by Laura Ruby
“How do you know that?” Tess said.
“Like I told you, I knew your mother once a long time ago.”
“When? Where? How did you know her?” said Tess.
“Why show yourself now?” said Theo. “Where have you been all this time?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have the time to explain,” Ava said. “We don’t have the time.”
“You knew the Morningstarrs!” said Tess. “But that means you’ve been alive for centuries!”
“Impossible,” Theo repeated. The word bounced around his head like a shooting star. Impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible.
Tess ignored him. “You could tell us all about them! You can tell everyone how important they were! What they did! So Slant can’t destroy any more of the city!”
“Technically, we destroyed a part of the city,” Theo said. Tess stared at him as if he’d grown some glittery spider eyes all over. “What?” he said. “You know it’s true.”
“The Morningstarrs did that. Technically and otherwise.” To Ava, Tess said, “We could go to the papers. We could go to the government. We could go to my mom.”
“No one will believe it,” Theo said. “I don’t believe it.” He didn’t. He couldn’t.
Impossible.
Ava shook her head. “It’s late. Your friends will be here soon. And reinforcements from—” She paused, sighed. “Oh, dear. It seems we’re missing a minion.”
Theo turned. Candi, the tall woman who had been slumped at the base of the angel, was nowhere to be seen.
“That’s unfortunate,” said Ava. “I dislike doing the same task twice.” She touched the moth pin on her lapel and the wings glinted in the moonlight.
As if Ava’s words were the lines from a summoning spell, Theo heard the rustle of grass and leaves, a surge of voices, a flurry of footsteps. The Cipherists arrived, breathing hard, looking as if they’d just played a touch football game that got a little overzealous. Dirt stained their clothes.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” said Imogen. “Where have you kids been? We’ve been calling for you.”
Ava said, “We had a bit of trouble.” She gestured to the blondes draped like boneless chickens all around.
Gunter said, “And you are?”
“This is my aunt,” Jaime said, before Theo could blurt IMPOSSIBLE INCONCEIVABLE PREPOSTEROUS like Cricket on too much Kool-Aid.
“Ava,” said Ava. “Pleased to meet you all.”
“We were exploring when the blond ladies came and started digging up that trunk,” said Jaime. “We hid. I couldn’t call for you, so I texted Aunt Ava. She lives in Brooklyn, not far from here. I knew she would come and help us.”
“Well,” said Omar. He spread his hands, gesturing to the bodies strewn about. “You seem to be a handy person to have around, Ms. Ava.”
Ava shrugged. “They had a fizz gun. I simply turned it on them. Most people who carry such weapons believe such weapons themselves make them invincible. They are surprised to find it isn’t true.”
“The blond ladies who found us had no fizz guns,” said Priya. “But we had Imogen. She knows kung fu.”
“That wasn’t kung fu,” Ray Turnage said. “That was a good old-fashioned beatdown. The rest of us hardly had to lift a finger.”
Imogen sniffed and flexed her wrists. “I didn’t like their attitudes.”
“They were rather irritating,” Ava agreed.
“Is that who I think it is?” Priya said, pointing to the man in the cowboy hat slumped on the ground. It seems that Candi must have administered the eraser—whatever that was—because the man started to sing a tune. “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore . . .”
“That man should not be singing,” said Ray.
“Who do you think it is?” said Imogen.
“That man who’s always in the papers. The one who looks like a smug turtle. Luke Babson. Mike Goodstone. Something like that.”
Gunter knelt by the slumped man. “Mein Gott, it’s Duke Goodson. I’ve read about him, I’ve seen him on TV. A nasty fellow. Likes to pretend he’s a good old Southern boy, when he’s about as Southern as my great-grandmother Brunhilde. He works for all sorts of horrible people.”
“Like Slant?” Tess said.
“Like Slant,” said Gunter. “But he mostly works to enrich himself.”
“That’s a lot of people in this city,” Imogen said.
“I like pizza,” said Duke Goodson.
Gunter stood. “I suggest we call your mother, Tess. Anonymously. Tip her that Mr. Goodson here was seen digging up graves in Green-Wood Cemetery.”
“That might get him a whole different type of newspaper write-up,” Imogen said.
“I’ll call after we’re done here,” said Omar.
“Won’t they be able to identify your number?” Tess said.
“I have a scrambler phone,” Omar said.
“You do?” Ray said.
