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.
Twelve-year-old Griff Owens can’t do maths. What he can do is tell you that every lost-dog poster in his suburb faces ten degrees south of west, and that all of them carry the same reference number. When Griff works out the posters are a cipher — and solves it, with a computer he has built from spare parts — the computer disappears. Three days later there is a white van outside his school and a stranger at his kitchen table, offering him a place at a school that doesn’t officially exist.
St Catherine’s of Brackenwylde has spent six hundred years in the Swiss Alps teaching children to notice things. There is no magic in its walls; only ciphers, cover stories, and teachers who have made an art of being unremarkable. For the first time in his life, Griff is somewhere his particular brain is an asset — until the Rite of Nine, a machine built to find the thing you are worst at and press on it until you break. There are two doors out of that room. The children who leave by the second one are never spoken of again.
Griff’s machine is rigged. He survives it, barely, and the school records a fault. So he and Clara Tremayne go looking for who tampered with it, and Griff reads the evidence the way he reads everything — quickly, confidently — and names the wrong man. Then Clara is found at the bottom of the north stair with a shattered ankle, and a note appears on Griff’s bed. One word.
STOP.
Whoever is inside Brackenwylde has already hurt the only friend he has. If Griff gets it wrong a second time, he goes home to the western suburbs and the life he was so grateful to leave.
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.