The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Mrs. Biedermann snatched the packet of papers away from the man. Theo stood and walked over to his parents. Up close, the tall man’s skin was so white his freckles looked a bit like cereal floating in milk.

  “You’ll find all the relevant dates and numbers on the documents,” said Mr. Stoop. “Don’t hesitate to call should you have a question. Have a great—”

  Mrs. Biedermann didn’t look up from the papers. “Don’t move. Either of you.”

  Mr. Pinscher rolled creepy, colorless eyes. Theo wondered if there was a scientific name for them, then decided creepy covered it.

  Mr. Stoop heaved a great sigh. “Detective, we do have other documents to deliver.”

  “You can wait,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  Mr. Stoop’s attention moved from Mrs. Biedermann to Theo, to the blocks he still had clutched in his hands. “Those were my favorite toys when I was a child,” said Mr. Stoop.

  Child? Theo swallowed his annoyance. “They’re not toys.”

  Mr. Pinscher snorted. Mr. Stoop’s lips twisted in amusement. “Of course they’re not.” He gestured to the Tower of London with his chin. “Did you build that by yourself?”

  “Yes,” said Theo.

  “No help from anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Not even your dad?”

  “Why would my dad build my model for me?”

  “And what’s it supposed to be?”

  “What?” said Theo.

  “Is it a fantasy world? A school for wizards, perhaps?”

  Theo stared up at the milk-skinned man and his cereal face, moles and freckles that spelled out nothing good. “I should have built the bridge.”

  Mrs. Biedermann touched Mr. Biedermann’s arm. “Larry, these papers say that they sold the building.”

  “Which building?” said Theo.

  “This building,” said Mr. Stoop.

  Theo must not have heard the man right. He thought he said this building, but—

  “That’s impossible,” said Mr. Biedermann.

  “I’m afraid not,” said Mr. Stoop. “I have to say that this wouldn’t be such a surprise if you kept up on the news.”

  Theo looked at his mom and his dad. He looked at the Tower of London, at the unfinished bridge in pieces in the corner, at the blocks in his hands. Tess was just talking about this before she left, but Tess always worried for nothing, didn’t she?

  “This is a Morningstarr building,” Theo said.

  “Yes.”

  “So, it’s impossible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  Theo felt his lips move, his mouth shaping the words. “Who did they sell to?” Even as he asked, he knew. He knew because Tess had somehow known all along.

  “So, Slant is our new landlord?” Theo asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said the short man.

  Mrs. Biedermann said, “We have thirty days to vacate.”

  Theo took a step back as if someone had just shoved him. Vacate? In thirty days? It had taken him twice as long to build the model in the dining room. How would they pack everything up in thirty days?

  And where would they go?

  The tall man, Mr. Stoop, glanced over their heads, eyes darting around their apartment. Theo didn’t have to turn around to see what the man saw: the well-worn furniture, webbed in cat hair; the books spilling out of the mismatched bookcases they’d bought at a flea market; the palm plant that had gotten so big that it grew in crazy loops at the top; Theo’s sprawling model encroaching like a rising tide on the living room. A strange heat crept up Theo’s neck into his cheeks. It wasn’t grand, it wasn’t even tidy, but it was their home.

  To his mother, Theo said, “What will happen to this place?” But her face had gone stony, unreadable.

  His mother tapped the paper in her hands. “I’m going to need confirmation of this.”

  “As you can see,” said Mr. Stoop, “that is a legal document, signed, notarized, and served. But you can call the mayor’s office if you’d like.”

  Theo squeezed the blocks so hard, the edges bit into his palms. He should have built the Morningstarr Tower like Tess had wanted. But how could he have known what was going to happen? That was Tess’s thing, the what-if game she always played with herself, driving everyone else crazy. What if a great white shark swam up the Hudson River? What if a tornado touched down in the middle of Broadway? What if boys were girls and girls were cats? What if a greedy jerk bought your house right out from under you?

  No, he shouldn’t have built the Morningstarr Tower. He should have built 354 W. 73rd Street.

  “Mom?”