“I thought everybody did.”
“What were they looking for, anyway?” said Gino. He crouched beside the hole Theo and Tess and Jaime had dug by the Angel of Music.
“No idea,” said Jaime. “They were mad when they found the trunk empty.”
“Then they would make abysmal Cipherists,” said Priya. “Even an empty box can be a clue. Everything is a dead end until it’s not.”
“Dead ends,” said Ray. “Nice.”
“What?”
“Dead ends? We’re in a graveyard?”
“You and your puns,” Priya said.
“Hey! You were the one who said it!”
“Not intentionally.”
“Do you think they were trying to solve the Cipher?” said Priya.
“Doubtful,” said Gino. “I can’t imagine this lot finding steps in the Cipher that we haven’t. And why bother trying to solve a Cipher when you can simply buy or steal anything and everything you want?”
Theo winced at the things he and Tess and Jaime had stolen: Ono and the book from Kingsland Homestead. And how much damage had the eagles caused at Station One? Someone would have to pay for that. Maybe they’d made it easier for Slant to buy the station, too, and charge everyone a skillion dollars just to ride the Underway.
Omar inspected the trunk. “This appears to be old. Perhaps early nineteenth century, perhaps even earlier than that. No identifying markings that I can see right now. But we can take it back to the society with us. Inspect it properly.”
Tess opened her mouth, probably to argue, but Imogen had spotted Nine. “Is that . . . ?”
“Yes!” said Tess. “The blond women brought her, maybe to help sniff out the trunk, I don’t know. They dyed her so that she wouldn’t be recognized. But I knew her. I would always know her.”
“Mrrow,” said Nine.
Theo was glad Nine was back but, at the same time, outraged that Tess and Jaime were so comfortable telling these lies when a woman who claimed to be the Ava Oneal was standing here, chatting as if she hadn’t been delivered straight from the pages of a history book. Or the pages of Jaime’s sketchbook.
Theo’s head spun. He needed some water. He needed some crackers. He needed a nap.
“I’m so glad that you found Nine, that you’re not hurt, that your aunt was able to come for you,” Imogen said.
“I feel awful that this little trip put you in danger,” Priya said. “We were so excited to have our little adventure we didn’t think about the risks.”
“We don’t often think about the risks,” said Gino.
“Some of us think too much about them,” Tess said. Nine nudged her fingers. Tess scratched the cat between the ears. Despite the living mystery, the breathing impossibility standing in front of them, Tess seemed calmer than she had in days. Once again, it seemed as if Theo and Tess had traded places, and that Theo was the anxious one, and Tess, the logical. He would have to have his own therapy animal. Considering his spinning head, his roiling gut, it would have to be a big one. A wolf named P
ink. A giraffe-owary named . . . Giro.
Help.
“Enough talking. We need to tie these people up and leave them for the police,” Gino said. “It’s better than they deserve, attacking a bunch of children.”
The Cipherists got to work tying up Duke Goodson and the blond ladies, with the aid of Ava and Jaime and even Nine, who twirled around Tess’s legs and mrrowed and purred so loudly that Theo would have heard her from Manhattan.
But while everyone else was tying up villains and criminals, Theo looked over the now-empty trunk. The other clues were so sophisticated, numerical puzzles and riddles hidden in monuments. The “Junk Trunk” was a silly name for an antique that could hold a clue to the Morningstarr Cipher, and such a crude and random way to hide a clue, but maybe that was the point. To hide the trunk’s importance, to throw people off. Theo felt all along the inside of the trunk, looking for anything they missed. A false bottom or lid. A fake side panel.
As he ran his fingers over the lip of the trunk, he felt something pointy. He picked at the point, pulled out an old photograph that had fallen between the lining and wall of the trunk.
Theo squinted at the photo, willing his overwhelmed brain to process what he was holding, what he was seeing, besides one impossible thing too many.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Jaime
While Tess chattered happily and Theo dissolved into the sludgy swirl of his own thoughts, time collapsed for Jaime. First, he was wandering in a graveyard, tying up comic-book supervillains, talking to bunch of puzzle hunters as well as a walking figment of his imagination; next, he was reliving his sixth birthday.
