J. J. HAD MENTIONED FLASH paper, but Marzana had pictured an effect like something you’d get from cheap fireworks, the kind you can set off on your front stoop. This flash paper, which had probably been deployed at very close range by a ghostly assistant, was on a whole other level.
The flare was accompanied by two muffled curses from the kidnappers, who clearly hadn’t been able to close their eyes in time, along with a tiny clatter of metal that was probably the sound of Tall Guy’s lockpicks falling from his hands.
“Crap, I can’t see a thing. What was that? Some kind of electrical—”
“I don’t know. I’m seeing stars, too. It must’ve been the light right over our—hey, Timmy? Look at that.”
So Tall Guy was Timmy. “What do you mean, look?” he snapped. “Didn’t I just say I couldn’t see?”
“Blink a bunch or something. This is weird.” The stocky guy’s voice was moving away, as if he were walking out of the alcove and into the concourse again.
“Where are you going?” Timmy demanded, following his partner.
“Just me,” Meddy’s voice said a second before the door to Marzana’s closed-but-not-latched locker eased open a few inches. One of Meddy’s eyes winked as she reached through to drop a roll of fabric and a couple of metal sticks into Marzana’s lap. The door eased shut again. Carefully, so as not to make a sound, Marzana peeked into the roll. A lockpick kit—Timmy’s, presumably—and the picks he’d taken out to work on the padlock.
Meanwhile, Timmy’s voice was moving away now too. “Kit, what are you looking at?” Timmy and Kit. Timmy was sounding a little desperate and a lot frustrated. “Come on, let’s get this done!”
“You have to see this,” Kit called back. “This is really bizarre. Is it . . . does it have something to do with the iron stuff?”
Marzana risked ever so slowly opening her locker door an inch again. Through the narrow space, she could see the backs of the two kidnappers, who’d gone to the end of the aisle of lockers and were now looking into the concourse.
Out there among the pockets of light and shadow, something was moving.
“What is that?” Timmy asked.
She caught a glimpse of it between the two men, just as Kit answered doubtfully, “I think it’s a balloon.” And it was: a big, almost perfectly round green balloon that bounced off the ground like a ball when it hit the floor. A punching balloon, Marzana thought, recalling a term she was pretty sure she hadn’t used since elementary school.
She saw it only for a second or two before it moved out of view, but that was enough to show her that the balloon moved almost like a living thing. Give me a spool of thread, J.J. had said, and I can do things you wouldn’t believe.
Marzana hesitated. Was this her distraction? But there was no point in climbing out—not yet, anyway, because the two thieves were still standing at the end of the aisle, blocking the way.
Meddy’s face appeared in the crack. “Not yet,” she said, putting a finger on Marzana’s nose. “Out of sight, please. They’re going to come back here after this, but just for a minute. Then it’s all you and Emilia. She’s waiting for my signal. Oh, and hold this for me.” She took the gold reliquary vial from her pocket and passed it through the crack to Marzana. “Just in case I need a little more freedom of movement. I’d like to be able to walk through walls if I have to.” Then she turned and picked up the backpack, which still lay on the floor by locker 152, where Kit had dropped it. “Now, let’s see. How do I do this without the backpack disappearing?” She considered, then shrugged, carried it to right behind the two men, and drop-kicked it so that it flew between them and out of the aisle.
Kit and Timmy screamed identical screams. Marzana stifled a laugh and pulled the locker door nearly closed again just as they whirled around in panic.
“There’s no one there!” Kit shrieked. “There’s no one there, Timmy! No one!”
“CALM DOWN!” Timmy shouted in a voice that sounded like a bad compromise between attempting to stay calm and howling bloody murder. “WE KNEW IT WOULD BE WEIRD DOWN HERE, SO LET’S JUST GET THE DAMN LOCKER OPEN AND GET THE HELL OUT OF—” Then he lost it for real and snarled a short string of curses. “THE PICKS ARE GONE!” Timmy took a deep, gulping breath. “Kit, did you—KIT!”
“The backpack is dancing with the balloon,” Kit said in a tone of terrified wonder. “The backpack is dancing with the balloon, Timmy. They’re dancing. That’s not the iron, right? That’s something else.”
