by Laura Ruby
“I think NOT!” Aunt Esther bellowed, and bashed another man who attempted the same.
The figure in gray hummed, that hum that wriggled under Tess’s skin, and suddenly, the men in the boat started shouting and pointing at the water, at something moving in the water. Dark shapes converged in the clear blue of the river, darting too fast to figure out what they were.
A thud and a crash. The boat lurched sideways.
“Go!” said the figure in gray. “Your aunt will take care of you. “
“But Nine—” said Tess,
An eruption of barking and snarling came from both sides.
“Nine has stripes and spots,” Theo said. “Tess—it wasn’t her.”
“GO!” shouted the figure in gray. “They have other weapons. Things that could stun you, blind you, make you forget.”
“Come on, Tess,” said Jaime.
“Please,” she said.
“I know, I hear you, but we have to go now,” Jaime said.
Aunt Esther rammed the boat onto the shore, and they all climbed in. She didn’t wait to greet the figure in gray, didn’t seem to care who it was. She backed the boat away from North Brother Island and sped away as fast as she could.
But Tess turned to watch the shore. As she stared, the figure lowered her hood, exposing the beautiful—and familiar—face beneath.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cricket
While Tess, Theo, and Jaime were hurtling away from North Brother Island in Aunt Esther’s borrowed solarboat, Zelda “Cricket” Moran was hurtling exactly nowhere. She was sitting in the middle of her blush-pink bed in the middle of her blush-pink room, staring at the mural she made the very first day she’d arrived here. Just this morning, she’d added a picture of Karl to it, eating his favorite snack. But that wasn’t why she was trapped here on a perfectly good day, when she could be out investigating. No, her mother seemed to understand why she’d painted the picture of Karl on the wall, even if it didn’t match the peachy pink of the paint her mother had chosen for her. “The color of dawn,” her mother said. What her mother didn’t understand, refused to understand, was that this building was filled to the brim with NEFARIOUS ACTORS performing NEFARIOUS DEEDS.
“You’ve been sneaking around, stealing things, drawing all over the walls! The only nefarious deeds being performed in this building are being performed by you!” her father had bellowed at breakfast, red in the face as he always was.
“‘I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean,’” said Cricket. It was a line from her favorite movie. She found it quite useful.
“WHAT?” Her father got redder in the face. Cricket thought he should see a doctor for that. It didn’t look healthy.
“Cricket,” her mother warned. To her husband, she said, “Go easy. She misses Karl.”
Her father seemed about to yell something else, but swallowed the words (words that probably didn’t mean what he thought they meant, either). He heaved a strangled sigh, then put a rough hand on Cricket’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry about Karl. I’ll call Detective Biedermann from the office and see if she has any more information, okay?”
Cricket, who had been expecting a fight, felt the tears well up in her eyes. She hated crying. But she did love her dad, as shouty and red as he could be.
“Okay,” she said, barely able to get the words out.
But that didn’t get her out of her punishment. She was grounded for two days for stealing the logbook from the security desk. Otto had created a diversion by throwing an epic temper tantrum in the middle of the lobby, and while the guard tried to soothe him, she swiped it. But some busybody had seen her do it, and here she was, sitting in this pink room with the pink comforter and the pink curtains and the pink, orange, and yellow pillows that her mother said looked like a sunrise but Cricket thought looked like pillows. Since Otto was two years younger than she, and more IMPRESSIONABLE, her parents said, he was grounded only for the afternoon.
It wasn’t fair.
So many things in the world weren’t.
The door creaked open. Her mother stood in the doorway sipping her coffee. “What kind of deeds, Cricket?”
Cricket swiped furiously at the tears that kept leaking from her eyes. Maybe she needed to go to the doctor, too, with all this leaking. “What?”
“You said this building is full of nefarious actors performing nefarious deeds. What kinds of deeds are you talking about?”
Cricket shrugged. She loved her mother, too, but Cricket had found that most people seemed to lose their minds somewhere around the age of eighteen or so. Suddenly, they don’t believe in anything. Not ghosts, not intruders, not spies, not NEFARIOUS ACTORS performing NEFARIOUS DEEDS. Mention that you heard the monster scratching under your bed again, and some adult will tell you that there’s no such thing, when you know perfectly well that there is, and they would, too, if only they paid attention. Mention spies, and a whole roomful of grown-ups will chuckle into their wine glasses—Cricket did not understand the point of wine, why would you want to drink something that made you silly?—and tell your mother how adorable you are and what an imagination you have and that maybe one day, you could be a storyteller or some person who makes cartoons or games for a living. Cricket didn’t even like cartoons and thought most games were a waste of time. She listened to true-crime podcasts and watched the news. She knew the ways of the world. She knew how things worked.
“Cricket?”
Cricket struggled to come up with vaguely nefarious deeds her mother would find believable so that she would stop asking all these questions. “There are a lot of people wearing loud shirts and those shorts that come down to your knees.”
“Bermuda shorts?”
“Is that what they wear in Bermuda?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why do they call them Bermuda shorts?”
