors.”

  “I wish you could draw the smell.” Tess inhaled the smells of carbon and the briny scent of the sea, but also something sharp and metallic that tickled the back of her nose. She wondered if stars had a smell. If the moon did.

  “Now,” said Uncle Edgar as the ship kept rising, “why don’t you kids tell me what we’re looking for and how you knew to look for it?”

  Tess took a deep breath, then told him what they had all decided they could finally reveal to him, especially now that he had agreed to help them: that their grandfather had gotten a letter written by Theresa Morningstarr herself the day that Slant had announced his purchase of 354 W. 73rd Street, that it was the start of a whole new branch of clues, that it had led them from the Liberty Statue to the Tredwell House, the chair of George Washington to the painting of William Waddell, the grave of Eliza Hamilton to the Octagon on Roosevelt Island, and finally to 354 W. 73rd itself, and what came after.

  Uncle Edgar was quiet for a long while, and Tess wasn’t sure if he believed them. Then he said, “Ava Oneal’s house. Your grandfather always wondered if she was the key to the Cipher.”

  “He did?”

  “She was such a cipher herself. Maybe a bigger mystery than the Morningstarrs.”

  “So you believe us? That there’s a second line of clues?”

  Edgar’s voice was kind when he said, “Does it matter what I believe?”

  Tess bit her lip, then shrugged. Though it stung a little to think that Edgar might believe that this was nothing more than a solarship ride, Tess believed, Theo and Jaime believed. That would have to be enough.

  Theo popped his head out of the window and craned up. “You can see the stars. You can never see stars in the city.”

  Edgar said, “That’s because of the lights. There are always too many lights on. They overpower even the light of the stars. But not tonight.”

  “Tonight we have to look down, not up,” said Jaime.

  Higher and higher they rose, the air getting colder and colder, until Tess was shivering, until the whole of the city spread like a blanket below them, studded here and there with winking diamonds. Even in the dark, the spire of the Morningstarr Tower poked at the clouds; the ribbon of the Underway laced all the buildings together. Just beyond the edges of the city, the water glimmered.

  All four of them hung their faces out of the windows, trying to see a map in the lights below, something that would tell them what to do next. Tess stared at the winking lights and darkened buildings and glimmering water, and frustration knitted her brow, knotted her guts.

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Theo said.

  “Me neither,” said Jaime. He looked up overhead and down below. “Kind of looks the same. Like a bunch of random stars.”

  “It can’t be random,” Tess muttered, but nobody seemed to hear.

  “I’ll take some photos anyway, just in case.” Uncle Edgar pressed a button the console. Jaime sketched furiously.

  “How long do we have till the police or whoever figures out we’re up here?” said Theo.

  “This airship is somewhat special. It’s invisible to radar, but not invisible to the eye, so we could get reported anytime now. I think we have enough pictures.”

  He maneuvered the airship around and floated them gently back to the society’s building. Another press of the controls opened the courtyard, and Uncle Edgar lowered the solarship inside.

  “You’re really good at this, Uncle Edgar,” Tess said.

  “You should see your aunt Esther fly,” said Uncle Edgar. “Your grandfather invited her out here last year.”

  “Aunt Esther is a pilot?” Tess said.

  Theo said, “Why not? She’s done everything else.”

  The gondola touched the ground and the balloon above shuddered. Uncle Edgar said, “Okay, let m
e just send these photos to the computer inside. Good. Everyone out!”

  They left the hangar and went back inside the archives. Uncle Edgar sat at an antique rolltop desk with a decidedly not antique computer on top of it. They all huddled around the giant screen. Uncle Edgar typed some commands, and one of the pictures he’d taken popped up on a screen.

  Theo tipped his shaggy head. “Could we put this picture on top of a picture of the city? Maybe the lights are referring to certain buildings or monuments?”

  Edgar did as Theo asked. “We’ve got a few lights on some of the bridges,” he said, “and here’s one at the main branch of the library, but most of these”—he clicked more keys, checking—“are in or on buildings built after 1855.”

  “What if you superimposed the map onto buildings built before 1855?” Jaime said.

  “Good idea,” said Edgar. He called up a map of New York City in 1855 and layered the photograph of the lights on top of it.

  “Looks like a lot of the lights are sitting on farmland or in the woods,” said Theo.

  “Maybe there are clues buried on those spots,” said Jaime.

  “There are buildings on top of them now. We’d never be able to get to them,” Tess said. Uncle Edgar glanced at her, his expression as kind as his voice had been earlier. Tess yanked at her braid hard enough to hurt. There had to be something else to this “map.” Or they had to read it in a different way.

  “Maybe it’s not a map of the city or even things in the city,” said Tess.