But while everyone else was tying up villains and criminals, Theo looked over the now-empty trunk. The other clues were so sophisticated, numerical puzzles and riddles hidden in monuments. The “Junk Trunk” was a silly name for an antique that could hold a clue to the Morningstarr Cipher, and such a crude and random way to hide a clue, but maybe that was the point. To hide the trunk’s importance, to throw people off. Theo felt all along the inside of the trunk, looking for anything they missed. A false bottom or lid. A fake side panel.

As he ran his fingers over the lip of the trunk, he felt something pointy. He picked at the point, pulled out an old photograph that had fallen between the lining and wall of the trunk.

Theo squinted at the photo, willing his overwhelmed brain to process what he was holding, what he was seeing, besides one impossible thing too many.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Jaime

While Tess chattered happily and Theo dissolved into the sludgy swirl of his own thoughts, time collapsed for Jaime. First, he was wandering in a graveyard, tying up comic-book supervillains, talking to bunch of puzzle hunters as well as a walking figment of his imagination; next, he was reliving his sixth birthday.

Jaime’s father didn’t take him to any of the places other fathers take their sons on their birthdays. They did not go to Ruggles Field to see the Starrs play the Cubs, they did not have a party at the exo arena at Chelsea Piers, they did not go for pizza and cake, they did not invite a group of kids for a rousing—and chaotic—game of bubble soccer, in which the participants dressed in giant inflatable balls and bashed into one another for fun.

Instead, Jaime and his father went to a museum to watch a man fold paper.

It was not just any man. And he wasn’t folding paper airplanes. This was an origami master, and the things he created from single sheets of paper were magical. Butterflies and beetles, fiddler crabs and crickets, scorpions and dragonflies. Abstract polyhedra and polypolyhedra. An allosaurus and a pegasus and cat after cat after cat.

“The Japanese have been perfecting the art of paper folding for four hundred years,” explained the tour guide, as the man quietly folded and pinched a piece of shiny bronze paper at a table behind her. “One of the most famous and accomplished was a man named Akira Yoshizawa, renowned for everything he did, but especially his gorillas.”