“Oh! I was wondering why there weren’t any T. rexes.”
“Come on,” said Theo, yanking Tess away from the clerk. They walked toward the entrance of the museum and then quickly cut right, taking the stairs. On the lower level, there were some classrooms and the children’s museum. The offices were behind a frosted-glass door marked, unsurprisingly, “Museum Offices.” Theo didn’t have to look at Tess to know what she wanted to do. They pushed open the door, and walked into the offices as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if they belonged there. At the end of a long hallway, there was another frosted-glass door, this one marked “Restoration.” It was quite a trick to creep silently down a hallway while still trying to appear as if you’re doing nothing wrong, especially when you were the son of one of the city’s most prominent detectives called in to investigate the city’s worst thefts. His muscles hummed with the effort of it, and that made him itchy again.
They passed individual offices, some empty, some with people working diligently inside, but no one seemed to notice them.
Until a man looked up from his desk and frowned.
“Hey!” he said. “What are you kids doing down here? You can’t be down here. Hey!”
Tess pushed Jaime, Jaime shoved Theo, and Theo stumbled, then ran. Most of the nearby offices were occupied, but there was one dark door, unlocked, that said “Laboratories.” Theo ducked inside, Jaime and Tess right behind him. It was a long, shadowy room packed with row upon row of lab tables. They dived underneath one of them, squished together. Somewhere, a refrigerator hummed a warning.
“We’re going to get arrested,” Jaime whispered.
“Shhhh!” said Theo.
The door creaked; footsteps echoed. “I thought I saw them come in here.”
“Who?” said another voice.
“A bunch of kids.”
“Why would a bunch of kids come down here? I don’t even want to be here, and I work here.”
Theo risked a peek around the table, saw a few sets of legs walking in their direction. He crawled to the next table, tucked himself under. He turned around, realized that Tess and Jaime had stayed put. He gestured for them to follow when the legs passed right between the tables. Theo went still. Tess slapped her hand over her mouth.
The legs kept moving toward the back of the room. Tess and Jaime crawled over to Theo and squeezed in next to him. They tried not to breathe.
“I don’t see any kids.”
“I’m going to have to call security anyway.”
“You don’t want to do that. You know what a freak Sig is. He’ll just do something bugburgers like have the kids thrown in jail.”
Jaime elbowed Theo and then made frantic motions with his fists like a person shaking a set of bars.
“We can’t have a bunch of kids running around down here. They could wreck something or steal something.”
“They were probably just looking for the cafeteria.”
“Or they’re thieves or in a gang or something.”
“A gang? Do you hear yourself?”
The footsteps rounded the room and then walked out into the hallway. Theo peeked around the table. The legs were gone. And there was a door on the other side of the room with light coming from underneath it. Maybe it opened into the restoration area. Theo pointed at it, waved for Tess and Jaime to follow. They crawled from one lab table to the next until they reached the door. Theo knelt and slowly turned the handle, cracked the door, looked inside. He saw a sea of easels and work tables, each with picks or brushes or other tools. He also saw a sea of feet. Tess tried to push him forward, but he resisted.
“There are too many people in there,” he whispered.
And then there were too many people out here; footsteps echoed in the hallway.
Jaime lunged back under the nearest table. Tess and Theo did the same. The lights came on. Heavy shoes thudded on the floor, then stopped. The shoes walked to the west end of the room, turned north, walked for a while, then turned south. Theo pressed his face to the floor and looked under the table, watched the feet move in straight lines. Whoever it was was walking a grid. The room was big, but not that big. It wouldn’t take long for them to be caught.
They had two choices. They could crawl into the restoration room and take their chances, or try to zigzag to the door leading to the hallway so that they could make their escape.
The footsteps stopped again. Theo pressed his cheek to the floor again to see where the shoes were.
Except he didn’t see a pair of shoes. He saw a cheek pressed to the floor just the way his was. And a pair of eyes. And a mouth that smiled.
Theo sat up so fast he whacked his head on the underside of the lab table. The footsteps thundered in their direction. Tess squeaked and scooted to the next table. Jaime went the other way. Meaty hands reached for Theo just as he threw himself out from under the table, slid down the empty row. He scrambled to his feet and caught a glimpse of a guard uniform before he ran, making random lefts and rights like a Morningstarr elevator. Tess squeaked again as the guard caught her, and then the guard roared as Tess’s sneaker came down on the top of his foot. Jaime reached over the top of a lab table, grabbed her by the arms, and hauled her across it to the other side. The guard lunged for them and missed. They split up, pinging around the tables like some reenactment of the world’s worst video game. As soon as Theo thought, Why is this man chasing us around tables, why doesn’t he just block the door, who is this bad at geometry? the guard gave up the chase, blocked the door. But he didn’t block the door to the hallway, he blocked the door to the restoration room.
Mistake!
Theo broke for the other door.
And ran headfirst into a wall.
He fell on his butt. Which hurt.
The wall said, “Hello, children. My name is Sig.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jaime
The man named Sig was built like Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four—almost as wide as he was tall—and had no tolerance for these shenanigans. Jaime knew this because Sig said: “I have no tolerance for these shenanigans.”
When Tess tried to explain about her aunt Jane John and how she worked here and how they were supposed to meet her and— “I don’t like shenanigans and I don’t like fibbers,” Sig said.
Fibbers?
Sig pushed them down the hallway as if they’d already been tried and sentenced and were off juvie till they were twenty-one.
His dad was going to kill him. Mima was going to kill him.
“Where are you taking us?” Tess demanded.
“My office. I’m calling the police. I’m calling your parents. None of you are leaving till both of them get here.”
“We didn’t do anything!” Tess said. Nine mrrowed in kind.
“I’m also calling animal control,” Sig said, sniffing at the cat.
“She has a license!”
“Faked,” said Sig.
“My mom got that license!”
“Your mom faked a license?”
“What? No!”