Priya’s mouth twisted into a rueful smile. “I don’t think the Cipher is much concerned about making sense or not.”
They did exactly as Delancey and Priya advised: they stayed overnight at the archives, barely sleeping a wink; Delancey checked Tess for dilated pupils, slurred speech, numbness, nausea, and about a million other things, and then shook her awake every hour, which made Tess so nervous she was a twitching mess. In the morning, Priya drove them back to 354 W. 73rd Street armed with alibis about Edgar, about the book that fell off the shelf and hit Tess in the head, leaving a small cut, about the extra suitcase that Edgar figured might come in handy for packing up their stuff, about Edgar telling them he’d see them again soon.
But they needn’t have worried about alibis. Every person in the building over the age of thirteen was so distracted by packing and apartment hunting that they probably wouldn’t have noticed if Tess, Theo, and Jaime had sprouted antennae and wings and turned into butterflies themselves. That made it much easier to sneak up to Grandpa Ben’s apartment with the suitcase in order to open it in private.
If only they knew how to get it open.
Which they didn’t.
But by the time they were settled in Grandpa’s squashy, comfortable furniture, ready to wrestle with the suitcase, the strange and horrible night caught up with them; they all fell asleep, waking only when Tess and Theo’s parents charged in and started banging things around.
“What? What?” said Tess, sitting up so fast that Nine slid off her lap.
“You are supposed to packing up here,” said Tess’s mom. “And instead I find you all asleep like . . . like . . . like”—she gestured to Nine—“like a pile of kittens! You promised that if I let you stay overnight with Uncle Edgar, you wouldn’t stay up all night and you’d be ready to help today. This doesn’t look like helping.”
Tess rubbed her eyes. “We were helping. We will help.”
“Are you going to tell me that you didn’t stay up all night?”
Tess opened her mouth, shut it. She didn’t want to lie to her mom, she didn’t, but Mrs. Biedermann was a little too angry. They’d been betrayed, they’d witnessed the death of someone they thought was a friend. Grandpa’s friend. After that, falling asleep for a couple of hours wasn’t a crime. And if they could only figure out the Cipher, no one would have to leave this place. That was the whole point. The reason why they had risked so much.
“You’re not even listening to me,” her mother said.
“I’m listening!”
Mrs. Biedermann put her hands on her hips and glared. The fact that she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that said “I found this humerus” with a picture of a bone did not make her any less intimidating. Even Mr. Biedermann’s normally calm and placid expression was angry, his hair in weird little ropes like the snakes of Medusa.
“We just—” Tess began.
Mrs. Biedermann put up a palm. Stop. “What were you thinking?”
“You know what we were thinking,” said Theo quietly.
“No, I know what you were doing, I have no idea what you were thinking. There’s a difference. My children should not be up all night on a wild-goose chase!”
Tess said, “It’s not a wild-goose chase, it’s a—”
“I know what it is. It’s a stupid puzzle that some people invented a million years ago. It’s a stupid puzzle that obsessed my own father. And you know what? That’s fine. I like puzzles. Who doesn’t like puzzles? But this is enough. It’s enough.”
“Mom,” Tess began.
“No. I will not listen to any more of this. It was one thing when we weren’t about to be tossed from our home. But now we have more important things to think about. We all have more important things to think about. We have to pack up and we have to get our stuff over to Aunt Esther’s and we have to find a new place to live. That’s the beginning and the end of the story.”
Despite the fact that they weren’t to trust anyone, this was her mom! And she should understand. “Mom, we found—”
“More clues?” said Mrs. Biedermann. “That’s amazing. That’s wonderful. I’m so glad to hear it. In the meantime, we are being evicted from this building. We are leaving, with all of our stuff, which will be entirely packed up in the next week. Do you understand me?”
Tess shut her mouth.
“Do you?”
Tess nodded; so did Theo. Even Jaime nodded, and this wasn’t his mother talking.
“I took the week off,” Mrs. Biedermann said. “And that means you and you will be here in this apartment every day packing along with your father and me. And every night, you will go to bed at a reasonable hour and you will stay in bed till you get up in the morning and do it all again.”
Tess couldn’t help it. “But—”
Her dad said, “No.”
“Dad, please,” she said.
“We shouldn’t have to beg for your help here, Tess,” he said, his voice low and even. “We shouldn’t have to beg you to be responsible.”
Tess thought of the movie they had watched together, the one about the man whose life was just a computer-generated dream, and how he had to be brave enough to release himself, face reality. “What about the black box, Dad?”
The angry expression dropped off her father’s face. He knelt in front of her, took her hands. “Tess, honey. I’m sorry. This is your black box.”
They ate breakfast, they packed. They ate lunch, they packed. They ate dinner, they packed some more. And every second they could spare, they tried to open the suitcase. They tried to pick it with a paper clip. They tried to pry it open with a screwdriver. Chisel it open with a chisel. Crack it with a hammer. Nothing worked.
The hours and the days ticked by—July 23, 24, 25. Priya Sharma, Imogen Sparks, Ray Turnage, and Omar Khayyám carted away books and maps and artifacts from Grandpa Ben’s penthouse, sometimes stopping by the Biedermanns’ for lunch or for dinner, trying to make small talk, even mentioning Edgar’s mysterious and sudden disappearance. When small talk got too hard for everyone, Mrs. Biedermann turned on the radio. And when Darnell Slant came on the radio, talking to reporters about progress, talking about making the city even greater than it was already, Mr. Biedermann kicked the wall so hard he left a hole.
No one bothered to patch it.
July 26, they ate breakfast, they packed, they soaked the suitcase in a bath. July 27, they ate lunch, they packed, they threw the suitcase down the elevator shaft. July 28, they ate dinner, they packed, they tossed the suitcase under the wheels of a delivery truck.
And still they couldn’t open it.
Every minute, they were consumed with erasing all the evidence of the life they had lived in this building, and the passing of every day felt like a hand around Tess’s heart, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. But time would not stop ticking away.
July 29
July 30
July 31