I held the paper up to my nose. It smelled like jasmine.
“It’s a clue,” Thomas said. “She meant it as a clue. We can use it to find her.”
And there was something about the way he said that, something in his voice, that made me doubt.
I looked over my shoulder, all around Poppy’s perfect green yard.
Nothing.
No one.
Was this another of Poppy’s tricks? Like when she hid in the forest and made the Yellows stop us and demand that stupid kissing contest? Was she going to step out from behind one of the lilac bushes, laughing her head off at me for being so gullible? Was this her revenge for what Wink and I did to her? An elaborate setup with letters and clues and Yellows?
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Not at all.
Maybe this wasn’t about revenge.
Maybe it was something else entirely.
Thomas took the letter back, put it away, and looked up at Poppy’s bedroom window, the one that faced the street. “I have this feeling that if we don’t find Poppy soon, we won’t find her at all. I’ve read and read the letter, twenty times, a hundred times. What does it mean? What’s the clue?”
I FOUND THE boy, the tall, dark-haired one with different-colored eyes, blue and green, one sky and the other sea. I was walking through the trees in the rain, thinking maybe I’d spot the solemn Strangers dancing to melancholy tunes in a woodland patch of dappled sun, like they did in Wild Edric and the Londonderry Girl. And that’s when I saw him, rooting around in the wilderness behind the Roman Luck house.
He didn’t seem surprised to find me standing beside him. He stared right through me almost, as if I wasn’t there at all. He was on his knees, brushing away dirt and dead pine needles with his hands, acting kind of hatter-mad. He kept looking over his shoulder, as if the trees were hiding things behind their fat trunks, which maybe they were.
The dark-haired boy got to his feet and then picked something up from the ground where he’d just been kneeling. A shovel.
There wasn’t a good reason to bring a shovel to the woods. There wasn’t a sane reason. The Folk brought shovels to the woods and dug things up and put a glamor on them. They made the dug-up things look like the babies they’d stolen and were raising as their own. And sometimes the Folk returned and buried those stolen babies right back in the dirt, if they screamed too much and were not liked. But the dark-haired boy wasn’t doing this. He wouldn’t even know about it.
“Why are you digging?” I asked.
The rain had stopped, and the sun was poking out, and the dark-haired boy with the different-colored eyes nodded at me, kind of nicely.
“Poppy’s disappeared,” he said.
“A lot of people disappear,” I said.
“I was horrible to her,” he said. “Horrible, horrible. She thinks I hate her.”
“No she doesn’t,” I said.
“She left a note,” he said.
“Let me see it,” I said.
And he put his dirty hands in his pockets and pulled out a black piece of paper with silver letters.
Briggs.
Briggs, do you know how you gave me that marble once, the really big one with the gold streak in the middle that you said you won in a fight when you were a kid, and I made fun of you for being into marbles, but you just ignored me and said it matched my gold hair, and I should have it?
We were in the woods drinking lemonade out of teacups and I got sentimental suddenly and told you to bury the marble under that big pine between the two little aspens so I’d always know where it was.
You hate me, Briggs. You all hate me, and I deserve it. I deserve every ounce of it.
I wish I’d kept that gold marble. I wish I had it now. Promise me you’ll find it, you have to promise, even if you’re angry, even though you hate me, promise you will.
Ask Midnight to help you look. He’s good at finding things.
“Can I keep this?” I said, holding the letter up in the air, but he was already gone. The boy with two different-colored eyes walked off into the woods, tiny flecks of sun filtering through the trees and sparking off his silver shovel. He went deep and deeper, until he disappeared.
I ONLY COME out at night now, I walk through the woods and plop down on the pine needles, starlight covering me like a gauzy blanket.
I sneak into Midnight’s room and he’s such a deep sleeper, he doesn’t even wake up when I put my lips on his.
I do all kinds of things after dark, some things I used to do but some new things too. I see everything. I spy on the Yellows and they never know I’m there. They couldn’t see me if they tried, I’m so good at hiding, as good as it’s possible to be. I was obvious before, loud and obvious, wanting all eyes on mine, needing it, look at me, worship me. But now no one ever sees me, and I like it, I like it. There’s only one place I don’t go, I don’t go back to the Roman Luck house, I hate that place, hate it, hate it, hate it.