The Map of Stars, page 21
As desperate as she was to get away, she wasn’t sure she’d take to the water. After all, water was what had taken her mother, if the cook could be believed. But she loved the ocean, the smell of it, the sharp cold spray that needled her cheeks, the slap of the waves against the hull, the roar of the surf. No one on the boat asked the boy called Myles White to recite verse while they drank tea, no one wanted to marry or marry off the skinny, scruffy boy who was as silent as a ghost. And though she endured the punches and kicks of drunken sailors, she got better at evading them, better with the small knife she carried for protection, too good, perhaps.
There were entire years of Ava’s long life that were a blur, and there were mere moments that were etched indelibly in her memory. The moment she’d climbed from the window and run for her life. The moment her first book was published. The moment she laid eyes on Samuel. The moment she gave her heart freely.
There were other moments, too. The moment she found the two strangers stowed away on the Aurora, a twin brother and sister who claimed they were from Austria but couldn’t speak German. The moment the woman had put more money in Ava’s palm than she had ever held in her entire life. The moment she laid eyes on the woman again: in the halls of Eliza Hamilton’s New York City orphanage, when Myles was calling herself Ava, and the woman was calling herself Theresa Morningstarr. The moment when she’d grabbed Theresa’s wrist with a ruined hand and said, “Help me,” after she’d been pulled, wrecked and dying, from a fire.
Theresa Morningstarr had helped in the only way she could. And now there was no one left to blame.
Ava inhaled the darkness again, drew it inside her and held it. The darkness had been her only constant companion through the decades, while the people she’d dared to care for had died or disappeared or drifted away, frightened by her unlined face, the dark hair untouched by silver. She had her poems and her stories for company, the worlds she’d held in her head and spilled onto the page, but it wasn’t enough, even for a ghost. There was a time when she’d hated the darkness for its loyalty to her, for its relentless attention, when all she’d wanted to do was hide from the world, curl up and sleep forever. Which was when Samuel had found her, and she had found Samuel. For a time, she was happy. But it was not to be.
So many things were not to be.
She exhaled. No use dwelling on what did not, could not happen. Better to turn her attention to what could. Now, when she prowled through the streets, snuck between the buildings that were being bought and sold and made and unmade, some for the first time since the Morningstarrs had built them, the entire city felt tense, the people full of bemused anxiety, as if everyone was waiting without knowing what they were waiting for, or what was waiting for them. She had felt this anxiety before. It was the kind of anxiety that sent people searching for answers anywhere and everywhere, the kind of anxiety that made people look for someone who had an explanation and a plan, no matter how ludicrous the explanation or how horrifying the plan.
And she—the one woman who should be least afraid—was afraid. Not for the first time, she wished for the Zīz, a bird so big its wings blocked out the sun.
“It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea,” a voice said. Next to her, Auguste Dupin, the mynah bird, flapped his wings.
“You’ve been so quiet that I almost forget you were here,” said Ava. She stroked the bird’s glossy black feathers.
“I was a child and she was a child,” said Auguste.
“I know about your Annabel Lee,” Ava said. “It’s a sad story.”
“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
“Both of us are filled with sad stories, aren’t we?”
Auguste said, “A wind blew out of a cloud.”
“As winds do.”
Auguste pressed his head in her palm and so Ava petted him some more. She’d brought him up to the top of this building for a bit of privacy. She liked the members of the society, and was grateful for their company and their help, but she couldn’t afford to get too close to any of them, no matter how kind they were, how committed to justice, how committed to the boy called Jaime Cruz and the twins.
The twins.
That those children, those earnest children, could be the same people she’d known so long ago! She had loved the Morningstarrs, but she had hated them, too. She didn’t know what to do with these children, didn’t know how to feel about them. Even if they would grow up to be the Morningstarrs, they weren’t the Morningstarrs yet. Tess was Benjamin Adler’s Gindele, his little deer; so was Theo. And Jaime Cruz, already big and strong but also so gentle, his hands the hands of artists, hands that had drawn her likeness before he’d ever gotten a glimpse of her face. And so much like fawns they all were, big eyes and long limbs and curiosity. So how could she hate them? How could she even be angry?
And yet here she was, sitting on top of a building like Jaime’s drawings, like that character from the books and picture shows—Batman? Catman?—still angry. The last time she’d visited Benjamin, and she’d been visiting often, he’d suggested that her rage was what had kept her going all these years.
“‘For it is not light that is needed, but fire,’” she’d said. “‘It is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.’”
“Meshugaas,” Benjamin said. “Craziness.”
She laughed. “Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass might agree that craziness is exactly what we need. So, what has kept you going? What has made you search for the origins of the Old York Cipher for so long?”
He’d shrugged and said, “I had an itch in the brain.”
