Everything is easy after that. We find the private room with a red poppy painted next to its name and enter it together, slamming the door shut behind us to stop the ghosts from barging in. The room itself is so small as to be suffocating, and I’ve definitely been inside closets that are more spacious, but that’s all fine because the room opens up to a balcony. Or it should, if the glass doors to the balcony weren’t locked. I can see the sunlight streaming in, the pretty rock gardens out the back, promising fresh air and freedom. I’m just getting ready to make my victory march when Cyrus spins toward me and holds his hand out expectantly.

“What do you want?” I ask him.

He frowns, like he thinks I’m picking an inappropriate time to crack a joke. “The key,” he says, his hand still stretched out in front of him. “You have it.”

“No, I don’t,” I say, wondering if he’s joking. If this is one of those instances where he’ll pretend to fumble around in his pockets searching for it before grinning and waving the key in front of my face. “You took the key. Come on, Cyrus.”

But his expression is as grave as the ghosts on the other side of the door. “I gave it to you just now,” he says. “I wouldn’t waste precious competition time pulling a prank.”

So it turns out that the universe is the only one joking here. This can’t be happening. “That’s just—I mean, that’s simply not true. You never gave me the key—”

“I did,” he insists. “I distinctly remember passing it—”

“You must be from another dimension, then, because that didn’t happen in this timeline—”

“I’m one hundred percent certain that I handed it to you,” he says.

“And I’m one hundred percent certain you didn’t,” I shoot back. “I guess that makes it two hundred percent likely that you lost the key.”

“Okay, that is—mathematically, that can’t be right. But it does appear likely that the key is missing.”

I bite back a hysterical laugh and pat down my bangs a little more aggressively than I usually would, if only to do something with my hands that doesn’t involve punching the doors. The glass is thin enough that it ought to shatter with one solid strike. Thin enough that it feels all the more ridiculous to be stuck here, separated by nothing except a stupid misplaced key.

“You’re sure you don’t have it?” Cyrus asks after a beat of depressing silence. “Because I recall that we were heading into the room, and I was busy closing the doors because those ghosts kept trying to stick their heads in after us, so I took the key out of my pocket and I held it out—”