Alexa was torn.

On one hand, she had just remembered something very important and needed to tell Janice right away. On the other hand, she was angry at her sister for not believing her about Dimitri—that big, dumb liar—telling her Zack and Sydney had got back. She didn’t know why Dimitri—that big, dumb, liar—was lying about telling her, or why he had told her in the first place if it hadn’t happened. Maybe because he was a big, dumb liar.

And Janice had believed him over her, and that wasn’t fair, and so she was mad at her big sister as only a little sister can be. The last thing she wanted to do was go and find her and talk to her, but she was pretty sure that was what she should do because she remembered Zack and Sydney being very specific when they told her a few months ago. She knew it was a few months ago because it was after she’d found Chippy but before she’d found Ratty the rat.

She did not stop to wonder how they could have given her a message a few months ago that she needed to deliver today. To think about that would be confusing, and she was not in the mood to be confused.

But neither was she in the mood to talk to Janice. So she was torn.

After thinking it over, she got up and walked purposefully around the first floor of the house. She had made a decision. It was a good decision, or at least she thought it was, and she wanted to follow through before something happened to change her mind. If she couldn’t talk to Janice, but needed Janice to know, then she would tell someone else and let them tell Janice. Since she wouldn’t talk to Dimitri, the only person left was Aunt Gladys.

She found her aunt where the poor, confused woman had spent most of her time since waking up totally not remembering anything—in the kitchen in front of a bowl of Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings.

“Aunt Gladys?” she asked.

“Am I?” asked Aunt Gladys. “I don’t remember brothers or sisters. Or parents. Or, really, much of anything.” She sagged and dropped her head into her hands.

Alexa gave her a second to be sad before asking, “What do you remember?”

Aunt Gladys lifted her head and looked out at something only she could see. “Ice cream,” she said. “There was a circus. A man offered me ice cream. He had a large mustache.”

She drifted off, squinting her eyes as if trying to peer at something just out of sight. Alexa figured that was all her aunt was going to say, so she got right to the point of her visit. “Zack and Sydney are trapped, and they need Janice to open a new door so they can get out. But I’m not talking to Janice, so I thought you could talk to her. So will you? You need to tell Janice that Zack and Sydney need Janice to open another door so that they can get out.”

With great difficulty, Aunt Gladys turned her gaze away from the cloudy past and looked at the littlest Rothbaum. “I have no idea what you just said,” she confessed.

“Adults!” huffed Alexa, who gave up on her aunt (she really missed the old Aunt Gladys) and stormed out of the kitchen.

Once she’d stomped through a few rooms in frustration, Alexa slowed and considered her options. She could ignore what she had just remembered about Zack and Sydney needing a new door. No, that didn’t seem right. She could tell someone else. Yes, that felt better. But who? Aunt Gladys had been a flop. Dimitri—the big, dumb liar—was out of the question. And she wasn’t any less angry with Janice. There wasn’t anyone else to tell.

Fine, she decided. I’ll do it myself.

She circled back to the central room, slipped through the vault door and under the heavy curtain, and walked up to the platform. The broken door still hung in the frame, a huge crack running down the center.

Step one, get rid of the old door, she thought. Easy-peasy.

She’d seen Aunt Gladys switch out the doors last time. It hadn’t looked that hard. There were big gold latches on the frame at each of the four corners. She hopped up onto the platform and toyed with the bottom two latches until she figured them out, twisted everything the right way, and got them to snap open with a satisfying sprong!

The upper latches were out of her reach, so she dragged the swivelly chair over, shoved it onto the platform next to the doorframe, and climbed on. By stretching out on her tippy-toes, she was just able to reach. She carefully twisted the first latch-knobby thingy while the chair beneath her threatened to roll away from the door and send her crashing to the floor. It was a delicate balancing act, and Alexa was quite proud of herself when she heard the sprong! of success. Next, she moved the chair over a bit and climbed back up to unlatch the final doohickey and release the door. It was again slow going, and at one point, the chair jerked over just a bit, enough to get Alexa windmilling her arms to keep from toppling over. But she steadied herself, reached up, twisted the thingamajig, and was rewarded with one more sprong!

“What on earth are you doing?”

Janice’s sudden outburst caught Alexa by surprise. She instinctively leaped back off the chair, and her momentum shoved the chair forward, where it crashed into the newly released door. The door toppled over with a deafening crash at the same time Alexa herself landed on her rump with a resounding thump.

“Alexa!” cried a suddenly worried Janice, rushing forward. “Are you all right?”

Alexa took a moment to answer that question. She had every right to be howling in pain and/or shock after her dramatic tumble—and she considered doing just that—but in the end, her mission was more important than a well-deserved tantrum. She staggered to her feet and was about to tell Janice that she was fine when she remembered she wasn’t talking to her sister. So instead, she shrugged, dusted herself off, and walked around the brass frame to start hauling the broken door out of the way.

“Wait! What’s going on? What are you doing?”

Alexa ignored her sister and dragged the heavy door as best she could. Which was not very well.

“That’s way too heavy for you,” said Janice. “Just stop, okay? Tell me what you’re doing.”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” answered Alexa, in as sassy a tone as she could muster for a seven-year-old. If she was going to talk to her sister, she’d at least be nasty about it.

