“The pages!” he said. “There’s an image on them! Look!” He picked up the ledger, closed it, and showed them the edges of the pages, which were a dull-iron gray. But when he opened the cover and slightly fanned the edges, a picture appeared.

“It’s a fore-edge painting!” said Tess.

Theo smacked himself in the head. “The one kind of hidden cipher I didn’t think of.”

“You can’t think of everything,” said Tess.

“I should have,” Theo grumbled. Normally, Tess would have made fun of him, but since he’d been trying to do Nine’s job, soothing Tess during her nightmares—and during her daymares—she’d been as nice as she could be. Which was mostly nice. Though, sometimes, when she despaired she’d ever get Nine back again, she wasn’t very nice at all.

They gathered around the book. The painting depicted a grand hall with elaborate ironwork arches and columns and a large clock suspended from the ceiling.

“I know where that is. That’s the inside of Station One,” Jaime said. “When we visit my aunts in South Orange, we take the train from there.”

Underneath the image was a message:

Stop the clock in dead of night

To wake what sleeps and stir their flight.

“Well, that doesn’t sound too ominous,” Jaime said.

Theo said, “Dead of night. Station One is open twenty-four hours a day, but our families’ apartments aren’t. How are we going to sneak out in the dead of night? And what time, exactly, is the dead of night?”

“When it’s darkest, I’d say,” Jaime said.

Tess ran a finger over the words. “‘To wake what sleeps.’ But what is sleeping at Station One?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Ominous.”

“Maybe mice are sleeping,” Theo said. “Doesn’t have to be something scary.”

But by this time, Tess had a strange feeling. That whatever the Morningstarrs had left sleeping at Station One was no mouse.

And if they woke it up, there was a chance they would never get it to sleep again.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Theo

They decided that staying at Jaime’s overnight was too risky. That his grandmother would surely hear them if they tried to sneak out of Jaime’s apartment in the middle of the night. But since Tess had so many nightmares, Theo’s parents and aunt were used to hearing some noise from upstairs, especially lately, since Nine wasn’t around. The three of them would stay in the twins’ room and sneak out the window at midnight. Theo told his parents that they didn’t have to worry about anything, that he would take care of Tess if she had a nightmare. Which seemed to surprise them.