“Cricket.”
“What?”
“I hardly think that people wearing silly clothes is nefarious. And I don’t think you think it’s nefarious, either. Why did you want that logbook?”
Not for the first time, Cricket wondered whether her mother was a double agent. Sometimes she seemed like a regular mother, interested in coffee and book clubs and her work as a freelance designer. But other times she seemed to look at Cricket as if she knew every one of Cricket’s thoughts and intentions, as if Cricket’s secrets weren’t secret at all.
Moms were DISCONCERTING.
“I wanted the logbook because I wanted to see who had been to the building.”
“Because of Karl?”
It wasn’t the reason, or at least, it wasn’t the whole reason, but her mother would think it was as good a reason as any. “Yes.”
Her mother nodded, thinking. “What if I make you a deal?”
Now Cricket was suspicious. “What kind of deal?”
“If I take you to see the security chief of the building, and let you watch the recordings of the day Karl was taken—”
“But Detective Biedermann already watched those!”
“We haven’t,” said her mother.
Cricket could hardly believe her luck. “Yes!”
“Hold on, I’m not done. If I take you to see those recordings, will you promise—”
“I’ll be good!”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say, either. Let me finish.”
“Okay,” said Cricket, wishing she would finish a little faster.
“What I was going to say was that I’d like you to promise me that you’ll tell me if you see something truly strange or scary or dangerous. I can help you. But I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong, if I don’t know what you’re truly up to. Do you understand?”
Her mother was being disconcerting again. Maybe she was a double agent—a mom, and more than a mom. A super-mom. A person who could still do depressing grown-up things like food shopping and taxes and laundry without screaming, but also hadn’t lost her imagination and her curio
sity and her brains. A person who knew the way the world worked, who knew how unfair things really were.
Maybe it would be okay to trust her.
Just this once.
Cricket reached under her bed, pulled out a box. She opened the lid and showed her mother what was inside.
Her mother backed up, her whole face screwing up in disgust. “Ugh, Cricket! What are those?”
“Not what you think,” said Cricket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Theo
Like his sister, Theo had been watching the island’s shore, too. He saw the figure in gray lower her hood, saw the perfect oval face.
“It’s a woman!” Theo said, impressed. He looked at Tess and Jaime, expected them to be as impressed as Theo was. But they were much more than impressed. They seemed utterly shocked. Jaime most of all.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong with you? I mean, I guess it’s a little surprising that such a small woman could have fought off so many men, but she could have training in all sorts of disciplines. I would expect that you two would know that women can take care of themselves.”
“That’s not it,” Jaime said.
“What then?”
“I know her. Sort of.”
“You mean you recognize her?”
“I should,” Jaime said. “I’ve been drawing her for months.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
Jaime searched his pockets, found a drawing. He unfolded it for Theo, held it up with both hands so Theo could see. In the drawing, a pretty woman, small and brown-skinned, stood in a long gray coat that seemed to swirl around her.
“Where have you seen her before?” Theo said.
“I haven’t. I made her up.”
“What?”
“I made her up,” Jaime said. Jaime’s own skin had gone slightly grayish, and Theo wondered if Jaime would faint and tumble into the water. Theo didn’t want Jaime to faint, and he definitely didn’t want Jaime to tumble into the water. He’d seen the dark shapes moving under the surface; he’d witnessed the lurch of the guards’ boat. Something terrible lived in the water.
And this woman had called to it.
But . . .
“You must have seen her somewhere,” Theo said, feeling desperate. “In the newspaper, or online. Somewhere.”
“No,” Tess said. “I’ve looked at his drawings. He’s done a ton of them. He’s been developing her.”
“I don’t know what that means!” Theo heard the whine in his own voice but couldn’t help it. He was starting to feel as if he were going mad.
“I was trying to create a superhero. A character for a comic,” Jaime explained. “I’ve put her in a million different outfits and poses, but none of them worked. Until Ada Lovelace’s dress gave me an idea. It was so plain. So I made a sort of coat-dress for my character. This is how I’ve been drawing her.”
“A . . . superhero? Why?” Theo knew it was a stupid question; or rather, it was a bigger question than Jaime or anyone could answer. Why a superhero? Why would she show up now? Why the animals hidden on this island? Why would anyone create them? Why the Cipher in the first place? Why why why?
“I think the question is ‘how,’” said Jaime.
“We’d get some answers if we went back to that island and questioned your superhero!” Theo shouted, his voice carrying over the splash of the water against the hull. Now he was starting to feel mad in the angry sense of the word.
Aunt Esther, who hadn’t seemed to be listening to the earlier part of the conversation, heard Theo. She said, “No one’s going back to that island. I don’t know what we stumbled onto, but it’s very dangerous.”
“That woman, though—” Theo began.
“That woman saved us from being killed by that . . . that . . . thing,” Jaime said. “What did you say it was?”
“A giraffe-owary,” Theo said. “Cassowary and giraffe.”
“She might have saved us from something worse,” Tess said.
