MARZANA, NIALLA, EMILIA, and Meddy arrived as planned in the spot by the lockers where they’d met up that morning, then snuck out again through the gym and into the garden shed.
Marzana took her little flashlight from her newly assembled toolkit. Nialla had brought one too. Meddy seemed to be able to see in the dark just fine, and the ghost girl was as delighted with the world under the courtyard as Marzana and Nialla had been. “Hold this,” she said, passing Marzana the gold vial reliquary so that she could explore the space with more freedom. She disappeared into the tangle of plumbing under the Orangery by walking straight through the nearest knot of pipes as if it wasn’t there to stand in her way.
“So what were you up to all day, Meddy?” Nialla asked her when she reappeared a few minutes later.
“Seeing what more I could find out about Mr. Otterwill,” Meddy said as they climbed down one by one onto the little pier over the dry canal. “I tracked him down in the teacher’s lounge this morning. I explored a little during his classes, and when he wasn’t teaching, I followed him around. I only walked into doors twice,” she added, pleased with herself. “After all these years, it’s hard to adjust to the fact that I can’t just skate through things when I’m carrying the reliquary.”
Nialla chucked her on the shoulder. “Congratulations, I guess.”
“Thank you. Anyway, while he was having lunch, he asked another teacher if she knew if the school had heard from Mrs. Agravin. Apparently nobody has, but they told him the whole story. Monday night, her sister—or, at least, someone claiming to be her sister—called to say Mrs. A. had come down with something, and because of her age, she’d been taken to the hospital just to be safe.”
Was that female caller, Marzana wondered, the same person who’d called Captain Flynn of the SCPD and blackmailed him into releasing Rob Gandreider from his cell?
“That much he said he already knew; he said when he was hired, they told him he’d be there until at least Wednesday, but now he’s just supposed to check in every morning, and had the other teacher heard whether there’d been any updates?” Meddy continued as they made their way along the canal toward the pier at 5 Westing Alley. “Apparently the sister had expected Mrs. Agravin to be released sometime late Tuesday; then she would take Wednesday to rest and probably would be back on Thursday, but definitely by Friday. The sister said she’d call Wednesday night with an update, but as far as anyone knew, no one had called. But then it starts to get weird. Miss Whoever-You-Mentioned-Earlier, Miss Pal-something—”
“Palkowick,” Emilia supplied.
“Right. She wanted to send get-well flowers, but the sister hadn’t said which hospital Mrs. Agravin had been admitted to. I gather there are only a couple hospitals in the Liberty, so she just called around to each one on Tuesday afternoon, but she couldn’t find her. The sister had said Mrs. A. would be discharged Tuesday, though, so Miss Palkowick just sent flowers to her home and didn’t think about it again until, I guess, yesterday afternoon, when the sister hadn’t called with an update like she said she would. This morning they started trying to reach Mrs. A. by phone, and they haven’t gotten hold of her yet. I think they’re beginning to be just a bit worried.” Meddy nodded ahead of them, to Emilia’s back. “And so . . .”
“So Meddy found me at lunchtime,” Emilia called as she hoisted herself up onto 5 Westing’s pier. “And I got Mrs. Agravin’s address.”
“You managed to get her address from the office during school hours?” Nialla asked, impressed. “With Miss Palkowick at large?”
Emilia opened the door with its gold-flaked address, her face dramatic in a shaft of dusty light from somewhere beyond. “I have my ways.”
During the climb up to the fifth floor of 5 Westing Alley, Marzana and Nialla told Meddy about the discoveries they’d made before math class. Then, with no little pride, they introduced Meddy to Boneash and Sodalime’s Glass Museum and Radioactive Teashop. Today four places had been laid on the table, along with four little half-moon-shaped pastries whose thick, rolled-crust edges made perfect handles, ideal for when you wanted to eat a rhubarb pie and climb down a narrow spiral stair at the same time. “Meddy,” Nialla said as she hoisted herself through the kitchen window, “do you think it could be a ghost who keeps this place and sets out the tea?”
Meddy looked a little sadly back at the single pastry they’d left on the table. “I don’t think so. I think another ghost would have known I don’t eat. Though I did used to love rhubarb.”
