Chapter 7

  Waking up in another body came easier to Elizabeth every time. Now it was little different waking up as usual, except that there had been no sleep beforehand—an odd sensation. This body, unmarred by burning Chirographic Script, was rested, but her mind was not. Doubts and worries and fears still circled, turning like clouds in a storm. She needed sleep to clear the thoughts away, to freshen her perspective, to start again with a clean slate. She now understood and appreciated this crucial function of sleep, the mental reset. She would sleep soon. But not yet.

  She yawned, stretched, opened her eyes, saw dim gleaming darkness above. The warm air smelled like salted peanuts and wine. Voices nearby murmured, low and soft because that always seemed the right way to speak in the Museum.

  “That’s enough, I think,” said Alan. Glass clinked against glass.

  “Why...why butterflies?” asked Rebecca. “What’s the big deal? They’re just...bugs, Alan.” Metal clicked against metal, then clattered loudly on glass. “Damn.”

  Elsewhere, further away so that Elizabeth couldn’t make out the words, a Canadian spoke softly to an Irishman.

  Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and sat up on the cushioned seating blocks. To her left, behind a window, a dark city spread far to the gloomy horizons. The city was implied; a dense shroud of fog obscured all detail, but deep neon lights in complex patterns illuminated the vapors from underneath. The city lay far below; Elizabeth sat in a windowed skyway connecting two dark buildings that towered miles above. Far up, in the cloudy sky, more lights mirrored those of the city beneath—an unsettling, vertiginous sight.

  Alan and Rebecca sat nearby at a sleek futuristic bar. More impossibly tall buildings disappeared into the clouds through the windows behind them, a network of interconnected walkways spanning the dark skies between. Some lights in the dark fog shuttered and flashed.

  “Awake again?” asked a soft voice from nearby. Elmer Sky smiled at her from where he lay. He heaved himself upright. “Had a good rest, I hope!” He did not proclaim his hope to the skies as he once would have, and his smile, though genuine, was not the pure, innocent happiness it had once been. Something of sorrow now touched his features and stained his ubiquitous glee at life and living. This broke Elizabeth’s heart, but it also made Elmer Sky more human than he had seemed before. He was not a one-note Shakespearean side-character, not anymore. He’d lost someone he cared about. Almost everyone here had, now, and it showed.

  “Elizabeth,” said Rebecca from the dimly lit bar. “Have a drink?” She gestured at the array of bottles behind the bar. Alan sat there on the other side like a gruff and grizzled barkeep, as though he had placed himself intentionally between Rebecca and the bottles. Rebecca had an empty lowball glass and a disassembled rifle in front of her on the counter; she didn’t appear very interested in either.

  “I’m fifteen,” Elizabeth said. Rebecca raised an eyebrow and tilted her head, but returned without further comment to her conversation with Alan. (“When I was her age, I was collecting trophies. Hunting trophies.” “Hmm. Heidi collected shells for a while. And those, eh, Pokémon. Not the collecting type, though.” “Hrm, Pokémon. Some of them are butterflies too, you know? I’ve got the pillows to prove it.”)

  Elizabeth, a bit annoyed at being so ignored, located AJ and Leah, both asleep near Elmer. McFinn and Will still spoke together a dozen paces down the walkway. Those two had overcome any differences shortly after entering the Museum, and McFinn had recruited Will as an assistant. The other scientist from October Industries had run off shortly after their escape from Earth and had not reappeared.

  “Jimothy,” she said, raising her voice for whoever would listen, “is alive.” She stood and smoothed out her dress, noting that she had to take a shower and either find a change of clothes or wash the ones she wore.

  Her words stopped the other two conversations. “Well, that’s marvelous!” said Elmer. Behind him, AJ and Leah stirred. Minutes later, Elizabeth made a brief report to the assembled party. They gathered around the sleek minimalist bar against the backdrop of the shrouded neon city, and she told them that somehow Jimothy Whyte lived. Elizabeth watched AJ when she shared this news. AJ bit her lip and turned away from everyone in a discreet effort to wipe tears from her eyes. Elizabeth’s heart went out to her sister, and in that moment she wanted only to be alone with AJ. But the others had questions.

  “How is Kaitlyn, dear?” asked Rebecca. Alan only nodded, but obviously he wanted news about Heidi. Off to the side, McFinn stepped closer to listen.

