For a second we’re in complete darkness. Then a match strikes and lights Aarya’s face up like a spotlight. She moves the flame toward the wall, illuminating two oil lamps, and pulls one down to light the wick inside.

Instantly the room brightens, revealing bookshelves of boxes and merchandise that suggest we’re in the storage room of the bookstore. Aarya leads us to the back wall, which I can now see is paneled entirely in dark wood, with electric sconces.

Aarya presses a piece of decorative metal on the side of a sconce and one of the wall panels swings open, revealing a door. Secret doors, secret pubs, coded messages in books at the library, private Gothic inns—it’s like finding out that all of your childhood suspicions that you could step through your closet into another world are turning out to be true.

Aarya pulls the panel fully open and Ash walks through, offering me his hand. I intertwine my fingers with his and join him on a stone staircase. The steps are worn unevenly, reminiscent of the ones in the Academy. Above our heads the stone arches, and I can’t see very far in front of me. The temperature reminds me of a cave, which Dad always claimed stays pretty consistently around fifty degrees no matter the season.

Ash and I stop at the bottom of the staircase and the oil lamp Aarya carries illuminates a portion of the straight stone passageway. I turn in both directions, but there doesn’t seem to be a distinguishable difference.

“The labyrinth,” Ash whispers near my ear, and I swallow.

I eye the passage warily as we follow Aarya down it and through a doorway into a large rectangular stone room. I look at Ash for an explanation.

“A medieval apartment,” Ash whispers, and points. “You can tell by the hearth in the wall.”

My eyes widen. “People lived underground?” I say, and even though I’m not cold, the hair on my arms stands up.

He shakes his head. “This wasn’t always underground. In fact the passageway we just came from used to be a street. And this was a ground-floor apartment. Over time this city has changed dramatically, and in an effort to level out some of the streets, parts of the buildings, markets, and houses got cut off and paved over. Sections of the city just got trapped down here.”

I shudder at the spookiness of it all. And in the way that darkness can sometimes invite gruesome thoughts, I immediately picture someone afflicted with the plague being attended to by a doctor with one of those ghoulish beaked masks.