BY THE TIME Marzana got up on Saturday morning, her parents had already left for the city proper. Since she hadn’t officially been grounded, she and Meddy trudged to the bookstore to meet with the other members of the Knot at ten as planned.
“Assuming the rest of them haven’t had their social privileges revoked,” she muttered to Meddy as they walked down the Viaduct stairs. “Incoming.”
Meddy, walking half a pace behind as she busily tied and untied grief knots in one of Marzana’s pink shoelaces, looked up just in time to sidestep a little girl heading in the opposite direction. “Meh. I think you guys are all missing a key point.”
“And I think you are forgetting what it’s like to have parents capable of yelling at you,” Marzana retorted.
“I most certainly am not,” Meddy snapped. She paused to tug the ends of her knot, unraveling it. “Well, maybe a little. But the key point is this: You didn’t actually do anything wrong, you know.”
“Apart from sneaking into my parents’ stuff and making copies,” Marzana said. “And eavesdropping. And lying, sort of. If I’m being honest.”
“Okay, yes, apart from all that. But seriously. We all sat around thinking about stuff. Asking questions. Trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense. And in the end, what did we do? We went to check on an old lady who might possibly have been sick or hurt, and we found someone who needed help.”
“In the course of which, we maybe did a little breaking and entering,” Marzana pointed out.
“Okay, sure. But in general, I think you could categorize all the questionable stuff as bad choices rather than anything actually dangerous.”
It was like talking to Nialla the night before. It all sounded so reasonable. And yet. “No adult in the world is going to see it that way.”
“Maybe not. Quit beating yourself up, though. We found someone who was missing. That’s a good thing.”
Marzana said nothing, and after a moment, Meddy took the hint and turned her attention back to the shoelace.
I named us after a structurally unsound knot that’s almost totally useless, Marzana thought bitterly. I got caught up in the sneakiness and forgot to think about what it—what we—might actually be good for, which is next to nothing except to be not quite as good as the real thing.
“Hey, you,” Lucky said as Marzana and Meddy slipped inside the bookstore a few minutes after ten. “Expecting the study group today?”
For the second time, Marzana tensed, waiting for Lucky to recognize Meddy as the ghost girl dressed in the outlandish hat and robe from Greenglass House, but they appeared to be past that. As far as the bookseller was concerned, this was just a member of Marzana’s crowd. “Yeah. You haven’t seen anybody else yet, have you?”
Lucky shook her head. “You two are the first. I’ll send the rest up when they get here.”
Meddy decamped for a look at Lucky’s role-playing-game books until the others showed up, leaving Marzana to hike up to the empty mezzanine alone. She dropped her backpack on the floor, sat in the chair at the end of the empty table, and looked down its length. What was she going to say to everyone?
The bells downstairs chimed, followed by Lucky’s chipper hello. A moment later, Ciro trotted up the stairs, his backpack over one shoulder and an unopened soda in his hand. His face was . . . weird. His face was happy. It was cheerful. It was maybe even triumphant.
“What the heck are you looking so grim for?” he demanded. “Did you get grounded or something?”
“No, I didn’t get grounded,” Marzana said, exasperated. “My parents are furious, but—what the heck do you look so pleased for?”
“Are you kidding?” He dropped his bag and sat next to her. “What are you talking about? We did it.” Ciro frowned. “Marzana. We did it. You see that, right? You assembled us to find this girl, and we did it. Yes, we might get in trouble, but honestly, I don’t care about that. We found a girl who’d been kidnapped. My mom is . . . my mom had a thing or two to say, but look: Even she, in the end, only had one real gripe, which is that we didn’t call in the adults sooner. She sure as anything didn’t object to my giving you the phone.”
Nialla had said it, Meddy had said it, and now Ciro. Why couldn’t she let herself see things their way? “Maybe your parents aren’t walking around looking at you like you’re persona non grata, but mine are.”
“Is that really the problem?” He looked at her for such a long moment that, in addition to her mounting frustration at having gotten this lecture twice already, Marzana felt herself start to blush. “How is this not how you imagined the situation might go?” he asked finally. “If we succeeded, our parents were always going to find out.”
