by Laura Ruby
Now Jaime sniffed. Theo sneezed. Tess rubbed her eyes, willing them to adjust. They were perched on some sort of landing. In front of them appeared to be nothing but the entrance to a stone tunnel leading . . . well, who knew where? Nine tugged at her harness, trying to pull Tess forward, though Tess held her back. This would have been easier on Tess’s arm if Nine didn’t weigh forty-five pounds.
Nine was definitely an Uppercase Cat.
“Well,” said Theo. “I don’t see the greatest treasure known to man, do you?”
“Nine can see,” said Tess. “And she wants us to keep moving.”
“Well, as long as the cat thinks it’s safe to keep moving,” said Theo.
“You mean the Cat,” said Tess.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I think the Cipher wants us to keep moving, too,” said Jaime. “Look down.”
Tess looked. At their feet, painted onto the stone floor, a phosphorescent-green arrow pointed straight into the tunnel. As if it had already anticipated their hesitation.
“Not particularly mysterious,” said Theo. “You’d think the Cipher would make things harder.”
“Haven’t things been hard enough?” said Tess. They had. Just over a month ago, a developer named Darnell Slant had finally persuaded the city to sell him all five Morningstarr buildings, the kids’ building among them. And just over a month ago, Tess and Theo and Jaime had decided that the only way they could save their building was to solve the greatest mystery of the Morningstarrs: the Morningstarr Cipher, the puzzle that the enigmatic twins had embedded in the streets and the monuments and the artifacts of New York City more than a hundred and fifty years before. A puzzle that people had been trying—and failing—to solve for all that time, because they had missed the most important aspect.
It hadn’t wanted to be solved. Until now.
At least, they hoped so.
“For all we know, the Cipher is leading us right into some kind of trap,” Jaime said. “It’s not like it would be the first time. Remember the Underway puzzle? When we almost died?
Theo said, “That’s comforting.”
“Always here to help,” said Jaime. Tess could tell that Jaime was trying to keep his tone bright, but he only sounded stressed. But then they were all stressed. And confused. They’d thought they solved the Cipher when the clues led back to their building. They’d thought they’d understood the Morningstarrs better than anyone. But the memories of their beloved building crashing down right before their eyes haunted them. It showed them that no one, not even they, really understood the Morningstarrs, and that the Cipher remained a cipher.
“Remind me why we’re doing this again?” Theo said.
“You know why,” Tess said. What Tess did not say, did not have to say, was that Slant was all over television and social media telling people how he would reshape New York City into the “city of the future”—whatever that meant. That he was talking about starting his own school so that he could “imbue the minds of the future with the values of the future”—whatever that meant. That he was backing political candidates and research groups that Tess’s dad claimed were “shady as all get-out”—whatever that meant. That Slant seemed to be more powerful than ever. That they had not managed to save their own home, but maybe they could save someone else’s. That the destruction of 354 W. 73rd Street had to mean something. And it wouldn’t mean anything if they didn’t solve the Cipher.
After a few moments, Jaime said, “We can’t let him win.”
They all knew who “he” was. They started to move, slowly, carefully, while Nine urged them along. With each step, tiny lights overhead sputtered to life, casting a dim green pall over everything, as much good as that did. Nothing to see but endless walls of stone. They seemed to be in some sort of tunnel running underneath the building.
“Do you guys feel that? There’s a slight pitch in the floor,” said Theo. “This passageway is leading us down.”
“Awesome,” said Jaime. “I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about.”
Tess stayed quiet, even though the questions were itching to burst from her mouth. Leading them down where? What if the tunnel collapsed on their heads? What if it led them straight through the island and then out to sea? What if a battalion of Underway conductors or Rollers or Lances or moths were lying in wait for them?
What if they failed again?
Nine turned and gave Tess’s fingers a gentle nip. She always knew when Tess’s mind was churning. She was a Cat, after all. But despite Nine’s calming presence, Tess shivered. “It’s cold.”
