It all happened so fast, it took me a while to figure out that I hadn’t actually just plummeted into some spontaneous black hole and would never be heard from again. The first thing that clued me in was the voice of a kid speaking right next to me.

“That were a close one, eh, mate?” he whispered with a thick Australian accent.

It was pitch-black. I mean the kind of dark where the only thing I could actually see was the inside of my eyelids when I closed them. It was also sort of cramped; I could feel that much. There was enough room for me to sit upright, as I currently was, but I could feel my hair brushing against a hard surface above us.

“Where are we?” I whispered. “What happened?”

He snickered quietly. “Come on. It’ll all come good,” he said.

With his accent and everything I didn’t really know what exactly he meant. But I heard him shuffling down the cramped tunnel to my right. Or at least I hoped that was him and not some sort of giant Thief Valley School rat.

“You coming or what, mate?” he whispered again, except this time his voice was several feet farther away.

“I can’t see,” I said back.

He laughed again. “Aw, well, lucky for you there’s only two ways to go.”

Then he started moving again. He had a point. And I definitely didn’t want to get stuck in here alone and end up some cryptic skeleton that would be found someday in the year, like, 2079 and make everybody wonder just how this strange small boy got stuck inside the walls of a school.

I quickly crawled after the Australian kid, wondering how and why I’d been saved twice by the students here. Especially after it had been their fault I’d been caught in the first place. The ground under my palms was cold and hard, with very little dirt or dust considering we were inside of a wall. Why would a crawl space behind a wall be paved?

“Are we going to see Ken-Co?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. I could tell he was having fun with me.

“So he runs a pretty good business, then, huh?”

At this the Aussie simply laughed. He laughed so loud it echoed through the tunnel and sounded like ten kids were laughing instead of just one.

When he was finished laughing, he stopped ahead of me.

“Mate?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s the best business this side of Brisbane, Australia. It runs like a machine. Every piece oiled, every employee loyal. Nothing ever breaks down, ever. You see, money does all our talking for us, and we answer to no one. We own this school, the teachers, the janitor; I even heard we got the superintendent under our thumb.”

If this was true, then I was dealing with a businessman the likes of which I’d never come close to knowing. Even Staples’s empire in its greatest moments was like a dude selling fake designer purses on the sidewalk compared to what this kid was describing.

“All right. Let’s go, then, yes?” he said, and kept moving.

After what must have been a hundred yards of crawling through narrow spaces and around corners, he stopped.

Then a small flashlight clicked on, which blinded me for a few seconds. After my eyes adjusted, I saw that we were at a fork. One branch of the small cement tunnel went left and seemed to gradually get bigger farther down the path. The right branch stayed pretty small and actually seemed to slope down, as if it led to an underground level.

“Kinda creepy-looking, isn’t it, mate?” he said, tilting his head toward the right branch.

“That’s where we’re headed, isn’t it?” I said.

He responded only by laughing again, and then he started down the narrow tunnel. I sighed and then followed.

The slope was pretty gradual at first, but after a little bit it got a lot steeper, and I felt my hands slipping on the cement. It was getting tough to keep from slamming face-first into the Australian kid’s heels. Then, just when I was sure I was at my breaking point, that I was about to get my teeth knocked out by his shoes or the cement floor, he was suddenly gone.

We finally exited the tunnel as it’d turned in to a larger room. I heard about all the bones in my body cracking and popping like fireworks as I climbed to my feet.

The room was cement and probably the size of a normal school classroom. There were no windows of any kind, and I assumed that we were likely at least partway underground now. Light came from six or seven flashlights and battery-powered camping lanterns hanging on the walls throughout the room.

Beside the passage we’d just come from, I could see at least two other small openings, as well as an open door leading into another chamber. The Australian kid stood next to me, watching my face and wearing that stupid grin of his. Two pretty big kids stood on either side of the open door. They were also studying me.

One of them was a girl and one a guy, but other than that they looked almost identical. They were clearly twins.

“We’ve been expecting you,” the girl said.

“What took so long?” her brother said.

The Australian kid shrugged. “I couldn’t find the bugger! He ran off and then hid in the three twenty-two storage room. It took me a few minutes to figure out where he’d gone.”

The twins seemed to accept this as an okay excuse because the girl handed him something that I was guessing was money. Then the Australian kid turned to me and said, “Well, good luck, mate. You’ll need it.”

Before I could ask what he meant by that, he was gone, scurrying off through one of the small tunnel openings in the wall.

I looked at the twins. The guy smiled at me in a smug way, as if he wanted me to know that he knew what was in store for me and that he also knew that I didn’t know what he knew. This kid was good at giving looks that said a lot.

The girl didn’t smile. She just stared at me.

“You’ve been expecting me?” I asked. “How is that possible?”

They didn’t answer. Instead the guy motioned toward the door between them.

“This way,” he said.

What was it with TV kids and being so reluctant to answer questions directly?

I followed the kids into the next chamber, which was roughly the same size and had a similar setup, including several small tunnel openings and two more metal doors. There was also a small printed sign a few feet from one of the doors that said, “The Line Starts Here →”

One of those red-velvet, movie-theater ropes used to partition lines at giant cinemas ran along the wall behind the sign. Nobody was in line at the moment, which made sense since it was regular class time. Speaking of, just how was it possible that all these kids were out of class without getting in trouble? There was a reason my business operated only during recess and lunch: it just wouldn’t be possible to get out of class regularly during other times of the day. I was annoyed that Ken-Co had achieved this, and I was probably a little jealous, too.

The guy pounded on the metal door opposite the sign. In the enclosed cement chamber the clanging almost sounded like thunder. His twin sister folded her sizable arms and continued to stare at me like she thought I might have insulted her but wasn’t quite sure.

“Pretty nice setup you guys have,” I said, trying to sound as nice as possible.

“Hmm” was her reply.

I heard a muffled voice from inside the metal door but couldn’t make out what it said. Then the guy turned to me and opened the door. He smiled and motioned for me to head inside the room.

“She’s been expecting you,” he said.