Jaime’s father didn’t take him to any of the places other fathers take their sons on their birthdays. They did not go to Ruggles Field to see the Starrs play the Cubs, they did not have a party at the exo arena at Chelsea Piers, they did not go for pizza and cake, they did not invite a group of kids for a rousing—and chaotic—game of bubble soccer, in which the participants dressed in giant inflatable balls and bashed into one another for fun.
Instead, Jaime and his father went to a museum to watch a man fold paper.
It was not just any man. And he wasn’t folding paper airplanes. This was an origami master, and the things he created from single sheets of paper were magical. Butterflies and beetles, fiddler crabs and crickets, scorpions and dragonflies. Abstract polyhedra and polypolyhedra. An allosaurus and a pegasus and cat after cat after cat.
“The Japanese have been perfecting the art of paper folding for four hundred years,” explained the tour guide, as the man quietly folded and pinched a piece of shiny bronze paper at a table behind her. “One of the most famous and accomplished was a man named Akira Yoshizawa, renowned for everything he did, but especially his gorillas.”
Once the tour had moved on to view said gorillas and the rest of the exhibit, Jaime and his father stayed to watch the man fold. This artist was not Japanese, but a white man with a tidy beard. To Jaime, he looked like a schoolteacher or maybe a librarian. His fingers looked too big to make such delicate things as the paper cranes that people could buy in the gift shop.
“Did you always do this?” Jaime asked him.
“I worked as a scientist a long time ago,” said the man.
“Oh! What kind of scientist?” Jaime’s father asked.
“A physicist,” said the man.
“My mom was a physicist,” Jaime said proudly. “She did lots of important things. She loved it. Why did you give it up?”
The man laughed. “I didn’t. Not exactly.”
“Huh?” said Jaime.
“What I mean is, folding paper is a lot like math, a lot like science.”
Jaime was doubtful. “Really?”
“Sure. NASA scientists are interested in the art of folding because they have to find ways to fit large things in small spaces. There’s another scientist whose art is displayed here, a man named John Montroll, who has made models of Platonic solids and Archimedean solids.”
“I don’t know what those are,” said Jaime.
“Beautiful,” said the man, in that dreamy way Jaime’s father might talk about his mother. “Origami is a lot like magic, too. No matter how many folds you make or if you end up with a cat or a crane or a mantis or a fish, you still have only one sheet of paper. The paper stays the same. It never loses its essence.”
“What’s essence?”
“Its spirit. Its soul.”
“Paper doesn’t have a soul.”
“No?” The man held out a tiny paper figure. Jaime took it. It was a bronze woman in a long elaborate bronze dress.
“Who is she?” Jaime said.
“I’m not sure. She might be many things. But I think she’s a scientist.”
“And also an artist?”
“Why not?” said the man. “But maybe you can ask her.”
Jaime still had the tiny woman. Every once in a while, he would ask her what she was. Sometimes he imagined she said she was a scientist, sometimes he imagined she said she was an artist—a particle artist, a star artist. Sometimes when he asked her who she was, he imagined she said she was his mother and she was all of the other things, too. Everything at once.
She was also a piece of paper. The paper remained the same.
So how could he be standing here talking to someone he’d drawn? Someone who looked a bit like his mother but wasn’t his mother, someone he was sure he’d never seen anywhere but in his own head and flowing from his pencil? How had he conjured up a woman who had lived in the past? Was she the same woman who had teamed up with the Morningstarrs? Was she an entirely different person? Was her soul the same?
“Hey, Theo!” Tess barked, cracking Jaime and Theo out of their respective reveries. “Are you going to sit there all night or are you going to help us?”
Theo, who had been crouching by the empty trunk, said, “Yes.”
“Yes, you’re going to sit there all night, or yes, you’re going to help us?”
“What?” said Theo. He looked as if someone’s great-auntie had whacked him upside the head with a giant pocketbook.
“Are you okay?” Jaime said.
“Yeah,” Theo said. “Fine. I’m great. Good. Sure.”
“Uh-huh,” said Jaime.
Theo stuck his hand in his hair. “You take a lot of pictures. Do you know when was photography invented?”
Jaime was used to the twins’ non sequiturs, Theo’s especially. “Hmmm,” Jaime said. “I think daguerreotypes were the first kind of photos. Maybe 1830s or ’40s?”
“Okay,” Theo said, the arm dropping. “Thanks.”
“Why do you want to know about photographs?”
“No reason.”
“You always have a reason. You’re the king of reason.”
“No, I’m not,” Theo muttered. “I never was.”
