I turn in a circle, staring at all the little odds and ends that make this room unlike the other stores and apartments I’ve seen down here. And then it suddenly occurs to me that we missed something.

“You guys,” I say. “There’s no dust in here, right?”

Ash stops what he’s doing. “Right.”

“And the fact that there’s no dust means the Lions altered this space. So now I’m wondering what else might have been altered. For instance, was this furniture originally here, or was it staged by the Lions?” I ask, walking around the room, examining the things in the middle of it that I initially thought were irrelevant.

“Debatable,” Ash says. “Occasionally there are furnished stores or houses in the labyrinth, but that doesn’t mean the Lions didn’t add items to this particular room.”

“Exactly, which means we could have dismissed something as old and discarded that is actually a clue,” I say, and we all go back to searching the room again.

I start at the workbench, examining the shoe-shaping tools, but before I get very far Ash starts talking again. “The step stool,” he says with an excited lilt to his voice that makes us all leave what we’re doing. He picks it up and moves it. “See how the floor underneath is scratched?”

We all look up at the same time, immediately realizing our mistake.

“It’s not that we missed something where we were looking…,” Ash says.

“…it’s that we were looking in the wrong places,” I say, finishing his sentence.

Ash moves the stool back to its original position and stands on it, reaching above his head. “It’s hard to find a door in a wall when it’s actually in the ceiling.” He runs his hands along the wood and stops suddenly at the edge of a crossbeam. He smiles down at us. “Got it.”

Chapter Twenty-five

ASH STICKS HIS fingers up under the edge of the crossbeam on the ceiling, gently lowering a hatch. When he has it about halfway down, a rope ladder falls to the floor. We all look at one another and it’s one of those moments when everything comes into sharp focus; one wrong move and we’re dead.

“Everyone do a quick check for your knives and for your blow darts. And hand over your phones,” Aarya whispers, and we do. “No mistakes, no fumbles.”

Ash and Aarya grind our SIM cards into the floor and snap our phones in half before stashing them in some old boots. The four of us share a look, affirming that everything is in order. Ash places his lit candle between his teeth and climbs upward, while Ines snuffs hers out, slipping it back into her jacket pocket.