The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  The portly man beetled his brows at her. “It’s the same thing.”

  Tess said, “But it’s not! Ciphers are much harder to crack, because—”

  The woman pointed at the leash in Tess’s hand. “Wild animals are illegal.”

  “This is Nine. She’s a cat.”

  “She looks like a jaguar. Or a leopard. Or a jaguar-leopard.”

  “She’s just . . . long.”

  The couple stared down at Nine, all forty-five pounds of her. Nine flicked her tail and offered a friendly chirp, as if to confirm, yes, regular cat, no jaguars here! Still, the couple backed away.

  Not surprising. Nine definitely wasn’t a regular cat. Nine was a mix of Siamese, serval, and who knows what else. A sprinkling of wolf, maybe. One day, Great-Aunt Esther showed up at the Biedermanns’ apartment with an oversized spotted kitten. “I have brought you an animal,” she said. “This animal is called Nine Eighty-Seven. I have also brought you some Fig Newtons. But not for the animal.”

  Aunt Esther, like a lot of people in Tess’s family, was more than a little eccentric. And Nine was probably a little more sabertooth than Siamese.

  The woman with the terrifying shirt said, “Normal people don’t walk cats.”

  “Normal?” said Tess. “Was Einstein normal? Marie Curie? Ada Lovelace? Ida B. Wells? Wonder Woman?”

  “Your cat is growling at me,” said Terrifying Shirt Lady.

  “She’s purring,” said Tess. Tess didn’t tell her that Nine had a ten-foot vertical leap.

  “You city people are so strange,” the woman said.

  “Thank you!” Tess tugged at the cat’s leash, leaving the tourists to the torture of each other’s company. Down the street to her left, the trees of Riverside Park beckoned, the weedy smell of the Hudson curling an inviting finger. But she took one last look at 354 W. 73rd—the familiar, unassuming gray facade, the windows like so many eyes watching over her, always watching over her—and headed east. It was early enough that the metal Rollers were out emptying garbage cans, scraping up bits of trash, and rolling them into hatches between waves of traffic. Sleepy people shambled to cars with cantilevered solar panels on top like the folded wings of locusts. As Tess got closer to Broadway, the Underway rumbled under her feet, as if she were walking on the back of some great murmuring beast. Everywhere, the city was waking up.

  She reached the corner and turned onto the avenue. Horns honked; voices rose and fell. Buildings loomed on either side of the sleekly cobbled road, cliffs of jutting stone and vast pools of shimmering glass drinking in the sun. In front of her, newcomers stopped to gape while harried New Yorkers streamed around them. A teenager on a Starrboard darned in and out of the crowd. No matter how many times she walked these streets, she always felt as if she were walking at the bottom of a canyon, a part of a great river of humanity carving out a path.

  These were the sorts of things she wished she could tell Grandpa Ben: that she felt like the buildings were cliffs, that she was a part of a river of humanity carving out her own path, that she both liked and hated that even strangers thought she was strange. Grandpa Ben had been the president of the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society for as long as Tess could remember and had been working to solve the Old York Cipher for even longer.

  But not anymore. Nothing about Grandpa was the same.

  Nine whined and nipped at Tess’s fingers, snapping her back to the real world. Another thing Theo would say: “That cat always knows when you’re catastrophizing. Get it?” She got it. Probably why Mom and Dad let Tess keep Nine, had her trained and registered as a therapy animal. People had gone mad for genetically altered and hybrid animals—fox-dogs, bunny-cats, cat-coons, fer-otters—till the city cracked down, especially on the larger hybrids, sometimes called chimeras. A cop on his beat took one look at Nine and the silver city tag dangling from her collar. He shook his head and muttered, “What’s next? Horse-bears?”