  “Everyone is fine,” said Elizabeth. She paused, considered amending that statement. Heidi had met the Dark Ruler and been half-deafened, and the way she spoke about it made Elizabeth think she’d been lucky to escape with her life. Then there was Isaac, blind. But on the whole, they were okay. Maybe not great, but okay.

  They sat for a while, and Elizabeth watched all of them closely. It still felt a little strange being around them after what seemed like such a long time in the Narrative. She felt like an outsider, perhaps because even the bizarre Narrative felt more real than this vast, empty, changing Museum.

  McFinn finished with Will and strode over to the bar, cape swirling dramatically. He looked like he belonged here, though his coppery red hair threw her off every time she saw him.

  “Alan,” he said, “a drink, if you please.” He settled onto a bar stool a safe distance from Rebecca. William Terry trailed after him, distracted by the view out the windows.

  “For all of us, dear,” added Rebecca. “I am proposing a toast. You too, Elizabeth. Elmer.”

  Alan prepared a row of shots in silence. And here Elizabeth thought: it’s the silence; that is what’s making this so strange. There should be music here. Soft, soothing music. Jazz, even. But there was never any music in the Museum. This place could produce every kind of visual spectacle, but not music.

  In silence Alan distributed small clear glasses brimming with amber liquid. Seven shots: Alan and Rebecca, McFinn and Will, Elizabeth and AJ, and Elmer Sky. Leah, not to be left out, received a shot of orange juice.

  Riley McFinn opened his mouth and began to speak, but Rebecca cut him off. “To Nick, my brother,” she said, her voice melancholy but rock-steady. “To Michael Whyte. Dwayne Hartman. Amelia. Everyone else.” She raised the glass, then kicked it back without waiting for the rest of them. They drank. It burned in Elizabeth’s throat. She hadn’t the faintest clue what type of liquor it was, nor did she possess the vocabulary to apprehend the taste of it. It was simply strong, violent, and appropriate.

  Leah, of all people, began to cry. Elizabeth suddenly recalled that Leah had met and then lost her brother again in the space of minutes. She missed her adoptive parents. Not to mention, she had come face to face with Abraham Black. Anyone would cry, especially a six-year-old girl.

  “Now, now,” said Elmer with a gentle smile. “It’s not all so bad.” Which was amazing, because Elizabeth remembered how he had looked at Amelia. Elizabeth had seen that smile and later clutched a pillow in her bed, dreaming that someday someone would look at her that way.

  “Yes,” Leah corrected him. “It is. It…” she paused, searching for the words. She found them after a moment, and they must have been Eric’s. “It is bull shit,” Leah informed Elmer matter-of-factly. Rebecca turned away to hide a sudden snort of mirth.

  Elmer, irrepressible, “Well that may be so, girl. But consider! The sun is rising somewhere, eh? No night lasts forever!” He chortled, amused with himself, and this was not something Leah could resist. A tiny smile crept onto her face.

  Rebecca stood abruptly and stalked away into the dark, discreetly wiping tears. McFinn, after a moment of consideration, stooped and drew something large and heavy up onto the table, muttering to himself about the sun rising somewhere. The object was a book, if it could still be called that. It was battered and waterlogged to such a disastrous degree that Elizabeth doubted whether it was legible at all. But it piqued her curiosity, as old books always did, and she dared to wander close to Riley McFinn as he flipped through a few crumbling, stained, utterly unreadable pages. The ancient paper bore only trace evidence that it had ever been written upon. Most of the pages could not even be separated from each other.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Wrong question, Ms. Eddison.” McFinn heaved a second book up onto the counter, every bit as bulky as the first. AJ and Alan watched from the side with mild curiosity as McFinn rotated this second book to face Elizabeth. “You should be asking, ‘Who is it?’”

  The book’s cover read: Nicholas Carter, and beneath that, 16.

  Elizabeth already suspected what it was before she touched it. It required only that she open the tome to a random page and read a few sentences to confirm her theory.

  “So,” she said to herself after a moment, “this is what they mean when they talk about our books.”

  “What’s that?” asked McFinn.

  “The daimon,” she said. “They have our books. It’s how they watch us in the Narrative. They keep saying they’re living in a library.”

  “Ah,” said McFinn. “I got this in a library. Bit damp, though.”

  Elizabeth flipped to the last page and read Nicholas Carter’s death there. Kate knew, of course. She’d been told how her dad, miraculously alive after so many years missing, had died again before Kate had even talked to him. “So everything he knew is in here,” she said.

