“Maybe not,” said Jaime. He pulled a tiny copper figurine from the trunk. A woman wearing a robe and crown held a torch aloft. Along the bottom of the figurine were the words THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, 1886.

“Is this supposed to be the Liberty Statue?” said Theo. “But it wasn’t built in 1886. And it doesn’t look like that. Where’s the eagle? And why is it green?”

Jaime set the figurine aside and hefted a small envelope. “Money!”

“Fake money,” said Theo, unpacking it.

“Yeah,” said Tess. “Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill? Where’s Harriet Tubman?”

“And what are these?” Theo said, holding up some diagrams of strange machines.

“No idea,” said Jaime. “But I recognize this one. Solar glass. It’s so wavy, though. Has to be ancient.”

“Look!” Theo said, pulling a rusted solar battery out of the box. “It’s enormous!”

They kept pawing through the trunk. They found a set of calculations on melting the polar ice caps, except the ice caps weren’t melting as far as any of them knew and they couldn’t imagine why someone would want them to. A book that said it featured extinct animals, but included pictures of polar bears and arctic foxes and tigers, none of which were extinct. An article on the dangers of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, except they didn’t know what an “oil rig” was. A printed blog piece about people continuously referred to as “illegals,” except none of them knew how a person could be illegal. Prescription bottles for mysterious drugs. A magazine cover warning about the coming war in the Arctic. A business card for a firm called Trench & Snook.

“What is this stuff?” said Theo. “Some weirdo’s apocalyptic cosplay props? This doesn’t seem like Morningstarr material. . . . Who put it here?”

“Who cares?” said Tess, her patience fraying like her braid. “We have to figure out which one of these things is a clue.”

“Maybe we should pack this whole trunk up and carry it out with us,” Theo said.

“What will we tell the Cipherists? That we just happened to trip over it?”

“Okay, then we stuff as much of this as we can into our backpacks.”

“But what if the clue is on the trunk itself? Written on the bottom or something?” said Tess.

“We could bury it again and come back,” Theo suggested.

“When will we have a chance to come back?”

“I don’t know!”

“Maybe we should try to be a little quieter,” said Jaime. “They can probably hear us up in the Bronx.”

Beams of light blasted them. They held up their arms, squinting against the brightness. Ono squeaked, “Oh no!”

From the shadows, a voice drawled, “It’s dangerous to go creeping around a graveyard in the middle of the night. Didn’t your parents teach you children anything?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Duke