“Why are you dragging, or trying to drag, that away?”

Alexa stayed silent, huffing and puffing against the weight of the door.

“Alexa? Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Because you don’t believe me!” snapped Alexa, finally giving up both on moving the door and not talking to her sister. She gained a moment’s satisfaction at the startled look of guilt on Janice’s face, then decided this was all way too much emotion for her to handle at once, so she went ahead, fell to the floor, and burst into tears.

Surrendering to her big-sister instinct, Janice rushed forward. “Oh, Alexa! I’m so sorry!” She dropped to a knee at Alexa’s side and cradled the crying girl’s head in her arms.

“Yoo-ooo di-id-n’t be-le-ee-ee-eve me-ee-ee,” hiccuped Alexa through her tears. “Yoo-oo thi-ink I—I—I’m a bi-ig, du-umb li-i-i-ar!”

“No!” protested Janice. “Never! You’re not a liar, Alexa. I never thought that.”

“Yoo-oo be-ee-lee-eve-d Di-mi-i-i-tri-i,” continued Alexa, who felt she might as well get it all out. “You-oo ye-elled at me-ee.”

“I did,” admitted the eldest Rothbaum. “I know I did. I shouldn’t have done that. Please forgive me?”

Alexa paused in her whimpering and peered up at her sister. “You’re not mad at me?” she asked without a trace of misery in her voice. “You don’t blame me?”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Really really?”

“Really really.”

“Really really really?”

Janice raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Weren’t you crying a moment ago?”

“That was then.” She pushed herself out of Janice’s lap and leaned back down to grab the broken door. “Help me move this?”

“Why did you disconnect the door? What are you doing down here?”

“Oh.” Alexa bit her lip. “Right. I didn’t tell you. Because I wasn’t talking to you. Because you yelled at me. So it’s your fault.” She planted her hands on her hips like she’d seen Sydney do when placing blame, but it didn’t feel right, so she let her hands drop.

“Didn’t tell me what?” asked Janice.

And Alexa told her. She told her about remembering how Zack and Sydney came into her room when she was reading to Chippy, about how they were trapped in the memory, about how they could travel between memories, and about how they needed someone to open another door and bring them a knob so they could get home. When she was done, Janice just stared at her in utter amazement, her mouth hanging open like it was trying to air out a particularly bad smell.

Alexa waited for her sister to say something. Janice, for her part, gave no indication that she was planning on doing anything but gawk endlessly at her little sister until the sun went supernova in a few billion years.

“Did you get all that?” asked Alexa finally. “Or do you need me to say it again?”

Janice shook herself out of her daze. “No. I got it. I’m good.”

Alexa didn’t think her sister sounded good, but she chose to ignore the matter and get back to work. “So will you help me?” she asked, indicating the broken door at their feet.

To Alexa’s great relief, Janice spun into action, grabbing the door and quickly shoving it out of the way. “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

“I’m not a big, dumb liar.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You thought it.”

“I never thought it.”

“You yelled at me!”

“Didn’t we already do this?”

Alexa giggled.

“Did they say anything about what kind of door they need?” asked Janice, looking around at the countless piles of doors ready and waiting to be hooked up and explored.

“Nope.”

“Right. Okay. So we just…pick one?”

Alexa marched up to the nearest pile of doors and patted the topmost door with the palm of her hand. “This one.”

“Are you sure?” asked Janice. “It looks a little flimsy.”

“A door’s a door,” answered an increasingly impatient Alexa. “Let’s go!”

With Alexa functioning as project manager and offering moral support, Janice lugged the chosen door over to the machine. Under her little sister’s direction, she stood the door on its end and latched it into the brass frame. Then the two girls retreated to the bank of computers, and Janice fumbled with the controls.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” asked Alexa.

“I watched Dimitri pretty carefully, then asked some questions after Zack and Sydney went in. I’m pretty sure—”

She interrupted herself by twisting a dial that looked like any other dial on the board. The machine instantly jolted to life with a mechanical cough, followed by an electric sizzle, followed by an unidentifiable sound from somewhere below. The now-familiar bright blue sparks of energy wrapped themselves around the door once again, and the entire frame buzzed excitedly for a moment before quieting into the soft, ever-present drone that meant everything was working.

“Is good! We go now!” shouted Janice, mimicking Dimitri.

“Don’t mimic that big, dumb liar,” said Alexa.

“Sorry.”

The two sisters turned their attention to the flimsy-looking door cracking with blue energy in the middle of the room.

“Now what?” asked Janice.

“I think we go in,” answered Alexa. She waddled over to the drawer and pulled out a doorknob. “You ready?”

“You realize we have no idea what’s on the other side of that door, right?”

“Zack and Sydney.”

Alexa grabbed a pair of rubber gloves and handed them to her big sister. Then she took Janice’s hand and led her, somewhat reluctantly, up onto the platform. At her prodding, Janice pulled on the gloves and reached out to gingerly touch the plain doorknob currently sparking with unidentifiable blue energy. When touching the knob failed to kill her, she went ahead and gave it a good grasp. A serious twist followed the grasp, a forceful yank followed the twist, and the two girls walked blindly into the light.