“I didn’t really imagine how it would go if we succeeded,” Marzana admitted. “Not after finding her.” Maybe that was part of the problem: Even with her undeniable expertise in imagining a million different eventualities, Marzana hadn’t imagined how her parents might react. And then, suddenly, she realized something else. “I don’t know if I ever imagined we’d actually find her. I thought my parents would, long before we got anywhere close ourselves.”
The day Marzana had told her about the kidnapping, Nialla had asked if the investigation Marzana was proposing was a game or not. Emilia had asked the same thing. Of course it isn’t a game, she’d said. Of course it’s real, she’d insisted. And yet she herself had neither imagined the most obvious outcome—that her parents would be furious—nor accepted the reality that, if the point had really been finding Peony Hyde, then getting in trouble shouldn’t have mattered.
I’ve been treating it like a game all along.
Ciro smiled, and Marzana had the unsettling idea that he’d seen and understood every thought she’d just worked her way through. “Say it,” he suggested. “We did it.”
“Shut up,” she muttered.
“You should try saying it. Feels good, man.” He grinned. “We did it?”
“All right, all right, knock it off. Let’s talk about something else. I guess you didn’t find a code in the ransom note after all, huh?”
Ciro growled a little under his breath. “Not a code, but then it was never going to be that.” He popped open the soda can and took a big sip. “Code’s when things stand in for other words or phrases or ideas or whatever. It wasn’t going to be a cipher, either—that’s where you’ve done substitutions at the level of individual letters or numbers. Number one stands for A. A stands for C. That kind of thing. In codes and ciphers, you hide the meaning of a message using some kind of key, which you also need if you want to get the meaning out again, but the fact of there being a message is generally pretty obvious. Peony couldn’t have done anything like that, first because she didn’t have control over what words or phrases she had to work with, and second, because if it was obvious she was trying to send a message, the kidnappers would never have used that particular note.” He rolled the can thoughtfully between his palms. “If this is anything, it’s steganography: the whole fact of the message being there is hidden. But even then, how could she have hidden a message using words and a word order she couldn’t choose?”
“But she had control over where she cut them from, right?”
“Yeah, that was the basis of Nialla’s idea, but . . .” His voice trailed off, dissatisfied.
“You don’t think there’s a message to be made from the words underneath?”
He sighed. “I mean, we tried.” He dug a piece of paper out of his backpack and handed it to her:NEXT AVENUE, COLD WIND CAN’T FLIES (FLY) UNDER MY AVENUE, BLUE AVENUE, COLD WIND AVENUE, UNLIKELY AVENUE, MY HOST (IS) A(N) UNLIKELY (SOMETHING), MY HOST FLIES UNDER A BLUE AVENUE.
“There are a few interesting words that seemed to have some promise,” Ciro continued, looking over her shoulder and pointing. “Avenue, host, under, unlikely, blue . . . but it just all feels so random. We don’t know if we should be trying to use all the words—I say no, but in that case, how do we know which words are important?” He stared down at the paper in disgust. “If there’s a way to put these words into a message, I can’t find it. I tried, Nialla tried, but nothing here makes sense, especially now that we know the message, if there is one, ought to point somehow to where you actually found her. And even if we were to hit on a version that does make a little sense, I’m not sure that means anything. Because this whole idea doesn’t make sense to me.”
“You don’t have the key,” Marzana said sympathetically. “And neither would anyone else who read the note.”
“No, that’s just it—we do have the key. I mean, Nialla’s thought, obviously, is that the key is the book itself—the comic Peony cut the words from. Except that’s not true—if Nialla’s actually right, the message isn’t in the ransom note at all, it’s in the book, which means the ransom note is the key. But there’s absolutely no way Peony could count on anyone identifying the book as the source of her message in the first place. So it’s the other way around—they’d have the key but not the message, and no way to know a message even existed.”
“But they did identify the book,” Marzana argued. “And pretty much right away.”
“I don’t know.” Ciro shook his head. “I mean, I’m accustomed to looking for what’s hidden. I know that a lot of times what you think you see isn’t all that’s really there. But sometimes it is all that’s there. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem to be.” He leaned on the table, propping himself up on his elbows. “Nialla saw the note and immediately started thinking of Quester’s Crossroads. I think she likes the idea that, even if it’s not obvious right away, there’s meaning to be found if you know how to look for it. And I like that idea too. But wanting a thing to have meaning doesn’t mean it does.”
