It felt as if weeks had passed since Shenanigan had watched the old van swing round the bend in her driveway and disappear from sight. Throughout their investigation, Ouvolpo had been just a name, attached by turns to villains, heroes, crusaders, vigilantes, artists, and criminals. Their name loomed large in the imagination of the world. But now here they were, five people washed by fairy lights, casting oversized shadows on the wall of the catacombs.

If Shenanigan had been hoping for a hideout, she was disappointed. This was clearly a temporary situation. Someone had dumped a battered church pew against one stack of bones, and there were assorted wobbly chairs, milk crates, and other discarded furniture. The members of Ouvolpo each had huge, well-stuffed backpacks, as if they spent all their time hiking. One pulled out a blanket and spread it on the ground. It was thin, and when they sat, Shenanigan could feel gravel poking her in the leg through the fabric. It didn’t seem right having a picnic without food. She wished she’d brought some clandestines for their clandestine meeting.

What do you say when you meet a gang of international art thieves who are on the run and wanted for murder? If you’re Erf, you apparently say:

“Um, hello. I love your work.”

This earned a few chuckles, and the Swifts relaxed somewhat.

Pomme had pulled a box from among the trash, and now she stood atop it.

“My mother didn’t teach me many useful things, but she taught me to make proper introductions,” she said. “May I?”

They nodded.

“Swifts!” Pomme’s voice rang around the chamber. “It is my great honor to introduce to you the most daring thieves currently operating without a government license! The brains behind the Skelton Garden Heist! The legends who returned the Glass Elephant to its rightful owners! The people who broke into your House! I give you: l’Ouvroir de vol potentiel!”

The children clapped. Erf whistled through their fingers.

“Where was your mother making introductions, the circus?” asked the acrobat, amused. His accent was American, and his smile had dimples.

“The stage, actually,” said Pomme. “The circus is your department, Emil. And shut it—you’ll spoil your intro.”

“Lo siento.”

“Emiliano Flores, of the Flying Flores Family!” exclaimed Pomme. “An acrobat from a long line of acrobats, all of them holding hands and dangling from a trapeze. Emil handles fabric, textiles, and sewing. You may know him as the creator of your inflatable bird!”

Emil bowed, rolled, tucked into a handspring, and landed on his feet in a perfect sweep of padded muscle. He was very beautiful, with soft features and eyes elegantly lined with gold.

“Emil has another very important role: He picks our targets.”

“How?” asked Phenomena, interested.

Emil dropped into a split so that he was closer to the sitting children.

“Well,” he said, “first I blindfold myself. Then one of my lovely assistants hands me a bunch of darts, and—”

“Emil, don’t give away our secrets!” cried another member, half laughing.

“Thank you, Otto. Otto Adebayo, everyone!” Pomme continued, pointing to a man with a widow’s peak and thick round glasses who gave them a smile like a flash of lightning. “Otto is our expert in alarms and other electricals. He knows how to redirect currents like nobody’s business. He’s also a master of anagrams, so please excuse him if he sometimes uses the wrong word—he just forgot to decode it before it left his mouth.”

“I always know the sword I’m trying to say,” Otto said, smiling. “I just get the trestle mixed up.”

“Exactly,” said Pomme. “Otto looks for anagrammatized messages in the names of the museums we go for that might help us.”

“That doesn’t sound very logical,” said Phenomena, frowning.

“Oh really? Because La Garde-robe is an anagram of ‘garde boréal,’ ” replied Pomme. “Which is how we knew there was a guard stationed on the north entrance.”

Phenomena shut her mouth at this overwhelming evidence, and gestured for Pomme to continue.

“Vy is our safe-cracker and code-breaker. Wonderful sculptor in metal and found materials. She can break anything, and break into anything,” said Pomme, nodding to a slight woman with spiky hair, sharp elbows, and a nose ring, who cracked her knuckles in greeting.

“Lmst nythng,” she said.

“Vy is also our linguist, though she has recently given up using vowels until the Pierrot mission is finished. We’re, ah, not sure why.”

