A loud crash echoed from the kitchen. Theo said, “You’re not the only one who’s mad, you know.”
“I know,” she said. But sometimes it felt like it. The therapist her parents brought her to see liked Tess to do a lot of drawings. The therapist was a nice man with a bushy mustache; he looked like a portrait from another century. He said, “It’s interesting that you drew yourself with this little golden crown on your head. What does the crown mean to you?”
“That’s not a crown,” she’d told him. “That’s a nimbus of outrage.”
Lance clomped back into the living room with the tray of stale cookies. Jaime gave him the empty glass, took two more cookies. Theo stuck a hand in his thick hair and held it there, his thinking pose. The cat stopped leaping and sat in front of the window, staring out at the middle distance. Tess let out a sigh, and with the sigh her outrage leaked away, leaving her with a hollow in her gut the size of a city. She slumped in the nearest chair, pulled the strap of her bag over her head, and set the bag on the floor. A stack of Grandpa’s unfinished crossword puzzles sat by the chair, as if Grandpa had been paging through the endless clues. “Almond capital of the world.” “Bug bite.” “Wrong.”
“Look at this place,” she said. “Where’s Grandpa Ben going to put it all when the building is gone? Where are any of us going to go? There has to be a way to stop this.”
“We could stage a protest,” Jaime said. “Go on a hunger strike.”
“My mom would never let me go on a hunger strike,” said Theo.
Jaime sighed. “Now that you mention it, neither would my grandmother.” He glumly ate another cookie.
“If we can’t keep Slant from knocking down a building he owns,” Tess said, “I wish we could find a way to buy it back.”
“Okay,” said Theo, “but where are any of us going to get that kind of money?”
Jaime finished the cookie, found an antique monocle sitting on a shelf. He took off his glasses, blew the dust off the monocle, and held it up to one eye, making that eye look twice as large as the other, deep brown with a ring of gold around the edge of the iris. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a treasure? We could buy back the building.”
“Well, if we could solve the Cipher, we’d—” Tess began, and then stopped. If they could solve the Cipher, then maybe they’d find treasure. More than treasure. The secret of the Morningstarrs. The reason for all these buildings, all these things they made. That had to be worth something.
It had to be worth everything.
“People have been trying to solve the Old York Cipher for one hundred sixty years,” Theo said. “I’m not sure there is a solution.”
Of course there was a solution. There had to be a solution.
“There’s a solution,” said Tess.
“How do you know?” Theo said.
“I just do.”
“I don’t,” said Theo. “The Morningstarrs valued process over product. Or maybe the process is the product. The puzzle is its own reward. That’s what Grandpa Ben said, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, Grandpa Ben’s not here,” said Tess.
Theo extricated his hand from his unruly hair. “What’s your point?”
“What if we did solve the Old York Cipher?”
“Tess . . . ,” Theo began.
“I’m serious!” Tess said. “If we solved it, we’d get the treasure and we’d also prove it wasn’t a hoax. It would be news all over the world. The city couldn’t sell this building or any of the other Morningstarr buildings, either. The buildings would be too important to sell.”
Jaime stared at her with his giant eye. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “A lot of things are for sale that shouldn’t be for sale.” He put the monocle back on the shelf and used the bottom edge of his T-shirt to polish his glasses. “What if your brother’s right and the Morningstarrs just wanted a whole lot of people running around trying to figure out clues? What if your grandpa was right and this is one big joke?”
“This is no joke,” said Tess. The top of her head was twitchy, itchy, as if her nimbus of outrage were getting too tight for just one person. “This is our home.”
Jaime slipped the glasses back on, blinked. Theo shifted in his seat. Nine padded over to Tess, laid her chin upon Tess’s knee. Even Lance went quiet. Tess knew what they were thinking. How could a bunch of seventh graders solve a mystery that people had been trying to solve for more than a century? People including her own grandfather? Grandpa Ben had tried; he had tried his entire adult life. Up till now, it hadn’t mattered that Grandpa hadn’t found an answer. The important things couldn’t be rushed. You had to dream your way to them, like a luftmensch, like the Morningstarrs themselves. She touched a page of Grandpa’s unfinished crossword puzzle. Tempus fugit. What if you had no time left to dream?
“It’s not just about us, guys,” Tess said. “A lot of people live in this building. People who don’t have the money to just pick up and move because some megalomaniac says we have to. We can’t sit around waiting for Slant to send his wrecking balls.” This wasn’t catastrophizing anymore. This was telling the truth. A lump hard as a pebble tumbled in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to swallow it back no matter how many times she tried. “We can’t just sit here, Theo. We can’t. We can’t.”
“Okay, okay,” Theo said, one palm up like a traffic cop. He gave her that look that said he just might go along, not because he thought it was a good idea, but because Tess needed him to, because he was her brother, because he was not a robot. At least not today.
Tess turned to Jaime. They’d gone to elementary school with him, they’d seen him around the building for years, but they didn’t know him, not really. He had his own friends and always seemed way too cool to hang out with them—the nerd twins, those fuzzy-haired weirdos. And yet Jaime was here, and he was listening, not pointing, not laughing. Tess cocked her head, a question.
“It’s my home, too,” Jaime said quietly. Through the dancing dust motes, something passed between them. A decision. An agreement.
Theo’s hand dropped to his lap. He frowned, his shaggy brows meeting in the middle just the way they had when he was smashing the Tower of London to bits. “Let’s say for a second that we are going to try to solve the Cipher,” he said. “We have to do it right.”
Jaime nodded. “We should start at the beginning.”
They were humoring her or maybe they were humoring themselves, but Tess didn’t care. She smiled. “‘It begins, as everything does, with a lady.’”
“Right,” said Jaime. “So let’s go see her.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Theo