An itch in the brain. A question. Ava had a question, too. This one for Auguste. Another reason she’d brought him to the top of this building in the middle of the night. Because Benjamin had hinted in his roundabout way that he had once, long ago, whispered something to Auguste, an answer, a discovery, a secret he hadn’t trusted anyone else to keep, especially not his own guttering mind. And Auguste would reveal this answer, if only you asked the right thing.
“Auguste,” she said. “If I were the singer, what would be my song?”
Auguste ruffled his feathers, flapped his wings. For a moment Ava thought he might try to fly away—and she would have understood if he had—but he didn’t.
Instead, he threw back his head and started to sing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Tess
Tess and Theo did not say a word as Jaime examined the picture of his mother.
They did not suggest that it was impossible. They did not suggest that it was doctored somehow, a fake. They did not ask who or why or how he came to be holding it, the intricate sequence of events that had to have transpired to get this locket into his hands. They just waited. Even Nine and Ono stopped playing, sensing that something was happening that might need their attention.
Jaime swiped at his eyes. “Stupid contacts,” he said. Nine rubbed her face against his arm, purring.
After a while, Tess ventured, “Are you sure it’s your mom? For a minute I thought it was Ava.”
“Black women don’t all look the same,” Jaime snapped. “It’s my mother.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Never mind,” Tess said.
Jaime sighed. “I know what you meant. And she sort of does look like Ava. Could be her sister.” Then he said, “I should check to see if there’s anything behind this picture. Or maybe some clue about where it came from, or something about the next clue. But I don’t want to rip it.”
Tess slid off her bed and knelt next to Jaime. Theo did the same, kneeling next to Tess.
“Maybe if we use a letter opener or a knife, we can pry it out without tearing it,” Tess suggested.
Ono said, “Oh no,” and waddled over to where they were crouched. It held out its robot hands. Jaime placed the locket in them. Slowly, gently, Ono tucked a tiny metal finger underneath the picture and ran the finger all the way around the perimeter of the locket. The picture—a small oval of newsprint, they could now see—popped up. All three of them exhaled in relief.
“Thanks, Ono,” Jaime said, taking the locket and the picture from the little robot. He handled the picture they way one would handle a baby bird, cradling it. He flipped it over in his palm. “It’s folded. Do you guys have tweezers?”
Again, Ono came to the rescue. One of his hands flipped, whirred, and became a pair of pincers. Jaime laid the picture facedown on the carpet and Ono used the pincers to unfold it.
When it was done, a newspaper article dated May 21, 2000, lay before them. The article announced that Renée Cruz had just received her doctorate in astrophysics, one of only a few black women in the country to do so. At the time of her graduation, she had already done important research into mirror neutrons and was eager to do more experimentation, she told the paper. There were whole worlds to be discovered. The article went on to say that her state-of-the-art lab at T&T University would be funded in part by the Mega Foundation, as well as numerous other enterprises and business leaders around the city.
But that was not the most remarkable thing about the article. The most remarkable thing about the article was what was written in the margin in ink:
You have the tools, you need the plans. Find them in the belly of the beast. The first movable staircase on the left, first door on the right.
Play fair.
And then, in a completely different hand:
Hurry.
“‘Play fair,’” said Jaime. “That’s funny. Nobody has played fair.”
“We have,” said Tess.
“No, we haven’t.” Jaime pointed at Ono. “Explain that. Explain this locket. Explain the ledger we took from that house uptown. Explain the stuff we took from under the obelisk in Central Park. We haven’t been borrowing. We’ve been stealing.”
“From who? From Slant?” said Tess. “Just because he was able to game the system and buy all these things that previously belonged to the city? I’m not going to feel bad about that.”
“Are you saying that you plan to give all this stuff back? Who do we give it back to?”
“The city,” said Tess, firmly. “When we figure this out, everything goes back to the city.”
“Oh no,” said Ono.
“Most everything,” Tess said. “I think you get to decide where you want to go, Ono.”
“Land of Kings,” said Ono.
Jaime touched the article with the picture of his mom, his fingers trembling slightly. “I just want her to be proud of me.”
“She is,” said Tess. “She would be.”
“You don’t know that!” Jaime shouted.
Tess wanted to shrink away from Jaime’s sudden anger, but she didn’t. “Yes, I do.”
Jaime shook his head. “I never even got to know her. Everything I know about her I learned from pictures and articles and videos. The world got her, but I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tess.
Jaime didn’t say, “It’s okay,” the way people do, because it wasn’t okay. He said, “I wonder who wrote this. Who thought we had the tools but need the plans?”
“Maybe Ava wrote it? Or Lora Yoshida?”
“And who wrote ‘hurry’?” Jaime said. “And what does any of this have to do with my mom? Like, why write it on an article?”
“Maybe so that you would—we would—pay attention to it,” said Theo.
“‘You have the tools, you need the plans.’ What does that mean?” said Tess. “We don’t have any tools. We have lots of papers and coins and a weird doll.”