“Bcs vwls r wstfl nd th sgn f ppr clss xcss.”

“Like I said, no idea. And, finally, Chad Watanabe-Jones! Chad is our construction expert. They used to work as a set-builder in California, but their joinery should be in the Louvre. They’re a poet with a hammer.”

“ ’Sup,” said Chad. They had silky black hair down to their waist, and a builder’s tan.

“They also read the horoscopes for our target buildings, and decide what day we break in.”

“Never try to rob a Libra on a Thursday,” Chad said, shaking their head. “Trust me on that.”

“And you?” Felicity asked Pomme quickly, since the sisters had sat through many anti-horoscope lectures from Phenomena and had no desire for another one now. “What do you do?”

“I design our tableaux, and I paint,” said Pomme modestly.

“And you really did all those heists?” asked Shenanigan dubiously. She remembered that Ouvolpo had been operating for decades. They must have all been very gifted infants. “Even the one with the bicycles?”

“Ah, no,” said Otto, looking embarrassed.

“What about the giant meatball?”

“No.”

“The bears in Copenhagen?”

“Absolutely not,” said Pomme indignantly. “Those bears looked like horses.”

“You see, we are Ouvolpo, but Ouvolpo isn’t just us,” said Emil.

“Vlp’s n ntrntnl rgnztn,” began Vy, then sighed when she realized she probably wasn’t the best person to explain. She nudged Otto.

“Ouvolpo is a worldwide international collective,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “There are dozens of us, spread across the globe. We work in small groups, and none of us know who are in the others. It’s better that way. If we’re caught, we can’t bar dreary outcomes.” He blinked. “I mean, betray our comrades.”

This was standard practice for many less-than-legal organizations, Shenanigan knew, and it struck her as very sensible. You never could predict when one of your group might be bribed, or blackmailed, or develop an unfortunate habit of talking in their sleep. Everyone felt a little safer knowing their colleagues couldn’t name names when the thumbscrews came out.

“Why are we here?” said Felicity, smoothing the blanket absently. “I’ve been following Ouvolpo’s work for a while. It makes sense that you’re made up of different cells, since the group’s art pieces differ so wildly—don’t snort, Phenomena; I told you this stuff was important—and that does make you harder to catch. But bringing us here is still a big risk for the five of you. You wouldn’t have done it without a reason.” She frowned. “You need us.”

“Oh, she’s smart smart,” said Chad.

“She’s Felicity,” said Shenanigan proudly.

“What could you need us for?” asked Erf. “You’ve got all the Pierrots.”

“Are you going to help us put Soufflé in jail?” asked Souris.

Pomme looked at her comrades. “Crime fighting is not really Ouvolpo’s job,” she said. “We do the crimes, remember? We’re wanted all over the world. We need to get out of here, as quickly as we can.”

“And you want our help?” asked Erf doubtfully.

“No,” said Phenomena. “They want our help stealing Toujours j’attends.”

Erf frowned. “But—”

“The real one,” Phenomena clarified.

Otto nodded, and opened the black case beside Vy’s boot. There was the Pierrot, just as Shenanigan remembered—only, not quite. Just like at the Musée Deburau, that pulling feeling inside her, that sadness, was absent. Otto turned the statue to show them the base, with Pierrot’s signature.

“That’s not forget-me-not blue,” gasped Felicity, squinting at the ink. “That’s cornflower blue!”

“It’s a fake,” said Emil. “A very good fake, but a fake.”

“I should have guessed Soufflé wouldn’t exhibit the real one while Ouvolpo were around,” said Pomme. “But I thought his greed would make him overconfident.”

“The Musée Deburau was a prat. I mean trap,” said Otto. “He was trying to lure us out into the open so the cops could catch us.”

“Or his hired guys,” added Chad.

“So the real Pierrot is still in the Hôtel,” said Souris. “In Grisaille’s room.”

Shenanigan wasn’t sure why they all looked so glum. “It can’t be harder to break into the Hôtel than it was to break into all those museums,” she said.