“Right,” Jaime said. Jaime couldn’t blame Theo for his confusion. That same metaphorical pocketbook had whacked Jaime upside the head, too. He was surprised they all weren’t careening around the cemetery, keening like ghosts who had seen a ghost. Would a ghost be afraid of a ghost? These were the kinds of things he was thinking now.
“Oh no?” Ono burbled.
Jaime patted Ono’s little metal head. “Kings, Ono, Kings.”
And this was the kind of thing he was saying, the kind of thing he was doing. Nine, sensing the general and pervasive anxiety, went to Theo and to Jaime in turn, nibbling on their fingers and rubbing against their legs.
“Kings, Kings,” said Ono, and imitated the cat’s soothing purr.
Imogen dusted off her hands. “Evil people tied up. Hole filled. I think we’re done here.”
Omar hefted the trunk. “I’ll take this to the van and call the police on my way back.”
“What about the rest of us?” Priya said.
Omar’s grin was like another flashlight in the dark. “I arranged for faster transportation for all of you.”
“What do you mean?” said Imogen.
“Look up, my friends,” Omar said.
Above their heads, quietly hovering, was a dirigible the same color as the night sky. A ladder unfurled from the cab and dropped to the ground.
Imogen clapped. “It’s such a clear night. The views will be spectacular. Kids, why don’t you go first? We’ll be right behind you.”
Ava said, “That is, as they say, my cue. It was a pleasure meeting you all. I will take my leave now.”
“Take your leave?” said Imogen, grabbing Ava’s hands. “Oh, please don’t. We would love for you and Jaime to come back with us. Any family of his is a friend of ours. I could show you our Morningstarr collection at the archive. It’s extensive, as you probably know.”
The woman in gray smiled, as a teacher might to an eager student. “I’m sure it is.”
“And we have cookies!”
Imogen’s warmth was hard for anyone to resist. And no one could resist cookies. “All right,” Ava said. “Thank you.”
Each of them climbed the ladder in turn. Nine consented to be draped around Gunter’s neck so that she, too, could ride the airship to Manhattan (as long as she agreed not to unsheathe her claws). From the cockpit, Delancey DeBrule greeted them all. She even gave a warm welcome to Ava, a welcome that surprised Jaime considering that the twins had once compared Delancey to a stick bug. (Which they thought was a compliment because, twins.)
“Everybody ready?” Delancey said.
“Get a move on, Delancey!” said Imogen. “I don’t want to end up in a newspaper article with Luke Songood.”
“I think you meant Schoomp Sonfluke,” Priya said.
“Nein,” said Gunter. “Doof Flukenfluke.”
“Good old Doof,” said Ray. “I hope they bury his career in the dirt.”
“No pun!” said Priya.
Ray’s laugh was like happy music, a trip down the piano keys. “Puns all day.”
They pulled up the ladder and the dirigible began its slow rise up and up. Below them, the cemetery got smaller and smaller. Soon, the tiny red lights from the coming police cars lit up the darkness below, but the dirigible was already too high to be visible from the ground. They saw the glinting black water of the river and, if they leaned out of the cab just so, the stars overhead. Up here, between earth and sky, Jaime’s head gradually cleared. The confusion fell away and there was only the glinting river, the sparkling city, and the stars twinkling. He thought that God must be an artist—a star artist, a particle artist—to have made such a pretty sky, such interesting people. He wasn’t even worried about the Cipher. They would figure out the clue, they always did. And it would take as long as it took. And they would find Karl for Cricket; maybe Ava would help them. He remembered Theo talking about his grandfather, saying his grandfather believed that solving a puzzle was about the process rather than the result; and though Jaime liked results, he felt comfortable with what was in process right now. The Cipherists were doing what everyone seemed to do at the sight of such magnificent stars, they pointed out the various constellations to one another, even though they all seemed to know them: Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Hercules, Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Lyra, Lynx, Hydra, Gemini. Ava joined in with a story about the constellation Orion. Some said that Poseidon was Orion’s father, she told them, but that the great huntress Euryale of the Amazons was his mother. Orion inherited her talent and became the greatest hunter in the world. But if Orion had inherited his mother’s hunting skills, he had also inherited his father’s ego. He claimed he could kill the largest and most ferocious creatures on the earth, any creature he wanted. As punishment, Gaia, the earth, sent a single small scorpion to sting and kill him.