He hesitated. “And I think maybe she hopes this is her thing to contribute. She wants there to be a message only she can find. I think . . . it’s kind of personal for her, believing in this theory. J.J. has tricks, Emilia’s sneaky, Meddy’s an amazingly useful wingman and also has all this institutional knowledge about the world the kidnappers exist in. Everybody has a ‘thing’ but Nialla.” He made an apologetic face. “I don’t know if you should tell her I said that. I could be wrong, but either way, I think it’ll hurt her feelings.”
It didn’t escape Marzana that he hadn’t mentioned any particular “thing” that was her own specialty; but then again, he hadn’t bothered to mention his, either. Maybe he took their respective contributions as givens: Hidden things, and . . . leadership, maybe? She passed his notes back. “Wish I’d thought to ask her. Peony, I mean. Not that she was forthcoming about the stuff I did ask her about.”
“I wish you’d asked her too. And if she had said there was a message hidden there, I would’ve loved to know how the heck she did it. Or who on earth she thought might come to her rescue, because literally no one but Nialla Giddis could have imagined the possibility.” Downstairs the bells jingled again, and first J.J., then Nialla called hello to Lucky. Ciro refolded the page hurriedly and stuck it back in his backpack. “Don’t tell her I said that, either.”
Nialla and J.J. came up together. “I made cookies,” Nialla announced, taking a foil-wrapped package from her bag. “I know some of us are feeling a bit conflicted, but I do think we have some things to celebrate.”
Meddy rejoined them five minutes later. By ten fifteen, all but two of the oatmeal cookies had been eaten—those had been set aside on a napkin for Emilia, who had yet to arrive—and J.J. was attempting to entertain everyone with fancy card techniques, using the black-and-gold deck Marzana had returned to him.
“Did you ever manage to get hold of her last night?” Marzana asked Nialla as J.J. performed his sixth faro, working on restoring his deck to its original order with eight consecutive perfect shuffles.
Nialla nodded, then shook her head. “Got through to a different kid. He thought she’d gone to bed, because her door was shut and the lights were off. He said he’d leave a message for me, though. So she knows we’re meeting this morning.”
At ten thirty, they were still waiting for Emilia.
At ten forty, Marzana paused in pacing by the poetry shelves and glanced at her watch. “Let’s give her five more minutes; then we’ll call.” Something was nagging at her. It wasn’t Emilia’s absence, though that was certainly distracting, and having to think about it was definitely making it harder to figure out what was really needling her subconscious.
J.J. got out his black velvet magic bag. He put away the cards and produced the walnut shells and some new peas. “You want to try this again?” he asked, rattling them in his palm at Meddy.
Meddy sat in the chair at the opposite end of the table from Marzana, her knees drawn up to her chest and her feet on the seat. “Sure. You first.”
J.J. scowled. “There’s this saying, Meddy.”
“A magician never reveals his secrets? Yeah, yeah.”
“No, genius, a different saying. Once is a trick, twice is a lesson.”
Meddy grinned. “You worried I’m going to figure out all the hocus-pocus?”
J.J. considered. “Not really.” He waved her around to join Nialla, who was lying on the bench across the table from him. Then he laid the shells out on the tabletop and set a pea in front of them. He gave Meddy an admonishing finger wag. “Don’t eat it this time.”
“You ate a magic pea?” Nialla inquired as she rose and scooted over to make room.
Meddy held up a pair of fingers. “Two. Fun fact: They’re—and this is probably a trade secret, so keep it under your hat—not real peas.”
“Well, duh, they’re magic peas,” Nialla said with a flourish in her voice. “Think you’re going to grow a beanstalk in your gut now or something?”
“I mean, yeah, obviously, but I’m not getting my hopes up.”
J.J. cleared his throat. “When you two are quite done.” He popped the pea underneath the middle shell. “Let’s do some of that fancy shell-switching you did yesterday, Meddy.” Instead of simply moving shells back and forth, he switched the left and the middle, then the middle and the right, then the left and the right. “Okay, shoot.”
“I see what you did there,” Meddy said, frowning in concentration. “Same trick, but different pattern and different speed from yesterday.”
“The pattern doesn’t matter,” J.J. replied. “Neither does the speed.”
“You’re not going to tell me the hand is quicker than the eye?” Meddy said, staring down at the shells.