“Oh, breaking into the Hôtel isn’t the difficult trap. I mean part,” said Emil, scooting away from Otto as if his anagrammatizing was contagious. “It’s breaking into Grisaille’s safe. It’s a Le Chiffre.”

“We got our own,” said Otto, kicking the black metal safe at his feet derisively. “To practice cracking it. Vy tried for weeks.”

“Mpssbl,” Vy said sadly.

“So now not only do we not have the last Pierrot, but we’re being framed for the murder of poor Bernard, and we were seen tonight by several dozen witnesses,” said Pomme.

“This is my fault,” said Chad mournfully. “I failed to account for Mercury being in retrograde.” They sighed. “We should have waited until tomorrow night, or entered from the south.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” said Pomme sourly. “Soufflé is determined to frame us.”

“It’s neat, really,” said Phenomena. “They destroy public support for Ouvolpo, eliminate a witness, and distract everyone from their own misdeeds, all at once. Very clever.”

“My Family have always been clever,” said Pomme bitterly. “Look, when I started this, I just wanted to get back at them. I wanted to right an old wrong. I invited Felicity to the Hôtel because I ran into her when I was casing La Garde-robe, and I recognized her from our research on Swift House. I figured you’d turn up when we robbed you anyway, and I was curious what would happen. But I didn’t think it through,” she said, frustrated, “and when you started investigating, I had to keep an eye on you, so I pretended to help you out.”

“You did help us out,” said Shenanigan.

“That’s the problem. I helped you right into the path of a murderer.” She sighed. “I wanted to warn you that tomorrow we are going to rob the Hôtel Martinet. I don’t know how yet, but we have to.”

“But Soufflé—”

“It’s not just about him.” Pomme chewed a nail. “We think we know why Pierrot was killed. Tyran’s business tactics aren’t a secret. Everyone knows he was ruthless. If he wanted to take your home and turn it into a hotel, he would—whoever he had to cheat, intimidate, or bully to do it.”

“Aunt Inheritance said there was plenty of information about Tyran’s projects in the city archives,” said Felicity, frowning. “Did no one care?”

“The people he kicked out probably did,” said Pomme. “But the people who lived on the rue Regrette were poor. Artists, bohemians, intellectuals. And often that meant queer people, or people of color, or immigrants—people who were denied the power to fight someone like Tyran Martinet.”

Skulls watched them from the shadows, the relocated bones of the Cimetière des Innocents.

“Our theory is that Pierrot didn’t go quietly,” continued Pomme. “That he fought back somehow. Tyran knew that he was talented and might eventually be famous enough to have a voice, that one day Pierrot might start talking, and people would actually listen to what he had to say. He couldn’t have that.”

“So he killed him,” said Shenanigan.

Pomme nodded. “And now you have a choice. What we do is illegal, but I don’t believe it’s wrong. You can choose not to get involved. You can tell Rousseau or the Martinets what you’ve learned, or just go back to Swift House. Or”—Pomme’s smile was sharp—“you can help us take Toujours, the real Toujours. We can finally expose what happened to his creator all those years ago. People don’t just disappear.”

Which was both right and wrong at the same time. A person can disappear. They can be disappeared. Down the centuries, it has been the grand project of those with power to make those without it disappear, as if they were a coin glinting in their fingers one second, and then in another—Pouf! See, my hands are empty. See, my hands are clean. But the person is still there, they still exist; they have just been temporarily tucked away, up a sleeve, or under a carpet, or in the ceiling of a Hôtel, and all it takes is a good shake to knock them loose.

Shenanigan’s brain was moving too fast for her to keep up, but she knew one thing: She was going to help Ouvolpo steal that sad, smaller-than-a-loaf-of-bread sculpture if she had to pick up every single Martinet and shake them herself. This whole time she had been forgetting the simple fact that swifts and martinets were the same bird, in different languages. They were the same Family. And if righting this wrong was Pomme’s responsibility, didn’t that make it hers too?

What did they have? They had nine people. They had a safe. They had an elevator that wanted to go to the fifth floor. They had five of the world’s fastest, most accomplished artists.

“If you’re open to suggestions,” said Shenanigan, “I think I have a plan.”