“Kit!” Thump. Kit made a pained sound, as if Timmy had punched him to get his attention. “Kit, look at me. Don’t look out there. Look at me. Do you have the picks?”
“No, I don’t have the picks! Why would I have the picks? You said that was your thing, and now we can’t get the locker open, and our backpack is dancing with a balloon out there!”
Timmy swore again. “The wire cutters, then. We can—” His voice fell silent. “The wire cutters are in the backpack.” The curses that followed this might even have succeeded in making Honora blush. “We have to get the backpack.”
“I don’t know, Timmy,” Kit said shakily. “The backpack looks like it’s having a nice time right now with its new buddy there, and I’m not sure we should interrupt.”
“We have to get out of here,” Timmy gritted, “and I am not leaving without whatever’s in that locker and neither are you, and I don’t know where the damn lockpicks waltzed off to, so we need my wire cutters. So get moving!”
“But it’s way over there,” Kit protested weakly.
“Then you cut around to the left and I’ll cut to the right and we’ll attack from both sides. It’s just a backpack, Kit.” The words were confident, but his voice was shaking a little now too.
“I think it might have changed its mind about its choice of profession.”
“Move.”
The sounds of two sets of footsteps receded: Timmy’s forceful and Kit’s reluctant. Marzana leaned out again, but through her little sliver of visibility, she couldn’t see anyone. If one of the kidnappers was cutting around to each side of the waiting area, she figured, that probably put Emilia out of play. Should she run while she had time, aim for just getting out of her dead-end hiding place?
Even as she hesitated, Marzana discovered she’d counted out the Commorancy Kid too soon. Emilia slipped around the corner of the locker bank and darted down to her. “Hey.”
“How the heck did you do that?” Marzana whispered, shoving Timmy’s lockpicks into her back pocket as she climbed out.
Emilia shrugged, as if this feat of sneakery was no big thing. She took another pouch of picks from her bag. “I started moving right after Meddy came and told me about the padlock,” she whispered. “Where’s the one we want?”
“Here.” Marzana tapped the padlock on 152. “Can you pop it?”
Emilia cupped the lock and looked it over. “Ah. Holdfast Bear-trap,” she said softly. “Mr. Caine uses one of these on the chemicals cabinet at Marymead.” She rolled up her sleeves, selected two implements from her pick pouch, and inserted them into the keyway.
“Crap,” Marzana muttered. Surely any lock a teacher would use on a cabinet full of dangerous chemicals—
Emilia popped the shackle open and glanced at Marzana’s stunned face. “Don’t be too impressed,” she said quietly. “Beartraps are easy if you know what you’re doing. The tougher-sounding the name, the weaker the lock.” She glanced around dismissively. “There isn’t a single one here that would take any skill to open. Not even the combination ones.”
“But those guys—”
“Worse than amateurs,” Emilia whispered, and stood aside. “All yours, boss.”
But just as Marzana reached for the lock to pull it from the handle, Timmy’s voice ricocheted through the space. “Hey! You!”
“Incoming!” Meddy shrieked. “Marzana, Emilia! Get out of there!”
Emilia scooped up her picks and her bag and darted out of the aisle. Spurred by some imp of the perverse, Marzana slammed the lock shut again before she followed. Those seconds were her undoing. At the end of the aisle, rather than flying out into the open space of the concourse, she ran smack into the tall kidnapper called Timmy.
The impact knocked the lockpicks loose from her pocket and right beneath her feet as she tried to backpedal. She went down hard, and before she could make any other move, Timmy had her by one wrist and her collar.
There was a flurry of sudden activity: to Marzana’s right, Emilia struggled to yank herself loose from Kit’s grip as Meddy, running in from behind him, began to whack the shorter kidnapper as hard as she could with his backpack. J.J. and Brandon were on their way too, sprinting in from where they’d been concealed. But before any of them could take another action, Timmy yanked Marzana upright and put something cold and hard against her throat. “Everybody stop. Everybody stop right now.”
Her heart felt like it was trying to hammer its way right out of her chest. It could only be a knife, the thing he was holding on her, because the others obeyed without a moment’s hesitation.