Theo stuck his hand in his spray-dampened curls, tugged to remind himself he wasn’t in a dream. “What could be worse than being killed by a giraffe-owary?”
“I could think of a lot of things,” Tess muttered.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Aunt Esther said, “that woman was a very helpful person who escorted you safely to the beach and out of harm’s way.”
“She called to something in the water!” Theo said. “Some kind of . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t know what was in the water. A shark-owary. A tiger-phin. A dolph-bear. Your garden-variety giant squid with eyes the size of dinner plates.
“Did she call to something?” Aunt Esther said. “Well. That is quite unlikely, but even if she did, it worked out for us. Those people aren’t following our boat, and it doesn’t seem as if the authorities have been called. Whoever is on that island, they want to keep what they’re doing a secret.”
“But what if they recognized us?” Theo said.
Aunt Esther frowned. “Why would they recognize you?”
Theo stuttered, searching for a reason. Tess filled it in.
“Because of the video with Nine. That lady who said Nine bit her,” she said. “They could figure out who we are. We could get in trouble. You could get in trouble.”
“Hmmm,” Aunt Esther growled. “Then we will have to keep an eye out, won’t we?”
“How?” said Theo.
“We’ll call in our own reinforcements.”
“What reinforcements?” Jaime asked.
Aunt Esther raised a brow. “You’re not the only one who knows a few superheroes.”
Aunt Esther returned the boat to her friend’s boat slip in Flushing, anchored it. Then, she herded Theo, Tess, and Jaime onto the Underway to Astoria. Back at Aunt Esther’s house, they found Theo and Tess’s parents sitting in the living room, eating oatmeal cookies.
Theo’s dad smiled. “Lance seems to be broken, Esther. He won’t stop baking.” He stood when he got a better look at them. “What happened to you?”
“Oh,” said Aunt Esther, waving her hand breezily. “It was such a nice day, so I took the kids boating. Wouldn’t you know it, everyone got a little bit seasick. So we cut our trip short.”
“Seasick?” said Theo’s mom. “You two never get seasick.”
“It’s mostly me, Mrs. Biedermann,” said Jaime. “It’s been a while since I’ve been on a boat.”
“I’m so sorry. Seasickness is the worst,” Theo’s mom said. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you some water. Or maybe some ginger tea? That could settle your stomach.” She hustled into the kitchen.
Theo’s dad said, “Where did you guys go boating?”
“Here and there,” said Aunt Esther. “Mostly, we hung around the bay. Did a little fishing.”
“Really? Were the fish biting?”
Theo remembered the dark shapes in the water, the lurching boat. “They weren’t biting us, anyway.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Theo’s dad, laughing. “Though I don’t suppose you were fishing for piranha.”
“They weren’t biting for us, you mean, Theo,” Aunt Esther said. “Still, it was a nice afternoon until the children started to feel a bit queasy.”
“Ah,” said Theo’s dad. “I don’t much care for fish anyway. We could have something else for dinner. Maybe order in. That is, whenever you’re feeling better. And you’re welcome to join us, Jaime. As always. Stay the night if you like.”
“Thank you, Mr. Biedermann,” Jaime said.
“You are looking a bit green around the gills, though,” said Theo’s dad. “Ha-ha. I’m going to get you a cool cloth for your head. That always helps me when I’m feeling a little sick.”
After Theo’s parents were out of the room, Aunt Esther said, “I probably don’t have to tell you not to mention this to your parents. Not just yet, anyway.”
It seemed odd to Theo that Aunt Esther would suggest that they not tell their parents that they were attacked by wild an
d probably illegal animals, threatened by strange men, and saved by a woman allegedly dreamed up by Jaime, but then Aunt Esther was deeply odd. And she seemed to understand that some things were better kept to yourself until the moment was right. If they told their mother what happened today, she would go to the ends of the earth to find the perpetrators. She would also put her kids under house arrest to keep them safe. As confused and angry as Theo was, as worried as he was, he didn’t want to be trapped in the house. He still wanted to solve the Cipher if they could. And they wouldn’t be able to do that sitting in Aunt Esther’s living room, eating Lance’s endless oatmeal cookies.
“We won’t say anything,” said Theo. Tess and Jaime nodded in agreement. Theo’s dad came back with the cool cloth and laid it on Jaime’s forehead. Jaime accepted this gratefully, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. Theo’s mother set Jaime’s tea on the table in front of him. She sat next to Tess, picked up Tess’s hand.
“I do have some promising leads on the animals,” she said.
“What animals?” said Tess.
“Nine and Karl. Are there others?”
“Oh! No! Well, probably,” Tess said. “I mean, if they stole two animals, they’re looking for more, right?”
“Yes,” said Theo’s mom. “That’s what I was thinking. I watched the video taken from Jaime’s building on the day Karl went missing. Clarkson is tracking down some people of interest right now.”
“What people?” Tess said.
“I don’t want to get your hopes up too much, but there were several people acting a bit strangely in the video. As a matter of fact, I should get going, too. I want to be there for the interviews.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Tess said.