“No way,” Sam said, for about the seventeenth time in two minutes, as they descended into the vast black entrance of the Chambers Street subway station. “You must be out of your mind. I’ll wind up in jail next to Dumfrey.”

Thomas trotted beside him like a puppy hoping for a treat. “Okay, okay.” He held up both hands. “No tough-guy stuff.”

Sam stopped in the middle of the stairs, glaring, and an old woman, moving in the opposite direction, let out a volley of curses.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Thomas said, making an X over his heart with a finger.

Sam sighed. “What’s the plan, then?” he said.

They once again began making their way through the crowd, down the stairs, and into the tunnels. Sam was already tired. The interview with Bill Evans—the thought of seeing their names or, worse, their pictures, in the paper—had made his head hurt. His feet hurt, too. His shoes were too small—everything was always too small.

He just wouldn’t stop growing. Sometimes, he lay in bed with his ankles sticking out over the footboard and his head banging up against the wall, and he tried to think very small thoughts: of being squeezed inside a walnut; of fitting, like Thomas, into a pipe in the wall; of being pressed underneath a gigantic thumb. He kept hoping that if he thought hard enough, it might help him shrink a little. But so far, nothing was working.

Dumfrey thought it was wonderful. “You’re a strong man, Sam!” he always said with a hearty laugh. “The strongest boy in America. You’ll look good with some size on you.”

What Dumfrey didn’t understand was that Sam didn’t care about being a strong man. All he wanted was to be normal. He wanted to play with a puppy without worrying about knocking the air out of its little lungs. He wanted to be allowed to hold Cornelius in his hand, like Thomas did, and feed him bread crumbs. He didn’t want to yank doors off their hinges accidentally. He didn’t like the fact that he could not give Pippa a hug when she was upset because he risked crushing her ribs.

He remembered how the detectives had looked at him at Anderson’s apartment, after the door had splintered to pieces at his touch. Like he was some kind of freak.

Well, he was.

“All you’ve got to do is get us in,” Thomas said. His eyes were bright and it occurred to Sam that he was actually enjoying himself.

“In where?” Sam said suspiciously.

“The morgue,” Thomas said, and ducked under the turnstiles without paying a token. Sam frowned and pushed two tokens into the coin slot.

“Like—like where they put the dead people?” Max stuttered.

“Sure,” Thomas said, turning to her. “But you aren’t scared of a few dead bodies, right, Max? You’ve seen plenty.”

Sam heard the challenge in his voice. Max must have, too.

“Sure,” she said, turning away from him.

“Even still,” Sam leaped in, in a desperate attempt to show that he, at least, was on Max’s side, “we can’t just walk in.”

“We’re not going to walk in,” Thomas said. “You”—he placed a finger on Sam’s chest—“are going to break in.”

“Usually”—Sam panted—“when you say”—he huffed and strained—“you have a plan”— he adjusted his feet for purchase and heard the lock on the other side of the door whine in protest—“it has”—another hard shove and the door shuddered against his back—“more than one”—he turned around and pushed with both hands—“step,” he finished, breathing hard, as the steel lock gave way.

The service door opened with a long creeeeak.

The morgue was in the basement of Bellevue Hospital, all the way on the east side, on First Avenue between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Ninth Streets. Pippa knew this because the previous year when one of Miss Groenovelt’s spotted tabby cats had died, she insisted that it had been foul play and had carried the body there for an autopsy. She had come back sputtering in outrage after they explained that it was not the habit of New York City medical examiners to conduct postmortems on cats. Pippa had spent many afternoons sipping weak chamomile tea and comforting Miss Groenovelt as she blubbered about poor Tabitha.

“Well?” Sam said, stalling. He hated hospitals, even more than he hated the thought of dead bodies. Hated the thought of illness and bedpans and, on the crazy ward, people strapped to their cots. “What now?”

Thomas answered him by slipping inside. Sam was glad that Thomas had at least taken the lead. He cast one last glance behind him. They’d snuck out just after dinner, and the sun was now setting beyond the spiky line of buildings, layering the sky with colors that looked as if they belonged in Sol’s Candy Shoppe. For one wild second, Sam had the urge to run.

“Come on, Sam,” Pippa whispered, gesturing to him to hurry up. He filed in after her, easing the door closed behind him.

Once they were inside, the sounds of car traffic from First Avenue, and the stink of fish from the East River, faded. They were standing at one end of a long, ugly hallway, poorly lit, that smelled simultaneously of lemon oil and unwashed sheets. From somewhere above them, Sam heard the squeak of shoes and the hum of machinery. He imagined, too, that he heard someone moaning.

To their right was a short flight of stairs leading upward, and signs pointing the way to registration and metabolic unit and psychiatric and accident and emergency: all words that made Sam feel like a thousand insects were crawling over his skin.