  Next was the post office, and there were no horse-bears there; the place was nearly empty. The only noises were the soft whisper of Nine’s paws on the marble floor, the low talk of the employees, and the faint shoop! shoop! of mail canisters shooting through pneumatic tubes in the walls. Tess pulled the keys from her pocket and unlocked Grandpa’s box, and the usual avalanche of envelopes fell out. Nine pounced and chomped, caught one in her mouth and refused to let go, which was fine with Tess, as she could see it had TRUST NO ONE TRUST NO ONE TRUST NO ONE written all over it. Most of the mail came from other cipherists, but some of it came from paranoid conspiracy theorists. Grandpa Ben didn’t mind the conspiracy theorists; he used to say that people thought he was one of them simply because he thought the Old York Cipher was real. So many assumed it was a fairy tale, a silly story that brought in the tourists, nothing more. Her parents thought so, even if they never said it out loud. Sometimes, Tess caught her mother’s impatience whenever Grandpa Ben came for dinner and launched into one of his theories. Tess couldn’t blame her father or her mother for not believing in the Cipher, or even for their relief when Grandpa Ben and the society parted ways. Mr. Biedermann had to counsel hundreds of kids at the school where he worked, some who didn’t have parents or even enough to eat. As a detective, Mrs. Biedermann had her own mysteries to solve, and they weren’t one hundred sixty years old.

  But Tess still wanted to believe. What if the Cipher was just waiting for the right person to solve it? Grandpa Ben once said that this was exactly how the Cipher snared a person in the first place; as you were trying to solve it, the puzzle made you believe that it was also trying to solve you.

  “You make it sound like it’s alive,” Tess had said. “A puzzle can’t be alive.”

  “Doesn’t this city seem alive to you? Doesn’t the air crackle? Don’t the streets hum? Lots of things are alive,” he said.

  “Then how can you quit?” Tess said.

  “I’m not quitting, Gindele.”

  Gindele. His name for her. Little deer. “Grandpa, you quit the society. You’re giving up.” She’d tried not to sound mad. So, he had some memory problems. Lots of people had memory problems. Maybe the doctors were wrong.

  He said, “Accepting things for what they are isn’t giving up.”

  “Far kinder tsereist men a velt,” Tess said, one of Grandpa Ben’s favorite sayings. For your children you would tear the world apart.

  “And I would,” he’d said, laying his still-strong hand on the top of Tess’s head. “One day, you’ll understand what that means.”

  Now Tess scooped Grandpa’s mail from the floor and stuffed the pile into her messenger bag. She paused to inspect the envelope still clenched in Nine’s teeth. The TRUST NO ONE message wasn’t scrawled in red marker or crayon the way those sorts of messages usually were, but carefully scripted in black ink. The whole thing was sealed with gold wax, too, which was a nice touch, and which likely meant that the contents were especially banana-pants—especially since the address had been crossed out and rewritten three times. Tess tried to take the envelope to put it in her bag, but of course Nine wasn’t having any of that. The cat lowered her head and growled.

  Ah well. Who cared if Nine wanted to gnaw on some random letter from some random person? Grandpa Ben couldn’t worry about such things anymore. And maybe Tess shouldn’t worry about them, either. Maybe she wouldn’t think about all the infinite possibilities, at least not the bad ones. She had the whole day, the whole week, the whole summer. Theo loved the precision of his blocks, but Tess loved building with things that warmed up in her hands—metal, plaster, clay. She could finish the model of a sphinx moth she’d been working on, one that would eventually hover in the air like a hummingbird. Or maybe Theo would come to Central Park and they could play Frisbee; she wouldn’t mind if he spent the whole game calculating the angles of her throws. Maybe her dad could take them out on a river cruise, and they could watch for schools of fish darting through the clear blue water of the Hudson. A trip to the top of the Morningstarr Tower, Underway tracks whirling around
the rocket-shaped spire like the largest, fanciest party favor. Grandpa’s warm and gravelly voice echoed in her head: “Of course the Morningstarrs would build a tower; they were luftmenschen, dreamers, always with their heads in the clouds. It’s a shock they ever made any money at all.”

  As Tess made her way back to 354 W. 73rd Street, she resolved to stop catastrophizing for once, to be a luftmensch dreaming up all the infinite possibilities—good ones—of a summer afternoon.

  But by then, the Old York Cipher—alive as the city, alive as Tess herself—had already made a choice.

  For its children, it would tear the world apart.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Theo

  Later, much later, Theo would think about how a single day—and a visit from two creepy strangers—split his whole life into before and after.