A few minutes later, they dropped one by one to the stones of Westing Alley and strolled out to Hellbent Street. At Surroyal Books, Lucky, occupied with a customer, barely looked up long enough to wave. Marzana exhaled a short breath of relief. Like Marzana and her parents, Lucky had been introduced to Meddy at Greenglass House, but if she noticed her at all today, she didn’t make the connection between the girl in the green-and-blue cap and Milo’s otherworldly buddy. Which was good. They could save that reintroduction for another time.
Marzana explained the bargain they’d made with Lucky for space on the mezzanine, and since neither of the boys had arrived yet, she, Nialla, and Emilia got to work moving armfuls of books, leaving Meddy to put them in order on the shelves upstairs, where no one would notice books disappearing and reappearing in different places as the ghost girl picked them up and put them down.
About ten minutes later, the bells over the door rang again. Marzana paused in the act of carrying an armful to the stairs and waved to J.J. and Ciro. “This way.” She held out her books to Ciro, who repositioned a long tube he’d been carrying in order to accept the new burden. She pointed him at the doorway to the mezzanine. “Take these up for me. J.J., come help me get the rest of letter E.”
“What are we doing, exactly?” J.J. asked as Marzana loaded him up.
“Earning our Batcave,” she replied, sweeping the rest of the books off the shelf and herding him up the stairs.
On the mezzanine, she found introductions already under way. Ciro, looking dazed, shook hands with Meddy. He glanced over his shoulder as Marzana and J.J. deposited their books on the shelf. “Oh, wow. J.J.—this is Meddy.”
J.J., straightening his stack of books into a neat horizontal row on one of the shelves marked POETRY, managed to miss the dramatic reveal. He looked up at her. “Hi, Meddy. Do you go to Marymead too?”
“Not exactly, no,” Meddy said with a smile. “Are you the magician, by any chance?”
J.J. grinned. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Cool. Can you do this one?” Meddy flickered once, then disappeared.
J.J. squealed in a highly undignified way and grabbed the nearest person, who happened to be Emilia. She patted his head. “There, there.”
Marzana knocked her knuckles on the table. “Come to order, everybody.” The setup was similar to down in the history room, with benches on the long sides of the table and chairs at the short ones. With only the slightest hesitation—This was getting easier!—she took the chair at the end facing the stairs and sat. One by one, the others followed her lead: Nialla and Emilia to Marzana’s left and right, J.J. next to Emilia because he was still a little shell-shocked and she had to more or less steer him to his seat. Meddy sat next to Nialla, and Ciro took the chair at the opposite end.
And then they all looked at Marzana.
She swallowed. “As the first order of business, I’d like to welcome Meddy to the group. I met her over Christmas, when I went caroling to an inn called Greenglass House with the Waits.” Marzana looked down the table at her. “Some of us are here because we grew up hearing about adventures our parents had, and we jumped at the chance to finally have one ourselves. But we have a rule that nobody has to talk about their parents if they don’t want to, and some of us feel like we can’t say anything specific. You don’t have to either, Meddy—but I want you to know you’re in good company.”
Meddy tapped her fingers on the tabletop. Unlike when she had jumped from the lockers that morning, the soft sound her fingers made when they struck the surface was perfectly normal, as if she had ordinary, solid fingers to drum with. She looked around the table, silently assessing everyone there. Then, “My real name is Addie Whitcher,” she said slowly. “My father was Doc Holystone.”
Ciro whistled, long and low. Even Emilia deigned to look impressed, though she averted her eyes almost immediately. J.J., however, turned to Meddy with an expression of deep sorrow.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. He made a twitchy sort of motion with his hand, as if he’d had the impulse to reach for hers but stifled it. And then Marzana remembered that Meddy had seen her father die, only moments before falling to her own death.
Meddy turned to J.J. in surprise. “Thank you.”
“So you’re . . . what, a ghost?” Ciro asked. “What’s that like?”