Theo said, “We have Ono. He’s unlocked this locket and done a bunch of other things.”
“Okay,” said Tess. “That’s one tool.”
“Oh no,” said Ono.
“You’re not just a tool,” Jaime soothed.
“Kings,” Ono said.
Jaime leaned forward. “What if some of the other stuff we’ve found is more than what it looks like?”
“What are you talking about?” Tess said.
“What if they’re like Ono? They can do other things. Or they have a different purpose than the obvious.”
“What purpose?” Tess asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we have to use them in a different way. Like, put them together or something.”
“Huh,” Theo said.
“I don’t think we’re looking for clues anymore,” Jaime said. “I think we’re looking for parts.”
“So we have to build something,” Theo said.
“But we need the plans to do that,” said Tess.
“They’re in the belly of the beast,” said Theo. “What beast? Did the beast swallow the plans?”
“A beast with movable stairs,” Tess said. “Escalators?”
Theo said, “Escalators in the belly of the beast. A building? Which city building could be the belly of the beast?”
“The ‘belly’ is the middle,” said Tess.
“So, the Tower,” said Jaime.
They nodded.
Morningstarr Tower. The former home of Theresa and Theodore.
Current home of one Darnell Slant.
It got too late for Jaime to make the long trip back to Hoboken, so he called his dad and asked if he could stay over.
“Sure,” said his dad. “Make the most of your summer. You don’t have much time left.”
They set up sleeping bags in the living room and tried to distract themselves with popcorn and movies. But it was hard to focus. Even harder to sleep. Tess tossed and turned, her dreams filled with monsters both human and animal. When the first light of the morning streamed through the windows, Tess dragged herself from her sleeping bag and stumbled into the kitchen. Lance clomped in, too, so she asked him for pancakes. He was happy to oblige. The pancakes would have to make up for the lack of rest.
Soon after, Theo and Jaime were up and soaking their own stacks of pancakes in butter and syrup. Since the twins’ parents were still in bed, the three of them talked in hushed voices about their next moves. Break into the Tower? But how? Darnell Slant was bound to have guards all over the place, and cameras, too.
“‘Play fair,’” said Jaime. “That’s what the clue said.”
“Huh?” said Theo, his mouth full of pancake.
“We visit just like every other tourist,” said Jaime. “That’s fair enough.”
“Slant isn’t going to give us a tour,” said Theo, his mouth still full.
“Slant isn’t going to notice us. He might not even be there,” said Tess.
“We can hope. Besides, if he is there, we can tell him what we told your mom,” Jaime said. “That we’re working on a school project. Doing research.”
Theo swallowed. “Slant doesn’t care about school. And he knows we’ve been researching the Cipher. He has to know. He’ll be suspicious.”
“Maybe we don’t tell him it’s a school project,” Tess said. “What does he care about?”
“Money,” said Theo.
“Power,” said Jaime.
“Attention,” Tess said. “Maybe we need to flatter him.”
“We’re just a bunch of kids,” Theo said. “He’s not going to care if a bunch of kids tell him he’s handsome or whatever.”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Tess. “He was desperate for our family to come to his announcement, right? He wanted that picture with Mom. So—what if we tell him that we disagree with Mom? That we support him? That we think he’ll be a great mayor. The greatest mayor who ever lived, maybe.”
“Appeal to his vanity,” said Theo.
“I like it,” said Jaime.
“Okay, but how do we do this?” Theo said. “What’s our plan?”
Tess held out her plate for more pancakes. “I say we walk through the front door.”
They finished their breakfast and left the house as early as they could, keeping an eye out for menacing mushroom men. But they arrived at Morningstarr Tower—Tess refused to think of it as Slant Tower, despite the new sign on the front of the building—without being bothered by anyone. So much of it looked the same—the beautiful gray stone, the same stripe of solar glass windows going all the way up the front of the facade, the same curl of the Underway tracks twisting around the building, the same whooshing sound as the trains glided around and around.
“Are you sure about this?” Theo said, looking up at the Tower. There were signs in the windows: “PLEASE PARDON OUR MESS. OPEN DURING RENOVATION!”
Tess remembered the last time she’d visited Morningstarr Tower. She and Theo had been with Grandpa Ben. Grandpa had talked about the history of the building, how it had taken the Morningstarrs fifteen years to complete, how there were twelve elevators that could move in any direction, rooms that could be combined and recombined, escalators that disappeared into the guts of the Tower and only the Morningstarrs themselves knew where they went. Grandpa Ben had called the Morningstarrs luftmenschen—dreamers—always with their heads in the clouds. What would Grandpa say if he thought that his grandkids were the same people who had invented the solar cell and the Lion battery? What would he say if he thought his grandkids were the luftmenschen who had dreamed this very tower into existence?
“Tess?” said Theo. “I’m not sure. Are you sure?”