  But, at that moment, Theo didn’t have a second to think. He sat against the wall, snapping blocks together so fast he pinched his fingers. A sheet of paper with a rough design and some quick calculations lay on the floor next to him. He probably wouldn’t be able to finish—the school people would be there soon—but maybe they’d be late. Really late. Drastically, dramatically late. And then his Tower of London model would be perfect. It would be complete. Even a person with no knowledge of history or architecture would recognize it.

  As Theo worked, his mother glanced up from the stack of files she was reading. “That is amazing, Theo.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You built the whole thing, grounds and all.”

  “Yep,” said Theo.

  “And you won the contest.”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  “And the school people will be here any second now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, what are you doing?”

  Theo snapped faster. He’d built all the structures that comprised the Tower of London, including the White Tower, the Salt Tower, the Broad Arrow Tower, the Bloody Tower, and the Tower Green where the wives of Henry VIII had lost their heads. He’d built the Royal Chapel, Traitor’s Gate, the Tower Wharf, and the remains of the Lion Tower Drawbridge. He’d even built the moat around the entire compound, and the Thames River along one side.

  But he hadn’t built the Tower Bridge. It was only the most iconic bridge in the United Kingdom. And it was right next to the Tower of London. Why hadn’t he built the bridge? He should have built the bridge.

  So, he was building the bridge.

  To his mother, he said, “Since we’re just sitting here, waiting, I figured I’d keep busy.”

  “That model already takes up the entire dining room. And now you’re building into my living room.”

  “So?” said Theo.

  Mrs. Biedermann pinched the bridge of her nose. “It would be nice if you kids got into miniatures.”

  “Technically, this is a miniature.”

  “Technically, your family is going to end up living in the hallway because our home will be filled with the entire city of London.”

  “Um-hmm,” said Theo. He could live in a hallway. Plenty of room in a hallway. Wasted space, really.

  The hallway outside their apartment suddenly produced Theo’s dad, who opened the apartment door and backed inside. He had a tray of coffees in one hand and a large white paper bag in the other.

  “I come bearing coffee for all!” Mr. Biedermann announced.

  “You’re the only one who drinks coffee,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  “You drink coffee, Mom,” said Theo.

  “I gave it up,” Mrs. Biedermann said.

  “Three days ago,” said Theo.

  Mr. Biedermann put the tray and the bag on the kitchen counter. “Correction: I come bearing coffee entirely for myself!”

  Mrs. Biedermann tapped a pen on her case files. “I thought you were going up to Absolute Bagels?”

  “Eh, the lines were full of snotty college kids.”

  “Tell me that you didn’t go to Sam’s to buy a jelly doughnut.”

  “I didn’t,” said Mr. Biedermann. “I bought a dozen jelly doughnuts. And some blintzes, too. Maybe a lot of blintzes.”

  “Larry!”

  “What?”

  “You’re supposed to be watching your cholesterol!”

  Theo said, “I guess he’ll be watching his cholesterol go up.”

  “Ha-ha,” Mr. Biedermann said. He dug around in the bag, pulled out a cardboard container and a fork. He opened the container and forked up a bite of blintz. “Where’s Tess?”

  “Walking the cat,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  “Good. She’ll work off some of that anxiety.”

  Theo said, “No, she won’t. Tess is like a Lion battery. She can’t walk it off or run it out.”

  Mr. Biedermann laughed. “Oh yeah? What does that make you, kid?”

  “Her extremely calm and well-adjusted brother,” said Theo.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Biedermann, chewing, swallowing. He nudged a stray Lego with his toe. “I thought the school people would be here by now.”

  Mrs. Biedermann said, “Yeah, me, too.”

  “Though I suppose it could be all the commotion out front.”

  “What commotion?”

  Mr. Biedermann shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone filming a movie, maybe? I saw a crowd and some cameras and went around back to the service entrance.”