  In the doorway, Stoop and Pinscher parted to reveal Tess, frizzy hair coming loose from her braid, Nine hunched like a sad gargoyle beside her.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “There are all these people outside. They’re saying . . . they’re saying . . .”

  Nine lowered her ears and hissed at Stoop and Pinscher, dropping some kind of paper she’d had clenched in her teeth. Mr. Pinscher bent to retrieve the paper, and Nine lunged with a yowl. Tess fought to control her cat, and everyone started shouting. Mr. Pinscher told Tess to call off her monster, Mr. Biedermann told the two creepy men that it was time for them to leave, and Mrs. Biedermann said something that Theo couldn’t hear because a thin buzzing noise had filled his head, drowning everything and everyone out. His legs pivoted him, robot-marched him back to his model, stepped him over the wall. Like the debtors and disgraced royalty that had crossed the gates into the Tower of London before him, he stood in the courtyard, wondering how he had gotten there.

  Tess, still wrestling with the cat, watched him from the doorway, frowning at him as if he were someone she’d met before but couldn’t quite place. Look at that boy in the dead-cat T-shirt. He seems so weird.

  The blocks dropped from Theo’s hands and landed right on the Tower Green where the wives of Henry VIII had lost their heads.

  And Theo—who, as it turned out, was neither calm nor well adjusted—lost his. He cranked up his foot and put it through the new bridge, the sound of the crash not nearly loud enough.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jaime

  While Tess Biedermann was trying to keep her monster cat from eating Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher and Theo Biedermann was losing his head, Jaime Cruz remained blissfully unaware that anything had changed. Despite the commotion in the hallway and Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony blasting inside his own apartment, he was fast asleep, big brown feet hanging over the edge of his twin bed. And he would have stayed asleep if his grandmother hadn’t thrown open his bedroom door, waded through the piles of clothes and comic books, and given one big toe a hard pinch.

  Jaime shot up. “WATCH OUT FOR THE ZOMBIES!”

  His grandmother, who he called Mima because she was like a mother to him, put her hands on her hips, raised one brow. “I am looking at a zombie right now.”

  “Mima?” Jaime said, blinking away dream-images of the shambling undead.

  “No,” she said. “It’s the secretary of state. I’m declaring your room a disaster area.”

  Jaime found his glasses on his nightstand and put them on. His grandmother came into focus—short and wiry, thick dark curls shot with silver, her expression the usual mixture of fondness and exasperation.

  “What time is it?” he said.

  “Time to admit to your long-suffering grandmother that you spent the entire night playing video games. Again.”

  “Not the entire night,” Jaime said, yawning.

  “Jaime,” she began, pronouncing his name the Cuban way, the J curling like smoke from the back of her throat. In addition to her native Spanish, she spoke five other languages fluently and another three well enough to make polite conversation, and she could ask for the ladies’ room or a cup of coffee in a dozen more.

  “Mima, it’s the first week of summer vacation,” Jaime said. “Kids are allowed to stay up playing video games during summer vacation.”

&n
bsp; “Says who?”

  “It’s in the Bill of Rights.”

  “Not the one I read. After breakfast, you can clean up all these books and papers and junk. It’s a fire hazard. I won’t have a fire hazard in my building, let alone in my own apartment.”

  “Okay, Mima.”

  She turned to walk out, stopped, and picked up a drawing from Jaime’s desk. He had a Lion-powered tablet his father had sent him but preferred drawing on paper. The tablet had a stylus and all sorts of fancy settings, but the smooth, pliable screen seemed so indifferent to his efforts. Paper soaked up the ink, drank it in as if it were thirsty for it.

  “Is this a zombie fighter?” said Mima, inspecting the drawing.

  “Yeah,” said Jaime.

  “Not bad. I like the sword. And these are some fancy boots he’s wearing.”

  “See, I told you I wasn’t playing games the whole night.”

