Brackenwylde: The Fair Unknown
An upper middle grade mystery about a boy who reads patterns the way other kids read comics; and the school that recruits him for it.
Griffith Owens can’t do maths. What he can do is keep track of lost dogs. Not the animals. The posters.
Eleven of them, pinned to poles and bus stops across Melbourne’s outer west. Different dogs. Different handwriting. The same reference number on every one, and every one facing ten degrees south of west. Nobody puts a reference number on a lost dog.
It takes him months. Classified ads whose prices break into primes. A server address he assembles from paper strips slid around a desk made out of a door. A file with no name, and inside it a word and a number he cannot account for.
He has no idea what he has been solving. He only knows he cannot leave it.
What he has found is a door, and behind the door is St Catherine’s of Brackenwylde: six hundred years old, built into a Swiss mountain, and absent from every register in the world. It will teach him logic, and languages, and how to move on ice, and how to fall without breaking. It will not tell him what any of it is for.
Then the school’s oldest assessment fails, in a room Griff is standing in, injuring him, and he is the only one asking whether it failed on purpose…
The cipher work and tradecraft are real, scaled for readers of twelve. I assess cyber threats for a living, and like my narrator I grew up in Melbourne's western suburbs and still can't do maths.