“Funny,” said Theo. It was. Also funny, when Jaime wrapped the leather strap around Ono’s middle, and Ono kept trying to back out of it, like Nine when Tess would put a hat on her.

So all of them were surprised when Ono suddenly grew about a foot wider—Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!—and then his regular size again. The leather puddled around his feet. He tried to step over it, tripped, and fell.

“Oh no,” he said.

“Oh yes!” said Jaime.

“Ono can be our scytale,” Theo said.

Jaime set Ono upright. “Do you want to be our scytale?”

“Oh no?” said Ono.

“Just do what you did before. We’re going to wrap this around you, and when we tell you, get a little wider. But just a little. Not all at once. You get me?” said Jaime.

“Land of Kings,” Ono said. He stood still as Jaime wound the leather strip around him once again. But this time, he grew only a block at a time.

Theo laid his cheek on the table in order to read the characters. “A little more,” Theo said.

Snap!

“More,” said Theo.

Snap!

“More.”

Snap! Snap!

“That’s it,” said Theo. “There it is.”

Jaime picked up the little robot and held it on its back. Now the characters on the leather strip were aligned horizontally:

Elder brother hides the clue in the Smallpox Hospital red on blue.

“The Smallpox Hospital, red on blue.” Tess said. “What smallpox hospital? And what’s red on blue? And which brother? Are we talking about Theodore Morningstarr? And why are they getting so rhyme-y all of a sudden?”

Theo pulled on his lip, let go. “There was a smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, but I think they moved it in the 1850s.”

“They moved the whole building?” said Jaime.

“Well,” said Theo.

They looked it up on Jaime’s phone. “‘One of the city’s few landmarked ruins,’” Tess read, “‘the hospital is often referred to as “the Renwick Ruin,” one that could be imagined as the setting for a nineteenth-century Gothic novel.’”

The ruin in the picture did look like something out of the nineteenth century. Like someone dropped an old European castle on an island in New York.

“‘The ruin is currently undergoing a five-million-dollar restoration.’” Tess said.

“I don’t see anything in there about brothers,” Jaime said. “Do you?

“Did Theodore have anything to do with building or funding that hospital? Did he have smallpox?”

“No, no,” said Tess, stabbing at the screen, “this doesn’t work. This particular hospital opened in 1856. That’s too late to have anything to do with the Morningstarrs.”

“Maybe there’s another smallpox hospital somewhere?” said Jaime. He took the phone from Tess, typed quickly with both thumbs. “It looks like there’s a smallpox hospital on North Brother Island. North meaning ‘above’ or ‘elder’?”

Tess unwound the leather strip from Ono. “That could be it!”

“Oh no,” said Ono.