They took the stairs to the fourth floor and followed the tiny light of Souris’s torch until it reflected off the brass number 415, tucked away in the dead-end corridor with its enormous padlock and its Wet Floor sign.

Shenanigan rummaged in her many pockets for her lockpicks. Maelstrom had been promising her her own professional set for years, and they were a post-Reunion present. She fought down a pang as she unrolled the little leather sheath and got to work.

“Fliss, can you pass me the tension wrench, please?”

“Which is the—”

“The one that’s shaped like a letter L, obviously.”

Felicity passed her the tension wrench, muttering that it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, and soon Shenanigan popped open the lock with a satisfying click.

Usually, places that have been uninhabited for a while have a particular smell, the same way dust or snow has a smell: something you can detect more with the mind than with the nose. Room 415 was definitely detectable by nose. It smelled of damp, with an undertone of bubble bath. Whatever else Soufflé had been lying about, he hadn’t lied about the leak. A large brown patch covered part of the ceiling, and there was a hole in the upper right corner where the water had caused about a square meter of plaster to give up being a ceiling and try being a floor. This had been hurriedly, but neatly, boarded up, though it still dripped.

Beneath the boarded-up hole was the stripped iron carcass of a bed frame. The carpet had been torn up and rolled out of the way, leaning in slumped bundles in the corner, and much of the furniture crowded against the wall like shy debutantes at a ball.

Souris’s torch moved around the room in frustratingly small patches. For a second, it passed over a twisted, inhuman face, and Felicity stifled a scream.

“It’s all right,” whispered Souris. “Look.”

He moved his torch back. The twisted face belonged to a painted goblin riding a pink horse with bicycle wheels instead of legs. It was part of a mural of strange creatures—chimeras and sphinxes, living machines and clockwork toys, a parade marching the circumference of the room. On the damaged ceiling were painted swifts, or martinets, with eyes in their bellies. Despite its sad state, there was a familiarity to the room. Pomme’s artistic style was, literally, all over it.

There was no sign of Gourmet.

“Well, it’s definitely disgusting in here,” said Felicity, wrinkling her nose.

“Soufflé’s bathroom is directly above this?” asked Phenomena. “How much water came through, do you think?”

“A lot,” said Souris. “He inherited Tyran’s old bath, and that thing was monstrous. It could have fitted eight people, easily. Grand-mère said that when Tyran got old his joints bothered him, so he used to sit in the bath in one of those old-fashioned striped bathing suits and conduct business from there.”

Shenanigan stared at the ceiling.

“Do you remember what you told me about hunches?” Shenanigan asked Phenomena.

“That a hunch is just the result of your brain taking in details you’re not totally aware of, and making connections in the background,” said Phenomena promptly. “I also said that they are not evidence.”

“And dreams?”

“Dreams are similar. They’re your brain absorbing information subconsciously, rearranging it, and processing it through combinations of images.”

Shenanigan stared at the hole in the ceiling, where the worst of the water had burst through. It was jagged, and brown with mold at the edges, and wide enough, if she could get the boards off.

She pushed the old iron bed frame more firmly against the wall.

“Souris, can you help me with these boards?” she asked, and Souris hopped up beside her. “And one of you give me a torch.”

“Oh, absolutely not—”

“Felicity, thanks,” she said, snatching her oldest sister’s. She shoved the torch into her belt, placed her foot on the wrought-iron headboard, and braced herself against the squishy ceiling alongside Souris. The bellboy took a small screwdriver out of his waistcoat and pried the nails on the boards loose. One by one, the planks dropped to the floor, revealing the hole in the ceiling.

It was more slippery than Shenanigan had anticipated, and some of the damp plaster crumbled in her hands, but on the second go she managed to get her elbows through the hole. From there, there was a lot of undignified grunting and wriggling, until finally her entire body was inside the ceiling.

Shenanigan had kept low, not wanting to bump her head on the floor above, or punch straight through the tiles of Soufflé’s bathroom, but she felt nothing but space above her. Cautiously, she stood up. Then she waved a hand above her head. She found nothing but empty air.

She dug the torch out of the waistband of her trousers.

“You all right?” called Erf.

“Yeah. Want to come up?”

