Every Move by Ellie Marney

Author:Ellie Marney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

The night is very soft and dark. I wonder if there’s been some sort of power outage, until I realise that the blanket is over my head. I push it off and look around.

Mycroft is sitting barefoot at his desk under the light of the Anglepoise; the printer has been returned to its spot, and the room has been tidied. Some of the papers on the wall are still hanging down where the tape has come loose; the excess is piled like autumn leaves on the floor below.

Mycroft has his hoodie back on, his head down, poring over papers at the desk. He looks pale but focused.

I push the blanket down to my chest. ‘Hey.’

He swivels to look at me. ‘Hey. Didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘You didn’t.’ I stretch my shoulders back onto the flannelette pillowcase. ‘You okay?’

‘Better.’ He wets his lips. ‘Thank you. For—’

‘It’s fine,’ I say gently. ‘It’s not something you should have to thank me for.’

He swallows, nods. Then he angles his pen to tap it on the papers on the desk. ‘I’ve been looking at the encrypted copy of my dad’s report.’

I get out of bed and move closer, stepping around the heater and pushing at my untidy hair. When I lean on Mycroft to see over his shoulder, he reaches up without looking to hold my hand, rub his thumb over my fingers.

‘Have you found out anything about this?’ I ask, plucking the cellophane bag with the coin out of the furore of papers. I hold it towards the lamplight. The label on the bag says Do Not Handle! in faded red marker, and the weight of the silver disc inside surprises me. ‘It’s heavy. Your dad said it was an owl?’

‘Yeah. An Athenian owl dekadrachm. It’s an extremely rare and valuable coin.’

‘How valuable are we talking?’

Mycroft takes the bag carefully out of my fingers. ‘I can’t be completely sure, unless I get it assessed. But the last coin like this, sold at auction, went for nearly half a million US dollars.’

‘Ah. Okay.’ I laugh nervously. ‘Crap.’

‘This is my mum’s writing.’ Mycroft taps his pen to draw my eye. The writing on the papers is neat and precise, quite different from Mycroft’s looping scrawl.

I squint at the sheets. ‘Mycroft, these aren’t words. It’s just a whole lot of numbers and letters.’

‘Yes, but I know this. It’s a list of International Chemical Identifiers – a way of encoding molecular information about chemical substances. They describe chemicals in layered terms, with data about atoms, tantomeres, isotopes, stereochemistry . . .’

That makes sense: his mother was an organic chemist. When Mycroft’s dad asked her to encode this for him, she went to the things she knew. Mycroft doesn’t look happy about it, though. He shoves his pen into his hair.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because they’re not correct – like this one, see? InChI=1/C2H6O/C1-2-3/h3H,2H2,1H3 should be ethanol. But she’s listed it here as calcium carbonate. And they’re all wrong like that.’

‘So this is the code? Your mum used these .

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