  “He also left some notes. As a digital document. I’ll send it to you if you like. Nick had great respect for you, Ms. Eddison.”

  “What does the ‘sixteen’ mean?”

  “Means we’re on the seventeenth round, lass. Nicholas Carter Seventeen died in a plane crash years ago.”

  Elizabeth mulled this over. “That means we’re both number seventeen as well.”

  McFinn whistled in thought. “Suppose so. Doesn’t much matter, I reckon.” He carefully removed this book to the side, revealing the ruined remains of the book below.

  “And this is...?” she asked.

  He spoke with reverence. “Nicholas Carter, number one.”

  “Ah.” Too bad it was illegible; Elizabeth wanted to know how all of this had begun. She was caught in a cycle, with sixteen repetitions so far, apparently. What had happened at the beginning? There might lie the key to its resolution. She turned her attention back to the more recently completed book. “May I...?”

  “Of course,” said McFinn. “Keep it. Clara can help you navigate it if you like. Keywords, dates, the like.”

  “Clara?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Right! Clara, install an app on Ms. Eddison’s phone. Full text of the book.”

  Elizabeth refrained from asking how Clara would or could do that. No doubt Clara was somehow already lurking within every wireless device in range. Instead, she said, “Clara, send it to Isaac as well. To ARKO.”

  Clara’s voice spoke from McFinn’s watch. “Confirm?”

  “Confirm,” said McFinn. Then, in genuine curiosity, he added, “Have you met ARKO yet, Clara?”

  “I have been in communication with him,” she said. Elizabeth thought Clara sounded just vaguely pleased with herself.

  “I think,” Elizabeth said after a moment of thought, “I will leave this book with Ms. Carter. The app will be sufficient for me.”

  McFinn shrugged, but there was something in his expression that suggested discomfort, as there always was when he was near Rebecca Carter, or speaking of her. Elizabeth guessed that McFinn, the infallible, extraordinary supergenius, did not like having failed at something, even something like marriage.

  Elizabeth returned to the bar at the center of the skyway and placed Nicholas Carter 16 beside the dozing Rebecca Carter. She located her sister, who sat on a dark cushioned square and gazed out the window at the grid of blurred lights in the fog stretching to the horizons far below and far above. Elizabeth had a notion that it was unhealthy to spend too much time looking at the spectacles endlessly supplied by the Museum. ‘If you gaze into the abyss,’ and all that. Perhaps it was because the Museum was always so dark, so quiet and still, so empty. What mind or minds was it a product of?

  But she said nothing as she went to her older sister and put a hand on AJ’s shoulder. “Hey,” Elizabeth said.

  AJ sighed, and that sigh communicated so much to Elizabeth that it bordered on Arcadeltian telepathy. It told Elizabeth that AJ didn’t want to hear it, any of it: no commiserations or platitudes, no comforts or assurances. It told Elizabeth that AJ didn’t want to think about losing Michael, didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want her little sister to bring it up.

  So Elizabeth changed what she was going to say without missing a beat. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  AJ stood and said, “Over here, follow me,” as though nothing at all was wrong. To Elizabeth, this demonstrated plainly that something was wrong. AJ was unnecessarily emotional; that was her nature. All her many feelings gushed out from her, and she made no effort to hold them back. Only when she was truly upset, deeply wounded, did she speak and act reservedly, like Elizabeth or their mother. It had always been this way. And AJ had been acting cool, collected, and restrained ever since entering the Museum. It made Elizabeth hurt to see her that way; her chest seemed to tighten, and she found herself nervously grinding her teeth—a bad habit recently begun.

  There had been altogether too much teeth-grinding lately. Too much tragedy, too much senseless loss, too much everything. Elizabeth had to put an end to it, and soon. But she also really had to find a bathroom.

  AJ led Elizabeth out of the skyway and into a dim corridor lit with strips of cool blue light along the corners of the ceiling. The corridor terminated in a silent escalator that lifted them rapidly up toward shadowy heights. They came to a large open space, dark but windowed, through which dozens of identical escalators silently shuttled up and down, many of them connected to a central open walkway that stretched away to the far glassy wall.

  Here was another fact about the Museum: no guardrails.

  “This way…I, I think,” said AJ, losing a bit of confidence as she looked around. “I thought…”

  “Let’s try it,” said Elizabeth. “It all changes, you know?”

