Wolf approached it. Was there a door somewhere? There had to be. He went around the vast structure once. It took five minutes. Nope. No door. But that was impossible. Wolf had trained his mind to think fast, so in a couple of seconds, hundreds of thoughts had run through his brain like rugby backs passing the ball back and forth and back and forth and . . .

Wolf went to the place where the rock had been, where there was now a tall pillar. Scratched into the ancient rock, were the letters MMXIV. Wolf memorized them but then, as backup, took out the small pen he wore around his neck and wrote them on his hand. There was nothing else on the pillar. MMXIV. What could that mean?

Was Wolf supposed to enter this building or not? They—whoever they were—were not making it very easy. Wolf understood that this was a test. He had already embarked on the “program,” whatever it would turn out to be. There was no going back. He just had to find a way in.

10

NEPTUNE’S LIFE HAD BECOME extremely boring, and he wasn’t sure why. Once upon a time he would lord it over all the stray and domestic cats that had the misfortune to wander into the Tusitala School grounds. As official school cat, he was entitled to claw and scratch the living daylights out of any other creature that came within his territory. And being school cat meant Neptune was fed the scraps from school dinners, which included real meat and fish, while most of the local domestic cats were fed those hard dry pellets that were made of, among other things, old pencil shavings and sofa fluff. The strays had to make do with voles.

But now there were no strays to gloat over.

What was going on? Even the domestic cats didn’t bother to come to the school grounds anymore. Much of the Cosmic Web avoided Neptune (mainly for fear of being eaten by him), and so his world had been reduced to the occasional scrap of news from an incredibly sulky owl. One of the domestic cats used to postpone being attacked by offering Neptune regular snippets from the pet noir novels that her owner liked to read aloud. Neptune had found he rather liked the idea of being a cat detective and solving a crime. He desperately wanted to know how the latest story ended. But Mirabelle had stopped visiting. Neptune realized that he had not seen another cat for weeks.