“I’m not sure I have all the rules down myself.” Meddy held out her hand to Marzana. “Reliquary? This is how I get to leave the house,” she explained when Marzana held up the vial. “If Marzana has it, I can do a lot of cool ghosty stuff, but I can’t go that far from her. If I hold it, I can go any distance, but my ghostly capabilities are pretty well squashed. I’m still making sense of it.”
Marzana cleared her throat. “Okay. Secondly, Nialla and I decided the day we started assembling this group that once we hit five members, we’d need a name. Well, we’re at six now. And I have a name. We are a knot.”
“Like in the Sidledywry books,” Nialla said, nodding in approval. “A knot, like a crew.”
“Yes.” Marzana took the shoelace from her pocket and smoothed it out on the table. “But we’re not just any knot.” With five pairs of eyes on her, she tied a reef knot in the lace and held it up.
“Reef knot,” Meddy said instantly. Marzana felt a momentary, entirely unexpected pang of jealousy. Apparently not everyone with dubiously employed parents had their underground educations totally neglected.
“Yes.” Marzana untied it, then performed the fiddly-looping tie of a grief knot, taking care not to pull it so tight that it came undone, and held it up. “And this is a grief knot.” She glanced at Meddy. “You want to explain?”
The ghost girl shook her head. “Your show.”
“Well, a grief knot looks like a reef knot, more or less. It’s a kind of trap, like leaving a strand of hair on a drawer pull to see if anyone opens it while you’re not looking.”
“Very cool,” Ciro said. “One knot masquerading as a different one. I like that.”
Marzana smiled. “I thought you might. A grief knot isn’t good for much but traps. It’s fiddly and weird and it has a funny twist.” She tugged to unravel it, then tied the slightly stabler thief knot. “This one’s also a trap, just a bit more sturdy.” She tossed the thief-knotted shoelace on the table. “That’s us: fiddly and weird, and who knows if we’re good for anything, but we’re going to try.” She looked from face to face. “We’re the Thief Knot.”
“The Thief Knot,” Nialla repeated thoughtfully. “I can get behind that.”
Meddy nodded, and so did Ciro. “You know I’m down with it,” he said.
“Me too,” J.J. agreed.
“Works,” Emilia said. “What’s next?”
“Well, let’s go around the table.” Marzana looked at J.J. and Ciro. “We have kind of a lot of new information from Marymead, plus the stuff from Ciro’s pictures. We’re going to need to go through those a bit more closely than I managed to today, because all this other info came up. Shall I start?”
“Might as well,” J.J. grumbled, “seeing as how I didn’t have a job yesterday.”
“I have some new stuff too,” Ciro said. “It can wait, though.”
“Okay.” Marzana opened her journal and took out the prints of Ciro’s photographs. “Well, you remember we have a teacher at Marymead who taught at Watermill, Peony’s school, and who we think was supposed to work at the camp that threw the party Peony went to before she was taken?” She nodded to Emilia. “Emilia cracked into his file at Marymead.”
Together, J.J. and Ciro broke into slow but very impressed applause.
“There wasn’t much there,” Emilia told them, as if this made the actual feat any less extraordinary. “But there were a couple interesting things. Mr. Otterwill ran the comics club at Peony’s school, for one thing, and we’re pretty sure he knew her, and he knew what she was reading.”
“How’d you figure that out?” J.J. asked.
“Nialla basically waved the book under his nose and got a reaction,” Marzana said.
Nialla smiled modestly. “Hold your applause. But I think—Mars, you were watching, am I right about this?—that he looked more sad than anything else.”
“Sad about what?” Ciro asked. “Do we think he’s involved, or do we think he just knows she was kidnapped? Like you said before, if he worked at the school and was part of the camp faculty, the police would have interviewed him.”
“I’m not sure, but at this point we absolutely have to treat him as a real suspect,” Marzana said, “because of the other thing we found out. It has to do with a relative of his, the person who recommended him on short notice to sub for Mrs. Agravin. A guy named Victor Cormorant.”
Ciro’s head came up sharply. “Cormorant. I’ve—” He looked around the table. “Why is that name familiar?”
J.J. shook his head. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Nialla, however, said frustratedly, “I don’t know, but I thought I recognized it too.”
