“It’s someone who solves a cipher—what do you think?”
“Cipher,” said the man, mopping his pink brow with a napkin. “Why does everything have to be so fancy? Why don’t they just call it a code?”
“A cipher isn’t the same thing as a code,” Tess said. “It’s way more complex, substituting words or numbers or even symbols in a message. Like the book cipher that the Morningstarrs used for the first clue in the Old York Cipher.”
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.