  AJ made a noncommittal sound indicating that she did know, but she didn’t like it. “I bet Callie would know,” she said, sounding miffed. Callie insisted on staying in the Narrative to watch over Elizabeth while she slept, which really did make Elizabeth feel better, but AJ wanted something warm and fluffy to hug.

  They paced together down the glossy black central walkway, past silent moving stairs. Dim lights of varying color marked the escalators so that gazing overhead gave the curiously abstract impression of many shadowy angles lit by unseen lights, along which lines of shadows moved. Elizabeth paused to stare but soon had to turn away for vertigo.

  “Where are we?” AJ breathed as they went.

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  Elizabeth pondered over the answer as they came to a vast curving windowed wall which afforded a view of the endless grid of haloed lights, cut by great vertical strokes of color-streaked darkness just like the building in which they stood. A many-layered network of skyways, visible only from the subtle lights within, hung between the structures.

  “Kate called it a Museum,” she said at last.

  AJ scoffed lightly in amusement. “Well,” she said, “Kate’s a weirdo.” That made Elizabeth smile. “I’ve never seen a museum like this. What would you have called it, Lizzy?”

  Elizabeth hadn’t thought about it. But a word surfaced in her mind, and it was perfect. “Piranesi,” she said. “If it were me, I would have called it Piranesi. Capriccio Carceri.”

  AJ worked out the meaning. “Capricious prison.” She chuckled. “Devastating.”

  “You are right,” said a small voice. “It is suspicious.”

  The Eddison sisters whirled around as one, clutched at each other, and made almost identical gasps of fright. Elizabeth raised a hand, ready to fling any threat into the dark at the speed of a jet plane.

  But it was only Leah. She stood there looking up at them, wrapped up in her blanket made of sky with the star-side facing outward. The sparkling nighttime sky trailed behind her on the floor. Elizabeth and AJ relaxed. “Now,” Elizabeth said through gritted teeth, “I really need a bathroom.”

  “It’s there,” said Leah. She aimed a blanket-shrouded hand at one of the nearby escalators. She yawned.

  “What are you doing here?” asked AJ. “Did you follow us?”

  Leah nodded, watching with wide, dark, serious eyes. “It’s all suspicious.”

  Elizabeth shared a giggle with her sister. “Come on,” she said, leading them to the escalator Leah had indicated. Leah had been so casually confident about pointing out the way that Elizabeth felt she must be correct. Maybe, she thought, that was how things worked here. If you thought you knew where you were going, then it became true? Nicholas Carter had known more about this place than anyone; Elizabeth had to read his book.

  Leah shuffled along while wrapped in her blanket, for the air was cool and slightly damp, with a faint scent of cleaning fluid. Leah’s blanket was like a moving window; the stars it showed did not move along with it. Leah led them to a broad open space up above where several branching skyways gleamed across the dark tile. Two restrooms waited in an alcove nearby, men’s and women’s. Two restrooms—because they had expected two?

  The restroom was a relief, and so was the shower it included. Later, wishing that she retained the ability to create objects from thin air so that she could wrap her hair in a towel, Elizabeth sat with AJ and Leah on cushioned seats beside an abstract onyx sculpture. They talked together and watched the crawling dotted lines of light representing a web of silent escalators.

  “Remember when we built that snow fort?” said Elizabeth, idly filing through all her best memories of being with AJ.

  “The one in the parking lot?” said AJ, a smile in her voice.

  “Oh, no. I meant the one in the forest. We used the monkey rock.” The rock which, from a certain angle and with a liberal application of imagination, resembled a monkey’s face.

  “Wild,” said AJ. “That was so long ago. We’d just got Callie, remember?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “Dad didn’t like her. Because of the eyes. And we found out that nothing stuck to her fur.” She smiled. “And she wouldn’t wear a collar.”

  “Kept losing her in the snow,” said AJ. “I loved her so much, Lizzy! I was so jealous, back then, that she was obviously yours. It made me so mad that she was always with you. Did you know, I just remembered, mom and dad always argued about Callie, you know, but mom used to call Callie an angel.”

  “Because of the car accident.”

  “Verily.”

  The car accident: when they had all found out, or at last confirmed for certain, that Callie was supernatural. That had seemed so normal to Elizabeth when she was a child. Of course she had an indestructible, teleporting, and perfectly huggable white lynx for a pet. Didn’t everybody? But mom had told her to keep it a secret.

  “I miss her,” said Elizabeth. “Mom.”

  AJ put an arm around Elizabeth and her damp hair. “Me too.”