  “No, you were drawing cartoons,” she said, putting the sketch back on the desk.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  She looked at that Spider-Man movie poster over his bed—Miles Morales leaping from top of the Morningstarr Tower, shooting webs in both directions. “As long as you keep your grades up,” she said, “there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  Jaime didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. They had this conversation all the time. Jaime would stay up too late with his computer games and his drawings; Mima would worry he was wasting his brains on foolishness and more foolishness; Jaime would point out his straight As; Mima would say that foolishness always catches up to a person sooner or later. Usually, she would launch into a lecture about his mother and the groundbreaking work she had done so many years ago, and his father and all the sacrifices he’d made. But not today. Maybe because it was summer vacation. Maybe because she knew that his best friends, Dash Ursu and Eli Avasthi, were both already at camp and Jaime would be alone till school started again. Maybe she really did like the zombie fighter and his awesome boots.

  “Come on, lazy boy. Get out of bed and I’ll make you some eggs,” Mima said, and swept from the room.

  Jaime climbed from the bed, stretched. He fed his hamster-hogs, Napolean and Tyrone, both girls. Napolean curled up in his palm the way she always did, naked little elf feet sticking straight up. Her “quills” had been rendered filmy and fluffy by the genetic engineering, and she emitted little happy squeaks as he rubbed her soft belly. Tyrone, on the other hand, squealed indignantly when he tried to catch her. She took to her wheel and ran like she was trying to power the entire cage for liftoff to a more just universe. Tyrone was not to be messed with.

  “That’s right, Tyrone,” said Jaime. “Don’t let anybody get you down.”

  The delicious smell of eggs and peppers wafted down the hall and into his room, so he put Napolean back in the cage. He pulled on his favorite painter’s pants and a Mister Terrific T-shirt, washed up, and slouched toward the kitchen. The short hallway was lined floor to ceiling with photographs of his whole family, his grandparents when they were young, long before his granddad passed. But mostly the pictures were of his parents—his mom splashing in the surf with her brother and sister on a beach in Trinidad, his father running on a soccer field in college, his mom again working in her first laboratory. As he did every morning, Jaime paused in front of his favorite, a picture of his mother holding a chubby little boy on her lap, both of them laughing, bright silver smiles in happy brown faces. She looked so young in the picture, too young for the chubby little boy to be hers, but she’d been thirty-two and a doctor when the photo was taken. It was the last photo his father ever took of his mother. It seemed impossible that a woman whose smile was so radiant had died just a few weeks later and that the little boy was now as tall as she was then.

  “If this food gets cold, I will be forced to feed it to your Franken-rodents,” Mima called.

  He touched the frame of the photo once, then tore his eyes away from the picture. “Coming.”

  Jaime sat at the table just as Mima scooped some eggs, onions, and peppers onto his plate. “What’s up for you today, Mima?”

  Mima exchanged Mozart’s Fortieth for Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va.” She waved her spatula to the beat. “Oh, Mr. Perlmutter complained that the moldings around his window need to be caulked, that the Morningstarr seal is coming loose again. And the Hornshaws have a leaking bathroom sink. And the Ms. Gomezes are having trouble with the air-conditioning.”

  Mima had been the building manager of 354 W. 73rd Street for more than thirty years. Delicate as she looked, she could snake a drain, plaster a ceiling, replace a lock, refinish a floor, rewire a washing machine, unclog a toilet, get out a juice stain, install a ceiling fan, operate a jigsaw, douse a kitchen fire, program a cable box, and probably survive in the wild with only a nail file and a thimble. Jaime’s dad said he got his mechanical aptitude from Mima and not Jaime’s grandfather, who could barely operate a toaster without injuring himself.

  Jaime took a bite of the eggs. His dad would be in Sudan for three months, working to start up a new solar power plant. The money was too good to pass up, he’d said. But Jaime couldn’t help wishing he’d passed it up anyway.

  “Did Dad call this morning?”

  “No,” said Mima, “but you know how busy he gets.”

  “He’s always busy,” Jaime muttered.

  “Your father has sacrificed a lot for you, mi vida.”

  Jaime nodded and shoveled more eggs into his mouth so he wouldn’t get another lecture on hard work, sacrifice, respecting one’s elders, and cleaning one’s plate after one’s grandmother toils over the stove to feed you, lazy boy. Besides, he was starving.