“Wow, you do have a whole stock of magic clichés, don’t you? No, the hand isn’t quicker than the eye. Your eye just can’t make sense of what it’s looking at. Here’s a fun fact for you: We’re less likely to notice what we don’t expect. Even if we actually see it. Pick.”
Meddy tapped the shell on the right. And just as he had back at Mrs. Agravin’s, J.J. lifted it to reveal nothing whatsoever. Then he lifted the one in the center to reveal the pea.
Meddy shook her head. “Honestly, I should just pick the one I think it’s definitely not under, shouldn’t I?”
“Try it.” He moved the shells around again, faster this time, occasionally flashing a glimpse of the green pea under this one or that. After the second time he switched up the walnuts’ positions, Meddy tilted her face to the ceiling. J.J. whistled as the shells stilled under his fingers. “Check you out. Don’t even have to look.”
“Doesn’t help to look, does it?” Meddy challenged.
“Fair enough. Which is it?”
“Center again,” the ghost girl hazarded, her eyes still on the ceiling. J.J. lifted the shell. Nothing. “Let me guess,” she said. “Nothing.”
J.J. shrugged. “Hey, what did you expect? You didn’t watch.”
“I thought blind guessing might actually be the better strategy.”
“But it’s not strategy,” Nialla argued. “Even if the pea had been there, he’d have vanished it before he showed you, right, J.J.?”
He made a face. “As if I’d ever engage in such shenanigans in an honest shell game.” Then he grinned. “Just kidding. There’s no such thing as an honest shell game.”
“You mean there’s no way to guess right, even if you guess right?” Meddy demanded. “This is baloney.”
“No, it’s not. You have the wrong idea about what it is,” J.J. said patiently. “It’s not a guessing game. It’s not a game. You can win a game, even if the odds are against you. But this is a hustle, and if you’re the mark in a hustle, all you can do is lose. The whole thing is based on the idea that that’s the only acceptable outcome.”
He set the walnuts aside. Meanwhile, Ciro, who’d been leaning against one of the philosophy shelves, came over to Marzana. “Want me to try calling her?”
Marzana nodded. “If you don’t mind.” The nagging something was rapidly taking over every bit of her mental capacity.
Ciro reached into his pocket, then hesitated. “What’s up?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Worried about Emilia?”
“No. Or not really. That’s not what’s bothering me.” Marzana suspected that Emilia, more than any of them, could take care of herself. If she wasn’t there, it was because she had chosen not to be. Most likely she had found her way past the paintings in the Library and was somewhere down in the Belowground tunnels. Okay, maybe I should be concerned about that, Marzana thought briefly. And yet she couldn’t really imagine Emilia Cabot ever getting lost, anywhere. No, this was something else. “I don’t know. I can’t quite work out what it is that’s bugging me.”
Ciro made a sympathetic face. “Is it your parents?”
Parents. “What do you mean?” Marzana asked.
“Just guessing—you clearly hate that you disappointed them somehow.”
“Oh.” She considered. That wasn’t it. And yet . . . But no. Then she looked sharply at him. “You know . . . I think it started bugging me around the time you and I were talking about the ransom note, but I just can’t . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind. Call Emilia. Lucky will let you use the store phone, I bet.”
“Nah. Emilia was supposed to be here and she’s not. I’m calling this an emergency, even if it’s just a potential, minor one.” Ciro wandered away, pulling the phone from his pocket.
At the table, J.J. took out a stack of nested silver cups and a trio of red balls. “Try this one. Similar, but not quite the same. Plus, the things to keep track of are bigger, so it has to be easier, right?”
He set the three cups in a line before Meddy and Nialla, then balanced a red ball on top of each. “This trick goes back to ancient Roman magicians. Their name for it was acetabula et calculi.” He lifted the ball from the cup on the right, tossed it into the air, and made it vanish as he caught it. Then he picked up the right-hand cup and revealed the ball underneath. “Goes like this.”
J.J. moved the red balls around, vanishing them with elegant flourishes from under individual cups, from between stacked cups, from his palms and pockets and from midair, then lifting this or that cup again to reveal one, two, even all three balls. A single red ball placed under the center one became two balls, or all three. Red balls became green balls. Then bigger balls. Then a ball-shaped chapstick that had somehow come straight from Nialla’s pocket. Then a small oval piece of plastic that turned out to be a two-stage pencil sharpener.
