He got up and tried to shake off the feeling, and when that didn’t work, he massaged his temples. He was distracted from the pain by his hamster-hogs, Napoleon and Tyrone, both girls, who began sniffing around their cage for breakfast. He opened the top of the cage, grabbed their food bowl, and poured some fresh kibble. As usual, Napoleon ran over and munched, but Tyrone, much pickier, took one sniff of the kibble and charged over to her wheel. She jumped on and ran as fast as she could, squeaking her displeasure with the kibble, with Jaime, with a heartless universe that had saddled her with an unfeeling, selfish owner who did not serve adequate food.

“Okay, okay,” Jaime huffed, shuffling to the kitchen to find some bit of fruit to please her. It was only when he returned with a couple of cubes of watermelon and watched Tyrone run that he recognized the source of the pain in his head: He was angry. So angry he could have sprinted ten miles on a Jaime-sized exercise wheel, if someone had invented such a thing.

Jaime was not an angry person. He was chill, he took things in stride, like his mother before him. He liked that about himself. As a baby, he was so calm and quiet that his parents took to poking him in his crib every hour to make sure he was still alive (or so Mima said). But that guard chasing Cricket, that woman faking her bite, Detective Biedermann taking Nine away from Tess, her own daughter, ate at him.

It just wasn’t right.

It wasn’t right when he got dressed; it wasn’t right when he sat at the breakfast table, dully shoveling Mima’s eggs into his mouth; and it wasn’t right when he lied to Mima, telling her that he was fine, and that Tess would be fine, that Detective Biedermann would get Nine back.

An hour later, he left for the twins’ house, the headache still squeezing his skull. He glared at the security guard on duty, even though it wasn’t the same one who had chased Cricket, earning a confused “Good morning?” from the poor guy. It made Jaime feel guilty, but not guilty enough to apologize. Which wasn’t like him, either. This quest to solve the Old York Cipher was not only taking over his life, it was turning him into a whole different person. Or maybe he would have turned into a whole different person anyway, he couldn’t be sure.

What he was sure of: They had to get Nine back, and immediately, as in today. And at the moment, he didn’t care who he had to glare at to make it happen.