“This way.” Thomas had unconsciously dropped his voice to a whisper. He gestured the group forward. At the far end of the hall—it seemed miles and miles away—was a small sign indicating the way to a second set of stairs.

They inched forward together. Although it was dinner hour and they were alone in the hall, Sam had the impression that eyes were everywhere, watching him. The hall was very cold and lined on either side with small rooms; he was afraid to look inside to see what they contained.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Max muttered.

“Me, too,” Sam said, and then wished he hadn’t. He should have said, instead, that he wasn’t scared at all.

When they were twenty feet from the stairs going down, a door suddenly opened in front of them, and a nurse’s voice drifted out: “That’s a good girl, Mrs. Marsh, be a sport. I’ll be right back.” Her elbow appeared; then her right foot.

They froze. Pippa gave a squeak of fear. Sam’s stomach plunged all the way to his toes, and he wondered whether he would have to go to surgery if it were to get stuck there. The nurse was coming into the hall. She would find them and arrest them for trespassing, and they would be sent to jail.

Or even worse, to Bellevue.

At the last minute, the nurse clucked her tongue and said, “Now don’t do that, Mrs. Marsh,” and retreated back into the room. But Sam knew they had mere seconds before she reappeared.

Thomas was the first to recover. He sprang toward the first door he saw and threw it open. It was a broom closet, no wider than a coffin, and cluttered with cleaning supplies and buckets, old mops and stiff rags. Thomas practically shoved Pippa inside, and Sam crowded after her, uncomfortably aware of the fact that he was pressing against her back and that her hair was tickling his chest. Thomas folded himself up at their feet.

“Let me in!” Max whispered, jabbing Sam from behind with an elbow.

“There’s no room!” Pippa squealed. “Sam, stop crushing me.”

“Shhh,” Thomas hissed.

“Sorry, I’m trying to—”

“I said you’re crushing me.”

“SHHH.”

“Let. Me. In!”

Pippa pushed. Sam leaned back. And Max went stumbling backward into the hallway, just as Thomas reached up and closed the door.

Sam nearly went hurtling after her. He heard the creak of a door again, and the nurse’s cooing voice.

“We can’t just—” he started to say.

“SHHH,” Thomas and Pippa said at once.

“—leave her,” he finished in a whisper.

But even as he spoke, he heard the nurse’s voice through the door.

“What are you doing down here, dearie?” the nurse said. “There’s no visitors allowed in the contagious ward.”

Sam knew how much Max would hate to be called dearie. He only hoped she would restrain herself from sticking a knife in the woman. Then she’d never get out of Bellevue.

Luckily, when Max spoke she sounded very unlike herself: young, and deeply apologetic. “Sorry. I—I got lost, I guess.”

Sam felt a warm rush of admiration for her. She knew how to lie to get herself out of a bad spot. He would probably have gone straight to pudding.

“Oh, you poor thing!” the nurse said. “Let me guess. You’re here for your mommy, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Max said quickly. “I’m here for my, um, mommy.” On this last word, Max rapidly turned a choking sound into a cough.

Pippa shifted so her shoulder was digging uncomfortably into Sam’s chest. Sam tried to glare at her, but it was too dark. And Thomas was planted directly on his feet, which were starting to go numb.

“Let me take you upstairs, dear,” the nurse said. “I’m sure we can find your mommy.”

“That’s okay—” Max started to say.

But the nurse cut her off. “It’s no trouble at all, dearie. No trouble at all. Come on, this way. Take my hand, like a good girl.”

It might have been Sam’s imagination, but he thought he heard Max mutter something very quiet (and very rude) under her breath. But the nurse kept babbling over her—“There’s a good girl, how frightening to be lost in this big place on your own”—and then Sam heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of the nurse’s shoes against the tile floor. He could no longer feel his feet, and Pippa’s shoulder made every breath painful.

At last, when the nurse’s footsteps had receded, Thomas pushed open the door. Pippa practically shoved Sam out into the hall, gasping.

“You nearly turned me into a pancake,” she said accusatorily.

He rubbed the cavity of his chest, where her shoulder had been digging a hole. “Well, you nearly turned me into a doughnut.” He stamped his feet to try and get the feeling back.

“Come on,” Thomas said. “There’s no time for arguing.” And he started again in the direction of the stairs.

“What about Max?” Sam said. The nurse would surely soon discover she wasn’t a visitor.

“Max can take care of herself, Sam,” Pippa said. “We’ll meet up with her later.”

“But—” Sam started to protest.

“Do you want to help Dumfrey, or not?” Thomas’s eyes were bright like two hard stones. Sam squeezed up his fists. But Pippa was right. If anyone would be okay, it was Max.

That’s why he liked her so much.

“Fine,” he said, and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Fine,” he said again.

“This way,” Thomas said.

They hurried in silence down the length of the hall, to the stairs leading into the basement, and the sign pointing the way to the morgue.