“Yeah,” said Jaime. “And quiet. I don’t hear the Underway trains. Do you?”
“No,” said Theo. “Walls and floors must be too thick.”
Jaime touched the stone on the walls. “There’s something written here.” He ran his fingers over the faint markings. “A name. Sam.”
“No last name?” Tess asked.
“Just Sam.”
They kept walking, the pitch of the stone floor getting steeper. From time to time, Jaime stopped and read another name etched into the stones. Beulah. James. Sissy. Solomon. Patrick. More often, there were simple Xs scratched into the stone, as if someone had only wanted to leave a mark.
“So many,” Tess said. “But if the door we came through was the only entrance to this tunnel, and that door was hidden until now, how did anyone get into this tunnel?”
“Maybe the people who built it signed their names,” said Theo.
“Hmmm,” Jaime said. “What’s that?”
“What?” said Tess.
“That,” said Jaime, pointing. A few feet in front of them, something crowded the tunnel. They stopped short, but Nine wasn’t having it. She jerked her leash out of Tess’s hand.
“Wait! Nine!”
Nine didn’t wait. She bounded forward, nearly swallowed up by the darkness. Her stripes and spots seemed to float in the air, her snuffles echoing off the stone. After a few moments, she chirped softly, calling to them.
“Wait!” said Theo, but Tess felt along the walls till she reached the large something that filled the tunnel. Which, when she ran her hands over the wheels and the sides, turned out to be some sort of carriage, the kind that you’d see in Central Park, drawn by sleepy, clopping horses. But when Tess peered around to the front of the carriage, there were no horses hitched there. There wasn’t anything hitched there. Unless? She felt along the reins, which tapered as they stretched all the way to the ground, where there were . . .
Tess jumped back.
“What?” said Theo.
“Ants,” said Tess.
“Ants?” said Theo.
“Four mechanical ants. They’re each about the size of a thumb,” said Tess.
“Are they moving?”
Tess crouched and squinted in the gloom. The antenna of one ant was swiveling their way, as if listening. “Maybe?”
Jaime crouched next to her. “Yep. Ants. Because why not ants?”
“The real ones can carry more than a thousand times their body weight,” said Theo. “Who knows what the mechanical ones can carry?”
“A fully loaded carriage, I’m guessing,” said Jaime. “Shall we?”
They got into the carriage. As soon as they’d sat down, the ants began to march forward. Or rather, scuttle. Despite the scuttling and the cobblestone tunnel floor, the ride was surprisingly smooth. Nine the Cat positioned herself at the front of the carriage, letting the slight wind ruffle her whiskers, like the captain on the prow of a ship.
They didn’t scuttle far, however. Or at least, the ride didn’t seem to be that long. But they did pass other openings in the tunnel, lefts and rights they didn’t take. Who built this tunnel? How did the ants know where to go?
The ants weren’t saying.
Tess wished she could talk to her grandpa Ben, wished he was here, right now, riding along with them. But Grandpa Ben had been moved from 354 W. 73rd Street to a place o
n Long Island, and to a fancy facility uptown immediately after that. Grandpa Ben forgot more than he remembered.
And then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped moving.
“We’re here,” said Tess.
“Great. Where’s here?” Theo said. The ants’ antennae twitched, seemed to point to a set of rough stone steps chopped into the nearest wall.
“Thanks!” Jaime said to the nearest ant. He held out a finger as if he wanted to pat the ant’s silvery thorax, then thought better of it. He patted Nine instead, who meowed her approval.
They left the ants behind and started to climb the narrow stone staircase that zigged and zagged. The first five minutes were easy enough, the second five were harder. The next ten were torture.
“This is an inordinate number of steps,” Theo said.
“I rebuke these steps,” said Jaime.
“I rebuke the Cipher,” Tess said, wiping the sweat from her brow.
“No, you don’t,” said Theo.
