Tess did keep calling, but it was harder and harder. She felt terrible, and sorry, but she didn’t know the right way to apologize for something she didn’t understand herself.
And she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything about anything. She would have loved to ask Ava about this, Ava who had somehow—magically?—been alive for almost two hundred years. But Tess had no way to contact Ava, and it seemed that Ava was furious, too, and would stay furious for as long as she needed to, which could be another two hundred years.
“Tess!” her mother said.
Tess jerked and almost fell off the bed. “What!”
“Are you having a spell?”
“No,” Tess said, casually letting the photograph drop facedown on the blanket. “I’m just thinking about Jaime. He’s upset about something but he won’t talk about it.”
“Maybe give him some time?” said her mom.
“That’s what his grandmother says.”
“I don’t think she’s wrong. Remember how mad you were at me when Nine went missing? You needed time, too.”
Time. They all needed time. But time had already played so many tricks on them. Nine had gone missing only a few weeks before, but it felt like eons, and it also felt like five minutes ago.
“You kids want lunch?” said their mom. “I’m making split pea soup.”
“Soup!” said Theo. “That’s for winter.”
“It’s nearly fall,” said their mom. “And there was a bite in the air this morning. Made me feel like having some hot soup. Want some? I’ll make some grilled cheese, too.”
In the kitchen, Tess and Theo ate their lunch. Well, Theo did. Tess swirled the soup so that a dark little hole appeared in the middle of the bowl. Is that how they did it? Traveled through a black hole? A wormhole? Some kind of science-fiction-y elevator that jumped around in space-time? Or maybe they were living in the multiverse, where many timelines existed alongside one another, and they had somehow moved from one timeline to a different one. But then, how had they not met themselves and shattered all of reality or whatever? Then again, who knows where Tess and Theo were in another world, another timeline. Maybe they lived in Idaho, maybe they lived in Beijing, maybe they lived on a generation ship exploring the whole of the universe.
“How’s the soup?” said Tess’s mom.
“Delicious,” Tess said, though she hadn’t even tasted it.
Tess had lived with Theo long enough to understand a bit about relativity. Most people thought time was a constant, but Einstein had said time was as changeable as anything else. Time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. A person traveling at light speed in a spaceship would age more slowly than her twin on Earth, because gravity bends time. And just recently, a mathematician concluded that, scientifically, time travel was possible. Space-time is curved, he said. If it weren’t, stars and planets would have to move in straight lines. So theoretically they should be able to turn that curve into a loop, making time travel possible. In the future, people might even be able to travel to their own pasts.
Bananas.
But.
Einstein had said, “Time only exists so everything doesn’t happen at once.”
Theo had also said that other scientists thought the whole thing was ridiculous. That even if time travel were possible—through wormholes or black holes or machines—humans would probably not be able to survive it. And what about the paradoxes? If Tess and Theo had actually gone back to 1798 and built New York City, did that mean they would have to do it again? Over and over?
She swirled the soup faster and faster. The image in the photograph was burned into her brain. It was hard for Tess to tell the ages of adults. Some adults seemed old when they were young, some adults seemed young when they were old. But she guessed that she and Theo—or whoever was in the picture—were in their thirties. And the singularities? People in their thirties have lives—work and spouses and pets and maybe even children. Who had they left behind? And why? What would make a person give up her future to travel to the past? Were they trying to fix something? Avert something? A war? A plague? An alien invasion?
“Tess, you’re spilling your soup everywhere,” her mother said, dropping a wet rag next to Tess’s bowl. On the floor under her feet, Nine was lapping up the soup that had dripped from the edge of the table.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You’re not hungry?”
“I’m hungry,” said Tess. She spooned up what remained in the bowl but barely tasted it. After she finished the soup, she ate the grilled cheese, chewing methodically, like a goat. She would need the energy. Because she knew that the only way to figure out who was really in that photograph, the only way to prove that Ava was the Ava Oneal, the only way to uncover the real secrets of the Morningstarrs, was to keep going. The Morningstarrs, whoever they were, were trying to tell them something, and whatever it was had potentially ruined her relationship with her best friend. To fix it, they would have to solve the Cipher, once and for all.
Tess got up from the table and brought her bowl and plate to the sink. She rinsed the dishes and stacked them in the dishwasher.
“So you were hungry,” Tess’s mom said.
“I was. I am,” said Tess.
“Still? Do you want some cookies? Your aunt Esther has some Fig Newtons in the cabinet.”
Tess found the cookies, took a whole sleeve. “Come back upstairs when you’re done, Theo.”
“Okay,” he said. Then, “Why?”
“You know why,” Tess said, putting as much meaning as she could into the sentence.
At her tone, Tess’s mom raised a brow. “What’s with your sister, Theo?”
“She’s weird,” Theo said.
“You’re both weird.”
“You raised us,” Theo said, tipping his bowl to slurp the last of his soup.
When she got back upstairs, Tess pulled her own trunk out of the closet. THE MAGIX, the top read. Though she had written it herself, the words felt foreign to her now, a language she couldn’t decipher.
On top of all her other items were the things from the trunk they’d found. She unpacked the postcards and papers, tiny objects and diagrams: a little copper figurine that read The Statue of Liberty, 1886. Currency with all the wrong people on the bills. A piece of solar glass so thick and wavy that you could barely see through it. An antique solar battery. Magazines and articles on extinct animals and “oil rigs” and all manner of things, none of which made any sense. Diagrams of strange machines that looked nothing like the Morningstarr Machines that populated the city. And that photograph! That impossible photograph!
She started gathering everything up, and a business card made of stiff, yellowing paper fell out from within it all and fluttered to the floor. Trench & Snook, it read, with a Manhattan address underneath.
Trench & Snook.
The names sounded like something out of comic book, a movie, a fairy tale.
It was as good a place to begin as any.
CHAPTER TWO
Theo
After the events at Green-Wood Cemetery, Theo had become obsessed with doppelgängers.
Doppelgänger: from the German words doppel, meaning “double,” and gänger, meaning “goer.” Someone who was a replica, a lookalike entirely unrelated to you, a stranger with your face. There was an internet site devoted to doppelgängers where you could upload a picture of yourself and find your double anywhere in the world. Double-goers, doubling and going all over the place, showing up in old pictures just to freak you out.