Myles whispered, “I stabbed a man. In the West Indies. There was a girl—she was sick and couldn’t work and he kept beating her. I stabbed him and I helped her escape. I don’t know where she is now. Where she went. If she’s safe.”
Again, he had no idea why he was telling her these things. The words felt as if they were being torn from him, ragged and bloody.
She said, “I was right. You are kind.”
“But the man . . .”
“Was beating a girl. And you saved her. Wherever she is, I’m sure she is grateful. I’m grateful.” The woman closed his fingers over the money. “Take this. And perhaps if you get sick of working on a ship, you can find me. I might have a job for you, too, someday. If you’re willing.”
“But I don’t know your name.”
She touched his too-smooth cheek. “You will.”
NEW YORK CITY
Present Day
CHAPTER ONE
Tess
There are people who are human whirlwinds. They move fast, they talk faster, they think even faster still. Their fingers jitter against their legs, their knees dance when they sit, their lungs heave as if they’ve been running a race. At night, when they try to sleep, their thoughts spin and jive. Sometimes happily, but mostly the thoughts knit themselves into nightmares that could make a person twist and kick, maybe even scream themselves awake.
Tess Biedermann was such a person. A whirlwind, a worrier, a jitterer, a heaver, and a kicker. Her knees danced, her thoughts spun and knitted themselves into nightmares even when she was awake. Because of this, she never really understood the phrase “Time stood still,” because Tess herself was rarely still, always leaping to the next thing, literally and figuratively.
But she was still now.
She sat on her bed in her room at Aunt Esther’s house, a photograph in her hand. She had been trying to make sense of this photograph for hours, for days, for ages, and yet she couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
“It’s not us,” said Theo, from the bed on the other side of the room. He’d been saying this for hours, for days, for ages, but that didn’t make sense to Tess, either. This photograph was proof that there was magic in the world, and Theo didn’t believe in magic.
“It’s not magic, either,” Theo said.
“You just read my mind,” said Tess. “That’s magic.”
“I didn’t read your mind—you’ve been mumbling the word ‘magic’ since we came back from the cemetery.”
“I don’t mumble.”
“You mumble all the time. You talk to yourself and don’t realize it. You have entire arguments while walking down the street.”
“How do you explain this?” she said.
“Photoshop,” he said.
“Doesn’t look Photoshopped.”
“Photoshop photos aren’t supposed to look Photoshopped,” he said.
Tess held out the photo to him anyway, but he didn’t get up to take it. He didn’t need to. He’d spent enough time staring at it himself.
In the photograph, a dark-haired man and woman sit at the foot of a tree, both them laughing. Someone had written The Morningstarr Twins, 1807 along the bottom edge of the photo. On the back of the picture were the words Now you know.
Tess didn’t know anything. She didn’t know how these two people, grown people, looked so much like her and Theo. Okay, exactly like her and Theo. They had the same pointy noses, the same frizzy hair. Weren’t people supposed to look different when they got older?
And if this was actually a picture of her and Theo, if they were the Morningstarrs, that meant that she and Theo had somehow found a way to travel back into the past. That she and Theo had built New York City and all its gleaming machinery. That she and Theo had held fancy parties for dignitaries and pirates and musicians. That she and Theo had laid into the streets and buildings the Cipher that had fascinated and confounded the world for a century and a half and then . . . disappeared.
Tess put her hand to her head, dizzy.
“They have to be relatives,” she said. “Our great-great-great-uncle and -aunt or something like that.”
“Our great-grandfather on Mom’s side came to this country in the middle of the nineteenth century. We’ve seen the papers at Castle Garden. And Dad’s family didn’t get here until 1922.”
“Explain it, then!” Tess said.
“I can’t,” said Theo. The words dropped out of his mouth as if he were spitting out bones. He couldn’t explain it—not for sure, anyway—and Tess could tell it was eating him alive.
Nine, black and shiny with the dye that had been applied to disguise her markings, nudged Theo’s fist until it relaxed. Then the cat stalked over to Tess and rubbed her big face against Tess’s knee.
“Jaime doesn’t believe we didn’t know about this,” said Tess.
“Would you?” Theo said.
“But we didn’t know!” Tess said. “How could we know? We still don’t know!”
“What don’t you know?” said their mother, standing in the doorway.
Without missing a beat, Tess said, “Where Nine has been. And who dyed her fur black.”
Their mother, a detective whose job it was to find lost things, frowned. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of it, but we keep running into dead ends.”
“Dead ends,” said Theo, and chuckled like a character out of a horror picture.
Their mother’s frown got even deeper. To Tess, she said, “What’s with your brother?”
“He’s weird,” said Tess.
“I can see that. Why?”
“He’s always been weird.”
“Right,” said their mother. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “Is Jaime coming over today?”
Tess shrugged. Another thing she didn’t know.
“He hasn’t been here in a while. Did you guys have a fight?”
“Not quite,” said Theo.
It hadn’t been a fight. Tess, Theo, and Jaime had teamed up with the Cipherist Society to figure out another clue in the Morningstarr Cipher. At Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, they’d dug up a trunk with all sorts of strange items inside, items that had seemed to come from some other city, a city that looked like New York but wasn’t—at least not the city they knew, the city they loved. And also hidden in the trunk was this photograph. This ridiculous, impossible photograph.
The mysterious Ava Oneal had taken one look and stormed out of the archives, where they’d been staying the night. Jaime simply handed the photo back to Theo and said nothing more. He said nothing when the Cipherists woke them for breakfast, nothing during the meal, nothing when Tess begged him to talk to her. And he’d said nothing since. Their texts went unanswered, so Tess had decided to call. Jaime’s grandmother answered the house phone, and every time Tess called, she said, “Yes, querida niña, I will tell him that you’d like to talk to him. Yes, I will tell him you’re sorry, though I have no idea what you’re so sorry about, or why he is so angry. No, dear, he still doesn’t want to come to the phone. All he does is draw and talk to those hamster-hogs and that little robot he carries around everywhere. When he is like this, I leave him alone, let him work things out for himself. That’s what you need to do, too. Keep reaching out, but don’t expect anything.”