“Yeah, but it’s a puzzle. Why these cards? Why this order?” Thinking hard, I tapped my fingers against my thigh, mulling over possibilities.

“Is this where we call your friends?”

“Chill. Let me think.” I could have called someone, of course, but I desperately wanted to solve the puzzle myself, wanted to be that kind of hero for Milo.

“Does it maybe have to do with the drawings?” Milo pulled out his sketchbook. “Like, they each have a human character in the foreground and a different building in the background.”

“I love it when you talk art to me,” I quipped as I helped him run through possibilities. Names of buildings in the pictures. What they represented. First letters. Our food was long finished, and the air in the car was frosty, but nothing was triggering a clue worth heading out into the cold for.

“Maybe we’re overthinking it.” Setting his pencil aside, Milo frowned. “I mean, they are all brick buildings. Not that we’ve got any shortage of those here—”

“Brick. Of course.” Grinning broadly, I all but crowed as I opened the car door. “The Brick family donated an obscene amount of money for the Brick Science Hall, like, a century ago. Now, why four cards?”

“Are there four floors?” he asked as he followed me out of the car.

“Are we sure I’m the genius one in this operation?” I matched my strides to his as we made our way past the library to the old science hall. “Let’s head to the fourth floor. And Boy Wonder, how about you figure out why it’s those four characters.”

We took a creaky elevator up to the fourth floor while debating what the characters represented on the card could mean.

“An archer, a gravedigger, some sort of chicken farmer, and a goth-looking chick walk into a bar…” Milo cracked.

“The farmer is raising a falcon army. And she’s a reaper,” I corrected automatically as I racked my brain, trying to make sense of the clues. “Which is sort of like an angel of death in the game.”

“Well, there’s enough dead creatures up here.” Milo gestured at the glass cases of taxidermy creatures lining the wide hall.

Thinking of the gravedigger part of the clue, I crouched low to the floor, looking under the cases. “Perfect starting point. Look for a little hidden cache that will have our next clue.”

“Like a falcon?” Coming to a stop in front of a case with a large black bird in it, Milo joined me in stooping low. The displays were creepy, and I wanted to find our clue fast.

“There.” I ran my hand along a decorative arrow on the front of the case, and right below it, on the underside of the case, I found a tiny box that held a code to type into the app.