And all the time, the cups and the balls and whatever else turned out to be secretly in play moved in a configuration that was at once simpler than it seemed it should be and more complex than it looked, because, of course, as J.J. had explained, it wasn’t the look of the thing that mattered. The pattern-that-wasn’t-a-pattern was almost soothing. J.J.’s motions, his patter, it all had a rhythm. Rhythm with a purpose.
A purpose. The idea lodged like a splinter in her brain, and Marzana was so occupied with it, she almost missed Ciro straightening and waving, the phone to his ear. I’ve got her, he mouthed. Then he took the phone to the farthest corner of the mezzanine and began speaking in low tones.
“Be right there,” Marzana replied, and he lifted a hand to show he’d heard. “He’s got Emilia on the phone,” Marzana reported to the others, who’d looked up from the table. “She’s okay.” They were all quiet for a moment, listening, but Ciro had stopped talking and there was nothing to overhear.
Meanwhile, the splinter that was the idea of a purpose was jabbing the same spot in her brain as the splinters that were something to do with my parents and something to do with the ransom-note message. And then, as her eye passed over the knotted shoelace Meddy had set aside so she could watch J.J.’s trick, another splinter jammed itself into the same nerve: something about a knot.
She forced herself to separate the four thoughts and try to examine them one at a time. What was it about her parents? Marzana paced to the window that overlooked Hellbent Street and watched the people passing below.
We felt that something was off, her mother had said. It was too easy, finding our way to that building. . . . I don’t know how to explain it, except that it felt like someone had left a trail of crumbs. Some of them false—we think Rob Gandreider was one of those—and some of them . . . moving us more directly to the next crumb.
Her parents had spotted something, a pattern or a pattern-that-wasn’t-quite-a-pattern, in the mishmash of clues that had led them to Peony. Or no, they hadn’t spotted it, but they had certainly sensed it. What had it been, that thing they sensed but had not been able to articulate?
A few feet away, Ciro was quietly bringing Emilia up to speed on the events of the previous night. Marzana frowned. Something he’d said. What had it been?
The key is the book itself—the comic she cut the words from. Except Ciro had said that was wrong, backwards. So why could she not get that line out of her mind?
At the table, J.J. dropped the pencil sharpener into his backpack and took two of the cups away. “Let’s try something simpler while we’re waiting.” He put a red ball on the top of the remaining cup. “Watch the ball. If you can tell me where it is, I’ll buy you a pizza.”
Meddy lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t eat.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” J.J. said, plucking the ball from the cup. “Fine.” He tossed the ball into the air. Impossibly, it appeared to vanish right when it left his fingers. “If you can tell me where it is now, I’ll not only buy you a pizza, I’ll eat it for you too. And I’ll even give you a hint.” He lifted the cup and showed the empty space beneath.
But Meddy had seen something. Her eyes glittered. “It is,” she pronounced, “in your left hoodie pocket.”
J.J.’s face fell. He came around the table and held out the edge of his pocket, offering it to Nialla. “Here. She won’t believe me if I do it.”
Nialla reached triumphantly into his pocket, frowned, and pulled out a big handful of nothing.
“Huh,” J.J. said. “Weird.” He reached back across the table and lifted the cup. There beneath it, smooshed into a roughly spherical lump, was the foil that had previously held Nialla’s cookies.
Meddy snatched the foil. “Son of a—okay, but where’s the ball, Houdini?”
J.J. coughed mildly, took the foil lump from her, and began to slowly pick it apart. At last he peeled open the middle of the crumpled foil. There, against all logic, was the red ball.
“Really?” Meddy protested. She grabbed the ball and the sheet of foil and turned both over in her hands. Then she took the cup and had a good look at that, too.
“Well, yeah.” J.J. sat on the tabletop with his feet on the bench and watched her examine the props. “They’re not gimmicked,” he said helpfully. “They’re perfectly normal.”
Meddy tossed the ball into the cup and dropped it onto the table in disgust.
Ciro stepped up next to Marzana at the window and held out the phone. “She’s fine. I told her what I know.”
Marzana took the phone and put it to her ear. “Hey. Where are you?”