“Sometimes I do,” said Jaime. “Like when I look around our new apartment and everything is so white it hurts my eyes.”
“And maybe when you have to climb ninety bazillion stone steps to nowhere?” said Tess.
“That, too.”
But the Cipher wasn’t leading them to nowhere. Just when they thought they would never stop climbing, when they thought their hearts would burst, they reached the top stair. And a door with no knob. Just a metal loop with the hasp of a combination lock threaded through it. The lock appeared to be old, something from another century. It had an oddly jagged steel hasp with three brass dials, each dial stamped with numbers one through nine. Tess tugged on it, but of course it was locked.
“Okay, we need a combination,” she said.
Nine meowed.
Theo’s brows scrunched. “Three dials would give us . . . seven hundred and twenty-nine possibilities.”
“Better than a million possibilities,” said Jaime. “But worse than, say, one.”
“There has to be a clue around here somewhere,” Tess said.
They examined the stones all around the doorway, looking for any kind of sign or symbol, but found nothing. They examined the door itself, but the surface had no writing they could find. Tess dropped to her knees and ran her fingers along the stone floor. Jaime and Theo did the same. Jaime went so far as to study the last ten risers leading to the door.
“Maybe the clue was in the number of steps?” Jaime said. “Did anyone count them?”
“I didn’t,” said Tess.
“I didn’t, either,” said Theo, sounding extremely disappointed in himself.
“So, how are we supposed to open the lock without any sort of clue?” said Tess.
Nine scratched at the door, meowed again.
“Maybe there isn’t any clue this time. Maybe there’s just work,” Theo said. “Start with one combination and go through them until we get it right.”
Nine twirled around their ankles, pausing only to give Tess a tiny nip on her ankle. Tess bent to pet her.
“We should have brought snacks,” Jaime said. “And some water. Because we could be fooling with this thing till next Thursday.”
Theo started with 1-1-1, then 1-1-2, then 1-1-3. Jaime kept a record in his sketchbook. Tess sat on the stone steps, her hand on Nine’s back.
She’d always had what her parents called “a prodigious imagination,” but she never could have imagined what had transpired over the summer. The fact that all five original Morningstarr buildings would be sold to Darnell Slant didn’t surprise her at all; she’d been worried about that since she was little. But she didn’t anticipate the fact that her grandfather would be sent a clue to the Morningstarr Cipher that no one had ever seen before. Or that the letter would lead to a whole new set of clues, a sort of shadow cipher operating independently from the original, a shadow cipher that Tess was convinced was the real Cipher. Or that solving the clues in the shadow cipher would lead to a horrible betrayal on the part of one of her grandfather’s oldest friends and the destruction of the Morningstarr building they were trying so hard to save. The fact that Theo and Tess would be forced to live with their great-aunt Esther in Queens and Jaime with his grandmother in a brand-new building all the way in Hoboken, New Jersey. The fact that they had no idea where else the Cipher would take them. The fact that solving the clues seemed to have awakened something at the very heart of the city itself, something that Tess wanted to trust, but . . .
Nine mrrowed again, rubbed her big face against Tess’s leg.
“My thumb is going numb,” said Theo.
“I’ll take a turn,” said Tess. She and Jaime switched so that Jaime was trying the combinations on the lock and Tess was keeping track. Theo sat on the step scratching Nine’s ears until her purr was a soothing rumble. When Jaime’s thumb went numb, Tess took over trying combinations and Theo took notes. Jaime sat on the steps to rest, and Nine licked his knees.
They switched places, and switched again. Hours went by. Or days. Tess couldn’t be sure.
Jaime flexed his fingers, rolled his wrist. “What if it’s a number we know already?”
Their old building was 354 W. 73rd Street. Perking up, Tess said, “Try three-five-four!”
Jaime did. No luck. They also had no luck with other addresses, birthdays of the Morningstarrs, or the month and the day the Morningstarrs disappeared.
