The first glimpse of the archives punched the word out of Jaime: “Whoa!”
Instead of being on the ground floor—the way you’d expect to be—they walked out onto a large platform where they could look at the cavernous spaces both above and below. The building had all its interior floors removed, leaving only four narrow walkways ringing the perimeter. The walls of the entire structure were lined floor to ceiling with shelves, those shelves packed with books and manuscripts. At the bottom of the structure, tables and chairs were arranged around cases displaying artifacts, scrolls, puzzle boxes, and gizmos. Though the shelves lining the walls and the tables and chairs were wood, much of the rest of the structure was metal—metal guardrails around each balcony, a wheelable filigree staircase that curled from the uppermost balcony to the ground floor three stories below. In one corner was a single birdcage in which a large black mynah bird whistled and flapped. A bunch of people sat at tables and in chairs, talking and bickering.
The mynah suddenly squawked: “Cat! Cat! Cat!”
Three stories below, more than half a dozen faces looked up, all of them grinning like clowns. “Wellington! Why are you dawdling up there? And why are you all grinning like clowns?”
Jaime didn’t know if he was grinning like a clown, but he did feel like leaping out of his own skin. He had never seen anything so close to the secret lair of the superheroes he’d spent so much time drawing. If Batman’s Batcave and Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum had a baby, it would be the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society’s Archives.
They took the tiny staircase one at a time, the whole thing vibrating with each step. Jaime wondered if they had picked this whirling staircase to make the trip into the heart of the archives doubly dizzying, so you never knew where to look as you made your descent.
A woman with a light brown face, bright pink hair, and a flowered dress like something out of the 1950s stood at the bottom of the staircase, beaming. She elbowed Edgar Wellington out of the way.
“Hey, Ms. Sparks,” Theo said.
“Ms. Sparks, Ms. Sparks, who are you calling Ms. Sparks? I’m Imogen, you little fuzzball,” she said, and gathered him up in her arms. “And you, too!” She squeezed Tess. Then she turned to Jaime. “And who is this handsome young man?”
“Jaime Cruz, ma’am.”
“I’m a ms., I’m a ma’am—you kids are killing me. Nice to meet you, Jaime,” she said, and gave him a squeeze, too, so tight that it could have doubled as the Heimlich maneuver. Then she placed both palms on her knees and made her face level with Nine’s. “And hello there, kitty. How are you? How many lives do you have left? Eleven or twelve, I bet.” Nine mrrowed and rubbed against Imogen’s combat boots.
Another woman charged over to them, a nose ring glinting against tan skin. “I’m Priya Sharma,” she said, giving them another round of hugs. “You can call me Priya,” she told Jaime.
“Keep hugging them like that and they’ll need an oxygen tank,” a white man with salt-and-pepper hair said from his wingback chair.
“Oh, just because you’re a cold fish doesn’t mean everyone is, Gunter,” said Imogen Sparks.
“Just because I don’t feel the need to squeeze the life out of children doesn’t make me a cold fish. I’m Gunter Deiderich.” He nodded at them all. “I’m sorry about your home.”
“We all are,” said another man, whose bushy beard began right under his dark eyes. “Do you remember me? I’m Gino Ventimiglia.”
“And that,” said Priya, “is Gino’s beard, which is making a bid for world domination.”
“This is Theo’s hair,” said Tess, “which is giving Gino’s beard a run for its money.”
“Maybe they can all join forces and defeat Slant,” said an olive-skinned and elegant man who introduced himself as Omar Khayyám, and gave everyone brief and elegant handshakes. After that, they said hello to Adrian Birch, Flo Harriman, and Ray Turnage, and got a shoulder clap, a fist bump, and a high five, not necessarily in that order. The only society member present who didn’t greet them with a hug or a high five or a handshake was a yellowy-pale woman Edgar introduced as Delancey DeBrule. The woman said nothing, simply sucked her teeth in disapproval.
Tess leaned over and whispered, “I once compared her to a walking stick. I don’t know why she was so insulted; phasmids are amazing insects. To escape predators, some give up a limb, some feign death, and some release a foul-smelling fluid. What’s not to like?”
Delancey stood up from her chair with an operatic flourish, turned the chair around so that it faced the shelves instead of the people, and then flounced back into her seat, ignoring them all.
The mynah said, “So there!”
Jaime said, “What’s the bird’s name?”
“Auguste Dupin,” said the bird, cocking its head and fixing Jaime with a remarkably intelligent looking eye.
“Auguste Dupin is the name of a detective invented by my namesake, Edgar Allan Poe,” Edgar Wellington said. “Poe had an interest in secret writing. We thought it would be a little less obvious than naming our mascot Cipher or Code, right, Auguste?”
“Cipher or code,” said the mynah.
“Speaking of ciphers and codes,” Jaime said, tapping one of the glass display cases, “why do you have an egg in a case?”
“You can write a message on a hard-boiled egg using ink made from vinegar,” said Theo. “The ink leaches through the shell and leaves the message on the egg underneath without a trace on the outside. It’s called steganography. Hiding messages rather than enciphering them.”
Jaime said, “Well, that’s—”
“See this little ball? Did you know that the ancient Chinese wrote secrets on scraps of fabric? And they balled up the fabric and dipped it in wax? And then the wax balls were swallowed?”
“How would they deliver . . . oh, uuugh,” said Jaime. “I would not want to be the one to get that message.”
“Sometimes Greeks would shave the heads of their messengers and tattoo messages on the scalp. Then they would wait for the hair to grow back, and send the messengers on their way. When the messengers arrived, their heads would be shaved and the messages read. That is, if the messengers didn’t die of blood poisoning first.”
“Not in a big hurry, then?” said Jaime, staring at a curling scrap of leather with a strange tattoo in one of the cases.
Edgar Wellington said, “Invisible ink on paper is another way to hide a message. Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary spy, wrote messages in invisible ink between the lines of letters his wife wrote to John André of the British army. We’ve found invisible writing in books and even on paintings. But that’s not the only way to hide messages. Here, take a look at this letter in this case. This is a letter from World War II. Look at the hidden message!”
Jaime squinted at the document. “I—”