  He was halfway through a second helping of eggs when he finally heard the voices outside in the hallway, a sort of hum that got louder and louder, cutting into Tito’s drums. Mima must have heard the hum, too, because she turned off the music. By the time she did, however, the voices had gone quiet.

  “Cricket and Otto?” Jaime said.

  “Those two have worn their mother out,” Mima said. “She stays inside her apartment, slumped in front of the TV like one of your zombies. And this is why I didn’t want that TV.”

  Jaime didn’t bother explaining that zombies wouldn’t exactly appreciate TV. He took one last bite of eggs and went to the door. He opened it to find a man so short that Jaime looked straight over the top of his head before even registering anyone was there. The man thrust a packet of papers past Jaime to his grandmother, who had come to the door. “Have a nice day,” the man said, his voice toneless as the whine of an insect.

  Mima took the papers and said, “What are these?” but the man was already whirring away.

  Jaime stepped into the hall. At one end of the passage, an impossibly, unreasonably, insanely tall man waited at the elevator. He nodded at Jaime as if in greeting, but Jaime had never seen him before. The little man reached his companion. The elevator opened and the two stepped inside, turning around to face Jaime. The pair of them seemed like something out of a comic book, one so stretched out and hollow cheeked and mole specked, the other so punched down and razor burned and lizard lipped. Jaime itched to draw them. As the elevator doors closed, the little man waggled his fingers. Bye-bye.

  “Did you hear?”

  Jaime turned his head toward the other end of the hallway. Tess Biedermann stood in front of her open apartment door, her hand tugging at the leash of her ginormous spotted cat, her face greenish and crumpled like a tissue.

  Jaime didn’t know Tess well, but he knew her well enough to know that it would take something awful to make her look like that.

  His own throat felt strangely tight when he said, “Hear what?”

  Jaime sat on the Biedermanns’ couch, chewing on some sort of pastry that Mr. Biedermann called a blintz, which sounded more like something that happened to you rather than something you ate. That guy? Oh, yeah, he was totally blintzed. Look at him. He’s just a zombie now.

  Mima, as blintzed as Jaim
e was by the news that their building had been sold right out from under them, was doing what she always did when she was stressed: cleaning. She’d found an ancient hand vacuum shaped like an anteater and methodically removed the cat hair from every piece of furniture in the Biedermanns’ living room. When she was done with the furniture, she followed Mr. Biedermann around making odd gestures in the air behind him, as if she were trying to figure out how to vacuum his pants without being rude.

  But then, Mima wasn’t the only one behaving oddly. The Biedermanns’ apartment was packed with people—all of them blintzed out of their minds. It was as if the entire population of 354 W. 73rd Street had decided that a police detective like Mrs. Biedermann would surely be able to rescue them from this disaster. She could call in some favors, help them fight city hall, and they wouldn’t be forced from their home.

  So, Mrs. Biedermann was making calls. From the look on her face, she didn’t seem to be getting the answers she wanted, but she kept calling. Mr. Biedermann had put up a big pot of coffee and was passing out cups. Mr. and Mrs. Adeyemi huddled with Mr. and Mrs. Yang and Ms. and Ms. Gomez. The Hornshaws talked to Mr. and Mrs. Moran while the Morans’ daughter, Cricket, darted through the apartment on her tricycle. Her little brother, Otto, demonstrated a blur of “karate” moves on top of the coffee table until his father plucked him off it. Under the coffee table, the giant spotted cat sprawled on what looked like a pile of laundry. Mr. Perlmutter, who had lived approximately a thousand years so far and didn’t seem too happy about it, brandished his walker at no one in particular. Tess Biedermann went around the room, asking various adults if they should band together and sue the city. The adults did what adults usually do to kids during a crisis: they ignored her.

  Most fascinating to Jaime was Theo Biedermann, who was stomping through a huge, sprawling Lego castle like a slow-motion Godzilla destroying a fictional Tokyo. He’d reel back his foot and send it through a wall. Reel it back again and knock out a tower. Kind of horrifying, kind of awesome. Even Otto stopped wriggling in his father’s arms to watch the blocks flying in every direction.