SO, MY FRIENDS, YOU HAVE COME TO THE BEGINNING OF THE END (OR THE END OF THE BEGINNING, IF YOU WILL). HERE YOU FIND NOT A PUZZLE AS MUCH AS A CHOICE: YOU CAN CHOOSE TO MOVE FORWARD, OR YOU CAN CHOOSE TO WALK AWAY. THINK CAREFULLY: IS ANY TREASURE WORTH ANY PRICE?
YOUR TASK IS BOTH SIMPLE AND MONUMENTAL: TAKE THE ELEVATOR TO THE 122115145112TH FLOOR. SET THE CANE IN THE CLOCK, AND YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.
BUT REMEMBER, ONCE THE DRAGON IS AWAKENED, THERE IS NO GOING BACK.
AT LEAST, NOT FOR A VERY, VERY LONG TIME.
Jaime said, “So, I’m guessing ‘122115145112’ is a code?”
“The letter says it’s simple, so the simplest thing would be to punch that number into the keypad on the elevator,” said Theo.
“And then?” said Jaime.
“And then we see what happens,” said Tess. “What the Cipher wants us to find.”
Jaime tugged at one of his ’locs. “Why does it sound like a warning?”
“Because it is,” said Theo. “I think.”
“But a warning about what?” Jaime said.
“Maybe we won’t like what we find,” said Theo.
“How could we not like it,” Tess said, “when the treasure could save our home?”
Jaime didn’t remind her of what had happened in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel—that Edgar Wellington had not been saved. That maybe the Cipher didn’t care about what they wanted. That it might be bigger than them all.
Jaime hefted the cane. “Okay, so what do you think the letter means by ‘dragon’?”
Tess stood. “We’re going to find out. The whole world is going to find out.”
They went to the elevator and pressed 122115145112 into the keypad. For a second, the elevator didn’t move, but then it began to hum. It trembled and then lifted upward, then over, up and over, up and over, stairstepping through the building on a steep diagonal. Then it flew in a horizontal line all the way to the back of the building, way past what Jaime thought of as the back of the building.
“Has it ever moved like this before?” Theo said.
“No,” said Tess, who was watching the doors as if they would open up onto another world.
And then they did.
The elevator stopped, still humming, rotating 180 degrees. There was brief whoosh and a slight wind. Nine mrrowed, jerked at her leash. The doors flew open. Beyond the threshold of the elevator was a long, wide marble hallway, as long and wide as an Underway train, a hallway that Jaime had never seen before, with beautiful chandeliers winking like stars in the dim light.
Without saying another word, they stepped into the corridor. All along the hall, there were paintings of magical creatures: a winged horse; a sort of lion-snake; and giant bird blocking the sun.
“The Ziz,” said Tess.
“The what?” Jaime said.
“This bird. It’s from Jewish mythology,” said Theo. “Kind of like a griffin, but bigger. He has another name, Renanin, which means ‘singer.’”
They kept walking, allowing Nine to sniff in front of them like a dog on a scent. The cat led them into a large sitting room with arrangements of antique furniture in front of a giant marble fireplace, a dining room with a long table and twelve chairs, another sitting room, a bedchamber with a four-poster, canopied bed. They saw nowhere to set the cane, nowhere obvious at least, until they reached a library with two reading chairs, a table and lamp between them. Jaime scanned the volumes. Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Harper, Mary Shelley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Publius, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, various volumes by a writer known only as A Lady, author of Penelope, as well as volumes in Arabic and Spanish and many other languages that Jaime couldn’t identify, all shelved in no particular order, or maybe an order only the librarian would understand.
Who was the librarian?
But then he knew.
“This is her place,” Tess breathed. “Ava’s. For all this time, people thought she’d left nothing here, but she left everything. That’s why the building is so big. Not just because the elevator needed room to move, but because her apartment was hidden here.”
Jaime picked up a saucer sitting by the table, the dregs of tea dried at the bottom of the cup. “What happened to her?” he said. But he could have been talking about so many people—Ava Oneal, for sure, but also all those other people who were servants and secretaries and wives and spies and prisoners and lunatics, all those people that history forgot or hid or deliberately erased, because they were not a part of the story that history wanted to tell.
“Look at this,” Tess said. She was standing in front of a large grandfather clock, but a clock that didn’t look like any other clock Jaime had ever seen. Stained black, it had a dial within a dial—both blue and green and yellow—and two different hands, one with a small golden sun, and another with a smaller silver moon. Small carved figures flanked the larger face of the clock: one man holding a mirror; one man holding a flask; one man playing some sort of lute; and lastly, a grinning skeleton lifting a bell. All along the top of the clock, more figures, these even more fantastical—like the paintings in the hallway—griffins, gargoyles, sphinxes.
“Creepy,” said Jaime.
“No, I’m talking about this,” said Tess. She pointed down. On one side of the base stood a tall black post topped with a pewter dragon, but on the other side, just a hole in the wood.
Jaime set down his duffel, pulled out the dragon-topped cane they’d found in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. “It’s the same.”
“This is where we set it,” Tess said.
Jaime took a deep breath. “The last clue said that once we do this, there’s no turning back.”
“We have to set it. We don’t have a choice,” said Tess.
People always had a choice, Jaime thought. But then, if they didn’t do this, weren’t they letting Darnell Slant write the story of this building, write their story, write them right out of it?
Before Jaime had a chance to change his mind, before any of them did, he took the cane and set it in place, twisting until he heard a small thunk. Immediately, the hands of the clock began to spin around and around. Nine meowed. The clock chimed. One, two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fourteen . . .
“What is going on?” Theo said.
Nine meowed again and pulled on the leash.
“Clocks don’t chime seventeen,” Theo said.
Nine scrabbled backward, her claws scratching for purchase on the marble.
“I don’t like this,” Jaime said.
Nine howled a long terrible howl.
“It sounds like a . . . like a . . . timer,” Theo said.
Tess leaped forward, tried to wrench the cane out of the base of the clock, but the dragon snapped off in her hand. She stared at it dumbly as the clock chimed on and on and on.
“I think we should go,” Jaime said. “I think we should go now.”
There was a sharp bang, and then a sound like the drum of rain on a roof. The big face of the clock popped open. Out flew something—what? A fluttering, silvery something.
Jaime stared at it, watching it dance like silver fire in the air.