“Move over there,” Timmy said, and the pressure left Marzana’s throat for a minute as he pointed toward the information desk with a short, wide utility blade. “Backpack, too. I don’t know how you’re doing that, but I don’t want to see it move either. Everybody stand right there.” To his companion he added, “Hang on to Blondie, though. Just in case, and you—” The knife blade pointed at Brandon. “Drop that wrench and kick it away.” Brandon obeyed with a gritted curse.
Marzana, meanwhile, glanced at Kit, who had Emilia’s wrists pinned behind her back, and realized it was the first glimpse she’d gotten of either man’s face. Kit was brown-haired and fair-skinned, somewhere in his early twenties, probably. He had green eyes. And he was familiar. The thought I’ve seen you before fought its way up through the adrenaline flooding Marzana’s brain. But where? “This has gotten so far out of hand,” he fretted.
“Shut up,” Timmy ordered. When Emilia had stopped struggling and Brandon, J.J., and Meddy stood together, the empty backpack dangling from Meddy’s hands, Timmy kicked the lockpicks out from under his feet. “So that’s where those went.” He tapped the edge of the knife against Marzana’s neck. “You had that lock open. I saw you shut it. Open it again.”
“I did it,” Emilia snapped. “Let her go. I’ll pick it again.”
“If you tell us where Peony Hyde is,” Marzana added quickly. “That’s all we want.”
Kit’s face froze with horror that would’ve torpedoed his attempt at playing dumb even if Marzana and her friends hadn’t already known the truth. “What are you talking about?”
“Marzana,” Brandon said warningly.
“What?” she retorted. “That’s the deal. We know everything. You tell us where the real Peony is and we’ll open your locker. Take it or leave it.”
She felt rather than saw Timmy shake his head. “The time to bargain is not when somebody’s got a knife on you.”
“We were here waiting for you,” Marzana said. “There’s backup coming from above. From the Hydes’ house. The only chance you have is to get out of here before they arrive. Otherwise you’re trapped.”
“Well, you didn’t get here through the house,” Timmy retorted, “so it seems to me that although we couldn’t find it, there’s another way in after all. So how about this?” He turned toward Emilia. “You open the lock, and I don’t hurt your friend. Then she can show us how you all got in here, and once we’re aboveground, she’s free to go. As long as you stay out of the way and don’t do anything to make me twitchy in the meantime.”
“She doesn’t know the way,” Brandon said. “I do. I brought them here. Let her go and I’ll gladly get you back to the surface. I know these tunnels. The kids don’t. You’ll be wandering the Belowground until you starve.”
“This is not a negotiation!” Timmy screamed. He jabbed the knife at Emilia. “Get that bleeding lock open! Now!”
“Peony—” Marzana began. Timmy roared and stuck the knife up against her throat again.
“Marzana, shut up.” Emilia spoke over them both in a trembling voice. “I’ll do it,” she repeated. “I have picks in my pocket.”
Since there were picks on the ground in front of her already, Marzana suspected this was a ploy of Emilia’s to try to get at something else she was carrying. Unfortunately, Timmy saw through it too. “Keep your hands where I can see them. You can use these.” He kicked the roll of fabric on the floor closer to her. Kit let go of one wrist, and Emilia scooped it up, then allowed Kit—who was starting to look nauseated—to march her to the locker by her collar.
The feeling of having seen him before nagged at Marzana again, more strongly this time. The answer was there, hovering just out of reach, but between the fear and the sensation of the knife against her neck, she couldn’t quite focus enough to catch it. She swallowed hard. “You’re about to get what you came here for,” she said. “Please tell us where Peony is. The real Peony. We know the one up in the Liberty was Tasha Cormorant in disguise.”
She could just barely see Kit from the corner of her eye as he whirled around, nearly choking Emilia in the process. “How did you—”
Timmy interrupted in an icy voice. “The little girl was never in danger as long as everyone followed instructions. And everything went according to plan, right up until you all walked in here. If she doesn’t make it home safely, it’ll be nobody’s fault but yours.” He took the knife away just long enough to yank Marzana around, look her in the face, and repeat, “Yours.” Then he frowned, and a bizarre expression flashed across his features. “You?”
And Marzana knew exactly what he meant. Because they’d met before. Earlier that week, in the dining room of Hedgelock Court.
Only he’d gone by a different name that day.