“Okay, this is weird,” Emilia exploded. “I also knew the name, and until I figured out how I knew it, I thought Nialla and I must just have noticed it at school. There were a couple Cormorants—Ezra and Nadia—who were trustees and have big portraits up on the wall. But that’s actually not how I know Victor Cormorant, and you guys almost certainly can’t have the knowledge about him that I do. So where have you seen his name?”
“And why would it be familiar to Nialla and Ciro, but not to J.J. and me?” Suddenly, a possibility occurred to Marzana. She reached for the printouts of Ciro’s photos. “You two are the only ones who’ve read these thoroughly. His name’s got to be here.”
Ciro snapped his fingers. “I think you’re right.” He took the pile from Marzana and shuffled to a picture of a page she recognized as her parents’ notes rather than Emmett’s. “Here.”
“That’s it,” Nialla said, and she and Ciro each poked an index finger at one line in a list of people to contact, written in Marzana’s mother’s handwriting. Marzana wasn’t surprised she’d missed it—during study hall, she’d been fixated on a different page altogether, the one with the snakebird drawing.
The first entry on the list read Rob/Rose/Hickson: Emmett’s three suspects; no surprises there. The next two names were known quantities: a friend of her mother’s who worked for the warder of the Liberty and one who worked for a local newspaper, both of whom Marzana figured Mrs. Hakelbarend wanted to talk to merely in the interest of leaving no stone unturned. The second-to-last read simply Tasha. But the final one was Victor Cormorant.
“So that’s one mystery solved,” Ciro said, looking up at Emilia. “Who is he, then?”
Marzana took Stanton’s Aviary from her bag and passed it to Emilia, who thumbed through to the snakebird entry and placed it in the middle of the table. “Underworld types who specialize in information are called carriers. They deal in knowledge, passing information about anything and everything, including information about likely jobs that might be attractive to other underworld types. There’s a very powerful knowledge-broker in Gammerbund called the Snakebird.” Emilia tapped the bird. “His real name is Victor Cormorant.”
“I’m guessing his identity isn’t common knowledge,” J.J. said, glancing at Marzana curiously.
“Nope,” Marzana and Emilia said at the same time. Marzana found the page with her father’s sketch on it and slid it up next to the Aviary. “But my parents know. And Emmett, the guy who came to my parents about the kidnapping, asked to be introduced to him. It seemed like Emmett just wanted to find out if the Snakebird had any information that might shed light on the case, but my parents seem to think it’s possible he’s involved. And, like I said, Victor Cormorant got Mr. Otterwill the substitute-teaching gig. Cormorant’s his great-uncle. Mr. Otterwill is literally staying with him while he’s in the Liberty.”
“Your folks don’t know about that connection, though, do they?” Ciro asked. “So why do they think Cormorant might be part of all this?”
“It has to do with him.” Marzana tapped Rob’s name on the first line of the list. “These three are suspects. They’re the ones Emmett originally asked my parents to look into. Rob’s a pretty small-time crook, but he’s the kind of guy who has connections to what my dad would call bigger bugs. He gets caught up in stuff. He was locked up in the city proper, and a couple days ago someone blackmailed a cop to let him go. Mom thinks the knowledge behind the blackmail had to come from somebody big. Maybe the Snakebird.”
“Let’s go back to the three suspects.” Emilia took out her own spiral pad and pen. “What else do you know about them?”
Marzana considered. “Apparently Hickson Blount is also a carrier, although my mom said she doubted he was good enough to have been the source of the blackmailer’s information. And I heard a colleague of my parents say that this wasn’t Rose’s kind of thing because she was a candymaker, though I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Presumably they all pretend to have straight jobs, right?”
“I remember your mom said something about that Rob guy that I didn’t understand,” Ciro put in. “About how every job needs a good fiddler or something, only I don’t think it was fiddler.”
“It wasn’t, but it was something like it. Fiddling Ben?” Marzana hazarded. She looked to Emilia, figuring if she knew about famous carriers, she might know this term too.
Emilia, however, shook her head. “I’ve got nothing.”
It was Meddy who spoke up. “Not a fiddling Ben. A fidlam ben. That’s a generalist, like our buddy Rob. Your basic, all-purpose ne’er-do-well. And Rose must be a confectioner, which is a counterfeiter. I can see why your folks didn’t think a counterfeiter would fit into this scheme. But a master carrier like the Snakebird would.”
