“Did you catch anyone?” Janelle said. “See anyone?”

“No.”

“If you’re woken up in certain phases of sleep, reality and dreams, they blend together for a little bit. And being up here for the first time, it’s probably going to cause some anxiety dreams. My anxiety dreams are all about how I just never go to class. And it’s the end of the year and I’ve skipped everything. On a good night, I dream about advances in 3-D printing and Gina Torres dressed as Wonder Woman. But here’s the thing . . .”

She stopped Stevie before they entered the yoga room.

“I think we all come here because we have something in our heads we can’t get out,” Janelle said. “We’re all kind of fixated on something. I want to make machines, and you want to solve mysteries, and Nate wants to write—or he doesn’t want to write—and Ellie wants to live in her own art commune. Hayes, he makes shows. I guess David makes games. I see him doing coding, so I know he can. We’re all kind of in our own world. It’s that your world is a real place here. I think your brain is a little busy processing the information. You had an intense dream. Something woke you. You can carry through some of those states and see things and think you’re awake and not really be completely out of a sleep state. Sleep is a funny thing.”

Put like that, everything seemed to make sense.

“How are you so smart?” Stevie asked.

“I read a lot,” Janelle said, smiling. She unzipped the front of her bag, shoved her pass inside and secured the lanyard to a clip, and zipped the bag back up again. Janelle did everything completely, even putting her pass away. “And I’m just amazing.”

The class was in a small studio room. Everyone dropped their bags in the hall and crowded inside. Yoga was popular, and the mats were only inches apart. Stevie used one from the school supply; it was rubbery and purple and smelled a bit like bleach and feet.

The teacher, Daria, had a little accordion-piano thing she played as she made everyone sit on some blankets at the start of class with their eyes closed. They were supposed to be focusing on their breath, but Stevie kept going back to that flickering moment where she had jerked out of sleep the night before and read the words on the wall. She played it back again and again. How awake had she been when her feet hit the floor, when she tried to memorize the words?

It was impossible to know. Sleep had its own mysteries, and Daria was telling them to get into downward facing dog. Stevie was still new at this yoga thing and Daria was soon standing over her and arranging her hands and hips and feet. Stevie had watched a few videos to prepare for this before coming, but in the moment, she was completely lost and whatever move she made was somehow wrong. She was two moves behind at all times, at best. Her knee was in the wrong spot, her arm not high enough, her twist not twisty. Daria hovered and, in a sweet, whispery voice, adjusted her positions again and again and eventually planted herself by Stevie as she guided the class. How did everyone else know how to do yoga?

The one advantage to all of this was that it cleared Stevie’s mind of everything else. She heard exercise did that. Was this what they meant? You were so busy being confused and trying to stop your sweaty hands from slipping on a mat that you couldn’t think anymore?

Stevie did approve of the fact that yoga ended by lying on the floor in corpse pose.

“You’re doing your filming thing tonight, right?” Janelle said at the end of a class, as they went out into the hall to retrieve their things. “Because Vi and I are going to . . .”

She was fishing hard in her bag, poking her hand into the bottom and the pockets.

“My pass,” she said. “It’s gone. I zipped it up. You saw me.”

“I did,” Stevie said. “Are you sure it’s not there?”

Janelle yanked the front pouch open. No pass.

“How the hell did it get lost?” Janelle said. “Did someone take it? I need to find it. I get access to things, and if I lose that . . .”

“We’ll look,” Stevie said, already on the floor, digging around in the pile of other bags as people came out of class and took them away.

“They charge you a hundred and fifty bucks for a new one,” Janelle said. “Crap. Crap.”

“It’s okay,” Stevie assured her. “Someone must have just screwed up.”

“How? By going into my bag and taking it? I have to tell Pix. Who steals passes? Who went into my bag?”

Janelle was getting upset now. This kind of disorder agitated her. And she definitely had put her pass into her bag.

“Maybe it was a prank?”

“To steal my pass?”

Stevie almost said, “Or put a letter on my wall.” But since the jury was out on whether or not that was real, she refrained. It was another weird occurrence in a short amount of time. A letter and a key. It had the feeling of a strange game, and one that filled Stevie with a low, simmering worry.

Games are not fun when you don’t know you’re playing.

14

IT WAS A PERFECT NIGHT TO GO UNDERGROUND.

Autumn was different up here, Stevie noted, as she and Nate made their way down the path to the art barn at eight o’clock that night. It was more—wild. This was probably to be expected, but still, the experience caught her by surprise. There was more scurrying in the bushes, more drama in the dark treetops, more wind. The air was thick with the fecund smell of early dropping leaves and the fragrant decay of layers of undergrowth. Everything was alive or vocal in its demise. This smell, this feeling—this is why Albert Ellingham had insisted on the spot.

“My kingdom for a Starbucks or something,” Nate said. “Are you feeling like we’ve been here forever too? When do we start eating each other or fighting for the conch?”

Stevie and Nate were both wearing dark clothes for this night mission. Nate was wearing baggy dark jeans and a slouchy black sweater that hung down to his fingers, making his long arms even longer. He looked about as excited as he normally did, but Stevie was used to this now. Nate was a rain cloud, but he was her friendly rain cloud, and the world needs some rain. Stevie was fully prepared for the venture with some black cargo pants and her black hoodie. Her wardrobe had not let her down. Both had the school-issued tactical flashlights in their bags.

“So this tunnel,” Nate said as they rounded the path by the whispering statue heads. “What was it?”

“A supply tunnel for alcohol during Prohibition,” Stevie said. “They used to have trucks come down from Canada. They kept the booze under the observatory in case of a raid, not that anyone would have raided Albert Ellingham.”

“I mean the tunnel,” Nate said. “Something about it being open again?”

“Because it was filled up for a while,” Stevie said vaguely. She didn’t want to say, “Since 1938, just unearthed, who even knows what’s down there now.”

“And we’re allowed?”

“No one said not to,” Stevie replied.

“But also we’re not supposed to tell anyone.”

“Act first, apologize later.”

She felt Nate staring at her, but she turned the other way to look at one of the grimacing statue heads.

“I don’t know if this is really going to count for three chapters,” Nate said, digging his hands into his pockets. “We’ve only been doing this for a week.”