“Let’s just keep working,” said Theo. “We’ll get there.”
Jaime sighed, hefted the lock again. Then, he frowned, ran his thumb over the hasp.
“What?” said Tess.
“The hasp isn’t a loop, but it’s not straight, either.”
“Yeah, I noticed that,” said Tess.
“It looks like cat ears.”
“What?”
“The way a little kid would draw cat ears. Triangle, straight line, triangle. See?”
Nine mrrowed softly, wound herself around Jaime’s feet.
“A cat,” Theo repeated.
“Or a Cat,” Tess said. “Like Nine.”
“Or nine,” said Theo.
For a moment, they were all silent. Nine stopped winding and licking and nipping, instead groomed the end of her long tail. Jaime said, “But Nine is just one number.” He tried 9-9-9, but that didn’t work, either.
“Nine isn’t her full name,” Tess said.
Jaime said, “What do you mean?”
Theo tucked Jaime’s pencil into his own overlarge, bushy hair. “When Aunt Esther gave her to us, she said, ‘I have brought you an animal. The animal’s name is Nine Eighty-Seven. I have also brought you some Fig Newtons, but not for the animal.’”
Jaime stared at Theo, at his pencil in Theo’s hair, then down at Nine. Nine peered at him, still and watchful, the answer to her own riddle.
“If this works, I think maybe we need to have a conversation with your aunt Esther,” said Jaime, before turning the first dial to nine, the second to eight, the third to seven. He tugged.
The lock popped open with a click.
And something small and whitish, the size of a pain capsule, dropped to the floor. Nine batted at it.
“Must have been hidden inside the lock.” Theo stooped down, scooped it up.
Tess peered over Theo’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“I think it’s a scroll,” Theo said, unwinding it. In Theo’s hand was a thin strip of yellowed paper on which was written:
TICKET #3152—TLJ. THE 17TH OF JUNE.
“Ticket #3152? TLJ? A ticket to what?” Tess said.
“Maybe we’ll find out when we open the door,” said Jaime. He plucked his pencil from Theo’s hair, wiped it on his pants, and put that and his sketchbook in his back pocket. Then he unhooked the lock and tucked it into the other pocket. With both hands, he took hold of the only available handle on the door, the small metal loop through which the hasp had been threaded.
“Ready?” Jaime said.
No, Tess thought. “Yes,” Tess said.
Jaime pulled. The heavy door opened just a crack. Tess and Theo got their fingers around it, and together they all wrenched the door wide. A shaft of bright light hit them. Before they could stop her, Nine slipped through the opening.
And that was when someone started to scream.
CHAPTER TWO
Theo
The woman was extremely tall, blue-haired, and brown-skinned, with hoop earrings so large that Theo thought they could serve as perches for parrots. She wore a black dress with lots of complicated straps crisscrossing her shoulders and a belt with at least three buckles that perhaps doubled as weapons. She loomed like a goddess, both hands on her hips, glaring down at them. Another woman, shorter and Asian, looking more surprised than angry, stood on a pedestal in the middle of the room in a half-pinned white wedding gown or caftan or muumuu or bedsheet—Theo wasn’t up on the latest fashions—both hands clapped on the sides of her face like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. If Theo had to guess, and he had to, the door from the tunnel had led them into the back of some sort of fancy shop. There were mirrors all around and plush armchairs. Several large stalls for changing. Some glasses and a pitcher of water with lemon slices floating in it sat on a marble table next to one of the chairs. Theo thought about asking for a sip of the water, but had a feeling the tall woman might dump the whole pitcher over his head.
“What,” boomed the tall woman, “in the name of all that is good and right do you think you children are doing?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, we were just—” Jaime began, but the woman cut him off.
“Child!” the woman said. “This is a place of business, not a public park! Not a movie theater! Not a library! Not a school! Not your living room!” She peered at Nine, who had dropped down to her belly as if to appear smaller. “And not a zoo!”