“Back at Marymead,” Emilia’s voice reported. “Sorry I’m not there. I found the Belowground station in the Library. I sort of lost track of time. But it’s all still there, Mars. That station’s totally intact. I found a map of the whole system, and I guess we’re kind of done with the whole kidnapping-investigation thing, but I really think you need to see it. It’s amazing. I had no idea. I think you should bring everybody here. Come in by that back route I showed you, the one that runs under the Orangery.”
“Emilia—”
But the other girl went on talking right over her. “Remember that thing in Sidledywry, after the main lair blows up in the first book, and then later Casie—or maybe she’s Nell at that point—finds the passage through the subbasement and discovers there was a whole lair within the lair? It’s like that. I’m not kidding.”
And then, out of nowhere, the memory of a girl’s voice drowned out Emilia’s uncharacteristically excited speech: I’m up to the fifth book. I had forgotten about Casie.
Suddenly Marzana felt certain she almost had it, that thing fluttering just out of reach, the splinter poking at her brain, the pattern her senses could almost pick out of all the noise . . .
Back at the magic show at the table, Meddy was still fuming. J.J. patted her shoulder. “You think you just have to outguess me, but really I have five ways of making you lose. More. This is just like the shell game. There is literally no way for you to win. Half the time the ball was never even on the table to begin with.”
The ball was never on the table to begin with.
The key is the book itself.
Marzana grabbed the nearest shelf with her free hand to keep from losing her balance. “Marzana?”
“Hang on, Emilia. I just had an idea. Or the beginning of one. Here’s Ciro again.” She shoved the phone at him and turned away, rubbing her head and thinking.
The book: You couldn’t read The Sidledywry Knot and forget about Casie. You could maybe forget about her original name; even Nialla had done that, and that’s what she’d thought Peony had meant when she’d been confused about Marzana’s reference to Casie. But what Peony had really said, now that she thought about it, was The main character is different in the later books. Not that she was called something different. Peony had spoken as if she didn’t actually know that Casie and Nell were the same person, which is a mistake you could make fairly easily if, for instance, you’d read only the most recent book. But according to Emmett Syebuck, Peony Hyde had been a big enough fan of the series for even her parents to be aware that she was in the middle of the most recent volume. Peony Hyde wouldn’t have made that mistake. Couldn’t have.
Following this realization, other voices, from other memories, began to speak.
We’re less likely to notice what we don’t expect. Even if we actually see it.
He’ll see a reef knot because that’s what he’s expecting . . . even if the knot falls apart under his fingers like a reef knot never would.
“J.J.,” Marzana interrupted. “Say that again, what you just said.”
The magician looked up. “The thing about the ball?”
“You said a lot of the time the ball isn’t even on the table.”
“Right. Well, sure. The magician always has control of the ball or pea or whatever, but it’s almost never where the audience thinks it is for more than a fraction of a second. I just make you think it is to get you to chase three empty shells around for a while. I make you look where I want you to look and see what I want you to see. The audience looks where the magician looks. Meanwhile, the pea is somewhere else, until I need to bring it back for the sake of the illusion.” He grinned at Meddy and Nialla. “And here’s the mark of how good this trick is: Even now that you kind of know how I’m doing it, you’re still going to think you know where the pea is. And you’re still going to be wrong every flipping time.”
Marzana sat down at the end of the table as J.J. began to move the cups around again, proving his point. “Chase three empty shells,” she repeated softly.
Shell number one: Rob Gandreider, set loose and told to lie low until the right day by someone who knew he’d run straight for his home in the Liberty.
Shell number two: Mr. Otterwill, conveniently maneuvered into a substitute-teaching gig in the Liberty only a day after one of his pupils went missing.
Shell number three: Mrs. Agravin, whose unexplained absence made room for Mr. Otterwill, and who just happened to live above a Belowground Transit station.
And then there were Emmett Syebuck and the Snakebird. Emmett, who had come to ask for help from Marzana’s parents on the assumption that a criminal on the run would go straight for the safe ground of Gammerbund, and with those three shells already set into motion to make it look as if Peony, the pea, must be somewhere in the Liberty. Never mind that, as both Marzana’s parents had pointed out at the time, it was almost unthinkable that anyone could smuggle an unwilling captive into the Liberty without someone knowing about it. Only the Belowground even made it look possible. But possible didn’t mean it was definite. And the Snakebird, whose true name kept popping up in unexpected places; and who had been one more signpost pointing to the Belowground and, specifically, had pointed her parents toward the station in Whipping Hyde.