  Leah spoke up from her seat nearby. “I miss my mom.” She said it as she said all things: matter-of-factly. Leah spoke as though she was reading definitions in a dictionary. Elizabeth wished she understood Leah well enough to know how to comfort her.

  “Do you miss Eric?” AJ asked.

  Leah paused from carefully crumpling up a piece of blank paper. She considered the question, then nodded. “Yes. But he’s okay,” she said. “He’s with Kate. I like Kate. Look.” She held up the paper to show them. She had put great care into mashing her paper into a shapeless oblong mass.

  “That’s wonderful,” said AJ. “You’re a killer, Leah Walker.”

  Elizabeth asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s Kate.” Leah said this as though it were so obvious she couldn’t believe she had to explain it. Then she added, “it’s also the big one. His name is...” She scrunched her face up, trying to remember. “Absolute…?”

  Absolem, thought Elizabeth. Leah had made a chrysalis. Or a coc-c-coon, said Kate in her head, d-de-d-depending!

  “Let’s head back,” said Elizabeth, standing. “I’m hungry.”

  AJ gasped softly. “My sister? Hungry? Are you okay, Lizzy?”

  Leah turned to AJ and whispered loudly, “She is always hungry.”

  Elizabeth ignored them and turned back the way she thought they’d come. AJ followed behind, musing to herself. “I wonder if there’s a kitchen somewhere in here...”

  “That would be excellent,” Elizabeth agreed. The bar down below had only snack food. Eric had told her that when he and Heidi had wandered around the Museum, they’d come across a buffet-style feast in a restaurant area. Could she put in a request for something like that?

  She passed a dark opening on her left and was startled to see other figures walking there. But no, it was only a huge mirrored wall, and she had only glimpsed her reflection. She paused and turned to face herself several paces from the mirror. “While we’re at it,” she said, “let’s find the laundry room as well. Or a wardrobe.”

  Elizabeth’s reflection stepped toward her. Something about this both alarmed and confused Elizabeth, who mentally stalled out for a moment as her eyes and body argued with each other. Because she was fairly sure that she had not stepped anywhere.

  Elizabeth’s reflection had dark features, but a light flared to life there, in her eyes, a deep violet glow, flickering, burning. Those eyes met Elizabeth’s, and they paralyzed her with uncomprehending fear. They were her eyes, in her face, but they were wrong, horribly wrong.

  It likes to creep about behind mirrors.

  The deep purple fire spread, crawled rapidly out over the reflection’s face, arms, hair, torso—and it wasn’t fire so much as letters, living, moving, hateful symbols spinning through the air.

  Leah shrieked, a piercing sound that shocked Elizabeth out of her hypnotic stupor. The mirror cracked as though struck by a mighty force, then explosively shattered. Thousands of glittering fragments expanded wavelike through the air, and many of them left trails of purple flame writhing in the dark.

  A hand clasped Elizabeth’s and pulled her nearly off of her feet. It was AJ’s hand, bigger and stronger than Elizabeth’s, and Elizabeth allowed it to drag her into an awkward run as they fled the remains of the mirror. But she couldn’t stop watching behind. The fire, the Chirographic Script, seemed to catch hold of everything it touched, regardless of whether the material was flammable. It spread in an instant; it grew together like a single monstrous creature; it reached out fingers of fiery letters toward Elizabeth—

  Another figure stood there in front of the fire. It held something long and dark in one hand, outlined against the flame. The figure struck out at the flame and the burning words dissolved; they vanished with a sound like a whispered scream of rage.

  Elizabeth dragged AJ to a halt. “Wait!” she said. She knew the identity of the figure. She and AJ and Leah stopped running. They turned to watch as the newcomer stalked back and forth over the place where the shards of the mirror had fallen. His head swiveled like a hound sniffing out its quarry, and he occasionally paused to grind the toe of a boot into the dark tile of the floor like a man putting out a cigarette.

  “It’s okay,” Elizabeth reassured the other two. “It’s the Dark Man.”

  Once satisfied with his work, the Dark Man turned to the three of them. Even though Elizabeth knew, or was reasonably certain, that he was not her enemy, a chill swept through her at the sight of that figure turning toward her. There was something indefinable and uncanny about the presence of the Dark Man. Perhaps he reflected the Museum: vast, empty, unknowable, and of course, dark.

