“What about it?” Regan prompted. “You look like your brain just took a wrong turn and fell off a cliff.”

“Do you realize that without that letter, we never would have gotten stuck in this stupid partner program?” I asked.

Regan opened her mouth to say something but then snapped it shut again as the realization hit home.

“Did your brain just fall off the same cliff as mine?” I asked. “Because I’ll warn you, the landing really hurts.”

“No way,” Regan said, sitting down on my bed and flopping backward so she could stare up at the ceiling.

“Way,” I said, plopping down in my desk chair so I could face her.

She sat up with a jerk a second later and stared at me. “Do you think the Lewis and Clark program was why we got the Cocoon in the first place?”

I shrugged. “Who knows.”

“So maybe we already did what the letter wanted us to do,” Regan said, biting her lip. “Maybe whatever bad thing was going to happen won’t happen now because I went all out to ruin your test.”

“You went all out, all right,” I grumbled. “How in the world did you spot that Butterfly so fast?” I asked, because if I was honest with myself, it had been eating at me that she got the jump on me like that. It was uncanny.

To my surprise, I saw a blush spread across her face, turning her ears a bright red.

“Um,” she said, biting her lip. “I may have had some help with that one.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The bullet points on the Cocoon,” she said, pulling a wadded-up piece of paper out of her pocket and flattening it in front of me. I glanced down at her list of bullet points, and froze when I saw the one that mentioned a deck, because there had been a list of bullet points on that letter. How in the world had I forgotten about that?

“You cheated,” I said, pointing my finger in her face. “You knew the Butterfly was going to be belowdecks. That’s not fair.”

“Really?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Because I’m pretty sure you had access to the exact same information.” I opened my mouth to protest, but, of course, she was right. I glanced back down at the list and frowned. “This is all you could remember?”

She nodded. “But I know I’m missing one.”

“You’re missing two,” I said, reaching over to snag a pen off my desk. I sat down, pulling her crumbled piece of paper over, and fixed the list, adding the two points she’d forgotten.

Behind the curtain.

Something about under a deck? Belowdecks.

Break a window? When the window breaks, grab me.

Trust the door will open when it needs to.

The prototypes are a bust.