And suddenly all the other little pieces came together: Peony not knowing the real identity of the main character of her favorite series. The fact that the kidnappers had gone to the trouble to lure Mrs. Agravin away for nearly a week but hadn’t bothered to construct an explanation for the full duration of her absence, which was guaranteed to eventually lead someone directly to the apartment where they’d hidden the missing girl. The fact that the specific lure they’d used was a cruise that ended before the ransom deadline, and yet they’d left Peony there to be found. If no one else managed to find the missing girl first, they’d practically scheduled Mrs. Agravin to come back and discover her tied to a chair in the middle of her living room, and they’d even arranged for the press to already be on their way when she did.
Even the fact that Peony—during the hot second she’d been sitting up straight—had looked taller and older than just eleven years. Kids came in all sizes and shapes, but when you combined that with everything else . . .
Abruptly the final splinter fell away. The knot.
Up in Mrs. Agravin’s flat, a single rope had been used to secure the girl’s wrists and ankles to the chair. One rope with a single knot, rather than four plastic ties or any other more secure system. A knot whose loose ends had been hanging right between Peony’s palms when Marzana had found her; a knot that, now that she thought back on it, Peony had been fidgeting with on the sofa. The knot had been undone by the time J.J. had handed the rope over to Mrs. Hakelbarend. Would it have meant something to the police if they’d been able to see it?
“Oh, my God.” Marzana leaped to her feet, glanced around, grabbed Ciro. “Sit down. Can you put Emilia on speaker or something? Everybody listen. Ciro, can you just keep an ear out for anyone coming up the steps?”
Ciro obeyed with a questioning look, placing the phone in the middle of the table, then positioning himself between the table and the stairs to the lower floor. “All clear.”
“Listen,” Marzana said breathlessly. “It’s a shell game. The whole thing is a shell game. Mom was right: Something was off. But more than just off: This isn’t over. Not yet.”
They all stared at her. “What are you talking about?” Emilia asked, her voice crackly as it came through the cell phone’s speaker. “How is it not over, other than wrapping up loose ends? You found Peony. You were there. Your mother was there. You found her, you talked to her—”
“Yeah, I did, and I should’ve known then.” She told them about the momentary confusion Peony had displayed when Marzana had referenced the book she was supposedly reading. “I should’ve seen it, but I didn’t.” Marzana glanced ruefully at J.J. “And there was the rope tying her to the chair. I cut her loose, so the knot was still there, and she picked it apart while we were watching J.J. do the shells and peas with Meddy. But if she’d been tied up with the kind of knot you could pick apart without even paying attention, I wouldn’t have had to cut the rope in the first place—I could just have untied it. Heck, if the knot was that easy, why was she even still tied up when we got there? That knot would’ve meant something to the police; I think it would’ve told them that she could’ve tied herself to that chair without any assistance from anyone else.” Marzana shook her head violently. “It’s like you said about your magic trick, J.J. I didn’t notice it because I wasn’t expecting it, even though I saw it. This was—is—a shell game.”
J.J. swore. He got it, of course, because it was all a matter of misdirection. “Not a shell game,” he said slowly. “It’s the cups and balls. It’s not just that the thing you’re looking for isn’t there: I let you see me putting something underneath one, I move things around . . . and something totally different comes out in the reveal.”
Ciro clapped a hand to his mouth. “Oh.” He got it too. Of course he did. Because this was all a bit of dazzle: a bit of flashy confusion to make one thing seem to be true when the reality was something else entirely, just like the dazzle his great-great-grandfather the camoufleur had painted on warships to confuse the enemy.
“It’s a Hickham’s Fluctuation,” Meddy said quietly. “Level One Prestidigitator’s exploit.”
“Oh,” Nialla said, her eyes popping wide. “Oh, no.”
Marzana nodded. “You see it.”
“I don’t,” Emilia protested. Crackle-crackle went the speaker. “‘Something different comes out . . .’?” She made a frustrated noise. “I can just picture you guys passing significant looks around and knowing what Marzana’s talking about, and I’m stuck here and I have no idea. Spell it out for me, somebody. I’m going out of my mind.”
Marzana leaned over the phone on the table. “It wasn’t Peony. The girl we supposedly rescued—it wasn’t her. It was someone else. Peony was never there.”