  Theo kept snapping furiously, liking the idea of a commotion. Maybe the principal would be forced to postpone till the afternoon. Or next week. Next month. Actually, September would be great, because then maybe he could build the whole city of London just like his mom had suggested. Or something else entirely. The Great Wall of China. The Shah Mosque in Iran. The Tower of David in Jerusalem. The Great Library of—

  “I still don’t get why you didn’t build the Morningstarr Tower,” Mr. Biedermann said through a mouthful of blintz.

  Snap, snap, ow! His dad sounded just like Tess. Or Tess sounded like his dad.

  Theo said, “I just wanted to do something different.”

  Mr. Biedermann nodded as if he understood.

  Then he said, “Why?”

  Before Theo ever started the Tower of London, he had tried to build the Morningstarr Tower. The Morningstarr Tower had twelve elevators that could move in any direction, escalators that zigzagged up the middle of the building, entire rooms that could be rotated and recombined to form new rooms of any shape or size. And that was only the beginning. It had taken the Morningstarrs fifteen years to complete. Theo could have worked for months and months and still not gotten the model right. Not even close to right. Sure, he could have built a serviceable representation of the building’s facade, but that would be like making a mannequin and saying you’d created an actual human being. He would never have finished the whole thing soon enough to enter the Lego contest, which offered scholarship money in addition to more Legos. And hadn’t Grandpa Ben used to say, “Is your work finished or is it just due?” So, Theo had tried to build something easier, something faster. And he’d won! Yet here he was, still building, almost out of time.

  A sudden pounding on the door made him fumble with his blocks.

  “The school people?” said Mr. Biedermann. “How did they get in?”

  “It’s probably just Cricket careening around the halls with her trike again,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  Mr. Biedermann said, “Or her little brother practicing his karate kicks.”

  “I’m not sure that putting Otto into martial arts was the best idea.”

  “Remember the damage he did with the Wiffle ball bat? At least he can’t knock the bulbs out of the fixtures anymore.”

  More pounding.

  “No,” said Mrs. Biedermann, “but he might just kick down the door.”

  Mr. Biedermann scooped another bite of blintz, threw open the apartment door. But instead of a six-year-old on a trike or a hyped-up four-year-old wearing his father’s necktie for a headband, there were two men in suits, fists raised. One of the men was so tall, his head reached t
he top of the doorway, bright red hair buzzed close enough that he looked as if his scalp had been scalded in hot oil. The other man was a foot and a half shorter, light brown hair slicked back from a pallid, pockmarked brow. As the taller man ducked his head in order to see into the apartment and the little one bared gray teeth, the bit of blintz fell from Mr. Biedermann’s mouth to the floor.

  “You dropped your lasagna,” the short man said in a flat voice.

  The tall man said, “That’s not lasagna. That’s a blintz.”

  The short man said, “What’s a blintz?”

  “A crepe, usually filled with cheese and fruit,” said the tall man. “I have to admit I prefer a savory blintz. No sweet tooth, I’m afraid.” He smiled brightly, blandly. “The ones with caviar are my favorite.”

  “Caviar is fish,” said the short man. “I don’t like fish.”

  “Technically—” Theo began, but his father cut him off.

  “Who are you people?” Mr. Biedermann said to the men. “Who buzzed you into this building?”

  “We buzzed ourselves in,” said the short man.

  “And how did you do that?” said Mrs. Biedermann, and swept her own jacket aside so the men could see the badge on her belt.

  The tall man held up a large and bony hand. “Let me back up a bit. I’m Mr. Stoop and this is Mr. Pinscher. You must be Mr. and Mrs.”—he consulted his clipboard—“Biedermann.”

  “Mr. and Detective Biedermann.”

  “Detective. I’m sure you know why we’re here, so I’m just going to give you these documents and we’ll move on to the next apartment.” He held out a packet of papers. When the Biedermanns didn’t take the papers, his smile drooped at the corners. “You didn’t watch the press conference this morning?”

  “What press conference?” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  “It was all over the news. There are crews out in front of this building right now interviewing people.”

  “Interviewing who? What was all over the news?”

  “That explains it,” said Mr. Stoop, smile back on his face. He pressed the clipboard to his heart. “I myself believe it’s important to keep up on current events, but not everyone agrees.”