I pick the unicorn up carefully, holding my breath. It’s made of silver paper, with not even a speck of dust on it. I slide my fingers across the folds of paper, like I did with the origami unicorn from earlier today.

I know one thing for certain: Adam made this.

“Elena?” he calls from the stairway. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah!” I shove the unicorn in my backpack before he can see it. I don’t know what it means yet, and I need more time to figure it out.

Adam and Zoe wait in the stairway. She stands close to him, like she might grab his arm at any second. I doubt she’d let him out of her sight, not with her hands shaking like that. And if they were together the entire time I was on this floor, there’s no way he could have placed the unicorn there.

Not this Adam, anyway…

“Find anything?” he asks.

“No.” If the future version of Adam put that unicorn there, he did so knowing I would search the third floor alone. He wanted me to find it—and only me.

We return to the lobby, where Chris and Trent are already waiting. “Like I said, nothing here,” Chris says. “Total waste of time.”

Adam sighs, adjusting his glasses. “We need a plan.”

Chris crosses his arms. “The plan is we go out there, find shit to bring back to Aether, then we come back. Just the bare minimum so we can get paid, and nothing more.”

“We don’t know what’s out there. It could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Zoe asks, her eyes wide.

“What if it’s not just this building that’s been abandoned?” Adam asks. “There could be radiation or—”

Chris shakes his head. “Hell no. I’m not gonna spend the next twenty-four hours holed up in this building. And I need that money.”

“He’s right. We can’t stay in here,” I say. Someone must have been inside the building recently to leave the origami unicorn upstairs. “Maybe there’s another way out.”

Chris pulls on the front door handle, but it’s locked. “The doors are glass. If we find something to break them, we can pull off the boards.”

“Hang on.” Trent pulls some little metal sticks out of his backpack. “Lockpicks!”

That’s a weird thing for Aether to put in our backpacks. I narrow my eyes. “How did you know those were in there?”

“I got bored and went through my bag while we were searching the place. There’s all sorts of stuff inside—food, water, and these lockpicks. You probably got them too.”