Emilia nodded. “The kidnappers pulled a lot of strings—probably more than we’re aware of yet, and it would’ve taken a carrier to know which strings to go for and how hard they’d need to be hauled on to get a result.”
“Okay, then. The Snakebird’s officially a suspect too.” Marzana looked around the table. “Who’s next?”
“Me,” Meddy said, rapping on the tabletop. She repeated what she’d learned about Mrs. Agravin. “It might be worth making a trip to her house to check on her.”
“I want to go,” Nialla said. “I love Mrs. A.”
J.J. raised a hand. “Well, I’ve got nothing to report because I didn’t have a job, as you remember, so I call dibs on being part of the mission to Mrs. What’s-Her-Name’s house. Where is it, by the way?”
Marzana turned to Emilia, who flipped back a page in her pad and consulted the jottings. “Whipping Hyde.”
“I’ll go too. But can we pause a minute?” Ciro got to his feet. “I need a map for when we get to what I have to report. I’m sure this bookstore’s got some for sale. Be right back.”
He hurried down the stairs. Meanwhile Emilia tore out a page from her pad, wrote down Mrs. Agravin’s information, and passed it to J.J. A moment later, Ciro came back, clutching not a folded map but a book under one arm.
“Bought a gazetteer,” he said, putting it on the table between them and opening it to the index. “More detail.” He trailed a finger down the list of neighborhoods, streets, and landmarks until it stopped on Whipping Hyde, then turned to a two-page spread of the entire Liberty. They all leaned over the atlas as he located and pointed to an irregular splotch of pale orange that was Miss Agravin’s neighborhood.
“It’s not too far from the Viaduct,” Marzana observed. “J.J., can I come with you guys?”
“You’re in charge here. Should we go tonight?”
“Yeah. The ransom has to be delivered by Sunday, so tonight and tomorrow are all we’ve got.” Marzana turned to Ciro. “But first, what do you have to report?”
Ciro reached under the table and produced the tube he’d brought with him, along with a battered old manila envelope from his backpack. “I mostly spent last night printing things off my phone. But I also did some excavation in the attic. This is everything I could find of my grandfather’s stuff from back when he worked on the Belowground.”
He removed the cap at one end of the tube, reached inside, and withdrew a handful of rolled paper, some of it thin enough to be almost transparent, some a vivid, saturated cobalt. Ciro unspooled the outer page and stretched it open on the table. Marzana turned in her chair, grabbed four small books from the poetry shelves, and passed them down the table for Ciro to use for weights. He muttered, “Thanks,” as he positioned them around the blueprint.
In one corner of the flattened page, the name Padraig del Olmo and the words Oldeye Overlook had been printed in old-fashioned lettering similar to the “fancy copperplate” Honora used to label things around the kitchen. The drawing was of a pavilion seen from the front: something like a band gazebo, only fashioned from saplings whose branches knitted themselves together overhead to form the roof.
“There are a whole bunch of these,” Ciro said, unrolling a second blueprint over the first: a more ordinary-looking brick façade that Marzana thought looked somehow familiar. Here the line under Granddad del Olmo’s name read Sanctuary Cliff. “I assume most of them are for stations down in the city proper, but they’re only labeled with names and numbers, not actual locations. Without a map of the system, it’s impossible to say where they are, and there was no complete map with Granddad’s stuff. But again, there were two Liberty stations, so theoretically two of these could be local.”
Meddy spoke up. “I can tell you where that one is,” she said, pointing at the drawing of the brick building on top. “It’s in the woods behind Greenglass House.”
“That’s why it looks familiar,” Marzana said. “I passed it with the Waits on our way to the inn at Christmas.”
Meddy grinned at her. “Milo would love this. I wish he could be here, too. Southwest side of Whilforber Hill,” she added for Ciro’s benefit. “A little more than halfway down to the river.”
“Good to know.” Ciro dug his own notebook from his backpack, opened it to a page already labeled STATIONS, ran his finger down the list he’d written below the heading, and wrote Greenglass House on the line next to Sanctuary Cliff.