“Not on your life.”

“It’s surprisingly”—she turned the torch on—“spacious. Oh.”

The beam of Shenanigan’s torch swept the open space like a diver’s lantern. She was in a Hôtel room. One half of the room, the half she was in, was black with damp. Years of spilled water had trickled through from the floor above, dripping inexorably into this hidden room, turning the carpet thick and plump with mold. The waterlogged wallpaper, once elaborately patterned, sloughed away from the wall like dead skin. The curtains hung limp, never to move in the breeze from an open window.

Shenanigan’s torch followed the path of the black damp across the ceiling, where its stretching fingers coiled around the overhead light. There was a sudden rainbow flash as it swept the crystal chandelier, points of light and color spiraling in the room like stars. It passed across the smooth white of the ceiling where the damp didn’t reach, and on to the rosy shine of the rose-patterned wallpaper—and then the beam of her torch traveled down the opposite wall, running over an exquisitely tiled fireplace, a blue velvet armchair, and a dead clown.

He was slumped in the corner by a chest of drawers. He looked as if he was resting. He looked, really, like he did in the pictures and paintings she had seen so many of by now, like he was staring up at the moon. This one’s hat was askew, and his ruff drooped a little, and the head that was tilted slightly upwards was now nothing more than a skull. Otherwise he was just another Pierrot, alone and melancholy, forgotten.

Shenanigan had seen bodies before, some of them much newer and much closer to her, genetically speaking, than this. She wasn’t frightened. She just felt sad.

“I think you’d better come up here,” she called.

“I told you,” came Erf’s voice. “There’s no—”

“Please,” said Shenanigan.

Shenanigan had to sit on the wet carpet to make room for Souris, Erf, and Phenomena. Felicity, too big to shimmy through the hole, was nevertheless tall enough to stand on the iron headboard and fit her head and shoulders through. They were all silent as they looked at the body of what was, undoubtedly, the missing artist Pierrot.

“How…” began Souris, swallowing, “how did we not know there was an entire room up here?”

“I think it’s the entire floor,” said Shenanigan. “And I think some of your Family do know. This would be Room 515—remember the smudged number in the guest book?”

“Room 515,” murmured Souris. “That’s why the number of windows doesn’t match the number of floors. That’s why the elevator sticks. There’s an entire floor of the Hôtel hidden between four and six. And no one told me.” He looked accusingly at the walls and ceiling, as if he was scolding the Hôtel itself.

“How long has he been here?” asked Erf. Their voice was calm, but Shenanigan saw that they were crying, staring fixedly at Pierrot while tears ran down their face. Felicity put an arm round them and squeezed.

“I don’t know,” said Felicity. “But this room is decorated in the art deco style, from the twenties. It’s very lavish.”

“Yes,” said Souris hollowly. “This was the original décor when we opened. Grisaille’s room still looks like this, a little.” He shone his torch around, but it pulled like a magnet back to Pierrot. “He’s been here since opening night, hasn’t he?” he said. “Just…lying here, until Bernard came to fix the ceiling. And found him.”

The torchlight gleamed off a strip of dark red silk just visible above Pierrot’s ruff. Once, it would have been tight round his neck. It was patterned with tiny birds. Shenanigan recognized it. Tyran was wearing it in the photograph on Grisaille’s wall.

“Yes,” she said.

Souris saw it too. He took off his bellboy cap, crumpling it in his fist.

“We have to go,” said Felicity. “The Martinets were willing to kill Bernard over this. We can’t let anyone know we’ve seen it, not until we’ve got help.”

“We can’t leave him here,” said Erf.

“I’m not leaving him,” said Souris thickly. “He’s been alone too long as it is.”

“I think we have to,” said Shenanigan. “For now. But…” She struggled to think of something that would help ease the anger and ache inside as she looked at Pierrot. “We can sit with him for a few more minutes, if you want.”

They sat. It was a lonely tomb. Shenanigan pointed her torch at the chandelier again, and the light from the crystal danced and whirled over the mold and over the silk wallpaper. The body of a person once known as Pierrot stared slightly upwards, as if watching the stars.

When they climbed back down into Room 415, Pomme was waiting for them.