AS I BRAID my hair in front of my vanity mirror, I’m shocked at how spent I look—dried out, as Emily’s mom calls it when you’ve cried so much that you don’t have anything left in you. At home, if I felt destroyed over a guy or a bad test, I’d go to Em’s house and she’d let me do my crying, and then we’d eat junk food and watch movies until we passed out on the couch. Here, with my crying done, I’m preparing to hunt down information about killers who might be trying to blot out my entire family. I’m not even sure how to process that.

Layla knocks lightly on my bedroom door and I open it.

“I’m ready,” I say, and she hands me my cloak.

I put it on and follow her into the common room, where Ash is on the floor peering through the crack under our door.

“Is he waiting for the guard to pass?” I whisper.

“We’ll barely have a second to spare. So keep up and stay silent,” she whispers back.

I nod at Layla, letting her know that I get the gravity of the situation and won’t screw it up.

Ash stands, counts seven seconds off on his fingers, and silently opens the door. We all jet out and he closes it behind us without so much as a creak. And we’re off—down the hall and into the stairwell. Ash doesn’t bother to listen at each floor like I did when I was alone. He must know where the guards will be.

We reach the bottom of the stairs and stop. The guard in the foyer is walking into the vine courtyard, and the instant the door closes behind him we run across the stone floor into the hallway near the teachers’ lounge. We follow it all the way down to where it dead-ends at a door. The shadow cover is good here, and the only sound is our breathing. However, if someone were to turn the corner there would be no place to hide.

Layla pulls out some kind of multitool that looks like a more complex version of the molded paper clips Ines used in our last challenge. She gets on her knees to access the lock better and slips the tool into the keyhole as I stare down the hallway. Metal clinks and my heart thuds before my brain verifies that the sound is coming from us and not from a guard.

Not four seconds later, Layla pulls the door open. We slip through into total darkness. I put my hand up and my fingers graze the heavy curtain that covers the doorways here. This door leads outside? I hear the lock click back into place and I hold my breath.

Ash pulls the curtain back by an inch, and in the dim moonlight I catch a sliver of the outer wall that surrounds our school. Layla taps my wrist and we’re moving again, through the curtain and along the tree-lined building. We pass two doors and stop at the third. Layla pulls out her lock-picking tool. I definitely don’t remember any of these doors from the inside floor plan. I’m not surprised that there are parts of this castle you can only access from the outside, but I do wonder how bad the punishment will be if we get caught sneaking into them.