Marzana leaned across Nialla for a look at his list. “Those are all the stations?”
“Not necessarily,” Ciro said. “Just the ones that I found drawings for. And I don’t know for sure that all of these even wound up being the final plans. Some of them might just have been proposals. Like, there are two completely different blueprints labeled Whitesmith’s Row. Wherever that is, presumably the city wouldn’t have built two separate stations there.”
“I’ll bet Whitesmith’s Row is in the Quayside Harbors. There used to be a big metalworkers’ quarter there.” Meddy pointed to a line where Ciro had written Coup de Grâce/Hacker’s Bluff. “And this is definitely in Shantytown.”
“Can I see?” Marzana reached for the notebook and scanned the list. Sanctuary Cliff, Misericorde, Whitesmith’s Row . . . There. Not Ottomy Street, but Ottomy Stalls. “This one’s in the Liberty,” she said, pointing. “Milo said he’d seen this name on the map in the station at Greenglass House.”
“Ottomy Stalls . . .” Ciro leafed awkwardly through the remaining rolled blueprints, then pulled one free and slipped its corners underneath the books. “Here. This is a huge long shot, but does anybody recognize it?”
They all leaned over the drawing. It looked like a storefront—just like any old alleyway storefront, complete with a striped awning and a big glass-front window with the words Ottomy Stalls on it in arcing gold letters. “It looks like it would fit right in on a market street,” Nialla said. “That’s all I can figure.”
“All right, so we think we’ve sort of identified four,” Ciro said, taking his notebook back from Marzana. “Maybe we can eliminate a few more stations from the running. Speak up if anything sounds familiar: Yellow Inlet. Coldside Farm. Salton Square.” He glanced around the table: nothing. “Hornblende Park? Saint Horace Rye?”
Emilia shifted in her seat. She said nothing, and her face betrayed nothing, but everyone looked at her nonetheless.
“What?” Marzana asked. “Saint Horace Rye, or Hornblende Park?”
For a moment, Emilia said nothing. Then she sighed the tiniest, quietest sigh. And then, without any other warning, she crumpled. Her face dropped into her arms, and Marzana had a brief glimpse of tears streaming down her cheeks.
They all sat there, stunned, looking at the quietly sobbing girl and then around at one another. J.J., on Emilia’s left, caught Marzana’s eye over Emilia’s hunched shoulders. “Hey,” he said, sounding helpless. “Hey, it’s okay. Whatever it is.” He patted her back, an awkward, wooden thump-thump with his palm. Still, it was something, and it managed somehow to break the horrified spell that had fallen over everyone else.
Nialla jumped up and rushed around the table. She scooted onto the bench on Emilia’s right and put both arms around her. Emilia leaned into the hug and continued her almost soundless crying with her face buried in Nialla’s shoulder.
Marzana fidgeted, completely at a loss about what to do. If it had been her, she’d have wanted privacy for a cry like this.
Across the table, Ciro pressed a palm to his eyes for a moment. When he took his hands away, his expression was full of regret. “Hornblende Park is a cemetery,” he said softly.
Meddy spoke up. “Your last name’s Cabot, isn’t it? Your dad is Alexander Cabot.” Then she glanced at the line where the cemetery’s name was written in Ciro’s notebook and corrected herself awkwardly. “Or . . . was?”
“Yes.” Emilia lifted her head off Nialla’s shoulder with a ragged breath. “To both.”
“How do—did—you know her father?” Marzana whispered to Meddy, who stared back at Marzana as if she’d admitted to having twelve toes.
“You don’t know who Alexander Cabot was?” she demanded in an undertone.
“No,” Marzana said defensively. “Why should I?”
Emilia had been the first person to say she couldn’t talk about her parents and what they did. The name Alexander Cabot meant nothing to Marzana, but Meddy clearly knew who he had been. Suddenly Marzana wondered if she’d misinterpreted Emilia’s reaction to being invited to join the knot. Perhaps that “Why me?” had not meant what she’d thought.
“Why?” Meddy repeated, incredulous. “Only because he saved your mom’s life once.”