  The Dark Man stalked toward them over the warped and pitted floor where the Chirographic had burned. He stopped ten paces short and watched them for a moment, his face entirely shadowed by his collar and his hat. “There is,” he said after a time of silence.

  Elizabeth swallowed. “…is…?”

  “A kitchen.” His voice was rough, hoarse as though he’d spent a few hours shouting, but otherwise unexceptional. “A laundry room. Keep moving. You’ll find it.”

  Elizabeth tried to think of how to respond, what question to ask, because she wasn’t about to miss this valuable chance for information, but AJ was faster.

  “Thank you!” she said earnestly. About the kitchen, no doubt. The Dark Man nodded in response. He seemed tired.

  “I forget,” he said after another uncomfortably long pause. “What people need. No one’s supposed to live here. Except me.” Maybe his voice wasn’t hoarse from shouting. Maybe it was simple disuse. Maybe he almost never spoke.

  “I…didn’t know the Chirographic could come here,” Elizabeth said.

  The Dark Man turned to glance at the place where it had been. “Not supposed to,” he said. He reached up to scratch his chin. “This is getting out of hand.”

  “The Chirographic is?” Elizabeth was determined to keep him talking for as long as possible. What did he know about the Script?

  The Dark Man was silent, his default state, for another long moment. “It eats words,” he said. “Be careful.” He pointed the thing in his hand, a long dark cane, at Leah. “You especially, Ms. Walker.” Then he turned, stalked into a shadow, and was gone.

  None of them remembered the way back. Leah reassured them, saying, “It’s okay, we’ll get back eventually.”

  They walked out onto a windowed skyway, thinking to perhaps look down and see the one with the bar. Although some nearby walks were visible, most were too dim, too shadowed, to see within.

  Elizabeth received a text message while they stood there, searching. She glanced at it, saw it was green text from the Bleeding God, Fiora, and would have ignored it had she not glanced at the content and seen

  FI: I see you!

  FI: I do!

  FI: look! look over here

  Elizabeth cast her gaze around, saw nothing.

  “What are you looking for?” AJ asked.

  “Fiora,” Elizabeth replied, distracted. “She said she could see me.”

  “There,” said Leah. “Frog.” She pointed out the window, up and away to a nearby walkway. Sure enough, Elizabeth dimly discerned two figures through the dark. One was blue, the other green. Both stood upside down. The green one, half the size of the other, hopped in excitement, glowing with emerald light.

  FI: do you see me?

  FI: hello Elizabeth Eddison!

  The green figure waved both arms. Its blue companion remained still.

  FI: look, Rosma! humans!

  RO: I have seen humans before.

  FI: you HAVE?!

  Leah waved in unsmiling response to the two daimon across the expanse of darkness. AJ spoke wonderingly. “Those are…”

  “The ‘gods’ I’ve been telling you about, yes. Or the daimon. Fiora, the green one, is…” Is the one that tried to heal Jimothy’s deadly tumor, and technically succeeded.

  EE: What are you doing here?

  FI: we were exploring! we were!

  RO: It may be best we keep our distance, human.

  RO: I yet consider thy kind as suspect.

  A spark of outrage flared to life within Elizabeth. She, the Frozen God, considered Elizabeth suspect?

  FI: oh, stop that, Rosma!

  RO: No.

  FI: yes! Elizabeth Eddison is GOOD

  FI: she is like a tiny weird Rasmus

  RO: A coward, then?

  FI: no way!

  FI: give me that!

  Elizabeth could not make out exactly what happened next, but it seemed as though the small green figure jumped on the blue one, initiating some kind of awkward one-sided wrestling match.

  AJ squinted into the dark. “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “What we did when we were kids,” said Elizabeth with a small smile.

  Eventually, the green light disengaged and fled away, bounding down the distant walkway in a series of long hops. Moments later, another message appeared.

  FI: stay where you are, humans!

  FI: I will find you! I will!

  But she did not, though Elizabeth and company remained in the walkway for a fair half hour.

  “I don’t think she is going to find us,” said Leah at length.

  Elizabeth had to agree. Somehow, she thought that if the Museum had wanted them to actually meet, they would have met in the same walkway. But seeing each other across the dark, however close they might appear to be...in this place, that was no different than glimpsing each other across a vast chasm.

  They regrouped with the rest of the humans in their elegant bar area shortly after. This disturbed Elizabeth somehow. She eventually realized the reason: during her entire journey with AJ and Leah, to the bathrooms and afterward, they had only traveled upward.